I don\u2019t know what to call this piece of writing \u2013 an essay, a fieldwork diary, or a journal entry? It\u2019s at the discretion of the reader to put this in whatever category they like. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, it is an experience, a feeling, and a memory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I want to talk to you about the women in my community, the very women I grew up seeing, the ones I look up to for love and resilience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
*<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last year, as part of my MA project, I spoke with women, married, older than me, in their early thirties to their seventies. As a 23-year-old researcher, studying <\/em>them felt like studying my possible future. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Wait! My research was about women, leisure, and friendship \u2013 three of my favourite words put together. In the introduction of my thesis, I wrote, \u201c…the potential of leisure and friendship as tools for empowerment, enabling women to challenge norms, build support networks, and redefine their identities within gendered landscapes.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Talking to these women was the most joyful stage of the research. In the afternoons, we sat on the verandah and talked about life. For those two hours, I was, for all intents, their friend. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For rural Malayali women, the opportunities to form friendships look different from those in urban settings. Kudumbashree1<\/a><\/sup> meetings on Sundays are something they all look forward to attending because that is their socially sanctioned <\/em>chance to meet their friends. Even if Sundays mean extra work, women will somehow finish their chores and head out to their friend’s house in the neighbourhood. As children, we called those meetings \u2018noisy spaces\u2019 where women talked in loud voices in ways that sometimes disturbed the men taking Sunday afternoon naps. Small as they may seem, these gatherings are powerful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My grandmother was a religious Kudumbashree member until a few years ago. After my grandfather died, she restricted her outings and gradually withdrew from the groups. Losing him also meant losing the weekly monetary contribution to the SHG.2<\/a><\/sup> She then passed the routine on to her daughter-in-law, my mother, who is now active in women\u2019s groups in the locality. As a child, I would often accompany my grandmother to these Kudumbashree meetings; my friends would also be there, coming with their mothers and grandmothers. It felt like a world within a world \u2013 weekly friends meet up. I could write a whole chapter on Kudumbashree as a focal point of friendship for rural women, but I will pause here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n *<\/p>\n\n\n\n Writers have celebrated women-women relationships throughout history. Adrienne Rich3<\/a><\/sup> wrote about the \u201clesbian continuum\u201d, highlighting how women\u2019s bonds provide emotional nourishment, a safe space to share an \u201cinner life\u201d, and a source of strength against what she calls \u201cmale tyranny\u201d. Eileen Green4<\/a><\/sup> describes friendship as a consistent \u201cthread\u201d that links people across life transitions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But how do these ideas play out in the everyday lives of women in my community?<\/p>\n\n\n\n In my conversations, women gained new friends at different phases of their lives \u2013 unlike their husbands, who often maintain the same childhood circle of friends. Marriage becomes an important turning point in women\u2019s friendships because, when they migrate to their husbands\u2019 homes, they often lose connection with their old friends. Though smartphones and the Internet now help, they cannot replace the physical intimacy of sitting beside a dear friend, holding hands, and sharing a cup of tea. \u201cThose are the luxuries men have,\u201d many told me \u2013 evenings in the village junctions and tea shops \u2013 daily male reunions. Spaces \u2013 public and private, physical and emotional \u2013 remain gendered even now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For rural women, then, engagement sites tend to be within the boundaries of the neighbourhood. Family functions, festivals, weddings, and funerals become important occasions\/spaces for them to meet and reconnect with friends. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Women often drop by their neighbours\u2019 houses between their daily chores, borrowing oil or masala, or plucking papayas and moringa leaves. These interactions are usually short-lived, as the actors quickly return to their tasks at hand. Nevertheless, we must not downplay the significance of these moments, particularly within patriarchal cultures. They matter \u2013 small acts of connection that I would like to see as safe, powerful acts of defiance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was apprehensive about asking older women, \u201cDo you have friends?\u201d \u2013 women who are sometimes fifty years my senior. I tried using words like \u201cpeers\u201d, \u201cneighbouring women\u201d, and \u201cold schoolmates\u201d instead of \u201cfriends\u201d, but kept returning to \u201cfriends\u201d. The only substitute for \u201cfriend\u201d is \u201cfriend\u201d itself. Irreplaceable, singular. Until then, I had assumed friendship was a male domain. Why did I think it wasn\u2019t for older women? I was lucky to realise it is. As a sixty-year-old told me, \u201cYour afternoons will be devoted to your friends to pass by and chat,\u201d (until the hot conversation is interrupted by someone asking for tea at four). <\/p>\n\n\n\n In rural settings, women\u2019s sexuality is policed in subtle and persistent ways, often under the guise of \u201ccare and safety\u201d. Women shared how people still comment if they are seen with their hair loose. Those two short strands of hair falling onto either side of the forehead, escaping a long braid, mean disobedience. \u201cLoose women is what they call us,\u201d one said. Indisciplined hair, it seems, becomes a symbol of an undisciplined woman. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As one woman said, \u201cI don\u2019t have privacy even at home. My mother-in-law\u2019s eyes roll when I shut my bedroom door and sit alone. Her tone then becomes uncomfortable.\u201d Even within marriage, women\u2019s sexual and emotional privacy is monitored, which extends beyond public spaces into the most intimate corners of domestic life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another central element in women’s friendship was gossip and humour. Women cracked jokes and teased one another \u2013 revealing a secretive version of themselves that appears only amongst other women \u2013 their \u2018equals\u2019. Gilligan\u2019s5<\/a><\/sup> work helps here: she explains how heterosexual relationships can reproduce dominance and subordination; same-sex friendships, by contrast, are often linked to greater emotional support and wellbeing for women. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In these conversations, emotional intimacy and openness came up repeatedly. One SHG member even said, \u201cThe main reason behind creating this group was to maintain our friendships and the bond we created during a training class.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n For many rural women, SHGs have provided rare opportunities for travel and sightseeing \u2013 to be away from home and routine. One of them sweetly recalled, \u201cWe stayed in a single room (during a trip), all of us together. We spent the whole night talking about things we never thought we would. We forgot to sleep and didn\u2019t realise it was past six in the morning.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n It is in these friendships with other women that they find a rare freedom and intimacy, a space to move and express themselves without judgment. Here, they reclaim their right to self-expression, away from the gazes that often follow them at home or in public. In these circles, women offer life advice and gestures of self-adornment, receiving affectionate compliments and tight hugs in return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Rich rightly said, women\u2019s relationships often exist on a continuum of love and desire \/affection. They offer comfort that is emotional, sometimes even physical \u2013 a space to feel at ease in their bodies and (re)define who they are. While social norms still dictate silence around pleasure, agency, and intimacy, yet in these quiet, brief interactions, women weave small spaces of selfhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If I were to make a word cloud of these conversations with women about friendship, it would look like this: laughter, fears, support, healing, trust, solidarity, belonging, freedom, learning, and reassurance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet, I am not naive enough to undermine the spells of patriarchy on them. A painful paradox emerged in the interviews. Some said, \u201cFamily is family. Friends are not. For me, my family is above anything else, and if they say no, it\u2019s a no.\u201d And to the next question, answering, \u201cThere is more happiness here (in women\u2019s groups) than at home,\u201d then adding, \u201cI feel like we have something when we (women) sit together.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Friendship, as they say, often ranks only second to their family \u2013 yet the joy and support they offer can be equally vital. It has taught some how to use the Internet, how to make informed decisions, how to save money, how to travel alone, and, above all, given them a space to be themselves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That said, structures of power, like everywhere else, operate within friendships too. To look at gender as the only variable in friendship is incomplete. Like Sara Ahmed6<\/a><\/sup> reminds us, there are social factors that decide who gossips, who speaks, and who is heard. I would like to believe friendships are spaces where power distributions are relatively equal, but they are never symmetrical as long as larger social structures exist. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Monster structures \u2013 they spare no one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even in the face of these looming forces, the friendships women forge \u2013 tender, witty and sometimes defiant \u2013 continue to grow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Cover image by The Better India<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The only substitute for \u201cfriend\u201d is \u201cfriend\u201d itself. Irreplaceable, singular.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":596,"featured_media":28654,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4968,8],"tags":[390,66,1653,3393,1521,121,5020,26,5016,2895,71,1910,48,99,5017,5018,2310,1384,5019],"class_list":{"0":"post-28651","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-friendship-and-sexuality-2","8":"category-voices","9":"tag-community","10":"tag-desire","11":"tag-empowerment","12":"tag-female-friendship","13":"tag-female-solidarity","14":"tag-feminism","15":"tag-feminist-reflections","16":"tag-gender","17":"tag-kudumbashree","18":"tag-leisure","19":"tag-love","20":"tag-older-women","21":"tag-pleasure","22":"tag-relationships","23":"tag-rural-kerala","24":"tag-self-help-groups","25":"tag-sisa-spaces","26":"tag-women-empowerment","27":"tag-womens-leisure"},"menu_order":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/596"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28651"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28707,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28651\/revisions\/28707"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Reference:<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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