In 2016, 10 women in Patna district of Bihar began a journey no one from their Musahar community had undertaken before. Each of them received a tiny piece of land on lease to do farming. Seven years later, the number of landless Dalit women in the Phulwari block of Patna district doing farming on leased land has risen to a whopping 4,000. The women farmers credit their success in unshackling from centuries of discrimination with the nearly four decades of tireless work by one woman, who they fondly call Bicycle Didi.
Sudha Varghese, the Bicycle Didi, a renowned activist for Dalit and human rights, has done much more than leasing farms for the Musahar community in Bihar ever since she arrived in Patna, from Kerala, as a teenaged girl in 1964. In Dinapur village on the outskirts of Patna, Varghese leads a women-empowerment organisation called Nari Gunjan she founded in 1987 with 200 members from the Dalit community. Today, Nari Gunjan has 2,000 members, and a hostel for Musahar girls, fully funded by the Bihar government for educating the poor. Another hostel, also in Dinapur, is home to 80 girls rescued from human trafficking.
"One of our biggest achievements was helping Musahar women own land for the first time in the history of the community," says Varghese. "After we helped the Musahar women do farming on leased land seven years ago, 10 of them have bought their own land for farming. These once-landless women are now members of the Forum for Women Farmers' Rights, a national collective of women farmers," she adds about Nari Gunjan's women-empowerment programme in agriculture supported by the Ahmedabad-based Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in Gujarat.
In November last year, a men's cricket team of Musahar boys, that Varghese helped form, beat a heavily-favoured Bank of Baroda team to win a local tournament. There were 11 teams playing for the trophy in the tournament held at the army grounds in Dinapur. "Nobody expected us to win," says Chandan Manjhi, 24, captain of the Dashrath Manji cricket team, named after a Musahar worker who became famous as the Mountain Man after carving a road through a hill in Gaya district of Bihar to link his community with the rest of the world. "Cricket has also helped young people like me to pursue education," says Chandan, who recently obtained a bachelor's degree in Economics.
Cricket and farming are some of the mediums that Varghese and her team have successfully employed to help the Musahar community's women and men fight age-old prejudices and inequalities. "After the 2016 alcohol ban in Bihar, the livelihoods of Musahar families who were engaged in brewing country liquor were severely affected," says Varghese. Helping the community women to do farming brought in money for their families. And cricket came as a source of discipline and commitment for many of the community's young people.
Born in Kuruppanthara in Kottayam district of Kerala, Varghese came to know about the Musahars after reading about the discrimination faced by the community in a Malayalam magazine. "I understood there was a lot of poverty and homelessness among the Musahars, who were treated as outcasts," says Varghese. "I wanted to go to Bihar to learn more about them." She was studying in Class VIII then. "My parents were against me going to a faraway state, but my mother's father supported me," adds Varghese. After she passed her Class X examination, Varghese, then only 16, left for Patna.
"It took me six years to learn the language. I stayed for 21 years in a hut of a Musahar family with them," recalls Varghese, who left Patna only to complete her education, first a bachelor's degree in English literature from the St. Teresa's College in Mysuru, Karnataka, and later a law degree from SLRS Law College, Bengaluru. Every time she completed a degree, Varghese would return to her home in Jamsaut village, 15 km from Patna. "The Musahar community treated me well and accepted me as one of them," she says. "I learnt the Magahi language that the community members spoke and also Bhojpuri."
Nari Gunjan, which is in its fourth decade, has helped in raising awareness among the Musahar community about the injustices faced by them for generations. One of the first priorities for Varghese when she began her work for the Musahar community was drinking water. "We helped in getting drinking water to the Musahar villages and also in getting ration cards and old-age pension," says Varghese. Education for the children was another priority. Nari Gunjan's education programme for adolescent Dalit girls was launched in 2001 with the aim to reduce malnutrition, illiteracy and lack of sanitation. A year later, Unicef extended its support to the programme. "We have 50 Kishori Kendras for Dalit girls supported by the Total Literacy Mission, a national programme," says Varghese, who spoke at the 2001 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and participated in the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in 2010.
In 2007, Nari Gunjan opened an employment training centre, Ajeevika, for Dalit girls. Another women empowerment programme saw the opening of over 200 self-help groups. In the last eight months, the organisation has been training 260 boys and girls in digital literacy, a programme supported by Unicef. Nari Gunjan's work today covers four blocks — Phulwari, Punpun, Bihta, Dinapur — in Patna district.
Varghese remembers her morning commute on a bicycle to villages for work in the '80s. "I used to walk to the villages at first, but will fall asleep in the meetings from the long, tiring walks," she says. "Then I bought a bicycle, which made the trips to the villages easy." Many years later, the Bihar government would give free bicycles to school girls, an initiative that boosted literacy and jobs among rural communities in the state.
A leading member of the National Dalit Human Rights Campaign, People's Union for Civil Liberties and National Alliance for Women, Varghese has found support among the Dalit families as well as government and corporate sector to improve the lives of Musahars and remove centuries of stigma as "rat-eaters" that an unjust society gave the community.
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