Anti Arrack Movement

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Südasien-Chronik - South Asia Chronicle 2/2012, S. 219-234 © Südasien-Seminar der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin ISBN: 978-3-86004-286-1 Women‘s Power: The Anti-Arrack Movement in Andhra Pradesh heikofrese@gmx.de HEIKO FRESE This is not a story. This is the achievement of women who have studied in an evening school. Our village is Dubagunta. We are wage earners. We produce gold from earth. But what is the use? All our hard-earned money is spent on toddy and arrack. When our menfolk do not have money they sell away our rice, butter, ghee or anything that fetches them arrack [...]. They take away whatever they can lay their hands on.... Apart from drinking they abuse us, pick up fights with us, slap our children. They make our day-to-day existence miserable [...]. Then we read the story of Sitamma’s death. It started us thinking. Who is responsible for her death? We then told the sarpanch (head of the village council) to close the arrack shop. But we could not succeed. So next day, hundreds of us marched out of the village and stopped a cart of toddy. We told the owner to throw away the liquor. We said all of us would contribute one rupee to compensate his loss. He was terrified. From that day no toddy has entered our village. Then, when a jeep carrying arrack arrived in the village we surrounded it and warned the owner that we would lodge a complaint with the magistrate. This sent a shiver down his spine. He closed his shop. Now we gained in confidence. We realized that this victory was possible only through education. This year no one dared participate in the arrack auction. This is a quote from a literacy primer, Adavallu Ekamaite (“if women unite”) and, as the first sentence indicates, not a fictional story. It is a part of the modern history of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, where in the early nineties of the twentieth century something
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