I understood who Vijay was when I saw him through the women who trusted him. It was the middle of summer in droughtprone Mhaswad, Maharashtra, and more than 15,000 women had gathered for a public meeting with him about higher wages and access to water. Men often migrated, and their wives were left to run households on wages that seldom came on time. I did not yet think of Vijay as someone I might marry. But at that meeting, I noticed how women spoke around him. They argued, made demands and spoke without fear of being reprimanded, while he listened seriously.
One woman stood up and said that her husband, who worked in the police department, had locked her inside their house to stop her from attending. She had broken the door and come anyway. At home, she said, she might have to defer to him. But outside, she would listen to Vijay and the movement.
As someone who wanted to work towards women’s equality in public and private life, I was struck by the force with which she spoke, and by the way Vijay took it all in without taking over her moment. I had known of Vijay through Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini, the Gandhian organisation founded by Jayaprakash Narayan, which I joined as an undergraduate at Mumbai University after its leaders came to campus urging young city folk to work in rural India. Vijay was a leader in the farmers’ movement in Mhaswad and our paths had crossed when he travelled to Mumbai for work. I sometimes helped with writ petitions and gathering support, but we rarely spoke directly. Born into a business family in Mumbai, I came from a world of books and feminist conversations. Vijay was from a farming family, and had not studied beyond the 9th standard. He began sending postcards to our organisation’s Mumbai office, explaining that because most of the participants in the movement were women, it was important to have women activists in the village too. I agreed to go.
Over the following year, as I travelled more often to Mhaswad, we came to know each other beyond these encounters. Once, after we had completed a padayatra, walking through villages, holding meetings and speaking to people, Vijay said that he was thinking of marriage and asked me, point blank, whether I would consider becoming his life partner.
I didn’t have an answer, requested time to think and returned to Mumbai. I knew there was chemistry, but I needed a moment to find answers. I had spent my young life speaking about equality in public, and I wondered whether that equality could also be lived inside a marriage. My father knew of my plans to study further, and he worried that a man with limited exposure to the world might not understand the pursuit of women’s rights and equality that had become central to my life.
When Vijay and I spoke about women’s issues, we spoke different languages. I used the vocabulary of feminism; he spoke about humanity and how one person should treat another. I asked what equal property rights would mean in practice. The land was of no interest to me, but how could I get others to fight for it without practising it myself? So once we were wed, my name was added to his inherited land. I told him I did not believe in wearing symbols of marriage simply because marriage required them, and he did not argue. It was my choice, and was treated as such.
In the early years of our marriage, our days often began in different directions. Vijay would leave on his motorcycle to meet people in the community while I cycled to meetings with women. He knew the region and its people in a way I was still learning. He taught me never to assume that women in a village needed someone from the big city to instruct them. In the evenings, we would return home and speak about what each of us had done.
Before founding the Mann Deshi Mahila Sanskari Bank, India’s first bank for rural women, we started a credit cooperative society. Some people wanted Vijay to take charge; they trusted him. He said I should lead it because my education and discipline would help build the institution. One man on the committee tried to get mischievous with the funds, but I refused to allow it. He complained to my husband, assuming he could persuade me to change course. Vijay believed I should listen to them more closely, yet never presented his opinion as an instruction. When I held to my mandate of turning the loss-making society profitable in my way, he simply told them, “She is not listening to me.” We disagreed openly; one person did not disappear into the other’s beliefs. In a marriage so close to public work, what mattered more than agreement itself was to remain independent while still standing together.
As Mann Deshi grew, my work demanded more of my time, and my name began appearing in newspapers. Slowly, the public identity that Vijay had occupied before me began to shift. One day, an officer at the revenue office told me that Vijay had visited earlier and gone unrecognised until a senior colleague identified him as Chetna Gala Sinha’s husband. Before I came to Mhaswad, Vijay had been a formidable leader in the community. Someone once told me that I had married a lion. Now, people were beginning to know him through me.
When I asked Vijay about it, he smiled.
“I am Mr Vijay Chetna.”
Sacrificing money is easier than sacrificing power. I have seen leaders mourn the loss of a position more than the loss of someone close to them. Even inside a loving marriage, a wife’s growing public identity can disturb the order the world has taught both people to expect.
By this point, I was travelling internationally, and Vijay accompanied me often. In 2002, I moved to the United States with him and our children for Yale’s World Fellows Program. In Mhaswad, Vijay held what you could call a daily durbar, where people would come to seek his advice. At Yale, I was the one whose days were claimed. In the evenings, he began cooking dinner, though he had never cooked before. A student who often came home for dinner knew Vijay only as the man who stood at the stove while I was busy with the programme. Months later, when he visited India and saw Vijay address a large public meeting, he was astonished. “You never told me your husband is a leader here,” he said. I smiled. “You never asked.”
In one place, Vijay’s authority was visible. In another, he could stand at a stove in a country whose language he did not speak and learn what the day required of him. Neither version of him diminished the other.
He listened to people who interrupted him, disagreed without humiliation and acknowledged that my decisions were my own. Even before marrying him, this is what I trusted.