Gulabi Gang: A Women Revolution in its true sense!
Even the absolute weakest members of society can manage life with extraordinary acts of will, luck and some recklessness to fight back. The person who best teaches that lesson is Sampat Pal, who was married off at the age of 12, bore the first of her five children at 15 and is essentially illiterate. Despite all this, she has not only empowered herself but thousands of women just like her. Sampat Pal Devi, the 54-year-old self-proclaimed ‘commander-in-chief’ of the Gulabi Gang, a group of vigilante women that operate out of Uttar Pradesh’s notorious Badlands of Bundelkhand, has been variously lauded as an activist, a feminist, and a pioneer of sorts.
Sampat Pal echoes solidarity to all women around the world fighting – in all their different ways – for a more just, equitable and peaceful world. From her earliest days as a child, Sampat had always felt keenly the offence of injustice—the sight of it enraged her. She began the Gulaabi Gang revolution when she was only 20 years old.
Sampat Pal Devi was an ordinary housewife who got married at the tender age of 12. After four years, while returning to her home, she heard about the drunken abuse of her friend’s husband. Unable to stop the abuse alone and enraged by the helplessness of her friend, she gathered the neighbours and beat the abusive husband of her friend in front of the whole society. An incident that marks the beginning of a new wave of change in her life. The idea of Gulabi Gang had incorporated from there. After a couple of years, Sampat Pal Devi and her Gulabi gang also fought for the allotted amount of food and grains which are supposed to be distributed by the local fair price shops.
She stood up for fighting violence against women, preventing child marriages, arranging weddings of couple in love despite local resistance, to ensuring delivery of basic rights for the poorest of poor. One woman who has been able to radicalise the draconian regime of patriarchy, blimpishness and a regressive society. Devi’s intervention had the desired result and the recalcitrant husband was forced to mend his ways. More importantly, Devi’s model of delivering alternative justice inspired a movement that now boasts of a network of 400,000 women - dressed in pink sarees and all wielding a stick - across 11 districts of India’s largest province of Uttar Pradesh. A revolution has begun!!