Stepping Out to Find Herself

Kehkashan Beg of Lucknow sees a whole world through her camera.

- Mehru Jaffer

The camera has literally given new vision and purpose to several girls living in lower income neighbourhoods of Lucknow, the state capital of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. For when Kehkashan Beg, 37, first got the opportunity to look through one she saw a whole new world – in which life did not start and end within the boundaries of one’s small home.

Till a decade ago Beg was just another purda-clad woman who had never stepped out of her crowded neighbourhood populated mostly with lower middle class Muslim families. In her twenties then it had never even occurred to her that she had the right to envision a life, future that was different from the other women in her family, including her own mother. Beg had “to teach myself to dream” and she learnt to do so when a chance encounter connected her to Sanatkada, a local non-government organisation that empowers Dalit and Muslim women through education and vocational training, which are funded from the proceeds of the handicraft and handloom store it runs in the city.

Madhavi Kuckreja set up Sanatkada in 2006, having spent 14 years in rural Chitrakoot and Banda districts in eastern Uttar Pradesh where she had engaged with Dalit and Muslim women combating violence not just at home but also at the hands of the local caste elites and state functionaries like the police. Once back in Lucknow she observed that there was an acute need for positive, strong female role models for the city’s Muslim women and so together with the Delhi-based Nirantar, which works on issues of gender and education, a module on leadership training was specially designed and implemented for them.