TCN Special Series on Women of Inspiration
By Subhashini Ali,
A most remarkable young woman, Fatima Bibi, was felicitated at the Inaugural Session of the 13th Tamil Nadu State Conference of the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) in Tirupur on the 20th August. Fatima from Madurai contracted polio when she was only 8 months old and has not been able to either stand or walk since then. She has been forced to crawl on all fours to get anywhere but this has not stopped her from, literally, going places. She was one of five children whose father, an employee of the Electricity Board, passed away when she was in the VIIth Standard.
Fatima’s mother, Sabira Bibi, brought her children up on her husband’s pension and insisted on educating all of them including Fatima. Fatima, speaking at the AIDWA conference, said that people in her family and also those living around them felt that educating a physically challenged child and, that too, a female was a ‘waste’ but her mother refused to go along with them and Fatima was able to study and pass her B Comm. She told me that, in college, her classes were on the second floor of the building and she used to crawl up two flights of steps to attend them. To think of her doing this, day after day, for four years is awe-inspiring and makes one conscious of the deep craving for education that young, under-privileged women have. They are tenacious in their determination to access the one thing that they feel can pull them out of the adverse circumstances that each one of them is born into.
Fatima Bibi with AIDWA memento
Not only did Fatima crawl her way up on the educational ladder, she also became a social and cultural activist. Left-cultural groups and women activists were a familiar sight in her village from the time that she was a child and she felt very drawn to them. She started singing, participating in street theatre, writing songs and short plays, learning to paint and also developed a keen appreciation of gender issues. In recent years, she has organized Muslim Women Conventions around the recommendations of the Sachar Committee in which AIDWA’s Muslim Womens Charter of Demands were discussed and supported. She was also active in forming a Peace Committee in 2008 when there was communal tension in Madurai over the Sangh Parivar’s determination to replace the green flag on a hilltop mazaar with a saffron one. It is incredible to think of this young woman moving with groups of men and women from one locality to another, determined to preserve harmony and peace and heartening to know that their efforts succeeded.
Fatima was by this time a well-known figure in Madurai. She had developed a talent for public speaking and elocution and participated in debates and contests. This brought her into contact with a film producer, Madan Gabriel, who inspired her to think of taking up film direction as a medium of expressing the ideas and emotions that were constantly welling up within her. Fatima then made a momentous decision: she moved to Chennai, got a room in a women’s hostel and joined a Film Institute that was nearly 30 kilometers away. She had a wheelchair by this time and she would get into an auto with it and then travel this interminable distance, back and forth, everyday. At the Institute, she tried to learn a little bit of everything connected with film-making! The result was that, within a few months, she was directing her first film, ‘Maa’. Fatima says that this is the first sound to emerge from the mouths not only of babes the world over but even of many animals; it means much more than just ‘Mother’ and encompasses all the miracles of creation. The film not only had a physically-challenged hero, but most of the technicians associated with it, the cameraman, the associate director, the sound recordist, the dance director and the music director, were also challenged in different ways. Despite the uniqueness of this project, the film got an indifferent release and could not make the impact that it could and should have. This has only made Fatima even more determined to make another film, sometime, somehow.
Fatima’s mother worried about her daughter’s safety and health and felt that she needed someone who would always be with her to help and look after her. She found a husband for her through marriage-brokers and the couple married in 2010. Fatima now has a 3 month-old baby boy, Hareeth (Lion) whom she delivered after a difficult pregnancy. She is reticent about her married life but says that nothing can stop her from constant endeavour and achievement.
Fatima’s wheelchair is beyond repair now but that has not stopped her from going where she wants to go. She says that she cannot stop to think either about her broken wheelchair or about her other problems. If she does, she will be stopped in her tracks. She says that, similarly, she had decided early on in her life that she could not afford the luxury of tears because, once she started to weep, she would never be able to stop.