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PODCAST 06 | PRIYANKA KOTAMRAJU

Music Thoughts in G by Cheyenne Mize.

P Kotamraju In the context of India, which is a very patriarchal society, it is very difficult to find women talking about themselves… But more than that, I thought there was voices of working-class women missing. You wouldn't hear or you wouldn't see their stories or what they think about their lives, or what they are doing with their work at all in newspapers, in media generally. So that was what was of interest to me, to look at women and what they say about themselves; not what we had to say about them.

F Sweeney: Priyanka Kotamraju, Atlantic Fellow for Social & Economic Equity, now a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, is a journalist who has written about the intersections of gender, class and caste.  

Welcome to CONVERSATIONS ON CONFIDENCE with clinical psychologist and neuroscientist Professor Ian Robertson from the Global Brain Health Institute in Dublin, and me, Fionnuala Sweeney.  Ian is the author of HOW CONFIDENCE WORKS: THE NEW SCIENCE OF SELF-BELIEF.  In this series, we speak to Fellows from the Global Atlantic community about the role of confidence (or lack of it) in their lives, both growing up, and in their work today as Atlantic Fellows advancing fairer, healthier, and more inclusive societies.

Over to Priyanka on her work and what inspired her to become a journalist:

P Kotamraju: I wrote for mainstream English newspapers, national newspapers, as well as very local, hyper local newspapers, tabloids called Khabar Lahariya, which were driven by communities of lower caste women. I'll come back to that. I have no background in journalism. I came from an engineering and a business background, and I was working as a marketer for newspapers when I realised it was very hard to sell newspapers in India, and I decided to make a shift to journalism. In journalism, what interested me was to listen to stories that were not in the mainstream or listen to people who were not being listened to or were not being heard. And that's how I got interested in listening to women and what they had to say about their lives.

F Sweeney: In making that transition from engineering to being a marketer to writing for newspapers, were you in any way lacking in confidence about doing that? Or did you have an innate sense of confidence about being able to make that transition successfully?

P Kotamraju: I was much more brazen when I was younger. As I've grown older, I've become a little more hesitant, a little more aware of the context of the society around me. To give you my socioeconomic background, I do come from an upper caste, upper class strata in India. So, it was naturally easy for me to think that I would succeed at what I choose to do, whatever that field may be. So, I didn't really think too much about the transition except for this is something I want to do, and I think I should be able to do it.

I was brazen. I wrote to every newspaper in Delhi at that time and asked for a job without having any qualifications or experience, and I assumed I would get it. It was a hard time, a couple of months before I got a job. But I did. But I think there is something that in your background because you are trained, because you're qualified, you're educated in English medium, you can speak the language with a certain amount of ease, you expect that these opportunities will come by, and you will be able to succeed in that.

I Robertson: Priyanka, you’ve portrayed the confidence that comes from being of high socioeconomic status, which is true in all countries. It’s one of the greatest sources of confidence. Normally, if you're at that status, you take it for granted and you regard it as your natural right. But you went on this journey where you started to put yourself in positions of vulnerability and you become less certain and less confident, because you're embracing the other great source of depleted confidence, which is gender. You've gone through that journey where you've sacrificed, if you like, the privilege of your socioeconomic status and the confidence that's endowed, to explore how to build that in working-class women as you describe them, I think it's a fascinating story.

P Kotamraju: Thank you, Ian. It’s difficult sometimes to see it like that. Sometimes when I look back, I have taken risks, which are economic risks actually, to move from well-paying jobs with a decent amount of security into uncertain, precarious work situations where you took a massive pay cut, and you didn't know if you were going to make rent or not.

But more than that, one of my assignments I clearly remember - because I was writing about women - was to cover violence against women with this particular hyper local newspaper called Khabar Lahariya, which literally translates into ‘the waves we made’. That for me was a transformative experience. I went to cover violence against women in this particular region of India, in the North, called Bundelkhand. And the experience of working alongside rural women journalists, neo-literate women journalists, journalists who came from backgrounds that were so different from mine, was such a rich experience for me that these were the colleagues that I wanted to work with for the rest of my life. I felt like I was in a newsroom for the first time in my life.

I Robertson: From your on-the-ground experience, do you see that confidence is lacking in particularly women of lower class? Is it as important a variable in human endeavour as I would like to think it is?

P Kotamraju: Yeah, I do think so because the group of women that started this venture called Khabar Lahariya, which is now a massive news organisation in India, the women who ran it come from historically marginalised groups: Dalits, lower caste OBCs (Other Backward Castes), Muslims - so religious minorities - and they have found it difficult to access the opportunities that I have accessed so easily and taken for granted.

There is one person that I would like to mention here, called Meera Jatav, who was been my colleague for about eight years, since I started my journey with Khabar Lahariya. We still work together. Whenever she talks, she talks about self-confidence and she says ‘I believe in myself, so I'm not afraid to go ahead. I'm not afraid of asking what I want and doing what I need to do, or being where I'm not supposed to be, because I have 100% belief in myself, what I'm doing is right’. With a lot of studying, with a lot of ground experience, I have learned over the years that self-confidence is something that the Dalit community in particular attaches itself to. This is something that Bhimrao Ambedkar has talked about, Jyotiba Phule has talked about, that as a community, if you have to stand up for yourself in the face of oppression that comes from everywhere and from everyone in caste, class, in your everyday interactions, confidence or self-belief is something that you have to build and that will take you in your journey.

F Sweeney: Ian, could I ask you a question based on something Priyanka said earlier, which was having the brazenness of youth and the confidence that comes with that to assume you’ll get all these jobs that you applied for.  How much of that has to do with youth and what’s going on in the brain at that time and how much to do with socioeconomic status?

I Robertson: Confidence comes particularly from your socioeconomic status, which as Priyanka says hers was high, but also from education. Being able to think abstractly empowers you, makes you feel powerful. And that makes you feel more confident. So, a combination of higher socioeconomic status and being highly educated is a very, very important source of confidence.

Women do have challenges to confidence at all ages. I don't think there's a general rule about this. It becomes a question of values and morality. And it strikes me, Priyanka, that loss of some of your brazenness, of your self-assurance, came from actually being exposed to some realities and becoming attached to values related to inequality. But there's also a tremendously nourishing sense of this collective confidence, of this collective effort with these women who had had such struggles.

P Kotamraju: I think you're absolutely right, Ian. That is my experience working with Khabar Lahariya, having a collective of women who are figuring out journeys, who are facing uphill struggles at Khabar Lahariya or in rural communities, in working class communities in India. The struggle begins at home for women, whether you are able to step outside of the home to find work, to be able to dream a career for yourselves, to dream of even education, or get a job, to pick up work that is not traditionally associated with women's work. And in the area that we are working in most of the women are engaged in agricultural labour work or ad hoc, daily wage work. Gruelling work, which gives you money, enough to feed yourself and your family for that day so you don't know where the next day's meal is coming from.

Most of the women that I worked with, who are still part of this collective of women, came from these backgrounds. They were construction workers. They were migrant workers. They were street vendors. They were agricultural workers. And for them to become journalists, become literate journalists, set the agenda and talk about issues that matter to them in the face of blatant - and again, I used the word brazen - patriarchy thrown in our faces everywhere, from the state to society to families, I could not imagine and that changed the perception of reality for me.

I Robertson: Confidence is about believing you can do things; it’s the opposite of helplessness. From my research, which I have to test with you and the reality you have grappled with, one of the great sources of confidences is actually dealing with adversity, with getting past tough times in spite of the adversity, and that seems to produce a particularly determined and resilient kind of self-confidence. Has that been your experience with your colleagues that you've been working with and with yourself, that actually these awful adversities - the prejudice, the patriarchy, the opposition, the violence - that actually facing up to that and getting through it, it strengthens you in the kind of Nietzschean way?

P Kotamraju: I would say yes and no. For me, I did find that in the span of say this last decade I went from a brazen young woman to feeling very helpless about the situation that my colleagues were in, and that I was working with them, to someone now with the confidence in what we are building, and in the future that we are imagining together.

I come from a background where I had everything. I had economic, social security and acceptance in whichever society I would choose to go in. Whereas on ground reality for so many women, for a majority of women in India, is that their presence is not accepted. Their presence is not acknowledged. So that adversity and that helplessness and that violence, the patriarchal violence, everyday violence bogged me down quite a bit.

I did not see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, except for having this amazing collective of women who somehow got up every day and said, we’re going to forge ahead. I’d questioned them and myself where do they find the strength to do this every day? Because this is exhausting. This is draining, and if you paid me $1,000,000, I would still not choose to do it. But having been in this struggle with them over the years, I’ve realised the value of having this collective and building a future where you imagine it's going to be an equal world or a fair and just world for everyone.

I Robertson: It's such a huge target you’ve set yourself, and a target, Fionnuala, that all the Atlantic Fellows in all the programmes are challenged with. It’s so easy to feel helpless in the face of an impossibly big task. What you've described, Priyanka, is the incredible power of the collective. You can be nourished by the sense of collective struggle. However, if you go up in a drone and look down at your work, you can see some intermediate achievements. You haven't cured patriarchy, you haven't cured the inequality by any means, but you have created a very extensive network of people and you can see some progress, a little bit of progress towards that. Would you say that was true?

P Kotamraju: Yeah, absolutely. It's difficult in the daily minutiae to look back or have a bird's eye view of things that you have done and things you have collectively done, and milestones you have achieved. But I am at this moment quite happy and proud of what we as a collective have achieved.

I left Khabar Lahariya a while back, but the community has grown, has inspired a generation of women to come out of their patriarchal societies to challenge them in every level. I think the discourse in the area that we operate has definitely changed for the better. There is more discussion around gender. There are more women coming out and pursuing vocations in occupations that you would not see them do that. There are more Dalit women, there are more OBC women, Muslim women coming out of these collectives.

I'm not talking about mainstream collectives, mainstream media or NGOs, or societies that look at the situation or these fights from the top down. I'm purely talking about ground up activities, ground up movements. The way they’ve built themselves. I think it's a great time to see the proliferation of how so many Khabar Lahariyas have bloomed in historically marginalised communities across India, and how they are speaking up for themselves, not willing to concede the platforms to those who have always been in power to dictate what they feel about themselves and how they should shape their futures. So I think that's extremely positive to see. But the struggle continues.

F Sweeney: Can I jump in there and just ask you to explain what OBC is?

P Kotamraju: What I'm referring to here is the official classification of classes and castes in India, which is basically the general classes, other castes or classes, and then there is a majority of the Indian population that falls into an umbrella term of many, many classes, labelled as ‘Other Backward Classes’, in which there are hierarchical levels of some classes being ahead of others. And then you have the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, who are mostly the Dalit Community, and the indigenous people of India. So, that is the official classification.

In parallel with the official classification, we have the cultural hierarchy of Indian society which puts Brahmins at the top of the hierarchy.  Savarna is how we label Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas. Shudras and Atishudras would basically comprise Other Backward Classes and the Scheduled Castes.

I Robertson: If you are classified as Another Backward Class, how you see yourself in terms of how confident you feel about doing anything in the world, by virtue of that label, must be hugely diminished?

P Kotamraju: What you're asking is very interesting, and I do not have a ready answer to this. But you would see in contemporary Indian history how the Other Backward Classes have used that term, that label to their advantage, and when they have protested for quotas or for reservations in the official scheme of things, the kind of backlash on Other Backward Classes for asserting themselves and their rights from the minority power institutions - Brahmins or Kshatriyas or the general castes - who are holding powers, so the elites, which is only a minority of the population.

But in terms of Dalit, Dalit basically means ‘broken down people’, ‘people who are broken down’. So, now we see that Dalits have embraced this label, and overturned that label to not mean ‘broken down people’, to assert themselves, to assert themselves as a community that has power, that can speak for themselves, and that will not back down.

I Robertson: That is a remarkable demonstration of the power of people to collectively create their own confidence, to not have it determined by external factors. But when you have such a hierarchical system, when you have people who are maybe lower down in the very lowest castes, the men in that very low status can maybe regain some sense of empowerment by their power over the women that they live with, and that's that awful oppression, the patriarchy. Women are really at the receiving end of all of this because at even the lower levels, the people who feel disempowered or humiliated or very low in status, the men take it out on the women. Is that accurate do you think?

P Kotamraju: You are absolutely right, Ian. In sociology or in anthropology, Dalit women are called thrice oppressed by caste, class and patriarchy, which is external and also internal, the patriarchy of the Dalit communities as well. It is called cumulative disadvantage, it is called interlocking oppression, the intersectionality of oppression, but the bottom line is that Dalit women have been at the receiving end of every conceivable oppression in Indian society.

It's a constant struggle to convince the men in your family or your extended family, that what you're doing is work, is a job. So, most of the Khabar Lahariya women are taunted, their characters are assassinated on a daily basis because they don't have proper times for their work. They would go early in the morning. It's a journalist’s job, which we in cities understand. It's a 24-hour job. But for women who come from these backgrounds, their characters are always cast in doubt: what are these women doing so late in the night, why are they always walking alone? And because now everything is digital, people think that they are easy to approach. So, the kind of violence that they face digitally also is something that, as city journalists or as upper caste, upper class journalists, we would not necessarily face. Of course, there are cases, but we would not face this on a daily basis.

The consensus at least in Indian society is that if you look at historically marginalised groups like Dalit women finding this new-found confidence, it results in a violent backlash. It has resulted in more violence, more clamping down on them. So, it has only brought about a reinforcement of patriarchy or everyday casteism or oppression in new ways to make your journey even harder.

F Sweeney: Priyanka, when you've come across this with the collective you've worked with, what then do you say to those women if there has been a backlash, particularly a violent one?

P Kotamraju: It depends on the power you have as a collective to talk back to a society that is feeling so much power. The small collective that we are, Chitrakoot Collective, I would say that the kind of violence that we have faced right now is innumerable microaggressions because we don't speak the language of the oppressors, or if you’re in conferences, if you’re presenting our findings, we don't have the cultural and social capital to frame things in a certain way that is acceptable. We don't have the buzz words, so to speak. Economically, there is a backlash. You will not be paid commensurately to to the work that you are doing.  There are so many ways in which the backlash comes back to you.

In Khabar Lahariya’s case - I do not want to speak for them. I'm speaking as an insider/outsider who has seen them for a long time, who has friends, still valuable colleagues. They are facing state backlash in terms of who they report on, what they report on. If they are exposing nexuses of power, how to clamp them down, how to remove the platforms that they've been given, how to dismiss them or devalue them. That's an ongoing project.  There is no ready response that we have for it because we have not figured out how we would unite in our response to that.

F Sweeney: You talk about the bird’s eye view looking across the work you've done over the years. When you've had challenges to your confidence as an individual and you've managed to reassert yourself, either through experiencing the power of the collective or your own resilience, is there, Ian, an expiry date on that confidence and that resilience once someone has overcome a challenge? Or is it something that constantly needs to be reinforced?

I Robertson: The courage you need to do what Priyanka and particularly her colleagues in the facing up to this violent backlash that she describes, the courage you need to maintain, not over a day or a week, but over years, in the face of not only sometimes what seems like a lack of progress, but what sometimes must feel like going backwards in the face of people trying to slap down people who are exposing abuse of power, etc. Inevitably, there will be times when you feel defeated. And that's where the collective is so incredibly important, the realisation that being courageous together can be enough for just stepping forward. As the great Persian poet, Rumi, says, ‘The road only appears with the first step.’ So, there are periods where cognitively you might think this is pointless, this is not going to work, but I am going to take that step anyway, because you don't know when you take that step, what new avenues or perceptions, new paths will open up. So, I'm guessing it is a constant effort of will to summon the energy to deal with these things, and you have to focus in and focus out.

P Kotamraju: I think you’re right on the money here. Our collective, the Chitrakoot Collective, and we’re a fluid five/six people with half of us being on ground in Bundelkhand, and the rest of us remote in different locations across India.

So, Meera, the co-founder of Khabar Lahariya, who built this movement of Khabar Lahariya over two decades. She, after two years of COVID and lockdowns and economic backlash, there was a period earlier this year for about two months where she said she was exhausted. She's 52 and she has been at the forefront of feminist struggles in Bundelkhand for, I would say, nearly three decades. So, from the early ‘90s she's been a self-made Dalit woman who has been struggling and who has been fighting patriarchal and casteist forces in the collective, and individually in family, in society and against the state. She said she was exhausted and she's someone that I look to for confidence, my daily dose of confidence, daily dose of sunshine. I talk to her, and I get my confidence and I'm able to do things. She said, ‘I am done. I have nothing more to do, I am in limbo now. I don't know where to go from here. I'm so disinterested in everything now’. And I've never seen her, experienced her, heard her say this for two months. And I would like to believe that it was the collective that brought her back from this sea of exhaustion, where she was able to summon her energies back into saying, ‘This is a struggle. This is a fight that I want to fight. And there are changes that I am seeing. And I want to build a world that is a better one for my own children.’

So, she's back up and about now, but for about two months, I think the exhaustion that I saw in her was the first that I've seen in about a decade of knowing her. And that was difficult to see, and I did not know at that time how she would come out of it or how we would be able to collectively come out of it.

I Robertson: What you describe is a kind of exhaustion, but also a kind of depression, I guess. In evolutionary terms, sometimes that kind of state of depressed exhaustion can be seen as a way of a recovering your resources. It’s a time where, rather than you being the person who's out there leading and all the stress and the demands that there are of being a leader, you're looking for succour, you're looking for other people to look after you because you've been doing all the looking after them. So, it's a kind of temporary retreat, mental and indeed physical retreat. Sometimes people can get stuck in that, in the sense of pessimism and futility and helplessness. But if you see it and if you're helped by other people to see it as a necessary retreat, then sometimes you can come out of it maybe more resilient, not always.

If you have a kind of higher level, a drone's eye view, if you like, of your own mental state, it can become easier to navigate and to harness these different mental forces, particularly if the collective, if your colleagues, recognise that as well and you can allow people to retreat, allow people to have periods where they feel exhausted or defeated. Does that ring any bells for you?

P Kotamraju: Absolutely. In fact, our collective, all of us, went through periods of exhaustion or depression and pulling away from the work that we were doing; we were burnt out. Whether it was, COVID, or what it was, but every single member of our collective did withdraw and then return at different levels.

Music Thoughts in G by Cheyenne Mize.

F Sweeney: Priyanka Kotamraju, journalist and Atlantic Fellow for Social & Economic Equity, bringing us to the end of today’s CONVERSATION.  

For more CONVERSATIONS ON CONFIDENCE, go to our website at www.atlanticfellows.org.  Here you can also learn more about the seven Atlantic Fellows programs empowering emerging leaders to advance fairer, healthier, more inclusive societies.  

I’m Fionnuala Sweeney. Thank you for listening.  I do hope you will join Ian and me for our final CONVERSATION in the series.  Our guest is neurologist Boon Lead Tee, Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health.

ENDS | DURATION: 28’ 08

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