Write approximately 150 words on Women’s role in anti-arrack movement. (2024, 10 Marks)
Arrack, a cheap distilled country spirit, was sold in Andhra Pradesh through state-licensed auctions that made excise a major revenue head. The anti-arrack agitation of 1992–93 is the clearest Indian case of poor rural women, without a party or an urban organisation behind them, forcing a state-level change in policy.
Origins: a literacy class becomes a movement
- The Total Literacy Campaign in Nellore district ran night classes for adult women. A primer lesson, Seethamma Katha, told of a family ruined by a husband’s drinking; learners at Dubagunta village (Kaligiri mandal) recognised it as their own life.
- Vardhineni Rosamma, a widowed labourer later known as Dubagunta Rosamma, led the women to shut the village arrack shop. The grievance was concrete: wages drunk away, debt, domestic violence and ill-health.
- The participants were mostly Dalit and backward-caste agricultural labourers, many of them neo-literates, who bore the household cost of the state’s liquor revenue.
What the women did
- Direct action: picketing shops, blocking the excise auctions, stopping delivery vehicles and destroying arrack sachets.
- Social sanction: shaming drinkers and sellers, boycotting vendors and extracting public pledges of abstinence.
- Scaling up: village committees, processions, street plays and memoranda to collectors; the Telugu press carried the story from Nellore across the state, and delegations and rallies reached Hyderabad.
The Congress government of K. Vijaya Bhaskara Reddy banned arrack from 1 October 1993; prohibition became an election plank, and N. T. Rama Rao imposed total prohibition on taking office on 16 January 1995.
Significance
- Power as acting in concert: in Hannah Arendt‘s sense (On Violence, 1970), women with no individual power generated collective power simply by acting together.
- The personal as political: drinking and wife-beating, treated as private misfortunes, were turned into a question of excise policy and public finance.
- Agency: literacy became political consciousness, illustrating Naila Kabeer‘s agency dimension of empowerment. The picketing repertoire echoed M. K. Gandhi‘s assignment of liquor picketing to women.
Limits
- N. Chandrababu Naidu lifted prohibition in 1997, citing bootlegging and lost revenue: the state was itself the seller.
- Prohibition is a moral-reform demand that leaves patriarchal control of household income intact, and parties soon appropriated it — as in Bihar’s women-backed prohibition of 2016.
Conclusion
The women made a domestic grievance a matter of state policy and showed that the weakest can set the agenda. The 1997 reversal showed that a movement can win a policy without acquiring the institutional power to keep it.