Moti Meena | An Immortal Fight

"Do not go gentle into that good night,... Rage, rage against the dying of the light." 

- Dylan Thomas

Life for a widow in many communities is death itself. It was no different for Moti Meena, an incredible woman from Salumbar, about seventy kilometres from Udaipur, Rajasthan.

Moti Meena's life has all the elements of drama - conflict between characters; conflict between a character and her destiny (which, for women, is defined by patriarchy); and severe internal conflict as well. But she fought each of those battles because she had the grit to fight: to fight a society that treats widows as so much unwanted baggage; to fight in-laws who treated her as a commodity to be traded; to fight the raging battle within her that told her she was weak and powerless. She took back that power and confidence that society and circumstances tried to rob her of and came through to be a light that illuminates and touches the shadows in everyone else's life around her.

On the 5th of March, 2017, Moti Meena's struggle with community norms and her outstanding contribution to rural healthcare programmes, saw her sharing a stage with other luminaries to receive the Rana Punja award at the Maharaja Mewar Foundation Annual Awards, Udaipur, Rajasthan.

The journey to shed off the shackles of the community started before her husband had passed away, working at an anganwadi. She had worked there for a year when her husband died of an "unknown" illness. Without much awareness of health issues and practically no health facilities, the Meena tribe is subjected to quack treatments that harm than cure. Quacks in the countryside cash in on illiteracy, poor health support and faith in destiny to peddle their pills and potions. Moti describes her husband's death as a betrayal, being cheated, and her mission in life is to help prevent other women from being similarly cheated. As a Senior Health Worker (SHW) with Aajeevika Bureau in Badwal, she looks after 24 hamlets spread out over three panchayats, all connected to an "Amrit Clinic", a rural health centre. With each clinic well-equipped with medication, two nurses on duty, doctors on call, the rural population is now, gradually, beginning to trust formal medical channels. This paradigm shift was difficult, and Moti, as the SHW, plays a pivotal role in bringing health awareness to her community with the Bureau's "outreach" programme.


Moti began her journey with Aajeevika as a volunteer, after an awareness camp she attended as an anganwadi worker. For six months after her husband's death she was housebound, indeed incarcerated, as all widows are, fighting a fate akin to living death. She had to assert her independence with her in-laws who were forcing her to marry her husband's younger brother who already had a wife and two children. She wanted to raise her three boys on her own and resisted this patriarchal intrusion to the extent of filing a case in the local "chowki". As expected, the "chowki" sided with her in-laws, not wanting to upset the power dynamics of the community. Moti was given a third choice -- to marry someone else who would pay some form of "bride price" for her. Resisting this commodification, Moti stepped out of the house and got a job. Not without dire consequences at home.

As she describes the mental and emotional trauma of that time, her eyes cloud and her ever-present smile disappears. "I sometimes lay awake at night and thought about committing suicide," she says. "If this is going to be my life, what is the point of living on." Such thoughts are not uncommon but I ask, "Why did you feel this way?" She thinks about it for a second. "I wasn't that troubled about my own life. I was sad for my children. They are so young. Where would I go and leave them? If they were older, I could have left them with the family. I tried to focus on what I could do so that these negative thoughts would leave my mind. But slowly, as I worked with Aajeevika, these thoughts faded. They would send me to various places. They began to trust me with responsibilities. That gave me confidence in myself. Slowly those thoughts went away."

"How did you make your way, in spite of the odds, to where you have reached?" I ask her. "It was not easy. Aajeevika wanted to send me to Chattisgarh for a nine-month training. When I told my in-laws about it, they told me that if I did, I could not come back to the house. My brother said he would look after the children. My parents were already paying my expenses. I could attend the training to become the SHW for this Amrit Clinic," she shares. "If a person has fallen," she adds, "you just need a couple of people to lend you a hand to pull yourself out and stand on your own feet. I felt like I had fallen down, and I just needed a little support. And now I have enough courage to travel anywhere on my own and do anything!"

Moti's work involves the education of a community with very little awareness. Every day, she visits one of the 24 hamlets and organises meetings. During one such meeting she taught them a song involving corruption that encouraged them to speak up against it. She measured the weight of all the children, using a nifty portable weighing scale, and recorded the weight to the growth chart. If the child's growth chart showed that s/he is underweight, she explained this to the mother and asked her to bring the child to the clinic for a check up with the doctor. Many children have been rescued from malnutrition with this simple intervention.

Trudging around the hot and arid countryside in her wake, I understood that her life is not an easy one, but she gains immense satisfaction from the work she does. She trains and supervises local volunteers, called Swasthya Kirans, organises "Ujala Samooh Meetings", awareness meetings on topics as wide as health and hygiene, human and legal rights. Women, especially, flock to these meetings to learn more. In one of the meetings that I attended, she told the women, "Our body has a lot of doors through which bacteria and germs can enter. If we keep our 'doors' clean, germs don't want to enter our body." A simple but powerful metaphor that communicated vital information.

In between raising her children and her work, Moti has found the time to complete her schooling till Grade 12 through open school. Now she would like to be trained as a nurse but is waiting for her children to grow up.

Meeting Moti Meena, witnessing the work she does, and encountering the spirit with which she approaches it, and her determination to fight regressive traditions, is an edifying experience beyond description. The lady's wonderful smile and happy nature that has crossed obstacles that most would flail at approaching makes this an inspiring life worth recording for the world.

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A few months ago, this story was written at the behest of a journalist friend who works in a national daily. However, this maiden venture into journalism apparently failed on several counts. I don’t really know what the specific counts were because the journalist reverted with something as vague as “it’s all wrong and needs to be fixed”. So, after waiting six months for more concrete feedback, I totted this up to yet another of the many odd experiences I have had. Nothing new in this, I mused, and there’s not much I can do with the all-obscuring all-wrong-needs-to-be-fixed, can I? That’s how so much of the world works—it kills stories that don’t fit the discourse.

However, while you can keep a good story down, you can’t put it out. Just as Moti has often been down but refuses to subscribe to Out, it just wouldn’t go away. It would pop out whenever I opened a certain folder, peep out of corners when I stumbled across the photographs I took of Moti’s work, sneak out and stare me in the face every time I was cleaning the video folders. It would gravely remind me time and again that I had not set out to write a journalistic piece but to tell her story. That her story had touched a nerve deep inside me when I met it, and that when I wrote it straight from where the good stuff comes—the heart—it was meant to strike the same nerve in my readers.

So, here it is, untouched by any editorial pen, and while mortally flawed to the cognoscenti, not a single word is etched with the journalistic quill. Which is just as well, I might add, for the Meena tribe, to which Moti belongs, thinks of journalists as a despicable species who are only interested in making money by exploiting their poverty. I was cautioned by the Bureau to keep the newspaper-connection under wraps, so to speak, or I would be hounded out. Journalists, they told me, write about the poverty, not the wealth of a dying culture; they paint in dull colours the lack of facilities and ignore the abundance of strength and reserve; they amplify the gory shallowness of progress and bury the depth of possibility. So I went in as the learning facilitator I am; I saw, I learnt, and, in the long run, came back humbled by what I had seen and learnt.