non-fiction

Q&A with Sheila McLeod Arnopoulos, author of Saris on Scooters

How did you come up with the idea for this work?
I have always written about marginalized people. In Montreal as a journalist I worked undercover in textile factories, for example, and wrote about the exploitation of immigrant women. Later, I became fascinated by the potential of microcredit to empower poor women when an Indian friend introduced me to Dalit (formerly untouchables) women in parched Indian villages who used small loans and organic agriculture to make the deserts bloom. Here was an opportunity to write a success story book! This led me to other Indian villages and slums where I met spirited women who refused to be victims and instead were banding together in microcredit groups to beat poverty and also promote social change.

Tell us a little about the overarching theme of your book.
Although about microcredit, my book is also a glimpse into the Indian side of an unsung Third World Women’s Movement of grassroots women working for a more egalitarian and flourishing world. Women I met were, for example stopping child labour and child marriage, in one case by forming a village youth group that young couples had to consult before their wedding could take place. Under the NGO Gram Abhyudaya Mandali, cooperatives of Dalit women were running a sand contract and getting ready to launch a full-fledged dairy. High-caste male bureaucrats, goons and rival contractors tried to destroy them but the women came up with brilliant solutions to outfox their adversaries, made money, and showed that they were first-rate entrepreneurs that could overcome.

Preserving their community during a political crisis was the work of poor Muslim women in a handicraft cooperative under an organization called Confederation of Voluntary Associations providing microcredit to the poor in Hyderabad. In full burqas, the women formed a chain to stop a potential riot provoked by Hindu police against their husbands and sons after Friday prayers at a mosque in the Muslim quarter of the old city of Hyderabad.

How did you research your book?
During four trips to India I knocked around Indian villages and city slums mostly in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat where I met poor but dynamic women taking microcredit loans for small businesses. To witness their lives up close, I sometimes lived with them in their huts. Feisty and fun to be with, many joined cooperatives that burst into the mainstream economy by starting a dairy and creating cutting-edge ventures in construction and embroidery. Not content to be left behind, street vendors in the Self Employed Women’s Association were setting up malls in the city of Ahmedabad and selling highly-valued organic produce to an up-scale market.

In your own work, which character are you most attached to and why?
Puriben is an illiterate women who was starving in the desert with her husband and family because of no work on the land due to drought and natural disasters. Under the Self Employed Women’s Association in Gujarat she became a “barefoot manager” and village leader organizing production of first-class hand-embroidered merchandise now selling on Indian and world markets. A born activist, she fought and won against male elders in her village who at first tried to stop her and her team of artisans from travelling outside the village to sell their embroidered clothes. Later, when the municipality failed to provide water to her village, she made them deliver after she led 200 women balancing empty clay pots on their heads on a 70-kilometre protest march from her village to the municipal water board. To show-case her embroidery skills, on behalf of her company, Puriben made regular sales trips to Delhi and cities in the West. But she was never seduced by the attractions of the urban consumer society and continued to value community life in her small Indian village of Vauva.

Describe the most memorable response you’ve received from a reader.
The most memorable response about my book came from the leader of one of the major organizations I profiled in my book. When he read the chapters that involved the women in his NGO, he said: “You have made literature out of the lives of the women.”

Saris on Scooters will be available in April.  Sheila McLeod Arnopoulos lives in Montreal.

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