Ms. Tamasi Roy Challenging the Existing Gender Social Norms

A middle-aged woman Tamasi Roy lives in Raidighi. She has been part of the Voice Woman action group since 2021. The family that Tamasi came from was conservative where the opinion of a woman was less valued by the male members of the family. When Tamasi joined the Voice group, she started sharing her everyday challenges like how she was convinced or sometimes pressured to follow several norms which she didn’t agree with. But gradually when she started participating in the gender sensitization workshops conducted under Mukti Voice, she eventually developed her perspective on gender and an understanding of how gender plays a significant role in depriving women of many social practices (priesthood, male dominance in various family customs, participation in cremation, etc )

After attending several sessions, Tamasi started challenging the existing social norms in her personal as well as the social spaces. At that time, there was a sudden death in her family, her sister-in-law(Sheuli Das -name changed) died due to heart disease. As she has one daughter, after Sheuli’s death, all the relatives came together to decide who will perform the cremation and it was almost decided that one of the relative’s sons will perform the rituals. In this situation, Tamasi opposed that decision and raised an open question to all that why her only daughter will be deprived of performing the cremation of her mother for the only reason that she is a girl and due to social norms, a girl/woman is not allowed to perform such rituals. She asked the reasons for not allowing a girl to complete the rituals to all the elder people in the family but no one was able to answer with logical points. In between, Tamasi’s mother, aunt and sister started supporting her and the Tamasi took the initiative to convince her elder brother (Husband of Sheuli) and she was successfully able to make him understand that their daughter would perform the cremation of her mother. With the support of Tamasi and a few members of the family, Diya(Sheuli’s daughter) completed all the rituals during cremation and performed 15 days of after-death rituals.