A dear friend Kameshwari came for my Gender Sensitisation course. She was in the University with me in the History Department till 1991and then left the University to focus only on women.
Today Kameshwari is a consultant on Gender issues with a large number of Projects both in India and abroad. We had both struggled to get a Centre for Women's Studies in our University from the late seventees and early eightees and as very Junior lecturers then we were not successful. We had a Women’s Studies Cell and under it we conducted a large number of activities like Seminars, Projects which would not fall in mainstream history. We got a formal Centre sanctioned only in 2007. Kameshwari introduced me to a large number of NGO's in Hyderabad and she played a big role in helping us get money for our Centre through Malladi Subamma. I showed her around our building. We had a great time and laughed that we had started our career at a time when senior Professors in the Department, always sent us to receive guests and during meetings wanted us to serve tea and write down the minutes and were shocked that we opposed it, saying we will all do this by rotation. We have indeed come much further than those early days when Gender was not a serious subject (in the eyes of many Professors), and we were often given some good professional advice that if we want to make our mark we need to focus and work in our main stream disciplines and not waste our time about trivial issues like Gender. We had to struggle a lot to introduce courses on Gender which cut across disciplines and justify to the senior faculty in Academic Council that we were competent enough to teach and will not bring a bad name to the University or lower the standards of teaching. Today we can laugh at all this for Gender studies has got a legitimacy and there is insistance from Government, UGC to address gender issues but four decades back Patriarchy was very strong in the Departments.
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