Background
Kamla Bhasin was born on April 24, 1946, in Punjab, India. Her father was a doctor in Rajasthan.
Author, song-writer and gender trainer Kamla Bhasin at her house.
Kamla Bhasin Kamla Bhasin at Delhi Poetry Festival
MP Shashi Tharoor felicitated womens rights activist Kamla Bhasin during the Laadli awards, in Mumbai.
Kamla Bhasin with her fan at Dhaka Lit Fest 2017.
Ram Singh Road, Panch Batti, Sangram Colony, Ashok Nagar, Jaipur, Rajasthan 302001, India
Kamla received Bachelor of Arts from Maharani’s College in Jaipur, India.
Jawahar Lal Nehru Marg, Talvandi, Jaipur, Rajasthan 302004, India
Kamla received Master of Arts from Rajasthan University.
Kamla Bhasin was born on April 24, 1946, in Punjab, India. Her father was a doctor in Rajasthan.
Kamla received Bachelor of Arts from Maharani’s College in Jaipur, India, and Master of Arts from Rajasthan University.
Kamla has worked in Germany and Thailand, and her assignments have enabled her to travel throughout Asia, from the Philippines to Sri Lanka to Nepal. Most of her work as a program officer for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has been centered in the area of New Delhi, where she served as a founding member of the Women’s Resource and Training Center.
For nearly forty years she has been engaged with issues related to gender, development, education, peace, identity politics, militarization, human rights, and democracy. She tries to explore connections between different issues and to promote synergies between different movements. Her main work is at the South Asian level where she has been involved in capacity building of South Asian and other young activists as well as networking between civil society organizations in South Asia. She is the co-founder and member of several women’s groups and voluntary organizations in India, and of a few regional and international organizations and networks, some of which are mentioned below.
From 1972 to 1975, Kamla was the Development Secretary of Seva Mandir in Udaipur, India. From 1975 to 1979, she was a program officer at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, in Bangkok, Thailand, and in 1979, in New Delhi, India. Seva Mandir is an NGO working with the poor in Rajasthan, India. She worked directly with the rural poor (men and women) to organize agricultural, economic, and educational activities. The main emphasis was on mobilizing people for their own development. From 1979 to 2001, she worked with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN, focusing in her work on supporting NGO initiatives for the development and empowerment of marginalized people, especially women, in South East Asia and South Asia.
Currently, Kamla is working with Sangat, a South Asian Feminist Network, for whom she is also acting as the South Asian coordinator of the ”One Billion Rising” events. Further, she is working with JAGORI, a Women’s Resource and Training Centre, and is a member of SAHR, South Asians for Human Rights. She is also co-chair of the worldwide network, Peace Women across the Globe. In her work, she has given many pieces of training and held numerous workshops, such as gender sensitization workshops for senior NGO leaders and managers, government officials, police personnel, members of Parliament in different countries of South Asia.
Bhasin has written extensively about development programs and their impact on the people who live in rural poverty. For the last twenty years a special focus has been to coordinate, support, and document the effort of the Food and Agriculture Organization to empower women throughout the region. An outgrowth of the author’s involvement with the rural women of India is the book Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition, described in the Women's Review of Books by Janet A. Contursi as a “long-awaited feminist history” that “documents women’s experiences of that event through the personal testimonies of those who lived through the trauma.”
The “event” played itself out over a period of years, but the violence began in the late summer of 1947, when India and Pakistan were separated into two nations, one ostensibly secular (India) and the other Islamic. The greatest violence was concentrated on the border areas, as people fled from one country or the other, depending on their religious convictions. The greatest devastation occurred among women, suggest Bhasin and her co-author. Women were abducted, sometimes painfully disfigured, forced to marry outside their faith and their native country, and eventually forced to return to their original homes, regardless of their own wishes.
Borders and Boundaries include so-called “official” histories of the violence, along with personal narratives provided by victims who survived the catastrophes and the social workers assigned to help in the recovery process. What emerges from the accounts is a realization that abuse, particularly sexual abuse, of the women was employed as a tool for “humiliating and dishonoring the men, families and communities to which they belonged,” as Contursi reported; later, the need to regain a family’s honor led to additional horrors for the women, who were victimized, sometimes even killed or forced into suicide, by their own spouses or parents, daughters or sisters, or other family members.
Despite the brutality from family, on the one hand, and callous political and religious policies on the other, there were victims who credited the time of the Partition as a source of their ultimate empowerment. The upheaval, these women claimed, forced them to rely on themselves for the first time and set them free from roles and expectations once hallowed by tradition.
Kamla is a founding member of the Society for Alternatives in Education, and a member of governing body of the Spastic Society of Northern India.
Kamla was married. But the couple broke up after incidents of domestic abuse and infidelity by him. She had a daughter, who died in 2006. Kamla also has a son who became disabled after a vaccine reacted badly.