Last June the India Tribune, the Chicago-based national newspaper for emigre Indians, named Kanta Khipple its first “woman of the year” for her leadership in founding Apna Ghar, the world’s first shelter for battered Asian women.
In 1986 Khipple’s three children urged her to retire. To please them–because she had not always pleased them, having spent many years away from them–she left a job in the Caribbean and joined them in Chicago. Her retirement lasted about a month. “I couldn’t do nothing,” she says. “I’m not feeble!” She read an article describing the Club of Indian Women, a social-cultural organization, and called to volunteer her services. “I didn’t want to sit around and play bridge. I said I would do anything where I could be fitted in. So they told me about Asian Human Services, one of the agencies they help.”
Under Khipple’s direction, the five women incorporated Apna Ghar in 1989; the next summer, offices were opened down the hall from Asian Human Services, and a hot line was established that is now receiving about 100 calls a month. Last November, ten beds in two nearby apartments were made ready to receive women, and since then the shelter has served about 25 women, who have stayed anywhere from two nights to three months, and another 25 who have received counseling and help finding housing, public aid, child care, and other necessities of life.
She has never adopted Western dress. “The sari is more comfortable, more convenient,” she says, although she is constantly adjusting her dupatta, the long scarf worn with the sari, almost as if it were a nervous habit. Then she says, more emphatically, “This is me, my identity. Besides, the Britishers occupied India for 200 years and never adopted the sari. They never took pajamas and shirt back to England. Two hundred years is not a short time. And it was not one or two Englishmen who came to our country. They maintained their own dignity in their lives. We used to do salaam. We used to bow our heads to the foreign person and all that.”
Khipple worked with a government development team as the family planning adviser. She’d convinced her superiors that family planning had to be integrated into a total development plan that included agriculture, sanitation, education, and nutrition. “And we had to teach the women how to earn some money and gain some independence for themselves.
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“And is the woman going to carry a diaphragm or a condom to where she and her husband have sneaked in the middle of the night to have sexual intercourse? In the villages, people live in extended families with men and women sleeping separately. The couples have to sneak off in the night to be with each other. We have not put our mind to these kinds of environmental, social, and psychological factors. We may give them all kinds of foreign devices to use, but they can’t work. I have tried to tell all those people like the Ford Foundation and others who want to spread birth control: ‘Come with me to the villages. Talk to the people. See how they live.’ It isn’t that they don’t want to plan their families. They do. Very much. But the conditions of their lives make it so hard for them to put it into practice.”
In 1953 the family planners tried to introduce foam tablets that would dissolve in the vagina like Alka-Seltzer when semen reached them, emitting a spermicide. This was the first of many failures with artificial means of birth control. Where could the women keep the boxes of tablets in their crowded, communal homes? When the women were sneaking across sleeping bodies in the dark to meet their husbands, how could they manage to get to the box and take out the tablet, tear away its wrapper, and insert it?
