This book on paramilitary women, intended for a wide audience. At the turn of the decade of Eightees, women in India set out to change their own lives and to celebrate new powers and vistas achieved by them. It was during the decade of Eighties that for the first time in the post-Independence era, women’s participation in a paramilitary organization as combatants was institutionalized. Scholars, policy makers and enlightened intelligentsia treated that opportunity as watershed in women’s occupational history and experience.
Women were part of the military in the past, led resistances and situated themselves at the center of the military operations and militarized security system. Female combatants in a paramilitary system created a ripple and many questions emerged about women’s role in the public arena, which is largly controlled by men.
In seeking answers to such questions it was revealed that although vulnerable to institutional power, women were not without power in the private spaces and nor were they non-public entities. This necessitated an examination of women’s involvement in internal security system of nation not merely to understand how women negotiate in conflicts related to internal security of the country, but also to understand the gender based interpersonal conflicts in the organization itself.
The book uses the words and experiences of women in 88 Mahila Battalion- a unit of Central Reserve Police Force, a paramilitary organization. In a paramilitary organization, women are physically and often socially more isolated from the family/ relatives/ friends and from global fashions. Yet some set out to change their lives. Roles and personalities are not about abstractions but about real feelings/ aspirations/ commitments in real women and in real lives.