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Cynthia Stephen

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Cynthia Stephen
Cynthia Stephen at a talk on Ambedkar at Ambedkar Jayanti Celebrations in New Jersey on 14 April 2018 Cynthia_Stephen.jpg
Talk on Ambedkar at Ambedkar Jayanti Celebrations in New Jersey
Born (1961-01-24) 24 January 1961 (age 63)
🏫 Education
💼 Occupation
President of the Training, Editorial and Development Services Trust (TEDS Trust)
Known forSocial Policy Researcher, Independent Journalist; Dalit activism

Cynthia Stephen is a Dalit activist, writer, social policy researcher, and an independent journalist. She works in the areas of Dalit studies, affirmative action and educational policy. She has written many articles and contributed chapters for books on issues of Dalit women, Brahmanical patriarchy, caste discrimination, girl child issues, womanism, theological perspectives in the Indian context including on gender, minority identity, Indian nation etc in national and international journals and reviews including Journal of Dharma, Religion and Society, and Integral Liberation. She is the President of the Training, Editorial and Development Services Trust (TEDS) and lives in Bangalore, India.[1][2][3]

Biography[edit]

Early Life[edit]

Cynthia Stephen's (born January 24, 1961) parents were both natives of Bangalore : Salome, a teacher and her father Y.A Stephen a geologist. She had an elder brother Joshua. All three are now no more. In 1994, she was married to K. Mounesh and they have a daughter and son.

Education[edit]

She studied in St. Philomena’s High School, Bellary till middle school. She completed her high school in Sandur Residential School, Sandur and PUC (Pre-University Course) in science from SCSVM junior college. She graduated from SES First Grade College, Sandur with a First Class BSc degree in Chemistry, Physics and Zoology. She was selected to study journalism in Indian Institute Of Mass Communication, New Delhi in early 1980s.[4] She has also completed a Master’s in Women’s Studies from the Alagappa University in 1999.

Influences[edit]

Her father’s love for books on topics like current affairs, theology, geology and her own interests in English literature, Russian literature, science, environment and the arts lead her to read widely on these subjects from a very young age. Apart from the Bible, English classics by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, P G Wodehouse, C S Lewis and as a child, Enid Blyton were her early influences.[5] She read Sartre, Camus and Simone de Beauvoir even as a schoolgirl, and as a young person enjoyed Russian authors like Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Dostoevsky.

Inspiration[edit]

She has been inspired by the lives and examples of Jesus Christ, Pandita Ramabai, Savitribai Phule, Jyotirao Phule and Dr. B R Ambedkar among others.[1][6] Her grandparents, parents and immediate family members have been huge inspirations as well.[1]

Professional Career[edit]

She began her career in the publishing industry as an Assistant Editor in Sterling Publishers, New Delhi. She moved into journalism as reporter cum sub editor for PROBE INDIA magazine, Delhi.

Prior to this she had interned with Evening News, a tabloid by the Hindustan Times. Subsequently she moved back to the south and worked as editor cum researcher with EFICOR’s training unit, an NGO on a research project on Urbanization in Bangalore. Following this she joined The Bridge Foundation as communications cum project officer. This was the first micro finance organization in the country. She is the earliest professionals to have worked in this field.[2] She rose to the operations executive and she left and took other assignments including in SEARCH, a well known training resource NGO, as part of evaluation research team. This assignment exposed her to the state-of-the-arts developments in the NGO sector both in theoretical approaches and the field. It was here that her talent in the area of gender and women was also noticed in the team. She re-joined The Bridge Foundation for another three years.

In 1995 she joined the Coordination Unit, Bangalore for the UN World Conference on Women which was held in Beijing. She joined this unit as the Communications Coordinator. As part of the job she traveled extensively throughout the country networking with groups working on women’s issue in metro cities, grassroots movements in the smalls towns and rural areas and with a number of academic and research institutions. Her fluency in five languages enabled her to be effective at this task which included addressing meetings and the press as well as appearing on TV to promote the work of the coordination unit.

In 2006, she organised, with some friends, a conference called "Dalit Women : Leadership and Beyond" at the United Theological College, Bangalore in collaboration with the Women's Studies Department of the College. It was here that she drafted the statement which was the outcome of the conference, and which initiated a network called the Dalit Women's Network for Solidarity (DAWNS). It was at this conference that she first applied the term Womanism to the experiences of women from a marginalised section in India. Originally, she coined the term Dalit Womanism.[6][7][8][9] Subsequently, she prefers the term Marginalised Indian Womanism to describe this experience/perspective.[1]

She has been involved in the follow up of the Beijing conference as part of the National Alliance of women, a national network of women's groups and NGOs. She has been instrumental in a number of initiatives on women's rights and policy dialogues with this network, including supporting the writing and compilation of parts of the NGO country report for The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women - CEDAW (the UN Bill of Rights for Women) conference in New York in 2007 and in Geneva in 2014, both of which she attended.[10][11][12] Her contribution for the 2007 NGO report of CEDAW, titled "CEDAW and Dalit Women" was the first time that the situation of Dalit women was analysed from the perspective of the CEDAW. This report was on girl child education for the CEDAW conference.[13] Her article titled "History of Reservations in India from 1800s to 1950s" is one of the most searched articles on the subject of reservations/affirmative action on the web.[14]

In 2012, she took over as the State Programme Director of Mahila Samakhya Karnataka, which was a state-wide network of women's groups, a Central Government project under the Ministry of Human Resource Development. During her two year tenure, she focused on building the skills in gender and social analysis in the team, and was successful in galvanizing savings, health related activities, and specially promoting the role of men and boys in gender sensitivity trainings at all levels.[15][6][2]

Subsequently she was invited to work with the state government Committee which was set up under the leadership of Mr. Ramesh Kumar, current speaker of the Karnataka Assembly, to revise the Karnataka Panchayati Raj Act 1994. Her contribution was in the arena of empowering women, especially those from marginalised groups, to be more effective through provision of women-friendly enabling facilities like qualified personal assistants, and amenities like childcare, toilets, and transportation. The draft bill passed into law in December 2015 and is presently in force.[6][16][17]

She was felicitated with the rest of the committee members by the Karnataka Panchayat Parishat and also honoured with them by the government at a banquet at the Vidhana Soudha in December 2016.[17]

In January 2016, after the suicide of Rohith Vemula, she was approached by Hindustan Times to write a piece on the issue.[18] Throughout that year, she continued to write articles on caste and gender violence and exclusion.[19][20][21] This included a report on the Shankar-Kausalya honour killing case.[22]

In 2018, she did a lecture tour in the USA where she spoke at Harvard University, University of Michigan, University of California (Berkeley campus), and Union Theological Seminary, New York, Columbia Theological Seminary, Atlanta, Candler School of Theology, and Boston Theological Seminary. At these universities, she addressed scholars, graduates, and doctoral scholars on women's movement in India, her theoretical work on the same, and the Dalit movement. In addition she was guest of honor at the series of Ambedkar's Birthday Celebrations across the states in America organised by The Ambedkar Asscoiation of North America (AANA), Ambedkar International Association, and Equality Labs.[23] She spoke at a side event at Commission on Status of Women in the United Nations as part of the panel on the issue of Women and "Sex Work". Lastly, she was a special studio guest on the live program The Stream at Al Jazeera wherein she was interviewed on the Shankar-Kausalya honour killing case.[24]

Media[edit]

Over the years, she has written a number of articles for newspapers (print and electronic media), magazines, and journals on contemporary political and social issues as well as contributed chapters to several books including on the girl child (Girls and Girlhoods at the Threshold of Youth and Gender)[25] and experiences of discrimination in higher education in India.[26] She was on the editorial board and a regular contributor to a quarterly review known as Integral Liberation (no longer extant) for more than 15 years. She is currently on the editorial board of Journal of People's Studies. She is frequently invited to be a panelist in both national and regional media to comment on current happenings. As part of Mytri Creations, she was part of the production team of Rabbi, a long running Kannada tele-serial and was one of the singers who sang the title song.[27] Subsequently, she contributed a number of talk shows to a series called Divyaasheervada, on issues of social concern.

Organising[edit]

For the longest time she has been a part of grassroots mobilising as a trainer of the leaders of the SHGs, and in empowerment and skill building in entrepreneurship, market promotion and financial management for the members of the SHGs who are engaged in economic activities. She is an enabler for networks and independent women’s and youth groups as well as for issue-based networks working on livelihoods and environment concerns. She is best known, however, for leadership building among Dalit women and Christian minority women’s groups. She is one of the leaders of the Indian Women’s Christian Movement, an ecumenical and interdenominational national body of Christian women.

Her body of work includes leadership in several people’s initiatives for justice, in large country-wide women’s empowerment groups, and theoretical work on women’s concerns from the unrecognized perspective of women and girls from the large number of marginalised sections in India. She represents three of them – being a woman, a religious minority (in India), and also being identified with the Dalit community, from among the former untouchables in India.

Research[edit]

She is an engaged and committed organic intellectual with a focus on policy research in the area of gender and development. She has pioneered a new area of research in the arena of Dalit women and marginalization and has coined the terms “Dalit Womanism"[7] and “Marginalised Indian Womanism”[1] to describe the experiences of mobilising, organizing and theorizing from the perspective of women from Dalit and other marginalized sections, one of the first ever theorists in this arena. Her articles are most commonly available online in the websites www.countercurrents.org and www.academia.edu, in addition to other sites. She has also researched and written in the area of Dalit Feminist Theology.

Training[edit]

She is well-known for her gender sensitization workshops for group members and leaders and grassroots NGO organisers. She was a Gender and Development trainer in Initiatives, Women and Development (IWID), Chennai, for several years, following a stint as Gender and Development Training Consultant with HIVOS, a Dutch funding agency. She continues to do extensive training in a number of areas related to Gender, Development, Women’s Personal Economic, and Political Empowerment. She is a well-known expert on the Prevention of Sexual harassment at the Workplace (POSH) Act, and sits on a number of Internal Committees in several government and corporate organizations.

She is currently the President of the Training, Editorial and Development Services Trust (TEDS Trust).[1]

She also has a publishing and distributing network called TEDS Publications.

Political Work[edit]

Dalit Issues[edit]

She is closely engaged with issues of organizing, empowering, and theorizing on Dalit issues and is much in demand as a speaker and writer on the issue, focusing especially on women, discrimination in higher education, lack of access to justice, economic empowerment, and in the political sphere.

Political Empowerment[edit]

She believes that the marginalized need to be in positions of power and decision making at all levels, especially the women from the Dalit and Adivasi communities, since they are the most disadvantaged in society.[6]

She was a member of the Ramesh Kumar Committee set up by the Government of Karnataka in 2014 to redraft the 25-year old Panchayati Raj Act 1995 as a result of her work in this area. The Act was passed in the assembly in 2015 and is presently in force.[6][16]

In keeping with her position on the subject, she too decided to step into the fray and filed nomination papers to the Bangalore North in the recently concluded general elections (2019).[28][29] However, the papers were rejected on technical grounds.[30]

Micro-finance[edit]

She is one of the senior-most people in the country to have worked on the issue, having been the first field worker in the first organization in the country to work in the issue, way back in the early 80s, namely The Bridge Foundation. She believes that it is a useful initiative to empower the poor, if it is used in conjunction with other development interventions.[2] She hopes to be more involved in microfinance activities in the future.

Awards and Honors[edit]

  • Received social justice award from Ambedkar Association Of North America, Periyar- Ambedkar Study Circle America, Association for India’s Development and Equality Labs at University of Michigan, Detroit on 7th April 2018.
  • Honored by Ambedkar International Mission, USA, for ‘incessant contribution in social change’ on the auspicious occasion of the celebration of 127th birth anniversary of Dr. B R Ambedkar, 14th april 2018, New Jersey.
  • Awarded as the ‘Outstanding personality’ by the Dalit Open University, Guntur on 13th july 2018.
  • She was awarded as the universal harmony “social activist” for International Women’s day on 9th march 2019.
  • She was conferred with the Life Time Achievement Award for 2019 by the St. Mother Teresa Virtual University for Peace and Education.
  • She was conferred the Akka Prashasthi award on 29th april 2016 by the Basava Samithi, Karnataka.
  • She was honored for anchoring the dalit women’s movement for courage and honesty by the Krantijyoti Savitribhai Phule Women’s Studies Centre, Savitribai Phule University, Pune in December 2017.
  • Received a citation from Karnataka Panchayat Parishad, Bangalore for her contribution as part of the Ramesh kumar Committee to re-draft the Panchayati Raj Act in January 2016.[17]

External Links[edit]

References[edit]

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Abraham, Alice (2019-11-01). "In Conversation With Cynthia Stephen: Dalit Activist And Writer". Feminism in India. Retrieved 2020-04-20. Unknown parameter |url-status= ignored (help)
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Lakhe, Amruta (2018-11-20). "How to Build a Bank for Dalit Women". Vice. Retrieved 2020-04-20.
  3. Stephen, Cynthia. "A Name of our Own - Subaltern Women's Perspectives on Gender and Religion".
  4. "Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) - Delhi Information". www.delhiinformation.in. Retrieved 2020-04-20.
  5. Kumar, Abhimanyu. "Carrying on the resistance". @businessline. Retrieved 2020-04-20.
  6. 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 "Dalit Women in Politics: Cynthia Stephen on Brahminism, patriarchy in politics — and the need for change". Firstpost. Retrieved 2020-04-20.
  7. 7.0 7.1 Stephen, Cynthia (2018-03-29). "Dalit Women's Movements: Leadership and Beyond". Medium. Retrieved 2019-06-08.
  8. "At a pan-India conference, Dalit women leaders come together to discuss their role in politics". Firstpost. Retrieved 2020-04-20.
  9. "Feminism And Dalit Women In India By Cynthia Stephen". www.countercurrents.org. Retrieved 2020-04-20.
  10. "India – Second NGO CEDAW Shadow Report". wunrn.com. Retrieved 2019-06-08.
  11. "Girls and Schools: Desiderata for the Third World" (PDF). United Nations Human Rights - Office of the High Commission. Retrieved 2019-06-08.
  12. "Indian NGOs raise Dalit issues before UN panel" (PDF). Partners for Law in Development. 2007-01-25. Retrieved 2020-04-20. Unknown parameter |url-status= ignored (help)
  13. Stephen, Cynthia. "CEDAW and Dalit women In India".
  14. Stephen, Cynthia. "THE HISTORY OF RESERVATIONS IN INDIA FROM THE 1800s TO THE 1950s".
  15. "Dalit Women's Tryst with Indian Political System: In conversation with Cynthia Stephen – NETRI". Retrieved 2020-04-20.
  16. 16.0 16.1 "THE KARNATAKA PANCHAYAT RAJ ACT AMENDMENT COMMITTEE" (PDF). Concerned for Working Children. Retrieved 2020-04-20. Unknown parameter |url-status= ignored (help)
  17. 17.0 17.1 17.2 "Grama Panchayat Hakkottaya Andolana". www.facebook.com. Retrieved 2019-06-08.
  18. "Educate, agitate, organise: The Dalit student won't be silenced". www.hindustantimes.com. 2016-01-20. Retrieved 2019-06-18.
  19. Stephen, Cynthia (2016-11-05). "In Chennai, TPDK Hails A Victory Of Good Over Brahmanism". Countercurrents. Retrieved 2020-04-20. Unknown parameter |url-status= ignored (help)
  20. Stephen, Cynthia (2016-10-15). "Mahishasur In The North, Ravan Leela In The South". Countercurrents. Retrieved 2020-04-20. Unknown parameter |url-status= ignored (help)
  21. "My family must be punished: Wife of Tamil Nadu 'honour killing' victim". Hindustan Times. 2016-03-30. Retrieved 2020-04-20.
  22. "Dalit's murder: In Tamil Nadu, caste is above God, 'honour' above life". www.hindustantimes.com. 2016-03-20. Retrieved 2019-06-18.
  23. "Reclaiming and Celebrating Dalit Histories | The Woke Journal". wokejournal.com. Retrieved 2019-06-18.
  24. barry (2018-03-19). "Why did Kausalya prosecute her own parents?". The Stream - Al Jazeera English. Retrieved 2019-06-18.
  25. "India: Girls and Girlhoods at Threshold of Youth and Gender-A Vacha Initiative - Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières". www.europe-solidaire.org. Retrieved 2019-06-18.
  26. "To be Dalit and woman in India today". Matters India. 2017-06-23. Retrieved 2020-04-20.
  27. "Rabbi, a new mega teleserial in Kannada". The New Indian Express. Retrieved 2020-04-20.
  28. "Our Democracy". Our Democracy. Retrieved 2020-04-20.
  29. Sasi, KP (2019-03-21). "Winnability "not important" for Cynthia Stephen, Karnataka civil society candidate". Retrieved 2020-04-20. Unknown parameter |url-status= ignored (help)
  30. M, Akshatha (2019-04-02). "Another lok sabha elections, but same old story: women's participation in Karnataka low". The Economic Times. Retrieved 2020-04-20.

Cynthia Stephen[edit]


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