Kamla Bhasin

Kamla Bhasin (born 24 April 1946) is an Indian developmental feminist activist, poet, author and social scientist. Bhasin's work, that spans across 35 years, focuses on gender, education, human development and the media. She lives in New Delhi, India. She is best known for her work on the NGO Sangat, a South Asian network of feminists, and for her poem Kyunki main ladki hoon, mujhe padhna hai. In 1995, she recited a refurbished, feminist version of the popular poem Azadi (Freedom) in a conference. She is also the South Asia coordinator of One Billion Rising.

She resigned from her job at the U.N. in 2002, to work on the network of South Asian feminists, that she built from the ground up. She believes in a form of advocacy that combines feminist theory and community action. She has worked with underprivileged women from tribal and working communities, often using posters, plays and other non literary methods to get through to communities with low literacy rates. She has always maintained that in order to usher effective change, sloganeering must be accompanied by community mobilization.

She calls herself 'The Midnight Generation', a reference to the generation of Indians born around the time of independence, 'at the stroke of the midnight hour..'. She was the eldest among five siblings. Her father was a doctor in Rajasthan. She grew up around villages in India and it helped her form an understanding about women's issues in villages in India. This experience would be instrumental in her life and future career. She went to a government university for her bachelor's and masters'. She later said that she found the experience uninspiring and graduated with second division.

She met her (now ex) husband in Rajasthan while working for Seva Mandir. She has later recounted that her husband was an incredibly feminist man and espoused progressive ideas. Her husband suggested that their children take both their surnames and was supportive when Bhasin's 70-year-old mother moved in with them. However things turned sour after incidents of domestic abuse and infidelity by him.

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