Who remembers those Friday afternoons, helping your mother get ready for a kitty party? Who remembers having to be the pre-decided caller for the evergreen game of Tambola? Who remembers your mother probably counting the earnings from the Tambola game, or if they hosted the kitty, then the earnings from that?
Pretty sure, almost everyone can either relate to these scenarios, or has heard about it from a friend, or just seen a gaggle of pretty ladies walking around the colony to a particular house and party noises soon filtering out.
Now, in recent times, the concept of a kitty party has become more of a joke than something serious, where people tend to either dismiss it as just silly little women trying to fill up all their ‘free time’ since they are just ‘housewives’ or something backward that is too good for progressive women.
There is a very specific face that people make when kitty parties come up in conversation. The thought “Oh, those. Aunties gossiping. Nothing serious” can literally be heard by those who don’t hold these kitty parties in any regard.
The media has not helped, with Bollywood showing a kitty party as a comic backdrop, full of overdressed women with too much time and too little sense.
However, there is actually a very strong feminist history to these kitty parties, which started sometime around the post-Partition Punjab and Uttar Pradesh in the early 1950s.
It has roots in Indian women, using the only way available to them, in a society that restricted them from having any sort of financial independence of their own, to build a financial safety net without asking a man for permission.
The Emergency That Created The Kitty
To understand what a kitty party actually is, and what it was, you have to start in 1947, not in a restaurant or a club, but in the immediate chaos of the Partition of India.
Kitty parties began in India during the early 1950s, in the aftermath of the 1947 Partition. Initially, the informal savings events were hosted at home by middle-class women in northern Indian states, such as Punjab or Uttar Pradesh, whose families were struggling to recover financially from the turmoil caused by partition.
Alongside the financial aspect, kitty parties also created a valuable social outlet for women, many of whom were not culturally permitted to work or travel much outside the home.
Think about what that sentence actually contains. These women could not work. They could not, in most cases, access formal banking independently. They had been uprooted from everything familiar, their homes, their cities, their extended family networks. And in the rubble of all that, they built something.
A room, a date once a month, an equal contribution from each person, and a rotating sum that gave each of them access to a lump sum of money — their own money, controlled by them, spent by them, with no husband’s signature required.
When kitty parties first got started, soon after India was partitioned in 1947, they offered something of a lifeline for middle-class women in the north of the country, mostly Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, whose families had been uprooted by the upheaval and who were trying to get back on their feet.
Writing in the South China Morning Post, journalist Kalpana Sunder described it as precisely this: not a social quirk but a survival mechanism, functioning as a lifeline at a moment when formal financial institutions were neither accessible nor welcoming to women operating without male intermediaries.
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The kitty party did not appear out of nowhere. It drew on a tradition of indigenous savings mechanisms that stretched back centuries on the subcontinent.
What the kitty party did, in the post-partition urban context, was take a rural, community-level savings mechanism, one already predominantly used by women, and adapt it for the middle-class urban household.
The structure was simple and, by design, required no documentation, no collateral, and no male co-signatory. It ran entirely on social trust.
One could even say that the kitty party was India’s version of a global feminist financial tradition.
Kitty parties operate as informal rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs), wherein participants make fixed monthly contributions to a collective pool, with the entire sum disbursed to one member per cycle on a predetermined rotation, thereby facilitating lump-sum access without interest or formal banking intermediaries.
According to the Chit Fund Association of India data, it is estimated that the nation has 15,000 kitty-party companies that collectively manage thousands of crores worth of funds.
Researcher Sharanya Deepak, writing in TASTE magazine in September 2018, quoted a woman in her 50s who has a kitty that has existed since 1982, saying, “Men think all we do at kitties is gossip. But I read somewhere that gossip is a bad word for a good thing. What is wrong about unloading your troubles onto your friends?”
Deepak also spoke to Seema Chadda (60s), who said, “When I was a young woman, I wasn’t allowed to work. Kitty parties meant we could have outings to meet with friends and do whatever we wanted once a month. When I found myself all alone, it was easier for me to go back into the world through them.”
The kitty party was left alone for long enough to become one of the largest informal savings networks in Indian history, to spread across the world with the diaspora, to fund business deposits, flat rentals and small enterprises and daughters’ education and emergencies in the night when no one else came. It did all of this while being dismissed as gossip.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: The Hindu, Refinery29, TASTE
Find the blogger: @chirali_08
This post is tagged under: Kitty Parties, Kitty Parties india, Kitty Party culture, Kitty Parties feminist, feminist, feminism, feminism india, financial independence, patriarchy, Kitty Parties history, Kitty Parties origin, Kitty Parties reason, financial independence women, financial independence indian women
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