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
According to reports, the etymology of the phrase ‘kitty’ in kitty party comes from colonial slang for a pool of stakes or funds in select card games. Later on, it started to stand for fun or savings, including chit funds, where each member contributes money to a collective pool.
Now, 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.
During the early 1950s, several families were struggling with financial problems in the aftermath of the 1947 Partition. It was then that middle-class women in northern Indian states, such as Punjab or Uttar Pradesh, started to host ‘kitty parties’ as informal savings events.
This was still a highly patriarchal and restricted time period, and the partition did not help women’s rights and freedoms. Women were expected to be housewives after marriage and not allowed to work. This led to them depending on their husbands for any financial needs and not having any independence of their own in this area.
For a long time, women did not even have access to formal banking on their own, or if they did, then most required some form of permission from the male members of the family.
The kitty parties thus became a lifeline for middle-class women, where not only could they get some financial independence, but also find a valuable social outlet.
You have to remember that for a long time, forget about work, but women were not even allowed to leave their house for leisure activities, unless everything was vetted by their senior family members and restrictions on when they can leave and come back applied.
These parties became a way for women to form their own communities and support systems outside of their homes, whilst still adhering to patriarchal norms.
In the midst of this, a room, a date once a month, an equal contribution from each person, and a rotating sum gave each of these women access to a lump sum of money, their own money, controlled by them, spent by them, with no husband’s signature required.
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 on the premise of informal rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs). This is where participants contribute a fixed amount to a collective pool on a monthly basis.
This pool of money is then disbursed to one member per cycle on a predetermined rotation. What this does is provide a lump-sum access to the person and removes any interest or formal banking intermediaries.
According to data from the Chit Fund Association of India, around 15,000 kitty-party companies are managing thousands of crores in 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 might be a subject of memes and parody now; however, at its core, it is one of the largest informal savings networks in Indian history.
It has enabled women from all walks of life to fund business deposits, flat rentals, small enterprises, daughters’ education, and emergencies at night when no one else came.
It has travelled across countries as immigrant Indian women brought it to foreign nations and let it evolve.
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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