In ‘Where there is a Wheel’, P. Sainath, the writer, refers to the ‘wheel’ of the bicycle to document the spectacular progress achieved by rural women in the Pudukkottai district of Tamilnadu. The title symbolically conveys the ‘progress’ achieved by rural women over a period of one and a half years. ‘Wheel’ is a commonly accepted symbol for progress or movement or mobility. ‘Wheel’ also means continuous progress or movement. While stagnation indicates decay and deterioration, mobility indicates dynamism.
The writer remarks that “people find curious ways of hitting out at their backwardness, of expressing defiance, a hammering at the fetters that hold them”. All these phrases make a reference to how the rural women of Pudukkottai district defied the challenge of the male bastion and broke the fetters that chained them to the confines of their homes by learning to ride a bicycle. These rural women, which included agricultural workers, quarry labourers, village health nurses, balwadis and anganwadis, gem cutters, school teachers, mid-day meal workers and gram sevikas, had to depend on the male persons at-home – brother, husband, father – to go to the market to sell their produce and to go to their workplaces in addition to doing household chores like carrying water from the village well, cooking, taking care of infants and washing clothes and utensils.
Today, women can be seen doing many tasks on their bicycles. They can be seen carrying water from the well along with their small kids sitting on the bar of their cycle in the front. Many of them bicycle their way to villages to sell agricultural produce or to work in the quarries.