Pragna Patel after receiving the award. Photo: Equal Rights Trust (all rights reserved)Pragna Patel has won the inaugural Bob Hepple Equality Award, announced last week. In 1982 Praga almost single-handedly revived the semi-defunct Southall Black Sisters (SBS), a campaigning and advocacy group for BAME women. Pragna was recognised for her ‘outstanding achievement’ and was joint winner with Mauro Cabral, Co-Director of Global Action for Trans Equality. With typical modesty, Pragna attributed the success of SBS to all the women who have been involved in its work. Apart from Pragna’s sheer hard work, long hours, dedication and commitment to the cause, in which she was ably supported by the two stalwarts, Hannana Siddiqui and Meena Patel, it was her political nous and innovative thinking that has kept SBS at the forefront of black women’s struggles in Britain.
Pragna arrived in Britain from Kenya at the age of five, with her mother and younger sisters in 1965, to join her penniless father who had hitchhiked his way to London a year earlier. Looking back, the moment when Pragna’s feminist politics were awakened was at 17 when she was nearly forced into a marriage, an incident which Pragna describes with equal amounts of humour and pathos. She was taken to a village in Gujarat, India on ‘holiday’ by her mother and introduced to a boy with whom she was left alone in a room for 15 minutes while the rest of her aunts gathered in another room. She remembers sitting on a stool, weeping copiously as she is harangued by a group of women for saying no ‘without any good reason’, bringing shame on the family, setting a bad example to her four younger sisters and undoing all the hard work that her mother had put in to bringing them up alongside her long hours of factory work. Although Pragna was not particularly religious, in her naivety, she thought the local church would come to her rescue. She locates the priest, ‘a rotund, roly-poly’ man, taking his afternoon nap in the church courtyard – a perfect image of apathy. Annoyed by a young woman disturbing his sleep with complaints about being married off, the natural destiny of all women, he tells her ‘not to worry. Leave it up to God, my child’.
She returns to England, engaged. After a year of ‘civil disobedience’ during which she often finds herself clutching Portrait of an Artist as Young Man to her chest, sobbing and repeating the refrain of its hero, Stephen Daedulus, ‘I will not submit’, her mother caves in, exhausted. And that is one of the key lessons Pragna brings to her work and success in later life: bloodymindedness or, more politely, persistence.
