mujhe jawab do! (answer me!): women's grass-roots activism and social spaces in chitrakoot...

Gender, Place and Culture, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 341–362, 2000

Mujhe Jawab Do! (Answer me!): women’s grass-rootsactivism and social spaces in Chitrakoot (India)

RICHA NAGAR, University of Minnesota, USA

ABSTRACT Focusing on an ongoing grass-roots campaign of rural women in North India, thisarticle examines how feminist activists strategically use and create social spaces to generate collectivedialogue and critical re�ection on issues of patriarchy and violence. The author highlights the ways inwhich grass-roots activists theorize the interrelationships among their own political actions, their visionsof empowerment, and the everyday gendered spaces they seek to transform. The article demonstrates howa serious engagement with social spaces in grass-roots activism can enable us to overcome the conceptualgaps in feminist theorizations of empowerment and violence, and to apprehend more adequately the nature,content, and meanings of women’s political actions.

Introduction

‘I am a man. A man! A woman is like a pair of shoes for me—to be worn whenI want, and to be discarded when I am done.’ Declaring this, the man kickedhis wife Mantoria hard in her back. As Mantoria screamed and writhed inpain, several men of Bachhran Village quietly wiped their tears. (Aapka Pitara,1999, p. 13)

In every village where women activists staged the street play, Mujhe Jawab Do! (Answerme!), the response from the audience was intense. Villagers sat, watched, and passion-ately discussed the play, not heeding the intense heat, or the time of the day, or the dailychores that were yet to be done. After all, one of the daughters or daughters-in-law oftheir village had recently been killed by the same kind of violence that took Mantoria’slife. But it was not simply Mantoria’s murder or its commonplaceness that they foundunnerving; what disturbed them more than anything else were the questions with whichthe play confronted them—questions about the worth of wives, daughters, mothers, andsisters in their own families and community, and about their deeply held beliefs regardingwhat constituted honor, violence, crime, and justice.

In this article, I tell the story of a grass-roots campaign of poor, rural women in theChitrakoot (previously, part of Banda) district of Uttar Pradesh state in North India. Myobjective is to examine how feminist activists strategically use and create social spaces togenerate collective dialogue and critical re� ection on issues of patriarchy and genderedviolence. A related aim is to highlight the ways in which activists working at thegrass-roots level theorize the interrelationships among their own political actions, theirvision(s) of empowerment, and the everyday gendered spaces they seek to transform.

Correspondence: Richa Nagar,Departmentof Women’s Studies, Universityof Minnesota, 425 Ford Hall, 224 ChurchSt. SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA; , e-mail: [email protected] . .

ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online/00/040341-22 Ó 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI 10.1080/09663690020008975

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342 R. Nagar

In the following analysis, I begin by brie� y situating this campaign within recentfeminist writings on empowerment and violence in the context of ‘Third World’development politics more generally, and of India more speci� cally. I argue that a lackof explicit engagement with space in much of the feminist literature on these topics limitsour ability to adequately apprehend the nature, content, and meanings of women’spolitical actions (Staeheli, 1996). This brief theoretical review is followed by a backdropof women’s grass-roots organizing in Chitrakoot, and the socio-economic and politicalrealities that de� ne women’s struggles in this region.

Drawing on my recent � eldwork, I then examine the two-step evolution of a campaignon violence against women in this area. The � rst step saw the rise of a politicizedawareness about violence within two local women’s organizations, Mahila Samakhya andVanangana, which stimulated the collective production of the play, Mujhe Jawab Do!, andthe accompanying songs and Phad (a picture story enacted by two narrators). The secondstep was to take the campaign from within the organization into the villages and publicspaces of the district government administration, and provoke a critical rethinking ofgendered violence in the local communities. To highlight how these campaignersdeveloped speci� c socio-spatial tactics to reach their audiences in villages ridden byclass-and caste-based inequalities, the subsequent section focuses on the campaign in twospeci� c villages, Malwara and Kaluram Ka Purva. Finally, I analyze the spatial andpolitical meanings embedded in the campaign, and the theoretical implications of thisstudy for scholars grappling with questions of women’s grass-roots activism and socialchange in marginalized rural communities of the so-called ‘Third World’.

My ethnographic methodology for this research involved � eldwork in Chitrakoot inDecember 1998 and April 1999, and an active involvement in a women’s streetcampaign, not simply as a participant observer, but also as a supporter and helper. Inaddition, I collected 30 life histories of Vanangana and Mahila Samakhya workers, andsupplemented these with 35 shorter interviews with organizational workers and of� cials.I conducted all the interviews in Hindi (my native language) and the translations inEnglish that appear in this article are also mine[1]. I also analyzed organizationaldocuments (including songs, scripts, newsletters and reports) in Hindi and Bundeli, andnews clippings in Hindi and English. My analysis of the spatial strategies adopted in thecampaign was greatly facilitated by teamwork with my research assistant, Khajan Singh,with whom I covered the two performances described at length in this article. In eachcase, we attended the rehearsals, accompanied the campaigners to the villages, partici-pated in publicizing of the play and selecting the site for the play, conducted interviewswith the spectators, and collectively re� ected upon the outcome of the campaign with theactivists after the event.

But before immersing in the details of what women did on the streets of Chitrakoot,this struggle must be placed in relation to recent theoretical conversations amongfeminists, in India and elsewhere, on the subject of empowerment and violence in thelives of rural women.

Empowerment, Violence, Space, and Ethnography: exploring the intersec-tions through women’s street theater

Despite intimate connections and overlaps among the issues surrounding women’sempowerment and violence against women, feminist theoretical interventions on thesetopics have often evolved in separate intellectual domains. While empowerment has beena salient theme in feminist discussions of development politics and ecological sustainabil-

Women’s Grass-roots Activism in India 343

ity in the ‘Third World’ (Harcourt, 1994; Kabeer, 1994, 1999), violence against womenhas been more centrally theorized in the context of women’s social movements (Kumar,1993; Ray 1999; Zaman, 1999; Visaria 2000) and in problematizing predominant viewsof intra- and extra-household relationships (Scott, 1990; Agarwal, 1994, 1997; Voight,1999). This conceptual separation hinders us from developing more nuanced understand-ings of the experiences and actions of women who grapple with brutal violence as aninevitable part of their struggles for economic and political empowerment. Here I arguethat an analytical focus on space and spatial strategies can enable us to develop fuller andmore integrated perspectives on women’s struggles by illustrating (a) how women identifythe interwoven strands of their lives in speci� c contexts, and (b) how they de� ne and actupon their shifting priorities and visions of empowerment and social justice within thosecontexts.

In recent years, development planners, scholars, and activists have all agreed thatempowerment of poor women in the ‘Third World’ holds the key to solving some of themost dif� cult problems of global poverty, hunger and environmental degradation (WorldResources Institute, 1994). Yet, the preoccupation with ‘measuring empowerment’ on thepart of many agencies that fund non-governmental organisations (NGOs), points to theproblematic way in which women’s empowerment has been accommodated into devel-opment thinking. As Naila Kabeer points out, ‘(a)dvocacy on behalf of women whichbuilds on claimed synergies between feminist goals and of� cial development priorities hasmade greater inroads into the mainstream development agenda than advocacy whichargues for these goals on intrinsic grounds’ (Kabeer, 1999, p. 435). Thus,

as long as women’s empowerment was argued for as an end in itself, it tendedto be heard as a ‘zero-sum’ game with politically weak winners and powerfullosers. By contrast, instrumentalist forms of advocacy which combine theargument for gender equality/women’s empowerment with demonstrations ofa broad set of desirable multiplier effects offer policy makers the possibility ofachieving familiar and approved goals albeit by unfamiliar means. (Kabeer,1999, p. 436)

With the translation of feminist insights into the discourse of policy, women’s empower-ment has come to be regarded by many development scholars and practitioners as aphenomenon that can be measured and quanti� ed on ‘solid and objectively veri� ablegrounds’ (Kabeer 1999, p. 439). In this instrumentalist approach to empowerment, farfrom being addressed as a main tool to perpetuate patriarchal power and authority,domestic violence simply becomes an item in a long list of indicators, which measurewomen’s access to resources, their agency, and achievements.

Feminist ethnographers focusing on the politics of household resource allocation havesimilarly critiqued feminist economists for paying little attention to violence as a form ofhousehold con� ict (Voight, 1999, pp. 155–156). While they have succeeded in movingthe discussion of household dynamics beyond the problematic notions of ‘cooperation’and ‘unity’, alternative models that seek to analyze gender relations have inadequatelytheorized gender dynamics within and beyond the household, as well as the linksbetween extra-household and intra-household bargaining power (Agarwal, 1997, p. 1;Voight, 1999). According to Voight (1999, p. 155), even those discussions that focusexplicitly on power and inequality, and employ the concepts of ‘bargaining’, ‘negotiation’and ‘cooperative con� ict’, have largely ignored domestic violence as an ‘extreme andbrutal expression’ of gendered power differentials. Following Alison Scott (1990), sheargues for a need to develop better understandings of women’s actual experiences of

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violence within the family, the frequency and nature of these experiences, and howstructures of authority are constituted and controlled within the family (Voight, 1999, p.156).

In sharp contrast to the silences on violence in the aforementioned literatures,domestic and communal violence against women has appeared, over the past 25 years,as one of the most prominent themes in feminist writings on women’s movements inIndia (Manushi Editorial Collective, 1979; Kishwar, 1989; Kumar, 1993; Ray, 1999;Visaria, 2000). Beginning in the 1970s, feminist movements in India not only witnesseda heightened awareness of inequalities embedded in interlocking systems of class, caste,tribe, language, religion, and region; they were also accompanied by increasing demandsfor the woman’s right to control her own life and body (Kumar, 1993, pp. 2–3).Successful alliances between urban and rural-based, as well as activist and academic,feminists led to the emergence of massive protests against violence in campaigns againstdowry, rape, wife-battering, and sati; in anti-liquor agitations; and in protests againstcommunalism and religious fundamentalism (Manushi, 1979–present; Kumar 1993;Butalia, 1998). Radha Kumar (1993, p. 160) summarizes the trajectory of Indianwomen’s movement thus:

In the late seventies feminists had focused on the dowry form as an expressionof the subordination of women within the family, and had seen dowry murderas one of the most brutal manifestations of violence against women. By theearly eighties, attempts to analyse the relationship of women to and within thefamily had led to examining the codi� cation of women’s rights in marriage,divorce, property, maintenance, etc., as in India most family law is differenti-ated on the basis of religion as well as community.

What is less clear in the literature on the women’s movement in India, however, is themanner and extent to which this nationwide feminist movement intersected with theemergence and accomplishments of women’s development NGOs in different parts ofthe country. How did it shape, for instance, women’s strategies, the nature of theiralliances, their priorities, and their visions of empowerment? If the predominant notionsof women’s empowerment, as Kabeer points out, are guided by ‘desirable multipliereffects’, how does a strong presence of anti-violence feminist voices inform and compli-cate women’s struggles against socio-economic disempowerment?

This story of women’s activism in Chitrakoot seeks to weave together these discon-nected strands of feminist conversations by engaging with ‘questions of political con-sciousness and self-identity’ which, according to Mohanty (1991, p. 33) are crucial inde� ning ‘third world women’s engagement with feminism’. Mohanty identi� es testimoni-als, oral histories, life stories, and written accounts ‘as an important context in which toexamine the development of political consciousness’ because these narratives constitutea ‘signi� cant mode of remembering and recording experiences and struggles’ (1991, p.33). My ethnographic analysis not only foregrounds women’s modes of remembering andrecording, it also takes Mohanty’s argument a step further by spatializing women’ssocio-political action; for we can neither grasp the complexities of speci� c feminisms, norapprehend the subjectivities and struggles of ‘Third World’ women without situatingthem in the geographical spaces from and within which they derive their resources,meanings, visions and limitations. In this sense, all socio-political acts can be seen as‘inherently geographic’ practices that are situated, legitimated, and imparted meanings inrelation to speci� c social spaces (Pratt, 1999, p. 218). An attention to space also enablesus to understand the interrelationships and interplay between what Katz (1998, pp.


174–175) has called ‘spatialized feminist politics’ and a ‘feminist politics of space’. Whilethe former refers to all the ways in which space and spatial relations are implicated andimbricated in oppression and liberation, the latter refers to politics that focus explicitlyon space and spatial issues, such as access to particular environments, the sites of violenceagainst women from the bedroom to the street, or the location of particular services andfacilities (Katz, 1998, pp. 174–175). In other words, a geographically informed ethno-graphic perspective can illuminate how social differences are embedded in various spatialcontexts and how feminist activists rework those differences through explicitly spatializedtactics (Staeheli, 1996).

It is with this aim of presenting a spatially informed analysis of women’s subjectivities,creativity and struggles that I tell the following story, in which socially and politicallyperipheralized women of Chitrakoot used street theater to address domestic violence asa major source of disempowerment in their familial and community lives. Street playsbecame a vehicle for these activists to ‘utilize [their] lived relations as a basis ofknowledge’ (Mohanty, 1991, p. 35), and to rethink, remember, and record women’sstruggles—not merely as a corrective to the gaps, erasures, and distortions in dominant(masculinist) discourses of family and community—but to forge new and more politicizedself- and collective identities (Mohanty, 1991). At the core of women’s performances wasa strategic deployment and construction of social spaces to generate collective dialogueand critical re� ection about patriarchy and violence; and these collective dialogues indifferent social spaces, in turn, guided activists’ visions of social change, and their abilityto pursue them. Women’s performance in the context of this street theater, then, became‘a critical social tool, an embodied moment of theory and practice’ (Dolan, 1996, p. 5),in which ‘thinking/speaking subjects located in time and space’ engaged in ‘consciousre� exivity, negotiation [and] agency in the doing of identity’ (Nelson, 1999, p. 332) andpolitics.

To give the reader a sense of the place, the next section provides a brief socio-economic pro� le of Chitrakoot. It also highlights the manner in which feminist grassroots organizing has emerged in this region since the late 1980s, and the key actors andprocesses, at the local, national and international levels, that shaped the organizers’approach to questions of empowerment and social change.

Feminist Grass-roots Organizing in Chitrakoot: a backdrop

Darakht phaldar nahin; Dharti kirdar nahin; Mard wafadar nahin; Aurat beniyar nahin!(The trees are fruitless; the earth, characterless; the men, unfaithful; and thewomen, shameless!)

These lines (supposedly written by the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb) along with thecouplet Gagri na phoote, chahe khasam mar jaye! (Can’t bear to lose my pitcher of water, evenif my man dies!) are often repeated to caution visitors when they � rst arrive inChitrakoot. The picture of a region characterized by a harsh climate, barren land,vanishing forests, and acute water crisis is further complicated by a long tradition ofbonded (indentured) labor, an almost ubiquitous presence of bandits and daduwas(powerful men), and a general environment of hardships that produces not only ‘disloyalmen’ in the folklore, but also ‘shameless women’ who proudly declare that their watermeans more to them than their men! Ranking near the very bottom of the national andstate averages in income, sex-ratio (846 women per 1000 men) and female literacy(23.9%), with raping, burning, and battering of women as everyday occurrences,

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Chitrakoot district is often described as a ‘society driven by the rule of the gun’(Vanangana, 1998a, p. 1; Srivastava, 1999, p. 453). In this district, two women’sorganizations, Mahila Samakhya (Education for Women’s Equality) and Vanangana (Daugh-ter of the Forest) have led what some have termed ‘a grass-roots revolution’ that spellswomen’s ‘real emancipation’ (Menon, 1995, p. 4).

The Mahila Samakhya program (henceforth, MS) was launched in 1989 by theGovernment of India in three states—Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, and Gujarat—withjoint funding from the Royal Dutch Government. Envisioned and guided by dynamicfeminist activists such as Vimala Ramachandran, Kamla Bhasin, Runu Chakravarti andAbha Bhaiya, this innovative scheme for women’s education explicitly committed itselfto women’s empowerment, and operated in collaboration with gender-progressive NGOsat the district level. Departing from traditional literacy campaigns which had very limitedsuccess, MS drew upon the National Policy on Education (1986), which emphasized theneed for a ‘positive interventionist role’ on the part of the Government in theempowerment of women (Agarwal, 1994, p. 497).

The mode of MS’s functioning displayed a keen awareness of geographical scale.Although its headquarters were at the state level, programs were implemented throughdistrict-level units. While urban women with more formal education held the of� cialpositions in each district-level organization, the pivotal forces were the rural women whoworked as coordinators called Sahyoginis and Sakhis. Each Sahyogini was responsible for 10villages, and each village had a Sakhi serving as a link between the village women andMS. Together the Sahyoginis and Sakhis organized meetings with village women, helpingthem constitute action groups (Samoohs) to collectively re� ect on their conditions,constraints and needs, as well as to determine concrete strategies and goals for theirempowerment. The literacy component was introduced only when the women them-selves demanded it (Agarwal, 1994, p. 497). Thus, as Agarwal (1994, p. 43) points out,MS was ‘not only couched in terms of women’s ‘empowerment’ but [also recognized]that organizing rural women into groups to discuss gender relations [was] a necessary� rst step toward that end’. MS became one of the rare government-funded organizationsthat allowed the most disadvantaged rural women to de� ne and pursue empowermenton their own terms according to their varying place-speci� c realities. Not surprisingly,then, while sexual violence and gendered and class-based environmental con� icts becamethe focus of MS activists in some areas, MS programs in other places prioritized literacy,pedagogy, technology, and the relationships between landlords and farm workers (MahilaSamakhya Uttar Pradesh, 1996, 1997, 1998). The success and uniqueness of MS is oftenimputed to its decentralized functioning and its sensitivity to contextual social and spatialrealities.

The MS program in the Chitrakoot district � rst hit the headlines of the nation’snewspapers when it accomplished the ‘incredible feat’ of training the poorest, illiteraterural women from lower castes and the local Kol tribe as hand pump mechanics. Thefollowing excerpt from a news story in a leading national newspaper captures the mannerin which the achievements of women in Banda were simultaneously exoticized andcelebrated in the mainstream media:

Bachendari Pal may have conquered the Everest, … and Kalpana Chawalamay be training in NASA to join the US Space Shuttle. But what the poor,tribal and backward women of Banda, Uttar Pradesh, have achieved in theiroppressive settings requires far more guts. Unlettered and fettered by tra-ditional norms, many of them have now become handpump mechanics while


several others have turned professional masons! … [A] group of village women[have learned] to drive the tractor … [T]hese women are a powerful symbolquestioning … not only the existing gender inequalities but also the feudal andcasteist mores of their social settings. (Paul, 1995, p. 6).

While acute water scarcity and governmental apathy were the primary forces propellingrural women to master the technology of � xing handpumps, the acquisition of this skillstimulated a critical consciousness among women about caste, class, and gender relations,and a deep desire to attain formal literacy. Once women’s con� dence grew, they nolonger wanted to rely on male mechanics for small things such as updating their logbooks(Rastogi, 1997, p. 107). This led to the establishment of women’s literacy camps in MSChitrakoot, followed by a 6-month long residential school for rural women. The ‘closelink between literacy programmes and the hand pump project created an environmentfor the use of literacy skills. Women began to exchange news about their villages andhomes … they were [motivated] to write their [daily] experiences and draw on walls’(Rastogi, 1997, p. 107). The evolution of Mahila Dakiya, a broadsheet published by theneo-literate women of MS Chitrakoot, was one of the most direct results of this literacycampaign. This ‘folksy, informal combination of [narratives], information blurbs, poems,songs and pictures’ (Rastogi, 1997, p. 107), circulated and read in more than 200 villagesof the Chitrakoot district, made a big splash in Indian newspapers when it won theMedia Foundation’s prestigious 1995 Chameli Devi Award for the ‘outstanding womanjournalist’ (Jansatta, 1996, p. 4; Chopra, 1996).

In the meantime, as MS Chitrakoot’s energies were spreading in various directions,two important changes began to occur. First, Madhavi Kuckreja, the director of MSChitrakoot, started thinking about how women trained as mechanics and masonscould obtain work contracts for government-funded schemes. Within the structure ofMS, however, such contractual work would have been illegal. Also, coinciding withthe World Bank involvement in MS in 1995, MS organizations in Uttar Pradeshbegan to face increasing pressures to standardize their objectives and projects acrossdistricts, to generate reports of accomplishments, and to measure the progress of eachvillage in terms of the numbers of women who had attained ‘empowerment’ (interviewswith Aarti Srivastava, March 30, 1999; Madhavi Kuckreja, April 11, 1999; Huma Khan,December 15, 1998, April 4 and 12, 1999; workshop discussions in MSUP state of� ce,Lucknow, December, 1998). While a close examination of these developments is outsidethe purview of this article, these factors pushed the leadership of MS Chitrakoot toenvision the birth of a new organization, one that could work in cooperation with MSbut not be sti� ed by the new constraints. As a result, Vanangana was born in 1994, andalthough Vanangana and MS have had their periods of tensions and con� icts, the twoorganizations have, for the most part, worked closely and complementarily with eachother.

The campaign against violence is perhaps the most successful example of this closecollaboration between Vanangana and MS Chitrakoot, a campaign which came aliveunder the leadership of Huma Khan, a student of gender, law, and social work, whosucceeded Kuckreja as the District Coordinator of MS Chitrakoot and subsequently tooka position in Vanangana in 1998. Even as MS and Vanangana were forging ahead withtheir literacy and savings programs, their newsletters, and their handpump mechanics,masons and caterers, the supposedly empowered women who worked in these organiza-tions to mobilize and empower others were still being beaten, raped, and burned in theirown homes. Workers were frequently harassed, threatened and tortured because of their

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involvement in MS and Vanangana; and at least once a month, of� cials were pushedinto situations where they had to rescue their workers from their husbands or in-laws. Todiscourage future acts of violence, these of� cials frequently resorted to openly humiliatingthe male perpetrators by blackening their faces or beating them in public (interviews withAarti Srivastava, March 31, 1999; Madhavi Kuckreja, April 11, 1999; Huma Khan,April 12, 1999; Kamla, April 6 and 7, 1999). And in the villages where these womenworked, instances of dowry murders and domestic abuse abounded, forcing of� cials ofthe organization to confront the limitations of a vision of empowerment that aimed atincreasing women’s access to technology and literacy without addressing the violencethat continuously reinforced their devaluation and disempowerment within their homesand communities.

These processes triggered within MS and Vanangana, a critical rethinking of theinstrumentalist versions of empowerment in development theory and practice. As inother feminist movements in India, women recognized that the tactic of shaming theirmale oppressors by deploying symbols of emasculation (men being beaten by women)and losing of face (blackened faces) was based on an acceptance of conventionalde� nitions of masculinity and femininity that MS wanted to reject rather than reinforce(interview with Huma Khan, April 4, 1998; Kumar, 1993, p. 4).

It is against this backdrop of contradictions that women faced in their personal andactivist lives that we must understand the emergence of the street campaign on violenceagainst women in Chitrakoot. In the following section, I discuss the two-step evolutionof the campaign within and beyond the spaces of the organizations.

The Evolution of a Campaign

Marked by its ‘primarily … political, often militant overtones’ and its close associationwith left-wing politics, modern street theater in India aims to provide re� ned entertain-ment while serving as a cultural intervention that can work directly at the level ofpeople’s consciousness (Garlough, 1997, pp. 7–8). Women’s organizations throughoutIndia have recognized and adopted street plays as a powerful medium to critiqueprevailing norms, to voice alternative visions, and to mobilize their audiences aroundissues such as dowry, domestic violence, women’s education, and marriage (Kumar,1993; Garlough, 1997; Sadasivam, 2000)[2].

For women working in MS Chitrakoot and Vanangana, however, street theaterwas a totally unfamiliar territory before 1998, and many of them had never even seenany kind of theater before. Moreover, the idea of generating a dialogue aboutwomen’s oppressions in the presence of men was alien to MS’s mode of functioningin which all the ‘consciousness-raising’ of women happened in women-only groups.Taking an open public stance on the issue of domestic violence, sometimes before theirown kin, was neither easy nor safe for organizational workers who were themselves onlybeginning to be politicized about this issue. How was it, then, that these very samewomen succeeded in using street plays as a powerful tool in their campaign? Whatguided their passions, visions, stories and strategies? What made them effective? In thenext three parts of this section, I address these questions by describing how womenactivists � rst built their campaign within the organization, and then took it to the streetsof Chitrakoot, stirring intense responses and passionate discussions in every space theytraversed.


Building a Campaign inside the Organization

When Pushpa beats me [in the play], she does it exactly like her ex-husbandkicked and beat her every day … [And] when I play Mantoria, I don’t actwhen I cry out with pain and fury. What dances before my eyes are the facesand corpses of women I have known, witnessed and touched. My heart burns,aches, and screams in rage for them as I perform. (Urmila, interviewed onApril 30, 1999)

In 1998, when Vanangana received a grant from Oxfam to support its campaignagainst violence, it sought help from Pravaah and Alaripu, two Delhi-based NGOsfocusing on popular education and communication, to strategize about the crusade thatwas to hit the villages of Chitrakoot in 1999. When the preparations started, workersfrom every section of Vanangana and MS Chitrakoot were grabbed by the theme andextended their earnest support to the campaign. The supporters included teachers fromthe literacy centers, handpump mechanics, Sahyoginis (mobilizers), of� ce assistants, andcaterers, all being women whose own lives had been deeply touched by domesticviolence.

But a few women such as Urmila (quoted here), Manju, Pushpa, Sampat, and Sunitahad become immersed in the issues of domestic violence months before the streetcampaign began. These women, under the leadership of the campaign coordinator,Huma Khan, met regularly to discuss the relationships among women, violence and law.They began to comprehend the multitude of ways in which the legal system marginalizedwomen, and the manner in which rural women could be educated about the laws so thatthey could protect themselves more effectively against the everyday violence thatengulfed them. The result of this legal training was a document, Janen Kanoon BadlenZamana (Let’s � gure out the laws and change the world), which sought to educateneo-literate women about the basics of the legal scenario and their personal rights, andwas circulated and read widely within Vanangana and Mahila Samakhya.

Equipped with this newly found knowledge, the women committed themselvescompletely to the task of removing the public silence on the matter of domestic violence.No matter what hour of day or night, as soon as they heard of any incident of violencein any village, these women rushed to the scene and interrogated the relatives andneighbors of the victim, seeking the support of police and devoting their meager personalresources when necessary. Although these women had never focused their activism ondomestic violence before, their long-term, hands-on experience of working on sensitivegender issues in villages ridden with class and caste-based differences greatly facilitatedthe undertaking of this challenging task.

Between January and November 1998, 28 cases of dowry murders and women’ssuicide were reported in Chitrakoot district, all the dead women being young (18–24years) and either pregnant or mothers of small children. In each case, the death wascaused by burns, beating, strangulation, hanging, or poisoning in the parents-in-law’svillage (Vanangana, 1998a, p. 1; Srivastava, 1999, p. 454). Let me cite a few examplesto give a name and face to some of these women. Neelam, a daughter-in-lawin Bachhran village, was burned to death by her in-laws. Her father, with the helpof Vanangana activists had the husband arrested. But 6 months later, the father strucka deal with his son-in-law and agreed to arrange his younger daughter’s marriagewith him. In Chamraunha village, Nirmala, a pregnant woman from the Kol tribe,was brutally beaten and hanged from a tree by her husband. Her father was so poor thathe could not pursue the case. In Taraun village, a 17 year-old Harijan woman was

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burned to death. Despite her repeated pleas not to be sent back to her marital home, hermother forced her to return to her husband. After she died, her husband accused her ofhaving illicit relations with her own father. In Bheethakhera, Gita Devi, mother of a 15day-old infant, was strangled to death and her mutilated body was thrown into the � elds.Her husband and his brother were arrested and then released on bail after a few days(Vanangana, 1999a).

In case after case, the parents of the victim showed reluctance to report the case tothe police, or the husband or in-laws were arrested and then released on bail, or thepolice, upon receiving a bribe from the in-laws, claimed that there was no evidence ofmurder (Srivastava, 1999, p. 454). It was also a common practice for the father and/orthe brother of the murdered woman to ‘settle’ the case privately with her husband orin-laws for an exchange of a sum of money, or by arranging to marry another daughterof their family to the now widowed husband at substantially ‘reduced’ dowry.

It was these heart-wrenching stories of murder, complicity, and silence that providedthe material for the street campaign. To prepare themselves for the campaign, the teammade a list of 30 villages in which women had been ‘found dead in unusual circum-stances’ during the last 12 months. In the social spaces of the two organizations, workerstalked about the events that had happened in these villages, and also shared stories ofviolence that they had themselves experienced or escaped. For example, Pushpa talkedabout the beatings that she suffered at the hands of her husband and in-laws, and howshe persuaded her parents to bring her back to their own village, where she subsequentlybecame involved with MS. Urmila was loved dearly in her own natal home, but onceshe was married at age 11, she encountered starvation and abuse for not bringing enoughdowry, and was later spurned for delivering a girl. After her daughter’s birth in 1991,Urmila chose not to return to her husband and joined MS. Sampat escaped from herin-laws’ house after she was burned by her sister-in-law one night, while Sunita sufferedbeatings and sexual abuse by her husband and in-laws, along with endless humiliationfor having a bad eye. Once Sunita started working in MS, she met and established a newhome and life with Sanjo, a woman who works for another grass-roots organization inrural Chitrakoot (interviews with Urmila, April 7 and 30, 1999; Sunita, April 22, 1999;Sampat, April 23, 1999).

The sharing of these pains and victories was bolstered with the singing of moving folksongs in Bundeli (the local language), which vividly captured the intense pain andinjustices in women’s lives. Accompanying these old songs were newer chants in Bundeli,as well as Hindi songs used throughout India in women’s demonstrations and streetplays, that women had created and learned as part of their own training as activists.Thus, the emotional pain evoked by the more traditional Bundeli song, Kahe ko biyahebides, ho lakhiya babul more? (Why did you marry me off to an alien place, my father?) wasjuxtaposed with another popular feminist song in Hindi, Beta pyaara, beti nahin; Meinpoochhoon ji kyon? (The son is loved and the daughter isn’t—I ask you why this is so?) whichpowerfully questioned the gender-based discrimination within parental homes.

The Phad and the Play

The making of the street play Mujhe Jawab Do! and the accompanying Phad (picture storypainted on cloth and enacted by two women) was shaped by all the aforementionedelements: women’s shared personal pain, the gendered practices that they had learned tointerrogate as part of their work, the songs that fuelled their consciousness with arenewed passion, and fresh episodes of violence in surrounding villages that they


investigated and intervened in as part of their campaign. Together these elementsresulted in the collective creation of pictures and scripts that were interspersed withpowerful songs and mirrored the lived experiences of women, some of whom wereenacting the very story of their lives. For example, the death of Pushpa’s closest friendby domestic violence, along with Pushpa’s own escape from her abusive husband,became the theme of the Phad which narrated the story of two childhood friends, Phoolaand Phoolkali. Among the many things that this Phad and the play Mujhe Jawab Do!critiqued, using rich, everyday metaphors from the local context, were the popularideologies that a son-in-law must be revered by the daughter’s family, and that ‘parentscould befriend their daughter at her birth, but not in her fate’ (janam ke saathi hain, parkaram ke saathi nahin) where fate is equated with her marriage. Both stories also uncoveredthe ways in which the village community, the police, the administration and the familycolluded to shield and encourage the atrocities against women (Srivastava, 1999, p. 453).The routine nature of these practices imparted the Phad and the play an intensity andfamiliarity that was captured vividly by Phoola’s and Phoolkali’s passionate call to theiraudience, ‘Listen, o listeners, for this is my tale and yours’.

The plot of Mujhe Jawab Do! was also based on a true incident, but the songs anddialogue that imparted soul and � esh to the story were products of collective labor. Inthe play Mantoria, the protagonist, is heartlessly beaten by her husband but gets norefuge, even in her father’s home. She is repeatedly told that no one can � x her fate.When Mantoria eventually dies, there is much breast beating and her father threatensto take the matter to the police and have his son-in-law arrested. Eventually, however,‘reason’ and ‘common sense’ prevail and the father, at the instance of the police and thevillage headman, strikes a deal with his son-in-law to protect the honor of his family andvillage. The father goes home richer, his conscience clear. After all, his daughter will notreturn, so what harm can some cash do? The policeman is content that he succeeded inresolving a case amicably and lucratively, while Mantoria’s husband is a free managain—free to remarry and to bring another dowry (Srivastava, 1999, pp. 453–454).

The corpse of Mantoria, covered with a shroud that her young daughter has placedupon her, lies in the middle of the stage the whole time her death is being bargainedover. After the bargain is struck and another shroud of silence placed over her death, thiscorpse rises, rhetorically demanding an answer to why her father, brother, neighbors andheadman have all chosen to be complicit in her murder. Everyone, declares Mantoria—from the family and the kin to the village and the community— is a criminal. Shedemands of the audience:

You people of this society, answer me! Is woman a commodity—an item onauction—who is sold when she is alive, and sold at double the price when sheis dead? You community members and kin, who hide women’s murders toretain the honor of your village, is this the place of honor you have accordedyour women? You, who label the killer of a cow to be a sinner and a criminal… answer me—is the murder of a woman not a sin or crime? (Vanangana,1998b)

Saying this, Mantoria lights a torch to remember all the women who have beenvictimized by this conspiracy of murder and silence, and passes on the � ame to all thewomen around her.

As the creative work of the play and Phad evolved, the organizers also developed theirdetailed plan of action. The purpose of their crusade was to generate critical re� ectionon gender relations and to build public opinion against violence in the very communities

352 R. Nagar

where the killing and silencing was taking place. Accordingly, during the � rst week of thecampaign (January 6–12, 1999), the team hit the streets of 11 villages (one of themlocated in the Satna district of Madhya Pradesh) where daughters or daughters-in-lawhad been found dead in ‘abnormal’ circumstances during the last 6 months. In eachvillage, they held marches and poster exhibitions, sang their songs, performed the playand the Phad, and held open public discussions. After campaigning in 30 villages in the� rst quarter of 1999, the organizers staged their performance outside the Tehsil (county)and district courts of Karvi town, the headquarters of Chitrakoot district. In addition tothe ordinary folks who � ocked in large numbers to participate in these highly publicizedevents, the performances and discussions were well attended by lawyers, constables,government administrators, school and college teachers, and students (Vanangana,1999a; author’s interview with Huma Khan, April 12, 1999). Later, Vanangana heldessay competitions and debates in local high schools on the issues addressed by theircampaign. The entire campaign received wide coverage by the local and state media andbecame the subject of articles in national publications, ranging from Aapka Pitara (amagazine for neo-literates published by the NGO, Nirantar, in New Delhi) to the scholarlyand internationally reputed journal, Economic and Political Weekly.

The Debate in the Streets

The campaign shook and overwhelmed the rural communities, and the organizers wereastounded by the large turn-outs of women and men, by the intensity and candor withwhich people spoke, and by the social critiques that emerged in these public meetings.

In village after village, emotionally charged women questioned the de� nition ofdomestic violence as a private affair: ‘Why is it’, asked a woman of Chamraunha villagebefore her community, ‘that when a wife is battered you call it a private affair, but whentwo brothers � ght it is a community affair?’ In a similar vein, a woman of Bachhranvillage protested, ‘If a policeman beats a man, the pride of the entire village is hurt andeveryone rushes to save him. But when a woman is battered inside her home, the villagedismisses it as an internal family matter’ (Vanangana, 1999a).

Some women and men drew connections between women’s lack of access to resourcesand their devaluation inside the household on the one hand, and women’s subordinationas a source of masculine pride on the other. ‘Until we stop treating our women as slavesand equating them with our shoes’, remarked a young man from Bachhran, ‘nothing willchange’ (Vanangana, 1999a). In Chamraunha, women angrily pointed out that eventhough each one of them was crushed in her home in the same ways as Mantoria was,none of them had the means to change the course of her life: ‘We do not have anyalternatives, that’s why we bear it’. In Bachhran and Kothilihai villages, women and menidenti� ed women’s inaccessibility to education and family property as the main factorsbehind their subjugation within the family and the hushing up of their deaths: ‘Corpsesdon’t speak, so who is going to tell you about the pain of those women,’ said a womanof Bachhran, ‘When a son dies, there is so much sorrow, but upon a daughter’s death,there’s only silence. Is she not an offspring?’ (Aapka Pitara, 1999, p. 14).

The relentless greed for dowry, in a society where no value was attached to women,said the village folks of Bachhran and Kothilihai, led to incompatible marriages. On topof that, people’s apathy and corrupt police of� cials had made women’s murders into alucrative business, a crime for which fathers, policemen, and headmen should all be‘publicly humiliated’ and ‘hanged to death’ (Vanangana, 1999a).


Men were critical of the ways in which they were socialized to take violence againstwomen for granted. One old man in Bachhran pointed out how men often found it hardto tolerate wives who were educated and aware of their rights. With reference to theHarijan woman who was accused by her husband of having an affair with her father, twowomen in Taraun village remarked that whenever a woman dared to speak against hersituation, her voice was quickly silenced by slandering her character (Srivastava, 1999;Vanangana, 1999a). Religion as well as the family, said the women, become sources ofwomen’s oppressions. When a man pointed out that most of the violence on women wasin� icted by other women, others responded by suggesting that this happened onlybecause women had no other means of achieving a social standing of their own besidesharassing women who were more vulnerable than themselves (Vanangana, 1999a).

In an intensely charged atmosphere, the people of Bachhran took a collective oath to‘stop violence against women’ (Aapka Pitara, 1999, p. 14), and a young man whofrequently beat his wife pledged before the village never to beat her again (Srivastava,1999). In Taraun, several women, along with the village head-woman, Leelawati,vouched to stop violence in their village. In Agarhunda village, the mother of thedeceased woman, Kamlesh, burst into tears as she watched the play. With a torch in herhands, she declared before her community, ‘I have lost one daughter, but we will see thatno one else in this village loses another’ (Srivastava, 1999, p. 454; Vanangana, 1999a).

Socio-spatial Strategizing

An active deployment and reconstruction of social space was at the heart of the women’scampaign in Chitrakoot. This was not simply because the activists chose the genre ofstreet theater to engage with the communities, but also because women’s experiences ofdomestic violence could not be separated from the highly spatialized ways in whichkinship and marriage are practised and experienced in much of rural North India. In asocial context where an unmarried woman is perceived as a daughter of her entire natalvillage (Mayaka), marriage implies an inevitable departure from the intimacy of theMayaka to the distant and alien Sasural (conjugal village), where the young woman isregarded as a daughter-in-law of the village. Thus, while the term, Mayaka, is inter-changeably used for both the parental home and the natal village, Sasural refers to theparents-in-law’s home as well as the marital or conjugal village. In the case of maritaldomestic violence, then, it is the Sasural where violent acts on a woman’s body and beingare perpetrated. And although this violence is often in� icted within the spaces of thehousehold, the nature of a woman’s relationship with her entire conjugal village is onethat structurally denies her easy access to alternative spaces where she can claim orexpect refuge.

In this social scenario, the Phad about Phoola and Phoolkali and the play Mujhe JawabDo! were likely to arouse qualitatively different responses in the Mayaka of a recentlymurdered woman than in her Sasural. It was not surprising, then, that the socio-spatialtactics employed by the Vanangana campaigners hinged upon this critical differencebetween the Mayaka and the Sasural, even though the gendered meanings held by thesetwo spaces were constantly complicated by the class and caste realities of each village. Inthe two subsections that follow, I juxtapose Vanangana’s campaign in two villages—onea Sasural (Malwara) and the other a Mayaka (Kaluram Ka Purva)—to highlight themanner in which a variety of processes combined to shape the enactment and receptionof the campaign: the symbolic and material meanings embedded in the spaces of Sasural

354 R. Nagar

and Mayaka, the local caste and class politics, as well as the particular circumstances inwhich women had been recently killed in each village.

Performing in the Sasural (Marital/Conjugal Home)

Village Malwara, April 26, 1999. 5.30 pm. The heat of the sun hadn’t fully subsided buteveryone seemed relieved that one more unbearable summer day was almost over. Twojeeps loaded mostly with women (and a few men) arrived in the village, where NeetuSingh, a daughter-in-law from the Kurmi caste, was hanged to death in her Sasural onOctober 13, 1998. Before we reached the village, Urmila made sure that everyone knewthe background of the case: Neetu, a beautiful and educated young woman, whose fatherwas a high school teacher, had received her BA degree and worked for the villagepre-school (aanganwadi). Three years ago, she was married into a renowned Kurmi home,where her father-in-law, Ramkumar, was also a high school teacher. Immediately afterher death, 20 prominent Kurmi men from her Sasural collectively paid Rs 50,000 toNeetu’s father and settled the case. When Urmila went to investigate the case on October14th, Neetu’s aunts con� ded that Neetu was endlessly harassed and � nally killed byher-in-laws. ‘But these men [her father and uncles] will not do anything’, an aunt said,‘they instantly accepted Rs 50,000 and hushed up the matter’. The case was not reportedto the police (Vanangana, 1998c). In Malwara, where the Kurmis constituted a wealthy,landowning and united group with considerable political clout, the of� cial position wasthat Neetu had committed suicide. When the campaigners arrived there in April, Neetu’shusband was already engaged to another woman and wedding preparations had begunin the village.

Urmila instructed the drivers to park their jeeps right in the middle of the Kurmineighborhood where Neetu was killed, and proceeded to ask the villagers about a suitablesite to stage the play. A young man rushed out of the jeep with posters, banners, andpaints to proclaim the mission of the group’s trip. The rest of the campaigners, womenand men, got out of the jeep with a drum, tambourine, and megaphone, announcing,‘Listen all, we are going to perform a street play in your village right outside the primaryschool! Hurry to a play that requires no tickets! A play that only takes 20 minutes!’Within a few minutes, curious children from all over attached themselves to this cluster,and together they moved through every lane, every door, and every � eld, accosting andextending a personalized invitation to each villager they encountered—to Bhaiyya(brother) and Bhabhi (sister-in- law), to Bahani (sister) and Dada (grandfather), to Amma(mother) and her Bahus (daughter- in-law), � lling everyone’s hearts with a sense ofexcitement and anticipation.

Within half an hour, 127 people (out of a total village population of 400) gatheredoutside the school to see the play. The dari (rug) symbolizing the stage was spread in thecenter of the public space with the performers seated in a circle, and the audience spreadall around this inner circle. Every prominent tree and wall around this street theater wasinscribed with popular feminist slogans written in bright blue ink: ‘We will � ght forjustice, we won’t allow deals to be struck over dead bodies’, ‘Listen to your daughtersnow, give them all their rights and share [of property]’, for ‘We women of this land, aresparks, not � owers’. The singers and drummers reinforced this tenor with songs thatprotested the discrimination suffered by girls (Beta pyaara, beti nahin; Mein poochhoon ji kyon?‘[The son is loved and the daughter isn’t; I ask you why this is so?’]), and celebrated thesisters who broke the chains of bondage to change the unjust world (Tod tod ke bandhanonko dekho bahane aati hain! ‘[Look, how all these sisters are coming out, breaking the chains


that bind them!’]). By now, the actresses (and one male actor), who had been busyassembling the audience earlier, were ready for the show to begin. It would be darkwithin an hour, so the group decided to plunge into the play without doing the Phad.Archana, the lead singer, announced to the audience that the group representedVanangana, a woman’s organization located in Karvi town, and she requested everyoneto pay close attention to the play they were about to perform because they wanted todiscuss it afterwards.

When the play ended, there was a palpable tension in the air of Malwara. Vananganamembers were acutely aware that holding an open discussion about the play was goingto be dif� cult in this Kurmi dominated village, especially with Neetu’s husband andfather present there. Yet, it was worth trying because in some places they had had anastounding success in generating passionate collective discussion precisely in such atension-charged atmosphere. Madhavi began by asking people why they thought suchatrocities took place. Ramkumar, the high school teacher (father-in-law of Neetu),seemed insulted at the question and confronted her: ‘If I provide all the facilities andsupport to my daughter-in-law, and she still chooses to commit suicide, who is at fault?’Madhavi tried to push the conversation: ‘Why is it that lawsuits continue for years whena son dies mysteriously, but it hardly takes a few days to forge an agreement on adaughter’s death? … Why is it that when a son becomes an adult, family members thinkten times before hitting him, but a woman is beaten every day?’

The campaigners urged women to talk loudly but people in the crowd had beguntalking to each other in earnest. Realizing that it was best to hold discussions insmall groups at this point, the campaigners scattered throughout the crowd to explorepeople’s responses. An old Kurmi woman said, ‘No one will criticize anything openlybecause we have to live in this village’. Another woman whispered, ‘They will marry himoff again, and he will roam around proudly without a sliver of guilt’. The women thoughtthat it was outrageous how some parents married another daughter in the same familywhere one has just been killed. Another group discussion was taking place among Kurmimen. Ramkumar proclaimed that Neetu was a bad daughter-in-law who refused to staywithin the boundaries of decency. His son, Sanjay, chimed in by quoting ‘the famouslines that even gods can’t vouch for a woman’s character’ (Group discussion notes, April26, 1999).

The public response of the villagers was predictable and clearly shaped by their casteand class af� liations. All the Kurmis in Malwara were of approximately the same classstatus and the majority of them were related to each other as close or distant kin, andno one wanted to criticize his or her aunts, uncles, cousins, or grand aunts in public. Inthe experience of the campaigners, the villages where people openly stated their viewstended to be those where divisions of caste and class were more clearly marked.Commented Urmila, ‘If there were Brahmans or Thakurs around, they would havecriticized Ramkumar’s family openly in Malwara. Otherwise, people from the same casteare always trying to protect each other from public disgrace, especially if they are froma similar or lower class background’. Sunita and Urmila recounted their performance inBhasondha village, where an upper-caste Thakur woman had been burned. She gave adying testimony that she had got burned while cooking because her in-laws threatenedto kill her 7 month-old daughter if she blamed them. In Bhasondha village, where theBrahmans, Thakurs, Kurmis, Koris and Chamars were � nancially of equal footing, theyopenly humiliated the husband and described how he had killed his wife, and how hebeat her and slandered her character every day (interviews with Urmila and Sunita, April30, 1999).

356 R. Nagar

This kind of open public dialogue was not to be seen in Malwara village, and villagerswere clearly hesitant to openly sympathize with the play. But even here some Kori men,who were poorer than the Kurmis, secretly extended their support to the campaigners.Rambalak, a 35 year-old, promised that ‘after watching this play, I feel like I will diebefore I lay a � nger on my wife again’ (Khajan Singh’s interview with Rambalak, April26, 1999). A man in his twenties expressed anger that Sanjay was going to marry again;one said, ‘Men who kill their wives should be publicly humiliated and ostracized’.Another man, Manojkumar, took Urmila aside and said, ‘I am from a poor and minoritycaste here, so I can’t oppose this murderer’s remarriage openly. But secretly, I will doanything I can to help you stop this wedding’. Manojkumar and two other Kori menvolunteered to establish a village-level watchdog committee in Malwara to ensure thatevery known case of violence against women was reported to Vanangana.

Performing in the Mayaka (Natal Village)

Village Kaluram Ka Purva. April 27, 1999. 5:30 am. It was the morning after Malwara andtime to stage another show. We wanted to reach Kaluram Ka Purva by 7.30 am so thatthe play could be performed before the sun got too hot and before people became tooimmersed in their daily chores. Although Kaluram Ka Purva was also a large,Kurmi-dominated village, the campaigners anticipated a signi� cantly different responsehere as compared to Malwara because it was the Mayaka of Girija Devi, who had diedjust 3 weeks ago after being harassed for 3 years for not bringing a television and a motorscooter in her dowry. Before they actually burned her on March 30th, 1999, Girija’smother-in-law, mother-in-law’s sister, and brother-in-law had been planning her murderin her presence, so that after her death they could bring home a new bride with a bigdowry. Whenever Girija’s husband opposed his relatives, they scolded him and hushedhim up. When Girija last visited her parents in January, she told them that she did notwant to return to Devkali; if she did, she was sure that her in-laws would kill her andher infant daughter. The father talked to Girija’s in-laws and their neighbors and madethem promise that they would take good care of Girija. At 8 pm on March 30th, Girijawas discovered with serious burns all over her body in her Sasural in Devkali, where she� nally succumbed to the burns on April 5th. The episode was particularly tragic for thefamily and villagers because Girija’s older sister was also poisoned to death in her maritalhome a year earlier. Girija and her sister left behind 5 and 6 month-old daughters whenthey died. Girija’s in-laws claimed that it was a suicide, but Girija’s father rejected theclaim (Vanangana, 1999b). The campaigners had been trying to persuade the father toreport the case to the police, but he was procrastinating, and based on numerousconversations with him, Urmila was convinced that he was about to make a deal withGirija’s in-laws (author’s interview with Urmila, April 27 and 30, 1999).

But the play couldn’t begin as early as intended. Given the caste politics of KaluramKa Purva, � nding a suitable site for the play proved to be an in� nitely dif� cult task. Theteam wanted an open space that was relatively undisputed so that people from all castesand classes could assemble there. They also wanted to stage it in roughly the sameneighborhood where the woman’s family lived, so that her relatives could be presentduring the play and discussion. And given the intensity of heat, it was also critical thatthere be some shade so that people could watch the play comfortably. In terms of castepolitics, Kaluram Ka Purva was split four ways among Brahmans, Yadavs, and twoopposing factions of Kurmis, one party of Kurmis having won the village headshipelection, and the other party having lost it. This meant that every location that seemed


physically suitable for the play turned out to be socially inappropriate. If the Yadavs livedin one area, Brahmans and Kurmis refused to come there, and if it was af� liated withone of the Kurmi groups, then the other Kurmi faction refused to come. Finally, after2 hours of desperate searching, Urmila and Kamlesh found a shady, spacious placeoutside the home of Lallu Lohar, which seemed relatively tension free. But women of theBrahman caste still refused to come.

By 11.00 am a massive crowd of approximately 350 people (out of a total populationof about 600), gathered outside Lallu Lohar’s home. The singers were singing one songafter another to hold the crowd, but they were still waiting for Girija’s parents to arrive.Finally, Pushpa and Poonam began enacting the Phad about Phoola and Phoolkali whiletwo others hurried to fetch Girija’s parents. Girija’s father, sister and grandmotherarrived in a few minutes but even after 15 minutes of pleading on Kamlesh’s part, themother did not come. For the last 3 weeks, she had not been eating or talking toanyone; the grief of losing two grown-up daughters within a year was too overwhelmingfor her.

While we waited for Kamlesh to return, an emotionally stirred audience had begunresponding to the story of Phoola and Phoolkali. A man in his forties rose as soon as thePhad was over. ‘This recent incident here is the most awful one we have ever seen. Wewant to do something about it, and we are touched that you have taken so much troublefor us.’ A 25 year-old man, Pradeep, openly criticized the way marriages were arranged:‘In 95% of the cases, it’s not a marriage, it’s a horrendous transaction. It’s our duty tochange this situation’.

Kamlesh returned after these brief remarks and the play started. I heard a villagewoman whisper to another, ‘These girls [actresses] are not from the city. They talkBundeli just like us’. A young woman standing next to me said, ‘This story they aretelling is not fabricated. This is what happens in our homes every day’. Throughout theplay, there were audible sounds of sobbing and crying from the audience, and asMantoria’s daughter covered her mother’s dead body, a teenaged woman in theaudience fainted. When the torches were lit, Madhavi’s voice shook with unshed tears:‘We have lit these torches for our bitiya [daughter], Girija. We haven’t been able toretrieve her dying testimony yet, but we hope that she wasn’t pressured to declare thatshe had committed suicide, because that would weaken our case’. A middle-aged womanresponded, ‘Don’t they understand that even a suicide is actually a murder? That womenare pushed to commit suicide?’ An old woman from the opposite end remarked, ‘Awoman’s death becomes an event to celebrate because then the man can get anotherbride’. Pradeep (quoted earlier) asserted that the primary driving force behind theseatrocities was the greed for dowry, even though the society kept inventing new ways tolay the blame of the death on the women themselves. Another young man said, ‘Themen who do this must be excommunicated—they don’t deserve to live in society’. ‘Byshowing how the man, his family and village, the police, the doctor, the headmencollaborate in this game’, commented an old Brahman man, ‘you have reopened ourwound again. We will wholeheartedly support you in this battle.’

Even though it was the middle of the afternoon by now, and at least an hour past mostpeople’s lunchtime, informal discussions about the play continued, and the villagersinsisted on treating the campaign team to chai and sherbet. Young men who had spokenout against violence collectively put down their names to constitute a village-levelwatchdog committee to prevent future incidents of violence. They also introducedUrmila to a middle-aged man in the village whose two married daughters had come tolive with him after being subjected to torture and mistreatment in their Sasurals; the

358 R. Nagar

daughters had to face considerable social stigma from the villagers for living way fromtheir Sasurals. Provoked by the play, two of Girija’s uncles publicly swore to take revengeby burning down her in-laws’ house, but the campaigners were able to steer thediscussion toward critical re� ection on the cultural practices that marginalized women,while indirectly putting pressure on Girija’s father not to strike a deal with her in-laws.

When we left the village to return to Karvi, the hearts of the villagers and campaignerswere heavy, and women and men came to the jeep to say goodbye. On the way to Karvi,the campaigners stopped at the local police station to remind the Superintendent ofPolice about Girija’s case, to demand his support, and to check whether Girija’s fatherhad reported the case (he had not). They strategized to do the next show in Devkali,village where Girija had been burned.

Discursive Geographies of Women’s Resistance: gender, space and politicsin Vanangana’s street campaign

If the political theater has a raison d’etre, it is surely its allegiance to peoplewho have been denied their fundamental human rights … What makes a playpolitical is not its � delity to the Party or to any model prescribed by Brecht orPiscator but its � delity to a people whose oppression cries out to be enacted onstage. (Bharucha, 1983, p. xvii)

In Vanangana’s ongoing crusade against domestic violence, the campaigners are insepar-able from the people whose oppression is crying out to be enacted on the stage. Bycentrally involving its rural-based workers in the campaign and in the creation of the playMujhe Jawab Do! and the Phad, Vanangana has given birth to a politically active feministtheater in Chitrakoot—a theater that has enabled women to participate not simply asspectators, but also as performers who narrate, evaluate, and enact their stories, andcritique the structures that marginalize them. In connecting the brutalities againstwomen with pervasive masculinist constructions of family and community, pride andhonor, fate and justice, the campaigners have created a ‘stringently political theater’(Bharucha, 1983, p. xiii) that lifts the shroud of silence from domestic violence andattacks previously unquestioned socio-economic and cultural practices responsible forthat violence. Through a creative use of their local language, folklore and songs, thecampaigners impart political meanings to ‘traditional’ cultural forms and play at once onthe guilt and humanity of their spectators (Bharucha, 1983, p. xiv). In so doing, they donot advocate a complete overthrow of the patriarchal system. Rather, they create aheightened awareness of the gendered injustices in their world and demand from theiraudience—the men and the women, the police and the village elders, the familymembers and the neighbors—‘a partial responsibility for these injustices’ (Bharucha,1983, p. xiv).

But our understanding of the rich and nuanced meanings embedded in this campaignwould be severely limited if we failed to appreciate the ways in which spatial politics layat the core of this crusade. Re� ecting on the performances and ‘personal geography’ ofEllen Rothenberg, Cindi Katz (1994, p. 41) observes that ‘the socially constructed natureof accepted demarcations such as those between home, body, and community is usuallymasked by its taken for grantedness’. For Katz, a spatially informed politics such asRothenberg’s exposes these constructions, seeks their origins, calls them into question,and transgresses the constructed separations between public and private, body and world(Katz, 1994, p. 41). The street campaign in Chitrakoot can also be seen in very similar


terms: as a spatially informed feminist politics committed to unmasking and transgressingsocially constructed divides—between the public and private, the Sasural and the Mayaka,the home and the community—each of which serves to subjugate, violate and silencewomen.

The politicization of the issues of domestic violence and gendered discrimination bythe campaigners was a spatialized act in which they literally moved the discourse on thesesubjects—� rst, from the privacy of women’s homes to the spaces of the organization, andlater, from the organization to the male-dominated public spaces of the community.With every spatial move, the activists consciously created a new public domain wherecritical dialogue and re� ection could emerge on women’s experiences as well as on thesocio-economic and cultural processes responsible for their oppressions. Thus, what wesee at work here is a very self-conscious construction and deployment of ‘sociospatialcircuits through which cultural and personal stories are circulated, legitimated and givenmeaning’ (Pratt 1999, p. 218). It was through the process of naming, sharing, retelling,and reinterpreting their own and others’ experiences of domestic abuse in a successionof different spaces that women learned to impart political meanings to these previouslymuf� ed stories, and to recognize the contradictions and oppressions embedded inpopular discourses of masculinity, honor and justice.

For a play that aims to generate critical dialogue on a social problem, writes Udaya(1988, p. 20), the street is the most suitable stage, because it is only in the streets thatsolutions to social and political problems can be found. The tactics deployed byVanangana activists clearly demonstrated this critical awareness of the street as a vibrantstage for politicizing a pressing social issue. But theirs was not a simple, undifferentiated,or romanticized understanding of the street as an arena for ‘doing’ cultural politics.Rather, in choosing the streets of those villages which had recently lost a daughter ordaughter-in-law to domestic violence, and by switching their stages between the mur-dered women’s Sasural and Mayaka, activists showed a heightened perception of thespatialized contours of gender and kinship, and the manner in which these shaped thesocial dynamics and dialogues in the streets.

Like many political theaters, Vanangana’s campaign, too, is rooted in a particular soiland time, and commits itself to addressing the needs of a speci� c community (Bharucha,1983, p. xviii). Such theater, according to Bharucha (1983, p. xix), ‘lives so intensely inthe historical moment of its creation that it has to constantly renew itself’. The strengthand integrity of such theater does not derive from its translatability or universalsigni� cance, but from the fact that these plays are not mere enactments of texts that canbe transposed to other times and places with necessary adaptations; rather, they are‘activities’ integrally related to a turbulent social and political milieu (Bharucha, 1983, p.xviii). The power of Vanangana’s campaign, then, stems not only from its temporalsigni� cance—from the fact that it is responding to instances of violence that are fresh inpeople’s heart and minds—but also from its ability to creatively employ socio-spatialcircuits and to continuously adapt itself according to the socio-spatial realities of everyvillage.

While it would be premature to assess or predict the longer term effects of this youngcampaign, this examination of Vanangana’s crusade against violence illustrates severalcritical processes. First of all, it shows how the program created a space for rural womento evolve politically, and how women subsequently pulled the organization in thedirection(s) of their emerging political consciousness. Women began to theorize theintertwined nature of empowerment and disempowerment in their everyday lives, andthe manner in which their struggles around access to literacy, technology, and economic

360 R. Nagar

security were inseparable from the deeply ingrained gendered practices of violence intheir communities. At the strategic level, these new feminist understandings led womento reconceptualize their spaces of action. Far from being con� ned to the women-onlyspaces of the organization, activism and ‘consciousness raising’ now involved claiming ofthe patriarchal and male dominated public spaces, and a radical rethinking of therelationship between the organization and the rural communities.

Both theoretically and methodologically, then, this analysis reveals how an attentionto space can promote more re� ned understandings of women’s ways of remembering,recording and articulating their struggles, and of the nature, content and meanings oftheir political actions. Because feminist ‘discourses emerge as situated practices inparticular places’, questions of political consciousness and self-identity that de� newomen’s engagement with feminism (Mohanty, 1991) can only be addressed by situating‘local feminisms’ (Basu, 1995) in relation to their place-speci� c contexts and strategies.Mapping the socio-spatial circuits through which women share and politicize theirexperiences enables us to chart the ‘discursive geographies’ (Pratt, 1999, p. 218) ofwomen’s resistance, and grasp the speci� c processes by which resisters learn to critique,rede� ne or transform the hegemonic views of empowerment and violence, masculinityand femininity, crime and justice.

Acknowledgements

I owe a debt of gratitude to Madhavi Kuckreja and Huma Khan, without whose helpand support I could not have undertaken this project. Many thanks to Aarti Srivastavaand to Urmila, Sunita, Kamla, Archana and Sampat for generously sharing their time,experiences and insights with me; to Khajan Singh for all his great help; and to the entireMahila Samakhya and Vanangana families for making my research trip to Karvi one ofthe most inspirational events of my life. Last but not least, I am extremely grateful toLynn Staeheli and three anonymous reviewers for their close reading and constructivecomments, and to David Faust for providing critical feedback at every juncture.

NOTES

[1] In three instances, interviewees responded in a mixture of Hindi and Bundeli (the local language), and amember of Mahila Samakhya or Vanangana served as a translator when a Bundeli word or phrase wasunclear to me.

[2] Experimentation lies at the core of street theater. Scripts evolve through group discussion, and currentevents and real life cases are used to contextualize issues and to effectively engage and communicate withthe audience. Authors employ popular tunes, songs and characters to provide entertainment and familiarcomparison points for the audience, and to also critique mainstream practices and discourses. In this mobilemedium of communication, props are kept to a minimum and there is no built structure called the stage.Instead, actors go out in search of their audience as well as a suitable site for enacting their play. Costumesare sometimes used to compensate for the starkness of the play and emphasis is placed most heavily uponthe performance of the actors (Garlough, 1997, p. 9).

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Organizational Publications

A. MAHILA SAMAKHYA UTTAR PRADESH (Lucknow):(1996) Lamps in the Wind: Annual Report, 1995–1996 .(1997) Changing Dimensions: Annual Report, 1996–1997.(1998) The Spirit of the Collective: U.P. Mahila Samakhya experience: Annual Report, 1997–1998 .

B. VANANGANA (Karvi):(1998a) Campaign against domestic violence and deaths within the family.(1998b) Mujhe Jawab Do. (Original script in Hindi and Bundeli).(1998c) Neetu Singh Case report (Hindi).(1999a) Campaign report (Hindi).(1999b) Girija Devi Case report (Hindi).

mujhe jawab do! (answer me!): women's grass-roots activism and social spaces in chitrakoot...

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