Gender, Place and Culture, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp.

341–362, 2000

Mujhe Jawab Do! (Answer me!): women’s grass-roots

activism 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, this
article examines how feminist activists strategically use and create social spaces to generate collective
dialogue and critical reection on issues of patriarchy and violence. The author highlights the ways in
which grass-roots activists theorize the interrelationships among their own political actions, their visions
of empowerment, and the everyday gendered spaces they seek to transform. The article demonstrates how
a serious engagement with social spaces in grass-roots activism can enable us to overcome the conceptual
gaps 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 when
I want, and to be discarded when I am done.’ Declaring this, the man kicked
his wife Mantoria hard in her back. As Mantoria screamed and writhed in
pain, 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! (Answer
me!), 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 daily
chores that were yet to be done. After all, one of the daughters or daughters-in-law of
their village had recently been killed by the same kind of violence that took Mantoria’s
life. But it was not simply Mantoria’s murder or its commonplaceness that they found
unnerving; what disturbed them more than anything else were the questions with which
the play confronted them—questions about the worth of wives, daughters, mothers, and
sisters in their own families and community, and about their deeply held beliefs regarding
what constituted honor, violence, crime, and justice.
In this article, I tell the story of a grass-roots campaign of poor, rural women in the
Chitrakoot (previously, part of Banda) district of Uttar Pradesh state in North India. My
objective is to examine how feminist activists strategically use and create social spaces to
generate collective dialogue and critical re ection on issues of patriarchy and gendered
violence. A related aim is to highlight the ways in which activists working at the
grass-roots level theorize the interrelationships among their own political actions, their
vision(s) of empowerment, and the everyday gendered spaces they seek to transform.

Correspondence: Richa Nagar, Department of Women’s Studies, University of Minnesota, 425 Ford Hall, 224 Church
St. SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA; , e-mail: nagar002@tc.umn.edu . .

ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online/00/040341-22 Ó 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd 341
DOI 10.1080/09663690020008975
342 R. Nagar

In the following analysis, I begin by brie y situating this campaign within recent
feminist writings on empowerment and violence in the context of ‘Third World’
development politics more generally, and of India more speciŽ cally. I argue that a lack
of explicit engagement with space in much of the feminist literature on these topics limits
our ability to adequately apprehend the nature, content, and meanings of women’s
political actions (Staeheli, 1996). This brief theoretical review is followed by a backdrop
of women’s grass-roots organizing in Chitrakoot, and the socio-economic and political
realities that deŽ ne women’s struggles in this region.
Drawing on my recent Ž eldwork, I then examine the two-step evolution of a campaign
on violence against women in this area. The Ž rst step saw the rise of a politicized
awareness about violence within two local women’s organizations, Mahila Samakhya and
Vanangana, which stimulated the collective production of the play, Mujhe Jawab Do!, and
the accompanying songs and Phad (a picture story enacted by two narrators). The second
step was to take the campaign from within the organization into the villages and public
spaces of the district government administration, and provoke a critical rethinking of
gendered violence in the local communities. To highlight how these campaigners
developed speciŽ c socio-spatial tactics to reach their audiences in villages ridden by
class-and caste-based inequalities, the subsequent section focuses on the campaign in two
speciŽ c villages, Malwara and Kaluram Ka Purva. Finally, I analyze the spatial and
political meanings embedded in the campaign, and the theoretical implications of this
study for scholars grappling with questions of women’s grass-roots activism and social
change in marginalized rural communities of the so-called ‘Third World’.
My ethnographic methodology for this research involved Ž eldwork in Chitrakoot in
December 1998 and April 1999, and an active involvement in a women’s street
campaign, not simply as a participant observer, but also as a supporter and helper. In
addition, I collected 30 life histories of Vanangana and Mahila Samakhya workers, and
supplemented these with 35 shorter interviews with organizational workers and ofŽ cials.
I conducted all the interviews in Hindi (my native language) and the translations in
English that appear in this article are also mine[1]. I also analyzed organizational
documents (including songs, scripts, newsletters and reports) in Hindi and Bundeli, and
news clippings in Hindi and English. My analysis of the spatial strategies adopted in the
campaign 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 each
case, 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 interviews
with the spectators, and collectively re ected upon the outcome of the campaign with the
activists 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 among
feminists, in India and elsewhere, on the subject of empowerment and violence in the
lives 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’s
empowerment and violence against women, feminist theoretical interventions on these
topics have often evolved in separate intellectual domains. While empowerment has been
a 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 women
has been more centrally theorized in the context of women’s social movements (Kumar,
1993; Ray 1999; Zaman, 1999; Visaria 2000) and in problematizing predominant views
of 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 an
inevitable part of their struggles for economic and political empowerment. Here I argue
that an analytical focus on space and spatial strategies can enable us to develop fuller and
more integrated perspectives on women’s struggles by illustrating (a) how women identify
the interwoven strands of their lives in speciŽ c contexts, and (b) how they deŽ ne and act
upon their shifting priorities and visions of empowerment and social justice within those
contexts.
In recent years, development planners, scholars, and activists have all agreed that
empowerment of poor women in the ‘Third World’ holds the key to solving some of the
most difŽ cult problems of global poverty, hunger and environmental degradation (World
Resources Institute, 1994). Yet, the preoccupation with ‘measuring empowerment’ on the
part of many agencies that fund non-governmental organisations (NGOs), points to the
problematic way in which women’s empowerment has been accommodated into devel-
opment thinking. As Naila Kabeer points out, ‘(a)dvocacy on behalf of women which
builds on claimed synergies between feminist goals and ofŽ cial development priorities has
made greater inroads into the mainstream development agenda than advocacy which
argues 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 tended
to be heard as a ‘zero-sum’ game with politically weak winners and powerful
losers. By contrast, instrumentalist forms of advocacy which combine the
argument for gender equality/women’s empowerment with demonstrations of
a broad set of desirable multiplier effects offer policy makers the possibility of
achieving 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 a
phenomenon that can be measured and quantiŽ ed on ‘solid and objectively veriŽ able
grounds’ (Kabeer 1999, p. 439). In this instrumentalist approach to empowerment, far
from 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 measure
women’s access to resources, their agency, and achievements.
Feminist ethnographers focusing on the politics of household resource allocation have
similarly critiqued feminist economists for paying little attention to violence as a form of
household con ict (Voight, 1999, pp. 155–156). While they have succeeded in moving
the discussion of household dynamics beyond the problematic notions of ‘cooperation’
and ‘unity’, alternative models that seek to analyze gender relations have inadequately
theorized gender dynamics within and beyond the household, as well as the links
between extra-household and intra-household bargaining power (Agarwal, 1997, p. 1;
Voight, 1999). According to Voight (1999, p. 155), even those discussions that focus
explicitly on power and inequality, and employ the concepts of ‘bargaining’, ‘negotiation’
and ‘cooperative con ict’, have largely ignored domestic violence as an ‘extreme and
brutal expression’ of gendered power differentials. Following Alison Scott (1990), she
argues for a need to develop better understandings of women’s actual experiences of
344 R. Nagar

violence within the family, the frequency and nature of these experiences, and how
structures 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 in
India (Manushi Editorial Collective, 1979; Kishwar, 1989; Kumar, 1993; Ray, 1999;
Visaria, 2000). Beginning in the 1970s, feminist movements in India not only witnessed
a heightened awareness of inequalities embedded in interlocking systems of class, caste,
tribe, language, religion, and region; they were also accompanied by increasing demands
for 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 against
dowry, rape, wife-battering, and sati; in anti-liquor agitations; and in protests against
communalism and religious fundamentalism (Manushi, 1979–present; Kumar 1993;
Butalia, 1998). Radha Kumar (1993, p. 160) summarizes the trajectory of Indian
women’s movement thus:
In the late seventies feminists had focused on the dowry form as an expression
of the subordination of women within the family, and had seen dowry murder
as one of the most brutal manifestations of violence against women. By the
early eighties, attempts to analyse the relationship of women to and within the
family had led to examining the codiŽ 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 the
manner and extent to which this nationwide feminist movement intersected with the
emergence and accomplishments of women’s development NGOs in different parts of
the country. How did it shape, for instance, women’s strategies, the nature of their
alliances, their priorities, and their visions of empowerment? If the predominant notions
of women’s empowerment, as Kabeer points out, are guided by ‘desirable multiplier
effects’, how does a strong presence of anti-violence feminist voices inform and compli-
cate women’s struggles against socio-econom ic 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 in
deŽ ning ‘third world women’s engagement with feminism’. Mohanty identiŽ es testimoni-
als, oral histories, life stories, and written accounts ‘as an important context in which to
examine the development of political consciousness’ because these narratives constitute
a ‘signiŽ cant mode of remembering and recording experiences and struggles’ (1991, p.
33). My ethnographic analysis not only foregrounds women’s modes of remembering and
recording, it also takes Mohanty’s argument a step further by spatializing women’s
socio-political action; for we can neither grasp the complexities of speciŽ c feminisms, nor
apprehend the subjectivities and struggles of ‘Third World’ women without situating
them 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 in
relation to speciŽ c social spaces (Pratt, 1999, p. 218). An attention to space also enables
us to understand the interrelationships and interplay between what Katz (1998, pp.
 Women’s Grass-roots Activism in India 345

174–175) has called ‘spatialized feminist politics’ and a ‘feminist politics of space’. While
the former refers to all the ways in which space and spatial relations are implicated and
imbricated in oppression and liberation, the latter refers to politics that focus explicitly
on space and spatial issues, such as access to particular environments, the sites of violence
against women from the bedroom to the street, or the location of particular services and
facilities (Katz, 1998, pp. 174–175). In other words, a geographically informed ethno-
graphic perspective can illuminate how social differences are embedded in various spatial
contexts and how feminist activists rework those differences through explicitly spatialized
tactics (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 politically
peripheralized women of Chitrakoot used street theater to address domestic violence as
a major source of disempowerment in their familial and community lives. Street plays
became a vehicle for these activists to ‘utilize [their] lived relations as a basis of
knowledge’ (Mohanty, 1991, p. 35), and to rethink, remember, and record women’s
struggles—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 politicized
self- and collective identities (Mohanty, 1991). At the core of women’s performances was
a strategic deployment and construction of social spaces to generate collective dialogue
and critical re ection about patriarchy and violence; and these collective dialogues in
different social spaces, in turn, guided activists’ visions of social change, and their ability
to 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 ‘conscious
re exivity, negotiation [and] agency in the doing of identity’ (Nelson, 1999, p. 332) and
politics.
To give the reader a sense of the place, the next section provides a brief socio-
economic proŽ le of Chitrakoot. It also highlights the manner in which feminist grass
roots organizing has emerged in this region since the late 1980s, and the key actors and
processes, 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 the
women, shameless!)

These lines (supposedly written by the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb) along with the
couplet Gagri na phoote, chahe khasam mar jaye! (Can’t bear to lose my pitcher of water, even
if my man dies!) are often repeated to caution visitors when they Ž rst arrive in
Chitrakoot. 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 of
bonded (indentured) labor, an almost ubiquitous presence of bandits and daduwas
(powerful men), and a general environment of hardships that produces not only ‘disloyal
men’ in the folklore, but also ‘shameless women’ who proudly declare that their water
means more to them than their men! Ranking near the very bottom of the national and
state 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,
346 R. Nagar

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’s
organizations, 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 spells
women’s ‘real emancipation’ (Menon, 1995, p. 4).
The Mahila Samakhya program (henceforth, MS) was launched in 1989 by the
Government of India in three states—Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, and Gujarat—with
joint funding from the Royal Dutch Government. Envisioned and guided by dynamic
feminist activists such as Vimala Ramachandran, Kamla Bhasin, Runu Chakravarti and
Abha Bhaiya, this innovative scheme for women’s education explicitly committed itself
to women’s empowerment, and operated in collaboration with gender-progressive NGOs
at the district level. Departing from traditional literacy campaigns which had very limited
success, MS drew upon the National Policy on Education (1986), which emphasized the
need for a ‘positive interventionist role’ on the part of the Government in the
empowerment 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 through
district-level units. While urban women with more formal education held the ofŽ cial
positions in each district-level organization, the pivotal forces were the rural women who
worked as coordinators called Sahyoginis and Sakhis. Each Sahyogini was responsible for 10
villages, and each village had a Sakhi serving as a link between the village women and
MS. Together the Sahyoginis and Sakhis organized meetings with village women, helping
them constitute action groups (Samoohs) to collectively re ect on their conditions,
constraints and needs, as well as to determine concrete strategies and goals for their
empowerment. 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
Ž rst step toward that end’. MS became one of the rare government-funded organizations
that allowed the most disadvantaged rural women to deŽ ne and pursue empowerment
on their own terms according to their varying place-speciŽ c realities. Not surprisingly,
then, while sexual violence and gendered and class-based environmental con icts became
the focus of MS activists in some areas, MS programs in other places prioritized literacy,
pedagogy, technology, and the relationships between landlords and farm workers (Mahila
Samakhya Uttar Pradesh, 1996, 1997, 1998). The success and uniqueness of MS is often
imputed to its decentralized functioning and its sensitivity to contextual social and spatial
realities.
The MS program in the Chitrakoot district Ž rst hit the headlines of the nation’s
newspapers when it accomplished the ‘incredible feat’ of training the poorest, illiterate
rural women from lower castes and the local Kol tribe as hand pump mechanics. The
following excerpt from a news story in a leading national newspaper captures the manner
in which the achievements of women in Banda were simultaneously exoticized and
celebrated in the mainstream media:

Bachendari Pal may have conquered the Everest, … and Kalpana Chawala
may 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 their
oppressive settings requires far more guts. Unlettered and fettered by tra-
ditional norms, many of them have now become handpump mechanics while
 Women’s Grass-roots Activism in India 347

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

While acute water scarcity and governmental apathy were the primary forces propelling
rural women to master the technology of Ž xing handpumps, the acquisition of this skill
stimulated a critical consciousness among women about caste, class, and gender relations,
and a deep desire to attain formal literacy. Once women’s conŽ dence grew, they no
longer 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 MS
Chitrakoot, followed by a 6-month long residential school for rural women. The ‘close
link between literacy programmes and the hand pump project created an environment
for the use of literacy skills. Women began to exchange news about their villages and
homes … 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 the
neo-literate women of MS Chitrakoot, was one of the most direct results of this literacy
campaign. This ‘folksy, informal combination of [narratives], information blurbs, poems,
songs and pictures’ (Rastogi, 1997, p. 107), circulated and read in more than 200 villages
of the Chitrakoot district, made a big splash in Indian newspapers when it won the
Media Foundation’s prestigious 1995 Chameli Devi Award for the ‘outstanding woman
journalist’ (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 MS
Chitrakoot, started thinking about how women trained as mechanics and masons
could obtain work contracts for government-funded schemes. Within the structure of
MS, however, such contractual work would have been illegal. Also, coinciding with
the World Bank involvement in MS in 1995, MS organizations in Uttar Pradesh
began to face increasing pressures to standardize their objectives and projects across
districts, to generate reports of accomplishments, and to measure the progress of each
village in terms of the numbers of women who had attained ‘empowerment’ (interviews
with 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 ofŽ ce,
Lucknow, December, 1998). While a close examination of these developments is outside
the purview of this article, these factors pushed the leadership of MS Chitrakoot to
envision the birth of a new organization, one that could work in cooperation with MS
but not be sti ed by the new constraints. As a result, Vanangana was born in 1994, and
although Vanangana and MS have had their periods of tensions and con icts, the two
organizations have, for the most part, worked closely and complementarily with each
other.
The campaign against violence is perhaps the most successful example of this close
collaboration between Vanangana and MS Chitrakoot, a campaign which came alive
under the leadership of Huma Khan, a student of gender, law, and social work, who
succeeded Kuckreja as the District Coordinator of MS Chitrakoot and subsequently took
a position in Vanangana in 1998. Even as MS and Vanangana were forging ahead with
their 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 their
own homes. Workers were frequently harassed, threatened and tortured because of their
348 R. Nagar

involvement in MS and Vanangana; and at least once a month, ofŽ cials were pushed
into situations where they had to rescue their workers from their husbands or in-laws. To
discourage future acts of violence, these ofŽ cials frequently resorted to openly humiliating
the male perpetrators by blackening their faces or beating them in public (interviews with
Aarti 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 women
worked, instances of dowry murders and domestic abuse abounded, forcing ofŽ cials of
the organization to confront the limitations of a vision of empowerment that aimed at
increasing women’s access to technology and literacy without addressing the violence
that continuously reinforced their devaluation and disempowerment within their homes
and communities.
These processes triggered within MS and Vanangana, a critical rethinking of the
instrumentalist versions of empowerment in development theory and practice. As in
other feminist movements in India, women recognized that the tactic of shaming their
male oppressors by deploying symbols of emasculation (men being beaten by women)
and losing of face (blackened faces) was based on an acceptance of conventional
deŽ 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 and
activist lives that we must understand the emergence of the street campaign on violence
against women in Chitrakoot. In the following section, I discuss the two-step evolution
of 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 association
with left-wing politics, modern street theater in India aims to provide reŽ ned entertain-
ment while serving as a cultural intervention that can work directly at the level of
people’s consciousness (Garlough, 1997, pp. 7–8). Women’s organizations throughout
India have recognized and adopted street plays as a powerful medium to critique
prevailing norms, to voice alternative visions, and to mobilize their audiences around
issues 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 theater
was a totally unfamiliar territory before 1998, and many of them had never even seen
any kind of theater before. Moreover, the idea of generating a dialogue about
women’s oppressions in the presence of men was alien to MS’s mode of functioning
in 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 their
own kin, was neither easy nor safe for organizational workers who were themselves only
beginning to be politicized about this issue. How was it, then, that these very same
women succeeded in using street plays as a powerful tool in their campaign? What
guided their passions, visions, stories and strategies? What made them effective? In the
next three parts of this section, I address these questions by describing how women
activists Ž rst built their campaign within the organization, and then took it to the streets
of Chitrakoot, stirring intense responses and passionate discussions in every space they
traversed.
 Women’s Grass-roots Activism in India 349

Building a Campaign inside the Organization

When Pushpa beats me [in the play], she does it exactly like her ex-husband
kicked and beat her every day … [And] when I play Mantoria, I don’t act
when I cry out with pain and fury. What dances before my eyes are the faces
and corpses of women I have known, witnessed and touched. My heart burns,
aches, and screams in rage for them as I perform. (Urmila, interviewed on
April 30, 1999)
In 1998, when Vanangana received a grant from Oxfam to support its campaign
against violence, it sought help from Pravaah and Alaripu, two Delhi-based NGOs
focusing on popular education and communication, to strategize about the crusade that
was to hit the villages of Chitrakoot in 1999. When the preparations started, workers
from every section of Vanangana and MS Chitrakoot were grabbed by the theme and
extended their earnest support to the campaign. The supporters included teachers from
the literacy centers, handpump mechanics, Sahyoginis (mobilizers), ofŽ ce assistants, and
caterers, all being women whose own lives had been deeply touched by domestic
violence.
But a few women such as Urmila (quoted here), Manju, Pushpa, Sampat, and Sunita
had become immersed in the issues of domestic violence months before the street
campaign 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 marginalized
women, and the manner in which rural women could be educated about the laws so that
they could protect themselves more effectively against the everyday violence that
engulfed them. The result of this legal training was a document, Janen Kanoon Badlen
Zamana (Let’s Ž gure out the laws and change the world), which sought to educate
neo-literate women about the basics of the legal scenario and their personal rights, and
was circulated and read widely within Vanangana and Mahila Samakhya.
Equipped with this newly found knowledge, the women committed themselves
completely 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 violence
in any village, these women rushed to the scene and interrogated the relatives and
neighbors of the victim, seeking the support of police and devoting their meager personal
resources when necessary. Although these women had never focused their activism on
domestic violence before, their long-term, hands-on experience of working on sensitive
gender issues in villages ridden with class and caste-based differences greatly facilitated
the undertaking of this challenging task.
Between January and November 1998, 28 cases of dowry murders and women’s
suicide were reported in Chitrakoot district, all the dead women being young (18–24
years) and either pregnant or mothers of small children. In each case, the death was
caused by burns, beating, strangulation, hanging, or poisoning in the parents-in-law’s
village (Vanangana, 1998a, p. 1; Srivastava, 1999, p. 454). Let me cite a few examples
to give a name and face to some of these women. Neelam, a daughter-in-law
in Bachhran village, was burned to death by her in-laws. Her father, with the help
of Vanangana activists had the husband arrested. But 6 months later, the father struck
a deal with his son-in-law and agreed to arrange his younger daughter’s marriage
with 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 that
he could not pursue the case. In Taraun village, a 17 year-old Harijan woman was
350 R. Nagar

burned to death. Despite her repeated pleas not to be sent back to her marital home, her
mother forced her to return to her husband. After she died, her husband accused her of
having illicit relations with her own father. In Bheethakhera, Gita Devi, mother of a 15
day-old infant, was strangled to death and her mutilated body was thrown into the Ž 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 to
the police, or the husband or in-laws were arrested and then released on bail, or the
police, upon receiving a bribe from the in-laws, claimed that there was no evidence of
murder (Srivastava, 1999, p. 454). It was also a common practice for the father and/or
the brother of the murdered woman to ‘settle’ the case privately with her husband or
in-laws for an exchange of a sum of money, or by arranging to marry another daughter
of their family to the now widowed husband at substantially ‘reduced’ dowry.
It was these heart-wrenching stories of murder, complicity, and silence that provided
the material for the street campaign. To prepare themselves for the campaign, the team
made 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, workers
talked about the events that had happened in these villages, and also shared stories of
violence that they had themselves experienced or escaped. For example, Pushpa talked
about the beatings that she suffered at the hands of her husband and in-laws, and how
she persuaded her parents to bring her back to their own village, where she subsequently
became involved with MS. Urmila was loved dearly in her own natal home, but once
she was married at age 11, she encountered starvation and abuse for not bringing enough
dowry, 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 her
in-laws’ house after she was burned by her sister-in-law one night, while Sunita suffered
beatings and sexual abuse by her husband and in-laws, along with endless humiliation
for having a bad eye. Once Sunita started working in MS, she met and established a new
home and life with Sanjo, a woman who works for another grass-roots organization in
rural 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 folk
songs in Bundeli (the local language), which vividly captured the intense pain and
injustices 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 street
plays, 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 biyahe
bides, ho lakhiya babul more? (Why did you marry me off to an alien place, my father?) was
juxtaposed with another popular feminist song in Hindi, Beta pyaara, beti nahin; Mein
poochhoon ji kyon? (The son is loved and the daughter isn’t—I ask you why this is so?) which
powerfully 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 story
painted on cloth and enacted by two women) was shaped by all the aforementioned
elements: women’s shared personal pain, the gendered practices that they had learned to
interrogate as part of their work, the songs that fuelled their consciousness with a
renewed passion, and fresh episodes of violence in surrounding villages that they
 Women’s Grass-roots Activism in India 351

investigated and intervened in as part of their campaign. Together these elements

resulted in the collective creation of pictures and scripts that were interspersed with
powerful songs and mirrored the lived experiences of women, some of whom were
enacting the very story of their lives. For example, the death of Pushpa’s closest friend
by 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, Phoola
and 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 popular
ideologies that a son-in-law must be revered by the daughter’s family, and that ‘parents
could befriend their daughter at her birth, but not in her fate’ (janam ke saathi hain, par
karam ke saathi nahin) where fate is equated with her marriage. Both stories also uncovered
the ways in which the village community, the police, the administration and the family
colluded 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 and
familiarity that was captured vividly by Phoola’s and Phoolkali’s passionate call to their
audience, ‘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 and
dialogue that imparted soul and  esh to the story were products of collective labor. In
the play Mantoria, the protagonist, is heartlessly beaten by her husband but gets no
refuge, even in her father’s home. She is repeatedly told that no one can Ž x her fate.
When Mantoria eventually dies, there is much breast beating and her father threatens
to 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 the
village headman, strikes a deal with his son-in-law to protect the honor of his family and
village. The father goes home richer, his conscience clear. After all, his daughter will not
return, so what harm can some cash do? The policeman is content that he succeeded in
resolving a case amicably and lucratively, while Mantoria’s husband is a free man
again—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 placed
upon her, lies in the middle of the stage the whole time her death is being bargained
over. After the bargain is struck and another shroud of silence placed over her death, this
corpse rises, rhetorically demanding an answer to why her father, brother, neighbors and
headman 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. She
demands of the audience:
You people of this society, answer me! Is woman a commodity—an item on
auction—who is sold when she is alive, and sold at double the price when she
is dead? You community members and kin, who hide women’s murders to
retain the honor of your village, is this the place of honor you have accorded
your 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 been
victimized by this conspiracy of murder and silence, and passes on the  ame to all the
women around her.
As the creative work of the play and Phad evolved, the organizers also developed their
detailed plan of action. The purpose of their crusade was to generate critical re ection
on 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 Ž rst week of the
campaign (January 6–12, 1999), the team hit the streets of 11 villages (one of them
located in the Satna district of Madhya Pradesh) where daughters or daughters-in-law
had been found dead in ‘abnormal’ circumstances during the last 6 months. In each
village, they held marches and poster exhibitions, sang their songs, performed the play
and the Phad, and held open public discussions. After campaigning in 30 villages in the
Ž 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 to
the ordinary folks who  ocked in large numbers to participate in these highly publicized
events, 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 held
essay competitions and debates in local high schools on the issues addressed by their
campaign. The entire campaign received wide coverage by the local and state media and
became the subject of articles in national publications, ranging from Aapka Pitara (a
magazine for neo-literates published by the NGO, Nirantar, in New Delhi) to the scholarly
and internationally reputed journal, Economic and Political Weekly.

The Debate in the Streets

The campaign shook and overwhelmed the rural communities, and the organizers were
astounded by the large turn-outs of women and men, by the intensity and candor with
which people spoke, and by the social critiques that emerged in these public meetings.
In village after village, emotionally charged women questioned the deŽ nition of
domestic violence as a private affair: ‘Why is it’, asked a woman of Chamraunha village
before her community, ‘that when a wife is battered you call it a private affair, but when
two brothers Ž ght it is a community affair?’ In a similar vein, a woman of Bachhran
village protested, ‘If a policeman beats a man, the pride of the entire village is hurt and
everyone rushes to save him. But when a woman is battered inside her home, the village
dismisses it as an internal family matter’ (Vanangana, 1999a).
Some women and men drew connections between women’s lack of access to resources
and their devaluation inside the household on the one hand, and women’s subordination
as a source of masculine pride on the other. ‘Until we stop treating our women as slaves
and equating them with our shoes’, remarked a young man from Bachhran, ‘nothing will
change’ (Vanangana, 1999a). In Chamraunha, women angrily pointed out that even
though 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 any
alternatives, that’s why we bear it’. In Bachhran and Kothilihai villages, women and men
identiŽ ed women’s inaccessibility to education and family property as the main factors
behind their subjugation within the family and the hushing up of their deaths: ‘Corpses
don’t speak, so who is going to tell you about the pain of those women,’ said a woman
of 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 top
of that, people’s apathy and corrupt police ofŽ cials had made women’s murders into a
lucrative business, a crime for which fathers, policemen, and headmen should all be
‘publicly humiliated’ and ‘hanged to death’ (Vanangana, 1999a).
 Women’s Grass-roots Activism in India 353

Men were critical of the ways in which they were socialized to take violence against
women for granted. One old man in Bachhran pointed out how men often found it hard
to tolerate wives who were educated and aware of their rights. With reference to the
Harijan woman who was accused by her husband of having an affair with her father, two
women in Taraun village remarked that whenever a woman dared to speak against her
situation, her voice was quickly silenced by slandering her character (Srivastava, 1999;
Vanangana, 1999a). Religion as well as the family, said the women, become sources of
women’s oppressions. When a man pointed out that most of the violence on women was
in icted by other women, others responded by suggesting that this happened only
because women had no other means of achieving a social standing of their own besides
harassing 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 who
frequently 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 the
deceased woman, Kamlesh, burst into tears as she watched the play. With a torch in her
hands, she declared before her community, ‘I have lost one daughter, but we will see that
no 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’s
campaign in Chitrakoot. This was not simply because the activists chose the genre of
street theater to engage with the communities, but also because women’s experiences of
domestic violence could not be separated from the highly spatialized ways in which
kinship and marriage are practised and experienced in much of rural North India. In a
social context where an unmarried woman is perceived as a daughter of her entire natal
village (Mayaka), marriage implies an inevitable departure from the intimacy of the
Mayaka to the distant and alien Sasural (conjugal village), where the young woman is
regarded 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 the
parents-in-law’s home as well as the marital or conjugal village. In the case of marital
domestic violence, then, it is the Sasural where violent acts on a woman’s body and being
are perpetrated. And although this violence is often in icted within the spaces of the
household, the nature of a woman’s relationship with her entire conjugal village is one
that structurally denies her easy access to alternative spaces where she can claim or
expect refuge.
In this social scenario, the Phad about Phoola and Phoolkali and the play Mujhe Jawab
Do! were likely to arouse qualitatively different responses in the Mayaka of a recently
murdered woman than in her Sasural. It was not surprising, then, that the socio-spatial
tactics employed by the Vanangana campaigners hinged upon this critical difference
between the Mayaka and the Sasural, even though the gendered meanings held by these
two spaces were constantly complicated by the class and caste realities of each village. In
the two subsections that follow, I juxtapose Vanangana’s campaign in two villages—one
a Sasural (Malwara) and the other a Mayaka (Kaluram Ka Purva)—to highlight the
manner in which a variety of processes combined to shape the enactment and reception
of 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 in
which 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 but
everyone seemed relieved that one more unbearable summer day was almost over. Two
jeeps loaded mostly with women (and a few men) arrived in the village, where Neetu
Singh, a daughter-in-law from the Kurmi caste, was hanged to death in her Sasural on
October 13, 1998. Before we reached the village, Urmila made sure that everyone knew
the background of the case: Neetu, a beautiful and educated young woman, whose father
was a high school teacher, had received her BA degree and worked for the village
pre-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 after
her death, 20 prominent Kurmi men from her Sasural collectively paid Rs 50,000 to
Neetu’s father and settled the case. When Urmila went to investigate the case on October
14th, Neetu’s aunts conŽ ded that Neetu was endlessly harassed and Ž nally killed by
her-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 reported
to the police (Vanangana, 1998c). In Malwara, where the Kurmis constituted a wealthy,
landowning and united group with considerable political clout, the ofŽ cial position was
that Neetu had committed suicide. When the campaigners arrived there in April, Neetu’s
husband was already engaged to another woman and wedding preparations had begun
in the village.
Urmila instructed the drivers to park their jeeps right in the middle of the Kurmi
neighborhood where Neetu was killed, and proceeded to ask the villagers about a suitable
site to stage the play. A young man rushed out of the jeep with posters, banners, and
paints to proclaim the mission of the group’s trip. The rest of the campaigners, women
and 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 primary
school! 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 Ž eld, accosting and
extending 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), Ž lling everyone’s hearts with a sense of
excitement and anticipation.
Within half an hour, 127 people (out of a total village population of 400) gathered
outside the school to see the play. The dari (rug) symbolizing the stage was spread in the
center of the public space with the performers seated in a circle, and the audience spread
all around this inner circle. Every prominent tree and wall around this street theater was
inscribed with popular feminist slogans written in bright blue ink: ‘We will Ž ght for
justice, we won’t allow deals to be struck over dead bodies’, ‘Listen to your daughters
now, give them all their rights and share [of property]’, for ‘We women of this land, are
sparks, not  owers’. The singers and drummers reinforced this tenor with songs that
protested 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 the
sisters who broke the chains of bondage to change the unjust world (Tod tod ke bandhanon
ko dekho bahane aati hain! ‘[Look, how all these sisters are coming out, breaking the chains
 Women’s Grass-roots Activism in India 355

that bind them!’]). By now, the actresses (and one male actor), who had been busy
assembling the audience earlier, were ready for the show to begin. It would be dark
within 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 represented
Vanangana, a woman’s organization located in Karvi town, and she requested everyone
to pay close attention to the play they were about to perform because they wanted to
discuss it afterwards.
When the play ended, there was a palpable tension in the air of Malwara. Vanangana
members were acutely aware that holding an open discussion about the play was going
to be difŽ cult in this Kurmi dominated village, especially with Neetu’s husband and
father present there. Yet, it was worth trying because in some places they had had an
astounding success in generating passionate collective discussion precisely in such a
tension-charged atmosphere. Madhavi began by asking people why they thought such
atrocities 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 and
support 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 when
a son dies mysteriously, but it hardly takes a few days to forge an agreement on a
daughter’s death? … Why is it that when a son becomes an adult, family members think
ten times before hitting him, but a woman is beaten every day?’
The campaigners urged women to talk loudly but people in the crowd had begun
talking to each other in earnest. Realizing that it was best to hold discussions in
small groups at this point, the campaigners scattered throughout the crowd to explore
people’s responses. An old Kurmi woman said, ‘No one will criticize anything openly
because we have to live in this village’. Another woman whispered, ‘They will marry him
off again, and he will roam around proudly without a sliver of guilt’. The women thought
that it was outrageous how some parents married another daughter in the same family
where one has just been killed. Another group discussion was taking place among Kurmi
men. Ramkumar proclaimed that Neetu was a bad daughter-in-law who refused to stay
within the boundaries of decency. His son, Sanjay, chimed in by quoting ‘the famous
lines that even gods can’t vouch for a woman’s character’ (Group discussion notes, April
26, 1999).
The public response of the villagers was predictable and clearly shaped by their caste
and class afŽ liations. All the Kurmis in Malwara were of approximately the same class
status and the majority of them were related to each other as close or distant kin, and
no one wanted to criticize his or her aunts, uncles, cousins, or grand aunts in public. In
the experience of the campaigners, the villages where people openly stated their views
tended to be those where divisions of caste and class were more clearly marked.
Commented Urmila, ‘If there were Brahmans or Thakurs around, they would have
criticized Ramkumar’s family openly in Malwara. Otherwise, people from the same caste
are always trying to protect each other from public disgrace, especially if they are from
a similar or lower class background’. Sunita and Urmila recounted their performance in
Bhasondha village, where an upper-caste Thakur woman had been burned. She gave a
dying testimony that she had got burned while cooking because her in-laws threatened
to kill her 7 month-old daughter if she blamed them. In Bhasondha village, where the
Brahmans, Thakurs, Kurmis, Koris and Chamars were Ž nancially of equal footing, they
openly humiliated the husband and described how he had killed his wife, and how he
beat her and slandered her character every day (interviews with Urmila and Sunita, April
30, 1999).
356 R. Nagar

This kind of open public dialogue was not to be seen in Malwara village, and villagers
were 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 die
before I lay a Ž nger on my wife again’ (Khajan Singh’s interview with Rambalak, April
26, 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 minority
caste here, so I can’t oppose this murderer’s remarriage openly. But secretly, I will do
anything I can to help you stop this wedding’. Manojkumar and two other Kori men
volunteered to establish a village-level watchdog committee in Malwara to ensure that
every 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 and
time to stage another show. We wanted to reach Kaluram Ka Purva by 7.30 am so that
the play could be performed before the sun got too hot and before people became too
immersed in their daily chores. Although Kaluram Ka Purva was also a large,
Kurmi-dominated village, the campaigners anticipated a signiŽ cantly different response
here as compared to Malwara because it was the Mayaka of Girija Devi, who had died
just 3 weeks ago after being harassed for 3 years for not bringing a television and a motor
scooter in her dowry. Before they actually burned her on March 30th, 1999, Girija’s
mother-in-law, mother-in-law’s sister, and brother-in-law had been planning her murder
in her presence, so that after her death they could bring home a new bride with a big
dowry. Whenever Girija’s husband opposed his relatives, they scolded him and hushed
him up. When Girija last visited her parents in January, she told them that she did not
want to return to Devkali; if she did, she was sure that her in-laws would kill her and
her infant daughter. The father talked to Girija’s in-laws and their neighbors and made
them promise that they would take good care of Girija. At 8 pm on March 30th, Girija
was discovered with serious burns all over her body in her Sasural in Devkali, where she
Ž nally succumbed to the burns on April 5th. The episode was particularly tragic for the
family and villagers because Girija’s older sister was also poisoned to death in her marital
home a year earlier. Girija and her sister left behind 5 and 6 month-old daughters when
they died. Girija’s in-laws claimed that it was a suicide, but Girija’s father rejected the
claim (Vanangana, 1999b). The campaigners had been trying to persuade the father to
report the case to the police, but he was procrastinating, and based on numerous
conversations with him, Urmila was convinced that he was about to make a deal with
Girija’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 Kaluram
Ka Purva, Ž nding a suitable site for the play proved to be an inŽ nitely difŽ cult task. The
team wanted an open space that was relatively undisputed so that people from all castes
and classes could assemble there. They also wanted to stage it in roughly the same
neighborhood where the woman’s family lived, so that her relatives could be present
during the play and discussion. And given the intensity of heat, it was also critical that
there be some shade so that people could watch the play comfortably. In terms of caste
politics, Kaluram Ka Purva was split four ways among Brahmans, Yadavs, and two
opposing factions of Kurmis, one party of Kurmis having won the village headship
election, and the other party having lost it. This meant that every location that seemed
 Women’s Grass-roots Activism in India 357

physically suitable for the play turned out to be socially inappropriate. If the Yadavs lived
in one area, Brahmans and Kurmis refused to come there, and if it was afŽ liated with
one of the Kurmi groups, then the other Kurmi faction refused to come. Finally, after
2 hours of desperate searching, Urmila and Kamlesh found a shady, spacious place
outside the home of Lallu Lohar, which seemed relatively tension free. But women of the
Brahman caste still refused to come.
By 11.00 am a massive crowd of approximately 350 people (out of a total population
of about 600), gathered outside Lallu Lohar’s home. The singers were singing one song
after 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 while
two others hurried to fetch Girija’s parents. Girija’s father, sister and grandmother
arrived in a few minutes but even after 15 minutes of pleading on Kamlesh’s part, the
mother did not come. For the last 3 weeks, she had not been eating or talking to
anyone; the grief of losing two grown-up daughters within a year was too overwhelming
for her.
While we waited for Kamlesh to return, an emotionally stirred audience had begun
responding to the story of Phoola and Phoolkali. A man in his forties rose as soon as the
Phad was over. ‘This recent incident here is the most awful one we have ever seen. We
want to do something about it, and we are touched that you have taken so much trouble
for 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 to
change this situation’.
Kamlesh returned after these brief remarks and the play started. I heard a village
woman whisper to another, ‘These girls [actresses] are not from the city. They talk
Bundeli just like us’. A young woman standing next to me said, ‘This story they are
telling is not fabricated. This is what happens in our homes every day’. Throughout the
play, there were audible sounds of sobbing and crying from the audience, and as
Mantoria’s daughter covered her mother’s dead body, a teenaged woman in the
audience 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 to
retrieve her dying testimony yet, but we hope that she wasn’t pressured to declare that
she had committed suicide, because that would weaken our case’. A middle-aged woman
responded, ‘Don’t they understand that even a suicide is actually a murder? That women
are pushed to commit suicide?’ An old woman from the opposite end remarked, ‘A
woman’s death becomes an event to celebrate because then the man can get another
bride’. Pradeep (quoted earlier) asserted that the primary driving force behind these
atrocities was the greed for dowry, even though the society kept inventing new ways to
lay the blame of the death on the women themselves. Another young man said, ‘The
men who do this must be excommunicated—they don’t deserve to live in society’. ‘By
showing how the man, his family and village, the police, the doctor, the headmen
collaborate in this game’, commented an old Brahman man, ‘you have reopened our
wound 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 most
people’s lunchtime, informal discussions about the play continued, and the villagers
insisted on treating the campaign team to chai and sherbet. Young men who had spoken
out against violence collectively put down their names to constitute a village-level
watchdog committee to prevent future incidents of violence. They also introduced
Urmila to a middle-aged man in the village whose two married daughters had come to
live 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 from
their Sasurals. Provoked by the play, two of Girija’s uncles publicly swore to take revenge
by burning down her in-laws’ house, but the campaigners were able to steer the
discussion 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 campaigners
were 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 of
Police about Girija’s case, to demand his support, and to check whether Girija’s father
had 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 politics

in Vanangana’s street campaign
If the political theater has a raison d’être, it is surely its allegiance to people
who have been denied their fundamental human rights … What makes a play
political is not its Ž delity to the Party or to any model prescribed by Brecht or
Piscator but its Ž delity to a people whose oppression cries out to be enacted on
stage. (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. By
centrally involving its rural-based workers in the campaign and in the creation of the play
Mujhe Jawab Do! and the Phad, Vanangana has given birth to a politically active feminist
theater in Chitrakoot—a theater that has enabled women to participate not simply as
spectators, but also as performers who narrate, evaluate, and enact their stories, and
critique the structures that marginalize them. In connecting the brutalities against
women with pervasive masculinist constructions of family and community, pride and
honor, fate and justice, the campaigners have created a ‘stringently political theater’
(Bharucha, 1983, p. xiii) that lifts the shroud of silence from domestic violence and
attacks previously unquestioned socio-econom ic and cultural practices responsible for
that violence. Through a creative use of their local language, folklore and songs, the
campaigners impart political meanings to ‘traditional’ cultural forms and play at once on
the guilt and humanity of their spectators (Bharucha, 1983, p. xiv). In so doing, they do
not advocate a complete overthrow of the patriarchal system. Rather, they create a
heightened awareness of the gendered injustices in their world and demand from their
audience—the men and the women, the police and the village elders, the family
members 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 campaign
would be severely limited if we failed to appreciate the ways in which spatial politics lay
at the core of this crusade. Re ecting on the performances and ‘personal geography’ of
Ellen Rothenberg, Cindi Katz (1994, p. 41) observes that ‘the socially constructed nature
of accepted demarcations such as those between home, body, and community is usually
masked by its taken for grantedness’. For Katz, a spatially informed politics such as
Rothenberg’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
 Women’s Grass-roots Activism in India 359

terms: as a spatially informed feminist politics committed to unmasking and transgressing

socially 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 silence
women.
The politicization of the issues of domestic violence and gendered discrimination by
the campaigners was a spatialized act in which they literally moved the discourse on these
subjects—Ž rst, from the privacy of women’s homes to the spaces of the organization, and
later, from the organization to the male-dominated public spaces of the community.
With every spatial move, the activists consciously created a new public domain where
critical dialogue and re ection could emerge on women’s experiences as well as on the
socio-econom ic and cultural processes responsible for their oppressions. Thus, what we
see at work here is a very self-conscious construction and deployment of ‘sociospatial
circuits through which cultural and personal stories are circulated, legitimated and given
meaning’ (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 succession
of different spaces that women learned to impart political meanings to these previously
muf ed stories, and to recognize the contradictions and oppressions embedded in
popular 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 that
solutions to social and political problems can be found. The tactics deployed by
Vanangana activists clearly demonstrated this critical awareness of the street as a vibrant
stage 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 or
daughter-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 the
spatialized contours of gender and kinship, and the manner in which these shaped the
social dynamics and dialogues in the streets.
Like many political theaters, Vanangana’s campaign, too, is rooted in a particular soil
and time, and commits itself to addressing the needs of a speciŽ c community (Bharucha,
1983, p. xviii). Such theater, according to Bharucha (1983, p. xix), ‘lives so intensely in
the historical moment of its creation that it has to constantly renew itself’. The strength
and integrity of such theater does not derive from its translatability or universal
signiŽ cance, but from the fact that these plays are not mere enactments of texts that can
be 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 temporal
signiŽ cance—from the fact that it is responding to instances of violence that are fresh in
people’s heart and minds—but also from its ability to creatively employ socio-spatial
circuits and to continuously adapt itself according to the socio-spatial realities of every
village.
While it would be premature to assess or predict the longer term effects of this young
campaign, this examination of Vanangana’s crusade against violence illustrates several
critical processes. First of all, it shows how the program created a space for rural women
to evolve politically, and how women subsequently pulled the organization in the
direction(s) of their emerging political consciousness. Women began to theorize the
intertwined nature of empowerment and disempowerment in their everyday lives, and
the 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 in
their communities. At the strategic level, these new feminist understandings led women
to reconceptualize their spaces of action. Far from being conŽ ned to the women-only
spaces of the organization, activism and ‘consciousness raising’ now involved claiming of
the patriarchal and male dominated public spaces, and a radical rethinking of the
relationship between the organization and the rural communities.
Both theoretically and methodologically, then, this analysis reveals how an attention
to space can promote more reŽ ned understandings of women’s ways of remembering,
recording and articulating their struggles, and of the nature, content and meanings of
their political actions. Because feminist ‘discourses emerge as situated practices in
particular places’, questions of political consciousness and self-identity that deŽ ne
women’s engagement with feminism (Mohanty, 1991) can only be addressed by situating
‘local feminisms’ (Basu, 1995) in relation to their place-speciŽ c contexts and strategies.
Mapping the socio-spatial circuits through which women share and politicize their
experiences enables us to chart the ‘discursive geographies’ (Pratt, 1999, p. 218) of
women’s resistance, and grasp the speciŽ c processes by which resisters learn to critique,
redeŽ ne or transform the hegemonic views of empowerment and violence, masculinity
and femininity, crime and justice.

Acknowledgements
I owe a debt of gratitude to Madhavi Kuckreja and Huma Khan, without whose help
and support I could not have undertaken this project. Many thanks to Aarti Srivastava
and 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 entire
Mahila Samakhya and Vanangana families for making my research trip to Karvi one of
the most inspirational events of my life. Last but not least, I am extremely grateful to
Lynn Staeheli and three anonymous reviewers for their close reading and constructive
comments, 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 a
member of Mahila Samakhya or Vanangana served as a translator when a Bundeli word or phrase was
unclear to me.
[2] Experimentation lies at the core of street theater. Scripts evolve through group discussion, and current
events and real life cases are used to contextualize issues and to effectively engage and communicate with
the audience. Authors employ popular tunes, songs and characters to provide entertainment and familiar
comparison points for the audience, and to also critique mainstream practices and discourses. In this mobile
medium 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. Costumes
are sometimes used to compensate for the starkness of the play and emphasis is placed most heavily upon
the performance of the actors (Garlough, 1997, p. 9).

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Organizational Publications
A. M AHILA S AMAKHYA U TTAR 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. V ANANGANA (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).