Using theatre to talk of taboo subjects in the Himalayan state of
Uttarakhand, and the lessons learnt
A
few years ago, our theatre troupe, Aatish, had gone to the Central
Himalayan region of Uttarakhand, in the Almora region, with our plays
on resisting menstrual taboos and pre- and post-natal care for women.
Before we booked our tickets, there was a big debate in our team on
whether the men in our troupe should go along with us. Would it make
it awkward for the women in the audience to interact with us if there
were men on the stage too? Would they even come to watch?
We
finally decided that patriarchal rules were set up by men and at
times implemented by women. So both men and women needed to be part
of the discussion. If a man wondered about why his menstruating
daughter is not sleeping in a hut outside, he needed to know that it
was her right to be as safe and comfortable as the rest of her
family. If medicines or nutritious food had to be bought for pregnant
or lactating mothers, men needed to know why it was crucial to budget
for it.
With
some of our apprehensions and nervousness still remaining, we got on
the stage on performance day. With our usual enthusiasm, glitches and
improvisation, we concluded our plays and waited with bated breath
for the audience’s response. The turnout had been promising. But we
still bit our nails fretting: would the audience find it worthwhile
to come for our upcoming performances in the area or would they
reject our choice of subject and actors for discussing what many
consider “womanly” issues, or, “ladies problems”!?
After
a kind applause, an old woman got up to say, “All right, we need to
maintain hygiene during menstruation. But living here in the
mountains we face water scarcity. Can something be done about that?”
Another man her age shared how his pregnant daughter-in-law was
forced to carry water as her spouse worked in the city and the
father-in-law was too old to do it himself. We encountered more
openness in talking about women’s health than we sometimes find in
urban settings.
A
local activist spoke of how women need to be healthy in order to
function well in society, drawing the analogy of a sewing machine
that needs regular oiling. We interjected to say that women need to
be healthy because everyone deserves to be, and not just because good
health ensures women’s productivity, something that ends up
serving others’ interests more than their own. Two girls came to
talk to us in private. One tried to explain a menstrual problem but
was not very clear. Her friend, standing a few steps behind, came
forward and revealed that her friend had been speaking on her behalf,
because the girl had been hesitant. She then spoke about the issue
herself and asked us if she should see a doctor.
Others
in the audience said that the hospital in front of which we performed
hardly had doctors or medicines. Someone from the hospital said that
is because people do not come to the health centre but prefer to go
to ojhas instead. There was a dialogue. We ended up doing a
workshop for the NGO that wanted to create a play on basic health
issues to show how people could take care of minor ailments (many
children in the region had been lost to diarrhoea) through simple
measures at home rather than going to quacks and risking their
health. There was also demand for a dance performance after all the
serious stuff we had put them through! Slightly embarrassed at our
lack of skill in the area, we had to excuse ourselves. In the
evening, we performed our play on menstruation again on a stage that
had been set for a Ramleela performance by the locals. As we tried to
break a taboo in our own small way, little heads of Ramayana
characters peeped from behind the wings.
Some
of the questions that had been raised by the villagers were simpler
to answer than the others. The people there probably already knew
that. But they wanted someone to listen, which we did. And we learnt
and unlearnt. We learnt a bit more about the lives of people in the
mountains, and unlearnt some of our own stereotypes. We realised that
for all of our efforts to spread “awareness”, we too had not used
words like “menstruation”, or “maahvaari”, its Hindi
equivalent, as many times in our lives as we did that day on stage.
We witnessed that once we had normalised the use of those words, a
girl in the audience could also use it to discuss her problem with
us. We lived the experience of every effort of liberation being a
collective one, not something that gets passed down from one to the
other. We saw that the restraint that an urban sense of privacy
imposes on middle class or upper middle class conversations is often
absent from many rural conversations where privacy and segregated
familial and individual spaces are often a luxury. We noted that
working at the local level required an understanding of the local
context, and not stand-alone, externally imposed “solutions”. We
were humbled to see that where fundamental rights could not be
availed of, people at times withered, and at others made do with
proud resilience. We observed that when representatives in a
democracy failed to serve their people, those people sometimes got
attached to dangerous peddlers of faith, for the desperate want of
something to hold on to in the face of adversity. And we learnt that
if we wanted more people to join our revolution, we needed to add
some dance to it!
Walking
back to our accommodation after the performances, workshops and
discussions, we saw a grey-haired lady beat us to the top as we
huffed and puffed up the treacherous hilly path. We knew that she and
her tribe could leave us behind each time, and we thought of the
“development” that had been too slow in reaching them, and yet
was ironically leaving them behind.
