Street Theater Can Open Men’s Eyes to Women’s Harassment

Women across region, class and age have always expressed a serious concern for their physical safety. Take the capital city of Delhi, for instance: It has regularly faced indictment for failing to provide safety to its women residents; a 2012 survey by the UN and the International Center for Research on Women showed that 95% of women felt unsafe in Delhi, and 51% of men interviewed there admitted to having sexually harassed women in public places.

Therefore, in an effort to examine the access – the lack thereof, and the challenges therein — to public spaces by women in the city, The Pocket Company launched Genderventions (directed by Niranjani Iyer), a theater project, of which I was a part. Through a series of street performances in different areas of Delhi, we set out to assess how comfortable and confident Delhi’s women felt outside their homes, and what men viewed as harassment, its causes and the possible solutions.

Here’s how the project rolled out and what we found.

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It started with a workshop, during which women members of the Genderventions team re-enacted scenes of harassment, the ludicrous suggestions — like “do not go anywhere alone” – that they and women at large are routinely given by society as solutions to women’s safety, and possible ways of resistance against these expectations.

For example, thinking about how women deal with the lack of public toilets, a high-stress scene, led to a skit in which one woman acted out peeing, while two covered her, and another stood guard.

As one of the activities in the workshop, women from the Genderventions team went to a park on a winter night. When men huddled around a bonfire saw them, the men asked why the women were out at night. Upon explaining that they were trying to reclaim public spaces at night, the men seemed to realize that the spaces they take for granted are daily battlefields for women.

During the workshop, too, women spent time learning the expected postures of a male body. This led to an exercise in which the Genderventions women occupied public spaces while assuming postures commonly associated with men. I participated in this, visiting a Delhi tea stall – the only woman there. I remember sitting with my feet up, or standing in the middle of the road with arms behind my head, while bystanders stared with a mixture of shock, awe, or, if they were women, of amusement and admiration.

In the same exercise, Gendervention’s male members tried to walk and carry their bodies like women. We took this exercise to the male members of the audience and gave them instructions usually given to girls about how to sit, stand, walk, laugh — be graceful; don’t be too fast; don’t walk so slowly that you seem dull; smile, don’t look morose; don’t laugh loudly; don’t put your chest out. This sought to help the men watching understand the undue pressure upon women’s bodies to simultaneously embody the obligation to be nice, and the fear of coming across as too nice. The men’s awkwardness was clear; they said they did not feel “natural” or at ease, and did not like being constantly instructed.

We found this to be effective experience-sharing, where the audience could empathize through having lived the same experience, albeit temporarily.

The project was taken to different areas, markets and street corners of Delhi and depicted the scenes of harassment developed in the workshop, and asked the audience to describe what they perceived. If they said the woman was being harassed, we asked why they thought so. They described how the woman was squirming and inching close to the corner of her bus seat, or scowling in anger if the man’s hand touched her knees.

We also depicted a scene in which a female actor started alone on stage, then male actors joined her. It allowed the audience to observe a woman’s body in a space free of men, and then observe how discomfort in her body started building up as more and more men’s eyes turned to stare at her. This was to shed light on how staring can constitute harassment for a woman.

Ultimately, men easily outnumbered women in the audience, because as an unwritten rule, women are not supposed to loiter and watch street performances. At one point, we even had to pause the performance and intervene because a young girl was not able to watch our play due to being constantly jostled by men. The only exception was when we performed in a team member’s residential area; there, women formed the larger piece of the audience pie because she had personally invited the women. 

After our shows, women in the audience spoke of how the only place where they felt comfortable in their bodies was the bathroom. 

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When it comes to providing security to women, the focus of the government is still on CCTV cameras, SOS apps and helpline numbers, whose aim is either to help women stay safe or to provide mechanisms to report if they are harassed. It is still far away from proactively creating spaces that are welcoming for women, and encouraging women’s right to risk. It is still a time where irritated cops ask women to avoid trouble and go home when these women come together for their night walks to reclaim the streets.

Sometimes we do not believe in solutions or alternatives until we see them; art can help with the visualization. The performances and interactions we engaged in show that, despite laws, men’s take on harassment came a lot from what they, and not the women, “believed” should be defined as harassment. Victim-blaming is still rampant.

In our “ideal city” exercise, we asked men and women to describe a city that is equally accessible and comfortable for men and women. When our female actor gave an example by sitting on an imagined bus seat, with closed eyes and a relaxed body, taking up enough space for herself, some protested that it was not the correct or proper way to sit.

Once, a member of the audience said a harassed woman on the bus should stand up on her seat and call attention to the harasser. After a team member carried out the suggestion and enacted that scene, I realized I had never considered the possibility — but after I had seen it “in action,” I felt I was ready to literally stand my ground the next time somebody tried to attack me. Ironically, but not unexpectedly, I had to confront a harasser on public transport even as I was on my way to one of these performances.

Delhi is home to women from diverse backgrounds. Some come seeking education and employment. Others have lived there all their lives. Both look to the capital with the hope that it would provide them with opportunities they do not have access to elsewhere. These women deserve better. They deserve more interventions by the state and its citizenry, more gender-ventions that change attitudes and actually prevent crimes against them, so they can equally and fearlessly claim every inch of the mega-city. 

First published in The Swaddle, 7 Jun 2019.

Hysteria

Grandmother isn’t friends with English.
Yet she said while growing up she had heard
That when women study too much
They get “hysteria.”

She was worried for me.

Sometime between her limited, till-grade-five, formal education
And her infinite informal education
They had made sure to teach her, in more than one language,
The terms for illnesses women can contract
If they seek to expand.

First published in The Sunlight Press, 20 Feb 2019.

Not seen, not heard: In slum evictions, children are some of the worst hit

“The first time a bulldozer came to our place, I was scared and kept sitting near our belongings that had been thrown out,” says Roshni, a ten year old whose family migrated from Bihar to Delhi looking for employment. Roshni and her family have been living in a slum in Yamuna Khadar’s Belagaon in the capital’s eastern region. The settlement is right behind Rajghat, the memorial dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi. Between 2011 and 2018, the houses and the small farms of the dwellers had to face frequent eviction drives by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA).

Children in these fragile communities are amongst the worst hit by slum demolitions. They miss out on education, dropping out of school due to homelessness, uncertainty, and the stigma they face in schools as “slum children”. Caught in a cycle of poverty and growing up with the violence of forced displacement, their future is one of unemployment or poorly paid jobs, not to mention underage labour.

Lakshya Aakriti Foundation (LAF), a not-for-profit, runs informal schools for them in Belagaon because often having to shift from one place to another severely hampers schooling. Diptesh Singh of LAF explains, “We have been associated with this place since 2012. The area faces around four demolitions per year. One demolition takes place in a staggered manner over several days. So for the entire period the families, including the children, stay around their homes in case the bulldozers return. And it is not as if children’s school calendar is taken into consideration when homes are demolished. Children end up missing many days of school at a stretch or dropping out altogether.”

Children of Belagaon attending a school run by LAF

This year Roshni saw DDA officials in her area again. But this time she was quick to act: “I carefully dismantled our makeshift home, carried the lighter things outside the house with my younger brother, called up my older brother, and waited for him to come and take the heavy stuff out.”

Despite the trauma associated with demolitions, some children feel it is better to stay on and claim their rights to the land their ancestors have lived on since before Independence. Being close to the Yamuna river, the area is different from most urban slums in its greenery and fertility, and many residents depend on farming for their livelihood. Abdul and Rohit, both about 13 years old, are friends reluctant to shift to another locality. Abdul explains: “There is open space for us to play cricket. Neighbours share fresh vegetables they grow.” But he rues the fact that it takes months for families to get back to farming after bulldozers have run over their crops.

When the JCB machines come to raze the houses to the ground, Abbas, 14, feels like “hitting those people till they run away”. “It would be so good if we can retain this land. Anywhere else we will have to pay rent, and buy cooking gas, while here we can use the wood available around.”

Abbas’s father, Shafiq, has an elder son who works in another city as a shop assistant. With the family facing either homelessness or the threat of it, the son had given up on education years ago. Being illiterate himself, Shafiq wants that at least Abbas should study well. In answer to a question about the line of work he wants to pursue later in life, Abbas replies with a blank eyed stare, “I’ll become whatever is written in my destiny.” Constant displacement has made him lose faith in the surety of anything and he believes that fate would decide his future.

With their right to housing taken away, children lose out on the right to education too

Sunayna Wadhwan has been an activist with organisations like Hazards Centre and Mobile Creches. In her experience of working with communities in slum clusters, she noticed many families don’t send children to schools so the kids can call and inform the parents if a demolition drive seems imminent: “When we conducted meetings, children would join and try to learn about what the future of their homes would be. Those who go to schools are often discriminated against. The school authorities feel these children won’t be able to stay in one area consistently and are reluctant to take them in. Once admitted, they have to face social stigma, like being made to sit on the last seats of the bus, because of living in slums. The proportion of students in higher education from such localities is low. A common trend for those who do study is to get enrolled for open or correspondence courses once they reach the college level. They realise that a college degree can be helpful in getting them jobs, especially through NGOs active in their area.”

Working with the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), Mukta Naik is an urban planner and architect. Remembering an incident of relocation of a community, she says, “The shifting took place close to children's board exams [considered a crucial test in an Indian child's school life]. Some children ended up losing the documents needed to appear for the examination.”

Resettlement also affects livelihood. Women working as domestic workers within the city are not able to find opportunities in the far flung areas where they are resettled. This affects the amount of spending on children's education, whether it’s about admission to a new school or traveling to attend the old one. The minute it becomes a question of a long commute, girls are made to drop out even quicker because of safety concerns. Sometimes they stay back to take care of the house or siblings, without being safe themselves in the cut-off areas they have been moved to.

Evictions also lead to absenteeism because there is so much damage to property that every member pitches in to put the household together. Children lose uniforms, bags and books. At a time when they have been rendered homeless, parents find it difficult to buy these things.

Rights groups say slum evictions make children vulnerable to violence, trauma and neglect

For the teacher in the school run by LAF in Belagaon, absenteeism is a regular concern. Once evictions/demolitions start occurring at regular intervals, children start dropping out. He says, “These children have to live in the constant fear of getting uprooted.” Shivani Chaudhry of Housing and Land Rights' Network, an NGO, recalls meeting a boy who broke down and started crying each time he saw a bulldozer. Demolition drives in Delhi’s slums have led to some children getting injured and others getting killed.

“The city sees adolescents in slums as potential abusers. But what about the tacit violence these children live with?” asks Enakshi Ganguly of HAQ Centre for Child Rights. “They grow up seeing their parents getting beaten up for fighting for their rights. The threat of children getting abused increases when resettlement takes place in remote areas and the jobs parents get closer to the city keep them out all day. Children are left to fend for themselves.”

Nazdeek is an NGO fighting for the rights of communities in slums. Jayshree Satpute, Nazdeek’s co-founder and lawyer, talks about litigation’s role in helping eviction affected people, “When the court comes up with a favourable order, like ordering authorities to make anganwadis (day care centres) for children, it happens after a year or so but also with results like two centres being close to each other, rather than in different localities.” 

The staff of these anganwadis are also not motivated. They have been fighting for better wages and recognition as government employees, and not volunteers. Working in slums is not lucrative because they get incentives if children have regular attendance. “In an area facing forced migration, this regularity takes a toll,” Jayshree adds.

Bipin Rai is a member of the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB), a government body in charge of looking after slum clusters and their resettlement. He says, “Evictions are not legal. That is why we resettle and rehabilitate. But DDA and the Central Public Works Department do not cooperate or partner with us when it comes to land under them.”

However, like Rai admits, DUSIB too is not directly engaged with looking after the social aspects but is involved more in the infrastructure of resettlement colonies. Sudeshna Chhatterjee is the CEO of a trust called Action for Children’s Environments. In her paper ‘Children’s Role in Humanizing Forced Evictions and Resettlements in Delhi’, she describes the active participation of children in resisting the Gautampuri evictions in the year 2000. It had brought to attention children’s problems and gained them greater participatory space. But to look after the complete social, educational and psychological well being of children facing displacement, special focus on children in city planning for changes to be made at the policy level is something urban planners, researchers and activists continue to advocate for.

India has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. But in the current Draft National Child Protection Policy framed by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, the mention of children in vulnerable circumstances, like those exposed to evictions or forced migration, remains missing. This gap reaffirms lawyer-activist Jayshree Satpute’s statement, “The elite classes want every opportunity for their children. But they don’t extend the same principles to other classes.” CPR’s Mukta Naik has something similar to say, “The Delhi Development Authority's perception of the city is elitist . . . and slum children have no place in this vision.”

(Names of children have been changed to protect identities.)

Firs published in Beyond Headlines, 31 Jan 2019.

Mother’s illness led this man to organic, climate smart agriculture

When Ravdeep’s mother first heard that her son is going to take up farming, she was deeply disappointed. Standing in his farm in Punjab’s Pharwahi village in Barnala, Ravdeep remembers with a smile: “She said all the resources and efforts she had put into my education had been in vain.” But she also knew and took pride in the fact that her son could successfully meet the most difficult challenges. Ravdeep proved it was true when farming became his means of livelihood.

Ravdeep on his farm

Actually, it was because of his mother that Ravdeep had felt an urgent need to grow food organically. When his mother got cancer in 2009, Ravdeep started spending a lot of time at the hospital. The number of people he saw that had got diagnosed with the disease, and the fact that children were also patients, shook him up. He started questioning his entire way of living. “I always knew that chemicals are not good for us but my mother’s illness made me realise that we are poisoning everything . . . our air, water, food.”

Then a friend gave him agriculturist Subhash Palekar’s book on natural farming. Ravdeep also got in touch with Kheti Virasat Mission (KVM), a non-profit working for farmers’ rights and food security that regularly conducts organic farming trainings.

The paddy problem

Ravdeep finally started farming through organic methods in the year 2012. “I first stopped growing paddy. In organic agriculture, it takes longer to harvest. The crop also has to be completely dry or the mandi, the market, does not accept it. By the time this happens, the sowing of the wheat gets delayed. I was also unhappy when I noticed the eventual hardening of the soil due to puddling [when the land is tilled while flooded to make the soil soft for rice plantation].”

Punjab ranks third in rice production in the country with 2.97 million hectares of the land under rice cultivation. 2.5 percent of human induced climate change in the world is estimated to have been contributed by flooded paddy fields.

Ravdeep says, “Earlier at least we used to retain trees around our farms. Now with the overabundance of paddy and the use of tractors and combines, there is no place for trees.” Not only environment but human health has been affected by the overzealous production of paddy. Ravdeep, along with his family, is conscious of his food choices: “Traditionally we grew and ate a variety of crops. Now it’s either rice or wheat and then we struggle with gluten allergy.”

He also blames paddy growing for being the original cause of stubble burning in Punjab, leading to polluting and warming of the atmosphere: “In fact the Punjab Agricultural University, based in Ludhiana, which is now advising farmers against burning, is the one that started doing it years ago.” Farmers say they cannot use machines or labour to remove the stubble because of the expenditure involved. But Ravdeep has a different take. He feels the cost one pays for illnesses like asthma or when injured in an accident caused due to decreased visibility because of smoke is much higher. Farmers need to see economics in its full picture, he insists, and not just have a short term vision.

However, he admits that a good number of farmers cannot afford happy seeders or tractors or other big machines. Some villages have a few of these machines that are to be shared by the community through cooperatives but it is often not practical. Ravdeep explains, “One seeder covers one acre of land per day. Farmers have ten days and 3000 acres to sow. So they need twenty seeders at the same time in the sowing season and cannot afford to take turns individually.”

After all these issues, Punjab has had to face rejection of export consignments because of pesticide residue in the rice. “The farmers who grow this rice do not eat it themselves. It is bought by the Food Corporation of India for distribution. People in south India like their own varieties. So why are we still growing it,” laments Ravdeep.

Beauty, and balance, in diversity

Following farmer-philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka’s book The One-Straw Revolution, on Ravdeep's six-acre farm, he is growing multiple crops, vegetables and fruit and flowering trees. They are not water intensive, and growing them organically has brought back the birds and insects that are killed or driven away by chemicals. In awe of this rich biodiversity through which his farm is making itself climate resilient, Ravdeep confesses that before this he had seen this feature only in the fields of his predecessors. Stubble is “food” for his crops and so he even collects the straw from his neighbours’ fields, which the farmers are only too happy about.

Long lost insects and birds have returned to Ravdeep's farm

The market

Ravdeep, like many other organic farmers, end up selling some of his produce in the common market. Wheat and pulses get the rates deserving of organic produce. He says 5-10 percent of the customers are ready to buy organic food at the correct price, though all agree that chemicals are bad. But in this small percentage there is a mix of “rich, lower middle and middle classes”, explains Ravdeep, depending on how serious they are about their family’s health or whether there has been an illness in the family.

KVM, which Ravdeep is connected with, has a shop in the area but it is open only once a week. Private buyers who get to know of organic farmers also buy from them directly. But Ravdeep says he could not have pulled it off without his family’s support. His wife, who is a teacher, and his daughter help with processing some of the produce at home before it can go to customers. “If I had to go out for processing, the cost and logistics of it would not have worked out.” Therefore Ravdeep recognises that a farmer cannot make a sudden shift to organic farming, and underlines the need for government to incentivise organic agriculture, and to provide markets for those who are already doing it.


First published in Beyond Headlines, 30 Nov.

Life as we knew it: How my three years in college shaped me into the person I am

I had around 74.6 per cent marks when I came to Delhi in 2003 to apply for college courses. 75 per cent was the cut-off at most places to even take the test (yes, I sure am glad I finished school as long back as I did and escaped the current day rat race young people get forced into). When in the sixth grade, I had been told there was a course where all you had to do was read novels. I had waited for years before I could get rid of maths and science in class 11 to opt for humanities. After that, I had been waiting to come to college and woo English Literature with single-minded devotion. I had secretly resolved to study literature through correspondence instead of choosing a subject I 'did not mind'.

As it turned out, I didn't have to go for a 'back up' option. Unlike in other colleges, the English department of Miranda House, Delhi University, allowed candidates to take their test if they had 65 per cent. When clearing the test got me both a college and a hostel seat there, I could tell that this was going to be a relationship where we understood each other.

I didn't find popular stereotypes about big city institutions to be true — either in the college or in the hostel — where your clothes or your accent were more important than what you did. And there was so much to do, apart from classes you didn't want to miss: Super(hyper?)active societies, protests, festivals, inter-college presentations, sports . . . everything laced with the camaraderie of brilliant women (peers, seniors, teachers and other staff members) who inspired and supported us. In my first few months in college, when someone asked me if I felt homesick, I realised I never got the time to. It was also my first time in a women’s only institution. But, if anything, I only felt more comfortable and confident here.

One of the most vibrant sites of this solidarity was my own department. There wasn't a better place to be. From the very beginning, we were taken seriously. So, I started taking myself seriously. We were called “ladies”, not girls. If we scored low on a test, there wasn't anger or scorn, there was concern. I remember one of my test papers where I hadn’t answered some questions and my teacher had written, “why”. I imagined her frown in worry over what I had done, and I wasn't wrong because that is what I witnessed when I met her to discuss the test. This one time I had missed a test, and when my teacher rescheduled it she said I was allowed to sit in an empty classroom and finish writing even without supervision because she trusted me enough not to cheat. I started doing more because my teachers believed I was capable of it. I spoke to my teachers about my problems and angst. We watched films together, in the college seminar room, in theatres, and their homes.

Some of us once bunked class for the heck of it, because it was one of those 'cool' things you had to check-off your list before you exited college. Later, we kept bugging other classmates to brief us about what had happened in those classes, hoping we hadn’t missed another discussion around Uppity Women of Medieval Times, or a heated debate on why there is no such thing as true love. But most importantly, we were pushed to think for ourselves, as one of our teachers said when advising us about our assignments, “If I want to know what the critic thinks, I’ll buy his book.”

Those years spoilt us because after we passed out we looked for similar spaces outside but couldn't find them. I cry each time I watch Mona Lisa Smile because the passion with which Julia Roberts keeps coming up with new interests and challenges for her students, going much beyond the syllabus and the classroom, makes me miss my own faculty. Because before college, we women were aware of gender discrimination. But our teachers gave us the tools to articulate that injustice, and the confidence to fight it.

Now when I go to college I walk with my stomach drawn in and my breath held. If I am taking a friend along and I point to a place where we used to rehearse or eat lunch, it leaves me feeling unsettled because I am not able to describe it properly. Because yes, that happened . . . but then, there was that too . . . and it came to mean that . . . and also something else . . . and how can I make someone else see all this or explain to them when they were not even there.

We carry our Miranda within us and if it won't have us back maybe we'll create some of our own. Something's gotta give.

First published in DailyO, 28 Oct 2018.

For whom no bell tolls

“What would you do if you don’t study?
Do you wish to become a rickshaw puller?
You would fail your exams and be thrown out of the school
Then you can join the school for shepherds and herd goats.”

We got scared, we studied some.

Now someone else pulls the rickshaw;
Someone else goes to the school for shepherds.

First published in Radius, 30 Sep 2017.