Where feminist theory comes out to play, where the ism itself is gloriously complicated in the actual living of lives; radical, messy, round shapes in square holes. We look at collectives, communities, protests, articulations of self and everyday, paying attention to seasons and emotions, finding the feminist cosmos in raindrops.
“How to ask a woman whether she has been called a daayan?” This was the first question that came to the minds of 46 women who were assigned the task of surveying those who have been victims of witch-hunting in Bihar. In the state of Bihar, as in Assam, Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha, witch-hunting is an open secret.
We send people to jail so we don’t have to think about them. What happens in jail, we’d rather not know. Or if we do, it’s through beefy heroes who beat the ‘criminal’ to pulp, preferably in slow motion.
Among the many gifts that the classroom throws in my face, one that I am equally envious and enamored by is the beehive of female friendships all around me.
We know very little about the life of the ordinary woman prisoner. She is either non-existent in popular imagination or made out to be an extraordinary deviant, transgressing all codes of social morality. But what constitutes the ordinary woman prisoner’s ‘criminality’? What lies at the heart of it? What are her dreams, desires and fears? What does a post-prison life look for her?
Harjant Gill, a documentary filmmaker and scholar who has made multiple documentaries on Indian masculinity(ies), says, “One of the challenging things about talking about masculinity is that you engage men in this conversation and they don’t really know where to go with it, or like, how to even interrogate it…
Work on gender in the development and social sector has traditionally engaged with women and girls. It was only in the mid-90s that some NGOs started working with men and boys on issues of gender. One of the first entry points for this was population control and reproductive health where they were encouraged to use condoms and to accompany their pregnant wives to healthcare centres.
Words scraped against my brain as I Iay down, exhausted, in my stark white hostel room. I tried to find comfort in the lingering smell of the oil my roommate was massaging her knees with—that smell spelt care. Setting my alarm for five the next morning, my innards groaned.
It is often said that a film should either entertain, engage, or educate (not in the same order though). And in our country, one obsessed with cinema, we expect a film to entertain us and make everything larger than life and extraordinary.
One evening, last year, I finally coaxed my mother to sit down and take pause from constantly running around the house. I had been following her around for days to have this conversation. Sometimes, she silently smiled, and at other times, she eluded me. But that evening, she let her guard down.
During COVID, when almost everything was closed in Bhopal, we began delivering books to children by going door-to-door. Adults in the family took to reading those books too.
