Education: What Makes It Feminist?
How do objects become precious to us? How can one object hold the multitude of our desires, dreams, fears, aspirations and inhibitions– sometimes pushing us away and sometimes propelling us towards itself?
Aashiyan has the air of a scout. Squeezing through gullies lined with garbage, whizzing past the worn-out, exposed brick-and-cement houses, she, along with around 15-20 other girls and women of Welcome Colony, Shahadara, looks at her neighbourhood anew.
Of course, it was the perfect beginning: a group of deaf children showing off some exceptional drumming, and that too related to Carnatic classical music.
In 2013, Nirantar produced a short documentary on the non-binary experience in schools. Featuring Nrrups, Sunil and Rajarshi, the film travels from Kolkata to Bengaluru to Thane to meet people for whom school was the brutal part of their childhood.
For Du Saraswathi, writer, theatre person and Dalit activist, the community and the self are twin constituencies. Her theatre and poetry reveal the making of an individual through historical, political and cultural forces.
We learned about photosynthesis five times. Every year, from Class 6 to Class 11, I forgot the exact definition so I had to relearn it even though I knew the concept. In the same way every year, I had to relearn that the boys in my class would sniff me out.
Hameeda has participated in the EduLog programme with The Third Eye for its Education Edition. EduLog mentored 12 writers and image-makers from India, Nepal and Bangladesh to remember – in the present continuous – their experience of education through a feminist lens.
In this series, we bring you gender stories from Nirantar’s archives as well as from the Hindi fictional world at large. These stories have been used in facilitation by various gender groups, and are also great conversation starters for difficult, tricky and conflicting issues that emerge while working with communities.
It was 1989. I think. I had been asked to speak to a group of women who worked in NGOs across Tamil Nadu. The meeting was organised by Legal Resources for Social Action (LRSA), a group in Chinglepet not far from Chennai. I was to unpack the historical contexts of legislation that pertained to women’s lives.
We have been meeting single women in small-town and rural India in our Ekal podcast series. In Episode 4, we meet a collective of single women in Marathwada, Maharashtra. What happens when the singular turns into a collective?
