Playing With Fire: Feminist Thought And Activism Through Seven Lives In India

232 Pages·2006·0.85 MB·English

by  Sangtin Writers

Playing with Fire
TThhiiss ppaaggee iinntteennttiioonnaallllyy lleefftt bbllaannkk
Playing with Fire
Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India
Sangtin Writers
Anupamlata
Ramsheela
Reshma Ansari
Richa Singh
Shashi Vaish
Shashibala
Surbala
Vibha Bajpayee
and
Richa Nagar
Foreword by Chandra Talpade Mohanty
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
The authors’ royalties from this book will be donated to the organization Sangtin. None of these will
be kept by any members of the Sangtin Collective.
Copyright 2006 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sangtin Writers and Nagar, Richa.
Playing with fire : feminist thought and activism through seven lives in India / Sangtin Writers,
Anupamlata . . . [et al.] ; Richa Nagar ; foreword by Chandra Talpade Mohanty.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4769-9 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8166-4769-0 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4770-5 (pb : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8166-4770-4 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Women’s rights—India—Uttar Pradesh. 2. Marginality, Social—India—Uttar Pradesh. 3. Sangtin
(Organization) I. Sangtin Collective, Sangtin Yatra (Organization) II. Title.
HQ1236.5.I4N34 2006
305.420954'2—dc22
2006005608
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
to those women
of Sitapur District
who gave us the courage and inspiration
to undertake this journey . . .
TThhiiss ppaaggee iinntteennttiioonnaallllyy lleefftt bbllaannkk
Contents
Foreword Chandra Talpade Mohanty IX
Acknowledgments XVII
Introduction. Playing with Fire: A Collective Journey
across Borders Richa Nagar XXI
A Journey of Sangtins
Anupamlata, Ramsheela, Reshma Ansari,
Richa Nagar, Richa Singh, Shashi Vaish,
Shashibala, Surbala, and Vibha Bajpayee
1. The Beginnings of a Collective Journey 3
2. A Very Short Childhood 15
3. From the Streets of Babul to the Wetness
of Aanchal 31
4. Prisons within Prisons: Battles Stretching
from the Courtyard to the Mind 68
5. Cracking Cages, New Skies 91
6. Challenges of NGOization and Dreams
of Sangtin 110
Postscript: NGOs, Global Feminisms, and Collaborative
Border Crossings Richa Nagar 132
Notes 157
Glossary 169
Selected Bibliography 177
TThhiiss ppaaggee iinntteennttiioonnaallllyy lleefftt bbllaannkk
Foreword
Chandra Talpade Mohanty
It is a gift to be asked to write this foreword to Playing with Fire. The
book makes two major contributions to feminist thought: it enacts and
theorizes experience, storytelling, and memory work as central in the
production of knowledges of resistance, and it offers a much-needed cri-
tique of colonialist discourses of development linked to donor-driven
non-governmental organization (NGO) projects of empowerment in the
Third World/South. Thus, it is a book that engages questions of feminist
methodology and epistemology, as well as questions of community- and
institutional-level struggles for women’s emancipation. In searching for
a way to write that is accountable to the spirit of this book and true to the
politics of knowledge production enacted and theorized by the Sangtin
Collective, I can write only from within the space of my own yatra(jour-
ney) as a “sister-traveler” in the transnational alliance the sangtinsdraw on
in their struggles against social and institutional power. Given the col-
lective politics of knowledge production, transparency, and accountability
that the sangtins enact, it would be ironic indeed if this foreword were
seen as “authorizing” the voices of the women in this remarkable book.
Sangtin,writes Richa Nagar, is a term of “solidarity, of reciprocity,
of enduring friendship among women.” The stories in this text enact this
process of becoming sangtin—of a collective journey of the personal
and political struggle of nine women toward solidarity, reciprocity, and
friendship across class, caste, and religious differences in the profoundly
IX