DAY NINE: Women’s Resistance in Three Acts: Experiencing 21st Century Delhi

Picture above from Wikimedia.org

Meenakshi Nair

Across India, and indeed the world, gendered domestic violence has seen a sharp uptick on account of stay-at-home orders during the Covid-19 pandemic. Crime statistics, news reports, and personal experiences construct Delhi as one of the most unsafe cities in the world for women, especially after the horrific gangrape and murder of Jyoti Singh in 2012. In the face of violence, Delhi also emerges as a site of creative resistance. In this blog post, I will briefly explore three acts of resistance by young women in Delhi against gender-based violence.

Bura Na Mano, Holi Hai!

Enjoyment and revelry are often coded with violence and are therefore exclusionary. For instance, the onset of spring in North India is marked by the celebration of Holi, or the festival of colours. Holi includes an element of playfulness – people smear colour and fling water balloons at one another. It is a festival that is meant to be fun, full of revelry, and for all alike. However, this revelry is gendered in nature and not as inclusive as it claims to be. The rallying cry for Holi play is “Bura na mano, Holi hai” or “Don’t be offended, it’s Holi” – and it is a rallying cry that seems to excuse all manner of sins. 

In the days leading up to Holi young women experience a heightened sense of both violence itself and the fear of violence while negotiating public spaces. This is because of a street harassment, or “eve-teasing” that, during Holi, takes the form of non-consensual Holi play – groups of young men throw water balloons at young women who have not consented to play Holi with them, and are instead going about their everyday activities. These water balloons are filled with a variety of fluids ranging from coloured water, mud, eggs, and even semen. 

In some cases, young women are able to file police complaints follow the case all the way to testifying in court. In most instances, however, young women receive no redressal. Revelry and celebration are meant to be creative, joyous occasions, experienced by all members of a community. However, the nature of Holi revelry is violent and exclusionary.

Khadar Ki Ladkiya: Young Women Speak Back!

In her work on young women from Lyari, in Karachi, Pakistan, Nidah Kirmani writes about how research often conducts women from the global south as passive recipients of violence. Kirmani finds this limiting and narrow, and instead argues that should also acknowledge and value the everyday experiences and enjoyment of women from the global south to construct a more complex and textured understanding. 

Khadar ki Ladkiya is a spoken word video shared on YouTube, written and performed in by the young women of Madanpur Khadar JJ Colony, a slum resettlement area at the outskirts of Delhi. On the one hand, it resists several kinds of violence and erasure that the young women of Khadar face. On the other hand, it bears witness to their everyday lives.

One of the violences the young woman of Khadar face, perhaps more subtle than overt sexual assault, is the kind of epistemic violence that Kirmani talks about: these young women are treated as readily available ‘samples’ for researchers or as passively waiting subjects for workshops on education, empowerment, and hygiene by civil society organisations. These young women are not considered to be legitimate producers of knowledge who are actively capable of creating knowledge about their own lives and experiences. 

In their collective spoken word piece, these young women recount the challenges of living in the city as young women seeking to be independent.

They acknowledge the larger culture of silence and impunity around gender-based violence and sharply critique the culture of protectionism that would rather young women remained within the domestic sphere than make public spaces safer and more inclusive. They also highlight how law enforcement and the police are at best, in dereliction of their duty, and at worst complicit in the violence.

The spoken word video functions as active resistance, but also bears witness to their everyday lives and enjoyment. 

Bharatanatyam in the Wild: Women’s Bodies as Spectacle

In the winter of 2017, I was part of an online dance project called Bharatanatyam in the Wild. It was imagined, shot, directed, and performed in by young women. The project took the classical south Indian dance form Bharatanatyam out of its usual contexts of the temple courtyard or proscenium stage and into the ‘wild’ – the public spaces of Delhi. These spaces included metro stations, public parks, and traffic intersections. While on the one hand the project explored the nature of the classical form itself, it also explored the presence of gendered bodies in urban public spaces. 

Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Ranade explore gendered experiences of public spaces, focusing on Mumbai, India, in their book Why Loiter? (2010). They demonstrate that men are free to be in public spaces safely for both work and leisure, and are free to loiter or hang out in public. Women, on the other hand, must have a purpose to be in public – either for education, employment, errands, or to add to the economy by purchasing goods. Women are not free to loiter.

Bharatanatyam in the Wild sought not only have women ‘be’ in public spaces, but also to engage in performance and spectacle in public spaces. The project drew attention to women who were using their bodies to occupy space and make art.

Personally, I did not feel unsafe or scared while engaged with this project: I knew that the moment I felt uncomfortable, I would be able to get myself away from the situation and to comfort by any number of means of transport. 

Additionally, the embodiment of the dancers and videographers perhaps also signalled a privileged class-caste background – our clothing, the presence of multiple video cameras, and the fact that we communicated to one another in English – and thus granted us a degree of safety perhaps unavailable to young women from, for instance, a slum or resettlement area. 

In some contexts, young women turn to due process for justice by filing police cases and going to court. In others, they bear witness to their own lives and experiences, resisting gendered (and classed) erasure and violence. In yet others, the body is made into a spectacle in order to reclaim public spaces. Resistance thus exists in many forms and is embodied in many different ways. 

Meenakshi Nair has been working towards her MA in Comparative Literature (Asia-Africa) at SOAS, University of London after studying English Literature at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi. She is interested in urban narratives across genres and media, performance, and in questions of curriculum and pedagogy. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Nether Quarterly and Porridge Magazine.