The stories in this book will agitate your heart and
energise your intellect, and stimulate and open up your imagination to the
possibilities of women’s agency and endurance. The Book was first published in
Hindi as Sangtin Yatra (a journey of
solidarity, reciprocity and of enduring friendship). The English version Playing with Fire appeared as a
response in defence of the first book. Sangtin
Yatra gives us hope that women can move from individual empowerment to form
a collective countervailing power bloc. In the Foreword, Chandra Talpade
Mohanty captures the theme and spirit of the book. She acknowledges the book as
a gift ‘which enacts and theorises experience, storytelling and memory work as
central in the production of knowledge and resistance’.
Playing with Fire was conceived and researched by
nine women but portrays the lives of seven village-level activists from diverse
castes and religions. The seven activists are: Anupamlata, Ramsheela, Reshma
Ansari, Shashi Vaish, Shashibala, Surbala and Vibha Bajpayee. These women have worked
in seventy villages in the Sitapur District in rural India. The women work for
the Nari Samata Yojana – a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) which seeks to
empower rural women of the Dalit castes (lowest castes). Eight of the women
started an independent organisation, Sangtin, that befriends poor rural women.
This is one of
the few intimate books in the development and gender field that presents the Stories and
perspectives of village-level fieldworkers. Very often fieldworkers do not get
to tell their own stories as the seven women reflect, ‘so often we have asked
other women to share their personal stories but no one has ever asked us to
tell our own’ (2006: 15).
It is in these
personal and collective journeys that we are given intricate and in-depth pictures of the
power structures in the Indian family, which ‘are often difficult to observe and
record’, and as another fieldworker writes, ‘many fieldworkers are unable to effect
change in their own homes and quietly endure family violence – but outside the
home in a collective and in the community they are towers of strength’
(Krishanmurty, 1999: 118). These are the stories that often feminist researchers
or even activists hesitate to intervene in, the stories of individual oppression
in the family. The reflective stories tell how women negotiate these multiple
oppressions and strategically challenge them. The collective stories become a
‘chorus’ as they inform us how their personal consciousness developed and
changed. The vivid and compelling stories tell us how personal issues get
intertwined with the political and social and rescue that long forgotten
feminist slogan that the ‘personal is political’.
Their
autobiographical journey
done though collective writing and reflection
is underpinned by the women’s dreams, starting from children through to youth
to marriage, to becoming mothers and then facing the world of work. Throughout
their journey, they question and challenge power and their life stories show
how working and learning result in changing people’s lives and that learning
can be subversive. The book also gives us insights into how NGOs operate in
rural India and questions assumptions about poor women’s oppression. The women
argue that NGOs should work with all women as women from all castes and classes
suffer different forms of oppressions and also have prejudices that require
critical questioning.
The reflective
method of journal writing
is transformative as women write their biographies in a dynamic way to ‘convey
the idea that human beings are active agents in making meaning of their lives
rather than being singly determined by historical and social factors’ (Merrill
and West, 2009: 4). The book tells us and opens the spaces that feminist
research has for such a long time wanted to record – the way people give
meaning and create their world in the family, community and in the wider world.
The collective methodology of writing, reflecting, of producing knowledge using
its starting point as women’s lives, the accountable and reciprocal nature of
the writing and disseminating the research is set out in the introduction and
in the first chapter. In addition, in these chapters and in a postscript, the
writers detail the challenges presented when their parent NGO tried to silence
them and claim ownership of their voices. In these chapters, we are given some
insights into how NGO’s reinforce class, caste and power hierarchies. It is
laudable that this project carried through all the necessary steps of
transformative feminist research as so often we are tempted to skip a few steps
on the way either for logistical or egotistical reasons.
The book is very compelling and the reader is under the spell of the
journey of emancipation and every instance of recollection, of the release from
the burden of their socialisation, from class and casteism, is not so much felt
as a release of a structure or even a category, but something that happens in
human relationships. The biographies show us how actively they “learn their world and their place in it as well as
how they have challenged centuries old rules.
In the spirit of
Sangtin Yatra
(of enduring friendship), I believe that all development workers, adult
educators, gender activists and field workers would welcome and salute this
book from rural India. In South Africa, we have similar stories and as women in
rural South Africa say, ‘you have lit the fire now bring the fuel’. We need to
hear more voices of women in development contexts to keep the fire burning and
to build on the collective spirit of the Sangtin writers. The book is testimony
to the critical and powerful role that reflection on our life journeys can play
in overcoming poverty, the reflections will ring true for many women who
tirelessly and courageously try and follow their dreams.
Review by
Salma Ismail
Sangtin Writers and Nagar, R. 2006. Playing with Fire:
Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India. Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press.
Feminist Africa (133 – 136)
