Learn Curve for Girls

Book Review: Walking Out, Speaking up – Feminist Street Theatre in India by Deepti Priya Mehrotra

 

A book on theatre and dissent, Walking Out Speaking up – Feminist Street Theatre in India by Deepti Priya Mehrotra is a book which is at once academic and rooted in social reality. Walking Out Speaking up – Feminist Street Theatre in India is a book made of fragments, fragmented as our lives are by dowry and social lies. The fragments comprising this book are quotes from interviews, extracts from plays in Hindi and English, photo documentation, news excerpts, feminist activism as a lived experience etc.

The book is a study and a very very meticulous study of the methods and formulations of the street theatre in North India that started with a wish to stop dowry deaths and other crimes against women. Om Swaha is a play on a dowry death, made personal and immediate through the commitment and agency of the method of street theatre.

Ehsas, a feeling and a street play, can be sensed so clearly and evocatively through the means of this book. The book almost takes us through a video journey of brilliantly apt images that bring Ehsas to life.

Images stark and real, images of death and murder, images colourful and on the dangerous invocations of fire in India today that would have made our ancestors from the prehistoric era who discovered the many positive uses of fire shudder, images of that which can be understood and images of that which has to be explained – images of feminist street theatre in India.

Feminist street theatre in India is an important part of the woman’s movement in India. Delineating the structure of the same is this book, a ready manual of intense writing which is at once self-aware and socially conscious. Feminist Street Theatre in India is both a subject of deliberations and actions.

Feminist Street Theatre can be understood as a grassroots movement lead by scholars and academics – central to our understanding of how to respond and react to that which is the content of our daily newspapers.

Feminist Street Theatre in India is a collective and movement lead by the chance and often lifechanging meetings of actors, feminists, activists, directors, scriptwriters, theatre coordinators over the outrageous and enraging contents of daily news. News – short and impersonal, hardly evocative and image based but full of reality as we never want to know it forms the basis of feminist street theatre in India.

News and journalism if the backbone of a society and culture, then theatre especially feminist street theatre is its secret mystical kundalini or serpent power – magical and powerful at once.

Watch the news and experience its horror and discover solutions for the realities it photographs and who better to help in this than feminist street theatre – a magical portal of learning and democratic processes?