Event

The quotidian and unexceptional form of peasant resistance, covert in nature, is often missed while accounting for processes of social change. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two villages in the sugarcane-dominated Muzaffarnagar district of Western Uttar Pradesh as a part of the author’s PhD research project from April 2019 to March 2020, this paper attempts to theorise the everyday resistance/politics of Dalit women agricultural labourers. I argue that Dalit women are actively engaged in the process of claim making while being embedded within the capitalist agrarian structure designed along the exploitative institution of caste and patriarchy. To begin with, the paper presents a robust review of literature on the processes of social changes in Western Uttar Pradesh, which have led to an increased political consciousness of the Dalits in the region. I argue that scholars have focused on these social processes for the Dalit community as a whole without taking into cognisance the nuances of gender. Although Western Uttar Pradesh has undergone significant socio-political changes, their positive effects in terms of redistribution of resources and increase in employment opportunities have yet to reach Dalit women to the desired extent. But it cannot be overlooked that these changes have unquestionably raised the political consciousness of Dalit women and made them aware of their oppression. However, the structural constraints limit Dalit women's resistance. Although ‘noisy’ collective action is rarely seen, continuous negotiation occurs whereby Dalit women agricultural labourers constantly question their oppression by challenging social norms designed along caste lines. Since the maximum interaction of Dalit women with upper caste landed elites happen in the ‘fields’, this bargaining takes place mainly around labour relations intimately linked with the village's caste norms. This persistent bargaining between the lower-caste working classes and the upper-caste landed gentry is non-contentious. It would be unrealistic to say that these everyday negotiations overthrow the established relations of power. Still, they nevertheless question and transform them in a way that brings about significant social change.

Government of Maharashtra in 2005 prohibited dance bars (a place of adult entertainment primarily in the form of dance by women), claiming that they were a threat to Indian morality and culture. Often termed as “whores in costumes” , it was believed that bar dancers would transform Mumbai into a “whorehouse.” With the ban's immediate effect, more than 75,000 dancers became jobless overnight. More than that, this validated a regressive perception of society in which dancing at the dance bar was equated with sex work. This situation leads to two threads of discussion: one is the idea of ‘consent,’ and the other is the negotiation of women within spaces that threaten their agency by either imposing a certain code of conduct on them or by restricting them from exercising their free will, especially in terms of choosing their profession.
Identifying this as a vulnerable space of existence and operation for women, this presentation intends to analyze four narratives based on the life and experience of women in Indian dance bars: Mira Nair’s India Cabaret (1985), Saba Dewan’s Delhi –Mumbai – Delhi (2006), Anish Patel’s The Fight to Dance (2006), and Sonia Falerio Beautiful Thing (2010). These narratives decode the ways in which bar dancers treated the bar dancingscape as a space where they had the agency to act upon their will. In their book, Global sex workers: rights, resistance, and redefinition (1998), Kempadoo and Doezema explore how transformative practices can emerge in the global sex industry despite the presence of structural constraints and power dynamics. They focus on identifying specific sites where ‘explorations of agency’ can bring forth change . By incorporating the concept of agency into our analysis and integrating it with Anindita Dutta’s theory of genderscape4, we can explore and describe the possible dimensions that exist within the bar dancing scape.
The distinction between sex work and bar dancing is spatial, as Indian laws are against prostitution. It criminalizes and attacks spaces of sex work, leaving them without addresses and hence no access to identification or banking services, thus increasing their precariousness. In contrast, before the enactment of the law, bar dancers did not face the same difficulties in accessing these services.
In the selected narratives, bar dancers repeatedly voiced their belief that their profession was much better than that of sex workers. In The Fight to Dance, bar dancers vehemently oppose being equated with sex workers, stating how their profession allowed them to retain respect and honor that any common housewife could afford. This distinction that the bar dancers build among themselves and the sex workers might be unique to the Indian scenario. It is also important to note that before the ban, the bar dancers effectively used the blurred boundaries of the dance bar by reasoning that it was not just about their survival but also about their dependents. In Mira Nair’s India Cabaret, most of the bar dancers had various responsibilities. Similarly, Leela, the protagonist of Beautiful Things, took it upon herself to support her mother, drunkard father, and two irresponsible brothers in any way possible as she took pride in her status of being the provider for her family. Such instances portray how these bar dancers were able to challenge the nationalist understandings of domesticity by exercising their own agency in the spaces of the dance bars. However, the Government of Maharashtra’s recurrent bans on the spaces of dance bars, even with the Supreme court overruling them each time , has forced the bar dancers into perilous situations, eliminating their spaces of negotiations. It’s worth noting that the ban was advertised as a way to purify the ‘city’ of sex, obscenity, and immorality. At the same time, three-star and higher hotels, theatres, cinemas, clubs, and gymkhanas were excluded from the ban bringing the intersections of caste and class dimensions within the dancingscapes of bar dancers.

pictured to have strong community values. Likewise, media coverage of the pandemic reinforced this image of resilience and solidarity. Although the state and its inhabitants take great pride in such an image, it tends to gloss over and ignore the many who are marginalised on the basis of their gender, ethnicity, and class - especially represented in the plight of handloom weavers in Mizoram. As the pandemic chased its peak in Mizoram, thousands of handloom weavers across the state were rendered jobless and unable to financially support their families. Most weavers specialise in the Mizo puan, a wraparound cloth that serves as a skirt worn by women on special occasions or to church services, while the intricate and endless imaginations of designs are sources of immense cultural pride. However, with lockdowns imposed for months at a time and churches shut, weavers lacked markets to sell their products to and could no longer afford new materials. These losses are undeniably gendered and greatly harm low-income women who make up a majority of the traditional handloom weaving economy in Mizoram. Additionally, weavers from Myanmar working in Aizawl were even more devastated. Burmese women are doubly marginalised, first on the basis of their gender and socio-economic status and second due to their identities as ethnic minorities who have lost their homes to political turmoil. Consequently, their plight has many repercussions for their financial stability and mental well-being.
From 2021-2022, I conducted research among handloom weavers in Aizawl, Mizoram, where I had the opportunity to not only witness the difficulties women faced first-hand but to see how they remained resilient in the face of an uncertain future and an even more precarious present. Their resilience was both personal and collective. Women found ways to resist their subordinate position in their community through their own efforts to make money for their families and with other handloom weavers to demand the state government for social and economic support. They were not always successful, and I came across many who struggled to wrestle their position in the larger community while struggling to maintain a sense of dignity that was once offered by their job at home. However, as the pandemic came to a slow simmer, no other group has come back in full force as the handloom weavers. Their continued resilience in their craft and practice has undoubtedly been a protest against the larger state and economy that disadvantages the poor handloom weavers, particularly as they fail to organise them into formalised economies or recognise the worth in their craft and sustenance of Mizoram’s material culture. Even more noteworthy are the Burmese women who escaped the military junta in Myanmar to strive for an alternative future to the one their militarised society offers. Despite their marginalised condition both at home and in Mizoram as refugees, they continue to assert their survival and protest their subordinate position through their craft. The complexities of building such resilience and collective challenge to their subordinacy, I argue, can be framed through women’s feminist dissidence in not only larger, hyper-visible protests but through the everyday negotiations of self-assertion as expressed by the handloom weavers in Mizoram.

University-based geographers located in the global South undertake myriad forms of research projects ranging from ones that are mandatorily performed as a part of the curriculum to voluntarily chosen research projects that are sometimes funded by external sources.
As a feminist geographer located in a heavily male-dominated discipline (Datta, 2020); based out of a peripheral provincial town in India, negotiating the ‘field’ entails creating networks and connections between and among research scholars and participants. The opportunities for ‘worlding’ geographical knowledge through documenting the production of spaces by vernacular, marginalized groups may be greater in our location, yet; these assignments are usually fraught with ethical issues and dilemmas (Radcliffe, 2022). Acknowledging the research participants’ positionalities and where they speak from helps collate the range and types of collaborations across diverse epistemologies. While researchers strive to build accountability and solidarity with the participants of the study and pursue material change, the insubstantial nature of compensation to the participants of the study for the time spent on research stymies prospects of their long-term involvement.
The paper focuses on the role of community members as participants and facilitators of the GenUrb project in New Delhi in creating spaces of well-being during the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper also attempts to critically assess the role of the participants of the research who, through their ‘participation’ (Cahill, et al., 2020), take on the work of the state.