Criterios de selección de los participantes

Do you know what my fight is about, Richa? I’m fighting to speak my way so that no family member, no community, no organisation, no researcher, no media person gets to distort my story to sensationalise my life! . . . I am speaking to you, seeking you out, building a relationship with you so that I can help you by telling you what you want to know.

But I do so with an understanding that you are committed to helping me out when I need you, whether you are here in Kanpur or in the US.

(Farah Ali, interview, 27 March 2002)

In these four bold and straightforward sentences, Farah Ali powerfully summarizes her own struggle as well as the nature of my partnership with her. I met Farah in 2002 through Sahara,¹ a nongovernmental organ-ization (NGO) that for the last 16 years has served as a legal counselling cell and support centre in Kanpur for women of all classes and religious groups on issues of domestic and dowry-related violence and troubled marital relationships. As such, they work with not only women and their male partners, but also with key members of their extended families who often play a critical role in the creation and escalation of their

‘marital problems’. Although I had known of and sometimes participated in Sahara activities since my college days, it was only in 2000–1 that my focus on women’s NGOs and their relationships with global-ization and communalism (religious extremism)

brought me to Sahara as a researcher interested in exploring the possibility of a long-term collaboration with the organization. Although my relationship and (limited) collaboration with Sahara are not a theme of focus here, a brief background is necessary to under-stand and contextualize the story of Farah.

Sahara officers wanted me to help them document, analyse and collectively reflect on their work and, initially, I was excited about the potential embedded in such a collaboration. After working with the NGO over a period of four months, however, I discovered that there was little openness among their leaders to internal or external criticism, especially in relation to their strong organizational hierarchy and a problematic underplaying (at times, negation) of class- and religion-based differences. These factors affected not only their internal structure but also the manner in which Sahara reached out to and intervened in the lives of the women who sought its help. The coordinator of the organ-ization was aware of my reservations about their approach, and we often had long, sometimes uncom-fortable, discussions on the subject.

One of the questions that interested me during my work with women’s NGOs in India was the inter-relationship between communal violence and domestic violence. For example, how are the rise of Hindu nationalism and the state-sponsored instances of anti-Muslim violence shaping the manner in which questions surrounding domestic violence are being addressed, recast or stifled inside/across familial and communal borders? Whenever this question came up in discussions at Sahara, one name that was repeatedly mentioned was that of Farah Ali, a 37-year-old Muslim woman who had filed but subsequently withdrawn her case with the NGO because she refused to adopt any of the steps that their counsellors advised her to take. One counsellor described Farah as ‘a sophisti-cated, US-returned Muslim woman’ who was uncom-fortable with the organization because she wanted her matter to remain private, whereas Sahara believed in politicizing domestic violence issues by making them public. The counsellor gave me Farah’s number but also warned me not expect a positive response from her.

As it turned out, however, Farah was living just a few blocks from my parents’ house, with her parents and her brother’s family, and very eager to talk to me – not on the phone, but at a neighbourhood restaurant.

We met at a street corner a few blocks from our homes and rode there together on a loud tempo

(three-wheeler). As we began to sense and share fragments of our histories and geographies, Farah and I recognized some striking similarities in our social locations that neither of us had encountered before: our upbringing in lower-middle-class families (hers Muslim, mine Hindu) in the same city; our ‘unexpected’ journeys to the US; and our shared status as mothers with a very young daughter, living with our parents and brother’s family – as well as the deep contradictions, joys and pains embedded in that reality. There is much to be noted and analysed along these lines about the telling, recording and retelling of Farah’s story, but for the purposes of this article, I want to summarize the complex strands of Farah’s struggle and return to the question of collaboration.

Why no one can give Farah a voice

Let me summarize the pieces that contribute to making Farah’s story sensational and exotic in the eyes of

‘outsiders’ – not just the outsiders who can gaze at her from the west, but also the multiple gazes that stifle Farah’s voice in her ‘own’ home, city and nation. Farah, a well-educated social worker from a liberal, middle-class, Sunni family, married Aamir in 1994. The marriage was arranged through their families, but she and Aamir spent ten months getting to know each other during the period of engagement, and both consented happily to the marriage. In 1995, Aamir got an opportunity to work as a scientist at a top US university, and she joined him after spending two months at his parents’ home in Meerut. Farah had deep reservations about how his family treated her, but she chose not to discuss her feelings with Aamir and focused her energies on building a healthy partnership with him once she reached the US. Despite her suspicions and discomfort about Aamir’s growing pull towards extremist interpretations of Islam, Farah mostly remembers herself as a happy, content wife and mother in New Jersey – until December 1998, when everything turned upside-down on a trip back to India.

By March 1999, Farah found herself abandoned with her five-month-old daughter Juhie in her in-laws’

home in Meerut because Aamir had taken possession of her immigration documents and returned to New Jersey. In April 2000, he divorced Farah from the US – on the grounds that she had failed to fulfil her duties as a Muslim wife and woman. Farah refused to accept the divorce but the Muslim Personal Law Board

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(MPLB) of India declared it legal. She had wanted to fight this, but then came 11 September 2001, followed in India by the re-escalation of the Hindu fanaticism over building a Ram Temple in Ayodhya and the senseless massacre of Muslims in Gujarat. Says Farah:

To tell you the truth, my voice has been snatched.

From my brothers, their wives and my parents to the rest of my community . . . and from the folks at Sahara and the Muslim Law Board to the white guys in the US Embassy [in New Delhi] . . . I feel like everyone’s hands are pressing against my mouth to silence me . . . All I have to do is just let out one word . . . and the media and the people will just find one more reason to dehumanise Muslims.

(Farah Ali, interview, 27 March 2002) Farah is correct. She is suspicious of anyone who wants to speak on her behalf, convinced that this would only serve their sociopolitical or careerist agendas while undermining her own objectives. In extremely delicate political times in North India, when the MPLB and her own family are asking her not to talk about her issues in public, Sahara wanted Farah to challenge Aamir by shaming him and his family in the mainstream media.

Embarrassing his family in public, according to Sahara, would force Aamir to reconsider – or perhaps withdraw – the divorce statement. It came as no surprise, then, that one well-intentioned Sahara worker proceeded to leak Farah’s story to a producer at Z-TV, who then approached Farah for an interview, with a promise of

‘tremendous publicity’ that would eventually help her win a parliamentary election!

Farah does not believe that any of these people can give her ‘voice’. She considers Sahara’s thinking to be too localized and parochial to understand her ‘case’.

She hates the guts of the Z-TV producer, who she sees as no different from those who caricatured Khomeini in the 1980s and are demonizing Osama bin Laden today. Farah is incensed by the stance of the MPLB but appreciates why this is not the time to publicly criticize them. She also recognizes how her family’s hands are tied, why they have to ask her to be silent about Aamir in these times of state-sponsored repression of Indian Muslims, but she also feels that she and her daughter are increasingly becoming unwanted burdens in her natal home.

In these circumstances, Farah believes that the only tool she has left to regain her voice and fight for justice is through gaining entry into the US, where she can

confront Aamir through the US law – not because it is inherently more just or sensitive than the Indian law, but because the US courts will not recognize the lalaqnama (Muslim deed of divorce) and/or would require Aamir to provide adequate maintenance for her and their daughter. Farah, whose parents- and sister-in-law have effectively prevented her from having any direct communication with Aamir since March 2000, also wonders if meeting Aamir face-to-face would make him realize the implications of what (she thinks) he has done under his family’s pressure.

Her final reason for regarding the US as her best option is familiarity; she has lived and worked there before so it seems to be the easiest place for her to start a new life as a single mother and give her daughter the environment that she needs to blossom and to have a bright future. But Farah also fears that 9/11 (and its aftermath) has irrevocably injured her relationship with the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the Embassy in New Delhi, and perhaps even with the very place where she had hoped to find a hope.

Reading/retelling Farah’s story

Farah’s story has many rich and complicated strands.

There are multiple actors embedded in multiple locations, of which I will name just three. There is Farah, who angrily – and rather perceptively – states that her fate is straddling Kanpur (her natal home) and Meerut (her conjugal household), family and community, the US and India, and the INS and the MPLB. There is Sahara – an NGO committed to a particular strategy of politicizing violence against women at the local level – which fails to appreciate Farah as a transnational subject, and which she dismisses as too parochial and as lacking subtlety in tactics. And there is me, a US-based researcher working ‘back home’, trying to build a complex alliance with Farah while also remaining committed to certain ethical and political stances.

In terms of the currently existing postcolonial and poststructuralist frameworks that can be deployed to make a ‘cutting-edge’ theoretical intervention based on this story, the possibilities are tremendous. I could choose to enact a highly innovative textual perform-ance; I could theorize the multiple border zones and border-crossings that are at work in this story; I could problematize existing theorizations of communalism, secularism and the postcolonial state; and I could revisit the famous trope of colonial feminism about

brown women being saved from brown men by white men. But I must accept that none of these approaches will have much worth for Farah, for women like her who are battling with similar forms of violence in similar locations, or for organizations like Sahara that are struggling to find new conceptual frameworks that could enable them to better understand and address the kind of violence and silencing that Farah faces.

Here I return to the partnership that Farah des-cribed between her and me at the outset of this section.

Farah wants me to help her return to the US by discussing her situation with individuals working with specific South Asian women’s NGOs in New York and San Francisco who can advise on how she can approach the INS to reclaim her green card status, and how she can sue Aamir through the Indian courts.

Farah has needed my assistance in tracking down Aamir and, after placing her confidence and trust in me so generously, expects me to be there for her as an ally and friend. To her, these are the most important parts of our collaboration.

For me – as for many other feminist scholars – the kinds of commitments and obligations described above come with any research that involves close relationships between a researcher and her ‘subjects’.

Generally speaking, there is nothing wrong in believing or acting upon this idea. However, we lose a critical opportunity to interrogate and extend our theoretical frameworks when we reduce such visions/expectations of partnership articulated by our research subjects to the status of commitments and obligations that are either post-fieldwork or independent of theory/

academic production. What we need to do instead is engage in a serious and honest examination of why the existing possibilities of framing and analysing Farah’s story contribute little or nothing towards advancing the struggles that concern Farah or Sahara. Why is it that the most sophisticated and complex theories – when translated into an accessible language – fail to deliver anything beyond a fairly obvious message to Farah and her family, and to Sahara! And what possibilities for extending or revamping those theoretical frameworks emerge when creating relevant knowledge for actors such as Farah and Sahara becomes my main academic goal?

The next step of this collaboration between Farah Ali and me seeks to explore the ways in which current feminist work on transnational citizenship and violence can speak to Farah’s experiences and to the organiza-tions in New Jersey, New Delhi and her natal city that

cannot at this moment interfere in Farah’s case or advance her cause. In this process, Farah also wants to build bridges with specific Muslim activists who are making feminist interventions in the politics of communalism and gendered violence in India in the aftermath of the Gujarat massacre. Hence, the real test of the relevance of this analysis, and the extent to which it can do justice to the enmeshing of local, global and transnational subjectivities, power relationships and citizenships cannot be based merely on my ability to provide another twist to the existing academic debates on these subjects. It hinges, instead, on Farah’s ability to draw sustenance, hope, direction and a sense of fulfilment from this collaboration, and from my ability to deploy insights from transnational feminist theories to help reach that goal.

Second border-crossing: producing a methodology to ‘speak with’ Sangatin

Manju: The Chamar and Yadav³in my village are at each other’s throats and everyone blames me . . . It all started on 13 March when Hari [a Yadav] and Kishan [Manju’s brother-in-law] broke into my home and beat me mercilessly . . . 1 went to the police station and said, ‘I dare any man in this village to touch me or humiliate me again for the rest of my life’ . . . Kishan screamed, ‘This woman is evil. She keeps three men.’ I said, ‘Yes, I have three men. I will keep two more. Why are my men his responsibility?’

. . . But for some reason, Kishan got released and Hari was arrested under the Harijan Act.³Now it has become a big caste war.

Eighteen rural women workers of the Mahila Samakhya programme in Sitapur (MSS) discuss Manju’s intervention and the complicated political situation it has created in her village. Rita and Sunita reflect on how caste and family politics enmesh to shape Manju’s current circumstances. Rohini and Gauri draw connections between Manju’s mis-matched marriage arranged by her more prosperous (and therefore more influential) younger sister, the physical violence inflicted upon her by that sister and the sister’s husband, and Manju’s intimacy with one of her husband’s cousins. Vineeta argues that the humiliation Manju suffers is closely linked to the manner in which agricultural land is divided between her husband and his brothers. Manju agrees with some of these statements and modifies or responds

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to the others. She fears that the caste politics in the village and accusations hurled against her will result in her murder – just as her friend Noor was killed last month. There are tears. There is concern. The 18 women sitting in the circle know that Manju’s fear is grounded in something too real and familiar. The group decides to hold a public meeting in Manju’s village in a week.

(notes of MSS mahasangh or general assembly in Sitapur, 25 March 2002;

all personal names are pseudonyms) In June 1996, I had the rare opportunity to join Richa Singh, the coordinator of the newly launched MSS, when she and her co-workers had just begun training eight local women as mobilizers. Each was responsible for mobilizing women in ten villages, mostly in the vicinity of her natal and conjugal villages. The idea was to give birth to a new model of education and literacy in these villages that allowed the poorest women from the ‘scheduled castes’ and ‘other backward classes’ to collectively understand, address and change the processes and structures responsible for their own marginalization. Another goal was to enable the women to build their own grassroots organization that would replace MSS at the end of the initial period of its activity funded by the governments of India and the Netherlands, and the World Bank. In 1999, the eight mobilizers, along with Richa Singh, registered as co-founders of a new collective called Sangatin, which would continue the work of MSS when the funding from its current donors stops.

In the seven years since 1996, MSS activists have become well known in UP, especially for their sustained efforts to challenge and modify specific festivals and rituals that sanction violence against girls and women. On a somewhat smaller scale, these women have also addressed the ways in which violence inflicted on the poorest women’s bodies is intricately connected with their access to land and wages, and with local religious and caste-based politics.

It is not surprising, then, that Manju’s narration of her conflict with Hari and Kishan developed into a detailed, insightful and multilayered discussion among MSS women, where they explored the material, metaphoric and political connections between landlessness, untouchability, poverty, morality and sexualized violence in Manju’s life and in their own lives.

Unlike the heavily researched work on some other similar women’s organizations in India, most of the

accomplishments of MSS and Sangatin have remained undocumented partly because of the desire of the rural women to be centrally involved as researchers in any documentation and analysis of their work. This factor, combined with my previous work with Manila Samakhya programs in Uttar Pradesh (see Nagar, 2000,

accomplishments of MSS and Sangatin have remained undocumented partly because of the desire of the rural women to be centrally involved as researchers in any documentation and analysis of their work. This factor, combined with my previous work with Manila Samakhya programs in Uttar Pradesh (see Nagar, 2000,