The inspiring story of Sampat Pal and her gritty Gulabi Gang is now the subject of Leicester-based theatre company Curve’s new project. Considered one of the best theatres in the world, Curve is working to turn the story into a riveting dance drama.
Led by Suba Das, an award-winning theatre director and producer, it will feature talent from across India, with the image of the lathi (a long bamboo stick, which the gang used as a weapon to fight oppression) being central to the theme. Aakash Odedra, a UK-based choreographer and award winning dancer says the lathi will meet kathak, which is like lightning and has a similar kind of energy as the Gulabi Gang.
Pal was born in the village of Bidausa, Bundelkhand, in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh. Her fight for rights began early, as her parents sent her brothers to school, but not her and her younger sister. Pal wanted to study, but her parents wouldn’t agree to. So, she would sneak out to the school and watch through the classroom window. Thus, she learnt to read and write on her own.
One day, a relative spotted her taking notes outside the classroom, and Pal was reluctantly allowed to attend school. However, her parents had other plans. In a region where child marriage is common even today, it was not unusual for them to marry her off when she was just 12 years old. Pal had her first child when she was 13, and by the time she turned 20, she was already a mother of five.
Her family life was tumultuous, and fed up with discord with her in-laws, she took up a government job. However, when she realised that the system was not right, she quit the job, refusing to bow to diktats that were against her principles.
Pal then took up tailoring and managed to save some money to open a training centre for women to become self-reliant. She soon realised that women were ready to fight for themselves without the support of their men folk. The issues before them were many, including child marriage, dowry harassment and deaths, farm subsidies and misappropriation of government funds.
She formed a group of women — all carrying lathis — and named it the Gulabi (pink) Gang, an NGO to help women in distress. She provided women pink sarees, which she continues to buy in bulk. There is no particular significance attached to the colour, except, as Pal puts it: “It is my favourite colour.”
She shot to fame when she beat up a policeman who refused to take action against a man who beat up his wife. Pal says, “In remote parts of the country, no one comes to the rescue of a woman in trouble. The police are corrupt and officials generally anti-poor. So, we fought for our rights, and sometimes even took the law in our hands.”
The modus operandi of the women in pink sarees is to confront the offenders and humiliate them in public. The purpose of shaming an offender is to ensure the offence is not repeated.
In an interview with The British Council (Curve’s funding partners for the dance drama) that supported his India trip recently, Das said he was highly impressed by Pal. He says the trip to India was life-changing. “The meeting with Pal was electrifying. She is funny, charismatic and amazing.”
Das’s trip to Bundelkhand was to meet the Gulabi Gang. “We were looked after so well — it could have been really dangerous, but it was just the most joyful experience. We drove past Pal’s house and sort of dropped in. I don’t think I was quite emotionally prepared for that. She’s such an extraordinary woman. She’s done so much good in the world. When we explained what we wanted to achieve with this show, she gave us her blessings. We spoke about the idea of this show having a real physicality to it, and exploring contemporary kathak, working with Odedra. She just got it immediately,” he says.
“We also met some of the other key characters from the novel [‘Pink Sari Revolution’ by Amana Fontanella-Khan], which will really help with the storytelling of the show. The other really significant thing was meeting the men — there’s a support network of men who are very happy to call themselves feminists. I went in with very Westernised assumptions that men in rural India are kind of all misogynists, and one of my questions to these men was: ‘How come you’re different?’ And their response was: ‘What do you mean?’
“They didn’t understand the question because to them, what they do is simply part of being human. It’s just like walking. That was important for me to understand — there is such ordinariness to their heroism. That was more profound than anything. It was one of those things that you come back from and ask yourself: ‘What am I doing?’ At Curve, we make extraordinary work year-round, but this is one of the first truly political pieces of work that we’ve engaged with.”
Gulabi Gang has no doubt succeeded in changing mindsets. And Pal has made it to the “Guardian”’s list of Top 100 Women: Activists and Campaigners. Several documentaries have been made on her, and women all over the world appreciate her courage. She has been invited to various international forums and has travelled to the US, France, Sweden and Italy.
The documentary “Gulabi Gang” produced by Nishtha Jain won international awards and was named the Best Film in Muhr Asia-Africa documentary section at the Dubai International Film Festival. It showed Gulabi Gang’s fight against repression of women and suppression within the caste system. The documentary captured some disturbing aspects, including the rural-urban disconnect in India, and highlighted the enlightening example of how a handful of women could mobilise hundreds of thousands of women to stand up and fight for their basic rights.
Despite encountering resistance at all levels of society — family, village, police and bureaucracy, the Gulabi Gang set out to reform and change age-old orthodox traditions and took new approach to life. An independent-minded woman, Pal loathed the village society that refused to educate girls, married them early and bartered them for money.
For a woman belonging to one of the poorest regions of the state, there’s reason enough to feel honoured that someone’s working on a dance-drama on her life. The region she lives in is male-dominated, with domestic violence a common occurrence. But Pal and her gang have changed it.
Terming Pal’s story as the fight for gender equality having massive resonance for audiences globally, Das hopes to bring the show to full production in 2017.
Nilima Pathak is a journalist based in New Delhi.
