 My name is Jaime de Bourbon Parme and I would like to welcome you here to an insight and an idea with Malika Saraphai. Malika Saraphai is a dancer, she's an actress, she's a choreographer, a writer, a public speaker, a social entrepreneur and an instigator of communal projects. She celebrates the positive reformation of images of womanhood but she also challenges people like us here on issues of gender bias, communal hatred, the environment, corruption and violence and she's currently the director of the Darpan Academy of Performing Arts. Now today we'll talk about the innovatively using arts to tackle social challenges such as women face in modern day India but before we've got the fantastic privilege to witness an actual performance by Malika today. Malika please. Tomorrow I'll face the court and the court will be the man who raped me, the principal of my school. You know there are no witnesses to my story. People saw him come into my house but who saw the look on his face? Who heard the tear of my clothes? Who smelled my fear? I did then and a thousand times since then I still feel filthy. I was a teacher at a small village school. Both of us women teachers were used to the male teacher's jibes and the accidental touching. I didn't say anything, I thought that's the way things were. He came to my home one evening. I have been getting complaints about you and I thought we'd better discuss them here otherwise things might get difficult for you. You know what he was talking about? He could see I was frightened. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. I felt comforted and the hand slipped to my breast and shout couldn't scream. If you say anything about this that's the end of your job. I'm a Brahmin in an office. I'll say you're a slut. Nobody will marry you. Do you understand? I just laid there for hours. I thought if I didn't move it would go away. It didn't go away. The blood dried on my thighs. Shock wore off and the anger began. Why didn't I scratch out his eyes? Why didn't I shout and scream? Why didn't I take him to the police station? I must report the crime. I must go to the police station. I must go to the police station. A fat policeman was sitting alone in the chalky. Excuse me. I have come to report a crime. Knock on the door, saved me. A woman police officer came in. Please help me. Rap, huh? Rap where rap? Sali, you think something's gonna happen? Have you been to a doctor? Have you been examined? He examined me and assured me I wasn't pregnant. Have you washed? Of course, doctor. It's been three days. That's a pity. Had I been able to examine the sperm identification would have been made easier. But doctor, I know who it was. Yes, but nobody else does. He told me how common rape is in the home, in the office, in the street. How rare a conviction is. He told me to forget about it and get on with my life. Like so many other women. But as I was going out, he told me about Shanta, a social worker who would explain the law to me. As I came out to the doctor's office, one part of me said, why are you making a fuss? So many women get raped. They just get on with their lives. Just forget about it. But another part of me said, why? I am not a culprit. I am the victim. I want justice. I will have justice. Half an hour later, I knocked on Shanta's door. Shanta was kind. She was like a sister. She believed me. She said she would help me. The next morning, we went and filed an FIR. Three days later, I lost my job. And one night, late at night, a group of men came and started banging at my door. Give us a free fire! Give us a free fire! Ran away to stay at Shanta's for four months. Then I heard that the principal had been given a promotion to a bigger school in another city. A promotion like that police officer who was given this big award after molesting a woman IAS officer. Where were the women who should have get out of his house? Where were the women who should have supported me? I began to think I had committed a crime just by talking about it. Then came the silence. No yes. No job. No press. No news from the court. Just reliving the incident again and again and again. But tomorrow, he faced the court. And if he lies, it will be in front of the judges and all of you. Do you know what an MLA said last week about rape? He said that 90% of the women who are raped enjoy the sex. Is this really what men think? Is this all that men understood a few months ago? My parents wrote. They also wanted to know why I just don't get on with my life. Why am I going on and on and on after this? And I looked at my life and I thought about it. What is so great about being a woman in India? What is so fantastic about being a woman alive today here? That the fear of losing it will make me forget that I have been raped. Malika, what a powerful performance. I saw the shock in everybody's face and it comes very, very close. I think reading about this topic and saying how arts can play a role in communicating, you see how much more powerful it is if you role play than actually you speech about it. So why don't we begin first of your motivation? How do you come to this topic of using arts? Two things. One is that traditionally in India, and I'm talking like 2000 years ago, all value education was done through the arts, whether it was teaching life skills through folk music and folk dancing or it was you went to a temple and the sculptures told you stories of what was right and wrong or you saw a dance and it was about the ethical quest or the spiritual quest. So we have a history of this and then we seem to have lost it completely. But as a child, I used to watch my mother who's a classical dancer, who's the first classical dancer to have taken classical dance outside the country as early as 1949. And by the time I was growing up, she was already using a form, which is otherwise used as a search for the Supreme, as a search for God and so on. She found that it was a very powerful language and she was using it as early as 1963 to talk about dowry debts. Now dowry is something that she hadn't encountered growing up in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. She came to Gujarat and she started reading in the newspapers about young brides jumping into the well and she couldn't figure it out. She was learning Gujarati and she kept saying to people, what is this? And she was so horrified that she used Bharatanatyam, which is a language of Sringara and beauty and so on, to talk about this hatred. So I actually grew up thinking that's what the arts are for. Nobody told me that the arts are supposed to be for entertainment. We see that very clearly in all of your work and I would suggest all of you to look at her TED talk on YouTube, which is incredibly powerful and shows also the richness of Indian culture and they're bringing a real message of education. So what are the major challenges women face today in India? Being a woman. Being a woman, that's a problem. It's a huge problem. It's a huge problem and the biggest challenge is that society, whether it is society as here, whether it's the corporate world, whether it's the government, has not realized the severity and just the seriousness of what I call an epidemic of decimation of women across the board, across the board. And we think that you have education, you have a high-powered job, you are fine and we are not because the street has become dangerous. Look at the BPO working women who are either murdered or gang raped or so. So no woman is safe. Has it become different since your mother's say time and now? Yes, because now we know so much more about how to kill and how to rape and how to mime and how to video while you are gang raping somebody and then you put it on MMS and you put it on internet and we know so much more. Is it more visible now or has it become a bigger problem? I think it's more visible now because we are fed a 24-7 violence women commodification kind of thing on television, on the internet, the pornography industry is the fastest growing industry in the world. Every kind of game that a child plays is about grasping a woman and breaking a woman and it's just everywhere. This misogyny is everywhere at all levels and I don't think people are realizing what this is doing. And of course Bollywood is a huge, huge culprit in this, in that this was not the films of the 70s, what we are seeing today. In the 70s there were stupid things but they were not misogynist. Today all you see is item numbers and item numbers with, I don't know how many of you have seen this absolutely foul song from Aya that Rani Mukherjee, all she does in a close up camera is thrusts her pubis at the camera for seven minutes. And then there's this singer called Happy Singh or Honey Singh whose video went viral and the entire lyrics is about how I'll thrust my penis into you, tear you apart and you will love it so much, you will be spurt in blood. Now this is the kind of culture that we are growing up in and for a society that is transmitting very quickly from the developing to this, this is what males get, this is how you become aspirational, this is how you prove that you are a modern male, this is how you prove that you are macho. And women form a great part of this whole play because it's very strange somebody was saying earlier how is it that women who have suffered also make other women suffer. This is the classic British divide and rule policy, you know you tell a woman or you know first of all arranged marriages means that you probably get married to somebody who doesn't love you to start. If you're lucky he starts loving you otherwise not. So from the day of the wedding in most Indian households you will be made to feel an outsider. Meanwhile your parents have said this is not your real home, go to your real home which is the other home. So you have neither this nor this. So then mother-in-law starts harassing you and what you think of is one day I will have a son and that son will love me. The daughter I will love but the daughter has to go away to her house. So the son becomes the most coveted thing and all my suppressed love all my suppressed need for affection for being valued as a woman everything goes on to this one son. So when the son starts growing up and if there is a wife and the wife has to be brought then I am going to hate that wife because she is taking this one thing that I possessed and that's the cycle. It's as a man if I see this performance I feel guilty because I identify myself with the other men and I see these horrible things happening. So how do you educate men to create two groups of men? Men who identify themselves with it but made a conscious choice of not being such a violent man and so you create some of support groups of a new identity of men because not just women needing to get emancipated but mostly the guys need to be emancipated it seems. Yes absolutely but you know it is such a complex social political religious behavioral issue that a warlike effort needs to be mounted from how we educate to how parents treat their children when they are little daughter is sent off to make tea son is sent off to play cricket this kind of thing all the way up. I mean why is it that when it's a woman in the chair you say chair woman or chair person is the man not a person why is he then called chair man why is why are they both not chair people or person you always use he when you're talking to somebody you always he oh but she comes into he no he comes into she it's not the other way around so he comes out of she and there won't be many she's around soon but what I'm saying is that there has to be government policy there has to be out of the box thinking there has to be corporate policy and language the way we use language the way newspapers use language it's still called stupid things like eve teasing you know our mindset hasn't changed because we haven't taken it as a serious problem it's still the problem of some woman in Haryana being gang raped it's not here and now people like us don't get this so one response to that would be despair seeing the problem is so big how can we ever make a difference no but on the other hand in the we love complex systems and to acknowledge complexity and then look at simple ways how you can tackle step by step issue so what would be innovative ways here in in India to tackle this well first of all I tell all parents please we bring up your children to be people not Hindus not Muslims not kaias not boy not girl just bring them up to be people with value for other people that's number one that's the most basic level secondly ask yourself when you are being gender prejudiced in your answers in your questions in your responses women for instance I tell this to women in girls colleges I say when one of your friends comes in particularly nicely dressed why do you say rather than say go up to her and say you know you look terrific where you off to simple things like this change your mindset and I have been trying to convince the government for 30 years I've been trying to convince corporates with social responsibilities we have a language through the arts which can transform we have statistically significant results over a 30 year period using television using using street theater using all the Indian folk theater forms and folk music forms that are dying out you could give them a completely new life we have a whole range of the uses of arts but nobody is willing to listen there are no people with vision to say this is not funding dance and music when you run a poster campaign you are not funding printing but they haven't been able to in spite of our own cultural history make this jump so how do you bridge that that challenge because so you're talking mostly about financing so the arts are not financed to be able to not the arts okay the arts may or may not be financed that's not my point here we need to finance the possibility of rapid change in our society whether it's about gender whether it's about human rights whether about saving the environment and the arts are the most transient language to do this this language needs to be understood and just as you have it experts you have experts who use the arts for change you need to actually make the environment so that they can leapfrog into upscaling what they have been doing you mentioned in your plenary as well you reached 40 000 women what sort of project was that how do you do that you know I was I'm partially from Kerala and I keep going back to Kerala and over the last eight or ten years I've been horrified to see the repression of women they are educated they are earning members and yet they are so frightened to open their mouths and I started just asking I got an award and there were lots of young women there and I said what's with you and they said that you know if we open our mouth we are the ones reprimanded if we go and tell a teacher in our school that so-and-so whistled at me then the teacher says why did you take that route why couldn't you have taken another why did you go alone why didn't you go in a group if in a bus I scream because somebody has put his hand on my breast then I'm the one who gets yelled at nobody talks to me for the next 10 days and they say I'm the one bringing attention on myself so I went to the Kerala State Women's Development Corporation who was giving me the award and I said you know you have a very serious problem here so in negotiating with them we took case studies from them and we created a fictionalized film called Unartapata which is the song of awakening and I personally with a psychologist who speaks Malayalam I speak Malayalam but not fluently went to 40 women's colleges over a three month period showing the film and opening up a discussion and you cannot imagine what comes pouring out and they run after our cars and they say ma'am everything you say is absolutely contradictory to what our principal says our principal says don't do this don't talk about it you mustn't discuss it don't have a conversation about it just shut up and go ahead as a result of that we have now got a website where anybody can ask us questions the film is up there and they have now asked us to make a feature film that will go to the larger public to sensitize men as well as women that having half your population repressed and suppressed and not speaking is extremely bad for the whole society I've seen in I've been working a lot in conflict zones and Congo is another country where where rape is used as a weapon of war and structurally so the first documentaries we helped finance was awareness on rape in general for the international public but the second was focused on Congo itself ex-rapists men who became older that when they were 45 50 they realized what they've done when they were 18 years old and and they were talking in the documentary to other men saying you know we made a big mistake don't make the same mistake and they were mediating between women that we've been raped and the rapists to find some sort of closure closure you'll never close it but at least a gesture makes at least the guilt not only on the women but also on the men and do you see any of these sites where you can bring the men you try to shock them wake them up but can you also bring them on board I'm sure it's possible I haven't tried it yet what one of the projects that we are trying to do just now is that you know we hear a lot of talk of dowry deaths and dowry violence and you talk constantly about female fetus I the government makes one set of laws here and one set of laws here none of which get actually followed up because the judicial system is the way it is but people are not at least people in policy making don't understand that the two are actually the same problem because a woman is treated as a commodity that needs to be sold off to the husband's family there are dowry deaths because the husband is actually saying you bribe me X lakhs or X million and then I will take this negative weight off you and I will keep her and I will go on milking her to get more money or I will kill her and that's exactly the same reason why people don't want daughters they don't want daughters because they don't want to get into a situation where they will have to have this huge debt so we are I'm trying to raise money actually one and a half crores to try a pilot project in colleges because these are the young people who will go into the marriage market in the next four or five years to make them realize that what they consider just normal conversations between the two parties how we will bring a thousand people to the barat and they need to stay in five star hotels this is the form that in many many communities dowry has taken so they say our community is the same because we are trying to with a performance go in start a discussion group then try and get a small core group who will pledge that they will not be part of this system train them to become trainers get them to go to parents groups and to teachers groups at the same time device television programming that is beamed in every day talking of different aspects of the same issue but using the most popular genres of television and at the same time try and devise a way to gender sensitize professors policymakers people in university senates vice-chancellors and teachers so this is this is the project that I'm at the moment going around with a begging board this sounds fantastic so anybody here the government doesn't usually support these kind of things so we should all kind of pledge in and the point is a lot of my work I see my work as the R&D because because we have a fully fledged arts institution all of whom are committed to using the arts for change we can try out lots of inventive ways test marketed in Gujarat come back tinker with the model go back try it out again do a pilot of a pilot and then say we can now go to any state and they will put in a little localisms but we can go to any state and train people to do this we've just had a hugely successful project in Jharkhand in 475 villages teaching people to take family planning seriously and it was done with the Johns Hopkins University who one year after the project went in to see how many people had converted from being an audience in this performance to actually going to the Asha worker which is the health worker to ask about information on family planning and they found to their astonishment that 85% of the couples in that age group had actually undergone family planning method not only just asked and this is an astonishing figure roleplay can be an incredible strong strong and you must remember that we are primarily not a literate society but an oral and a visual society I can go in the middle of any highway and I beat on a drum and in two minutes I'll have 5000 people then wow isn't that true it's true it's true and we are not using it we have obviously I mean it seems that a lot of potential in India is locked in and 50% of the workforce is locked in into into cultural structures violent structures that has an economic potential I can we heard today that more and more women are getting employed in certain sectors I could imagine for them it would be very interesting to hire a creative person like yourself to organize virtual within the organization to transform and unlock this economic potential that's a win-win situation it's also a win-win situation for the whole world's heritage because there are so many art forms that are dying out and if we could inject this kind of energy into them then they would have work and they would have a new way whether it's tamasha or it's wall paintings or it's any of these and it would mean that a lot of the art heritage of the world which would otherwise disappear very rapidly would also be saved which is again a very very important aspect of heritage we came to India to to learn and and we want to bring back a message to the rest of the world what do we learn from you here in India what is the message we have to bring back home to implement this kind of methodology of using arts to improve the situation of women in other parts of the world what will be your message your takeaway the takeaway has to come from you not from me I think this whole thing about not seeing the wealth that you do and always seeing the wealth out there to be able to relook at something that is very familiar to you but might be used in completely different ways to solve completely different issues is something that everybody needs to do and I think creativity there is a deal with natural resources and with with scarcity there's one thing that is not scarce and that's ingenuity of the mind and I think that's what what the takeaway I would have taken from this this session and another thing is that I see that culture there's there's few countries in the world that have such a strong cultural identity as India and you're actually using this massive strength to actually evolve the same culture into something more positive so that will be my takeaway of this session thank you very much thank you would have a new way whether it's tamasha or it's wall paintings or it's any of these and it would mean that a lot of the