Kissa UP Ka*

The only place I had been to in Uttar Pradesh was Agra. Yes, my visits to Uttar Pradesh were limited to the Taj Mahal, which I had seen at least a dozen times in the past fourteen years that I have lived in Delhi. As a child, every time there were relatives or friends who visited my family and wanted to see the Taj, I was sent along with them. So my understanding of Uttar Pradesh was restricted to what I had read about it in school and in the national dailies, and to rattling off what the local tourist guide would tell you about the Taj Mahal or the Agra Fort.

I realized that all that had to change if I had to do a good job at the doctoral thesis I am pursuing at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. The title of my thesis is ‘Women’s Movements in India and the Culture of Social Action’. The title does not reflect any direct connection with Uttar Pradesh. Okay, let me specify that I am studying the interaction between women’s movements in India and the twin-dialectics of political assertion of Dalits and the rise of Hindutva. Given that the assertion of Dalits and rise of Hindutva has emerged in a pronounced fashion in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, I chose UP for carrying out my fieldwork for the thesis. Choosing UP was not that tough but I had no idea about contemporary women’s activism in Uttar Pradesh. All I knew were a couple of figures from the latest Human Development Report on the poor condition of women in the state. Once in India, rationalizing my lack of knowledge of UP by saying that it meant that as a researcher I had the required distance with the subject of study was simply not going to work.

Udaan, a residential camp for out of school adolescent girls, provided me the context I needed to make my first field visit to Uttar Pradesh, and to examine with my own eyes the conditions in which women live in parts of rural Uttar Pradesh. Care, India and Sarvodaya Ashram, Hardoi were happy to facilitate my visit on the condition that I would prepare a short note on my experience at Udaan. I clarify at the outset that I do not intend this piece of writing to be a crisply typed out report but a narration of a set of anecdotes that capture my experiences and observations of the days I spent interacting with the Udaan girls and teachers, and mother groups set up in neighboring villages.

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'Kissa UP ka' may be translated as 'anecdote(s) from UP'