Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India

Selected for The Rumpus’s list on WHAT TO READ WHEN YOU WANT TO CELEBRATE WOMEN’S HISTORY

Playing with Fire is a chorus where nine voices from varied sociopolitical locations self-reflexively merge themselves to articulate the nuanced intersections of caste, class, gender, religion and socio-spatial location, and their centrality in understanding women’s empowerment, NGO activism, and the politics of knowledge production. This book was first published in Hindi as Sangtin Yatra in 2004 and the conversations that it sparked played a critical role in the making of Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan, a movement of chiefly Dalit farmers and labourers in Sitapur District of Uttar Pradesh, India.

Seven of these voices belong to Anupamlata, Ramsheela, Reshma Ansari, Shashibala, Shashi Vaish, Surbala and Vibha Bajpayee – village-level NGO activists from diverse caste and religious backgrounds, who have worked as mobilizers in seventy villages of Sitapur District in India. These women form an alliance with each other; with Richa Singh, a district-level NGO activist; and with Richa Nagar, a teacher at the University of Minnesota to highlight key moments of a collective intellectual and political journey.

In 2021, we released Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism Through Seven Lives in India as an eBook, and to celebrate the book’s journey so far, we invited members and supporters of Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS)—Kalyani Menon-Sen, Meera Sanghamitra, Prakash, Rambeti, Richa Nagar, Richa Singh and Surbala—to participate in a discussion moderated by Urvashi Butalia. You can watch the recording of the discussion here.

The thought-provoking conversation was later converted into a piece in Hindi, and published in Hindi Sahitya ka Itihaas II: Kuch Paath, Kuch Vimarsh, edited by Devendra Choubey, Ajay Kumar Yadav, Ganpat Teli and Ujjwal Alok. You can read the full piece here.

THE SANGTIN WRITERS Anupamlata, Ramsheela, Reshma Ansari, Richa Singh, Shashibala, Shashi Vaish, Surbala, and Vibha Bajpayee were members of a grassroots women’s collective called Sangtin, that later evolved into Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan.

RICHA NAGAR is Professor of the College and Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her eight books in English and Hindi include A World of Difference: Encountering and Contesting Development (2009), Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis (2010), Muddying the Waters: Co-authoring Feminisms Across Scholarship and Activism (2014), and Hungry Translations: Relearning the World Through Radical Vulnerability (2019).