www.civilsocietyindia.com,www.civilsocietyonline.com

Séverine Fumoux
New Delhi

IT all started about two years ago. Urvashi Butalia, founder and head of Zubaan, a well-known feminist publishing house, wanted to visually map the history of the women’s movement in India from the 70s. Along with her colleague Jaya Bhattacharji, she sent out a request to more than 200 women’s groups for visual material.

They sent a flood of posters. Zubaan started an archive. Out of 1500 posters, 250 were selected for an exhibition on the women’s movement in India held at the India Habitat Centre. The display, ‘Women Posters’ illustrates some major national campaigns that have taken place in the past 30 years. Acknowledging the existence of identity politics within the women’s movement,Zubaan organised the exhibition on several themes ranging from health, environment, education, to civil rights and violence against women, so that every group got a chance to illustrate its contribution to the campaigns. “The groups have a sense of ownership,” says Butalia. Every exhibition is being adapted to represent the issues and groups of the region it travels to. Each poster is displayed in its original language but its caption and information are in English. ‘Women Posters’ is more than a display of images. It has provided an opportunity to sensitise audiences to women’s issues through related events. A twoday workshop at the Lalit Kala Akademi in Baroda, got the local community to design new posters. Indian colleges and publishing houses as well as Western art institutions see the poster collection as a visual medium for understanding the movement’s history.

In fact, the humble poster is now recognised as a crucial outreach tool for the women’s movement. It started as a crude disposable object in the ’70s and was then refined and made reusable in the ’80s. In the ’90s, the poster was turned into an elegant art object. Its text was shortened or removed altogether generating instant empathy, especially in rural campaigns. All along, some women have been using their local craft skills to integrate the issues of the movement into their daily lives, creating an alternative form of posters. In remote areas of Bihar, women use phads, pieces of cloth on which they embroider narratives of reproductive rights and other women’s issues, which are then sold as curtains or table cloth. As a result, the poster has taken on a strong aesthetic dimension unique to the women’s movement, including a diverse set of symbols: a middle-class woman ignoring domestic duties and putting her feet up in front of a TV or a peasant woman using her rolling pin as a pencil and brandishing her blackboard as a weapon. The icon of the woman as a multi-armed goddess appears in many posters as a sign of the plural identity and multi-layered life that defines Indian women.“The collection today is only the tip of the iceberg”, says Jaya. Let’s hope Zubaan’s archive of posters will keep growing and growing.