Last Friday, Mumbai’s Gujarati stage patrons were in for a surprise. Amdavadis are next. Theatre veterans Mahabanoo and Kaizaad Kotwal are set to lead them down that kaali, bheeni, saankdi galli where they haven’t gone before
Krutika Desai, Swati Das and Devaki performed at the premiere of The Vagina Monologues Gujarati on Friday in Mumbai
When theatre director-producer Kaizaad Kotwal, dressed in a flaming red shirt and scarlet keds, requests the audience gathered at Mahalaxmi’s G5A Black Box to whisper, “vagina”, they follow. Louder. “Vagina!”
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But, when actors Kruttika Desai and Swati Das jump off their high stools, abandoning the sophisticated monologue format under focused spotlights—grabbing a dhol in nukkad natak style—urging the audience to enunciate clearly and lyrically the Hindi slang for vagina, “ch##”, the volumes dip. It takes courage to be an audience member of The Vagina Monologues. And good fortune.
The widely acclaimed episodic play written originally in English in 1994 by Eve Ensler, now preferring to go by the name V, has been performed globally by some of the world’s best acting talent, including Marisa Tomei in Mumbai in 2004, when Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal and Kaizaad of Poor Box Productions managed a coup and got fitness icon Jane Fonda and the Oscar-winning star on the same stage. Every year on February 14, women’s rights activists and students organise the staging of various versions of the play, in myriad languages, almost always going away with stories of sexual abuse survival narrated by the audience members. As it happened on Friday evening, when a woman declared that she was a survivor of female genital mutilation (FGM).
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Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal and Girija Oak are part of the cast of the Gujarati adaptation
Not confined to remote sub-Saharan Africa, FGM is quietly practiced by a sect of Shia Muslims in India, with the women suffering trauma, pain, humiliation and the risk of infection after being “cut”. The clitoral hood of under-age girls is partially or wholly lopped off with razor, blade, shard of glass, in a ritual called khatna to prevent women from being promiscuous and “lustful”. Most survivors have said, sex is never pleasurable again. Interestingly, India’s successive governments across political parties have chosen to look the other way. In 2017, the Ministry of Women and Child Development filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court, stating: “It is respectfully submitted that at present there is no official data or study (by NCRB etc) which supports the existence of FGM in India.”
In an interview to this paper in 2018, Masooma Ranalvi, Shabana Diler and Lakshmi Anantnarayan spoke of a survey they conducted among the Dawoodi Bohra community in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Close to a hundred respondents including men, women, survivors, circumcisers, pro- and anti-khatna voices spoke, to reveal that almost 80 per cent of the community in India practices it.
The actors at Friday’s theatrical world premiere of the Gujarati adaptation organised in association with the US Consulate and the Rotary Club of Mumbai Nariman Point didn’t address FGM, but Desai’s monologue of a girl raped by her uncle at seven; convinced of her vagina’s trouble-rousing destiny at 10, choosing to “tie” it shut and safe with three pairs of underwear, a dupatta and a salwar, and then discovering a paradise of pleasure during a chance lesbian encounter with a begum, was both gut wrenching and evocative. A man in the audience laughed. The women wrestled with a lump in the throat.
“A cold gun, a bottle, a broom... anything that they could find, was stuffed inside me.” While one monologue spoke of rape as a war-time tactic, possibly inspired by a story from Bosnia, it brought back flashes of the 2012 Delhi bus gang rape.
The previous productions, in English and Hindi, have adapted some of the stories to India. As did Mahabanoo this time, when she played Mehroo, an aged Parsi woman from Cusrow Baug, refusing to jog her memories of the “moist, dirty cavern” which no one wants to talk about. When boyfriend of yore Pesi Pastakia took her for a spin in his Morris Minor, and kissed her, leading to a “flood”, he dropped her like a hot potato. The fear of an orgasm, and losing another love, ensured she shut “the basement.. bheenu bhoiteryu” forever.
And you didn’t have to be a genocide or rape survivor to identify with the stories. You had to be, simply female. When Girija Oak said that her Gujarati wife avatar hates a hajamat of pubic hair, because it leaves her feeling bald, red-yellow-blue with bruises, it’s an every-woman story. The prickly discomfort of shaving; the sharp burns of hair removal creams, and gut ripping pain of a “Brazilian”… we hear you.
The Bengali marriage counsellor suggested she do what the philandering husband desired—shave. She refused; “I won’t; he can if he must.” And he did. Clumsily, unfeelingly, leaving her with bleeding cuts. It wasn’t fiction, only true stories of dozens of women who were interviewed about sexual abuse, gender violence, the guilt of pleasure, and social stigma surrounding their bodies.
The challenge that tackling the stories in a new regional language brings, was in fact, celebrated by Mahabanoo and Chirantana Bhatt’s adaptation, whether through mythological references (it reveals a world of endless layers… like Draupadi’s saree) or cultural suggestions (it plays hide and seek with you, santa kukdi!).
V would have been glad that more than one story on Friday night was a tribute to the female orgasm. She would have been gladder, that the clitoris—bhagn in Gujarati—found at least a mention if not title credit that the yoni has long enjoyed. The pea-sized complex structure houses more than 10,000 nerve endings, making it the top erogenous zone of a woman’s body, and a primary source of sexual pleasure.
Bizarrely, there is a male ego pow-wow story concerning the clitoris that goes like this. Italian anatomist Mateo Realdo Colombo may have discovered it in the 16th century although priest-physician Gabriel Fallopius argued that he had spotted it first. And then in a masterstroke, the medics of the late 19th century declared that the clitoris had no role to play in reproduction, robbing it of its importance in a body that was long believed to be created only for procreation.
The Church was elated. The hymen, a fold of tissue covering the entry to the vagina and named after the Greek God of marriage who died on his wedding night, became the focus. The moral significance of the hymen and its protection until marriage, suited the men. The children borne by the women they married were confirmed as their own.
And just like that, the world forgot that women can, and deserve to, have a right over pleasure.
Mahabanoo and her janana sorority want Gujarat to remember.
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