This

interview was conducted by Selda Tuncer in Ankara on 22 April 2012 for the Turkish Feminist Journal, AMARGI, and was published in Turkish in AMARGI, No.25, June 2012, pp-13- 20.

Interview with Richa Nagar An Honest Dialogue on Difficult Questions of Feminism Selda: Lets start with, you always say journey, I mean, how did you start this journey in India. Was it a deliberate decision or how it happened to start working in this area? Richa: As I mentioned yesterday, after my work in Tanzania, I had two sets of questions in mind: One was about how one uses academic knowledge and the forms that it takes. Another was about the ways in which I--as a scholar, thinker and a creative writer or creative worker--wanted the knowledge that I produced or co-produced with people to travel back to their places and become meaningful for the people who participated in creating that knowledge. Because of the limitations with the research in Tanzania, and also my institutional location at the time, I couldnt take on those challenges then. For instance, I wanted to publish my research in Gujarati and Kiswahili but it did not count as important intellectual work. At this time, I was beginning my academic career. I also recognized that living and being committed politically in three countries in three continents was not going to be easy. I had strong roots in North India in terms of creative and political work that I wanted to do there. I was also located in the US as a teacher and scholar. And then, there was this work that I had embraced in East Africa and I realized that if I wanted to put all of my energy into building something or in helping constitute solidarities focused on specific struggles, I would have to make some tough choices. It was also around the same time that I began working with non-governmental organizations in India. Between 1996 and 2002, I volunteered my labor in a number of womens organizations including the network for which we (Sangtin Writers) use the pseudonym, NSY, in the book Playing with Fire. The program was sponsored by the government of India. It was initially funded by the Dutch government and in 1995 the World Bank stepped in. I began volunteering for this program in several districts of Uttar Pradesh. Uttar Pradesh is also where I come from, where I have strong roots, and I was committed to writing in Hindi for audiences in Uttar Pradesh (UP). No matter what I did, I knew that I had to be able to write in the Hindi language. Often people from northern research institutions think of UP and Bihar as very hard places, where theres violence, where things are rough, where there is more illiteracy and where things are unsafe for women. But this is where I always wanted to work. Here I should add about NSY that regardless of the attack by the director of NSY Uttar Pradesh in 2004, this organization has in fact enabled a lot of important things for grassroots feminism in rural India. In terms of the political understandings with which this organization
1

was designed, it was unparalleled and quite unique. The earlier work that I did on womens theater in 1998 and 1999 in Budelkhand was also enabled by this program. But as I worked with NSY and other NGOs from 1996 and 2002, I also came to understand about questions of power and difference that marked NSY and many other womens organizations and also the accompanying silences at the national and regional levels. These inequalities and silences are what the sangtins talk about in Playing with Fire: the way that elitism and classism work in the organizations that want to bring about greater equality. This was something that everybody talked about inside the organizations, but there was no formal acknowledgement. It was either seen an inevitable reality, or there was a resistance to acknowledging the centrality of these questions. I was getting frustrated because there were questions I wanted to address but which were very difficult, if not impossible, to openly explore with members of the organizations given the environment and also the interdependencies. If you and I are codependent, chances are that even if we see a problem with the structures we are embedded in, we are not going to say anything about it openly because tomorrow you might seek me as a partner for something, or I might hire you for something; so both of us keep our mouths shut instead of acknowledging the structural, theoretical, or attitudinal problems and related questions of power -- and coming together to address them. This is the time when I met Richa Singh. Off and on, I had spent time in Sitapur. In 1996 when NSY program in Sitapur was just starting, I took the train to Sitapur with my mother and we spent a couple of days there. After that, I ran into Richa Singh at regional meetings of NSY, and she would often complain, You wander around from one organization to another, why dont you come to Sitapur, and I would respond with something like, Id love to come as soon as I have taken care of commitments at other places. One day, around the festival of Holi in March 2002, Richa just came to my parents house and asked how my work was going, and I told her about some of these issues and said, this is very difficult, you cant really ask honest questions because the people who have the power will not listen. And she said, you know, these are the same things that we feel very frustrated about, but nobody counts our work as anything because it is not documented. And then we started talking about the politics of documentation and whether documentation can necessarily measure what happens on the ground, or whether documentation is about primarily about skillful projection of the work by people who have been trained to present the work in impressive ways and in English. Thus, we started talking about the politics of feminist research, of making documentaries, of gender trainings, etc. That is when she said, you have to come to Sitapur and we will talk with all the women together and see where this conversation can take us. So I went to Sitapur and we initiated a dialogue about the politics of documentation and gender training and about the unspoken hierarchies that were always present but not dealt with. We continued the discussion through letters and several months later in December, when we met again, the members of NSY-Sitapur who had founded Sangtin said, we dont have any experience
2

working politically with life histories. We do collect life histories of women in the villages, but can you help us work with them in a way that we can think about our future work? Thats when we spent nine days together continuously and figured out how we should collectively reflect on our journeys and write about them. In that group of nine women, some of us could write easily and some couldnt write easily. Some thought primarily in Awadhi and for some Hindi was easier. So even in that intimate a group, you found very different ways of connecting with pen and paper, feelings and thoughts. Thats how the journey started. Selda: In most of your work, also in Playing with Fire, your critique indicates the rigidity of how empowerment gets defined in the world of donor-driven NGOs. Your critique also implies the necessity for producing verifiable and measurable definitions and evidence of empowerment. After all this experience and knowledge, how would you redefine the notion of empowerment? Richa: As I said, I think in response to a question yesterday, empowerment can only happen through dialogue. The possibility of generating certain kinds of conversations that have been foreclosed can itself generate new meanings of empowerment. This kind of empowerment cannot be predefined by an organization or a set of leaders. Im not talking about just some NGOs, but anywhere, in any context. For example, in the context of a classroom, if you come in and announce that Im a feminist teacher, and by the end of this course, you need to become this and this and then I will call you an empowered student. Even if the student becomes what the teacher wants, that will still be an imposition of the teachers idea. That is why, in Playing with Fire, we talk about everybody being a teacher and a learner. If all of us, as a collective of women coming together from different locations and experiences could share, analyze and interpret our insights while having a set of shared goals and commitments, then that collective process of knowledge making could also allow us to recognize what we need to learn, and what we need to unlearn. It is only then that we could start dreaming together, and building a vision together. Yesterday, in the morning session, the friend from the theater group said, we dont care about whether there is a play in the end; it is the process that matters. Sangtin Yatra has been very similar to that for us; empowerment is the process through which we build a community where everybody teaches and everybody learns, and where we understand knowledge as collective sharing of ideas and making of visions and dreams through difficult dialogues. Also, in this process, we can no longer say that this is yours and this is mine, as everything becomes a sort of unified, blended vision that is also respectful of our individual journeys. That process is where empowerment emerges from. In the SANGTIN KISAAN MAZDOOR SANGATHAN or SKMS (Sangtin Farmers and Workers Organization), there is a young Dalit man called Tama who cannot see, and another young man who is living with polio, also Dalit, whose name is Kamlesh. When you consider the enormous energies that they and others, coming from extremely marginalized locations, pour into the movement, you ask: Why do they give so
3

much of their souls to this work? Its not like there is a promise of better access to health care, or of their children receiving better education, or that they will get clean water or a meal at the end of the day because of the movement work. None of these material gains can be guaranteed for any of them, but they still feel empowered. Why? Because together they have been able to change something in the social relations of the community: In terms of the way that the development officers treat the rural poor, in the ways that the people demand accountability from the government, in the ways in which questions of casteism, untouchability, and gender oppression have been politicized in the 60 or 70 villages that are part of the movement. So empowerment is happening not because it is already predefined as a goal. It is because of the relationships and collectives that are emerging in the movement, and the new possibilities, dreams and energies that the process of movement building is making possible. Selda: In your work, you consider donor-driven NGOs as a certain form of globalization process. In that sense, one of your main critiques is that there is a gradual distancing from the idea of social change, or structural change, in their agenda. In your conversation with Saraswati Raju, she says about related processes of globalization that people try to adapt rather than changing things, because globalization is no longer an option, but a fact. They cannot escape, for instance, from professionalization; they can only deal with it. What is your opinion about this, is it really like this? Are there spaces or possibilities that womens NGOs might have to reinforce or create more empowering changes? Richa: I think Saraswati and I come from different positions in this dialogue; also, this piece was written prior to the beginning of Sangtin Yatra. Another thing: even though in some of my work I discuss NGOs and social movements as separate things, it is actually a very difficult distinction to make because at least in the context that I work in, many times a registered organization and a movement on the ground are co-constitutive they support and enable each other. In the case of SKMS, for instance, there is still a registered body called Sangtin, which the people founded as an NGO, but the movement on the ground calls itself Sangtin Kisaan Mazdoor Sangathan. When funds are needed for certain kinds of initiatives, for instance, for political theater, or for visits by the people from the movement to other movements, Sangtin is the body that receives funds from supporters, which in turn, enables the movement to undertake those initiatives. If one starts looking at these things with fixed lenses, that NGOs are bad and social movements are good, then we cant really get to the complex ways in which movements are negotiating their relationships with funded activities. And there are also NGOs that are able to get funds on their own terms. So, blanketing all NGOs as donor-driven and limited in political scope can be dangerous, but generally speaking, if donors drive the projects, then the goal of the organization becomes primarily focused on sustaining itself (its office, salaried staff members, phone and internet etc.) rather than focusing primarily on the priorities that are emerging from the ordinary everyday spaces and lives. So, I think what Saraswati is saying in that piece is that NGOs are
4

not going to disappear. When the welfare state has given up its responsibilities and NGOs have become the vehicle through which governments function, then we have to engage with NGOs. At the same time, it is important for us to be able to demand accountability from NGOs and for social movements to keep their priorities alive so that people are working on what is being articulated on the ground, rather than on something for which funds are available. Selda: Actually I totally agree with you but also this means that, in the first place, for pushing and criticizing NGOs, as you said, we need strong social movements. While womens NGOs were so influential and determining this field, what would be the role of independent small women groups and how can they influence these processes? In that sense, how we, as feminists, should and need to engage with womens NGOs and how can we put our critiques into practice? Richa: I will begin with your second question. I believe that feminists need to understand the dangers of institutionalization and individual celebrity and reward structures. Even though I talked about these things in the context of academia yesterday, the same is also true of NGOs. True collaboration and true dialogue across difficult borders can help us identify the parallels between feminist organizing and the academy in the context of professionalization that is, the professionalization of feminism through the academy and the professionalization of feminist activism through the NGOs. When we do this, then we can understand the interlinked structural processes that are at work. Many times feminist academics end up providing their own critiques about these issues and the NGO-based feminists provide their own critiques about the same issues, but the conversations remain separate and there is no dialogue. We need to find ways to bring the conversations back together because only then we can identify and challenge the interlinked structures. This connects with the politics of knowledge production: What kind of knowledges can be constituted then we become aware of the structural constraints that are operating in interrelated spheres that are shaping the various global discourses of feminism? I will also say that the same is applicable to the context of social movements. There are no pure spaces in our world that are not suffering from contradictions generated by professionalization and from our own locations with respect to consumerism and capitalist structures whether it is academia, social movements, or the spaces of artistic work. We need to map them together and see what collective strategies can evolve. And that is why I continue to believe in collaboration. It is not that collaboration is an answer to everything, but it is an important way available to us for analyzing the politics of power and difference in diverse locations and for producing more effective critical analyzes and interventions. Here, I also want to mention the politics of individual desires -- how we as individuals relate to the market in terms of what we desire to eat, how we want to live, what kinds of jobs and futures we want for our children, what kind of homes we want to live in. We live in a world where we have to understand the politics of these desires and work through our own contradictions. And all of these aspects go back to self-reflexivity and interrogation. In SKMS, we use the Hindi word,
5

ATMAMANTHAN for such self reflection. Atmamanthan means the searching of ones own soul. So what I am arguing is that we must interrogate ourselves individually and collectively at multiple levels. Such interrogation or soul searching cannot focus just on NGOs or just on the academy and it cannot leave out the arts or the political movements. With respect to what you said about NGOs being so powerful I think that will have to be seen context by context. For example, in the Indian context, there are some NGOs that work closely with the state and others which do not and there are also important debates about whether fighting for fair implementation of state policies, for example, should be seen as a reformist exercise or it is really about imagining interventions that can help us to change the structures. Similarly, there are questions about whether and how to engage with rights framework and with questions of cultural identities and the struggles of the poor and indigenous people for land, water, clean air, and forests, We need to understand how both social movements and NGOs are working on these questions, how they are theorizing these issues, and we need to grapple with how we can productively participate in and help to build alliances between NGOs and movements that are working on overlapping agendas with similar political commitments. Far from an analytical separation of NGO sector from the movements, or of the academic sector from the arts, we need an active politics of alliance building that is focused on formulation of critical political strategies from multiple sites and that is committed to difficult dialogues on an ongoing basis within and across all of these sites. Selda: I want to continue the discussion from another angle. So, another important concept that you emphasized is transnational feminist practice. Your work seems to suggest this as a solution by combining different types of knowledge, skills, and different fields; of course not in the sense that it has to be like this or this is only way etc. Can you tell some about the ways and conditions of this? In what sense do you use this concept? Richa: I get worried about labels; for example, the distinction between post-colonial feminism and transnational feminism. Or when I was asked yesterday whether the concept of empowerment should be replaced, I said no, it is about what the work around empowerment enables. If empowerment is imposed from above it fails, but if it is an ongoing commitment to dialogue with questions of power and difference and trying to create new visions on the basis of that dialogue, then empowerment works. Similarly, engagement with post-colonial critique is a must. Grappling with the critique of power and representation in knowledge making and the circulation of knowledge is essential for all of us who want to think about social and political justice. Women of colour feminisms have also talked about some of the same things that postcolonial and transnational feminists have been committed to. So, to me, the possibilities associated with a label are about what is in the label. I might call something transnational but also be in complete disagreement with other people who deploy the label of transnationalism. Correct? So the challenge, as I see it, is to have a continuous struggle with questions of power, privilege, voice and authority in the intellectual work that we do, but at the same time grappling with how to bring these
6

insights into a dynamic politics of alliance and solidarity work. This is also where our academic theories do not go far enough. We ask a lot of important questions but do not struggle enough with what political engagement with those questions might look like. We do not often ask what it means to mobilize academic insights in ways that they can converse with insights emerging from spaces that are not purely academic. As a result, knowledges and struggles from the ground and from the academy do not come together to define concrete politics and to formulate critical forms of feminist solidarities and alliances. The questions are: How does one negotiate these politics of difference, and work through their ongoing ups and downs? How does one learn to dream as part of a collective? How do we articulate solidarities? Also, we need to remember that whatever works today for any collective may not work tomorrow. In this kind of dynamic context, how do we continue asking hard questions without giving up our responsibility and our sense of accountability? It is not just about the academic being accountable to non-academic. It is about everybody in the collective, everybody in the alliance, learning to be accountable to each other as well as learning to be accountable to the struggle that we represent. So it is very complex politics of accountability and responsibility. I also think it goes back to the contradictions I discussed before. All of us are participating in systems of violence, even as we want to challenge and overthrow some of the same structures of violence. So the politics of accountability and responsibility imply a deep commitment to continuously questioning how we are ourselves implicated in the same structures of violence we also want to fight against. Selda: Can you give some examples from your own experiences as an activist and especially a feminist scholar, at a practical level? Richa: I struggle a lot with what it means for me as a US-based academic, with research funds and a monthly pay check that is many times more than what any one in my family or anyone in the movement makes, and what does it mean to have the privilege to travel back and forth between many worlds to carry out the work that I want to do. This is where the generosity of the Sangtin Writers collective was amazing because we could openly talk about the salaries that each of us made, and the bank accounts we had or did not have, in a context where there are members of the movement who dont have a roof on their heads or who do not have toilets or running water in their homes. So we talked about these differences, but in these same moments members of the collective also gave examples of other kinds of gaps that separated them. For example, Richa Singh would reflect on what it means for her to be created as a star of the movement by the media even though we believe that SKMS is an anti-hierarchal and leaderless movement. Similarly at the time of elections, some members of the movement get approached by the political parties to run for elections. So my sangtins (or comrades) would often help me see that the issues are not just about me and my American salary, they are about how we all are acquiring and negotiating the power and attention we receive as parts of the movement. So what is amazing about what we have been able to build in SKMS with a lot of tears and painful dialogues is the fact that everybody is able to ask these questions of themselves, and of each other. So collectively, we have been
7

able to complicate the violent structures of power that we are inserted in and from there we are able to continue the work of dreaming and building together. We do this by asking questions, by making ourselves uncomfortable, by pushing each other to be accountable, and by continuing to respect and nurture the trust that comes only from struggling with the hardest questions. Selda: At this point, I want to ask about the notion of responsibility which you emphasized in the last question and also in most of your work, I dont think it is arbitrary or something like that; it becomes especially important in the context of global feminist solidarity and womens transnational struggle. As far as I remember, you also indicate this kind of context at the end of your book, Playing with Fire. I am recently thinking about responsibility, if it can be a political principle or tool and I feel that we as feminists need to think more about responsibility politically. What is your opinion about it, what would it bring us politically? Richa: If power is perpetually present and if the politics of difference are what we have to negotiate all the time; then we are not talking about resolving things. Power is present even in dialogue. But at the same time I do believe that if a critique of power happens only at the level of a fixed critique and does not become part of evolving dialogues with people whom we are representing, whom we think we are in struggle with, then it means we are not exercising our responsibility. I think the responsibility of an intellectual, the responsibility of a political being, the responsibility of a creative artist is to continuously grapple with these hard questions, but not in an isolated way, and not in a vacuum. If one believes in solidarity, that necessitates an engagement with questions of translation, however inadequate those translations might be. The ideas and visions have to be able to travel, be critiqued and revised, and become meaningful, and again subjected to critique, in different locations. And, of course, this means that grappling with power will always have to be there. But it is only through the messy politics of representation and translation and dealing with power in the process that we enable possibilities of creativity and for honest relationships which allow for emergence of more refined political understandings. So I think what I am articulating as a responsibility involves a responsibility to participate in dialogue, a responsibility to learn to dream collectively, and a responsibility to translate. At the same time, these responsibilities mean that we have to be continuously aware of what each of these things enable or foreclose and also that those of us with more power and more privilege will have to criticize ourselves more. Selda: Thats the responsibility I meant and believe in. And we come to the last question. I guess the second book of Sangtin is coming out. What will it be about actually? Can we read it later? Are there any plans for the translation? Richa: The new Hindi book, Ek Aur Neemsaar, came out in January 2012. The book tells the story of the making of the SANGTIN KISAAN MAZDOOR SANGATHAN from 2004 to 2011. The first part of the book is a kind of deliberately constructed diary of the movement as well as
8

its analysis. It looks at various campaigns as well as the questions the movement has struggled with, and also the issues that the movement cannot resolve. This is the first part. The second part has three chapters: One is about continuing to think about humiliations and past and presents. How do you bring these conversations in an ongoing movement so that the past of humiliations and injuries that people bring to the movement are present in a movements analysis and vision? So it is not just about the campaign that the movement is focusing on, but also a commitment of continued engagement with the politics of difference. And there, we also articulate the relationship between voice and silence. Another chapter is on problematizing the dominant meanings of fieldwork. What does it mean for a pundit (scholar) to form an alliance with a boat person (labourer). We start with a story about the boat person and the scholar who are travelling on the boat together. The scholar demeans the boat person because the boat person doesnt know about Marxism, capitalism, or feminism, but then suddenly the boat starts drowning and the boatman says to the scholar, well you know everything, so now you swim, but the scholar cannot swim. So the question is why didnt the boatman try to save the scholar? This is an opening question which then moves into the politics of fieldwork and expertise. Another chapter focuses on what constitutes feminism, what is a womens issue, and what is a feminist movement. Then we share some lessons and stories from the movements journey. Finally, we have a play which articulates how the movement sees different forms of violence as constituting one another and the need for people from privileged and marginalized locations to come together in the struggle against multiple and interlinked forms of violence. I am asking myself hard questions about translating the book into English at the moment but maybe being in Turkey will give me some answers. I was talking to Aksu and Tennur yesterday and they were also agreeing with me that translation is a very problematic thing but they also said that sometimes this is the only way we can talk to each other across contexts. So I will continue to think about it more.