Poster Women II: The Voices Of Rural Women

By JF on Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - 12:02

Zubaan Books' is attempting to give a voice to the rural women through their art work. Payal Dhar finds out more about the Poster Women exhibition that puts together a thread of history through traditional art forms worked on by women in rural areas

A unique exhibition called Poster Women II took to the roads in February-March this year. Titled ‘Painting Our World: Women’s Messages Through Art’, it is an attempt to bring to the foreground the voices of rural women as they use traditional art forms to engage with social issues that concern them in their daily lives. In its first leg, the exhibition travelled to Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore.

“The Poster Women travelling exhibition is an attempt to tell people that rural women have a voice, that they have concerns, they have their own stories to tell,” says Shweta Vachani, coordinator of the Poster Women project. “And our purpose in this has been to bring their voice to the forefront, to make it more public and reach out to a wider audience.”

Poster Women was started in 2006 by Zubaan, a feminist publishing house based in Delhi. It was an attempt to visually map the women’s movement in India through the posters it had produced over the decades. “There are few archives of this kind, and posters and grey literature like pamphlets or booklets or parchas are not considered part of history,” says Vachani. “You don’t record or catalogue them, and so one part of history is completely lost to the movement.”

Zubaan managed to collect about 1,500 posters, which are in the process of being annotated and a Web archive is in the works. But something unprecedented happened during that phase, which was called Poster Women I: “When we were collecting posters,” Vachani says, “some groups sent us scrolls or paintings and other traditional art forms which women were using to send out feminist or social messages, and we realised that these traditional art works are representative of the rural women’s voice, where they were talking about issues that concern them, about women and about the rest of the world.” This was a perspective the posters did not represent, and thus was born Poster Women II.

Women have used traditional arts for generations to tell their stories through paintings, embroidery, weaving and other such crafts. Often, this has been a powerful medium to balance the telling of history, which has largely remained the story of men. The increasing involvement of rural and semi-urban women with progressive movements has led to a growing awareness of social issues among them, and the Poster Women exhibits lucidly document how women have been using folk art and crafts to talk about them.

The travelling exhibition includes Madhubani art, Sujuni embroidery and Khatwa from Bihar—with Madhubani artist Pushpa Kumari touring with the exhibition—Patachitra from Bengal, Phad paintings from Rajasthan, applique and Jogi art from Gujarat, Khovar from Jharkhand, and Gond art from Madhya Pradesh. The exhibits comprise compositions devised by women who have been marginalised and excluded, often illiterate, yet talking of issues that are contemporary in a wider context, including violence against women, dowry, HIV/AIDS, communalism, livelihood rights, mobility, environment, and marriage and domestic work.

A key person involved with Poster Women II has been curator Minhazz Majumdar. She was engaged by Zubaan to source exhibits for the travelling exhibition given her extensive experience as an art scholar working with rural artists. “She knew exactly where to go, where to look, where to tap sources,” says Vachani, “but what I found really unfortunate is that we couldn’t find anything from south India.”

The reason, she feels, is partly to do with how economic imperatives have forced artists to reorient their art to meet the demands of the market. Instead of social messages, they are now focusing on decorative, plant and animal motifs that are popular among Western and urban consumers. “No one would want to sleep on a quilt which has big condoms depicting HIV/AIDS prevention or something on female foeticide,” Vachani adds. “I don’t have a problem with them catering to the market and earning more money. The thing is that they are not able to sell what they traditionally do. That the issues that are relevant to them are not important in the market is very obvious and that is problematic.”

Zubaan’s attempt is to keep Poster Women II alive for as long as they possibly can. They intend to preserve and document the exhibits, and eventually add them to the Web archive. The travelling exhibition continues in late March, going to Jaipur first, and then travelling to Baroda and a few other venues later.

Payal Dhar is an author and freelance writer who flits between Bangalore and Delhi. You can find out more about her at Writeside.net.