Muddying the Waters

Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism

Richa Nagar

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780252080357, 9780252038792
• eBook ISBN: 9780252096754
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

In Muddying the Waters, Richa Nagar embarks on an eloquent and moving exploration of the promises and pitfalls she has encountered during her two decades of transnational feminist work.

With stories, encounters, and anecdotes as well as methodological reflections, Nagar grapples with the complexity of working through solidarities, responsibility, and ethics while involved in politically engaged scholarship. Experiences that range from the streets of Dar es Salaam to farms and development offices in North India inform discussion of the labor and politics of coauthorship, translation, and genre blending in research and writing that cross multiple--and often difficult--borders. The author links the implicit assumptions, issues, and questions involved with scholarship and political action, and explores the epistemological risks and possibilities of creative research that bring these into intimate dialogue

Daringly self-conscious, Muddying the Waters reveals a politically engaged researcher and writer working to become ""radically vulnerable,"" and the ways in which such radical vulnerability can allow a re-imagining of collaboration that opens up new avenues to collective dreaming and laboring across sociopolitical, geographical, linguistic, and institutional borders.

1. Translated Fragments, Fragmented Translations

	We became deer.
	Grazed forests intelligently.
	Undertook journeys after careful planning.
	Fought wars with martial perfection.
	Applied all our attentiveness
	in understanding issues
	and set aside countless carelessnesses
	for the rare,
	momentary,
	unexpected
	moments of love.
	—Katyayani, “Samajh”

If the politics of alliance making are about making oneself radically vulnerable through trust and critical reflexivity, if they require us to open ourselves to being interrogated and assessed by those to whom we must be accountable, then such politics are also about acknowledging, recognizing, and sharing our most tender and fragile moments, our memories and mistakes in moments of translation, in moments of love. For, it is in the acknowledgment, recognition, and sharing of these moments, memories, and mistakes that we live our trust and faith, and where we often encounter our deepest courage and insights. It is also in these fragile, aching moments that we come to appreciate alliance work as constituted by fragments of journeys—some fully lived, and others abandoned at different stages . . . interrupted passages through which the co-travelers recognize the power of becoming radically vulnerable together. These fragmented journeys are marked as much by opening ourselves up to the risks of becoming wounded, as they are marked by silences and withdrawals, and by returning to forgive and to love—again and again.

In this section, I share excerpts of letters, conversations, poems, and two previously published essays titled “Local and Global” and “Theater of Hopes” from contexts that might seem disjointed on the surface but tell stories that have enabled the arguments I have made in the rest of this book.¹

Patches and Quilts/Betrayals and Bonds

It was in November 2010 that I met Piya Chatterjee for the second time (our first meeting was a brief encounter at a gathering hosted by a colleague in Minnesota almost a decade earlier), at a panel that she co-organized with Amanda Swarr for the Annual Conference of the National Women’s Studies Association in Denver. There, in one of the very last panels on the final day of the conference, we heard each other speak, were moved by the stories and connections that we could hear and sense, but had no immediate openings (time or space) to explore. Later, in a phone conversation, we decided to continue the process of sharing and discussing through letters. Fragments of these letters, alongside excerpts from essays, journals, and poems—some untouched and some revised since they were first written or published—have found their way into this chapter, for they have allowed me to become radically vulnerable through dialogue with a colleague who is grappling with similar entanglements of power, knowledge, and their possibilities and impossibilities.²

Dear Piya,

It’s 3:11 am on the morning of Dec 23rd and I have finally come to terms with the reality that there will be no ideal moment in which I can begin and end this first letter to you. Words will spill only when I selfishly steal time for this writing from difficult memos and emergency emails on faculty matters; from reading promotion and tenure files in Minnesota while remotely organizing a theater workshop in Uttar Pradesh; from trying to grapple with the gravity of complaints from Tarun in Mumbai, my father in Lucknow, and my daughter in Saint Paul that I don’t make enough time for the promises that I have made to them; from the temptation to fix the five-month-old leak in my kitchen ceiling so that I do not have to live in David’s basement for the rest of this dark long Minnesota winter.³

It all sounds so dramatic (living in starkly different worlds at the same time imbues life with a permanently dramatic quality, doesn’t it?), but this writing seems too critical and fragile to postpone or bury under other seemingly urgent worries. After our phone conversation earlier this month, I feel as though I have stumbled on a new ocean of thoughts and memories to work through. I sense an urge to process struggles in my seemingly fragmented journeys as a political, intellectual, and creative being. I feel a need to share stories about feminisms and feminists, about solidarities and betrayals that I haven’t dared to repeat for fear of them being misunderstood. I want to share hard truths without worrying about the possibility that they might rebound when they reach the other side. For me our commitment to talk through letters is a simple act of trust that inspires me to relive and remember, to connect and weave in words so many important pieces of life—and death—that I have not allowed to belong together for myriad reasons.

But along with this urge I also hear echoes of the poem by Adrienne Rich that you shared with me:

When my dreams showed signs

of becoming

politically correct

no unruly images

escaping beyond border

when walking in the street I found my

themes cut out for me

knew what I would not report

for fear of enemies’ usage

then I began to wonder.⁴

Like everything else that we struggle with, this letter writing is also about learning our responsibility as translators, as quilt makers who struggle to patch together that which we want to translate with that which should not or cannot be translated.

But how do we make decisions about what to narrate and what to swallow?

How do we learn to let free those unruly images escaping beyond border without fearing that they might empower our enemies?

How do we facilitate what Spivak terms as “love between the original and its shadow, a love that permits fraying”?⁵

How do we decide which stitch to use for which patch while helping each other to appreciate the broad contours of our stitches—our bittersweet relationships with English, Bangla, Hindi, Urdu, Awadhi, Gujarati, Kiswahili? Some stitches I learned very long ago from my mother and aunts and neighbors, from the women who visited my grandmother every afternoon, and from the teachers in La Martiniere Girls’ School, who dismissed pretty much everything I learned in my home and neighborhood. The remaining stitches I workedout by myself as I recognized the value of discontinuity and dissonance, and grappled with the violence that a desire for harmony often inflicts on the very worlds that are in uncomfortable, even frayed, conversations between the original and the shadow, between all that tears us apart in our many homes and worlds.

It is a hot humid afternoon in August 2010. A team of fifteen saathis, women and men, from the Pisawan block of Sitapur have been working with Tarun, Kamal, Shivam, and me almost around the clock for the last several days to create a play that can encapsulate and advance the struggles of SKMS. Working on creating a script, that is predominantly in Hindi (with some songs and occasional phrases in Awadhi) and memorizing the lines that only four out of eleven actors are in a position to read, has been far from easy. The team is sleep-deprived, soaked in sweat, and still going strong. But the long power outage is becoming trying. We break for lunch. Rajendra has been cooking lovingly for us—he has made khichdi. This is not like the khichdi with equal proportions of rice and dal that I often cook myself or consume at Richa Singh’s home right here in Sitapur. This is a big vessel of rice mixed with less than a cup of dal, and it is served with mustard oil, salt, and hari mirch on the side. As I eat this khichdi, I realize that I won’t eat my next meal with the group later that night because Richa Singh and I plan to work at her home on our book about the Sangathan while the team continues its rehearsals in the office. I worry about the absence of flesh on the bodies of so many saathis who are sitting around me. I recall how so many of them are perpetually running a mild fever that has never been diagnosed. I know that saathis will eat khichdi again for their next meal, maybe with some watery aaloo-tamatar ki sabzi. Richa’s mother will probably cook roti, aloo-pyaz ki sabzi, and bhindi tonight, and there should also be some left over gulgula from this morning. What is the appropriate label for this momentary solidarity of stomachs in which I am participating? A joke? A ritual? A way for middle-class members and supporters of the Sangathan to deal with their own burdens?

Bitoli comes and sits near me as we eat that same khichdi; she talks about this and that, and then abruptly stops and asks me how old I am. I say forty-one. Richa Singh chimes in with her familiar laughter, “And guess what? I am older than her by more than a year!” Bitoli does not smile. She mentions her bony arms and shriveling skin, her disappearing teeth, her sunken eyes, and suddenly the loud, ringing voice of Bitoli that I feel thudding in my own chest rehearsal after rehearsal seems very soft and sad:

“I must be younger than both of you. Do you see a single white hair? Yet, I look older than everyone else here. You know why? Because poor become much older much sooner. Poverty means living a short and hard life.”

Eight years ago, during the writing of Sangtin Yatra, we talked about the importance of every saathi of the Sangathan eating the same food when we were together so that we could begin to break the walls of untouchability that prevented some sawarn saathis from eating food prepared by the dalit saathis. The Sangathan succeeded in achieving this goal. But how does this Sangathan— or any Sangathan—prepare itself to honestly confront Bitoli’s truth without risking its own survival?

On a warm summer night in Lucknow, my six-year-old body is wrapped around Baa’s on her cot, and its loose coir weave is almedical most touching the ground of the enormous aangan of Kothhi Sah ji. With my right leg on her hip and my arm over her side, I snuggle close to Baa’s beautiful, comforting body and ask her hesitatingly, “Baa, can I go to Nani’s house with Maa and Bhaiyya?”

Baa stiffens. Her hand on my back seems hard and cold. She says sternly, “Bhaiyya is glued to your mother. She is still nursing that two-year-old doond. Let them go. You and Babli will stay here with me.⁶ Your Nani’s house has no running water or electricity. You will be without a fan in this heat for a month. There isn’t even a toilet in that broken, clay house. ‘Itli garmi maa bilbilai jasho tyan. Agla waras joyun jashe!’”

Maa never got Baa’s permission to take me to her parents’ house where she grew up. It was the symbol of everything shameful. Filth. Poverty. Possible disease. While Bhaiyya went year after year with Maa to Mathura and thoroughly enjoyed each one of his trips to Nani’s, my first—and last— visit to that house was in 1980. Babli and I had gone with Baa to spend our summer vacation with our grandfather, who was then living in a guest house in Mathura to work on his historical novel, Khanjan Nayan. The three of us stayed in Dadaji’s room for a month, and Nani invited all of us for lunch to her house one day. Once in that prohibited place, my sister and I convinced Baa to let us stay with Nani for a night. That is probably the only time I got away with accomplishing something that was against Baa’s wish without being punished later.

Baa loved me so much she could die for me. But the day after she died in 1985, I was crying with anger. Not only had she gone away, she had also stolen my relationship with my mother forever.

Angrezi ka imtihan. Aur toofani barish. I can no longer tell the difference between the two—the thunderstorm that is drenching Baba and me as he holds his huge black umbrella over our heads, and the deluge of tears that is falling down my face as I try to memorize the “words and meanings” that I will be tested on in my English class.

The Chowk branch of City Mon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About this book
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introducing Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism
• 1. Translated Fragments, Fragmented Translations
• 2. Dar es Salaam: Making Peace with an Abandoned “Field”
• 3. Reflexivity, Positionality, and Languages of Collaboration in Feminist Fieldwork
• 4. Representation, Accountability, and Collaborative Border Crossings: Moving Beyond Positionality
• 5. Traveling and Crossing, Dreaming and Becoming: Journeys after Sangtin Yatra
• 6. Four Truths of Storytelling and Coauthorship in Feminist Alliance Work
• Notes
• Glossary
• References
• Index
• About the book