Reaching for the Sky by Urvashi Sahni

Author:Urvashi Sahni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Christina’s first collage

Self-Knowing Is Self-Creation

We did much reflective discussion around the role-plays and the collages. Our drama provided the girls with a “site” to do the self-work that is needed to “know” the self and “construct” it. This is not a place they had experienced before. They never had the time, the space, or the legitimacy to have a site for self-work. Christina asked me after the first dialogue, “Aunty, why are you talking to us about our lives?” She, along with the others, said this was the first time anyone had cared to talk to them about their lives or their feelings. As Rama writes:

Girls cannot speak to anyone in society. They can’t express their wishes to anyone, because no one cares what girls think or say and no one listens to them.

Kunti, Aarti, Rama, and their classmates used both their imagination and their reason to make fresh sense of their lives. Their initial creative efforts provided them the space and the physical tools to work on themselves and make meaning out of their experiences. Their discussion with their peers and me helped them engage in this self-actualization exercise. They came to understand their homelessness in the world and, more important, to question its injustice. Thus they created a new self in a “series of horizontal selves,”8 questioning and trying to make sense of the position of the previous self, with reference to justice. Freire calls this process a “denunciation,” that is, the naming and analysis of existing structures of oppression, followed by an “annunciation,” or the construction of new structures, forms of relationship, and ways of being in the world.9 Together and individually, the girls felt/imagined/thought while making their collages, using their felt experiences as the subject matter for the knowledge they were creating. In their culture circles, they also found a respectful, willing, and responsive audience who participated in the self-construction effort. They were learning the valuable and empowering lesson that critical feminist pedagogy aims to teach: they could be knowledge creators, not simply knowledge consumers.

Our Play

We worked on a play, Rani Laxmi Bai, for six weeks and finally staged it in a public auditorium. The play is the story of the great Indian hero, Rani (Queen) of Jhansi. She was born in 1835 to a Brahmin family, and at the age of 14 became Rani Laxmi Bai of Jhansi when she married the Raja of Jhansi. She was widowed in 1855. She was an extremely unusual woman, as she grew up trained in sword fighting, horseback riding, and wrestling. She trained all her maids-in-waiting similarly. When she was married, she built and commanded a women’s army, which defended Jhansi against the British. Her most trusted generals were women, and her women’s army fought in the infantry, cavalry, and artillery divisions. The British were stunned to see this women’s army and were awed by the young queen’s prowess. She was one of the main heroes of the first battle for independence in 1857, when she took on the British army almost by herself and died fighting on June 18, 1858.

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