The Gulabi Gang
For the average Indian woman who suffers from patriarchal norm, a crippled justice system, and a dictatorship of no alternatives, the Gulabi Gang is that glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel.
In a country which appears in the news predominantly due to rapes, women have to wield the stick and take on real-life villains themselves. It makes for a rare and emotive story of female empowerment worth spreading.
Known for their stunning pink saris and refusal to shy away from physical confrontation, the Gulabi Gang has become one of the most recognizable movements against gender violence and inequality in India. Active primarily in rural villages in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, the Gulabi Gang is a self-proclaimed “gang for justice”. It does not liken itself to a gang in the traditional sense, and asserts its role as more of a team that fights for equality.
The group did not keep official numbers, but according to the Hindustan Times, in 2014 the group was active in two states - Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh - and claimed around 270,000 members.
The Gulabi Gang cannot and should not be reduced to a gang in the vernacular sense. It uses a variety of nonviolent, direct action tactics, including marches. Members help illiterate women and lower caste people submit applications for government aid and access both civic and literacy education.
However, their willingness to physically confront, beat, and publicly shame oppressors overshadows its nonviolent efforts and has become inextricably linked to the group’s public image. In many ways, this image has led to the global popularity that sets the Gulabi Gang apart from many other contemporary groups. This, along with a combination of forces that inform mediations of activist women, make them the subject of books, documentary films, and various international articles.
However, the Gulabi Gang’s use of violent resistance affects its local, national, and international legibility in a variety of ways. It affects local interactions and political dynamics as well as the broader vocabularies within which the group is understood. Similarly, the Gulabi Gang’s use of violence is not a simple matter of choosing one tactic over another, but is animated by how violence is used in the group’s rural communities to enforce and maintain gender and caste stratification.
Contextualized in a rich history of negotiating the social configuration of women in India, the Gulabi Gang sets a challenge against conventional distinctions between violence and progressive forms of resistance that are privileged in both popular discourses and academic theory. The Gulabi Gang’s use of violence reflects and disrupts systemic patterns of violence as oppressive tools, shedding light on the rhetorical dimensions of violence as well as the limitations of dogged adherence to violence’s rhetorical nature in the name of particular notions of progress.
To this end, one should approach the Gulabi Gang as a counterpublic that used violence to articulate its counter publicity both locally and globally. Here, counterpublicity is primarily defined as the ability to “make possible new forms of gendered or sexual citizenship—meaning active participation in collective world making through publics of sex and gender” and the ability to go public, extending influence with regard to such world making through texts and their circulation. Gender has been a particularly potent rhetorical marker in India’s history. Colonialism, ideas of community, and Indian identity have often been implicitly and explicitly defended and maintained through the articulation of gender against the backdrop of certain social and political practices. Consequently, gender citizenship does not just give meaning to the gendered body, but has the ability to improve communities and even the nation-state in a variety of ways.
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