"Yoni Speak"

Sauma Roy, OutLookIndia

A play on women's sexuality. Is it about empowerment or another socialite
affair?

"Obviously Madras has no vaginas. If Madras has no vaginas it must be full
of assholes." — Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal, director-actress, on "The Vagina Monologues" being
banned in Chennai.

Each side seems to be going for the shock and awe approach, in this latest
battleground in the battle of the sexes.Although Eve Ensler's seminal play "The Vagina Monologues" has experience with
getting equally vehement responses in every direction, it has notched up a
whole lifetime's worth of them in two weeks of its showings in Mumbai and
Delhi. Apart from being banned by the Chennai police, it has drawn packed
houses, celebrity waiting lists, kind of aligned Pooja Bedi and Shiv Sena
moral policeman Pramod Navalkar on the same side, had women up in arms
against the ban and even provoked its first play in male response.

And while responses to the play have been, like George W. Bush's
characterisation of his presidential opponent, John Kerry, on every side of
an issue, the banning of the play has left the Chennai police isolated. The
play, which recounts women's experiences with coming to terms with their
sexuality including being sexually abused, has been performed across the
planet and banned in some countries, including most recently in China
because there is no non-abusive word for vagina in Chinese.

Several Indian film actresses turned down parts in the play. "What would
they tell their parents and producers," says Kaizad Kotwal, the play's
producer. "Here we pretend these things (female sexuality) don't exist and
we don't talk of them," says writer and publisher Urvashi Butalia. In Delhi,
Mody-Kotwal got requests to call the play a V-day celebration instead of
Vagina Monologues, which she turned down. All this, while "music video
models are telling us how to dress and where to invest," says singer Shubha
Mudgal. "It is disgusting the way women's bodies are used in music videos
etc but just because they don't use the word vagina there, they are not
banned."

Women, many of whom have watched the play and found it uplifting, say
banning is an extreme response to a play that clearly identifies itself as
adult fare. "Surely, people don't go to see Vagina Monologues thinking it's
about gardening. They are making a choice in seeing the play and no one has
the right to stop them. There are no taboos in a democracy," says
actress-turned-columnist Pooja Bedi. So adman Alyque Padamsee has taken the
democratic route of directing a male riposte to The Monologues. Complete
with a condom company sponsorship, Padamsee's play will show in Mumbai next
month. His play, the P-Dialogues, will have women and men and will be
dialogues not monologues. Filmmaker Mahesh Manjrekar is also said to be
planning a movie, coincidentally called Vaginal Truths. Although the play
was banned because the Chennai police said it could "disrupt public peace",
writer Shobha De says: "I don't see how blood would have spilled on the
streets if this play was screened."

But banning the play could well be a masterstroke in getting women with
virulently different reactions to the play together. The debate on whether
the play should have been banned are skewed but on reactions to the play,
there are nearly as many views as there are people. Most of the reservations
have come from the use of the word vagina in the title. Before the play
begins, Mody-Kotwal asks the audience to whisper the word, then collectively
say it louder and louder, till they are primed up for the performance.

"Eventually everyone joins in," she says. She does a passage on an aging
Parsi woman's memory of her glory days, others relive their experience with
child birth, sexual abuse; in Bombay, Oscar-winning actress Marisa Tomei
read a piece on her right to wear a short skirt and not be harassed.

Mody-Kotwal and Ensler, who is at the head of the global V-Day (V stands for
victory, Valentine and Vagina) movement that raises money and awareness
against sexual abuse, say the vagina is a medical term and the heart of life
and abuse, so why the shame in saying it. "Why this censorship and
self-censorship on saying what is a part of a woman's body?" asks poetess
Imtiaz Dharker. Sandhya Gokhale of the Forum Against Oppression of Women
says the use of the word vagina publicly starts a dialogue where there is
none. "In the '80s, when we started campaigning against rape, that was a
banned word."

But yelling "vagina" isn't exactly the pinnacle of women's empowerment, say
others. "It has nothing to do with women's empowerment. I would rather have
my mouth talk than parts of my body," asserts De. She thinks using the word
vagina gives the play shock value and publicity but it's just tokenism. Says
Bedi: "It's all okay to watch it in the theatre but it is distasteful to
have a worldwide movement called Vagina Day!" She wrote in her column that
although she liked the play, she thinks brandishing it outside the theatre
is similar to "men scratching their private parts in public". Padamsee has
called his play P-Dialogues to ensure it doesn't offend sensibilities. But
Kotwal says he is "skirting the issue".

And the controversy has brought public spotlight on the kind of event that
is followed by cocktails and seen by page three guests. "It is offensive to
link women's empowerment to this. This is a nice excuse to party, it's not
about a cause," says De. She says if they really wanted to talk about sexual
abuse, the play should have been staged in Mumbai's mega-slum

Dharavi, in Hindi or Marathi. Having svelte women in new-age intellectual's
fashion accessories like thick-framed glasses, like Ensler, read prose
celebrating the Indian woman's comfort with being fat to women who vacillate
between eating nothing and doing the fashionable South Beach diet, may just
be adding to the list of cool things to do. Surely Ensler must not have
collected the experiences of her Mumbai audience, many of whom only
associate with Jane Fonda, who also read excerpts, with her aerobics tapes,
when she wrote in Jadi that Indian women enjoy being fat because some fat is
vital to holding the sari in place.

"A westernised English audience is used to seeing all kinds of things. This
is infotainment for them," Padamsee says. The play will have a different
sensibility if it was taken to a larger audience, he says. And while ladies
who lunch in south Bombay and south Delhi may watch it to push the frontiers
of cool and may redirect the dialogue on abuse, there was Aishwarya Rai at
the showing.