I’m sitting in a large open space with an audience of some 2,000 people. On the stage is performer Maya Krishna Rao. She’s doing her show ‘The Walk’, created in the wake of the massive protests that followed the rape and death of Jyoti Singh Pandey, the young physiotherapy student, in Delhi in 2012.

The screen behind Rao projects her image, larger by several sizes than her person. As she walks and talks, her anger palpable, her grief visible, the strength of her taut, muscular body evident in every deliberate step she takes, there’s not a dry eye in the audience. We’re gripped by an unnameable, and yet all-too-familiar fear, rage, a sort of helplessness.

Many of us are crying for the young woman who was so brutally violated, but we’re also crying for the thousands of women who continue to be thus violated every day of their lives, in their homes, in the streets of the cities, towns, villages where they live. We’re also crying that such a simple thing, such a necessary thing — putting one step in front of the other and walking in a public space — should be so difficult, so impossible, and to be able to do it such an achievement.

I’m reminded of a visit long ago to New York — nothing about that visit has stayed in my mind, except one image, which is etched into my brain. And that is of a long march, of lights and a grim silence breaking up the darkness, and of thousands of women carrying placards saying ‘Take Back the Night’. That was my first exposure to the walk as protest, a way of claiming public space for ourselves, for women, who have traditionally been denied such spaces.

The walk has traditionally been a powerful way of protesting, of demanding change, of laying claim to a space, a geography, of refusing to accept conditionalities about who had legitimate claim to which space. People have walked for water, against violence, for trade union rights, for equitable laws and so much more. Long-distance protest marches — such as the walk undertaken by the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini in 1980 from Rajasthan to Delhi to protest violence against women (in many ways a precursor of Rao’s ‘Walk’) — help to spread awareness of issues along the way, involve locals in discussions.

But the walk is also just a way of getting from one place to another. Why, for women, should it be so full of fear? Many years ago, when I began work in my first job, I’d walk about 10 minutes to the main road to take a bus to work. You would have thought that in the mornings it would not have been so difficult.

And it wasn’t, really, except that one always had to be careful not to be pushed and groped by the stray passer-by, the stray cyclist. I remember waiting at the bus stop one windy day when suddenly a cyclist pedalled past and, before I knew it, he’d snatched the shawl off my back and was gone.

But even that wasn’t particularly bothersome. A shawl is a shawl and someone will wear it and keep warm. Much more difficult was the walking home in the evening, often when it was dark, from the bus stop. Familiar streets suddenly turned hostile, every shadow a threat, every stray car a concern, every catcall something to ignore.

What is it about space that somehow creates a sense of entitlement among some people, and a sense of fear and uncertainty among others? Post lunch in the streets around my office I see men walking around all the time, they’ll stop and chat, drink a cup of chai at the local stall, hang out for a smoke. But I don’t see too many women — some yes, but not as many as we know work in that area.

It’s not only for women that walking is fraught with danger. It’s equally so for the poor, for the domestic workers, for factory and office workers, for petrol pump attendants and so many others who are denied their legitimate claim to public space by those who have the money that allows them to claim a sense of entitlement to that space.

Years ago, I read a novel in which the protagonist, a woman, is ‘disinherited’ of everything she can lay claim to — a home, a family, relationships, friendships: one by one she loses them all. And then, one day, she decides to walk, alone, across her country, claiming the land as her inheritance. She walks, suddenly powerful, and no one dares stop her. Rather like Rao’s multiple protagonists, who go from fear to assertion, from helplessness to agency.

If walking is something that is fraught with danger for women, it is also something that they have, from time to time, used to assert their rights, to demand attention to their concerns. This is what it means to transform fear into power.

What if, on a given day, every woman in India decided she would walk in solidarity with other women? Millions of us across the country. The Women’s Walk.

Urvashi Butalia is an editor, publisher and director of Zubaan

blink@thehindu.co.in

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