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On the Political Uses of Folklore: Performance and Grassroots Feminist Activism in India

This essay explores the use of street theater by grassroots Indian feminist groups to carve out a public forum and to articulate pressing concerns about rape, inheritance law, and women’s representation in popular and historical texts. Focusing on a situated performance of a play titled Women in Search of Their History, I consider the ways that the virangana, an Indian folk heroine type, and the garba, a women’s folk dance, are appropriated and reinterpreted, becoming topics for rhetorical invention. Critical play with these folk forms provides these women with the means to persuasively articulate a feminist message to diverse audience members.