Mumbai: Yoni ne welcome karva ready chho?

When theatre directorproducer Kaizaad Kotwal dressed in a flaming red shirt and scarlet keds requests the audience gathered at Mahalaxmirsquos G5A Black Box to whisper ldquovaginardquo they follow Louder ldquoVaginardquoBut when actors Kruttika Desai and Swati Das jump off their high stools abandoning the sophisticated monologue format under focused spotlightsmdashgrabbing a dhol in nukkad natak stylemdashurging the audience to enunciate clearly and lyrically the Hindi slang for vagina ldquochrdquo the volumes dip It takes courage to be an audience member of The Vagina Monologues And good fortuneThe widely acclaimed episodic play written originally in English in 1994 by Eve Ensler now preferring to go by the name V has been performed globally by some of the worldrsquos best acting talent including Marisa Tomei in Mumbai in 2004 when Mahabanoo ModyKotwal and Kaizaad of Poor Box Productions managed a coup and got fitness icon Jane Fonda and the Oscarwinning star on the same stage Every year on February 14 womenrsquos rights activists and students organise the staging of various versions of the play in myriad languages almost always going away with stories of sexual abuse survival narrated by the audience members As it happened on Friday evening when a woman declared that she was a survivor of female genital mutilation FGMAlso Read Taking a chance on Khadi 20Mahabanoo ModyKotwal and Girija Oak are part of the cast of the Gujarati adaptationNot confined to remote subSaharan Africa FGM is quietly practiced by a sect of Shia Muslims in India with the women suffering trauma pain humiliation and the risk of infection after being ldquocutrdquo The clitoral hood of underage girls is partially or wholly lopped off with razor blade shard of glass in a ritual called khatna to prevent women from being promiscuous and ldquolustfulrdquo Most survivors have said sex is never pleasurable again Interestingly Indiarsquos successive governments across political parties have chosen to look the other way In 2017 the Ministry of Women and Child Development filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court stating ldquoIt is respectfully submitted that at present there is no official data or study by NCRB etc which supports the existence of FGM in IndiardquoIn an interview to this paper in 2018 Masooma Ranalvi Shabana Diler and Lakshmi Anantnarayan spoke of a survey they conducted among the Dawoodi Bohra community in Gujarat Maharashtra Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh Close to a hundred respondents including men women survivors circumcisers pro and antikhatna voices spoke to reveal that almost 80 per cent of the community in India practices itThe actors at Fridayrsquos theatrical world premiere of the Gujarati adaptation organised in association with the US Consulate and the Rotary Club of Mumbai Nariman Point didnrsquot address FGM but Desairsquos monologue of a girl raped by her uncle at seven convinced of her vaginarsquos troublerousing destiny at 10 choosing to ldquotierdquo it shut and safe with three pairs of underwear a dupatta and a salwar and then discovering a paradise of pleasure during a chance lesbian encounter with a begum was both gut wrenching and evocative A man in the audience laughed The women wrestled with a lump in the throatldquoA cold gun a bottle a broom anything that they could find was stuffed inside merdquo While one monologue spoke of rape as a wartime tactic possibly inspired by a story from Bosnia it brought back flashes of the 2012 Delhi bus gang rape The previous productions in English and Hindi have adapted some of the stories to India As did Mahabanoo this time when she played Mehroo an aged Parsi woman from Cusrow Baug refusing to jog her memories of the ldquomoist dirty cavernrdquo which no one wants to talk about When boyfriend of yore Pesi Pastakia took her for a spin in his Morris Minor and kissed her leading to a ldquofloodrdquo he dropped her like a hot potato The fear of an orgasm and losing another love ensured she shut ldquothe basement bheenu bhoiteryurdquo foreverAnd you didnrsquot have to be a genocide or rape survivor to identify with the stories You had to be simply female When Girija Oak said that her Gujarati wife avatar hates a hajamat of pubic hair because it leaves her feeling bald redyellowblue with bruises itrsquos an everywoman story The prickly discomfort of shaving the sharp burns of hair removal creams and gut ripping pain of a ldquoBrazilianrdquohellip we hear youThe Bengali marriage counsellor suggested she do what the philandering husband desiredmdashshave She refused ldquoI wonrsquot he can if he mustrdquo And he did Clumsily unfeelingly leaving her with bleeding cuts It wasnrsquot fiction only true stories of dozens of women who were interviewed about sexual abuse gender violence the guilt of pleasure and social stigma surrounding their bodiesThe challenge that tackling the stories in a new regional language brings was in fact celebrated by Mahabanoo and Chirantana Bhattrsquos adaptation whether through mythological references it reveals a world of endless layershellip like Draupadirsquos saree or cultural suggestions it plays hide and seek with you santa kukdiV would have been glad that more than one story on Friday night was a tribute to the female orgasm She would have been gladder that the clitorismdashbhagn in Gujaratimdashfound at least a mention if not title credit that the yoni has long enjoyed The peasized complex structure houses more than 10000 nerve endings making it the top erogenous zone of a womanrsquos body and a primary source of sexual pleasureBizarrely there is a male ego powwow story concerning the clitoris that goes like this Italian anatomist Mateo Realdo Colombo may have discovered it in the 16th century although priestphysician Gabriel Fallopius argued that he had spotted it first And then in a masterstroke the medics of the late 19th century declared that the clitoris had no role to play in reproduction robbing it of its importance in a body that was long believed to be created only for procreationThe Church was elated The hymen a fold of tissue covering the entry to the vagina and named after the Greek God of marriage who died on his wedding night became the focus The moral significance of the hymen and its protection until marriage suited the men The children borne by the women they married were confirmed as their ownAnd just like that the world forgot that women can and deserve to have a right over pleasureMahabanoo and her janana sorority want Gujarat to remember