Those of you who are regular visitors to the Asia Society probably know that this is the fourth lecture in what is a new, important, timely series called the Citigroup Series on Asian Women Leaders. This new series focuses on the vital role that women are playing in Asia and features leading social activists, policymakers, community leaders from Asia and the U.S. For me, it gives me great pleasure on behalf of the Asia Society to thank Citigroup for their support of this exciting program, and for giving us the opportunity to feature prominent leaders like tonight's speaker, Mallika Sarabhai. I especially want to thank Victor Menezes, Chip Raymond and Bill Ferguson for their support of the Asia Society and of this work in particular. They are not here, but I would like for you to carry our grateful thanks. But before I introduce Mallika this evening, I would like to invite Pamela Flaherty to say a few words. Pamela, please.

PAMELA FLAHERTY
Clearly I am honored to be here, to hear someone as distinguished as our speaker tonight. Citigroup has been doing business in Asia for over a hundred years. We in fact celebrated our hundredth year just last year, and in fact have had a long and productive and wonderful relationship with the Asia Society, so this just seemed a perfect marriage to do this. And as I was thinking about this evening and the series and reflecting on the world that we live in, which in many ways is a pretty frightening and challenging place these days, it seems to me that nothing can be more important than reaching out and helping each other to understand different societies, people of different ethnicities and races and cultures and religions, to learn about them and learn to live together in the pluralistic world that is the one that we have today.

The other thought that struck me is that it has occurred to development economists that you cannot have economic development in an advanced country without the full participation of women. This sounds like a stunning event; it's a little hard to imagine that it took fifty years to realize, but in fact this has been their recent "Aha!" The light bulb has gone off, and in fact, nothing could be more important than to recognize that this in fact has been going on for centuries and there really truly are women leaders who are making an incredible difference in their countries and around the world. And I just want to thank the Asia Society and one of these women leaders for being here tonight. Thank you.

GOWHER RIZVI
Thank you so much, Pamela. As I said earlier, because if one admires Mallika as much as I do, it is really very difficult - as I was coming up, to thinking how I would introduce Mallika today. And without exaggerating, I would say that one almost felt, how does one add color to a rainbow? How can one say anything more about so much that she has achieved in her youthful life - is quite extraordinary, quite amazing. But nonetheless, let me try and say a few things.

Mallika is going to speak today on Arts for Social Change: Building Awareness for Action. And most of you will have seen from here a biographical note which has been circulated. She is one of the most remarkable, multi-talented, versatile persons that at least I have had the privilege of knowing. Mallika has starred in numerous films, and has conceived and choreographed several international productions. She applies her talent in the arts well beyond entertainment, and confronts and comments on critical social challenges, including violence and discrimination against women, ethnic conflict, AIDS, and health care issues. She has passionately believed that art is the mirror of society, and must present and reflect social realities. And not surprisingly, when she speaks, you will hear her speak on efforts to claim art as a developmental tool for communications, education, and social action.

It was a part of this commitment which led Mallika to found the Center for Nonviolence through Art, a learning hub for artists to meet and share ideas about how to curb violence that went on, for development, and a center that creates and develops performing art modules for development issues.

As many of you know, last year India went through a particularly difficult period in Gujarat, with widespread sectarian violence. And sadly for most of us, who were not in India then, we only heard about the grisly carnage, which of course was grisly and horrible. But I think what of us did not hear of extraordinarily brave human beings who stood up and braved their lives to speak up and oppose the grisly things that were happening? And foremost amongst them, and I say this without any exaggeration, was Mallika. She stood up; she mobilized her organization, her friends, against enormous odds and personal risk, she bravely came out and supported those who had been affected by the violence. So Mallika, in introducing you, it also gives me an opportunity to thank you and salute you for the wonderful work you did in upholding the cause of tolerance, of pluralism, of free speech. And I do not exaggerate in saying that the great country that India is, and all the wonderful things that happen in India are in large part due to people like Mallika and her friends. So Mallika, with these words, I'd like to invite you to come up to the stage. Please welcome Mallika.

MALLIKA SARABHAI
I'm not sure I deserved that!

One of the clearest memories that stays with me, often through trying times when I feel that nothing that we can do as individuals can stem the tide of horror that seems to be engulfing us, is an event that happened soon after I came out of what was a significant period of my life. It was working with the director Peter Brook for five years, and coming out a fairly changed person, but knowing that my art and activism couldn't be two separate channels; they had to be one.

I was performing in England a piece I had developed. It was a one-woman show, called "Shakti: the Power of Women" and we were performing in a parish church in Duddeston. Now, some of you might know that Duddeston, in the outskirts of Birmingham, was the site of one of the worst race riots in recent history in Britain. But it also is a place where very early immigrants from the Punjab in India migrated. I received a phone call from the parish priest saying "I believe you are doing this piece, and we have a very serious problem of young Punjabi girls going into prostitution, just to get some kind of freedom from very conventional households. So could you come and perform here?" We went to perform, and in the front row of this very makeshift performance area in the church sat a woman dressed in a beautiful Indian sari, who didn't look like somebody who was an Indian living in Britain. And I watched her as I performed, and she was completely concentrated. At the end of the show, she walked up to me, and she pushed back her hair, and there was this huge scar running down, just under the hairline. And she said, "I live in Hyderabad. And for ten years, my husband has tortured me. And I kept thinking that it was my duty as a Hindu wife to put up with whatever happened. And then three months ago, he took a hatchet and he tried to chop the top of my head off. And I have friends in England who had left an open ticket with me, that when it finally gets to be too much, to use the ticket and come to us. So I have come here. But every single day, I have been thinking, 'I have failed as an Indian wife. I have failed as a Hindu wife.' But seeing your show today, I realize what a fool I've been. And thank you, because I think I need to go back to India, and tell other women not to make the same mistake that I have made."

Six months later, the British Council was touring the same show in India and I was in Bangalore outside the British Consul office, and I suddenly hear, "Mallika!" from across the street. And I turn around, and there she is. And with her is a busload of women, whom she has driven from Hyderabad to Bangalore, all abused wives, that she thought I could convince.

And so, when I feel very depressed, when I think, "how can one break through so many barriers?" I see this woman pushing her hair back. And so much comes back, and so much of the pessimism disappears.

Many people think that using the arts for activism is sort of a new invention, but in fact if you look at the history of the arts, especially in India but I think everywhere, arts were connected to moral and religious education because at some stage in the development of humanity, religion and ethics were the center of life. And so the arts were entrusted with that which was the most significant and necessary to be taught.

If you look at the Indian arts - Indian classical arts, Indian folk arts - all of them talk about this search for the spiritual. The search for something outside. And through dance, sculpture, music, theater, teach values. Somewhere the world changed, and religion became a smaller and smaller part of daily living, but the arts seem to get stuck with what they were talking about. And at some stage, and I think to me it must be fairly recent, they became not the bread and butter of living, but only the icing on the cake. And in doing so, we seem to have fallen into a loss of one of our most incisive tools of communication. If today we are in the state we are in after fifty years of concentrated development, and the entire rich world thinking of welfare states, how to make things better for people, how to get stuff across to the less privileged, and we find ourselves in a state where there's more hatred, more divisiveness, probably more poverty, probably more illness, a greater number of people dying of very easily solvable -and more people going to war, then surely somewhere we've missed the path. What we thought of as educating, and what we thought of as developing, are perhaps not where we want to be. And perhaps we need to change the prism and say, "Where is it, and what is it that we want to get to? What is this development that we need to get to?" And I think most people will agree that perhaps humaneness is what we need to first reach before getting anywhere further. And what seems to be lacking is this humaneness, and a language of humaneness.

I remember as a child - my mother and my father came from two different parts of India, so when we were being brought up, the only language they spoke in common was English. And my mother was learning our regional language, Gujarat, when my brother and I were first going to school. She had a teacher who used to make her read the newspapers. She started reading in the Gujarati newspapers, of young girls, in a region called Saurashtra, in Gujarat, where all the beautiful embroidery comes from, throwing themselves into the well. And she couldn't figure this out. So getting interested in this, she started talking to friends, and she found that these were women who were desperately unhappy in their marriages, and seeing no way out of the marriages, decided to commit suicide. And the only means available for them to commit suicide was to jump into the well. And she created a dance piece around this called "Memory is a Ragged Fragment of Eternity." And in 1963 she performed it for the then-Prime Minister of India, Pandejavala Nehru, in Delhi. And she has often talked to me about this, of how Pandeji came to her after the performance and said, "Manal, what are you talking about?" And that was how the first inquiry into what is today called "Dowry Deaths" took place. It was because the Prime Minister saw a dance performance about women killing themselves out of unhappiness.

As I was growing up in the academy that was founded by my mother, I saw a lot of the individual artists trying in one fashion or another to use the arts in a way that communicated ideas rather than entertainment. In the '60's, India was often at war with China, or certainly, the threat of war was there. And I remember going on trucks in to the villages with extremely well knit folk theater to talk of the war effort and the need to mobilize resources. And I used to sit and watch the interaction of the folk theater artists with the audience, and how they would go to the villages two or three hours before the performance. They would chat various people up. They would find out exactly what was happening in the villages and would knit all this into the performance so that each performance, though the essential plot was the same, and the essential message was the same, each performance became localized. And the people thought, "oh gosh! This is all about us." And there was this instant rapport that was built.

My personal immediacy with this came when I was doing the Mahabharata. And in one of the early performances in France, when I was very unsure of what I was doing - it was a twelve-hour performance, it was in French - I was just beginning to learn French. My constant worry was, if I forget something, what do I ad-lib in? And then I decided it was probably safe to ad-lib in any Indian language. So that reassured me somewhat. But I remember distinctly we were doing the previews, which were primarily for students. It was just before midnight, I was taking a subway at the Gar du Nord, and there were two young, sound of very "miniskirted" girls on the other side of the platform, who yelled at me and said "Madame Draupadi!" And I sort of looked and I said "Madame Draupadi …" and they came up to me and they said, "you know, we don't believe in feminism. We believe it's all a load of nonsense. But you know, your character, why doesn't feminism talk of women like that? Now that woman we'd like to be like!" and I thought, that's extraordinary. One character, in semi-broken French, and two very hip girls feel this.

Over the next five years, performing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I remembered tough women from Harlem coming and stopping me and saying, "You got it there." Going into aboriginal areas in Australia and aboriginal women stopping me and saying, "we want to talk about this." Seeing young Indian-American girls coming up to me and saying, "How come our mothers don't give us this kind of a role model? Why do they always talk of Sita?" and coming out of this saying, surely, this is a way of cutting through a lot of things and getting inside people.

So when I went back after the Mahabharata in the early '90's, I felt very strongly that all these individual efforts needed to be put together into a concerted program that could work at several different levels. One was, of course, the performance level. But another had to be a grassroots level, where a performance performed wherever, not in a theater but wherever, could be linked and followed up with interaction, so that one had to train a cadet of people who were both actors and activists, who could take something dressed as a performance, make a performance that people wanted to see, that wasn't boring or tedious, that gripped people, and still raised questions that they could then follow up with these people, in answering the questions and exploring the questions further, and whatever. And we set out trying to get funds. And everywhere we went, we were told: "We don't really finance song-and-dance numbers." I remember desperately trying to explain that if they could fund posters, then they were not funding printing. They didn't say, "we don't fund printing." They thought that was fine as development communication. But the minute you talked of using theater or dance, because of what we have made theater and dance over the last 100, 150 years, it was immediately treated as something entertaining, dispensable, and a song-and-dance number.

So at our academy we decided that if nobody was willing to do this, if nobody was willing to back us enough for us to build up a track record that we could take to people and show them, then we would have to do it ourselves. And we started working with small groups that we financed out of our other performance income. And one of the first projects that we started on was working with a group of tribal villagers in Northern Gujarat. Now, the word "tribal" has an odd connotation in English, but when in India we say "tribal population" we are talking about the autonomous peoples. Pre- everything we know of as India, pre-Hindu, certainly. But still very prone to superstition, still in many cases extremely patriarchal, still communities where regularly if someone's cow dies, the witch doctor is called in and will name one woman - never a man - one woman as being a witch and she would either be stoned or she would be burned, or as in a recent case two years ago, her husband would be asked to take two slabs of stone and crush her head with it, so that the cow could live. We decided this is the society we wanted to try something in. So we went around the villages, and we said, "We are looking for people who have some kinds of skills in dancing, whatever tradition - singing, playing an instrument, anything. And who wants to join us for a few months and see if we can do something different?"And we got together a group of twelve people, six men and six women, from as many different autonomous groups. What was an interesting challenge, on top of everything we had expected, is that many of these different autonomous groups had blood feuds with each other. So technically, someone in the mixed group couldn't go into half the villages, because if they found out that it was someone from another autonomous group, the blood feud was on.

And we started working with them, first by asking them to tell us their stories, their myths, then slowly telling them about what we wanted to do, saying, would they partner us in taking these issues back to the people, then having them perform for us, then saying, "how do we change this into something that gives the truth, rather than a myth which just condones bad behavior?" It was a fascinating process, because in many cases we had to balance between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Because if the entire thing was familiar, then people were not interested in seeing it. If it was entirely unfamiliar, they would say, "this is something the city people do - it has nothing to do with us." So we - for instance, we would say to them, "What are the main issues just now in your village?" and one of the first ones that came about was alcoholism. And then we would sit them down and we would say, "what are your myths about alcoholism? Do you have myths?" or "When do people drink?" or "Do you have a god that gets drunk?" or "Do you have epic characters that get drunk?" And we would get all these stories. And then we would rework them, so that it would begin in a very familiar and comforting way, but at some stage would suddenly change. We also started trying to put in something different visually which would be exciting for the kind of public that was going to see it. So it was an interesting mixing of the old and the new, technology-wise, visual impact-wise, and thematically.

Simultaneously, this group was trained to interview people, to give information, to find out and be able to impart correct information, on simple things, like childbirth. UNICEF has these horrendous figures that seventy percent of maternal mortality in India could be stopped if the blade with which the umbilical cord is cut is new. It costs two rupis (three cents). Information is not there, therefore it's not there. So we started giving them this kind of information.

We also had to be very careful not to alienate the men of the village. Because otherwise it was going to be a no-no right from the beginning. So we decided that though our main aim was to empower the women, we had to get the men and the village elders on our side, so that they saw the process that the women formed as an integral part of the change for betterment of the entire village. So rather than go directly into anything like family planning or personal hygiene, we started with things like alcoholism, like the issue of witchcraft, which had a general impact on the whole village. And we would go in and first of all try and see if the head man - this was before India's legislation that brought in a lot of head women - this was still "head man" time, ten years ago - that the head man didn't feel threatened. That the witch doctor didn't feel threatened. Because otherwise the witch doctor could immediately threaten, or make people feel threatened, by saying "I will jynx anybody who goes to see this performance." So the group would go in, they would chat people up. We had selected thirty villages that we had decided to work with continuously over time, with repeated interventions. And there was some sort of amazing episodes - like when we were doing the play on alcoholism - when all the village elders were totally drunk during the performance. And one of them - one of the witch doctors -sort of kept meandering through the performance area, and saying "Get out of my village!" And the tribal group had to learn how to handle this.

The process was such that by the end of the first two years, the group itself was so empowered, that one evening they were performing somewhere and heard that in another tribal village, a hundred kilometers away, a village that they had never been to, and they had nothing to do with, a woman was going to be tied - because she had been deemed a witch - was going to be tied upside-down on a tree and made to prove her innocence by being dipped in boiling oil. And if she came out unscathed, it would prove that she was not a witch. None of us were there, but the group decided - and took the initiative - to get into the bus, drive the 100 kilometers overnight, and start drumming and singing in the early morning. In India, you can be in an empty land and you start drumming and within five minutes you have like 2,000 people there. So suddenly people started collecting, and they were singing sort of very happy songs; people gathered, and slowly they started the story. This deadly silence descended on this village. And they went on lengthening the story and bringing in arguments and so on and so forth, until three hours through this, the witch doctor came and he said, "Stop! I want to stop this performance. What do you have against me?" And they said, "We have nothing against you! You are somebody who has an incredible amount of knowledge. You know so much about the herbs and so on. It's not necessary to have to blame somebody for something." And they took him through this thing of how his knowledge was very important, but that he didn't have to show his power by witchcraft or witchery or any of this, till five hours through the discussion he wanted to join the group. So he did join the group. And for the next seven years was part of this group.

So our work on one side went into this sort of very, very basic working with tribal communities, slum children in schools … we did a very interesting project with the municipal corporation in Ahmedabad. Ahmedabad is a city of five million people, and like most municipal corporations, our municipality is always broke. I believe New York is too. And they never had money to do anything. We have a system of what we call municipal schools. And they really are seen as - and probably are - the bottom of the bottom. So anybody who can afford to take their kids out of the municipal schools will do so. Which means that really it is the most underprivileged who go to these schools. So we decided that we wanted to do a three-year project with these schoolchildren, trying to make them into environmental activists. Because these are the kids who live in the dirtiest areas, who drink the dirtiest waters, who probably get smoke blowing into their faces all day because they live next to the factories. Their mothers probably cook on cow dung, which makes them even more prone to pollution. And we felt that in a country like India, it was very easy to go on saying, "The government doesn't do this - what can we do?" And this is a large extent of what happens - "What can we do? There's nothing we can do." We felt that if we could give children the feeling that they could do something, then not only would this empower them, but it would start a chain reaction within their families and then their larger families. So we set up a group of folk performers and we re-wrote traditional folk theater texts. For instance, there's a text about the Ganges river and about the gods Krishna and Radha singing love songs by the river Jamuna. Most of the love songs of Krishna and Radha which most people sing are about either bathing in the river or dancing by the side. So we took this very well-known story. Except that Radha says, "I will see you there" and she arrives at the river and there is no river left. It's only a gutter. And Krishna arrives, and Krishna says, "How can you romance in this stinking place? Let's go into the forest." They go into the forest and there are no trees left. Because all the trees are being cut down. So Krishna and Radha sit, and say "Now what?" Krishna says, "What can we do? The government doesn't do anything." So Radha looks at him, goes somewhere, picks up a broom, hands him one, and says "Well, clean it then!" Then we invite the audience in, all these little kids, and give them each either a tree or something like that, depending on what the topic is, and get them working. So this project was hugely successful. One of the things we said to the kids is that when you come to school, pick up three bits of rubbish from the street. We made one pit where they could throw all the metal and glass, another one with all the newspapers, and a third one with all the food. Every day, these kids would come, and they would throw their bits in. Then we made a deal with the municipal nurseries that if we turned some of this into fertilizers, would they buy it back? And the nurseries said, "yes." Then we made a deal with the paper centers, and said, "Can you take it back?" And at the end of this one year, the kids had made enough money that they could then decide on what to buy for their schools. And all of them in each school bought the first water filter for clean drinking water ever bought for a slum school.

There are hundreds of stories like this. What I have put together for you is a short ten-minute video which will take you through this work. There are subtitles. It starts with the first lot of work that I talked about, in the villages. You will see that we have developed a rather wonderful bus which opens up into this really nice stage, so that we can go anywhere and perform with lights and microphones and so on. The second bit is the performance piece that I talked about. And the third bit, again very important in today's work, and something that Gowher as head of Ford Foundation in India, has greatly facilitated in using the arts for change for broadcast television. So I'm going to show this ten-minute video and will be very happy to answer any questions. [video]

MODERATOR
Thank you, Mallika. You have all heard and you have seen how Mallika has used her art and turned it into a powerful instrument for social transformation. We still have some time left, so with your permission Mallika may we take a few questions? Please raise your hand and please do identify yourself.

AUDIENCE MEMBER ONE
Hello … I work for a nonprofit organization here in New York City that deals with women's health issues globally. I saw in this that you did some work in Africa. I was wondering if you could expand a little bit on the issues you had to tackle and how you did that.

MALLIKA SARABHAI
The production that I traveled extensively with in Africa was called "IK2 - The Myth of Myths." It was primarily about how in traditional cultures like Africa and Asia, children's stories, and stories told to children growing up, are used by power groups to keep other groups down. Women being a very large target of this. But we took stories from across the world, and these included all sorts of issues, because our fables tell all sorts of stories. But the way one group enclosed another, or the way, for instance, in every myth everywhere, there's a wonderful king and he has two wives, and the beautiful one is a bitch, and the plain one is wonderful. You know, who wrote this story, and why? So we dealt with that. It wasn't particularly health issues. But subsequent to that, several of our African colleagues, seeing the result of that performance and the kind of thinking it got people into, have been using it to do health-related things, especially in South Africa.

AUDIENCE MEMBER TWO
I have been involved in World Development for the last twenty, twenty-five years, and your work is remarkable. I think this video should be shown in different places, different countries, even in this country. My question is, I'm very interested in the Ganges project and the Ganges has to be saved. I was wondering whether you have any program to save the Ganges using art as a means to educate local people, and also faith as a means to educate people and to change the attitude of the people to save the river.

MALLIKA SARABHAI
It's interesting that you ask, because in fact we do. My mother created a program when the Ganges cleanup project first started fifteen years ago. It's a piece that talks of the Ganges as a concept of un-corruption, and I use that word particularly, in the mind and outside. And the piece chases how the Ganges decides - Mother Ganges decides one day - that people are treating her so badly that she draws back her water and returns. And it is only then that people realize that no amount of praying, no amount of lighting more fires, and throwing more ghee into homam is going to bring the Ganges back. In the piece, they start cleaning up and they start doing things themselves, before the Ganges finally decides to come. This was used across Uttar Pradesh. Obviously, thousands more things like this need to be done, but the answer is yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER THREE
Some of what you have done, most of what you have done, is very powerful and must be threatening to a lot of people, I'm thinking particularly in the political arena. Could you talk a little bit about the extent to which, in what ways has it been embraced, perhaps, by political leaders, and in other ways it has not been?

MALLIKA SARABHAI
It's interesting - the first really controversial work I did, especially one that touched religious issues, was this piece "Sita's Daughters", you know where you saw that rape sequence. Because you know Sita herself, the name itself, "Sita's Daughters" - Sita is a much-valued wife of one of our gods Ramah. Traditionally, each young Indian girl is told, be like Sita, meaning, be ready to jump into the fire if your husband asks for proof of your chastity. So she has in fact become a symbol of how women need to be repressed, are repressed, by saying this is the ideal wife. My piece starts with Sita finally breaking her silence and questioning, at the end of her life, questioning all the things that her god-husband did. And saying "What motive did you have? What was your agenda?" because if you're a god, you're omnipresent and omnipotent. So then why did you purposefully allow this set of events, because you had an agenda? I remember when I first started performing it in what was a much less fundamentalist India ten years ago, and having two of our fundamentalist groups actually trying to stop the show, threatening from outside. Equally when I was performing it in India, the head priest of all the temples writing me a letter, saying, "Mallika, thank you for stripping Hinduism of its false orthodoxy."