Whatever your take on Valentine’s day, it’s funny imagining Pramod Muthalik inundated by soft piles of pink knickers, as promised by a newly formed “consortium of pub-going, loose and forward women”. Whether or not they answer to the F-word, there are evidently loose networks of citizens responding to events that seek to roll back women’s freedoms — at last count, about 32,000 people are participating.

Another of these novel projects is Blank Noise, formed around the specific issue of sexual harassment on the street, now working in five cities. Like the ‘Hollaback’ campaigns in various Western cities, they encourage women to take a picture of a harasser, and put it up online; share stories of unwelcome encounters, laugh at it, and generally, reclaim the open street. Blank Noise is an ongoing, thoughtful project, and Pink Chaddi is a spontaneous reaction to the Mangalore violence — but they are indications of a playful, deeply political, media-literate response to issues that intimately impact women’s lives.

This emergent movement has a touch of the Fun-Fearless-Female Cosmogirl sass that will doubtless alienate some old-style activists with their more ascetic methods. But could it point to a lively new strand of feminist action in India?

In the US, for instance, as young women examine their ambivalence towards their mothers’ manifestoes, some are lulled into post-feminist fantasies, now that the big battles of equal pay, abortion, and structural discrimination seem more or less under control. Others discard the macro-narratives and try to define issues that matter, and their individual angles to them.

... contd.