The Avanigadda Public Hearing

Take this as a scene: the cook and housemaid at the PSVS compound - the gorgeously exuberant, wide-eyed lady who tutors me in chappati, dahl, and dosa, and breaks up the long days with 'coffee Joey' - is stood on a brightly-lit stage, in front of 500 people, in floods of furious tears.

Despite the Telugu, I knew the outline of the story she was relating to the audience of the Town Hall; it had been recorded weeks before this day, translated, and given to me and Wilf to prepare for publication. The story relates her own experience of unthinkable loss, abuse, confinement and violence, at the hands of previous husbands. She is one of 25 women who gave their testimonies on the 29th of October at the Krishna District Court of Women's first public hearing in Avanigadda.


After days of laborious, repetitive work and frazzled nerves, with the last folders folded, and all documentation a-ready, the court finally commenced. The expert witnesses, consisting of academics and delegates from women's rights NGOs whose function was to 'make sense of' and 'contextualise' the violence, took their places on the stage. The audience of testifiers, other NGO and women's group members, volunteers, politicians, students, lawyers, locals, and other interested folk, watched on.

Thus the day unfolded, predictably chaotic, mostly incomprehensible to my English ears but, thankfully, a success. The testimonies were given despite power cuts and an audience whose levels of respect wavered throughout. And with all the tears and the hitches, each of the women who spoke did so with dignity, purpose and confidence, finally giving a voice to the violence which has become endemic behind the closed doors of homes in Andhra Pradesh.

'There's nothing like this in the district - or even in any district here' said Jose, a campaigner and staff member who has dedicated his life to promoting rights and education to the vulnerable, particularly the tribal communities of India.

As far as I'm concerned, this says it all. In a country that is bursting at the seams with NGOs, which holds perfectly decent women's rights legislation, there are still no forums where women can simply stand up and express the crimes committed against them. There are so many reasons for this, from cultural and social biases to insane levels of corruption, which prevent the mainstream courts, police, and political and welfare institutions from providing a fair platform for women.

What a triumph that, for one day, the court of women provided such a space.

Picture book diary

All I ever seem to do is write. Posters, brochures, manifestos on women's human rights, all of them so flowery they leave you bouquet-heady with the delights of Indian idioms.

Here are some pictures to speak some words:


The view from the Charminar in Hyderabad - the busiest city I have ever set my sandal in. A truly wonderful, disorientating place.


Finishing my book on the train back to Vijayawada. We stood in the open doorway for the last hour as the train pulled in, racing across the vast moonlit river from Gunter district.


Only hanging out in a private members club with some friends - yes, I said friends. So what if they're just the guys that fix my laptop?


The beach at Machilipatnam - less swimming, more speeding in a motorbike/autorickaw with your entire extended family on board. Still, I dipped in the sea and swam in all of my clothes, appearing, as far as the reaction of other beach-goers tells me, like a ginger sea monster.

Work and more work

As the first Court of Women public hearing looms ever closer, the work load weighs heavier. The public hearing will take place Avanigadda at the end of October. Women from this part of the district who have survived extreme violence at the hands of family members will offer their testimonies to the court, trying to lift the shroud of silence on the issue and, maybe, gain some redress, who knows. Expert witnesses will give speeches, trying to make sense of the violence from a variety of perspectives: political, social, legal, medical, and so on.

I spent last week working almost day and night far away from home in Avanigadda, with poor Wilf stranded back in Gannavaram. The work ethic in the PSVS compound was terrific: up at 6am, on to work until a thick mist of sleep clouds your eyes with lots of snacks and coffees punctuating the day. For me it meant 10/11pm, for others it meant the early hours of the morning. I was fund raising anxiously, a desperate bid to cover a budget that is inflating by the hour.

Our week ended (on Saturday of course, never Friday) at All India Radio with Theresa giving an impassioned speech on women's rights (or she could have been talking about her penchant for kittens for all I know, the Telugu gap widens by the day). Then on to a Global Forum for Women event in a very grand hall with chandeliers hanging spledidly and inappropriately, whilst the committee - all male of course - championed the cause of women's human rights (or talked about kittens?). Apparently these guys are supposed to 'sensitise' the government to 'women's issues'; the reality, it seems, is that they take funding from other NGOs and enjoy a lot of expensive, elaborate events. Bah.

This week my work-base was closer to home, just a bus hop (an Indian hop, not an English one), to Vijayawada, in a complex of NGOs dedicated to enforcing child rights. Everyone is madly gathering the testimonies, throwing them recklessly around in a ping pong of Telugu and English, with edits and re-edits forming tangled knots all over the shop.

Wilf's off from school for a week - I'm setting down the laptop and heading to Amaravathi to be a tourist again.

Ganesh Chaturthi

Festival ‘season’ is upon us, a stint which lasts until January of next year. Last weekend we went to Vijayawada – the streets, splurging already with humanbeingshumanbeings, had gone wild in praise of the elephant god as Ganesh was paraded around on Rickshaws or displayed for worship in monochrome tents which glowed crassly with too many fairy lights.

(Vijayawada at night)

We left Vijayawada for Bhavani Island, a quick boat ride across into a ringfenced oasis of peace where the nutural beauty is, quite literally, policed. The floor is a thick green carpet, the high trees, the bushes, the flowers and NO TRAFFIC oh has there ever been such quiet before anywhere? But stick to the path and don’t drop litter or the police man will spit a shrill whistle in your ear.

Walking around the island, we entered a clearing where fully grown adults, including women in flowing saris, played on giant playground apparatus. Spiderwebs, rope bridges, swings and the like.

We wept with laughter. This, we concluded, was what the middle classes get up to in Vijayawada, when they’re not looking at caged monkeys and giant plastic dinosaurs in the Rajiv Gandhi gardens (a story for another time). We pondered it with a mango juice, looking out over the Krishna, over the mountains, and the hallucinating city alive with festivity.

The Courts of Women

Our first day at MJM college, set up by PSVS for school dropouts – ex-child labourers and the like. Not, shall we say, an underwhelming welcome. Posters, banners, intricate chalk drawings on EVERY blackboard, beaming off the floor and steps. ‘Welcome Zoe and Wilf’ adorns each nook, each cranny, until I’m sweating with expectant eyes.

‘I’m not supposed to be teaching – I’m working for PSVS, WIlf is teaching.’ They don’t quite understand me. Still, I have helped just a touch in the classroom and they are starting to get used to me sat typing in Principal Rau’s office.

So far my work has been on the Vijayawada Court of Women which is happening in one month. Courts of Women were started 20 years ago by the Asian Women’s Human Right’s Council on all sorts of topics: war, HIV, sex trafficking, globalization. They offer a space for women who have suffered violence and discrimination to give testimonies, to be listened to, in front of an audience, expert witnesses and a jury. The idea is to allow suffering to be voiced and addressed, in places where cultures, authorities, and justice systems tend to silence women.

I have been editing victims’ testimonies which read like catalogues of extraordinary violence. The dowry is the root of so much of it; women are locked into a system which treats them as commodities, where husbands are free to be as abusive as they please in the knowledge that society will support the man and never the woman. They can beat their wives, abuse them, rape them, set them alight, force abortions, and most of the time the police will condone it, no prosecution will follow because of prejudice or bribery. Wives don’t leave because losing honour is a worse fate than death.

There is so much preparation going in to the court. Last week the survivors participated in playback theatre, relating their experiences to a group of actors who then played it back to the audience. An odd idea, and perhaps the scenes in question are too sensitive to leave in the hands of drama? We have also been making power points showing videos of previous courts to present to girls schools and women's groups. More to come.

First hop over the vada

We have done Cochin, the Indian-Chinese-Portuguese hotchpotch with winding streets, all dosa and banana. Fishing nets, Jew Town spice market, Dutch Palace, Ernakulum ferry and mad techno hubbub – done. Rahool from the fort (‘don’t feel sorry for the Mumbai slummers they all have cable’) and Mr Benson who ran the home stay, who sang Hindi movie songs with his friends and the other English traveller (Foo Fighters: the Bollywood years), and old Ignatius Benson who took to kissing Wilf’s stomach – farewell.

Two weeks have passed since the 18 hour chug to Vijayawada, sweaty on the sleeper. She took us to buy pots and pans and sped us maniacally through the Krishna District.

First stop was our flat in Gannavaram: three rooms, ants and lizards galore, no shower, but a ceiling fan which can soothe all calamities. Home sweet home.

Next stop, the PSVS compound in Atkur, two hours away (Theresa’s home). This place is all chipmunks and fruit trees, frilling the house, the offices, the outside meeting space which sits like a band stand ready for performance. Durga cooks and we chat with Theresa, and other activists who stop by, about dowry, female degradation, child marriage, child labour, domestic violence, police corruption and on it blows; the struggle is her life blood. She laughs, however, at any opportunity, particularly where translation is concerned: 'Have you ever seen a man-go up a coconut tree?', and so on.

Then two days in Visanapeta, compound number two, the HQ three hours away. Smiling Lakshmi feeding us as we hide from the monsoon and Theresa leaves to hunt down a child who is being forced into marriage that night. Mission accomplished, she is found and sent to school.