Vandana Kumari Pandey

Vandana Kumari Pandey, aka Vandana Asha, is a theatre practitioner, an arts-based facilitator, and founder of Rang Karwan, which works with children, youth and women on different issues using Theatre of the Oppressed, creative drama, psychodrama, music, dance and movement therapy and research. Through this project, she will explore the use of the Forum theatre technique in the digital medium to examine issues of increased online harassment of women.

Titled Priyanka’s Story the project Vandana envisions along with her team of psychologists, educators, anthropologists and actors is a response to the increase in cybercrime against women post the Covid-19 lockdown. The digital, which is both a social and public space, is replete with abuse and harassment and needs to be reclaimed. The project will attempt to use online modalities to mirror, problematise and find possible interventions to the communications that occur over this new-age, free-for-all internet, especially for women. As in the technique of Forum Theatre, the audience of consented collaborators – individuals and organisations – called ‘spect-actors’ will be invited to suggest and enact solutions through role-playing. This is aimed at stimulating dialogue in the form of possible actions to resolve the problem. The collaborators would include decision-making-bodies in gender-based discrimination and cyber safety including Enfold India, Taarshi, Internet Freedom Foundation and Akancha Srivastava Foundation to name a few, and women aged 21-35, currently working from home in Indian urban centres. A series of bi-weekly surveys done with them will inform the script and creation of the first of the four four-minute Forum Theatre videos. Each video will be disseminated with an accompanying survey, to elicit responses which will influence the protagonist’s actions in dealing with the problem in the next video. The videos and surveys will be disseminated over a period of one month. There will be a 20-minute film based on the four videos as well as the compilation of the interventions. This will be made public and function as a resource for possible behavioural interventions that women and their allies can take when faced in a similar situation as Priyanka. It will also be made available to all collaborators to disseminate across their social media platforms.

The outcome of this grant will be this 20-minute film. The Grantee’s deliverables to IFA will be copies of the four videos, the 20-minute film and the compilation of surveys and interventions.

This grant is made possible under the special initiative 25x25, with support from lead donor Kshirsagar-Apte Foundation, and philanthropy partners, Titan Company Limited, Priya Paul, and Sethu Vaidyanathan.