Singleness and Sanghathan

http://www.cuspthejournal.com/issue2/bhavya.html

This paper poses a problem; a problem that the work on/of transformation is faced with in the specific context of singleness among rural adivasi women in Rayagada district of South Odisha. This work is a part of an ongoing action research which is an attempt towards foregrounding the 'lived experience' of being single and being woman by attending to the condition of 'singleness' among rural adivasi women and exploring alongside questions and collaborative collective processes of transformative praxis. This work began in 2013 in one village named Emaliguda in the district and is currently in the process of further expansion to other villages in and around the area. The work so far has generated some insights and understandings around the condition of singleness among adivasi women and in the process, has helped mobilize a single women’s collective called Eka Nari Sanghathan (Single Women’s Collective). 

The problem that has opened up with this action research work, which is an attempt to work on the question of subject, social and political transformation (the three axes of transformation that stand in mutual constitutivity), is how to bring these three axes in dialogue with each other. In other words, if these three axes of transformation are mutually constitutive, then how does this mutuality and constitutivity translate into praxis? What does it do to the question of praxis? How does one account for their simultaneity (transformations in subject, social and political taking place in tandem with each other)? And how does it respond to the question of the (im)possibility of transformed futures? What is it to work and think deconstructively; what is it to engage with the problem(s) at hand is what seems to me as of now “my heightened sense of necessary absurdity”; and this paper is an attempt at exploring deconstructively, the above mentioned questions. The exploration however, takes me to psychoanalysis.