My Kannada is not good enough to catch the nuances, but the emotions could not be missed. They sang of the families they had built for themselves, among people they could be themselves with – when everything else is denied to them. We have no mothers, no fathers, no sisters, no brothers, no work, no family, no home – except our own community, they sang, and even through through the underlying sadness, the sense of pride in the community was evident.

Then, a slightly built woman in a white kurta and jeans, began the ‘main’ performance of the evening. She started telling her story, a powerful one that kept everyone in the audience enthralled, despite the absence of any props or instruments. Told in the first person, in direct and evocative Tamizh, this was the story of a young boy’s journey to understanding his own nature and the long road to his finally becoming a woman. The life of the Aravani community, their challenges, their origin myths and their family dynamics were all part of the story, but the most powerful part of it was her longing to be a woman, and the desire for it which is so powerful as to enable her to endure the ritual castration, done by a traditional healer without anaesthesia. The performance was all the more gripping for its blunt edge, though laced with plenty of humour and witty dialogue.

So gripping was the story and its telling that I assumed it was the performer’s own story. Only at the end did we learn that the performer, Pritham Chakravarthy is not herself part of the community, but a theatre activist and researcher who has spent considerable time researching the stories of the Aravanis, and brings them to a wider audience through her story-telling.

One question remained at the end of the performance, which I was somehow reluctant to ask, but now regret not asking! Something which came up repeatedly during the performance was the attraction to objects traditionally viewed as marks of the Indian woman – saris, bangles, flowers. In urban India, at least, the markers of femininity themselves are in a state of flux.  In that context, is the Aravanis’ ideas of womanhood a constant or how is that changing? In other words, how closely is womanhood for them linked to the outward symbols of femininity and in particular, to these symbols? Do they need the ‘display’ of womanhood or is it simply enough to feel woman to be a woman? In this context, I thought blogger Deborah’s piece on the cluster-concept of being a woman was worth reading.