Picture This! ― Painting the Women's Movement

From her home in a small village in the Kutch district of Gujarat, Dalit artist Radhaben Garwa has documented the rural women’s movement in Western India and beyond through her drawings. Her images?more than two hundred of them gathered here?tell stories of the women from her village and from the Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan, the NGO she works with, in their campaigns for women’s rights, economic empowerment, and resistance to globalizing corporations.

In one sequence of pictures, Garwa receives a phone call inviting her to a meeting abroad; she draws the entire journey from village to airport, from the international destination to her first ride in an elevator. In another, she depicts the Chipko movement of the 1970s against deforestation; in a third, she shows the fragmentation of fields and farming activity as a result of globalization.

With an afterword by leading feminist journalist Kalpana Sharma, this full-color compendium of an artist’s work attests to the beauty in female solidarity.

Radhaben Garwa has been drawing and painting the women’s movement for the past sixteen years. Sushma Iyengar was one of the founders of KMVS, an organization of rural women based in Kutch, Gujarat. Kalpana Sharma is a senior journalist with The Hindu newspaper and has written on women’s issues for many years.