“To engage a woman coming from a marginalised community, to make them believe that they can tell their own stories, to make them write those stories is a great task,” says Priyadharsini Palani, the founder and director of The Blue Club, a media organisation based in Chennai that works with women coming from marginalised, working-class families. It believes that the women have been stereotyped to be a certain way, and only the women themselves have the power to change the way their narrative is told. The Blue Club conducts writing workshops for these women to help them take control of their stories.
“For them to be able to attend writing workshops, and to write means forgoing a day’s work, a day’s worth of salary,” Priyadharsini adds. “Their stories are seldom heard but the society needs to hear them.”
After the lockdown, The Blue Club is slowly preparing to resume its earlier activities; it has initiated a crowdfunding campaign to support its participants for this purpose. The money will be spent in organising food for the workshops and hiring babysitters so that participants can focus on writing. “Our participants are aged between 15 and 25 years of age but even within this group, there are very young mothers who turn up with toddlers. We’ll also have to keep that in mind. During the duration of the workshop their children will have to be taken care of. Only then can they get into the mind frame of exploring writing,” she adds.
According to Priyadharsini, these women are brimming with stories to be told and experiences that only they can write about. “We are often shown women in slum areas brawling next to water tankers or next to a single pipeline that provides drinking water to that entire colony. It’s a different story why they don’t have access to drinking water in their homes. But it’s easy for a bystander or even the media to project them as ‘sandakaaris’ (a woman who always fights) and to attribute that behaviour to be a part of their culture. No one can begin to understand their side of the story, unless they themselves come forward to tell it. Similarly eviction is another topic,” Priyadharsini explains. The Blue Club’s workshops are considered crucial for this reason, so that the women find their voices and tell their own stories.
“We spend two to three months in their areas, select a space where they can gather once a week and train them on how to write,” Priyadharsini says. In its five years of existence, The Blue Club has encouraged 200 women from areas in Chennai like Perumbakkam (a resettlement colony) and Thideer Nagar to write.
They also recently started a fellowship programme exclusively for Dalit women and queer persons that was a first-of-its-kind initiative in the country. “We continue getting more entries and we’ve decided to take in 15, given that it’s conducted online,” Priyadharsini adds. This three-month fellowship, expected to begin in mid-November, comes with a stipend of Rs 30,000.
The Blue Club also started a crowd-funding drive last week, aiming to raise Rs 5 lakh. These funds will be used to set up safe spaces for victims of gender-based violence coming from marginalised backgrounds, in addition to the training programme.
“We’ve seen that younger women, college-going students in particular, are able to better embrace the programme. We recently worked with women from a non-governmental organisation called Paathai. Many young women show great interest in these writing workshops,” Priyadharsini shares.
Those wishing to contribute to The Blue Club’s initiative can do so here.