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In both the street theatre and research, hierarchy is unsettled. The ‘platform’ needs to dissolve. Knowledge does not descend from a raised stage or an academic institution. Knowledge circulates among bodies in proximity and their minds. The actor and the audience blur into one another. The researcher and the community must also do the same.
In both the street theatre and participatory research, the challenge often is how to engage with the hierarchy, which is often intrinsic to any art and research. The “platform” needs to dissolve. Knowledge does not descend from a raised stage or an academic institution. Knowledge circulates among bodies in proximity and their minds.
The actor and the audience blur into one another. The researcher and the community must also do the same.
This reflection sharpened for me at the launch of Deepti Priya Mehrotra’s book – Walking out, Speaking up: Feminist Street Theatre in India – on February 25, 2026, at the India International Centre (IIC), New Delhi, where memory, history, and politics braided themselves through the lens of autonomous feminist street theatre. The conversation amongst some of the feminist scholars – Deepti, Urvashi Butalia, Uma Chakravarty and Lata Singh – did not feel like a formal literary event. It felt more like an extension of the street. The discussion was layered with recollection, dissent, and several unfinished questions. The idea of the street as both subject and object was invoked. They saw the street as a site where power is enacted and also a site where it is challenged.
The rich discussion gave some insightful perspectives to the audience, myself included. Early autonomous women’s plays from around 1979 were recalled, namely Om Swaha and Aurat, which were centred around dowry, patriarchy, and bride burning. The charged significance of the 8th March performances related to International Women’s Day at the Red Fort was remembered. These were not mere cultural moments. They were political occupations of public space. They are political because now these spaces are banned for public dissent.
In the discussion, they (Deepti and Urvashi) spoke about how the play Om Swaha, which related to the issue of dowry, was organised in the 1980s. They stated that street play was organised at the very locality where the dowry death happened. These street plays, according to them, shifted the attitude of women from “adjust karna chahiye” to “chhodna chahiye”, that is, from accommodation to refusal. Similar shifts, discussed in the room with quiet intensity, were not simply about dialogue on a script. They marked a transformation in consciousness, in accepted narratives.
Spaces like the prestigious women’s college Miranda House were recalled as nurturing grounds for first-generation feminists who stepped into public life. Performances responding to the violence of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, following the death of then Prime Minister Ms Indira Gandhi, unsettled national symbols. They revealed how the nation itself could be staged and restaged. Encounters with police, censorship, and the increasing difficulty of performing on the street today surfaced as reminders that public space is always contested.
Almost every presenter remarked, ‘Archiving these histories is itself a political act, shaped by time, memory, text, and visual traces.’
Listening to these reflections, I kept drawing its parallel with research. Participatory research, like street theatre, refuses the (dis)comfort of distance. It asks who frames the question, who interprets the answer, and who owns the narrative.
In street theatre, the most powerful moment arrives when the audience begins to speak. When the audience interrupts, contests, and offers their own interpretations of dowry, violence, health, and labour, the script becomes porous. It is collectively authored and revised through constant disagreements and agreements between the actors and the audience. In the same way, participatory inquiry must move from extraction to co-creation. The researcher cannot remain on a raised pedestal. Authority must circulate.
Yet neither the street nor research is automatically democratic. Both are contested terrains. The street carries class fractures, caste hierarchies, and state surveillance. Today, dissent is monitored. Gatherings are regulated. Public performance is constrained. Similarly, research is shaped by institutional control, funding logics, and narrow definitions of what counts as valid knowledge. Mainstream academic systems discipline both speech and method. To reclaim the street is to challenge that control. To practise participatory research is to challenge it again.
Street theatre teaches us that knowledge lives in bodies that are in proximity and that are often at collective risk. Knowledge itself is vulnerable, responsive, and unfinished. Participatory research must embrace that same vulnerability. It must allow interruption. It must accept that the script may change mid-performance. The street has to be made democratic through occupation, conversation, and courage. And so must the research be. Both demand that we all need to step out, speak up, and refuse the script that has been handed down to us. The notes in the margins need to be pushed to the centre.
