On the Political Uses of Folklore: Performance and Grassroots Feminist Activism in India.

This essay explores the use of street theater by grassroots Indian feminist groups to carve out apublicforum and to articulate pressing concerns about rape, inheritance law, and women's representation in popular and historical texts. Focusing on a situated performance of a play titled Women in Search of Their History, I consider the ways that the virangana, an Indian folk heroine type, and the garba, a women's folk dance, are appropriated and reinterpreted, becoming topics for rhetorical invention. Critical play with these folk forms provides these women with the means to persuasively articulate a feminist message to diverse audience members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]