What Bollywood movie would your vagina star in? What would your vagina’s bio-data say? Is your vagina veg or non-veg? Sounds like a Desi’d up version of the Vagina Monologues… could it really be?

Indeed, Desi women are ready to go public with their private parts! South Asian Sisters, a collective of progressive South Asian women from a variety of geographical and educational backgrounds, exemplifies the creative activism that is taking place to combat oppression within and against our communities. Among their upcoming projects is a full-scale production of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues, with a distinctly Desi flavor. The event will be entitled “Yoni Ki Baat” and is tentatively scheduled for late April.

The inspiration for this project came from personal contacts of South Asian Sisters: Deepti Sudhindra and Ruchika Chanana, the producer and director, respectively, of the first-ever Vagina Monologues to be performed in India. The highly successful Kamaaya Productions event took place in Bangalore in July 2002, but unfortunately endured its expected share of backlash. One group of lawyers even threatened legal action against the performers, citing vulgarity as a potential criminal charge.

Though there is no question that the Monologues can be incisively irreverent, the purpose of the project is to empower women with a voice against violence and provide a safe and relatively light-hearted space to discuss issues ranging from menstruation, masturbation, and orgasm to abuse and genital mutilation. Maulie Dass, co-founder of South Asian Sisters, says the organizers hope to outreach to South Asian women of all generations and ensure that all languages and sexual orientations are represented and respected. A large email questionnaire will be sent to hundreds of South Asian women in the next few weeks, and their responses will be compiled into short skits and monologues performed by five or six women. “This will be a women’s only event, for both comfort reasons as well as to gauge reception,” Dass says, but non-South Asian sisters are also welcome to attend.

The mission of South Asian Sisters is to empower, support, and educate South Asian women around the world; to create a collective for women of color; to counsel women on topics including health care and legal rights; and to create an online community with event postings, classifieds, articles, art, and other resources. A self-defined feminist space in the South Asian diaspora, the women’s collective created a website in 2000 and gathered momentum as an organization in the summer of 2002, demanding a space within the South Asian progressive space to ensure that female leadership was upheld and respected. Members are geographically dispersed in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Colorado, and come from a variety of backgrounds, languages, and careers, including education, health, journalism, and engineering. The organization operates on a model of mutual empowerment between South Asian residents and residents of the diaspora, and maintains contacts in Bangalore and Sri Lanka to learn more about events, actions, and issues that are both domestic and global.

The founders recently held a workshop on South Asian Feminism at the South Asian Progressive Conference on January 25 in San Francisco. “Many sisters were there and all had some really important and empowering dialogue,” Dass says, “but it’s just the start, and that’s where our meetings come in.” At meetings, members organize events and brainstorm issues that pertain to South Asian women. Past topics have included body image and sexual harassment at Desi parties.

Other proposed projects include marching with Trikone (a South Asian gay/ lesbian/ bisexual/ transgender organization) in the Pride parade, a clothesline project in collaboration with an NGO in Sri Lanka, and a South Asian progressive gathering for women only.

For more information about the organization or the Monologues project, see www.sasisters.org or send an email to sasisters@sasisters.org.