A college in Bhuj, Gujarat, in February this year forced 68 women students to remove their underwear to prove they weren’t bleeding. While India has approximately 355 million menstruating women and girls, prejudices, especially linked to the country’s religious practices, run deep.
Assisted by technology, affordable mobile phones and cheap and reasonably uninterrupted data, the last decade has seen the conversation around menstrual health gain a lot of online traction in India. The biggest beneficiaries of this development have been India’s adolescent children living in its remotest areas, who are using all resources available — from chatting with educator “didis” on WhatsApp groups, putting up Instagram stories and TikTok videos, and using menstrual tracker apps to talk about their period stories.
Grassroots workers, too, are utilising social media tools and available technology to spread information about safe menstrual practices in areas where conversations about sustainable menstrual practices are a matter of privilege.
Let’s Talk Periods: India’s TikTok Scene
In India, among the limited content on TikTok on periods that breaks down the anatomy, process, utility and applicability of menstrual hygiene management (MHM) and Sexual Reproductive Health (SRH), without cheapening the social conversations surrounding them, are hidden gems.
One of them is Nitin Kumawat’s beautiful poem, “Aaj Phir Mahina Aya Hai” that talks about a woman’s experiences on the first day of her period. Filled with cultural anecdotes, the poem deconstructs the shame and patriarchy associated with bleeding that is inherited by women through generations. Then, there is Rajat Sharma’s TikTok video which takes on the toxic bro-culture that isolates menstruation as “women’s issue”. Sharma goes by the name ‘Rajatbornstar’ and has close to four million followers on the platform.
https://www.tiktok.com/@n1tin/video/6755739610044747010
https://www.tiktok.com/@rajatbornstar/video/6776491425279331585
In another video, YouTuber and TikTok star who goes by the name Dr Animesh MS can be seen endorsing Meftal Spas — a medicine that’s achieved the status of “period bandhu” for millions of folks who experience extreme pain while menstruating. There are also TikTok videos on exercising during periods and the relative merits of consuming ripe papaya to regularise period cycles.
When the @instituteofhumananatomy uploaded a video for their 4.2 million followers on TikTok explaining the mechanics of menstrual cramps, it was both gruesome and fascinating to watch him poke around a cross-section of the female reproductive system. The video became a global viral, riding on the universality of the phenomena that binds the dysmenorrhoea sisterhood.
Activists, however, point out that there is a world of difference in the topic of conversation between rural and urban audiences. While conversations in urban India are around sustainability, and the activism around choices and taboos, adolescent people in India’s remotest parts are starting off on questions as basic as — where does period blood come from?
Period Art And YouTube Dispatches
To bridge this gap, and to have meaningful conversations, workers are figuring out ways to combine online tools with offline engagement. A case in point – Srilekha Chakraborty’s mural art wall project (that is documented on Youtube) that invited adolescent boys and girls from six interior districts of Santhal Pargana of Jharkhand (Godda, Deoghar, Dumka, Jamtara, Sahibganj and Pakur — and Chaibasa in West Singhbhum ) to paint giant murals to talk about periods.
“When you’re talking to children and adolescents you have to be creative. Art is such a medium.” Pointing out that ASHA workers aren’t trained to talk to girls in a way that helps them talk about menstruation openly, she feels wall art is a great way to educate the girls. “Wall art is a great media. Girls who can’t read can see the images,” she says. She made the girls — mostly from the adivasi community — put up their period stories on a tree.
Chakraborty uses all the social tools at her disposal to talk about her work. Her mural project is on YouTube and so is her work with young Adivasi girls and other marginalized communities in Jharkhand. She started the campaign #PeriodsPeCharcha to ensure mandatory menstrual hygiene services in Anganwadis of Jharkhand.
“The wonderous thing is, despite the walls that are up in the conversations about menstruation, in Santhali, periods are called hormo baha. Hormo means body and baha means flower. It literally means that the menstrual cycle is when the body is blooming,” she says.
Period Hotlines
Jasmine George of the Hidden Pockets, an organisation that creates conversations around sexual and reproductive health, says a lot of people, especially women from far-flung areas use phone hotlines to talk about periods, and in certain cases — with urgency and a sense of panic. “On our helplines, we get regular calls from women who have skipped their periods.” These calls come from a lot of small cities, where the NGO provides assistance to young people in three languages – English, Hindi and Malayalam. “And if periods are late by even a day, they worry about pregnancy, even if they aren’t sexually active,” George says. But one distinct aspect of opening up of various platforms enabled by tech is the increased participation of men.
Involvement of Boys and Men
While the language around periods hasn’t had a radical, conscious shift to include trans and non-binary menstruators, brilliant videos of a boy named Anil patiently and meticulously explaining the female reproductive process with aid of visual tools.
Even during the mural project in Santhal Pargana, the big challenge was to break the painful barriers of shyness of adolescent boys and bring them into this conversation. A young man called Kameshwar Verma rose to the challenge.
“The boys of Lachhadi village were ashamed to talk about this. Men would think what role do they have to play in this? It’s after all women’s issue, they would be embarrassed to even use the word mashik.”
But during the wall mural project, they realised that periods are perfectly natural. They even made their own slogans — “Mahwari na koi bhaar hai yeh, prakriti ka uphaar hai,” Verma says.
“I realised that men feel very woke about talking about periods. Most people who call in are men asking about the late periods of their daughters or girlfriends,” George says. But in a country where misogyny is deeply rooted in ownership of women’s bodies, George is also wary about the increase in men tracking apps for period dates. “I feel scared that this is also to keep a track of women’s sexual activity.” Besides this, (for a sexually active couple), there’s a huge misconception about the three days after period where people think women will not get pregnant following condom-less sex. There’s still the risk of sexually transmitted disease, she says.
Smartphones Streamlining Period Talk
Poonam Kumari, a Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) trainer in Sarwan in Deoghar working with NEEDS, looks after 14 Panchayati blocks and advises adolescent girls on how to use handmade cloth pads among other MHM practices.
The NGO trains girls who’ve either passed out of school or dropped out to manufacture simple handmade cloth pads to generate employment and help local women shift to cloth pads. “We’ve given mobile phones to about 30 girls, they run Whatsapp groups, and in turn train others,” she says.
Most of the girls of the area have access to WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook because data connectivity is fairly good. In addition, they have access to the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s Saathiya mobile app that was part of the government’s Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram (RKSK) programme.
While technology has been able to bridge certain gaps, many still remain. “Personally I appreciate all kinds of work happening in this space that helps break the silence in the most creative ways possible but as a Menstrual Educator I have come to understand social media activism as elitist activism and it’s damaging to those working at the grassroots,” says Angana Prasad, Executive Director at Project KHEL.
A few years ago when a group of students wrote feminist slogans on sanitary napkins and hung them up all over university campuses to protest rape culture, Prasad and other activists like her bore the brunt. School principals in smaller towns saw this as revolutionary ideals that will lead girls to stick pads on the school walls and eventually cause the school to close. They stopped NGOs from conducting training on MHM.
Ultimately social and educational privilege plays a big part in social media messaging of activists in big cities and menstrual trainers on the field face the backlash, says Prasad, whose organisation is planning multi-city ‘Story Circles’ — a safe space where young children can discuss periods in a creative and fun way — through shared experiences.
“Both forms of activism can co-exist but there has to be a sense of perspective about the impact (these campaigns) might have and some amount of sensitivity for the cause. In the period staircase, while urban campaigners are in rung three and discussing taboos after having understood the biology, flow management and social positioning, in villages young women, who aren’t even the decision-makers in matters related to their own bodies, the struggle is still to get them to understand that periods are worth being spoken about,” Prasad says.
There is a lot of goodwill that online campaigns have generated in reaching the message to the masses. Both spaces now have to find a common meeting point.
Mural in the featured image painted by: Shruti Ghosh and Francis Mathew of Artists Anonymous