Didi, Take the Mic
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
Republished from 'Thoughtful Taraaki' by Transform Rural India (TRI)
Somewhere in Manawar, Madhya Pradesh, in the scorching heat, a group of women is sitting together, rhyming over a tune. It isn't a Bollywood number borrowed for the occasion. It is one they built themselves, line by line, sung by the very women it is about. For generations, the stories about rural women's lives were told by everyone except the women themselves: policy documents, statistics, the occasional folk song written by someone who had never worked in these fields. Gender justice messaging arrived from outside, in language that rarely sounded like home. It was heard, sometimes, but it was never truly owned. And a message nobody owns rarely changes anything. So this time, the approach was flipped. Close to 30 women across Manawar and Petlawad blocks of Madhya Pradesh joined hands with Justice Adda's Anthems for Justice initiative and Transform Rural India to write, compose, and perform their own songs on gender justice. From workshop to mandli Justice Adda ran the trainings and workshops that gave the group the tools of songwriting and composition. But the words, the tunes, and the stories belonged entirely to the women. For each song, a mandli was formed: a collective that stayed together through the writing, the rehearsals, and finally the performance, so that no single voice carried the work alone. As Kalpna Muniya from Petlawad puts it simply: “हम समुदाय के लिए यह गीत बना रहे हैं, ताकि जागरूकता पैदा हो और लोगों को कार्रवाई के लिए प्रेरित किया जा सके।” We're making this song for our own community, to create awareness and spark action.
Over seven months starting from January 2026, the mandlis shaped four songs, each pulling gender justice into a different, lived-in corner of daily life: education and aspiration, land and the environment, marriage and belonging, and struggles that usually go unspoken. Climate action threads through several of them, because for these women, gender and environment were never separate conversations to begin with. They show up together in the same field, the same well, the same drought year. Among the many voices behind this work are Kalpna Muniya, Seema Seenam, and Neha Osari, women who came in as participants and are leaving as songwriters, composers, and performers in their own right. Ground truth, set to music The reason these songs carry weight is who decided what went into them. Every line was chosen, argued over, and finalised by the women themselves, not handed down as a message to deliver. That is what keeps the songs genuine: they come from the ground up, shaped by people describing their own reality rather than someone else's version of it. Knowledge that is evidence-driven and community-generated travels differently. It convinces because it is recognisable, and that is what carries a message from being heard to being acted on.
The process also did something quieter but just as important. It gave rural women a stage to discover skills they didn't know they had. Someone found she could turn an argument into a rhyme. Someone else found her voice carried further than she expected. Over dozens of rehearsals, mock shoots, and retakes, "we sang a protest" became "we wrote, composed, and performed four songs, start to finish." Four mandlis, one shift
Four songs. Thirty women who are now songwriters and performers as much as they are community members. And, more quietly, a shift in who is seen as an authority on gender justice in these villages: not an outsider with a message, but a didi with a mic. During one of the interactions, Anita from Manawar shared, "हम पूरी दुनिया को सुनाना चाहते हैं कि हमारी आवाज़ कैसी है, हमारा गाना कैसा है।" — establishing, in her own words, that this was never a plea to be heard, but a declaration of what they had already found within themselves. Her voice, like the mandli's, wasn't asking for space; it was claiming it.
Beyond the screen
The songs are built to travel beyond it: as tools for dialogue within women's collectives, community institutions, and public platforms, carried by voices the community already trusts. At Transform Rural India, we work as purpose-driven development designers, and initiatives like this are exactly why. We believe that real systems change rarely starts with a policy. It starts with people finding a new language, new confidence, and new platforms to speak from. The next step is scale: more mandlis, more villages, more songs that turn lived experience into collective expression, collective expression into solidarity, and solidarity into conversations that can shift gender norms for good.
Because when women write the songs, they don't just add their voice to the story. They decide what the story is.
All songs can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXP0pcvN4X-4
