Interview with Lata Pratibha Madhukar

The Global Feminisms Project (http://www.umich.edu/~glblfem/en/index.html) is a collaborative international oral history project that examines the history of feminist activism, women's movements, and academic women's studies in sites around the world. The current archive includes interviews with women's movement activists and women's studies scholars in China, India, Nicaragua, Poland, and the United States. We are currently working on adding interviews from Brazil and Russia. The Project is based in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG) at UM, which is also the home for the U.S. site research team. Our international collaborators include: - Laboratório de História Oral e Imagem - UFF (the Laboratory of Oral History and Images at the Federal Fluminense University in Rio de Janeiro) and Núcleo de História, Memória e Documento - NUMEM (the Center for History, Memory, and Documentation at the Federal State University in Rio de Janeiro), BRAZIL - China Women's University in Beijing, CHINA - SPARROW, Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women in Mumbai, INDIA - Movimiento Autónomo de Mujeres de Nicaragua (Autonomous Women's Movement), NICARAGUA - Fundacja Kobiet eFKa (Women's Foundation eFKa) in Krakow, POLANDLata Pratibha Madhukar was born and brought up in Nagpur and has a post graduate degree in Marathi. It was during the emergency period from 1975 onwards that Lata started feeling the need to be an activist. She became an active participant in various campaigns and discussions from 1978 onwards. She worked as a lecturer and later as an anchorperson for the radio in Wardha, Maharashtra. After her marriage she moved to Mumbai and worked as a research assistant in the Research Centre for Women’s Studies, SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai. Later she joined the Women’s Centre, (Nari Kendra) Mumbai, and was with the Centre for seven years during which time she was active in the women’s rights movement. In 1991 Lata joined the Narmada Bachao Andolan, an environmental movement that questioned the basic tenets of development planning, as a co-coordinator. For the next nine years, she threw herself into this struggle, organizing protests, and mobilizing support and she also engaged herself in advocacy and research related to the movement. She went on to become the national convenor for the National Alliance of People’s Movements. Lata is also a writer and a poet and she lives in Mumbai.The ‘Global Feminisms Project' was funded, beginning in 2002, by a major grant from the Rackham Graduate School, with additional funding provided by the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Women's Studies Program, and the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/55731/3/CM_LataPM.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/55731/2/LataPM_I_E_102806.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/55731/6/Lata_NTSC_FFmpeg.mp