Day 1: Privilege, Power & Naming the Words We Use
The first day began with an introduction and orientation to Sambhaavnaa Institute, including a detailed briefing on POSH (Prevention of Sexual Harassment) and the Internal Complaints Committee.
The workshop opened with an icebreaker where participants moved through the room, seeking out the names of people they didn’t already know, building the first sense of a shared space.
This was followed by a word exercise: six chits, each carrying a word – Samata (Equality), Pyaar (Love), Insaaf (Justice), Samman (Respect), and Garima (Dignity) – were placed on the floor. Participants picked a chit and formed groups with others who’d drawn the same word, then discussed what it meant to them before reporting back to the larger circle.
As the words went up on the board, facilitators pushed participants to interrogate them further: where do these ideas come from, and why do we group something like “love” alongside concepts like “justice” and “equality”? The question was left open, a thread to return to across the week.
Three charts were placed at the center of the room for participants to write on freely about their expectations and contributions, followed by a session unpacking caste, religion, difference, and discrimination at a deeper level.
To frame the week’s central lens, one facilitator’s framework is worth carrying forward: power (“Satta-dhari”) accumulates through caste, religion, money, gender, and community, and its absence (“Sattahin”) is what marginalisation looks like when these same categories work against you.
Day 2: How Power Shows Up in the Body
The day began with a theater-based “power walk” exercise, followed by a recap discussion on how power shifts hands and who controls resources in society.
The afternoon turned to a more personal question, facilitated by Fatema: When did you first become aware of your own gender? Participants explored this individually, some through visual reflection, others non-verbally, before sharing in small groups, with several using role-play or theater to voice their story to the wider group.
Followed by a detailed discussion on gender, sex, power, and powerlessness.
Later in the evening, a screening of ‘Margarita with a Straw’ on disability and sexuality followed by a late-evening discussion took place.
Day 3: The Roots of Patriarchy and Opening Up Sexuality
The day’s first session traced the history of patriarchy, how it emerged alongside the family unit and private property, and how deeply that history is entangled with caste. Participants shared their group’s discussion through role-plays.
One participant reflected on playing a man and a Brahmin in a role-play, describing how elders touched his feet purely based on that assumed identity, a small but sharp illustration of how caste and gender combine to command unearned deference.
This was followed by a collaborative exercise mapping a “Tree of Patriarchy,” tracing its branches and roots as a group.
In the second half of the session, several participants shared their personal experiences of how societal systems compelled silence on traumatic events.
A grounding exercise followed: participants were asked to name something they liked about their own bodies. One participant’s response opened into something larger; he spoke about how meaningful it felt to simply drink water alongside everyone in the room, describing how in his village, caste barriers mean he and others are denied access to shared handpumps and seating. It became a quiet, powerful illustration of how caste operates through the smallest everyday gestures.
The day closed with an opening into sexuality as a topic: what does it mean to be attracted to more than one person at once? What is asexuality? Is “transgender” a subset of “non-binary” or a distinct category? These questions were left as an on-ramp into the deeper sexuality sessions of Day 4, alongside a short set of reference videos.
Day 4: Sexuality, Consent, and the Architecture of Norms
This was the most extensive day of the workshop, both emotionally and conceptually.
Opening the day: In the recap, one participant who had attended many gender workshops before noted that it was the personal stories shared the previous day that finally shifted him toward genuine empathy, more than any prior training had. Facilitators also acknowledged that the “first memory of gender” exercise had been difficult for some; several participants shared that the space had given them room to speak about experiences of sexual abuse for the first time.
The sexuality session was introduced with care: a disclaimer let participants know they could step out if the material felt triggering, and that discomfort or embarrassment in this conversation was expected and welcome to name aloud.
The session unpacked what sexuality is, how it connects to gender, and how the “rules” society builds around it end up deciding people’s place within it, including how sexuality intersects with capitalism.
A word-web built around Younikta (sexuality) drew out its many dimensions: physical pleasure, desire, marriage, age, control, bliss, consent-based practices like BDSM and kink, sensitivity, personal preference, notions of purity, fantasy, the idea of “body count,” the fact that curiosity about one’s own body begins in childhood, and the particular intersection of disability with sexuality, including how caste and marriage norms can compound the exclusion disabled people already face.
The Gujarati custom of Maitri Karar (a formal companionship agreement) was discussed as a cultural example, alongside the weight of shame, the reality of rape and child sexual abuse, and the pointed observation that conversations about desire routinely exclude widows.
Sexuality was framed as having physical, emotional, personal, social, and culturally diverse dimensions, with both positive and negative sides.
Discussion also touched on real gaps in consent law: POCSO does not recognise a child’s capacity to consent, underscoring why consent, safety, dignity, and care are treated as non-negotiable, including within practices like BDSM.
On masculinity: using two contrasting images, a young boy and boxer Mary Kom, participants were asked what they saw. Answers ranged across softness, fitness, confidence, authority, and financial strength, surfacing how inconsistently and selectively “masculine” traits get assigned to bodies. The takeaway: masculinity and femininity function more like qualities anyone can hold than fixed attributes tied to sex.
Key distinctions drawn:
- Sex: assigned at birth (male, female, intersex)
- Sexuality: the fact that (almost) everyone is sexual, with asexuality as a distinct identity
- Sexual orientation: who a person is attracted to
The group also discussed how gender’s rules are built on sex, while sexuality’s rules extend further into caste and the wider system of oppression altogether, and that patriarchy’s basic unit, the family, follows a strikingly consistent structure across contexts.
It was noted that a person’s gender does not dictate their sexuality, and the distinction between “transgender” and “non-binary” was clarified as one of identity versus a broader umbrella.
Participants also discussed how women’s desire isn’t bound by age, referencing folk wedding traditions in Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, and Haryana, where women sing and dance to sexually charged songs, a tradition-sanctioned space for expression that rarely gets named as such. The Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram (India’s national adolescent health program) was flagged as a resource, and a common myth was corrected: nightfall is not exclusive to boys, even though most educational material frames it that way.
Day 5: Naming the Hierarchy and the Constitution’s Promise
The day opened with space for “burning questions” on sexuality, followed by a set of resources for participants to continue learning beyond the workshop: CREA.org, TARSHI (and its Neeli, Peeli, and Laal Kitaab series), Nirantar’s Khulti Parat, sexualityanddisability.org, the Transgender Persons Act 2019, the NALSA judgment, the book Breaking the Binary, Anjali (mental health resources), the video series Agents of Ishq, and the podcast Masculinitea.
The Hierarchy of Sexuality exercise: Two newspapers were laid flat, marked with 10–12 concentric circles, the center representing the position society treats as its “ideal.” Through group discussion, cards representing different relationships and identities were placed on the circles:
- Center (society’s “ideal”): A married couple, same caste, same religion, same class
- Third circle: An elderly couple’s sexual desire, challenging the assumption that desire fades or disappears with age
- Other circles: A disabled woman seeking a relationship; a woman in sex work, discussed alongside the Devadasi tradition, the Nat community of Rajasthan, and the Bedia community of Madhya Pradesh, along with the observation that Bengal’s Durga idol-making tradition uses soil taken from sex workers’ homes, a striking example of society depending on communities it simultaneously stigmatizes; a relationship between two women; a disabled man seeking a relationship; a married woman’s extramarital relationship; a married man’s extramarital relationship
- Second-to-last circle: An interfaith, inter-caste heterosexual couple
The exercise closed with a quick breakdown of the acronym LGBTQ: L, G, and B describe sexual orientation; T describes gender identity; and Q serves as an umbrella term.
On constitutional rights: the day connected the week’s themes to Indian law and the Constitution: the Right to Life with Dignity, the Right to Education, and the layered history of Triple Talaq (where the instant/immediate form was struck down using the Right to Equality as its constitutional basis). Discussion covered how customary law loses force wherever it conflicts with constitutional equality (Article 13), affirmative action and reservation as tools built to correct these imbalances, and the history of Section 377, a colonial-era law dating to 1860 that criminalized “non-natural” sexual acts, decriminalized for consenting adults by the Supreme Court in 2018.
Throughout the day, participants recorded their personal takeaways on cards.
Closing Feedback
Participants consistently described the workshop as one of the safest spaces they’d experienced; several noted it was the first time they’d felt able to share personal experiences, including sexual abuse, that they had never spoken about before. The disability-inclusive framing of discussions was specifically appreciated, as was the facilitation style throughout. A handful of practical suggestions came up around food and seating, and one participant suggested that future sessions could create more room for participants to sit with their own privilege rather than only discussing others’.
Note: A couple of items in the raw workshop notes have been intentionally left out of this report an unverified medical claim made in passing and an off-color remark referencing sexual violence neither of which is necessary for an accurate account of the workshop and both of which could read poorly out of context.