Click here to access Vasanth Kannabiran's Oral History audio files.

Additionally, you can click here to access the accompanying time-coded summary of the interview. Full transcripts and other oral history materials are available at the British Library Sound Archive, London, United Kingdom, and at the WLP office in Bethesda, MD. For more information, please consult our Oral History Archive of the Global Women’s Movement Terms of Use. 

About the Interviewee* 

Vasanth Kannabiran (India) has been an active member of the women’s movement in India for the last three decades. She has focused on issues of communal harmony and peace, as well as gender and development. A founding member of one of the earliest feminist collectives in India, Stree Shakti Sangathana, Kannabiran has been an advisor to several government initiatives on bringing gender into governance, with the police and judiciary. She is a focal point of the National Alliance of Women and the Indian National Social Action Forum, of which she was president. She has worked on capacity-building in the NGO sector, training and encouraging successive generations of development workers, especially women, and making tools of feminist praxis accessible for grassroots mobilization.

She has been a Consultant to evaluations and policy formulations of Central Government, Bilateral, and Multilateral agencies and has prepared studies on gender training, gender and human rights, and gender and poverty. Working closely with the Women’s Program of the Asian South Pacific Bureau of Adult Education and the National Alliance of Women, she is recognized at the regional and national level for her work on gender and development.

A founding member of Asmita Resource Centre for Women, she co-edited and co-authored Sarihaddulu Leni Sandhyalu, Saramsam, Mahilavaranam, De-Eroticizing Assault, Web of Deceit and E-Kalam. Her latest publication is A Grief to Bury: Memories of Love, Work and Loss. She conceived, wrote, and directed four ballets in English: Menakaa in 2008, Peace on Earth in 2009, Ahalya in 2011, and Gandhari, which premiered in Hyderabad in 2013. Kannabiran was nominated among 1000 women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005 and was invited to serve as a Goodwill Ambassador of the World NGO Day Initiative.

*This brief biography was recorded concurrently with the subject’s interview for the WLP Oral History Archive of the Global Women’s Movement.

About the WLP Oral History Project

The WLP Oral History Archive of the Global Women’s Movement preserves stories and lessons of women’s rights activists from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America who have left their mark on the struggle for women’s advancement. We have collected dozens of oral histories from 25 countries, and the project is ongoing. Since 2014, WLP has collaborated with the Sound Archive of the British Library to host the repository.

Read more ABOUT OUR ORAL HISTORY PROJECT.

Read our Oral History Archive of the Global Women’s Movement Terms of Use.