(Excerpt from note about its goals and objectives)

[Samvad is a gender forum started in October 2011 in response to the complex issues related to gender, lgbt and queer politics in the EFL University campus.  Kavya Krishna’s contributions in “Charting a History” in this volume provides some picture of the circumstances of formation] The task of introducing Samvad stands at the intersection of various histories, ready to be invoked, tentatively perched: the history of various struggles in this university, the history of failed attempts to run lgbt groups and gender forums on this campus, the history of the feminist political movement in this region, in this country, and the personal histories of individuals who have organized this forum.
[…] We have been asked if Samvad will deal only with the issues of women. We have been asked if we will oppose purdah. We have been asked why we need this forum on campus, when we already have so many other student organizations in an already over-crowded campus space.  A feminist organization can mean various things. What is the kind of feminism that Samvad aspires to practice and work with?
These are obviously very complex questions and they all come to us from different locations. At this stage of Samvad, we can only make some tentative remarks that will probably gesture towards some answers.  To begin with, Samvad is not a women’s group, but a gender forum. We make this distinction to emphasize that we are not working with a feminist framework that sees women as the only objects of their intervention. Instead, we want to work with the objective of destabilizing established notions of gender and sexuality. And in this sense, as bell hooks has put it, feminism is for everybody.
We see the Gender Forum as capable of playing a crucial role in naming and negotiating with the varied networks of power in our societies and in our campus. From the casual essentializing remarks that circulate within our hostels to the various kinds of sexual harassment faced by participants to the silence regarding alternative sexualities, the Gender Forum has a complex field to intervene in. This intervention can be in terms of sensitization, mobilization, debate and discussion, as well as initiating change through procedure and protest. In the face of various caste, class, regional and cultural struggles that are waged inside this university and outside of it, some of us have felt an acute need to have a feminist organization that would provide an enabling critical lens to analyse these complex and intermeshed formations of caste, gender, class, culture, identity. While Samvad will function in the space of the university, we see it as working in solidarity and even sometimes in continuity with various other struggles in the region and the country, for example, the struggle for Telangana, and especially the role of women in this struggle, Irom Sharmila’s struggle against AFSPA, land struggles against corporate, capitalist forces in various parts of the country, the currently ongoing Maruti Suzuki Employees’ struggle in Manesar, among many others.
Samvad intends to take up a range of issues, through various modes of intervention. We plan to have academic readings and discussions, film screenings, workshops, cultural activities like theatre, information-sharing and sensitization campaigns, each month. Along with all these activities, we will take up individual as well as general issues that are brought to our notice by the participants of this university. To begin with, we plan to focus on three issues:
1.    GSCASH: In spite of UGC regulations, GSCASH is not active on this campus. In the event of sexual harassment, we have no phone numbers to contact the concerned authorities, we have no information about the sexual harassment policy.  In fact, a lot of us don’t even know what constitutes sexual harassment… We hope that Samvad can play a role in the revival as well as the sustenance of GSCASH in this university.
2.    The second issue is related to the women’s hostels. The Baichanda hostel that houses BA students, among many other students, closes its gate to visitors at ten. The ten o’clock rule has been enforced since August, and has been enforced only on this hostel. The other hostel for women, the Akka Mahadevi Hostel, continues with the old eleven o’clock rule… What we want to do is facilitate discussions among the residents of the Baichanda hostel about what they think is desirable for them. As a gender forum, we do not wish to occupy any moral high ground and attempt to enlighten people about their rights and violations. Instead, at all points and levels, we wish to pay attention to the choices that men and women make, in spite of being framed within powerful structures. And that is precisely why we have decided to call this Forum, Samvad. A word that is common to several Indian languages, Samvad means dialogue, discussion, exchange, debate.
3.    Finally, we wish to emphasize the urgent need to have student elections on this campus. Not only do we need democratic processes and a legitimate platform for students, we also need to regulate the procedures and systems that sustain this university.
Among the various other issues that we have in mind, We would like to talk about one more extremely pertinent issue that Samvad intends to address in the near future. This is related to the absolute inadequacy of basic facilities for the non-teaching staff on this campus. Women workers do not even have a place to rest, especially in case of health problems. There aren’t adequate bathrooms, and the bathrooms that exist are often non-functional – sometimes, they are not repaired for months, and mostly, there is no running water.  We do not see these as simply administrative failures. These are also ideological decisions, and we wish to crucially challenge them at that level. What kind of a workspace is this university for the non-teaching staff? We want to take this question seriously, and work with various sections of the university to make a difference to the state of affairs.
[…] I know that the picture is still fuzzy. But I also hope that this open-endedness can be made productive. More than anything else, I hope that this tentativeness can be utilized into creating dialogic spaces on this campus.