End genital mutilation, says ‘Batman Wannabe’

MUMBAI: A wise man once said, “Always be yourself. Unless you can be Batman. Then always be Batman.” Mariya Taher takes her word seriously when she calls herself a “Batman Wannabe” on Twitter.
“Batman doesn't have superpowers but uses his mind to connect with people. I think he’s really cool, clever and resourceful! That's how I want to bring a positive change,” laughs the 33-year-old social activist from Boston.
Currently in Mumbai – her Gotham city — to interact with college students on gender violence, Mariya has been an important voice against female genital mutilation (FGM), after she spoke up about her own experience of being “cut” as a seven-year-old: first through her writings, then with a video and currently as one of the five founding members of Sahiyo, a group based in Mumbai, rallying to end FGM.
Born into a Dawoodi Bohra family in California, Mariya underwent ‘vacation cutting’ at an apartment inside a run-down building in Bhindi Bazaar during a summer holiday with relatives in Mumbai. But it wasn’t until high school that she started questioning female genital mutilation. “I was never traumatised by it because there was a celebration when it happened. When I came across the term FGM as a teenager, it reminded me of what I’d gone through. That curiosity prompted me to study it.”
As a student of social work, Mariya started out with domestic violence issues but felt impelled to go back and probe the FGM practice that young Dawoodi Bohra girls were made to go through. “I realised how it was a form of gender violence,” says Mariya who wrote her thesis on FGM among Dawoodi Bohras in the US. “I wanted to understand the reasons and how it could be justified when it was against the law,” says Mariya. Her research threw up several instances of Bohra women in the US having undergone what she had – khatna — and it was the first study that laid bare a practice common in Indian communities as well as in places like Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore.
While women in India have started to raise their voice against female circumcision and an online petition has garnered over 50,000 signatures, “legislation can take long”, says Mariya who has been working with the Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association on passing state legislation to criminalize FGM. She says, “Although the US passed legislation in 1996 criminalising FGM, it was forgotten until 2013. There was a big loophole: It said nothing about taking people outside the country.”
Besides domestic abuse and challenges south Asian women experience in the US, FGM as an issue with “real fears and anxieties” is the priority at the moment for Mariya. “Storytelling is key so that legislation when it happens is sensitive. We don’t want to break up families or send them to jail,” she says, pointing at the need to avert unintended consequences. “Like the time when conservative news sources in the US took my story and used it to attack Muslims, heightening Islamophobia. There has to be the right balance.”