To contextualise the politics that MAVA represents, we also need to locate it on a terrain mapped out by men’s groups and movements. We notice that at least two other men’s formations are active in the city. The first is the Purush Hakka Saurakshan Samiti (PHSS) which purports to be “India’s First Registered Committee for Protection of Men’s Rights”[3]. This men’s rights group could be broadly categorised as what has been described as a ‘backlash’: a somewhat defensive reaction to feminism, the women’s movements and the supposed legal and quasi-legal concessions that the state makes to women; it could also be viewed as a reaction to the alleged injustices that modern men have to suffer in a social context determined by the changing gender relations. The PHSS primarily focuses on what it terms to be the misuse of the Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code or what has come to be known as the Anti-dowry Act, and in this sense, can be described as an issue-based group. Though there do not seem to be any points of comparison between MAVA and the PHSS, it is interesting to note that in terms of the social composition of their memberships they are strikingly similar – which happens to be urban, educated and middle-class in both the cases. The other men’s formations that need to be mentioned here are the gay rights groups such as the Humsafar Trust (HT). The HT deals with issues concerning gay men and men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM). Its activities include educating the gay and MSM communities about Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV/AIDS and providing them with support structures and access to health facilities. The Trust’s work also involves advocacy and research on gender and sexuality issues pertaining to sexual minorities[4]. The HT, therefore, can be understood as a sexual-identity-based men’s formation, and can be clearly distinguished from a pro-feminist group such as MAVA.

Here, one is tempted to compare MAVA to the influential, pro-feminist men’s organisation based in the United States, the National Organization of Men against Sexism (NOMAS). NOMAS, which began as a self-consciously pro-feminist and gay-affirmative organisation in the seventies, is committed to creating equality and justice between men and women. In this regard, it wages a joint struggle with women to change the social structures of power, to end men’s sexual violence against women and to humanise men so that they live happier, healthier lives. Right from its inception, NOMAS has been a broad-based organisation, in the sense that it has always had gay men as its members and the articulation of gay rights as one of its primary objectives. However, over time, it has further broadened its appeal by taking up struggles against racial oppression and connecting with Afro-American men outside the organisation. Thus, it has been able to transform its earlier ‘white, professional-class’ character into a more robust and diverse one[5]. In terms of its purported goals, MAVA and NOMAS appear to coincide. However, there are significant differences in the ways in which NOMAS has been able to grow by establishing linkages with other men’s groups by opening out their pro-feminist agenda to include issues concerning sexual and racial identities. In the process, we can infer that it has also responded to newer understandings of gender relations that ask us to locate them within other, diverse structures of power. The paths traversed by NOMAS from a rather unitary, liberal pro-feminism to a more variegated and embodied post-feminism, it seems to me, indicate the directions that MAVA might wish to take up in the future to expand its sphere of influence[6].