Pink Saris Gang

Photo by Jörg Böthling/missio

They march in pink saris, brandishing wooden sticks. They call themselves the “gulabi gang” (gulabi means pink in Hindi), and go after men who have beaten and abandoned their wives, as well as corrupt village officials. They are a group of several hundred vigilante women who live in Banda, an extremely impoverished region of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where child marriages, sexual violence and dowry deaths are rampant. Their leader is the feisty Sampat Pal Devi, an illiterate low-caste woman who was married at 12, and had her first child at 13. Sampat Devi founded the Gulabi Gang in 2006, and has since earned the respect of village officials as a force to be reckoned with. The group treats the government and NGOs with equal distrust, and has decided to take the justice of the region into its own hands.

Check out the trailer for Kim Longinotto’s 2010 documentary on the group, “Pink Saris”:

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