CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
FOREWORD: WOMEN IN SEARCH OF THEMSELVES
Namita Gokhale
INTRODUCTION
Catriona Mitchell
PROLOGUE: BREAKING THE SILENCE
Leila Seth
REARRANGED MARRIAGE
Ira Trivedi
BLACK
Rosalyn D’Mello
SQUARE PEG, ROUND HOLE
Mitali Saran
OXYGEN
Urvashi Butalia
OVER MY SHOULDER
Annie Zaidi
HOME GIRL: A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A SMALL-TOWN SOCIAL WORKER
Anjum Hasan
BEYOND MEMORIES
Salma
THE VILLAGE WITHOUT MEN
Anita Agnihotri
TICK TOCK
Tishani Doshi
SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE
Anonymous
LOVE IN THE TIME OF THE INTERNET
Ira Trivedi
S/HE GENERIS: SHAPE-SHIFTING OUR WAY ACROSS THE RIVER OF DESIRE
Margaret Mascarenhas
KARAIKAL AMMAIYAR AND HER CLOSET OF ADORNMENTS
Sharanya Manivannan
CAST AWAY
Tisca Chopra
MATAJI
Deepti Kapoor
BAMBOO BASKETS AND BROCADE SARIS: LIFE AND STORIES OF DALIT WOMEN
C.S. Lakshmi
TWO SISTERS, TWO LIVES
Nirupama Dutt
THE SCIMITAR OF WORDS
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE EDITOR
COPYRIGHT PAGE
FOREWORD
WOMEN IN SEARCH OF THEMSELVES
NAMITA GOKHALE
As a writer, publisher and festival director, there are various journeys I have made across my life. Through yatras1 and parikramas2 and pilgrimages, I have tried to make sense of my world and find patterns of meaning within it. Through writing and publishing books, through literary events, through the lived life which is the raw material of it all, it has taken me some time to accept that I am woman writer.
When my debut novel Paro: Dreams of Passion was published in 1984, it subjected me to the shocked outrage of Indian readers who could not believe that a bona-fide Indian woman had so flagrantly crossed the line of propriety. I had thought of it as a comic novel and was surprised by the outrage; it’s a relief that different generations of readers have found it funny for over thirty years now.
It’s been a long journey, a stumbling quest across twelve books, and another I am currently working on. I have at last come to terms with being a woman – an Indian woman – whatever that might imply.
I am a writer, I am a woman. Yet, as writers, we are more than the sum of our sex, gender and biology. As writers we are constantly trying to enter the minds and skins and situations of all the people we write about, be they men, women, both, or neither. And yet there is a critical mass of womanhood inside many of us – an aggregate of hurts, rejections and assertions – that we don’t want to leave behind; that we do, in fact, wish to address as writers.
The life of a woman is an interior life; it is spent in daily tasks, it follows the rhythm of the seasons, and, usually, it ends and passes without record.
One of my books, Mountain Echoes: Reminiscences of Kumaoni Women, compiled oral biographies of my grandmother and three grand-aunts, all four highly individualistic, vibrant and feisty women. My family roots are in Uttarakhand, in the mountains around Nainital and Almora. In the dedication I observed, ‘In our mountains women are rarely afraid. They are strong, direct, loyal, and in most situations they are free to speak their minds. You see them roaming the forests for fodder, strong-footed as goats, fearless as lions. They are not afraid of the dark and they brave the cold, they ford the swift mountain streams sure-footedly and when they are surprised by an attacking tiger, they have been known to raise their scythes and give chase to save a savaged sister from a man-eating predator.’
When I began recording the lives of my grandmother and grand-aunts, and the lives of their mothers before them, I encountered a moving personal strength and a disturbing social vulnerability. I observed, ‘The history of women is left to us in folklore and tradition, in faintly remembered lullabies and the half-forgotten touch of a grandmother’s hand; in recipes, ancestral jewellery, and cautionary tales about the limits of a woman’s empowerment.’
As a writer, my interests moved to mythology and its living manifestations in India. Four books, The Book of Shiva, The Mahabharata for Young Readers, Shakuntala: The Play of Memory and In Search of Sita: Revisiting Mythology, emerged from this quest. I learnt a lot from The Mahabharata. Unlike in The Ramayana, the women of this vast epic negotiated their lives outside as well as inside domestic spaces. Be it Kunti, Draupadi or Hidimba, Amba, Ambika or Ambilika, queen, demoness or transgender, these women demanded agency and lived life resolutely on their own terms. As a child, I had been told that The Mahabharata was not to be kept at home, or read by women, as this would cause discord. I realise now that this injunction was born of patriarchal caution, that the self-willed strength of these epic women was not a role model the men wanted emulated. The mythological figure of Sita stands as an archetype for most Indian women. Mythology is not an academic area of study in India but a part of a living cultural continuity. The gods and goddesses are alive here and we encounter them at every stage and step of daily life.
Indian women fill up a large space in the map of humankind. There are approximately 623 million of us – approximately 8.6 per cent of the human species. The stories of our lives, and the contexts and circumstances within which we negotiate our womanhood and self-hood, are as diverse and varied as India herself. As a nation and a culture, India remains a paradox and an enigma, replete with contradictions. India is a land where women are worshipped as goddesses, yet barbaric practices such as sati3 and child marriage continue to exert their hold into the twenty-first century. It has had a woman prime minister and president, and women excel and exert influence in professions such as politics and law, the administrative services, media, literature, medicine and banking. But the real strength of Indian women, those unsung heroines who hold up more than half the sky, comes from the disadvantaged, the indigent and marginalised, the often-silenced majority who till the soil, graze their cattle, work in menial domestic jobs, and look after and sustain their immediate and extended families.
Although the sheer size, scale and gradations of Indian culture and society make any form of generalisation untenable, its Stree Shakti or feminine strength, and the resilience and spirit of its women, are manifest at every turn and encounter. This individual strength is at odds with their social vulnerability, with both rising to the fore at a time of intense, liminal change. The upheavals of modernity and the indelible imprints of an ancient and enduring civilisation combine to create fresh opportunities, and also new fractures and faultlines.
Walking Towards Ourselves has contributions from writers with a range of distinct and strongly individual voices. Many of them are friends, others are writers I have read and admired. Resisting easy stereotypes, they tell their stories, or those of women around them, with direct and compelling truth telling. Somewhere between these stories of women in search of themselves, one glimpses tangled strands of narrative, shared vulnerabilities, common strengths.
Leila Seth’s measured yet passionate plea in support of the rights of women, calling for an end to the wrongs done to them by a feudal patriarchy, is echoed with personal anguish in ‘Scenes from a Marriage’ – a disturbing testimonial by one writer who has chosen to remain anonymous. Leila’s thoughtful and wise examination of lega
l redress puts autonomy and violation of bodily space into perspective.
In a society where women’s minds as well as their bodies are perceived as belonging to their fathers, their brothers and their husbands, women write about sexuality to test the limits of autonomy, to take charge of their intellect and creativity. Skin, flesh and outrage merge into powerful protest and acceptance in the direct, unblinking pieces by Rosalyn D’Mello, Margaret Mascarenhas, Mitali Saran, and the anonymous writer. ‘Autonomy is the most powerful drug in the world,’ declares Mitali Saran, as she tells of how she manages an open and individualist lifestyle while living with a ‘madly brave and madly fearful’ mother.
The essays and musings in this collection – wise, anguished or rebellious as they may be – are drawn from across India, some in translation from Bangla, Tamil and Punjabi. Writer, essayist and retired civil servant Anita Agnihotri writes in Bangla, one of India’s most evocative literary languages, and the sixth-most spoken language in the world. Her piece ‘The Village Without Men’ is set in the fragile and threatened eco-system of the Sundarbans, where one woman’s battle for dignity and survival becomes the story of ‘each and every woman of the Sundarbans.’
Novelist and critic Anjum Hasan’s powerful and moving documentation of the dreams, responsibilities and duties of a young social worker in Southern India carries the resonance of many lives and many hopes, ‘and most of all, just this: a roof over her head, a warm blanket, the life that she and her family have built, which is very precious and very hard won.’
On a very different note – tongue in cheek but deadly serious – Annie Zaidi walks us through the personal journey of a woman writer and journalist negotiating the hazardous contours of urban Indian landscapes.
Deepti Kapoor writes an interrogative piece about her grandmother, her mother and herself, examining the continuum of women’s narratives, and the many contradictions in their entwined stories and disparate worldviews.
Ira Trivedi’s poised yet poignant foray into the frenzied world of the Indian matrimonial industry reveals the dark truths of the bridal market.
Sharanya Manivannan employs clothes and the wardrobe as a metaphor for identity and adventure.
While Tishani Doshi writes of children and progeny and the idea of motherhood, Salma chronicles her rebellions against tradition and modernity using the weapons of words and poetry.
C.S. Lakshmi, ‘Ambai’ to her devoted readers and fans, writes of SPARROW – the Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women – and her groundbreaking work on documenting oral histories and narratives.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s piece picks up the strands of childhood memories to stress the abiding centrality of women, education, literacy and learning. Nirupama Dutt’s memoir of her sister, Devi, twenty-eight years her senior, and her tragic and wasted life, ends with the question ‘where does your story end and mine begin?’
For me, the emblematic piece in this anthology is Urvashi Butalia’s recount of her journey from being a ‘newly minted young feminist’ to founding the now-iconic feminist presses Kali for Women and Zubaan. As she concludes, her story converges, as many in this anthology do, with that of her mother, who dies, a week short of her ninetieth birthday, in her arms. ‘As happens in life, by the time she was into her eighties, our roles were somewhat reversed, she the “child”, I the “mother”, both of us feminist, both of us working women, both of us Indian.’
These are transformative tales and they carry the texture and nuance of being Indian, and of being women, within them. They bring alive a revelatory panorama of struggle and survival, sorority and resistance, and remind us that we are each other’s stories.
* * *
1. Sacred journeys
2. Circumambulations
3. The (now illegal) practice of a Hindu widow cremating herself on her husband’s funeral pyre in order to fulfill her true role as wife.
INTRODUCTION
CATRIONA MITCHELL
Last time I was leaving Delhi, my flight home to Australia was scheduled for 2 am. Being someone who travels a lot and at odd hours, it didn’t occur to me that this might be a problem until the date arrived and I realised I would need to cross the city at midnight. Lack of safety for women in Delhi had been a focus in the international press for at least two years. In the absence of a driver with whom I was familiar, and with the safety of Uber under question at the time because of a sexual assault by one of its Delhi drivers the previous month, I felt a growing sense of vulnerability – especially as darkness descended and a night fog started to envelop the neighbourhood.
Then I remembered an article I had come across a few days earlier, which was about an N.G.O. that had set up an all-female taxi company. It sought out unemployed women from the city’s poorest parts, taught them to drive and to read maps, gave them training in assertiveness, self-defence and communication skills, put them in uniform, and paid them a wage so decent that even the most resistant in their community were supportive of their employ.
I made the phone call.
The taxi arrived just after midnight, making its way slowly down the laneway to where I stood waiting with my suitcase in the dark. I could barely see the driver above the steering wheel, she was so slight. She was young, too: barely over twenty. She smiled as I clambered in with my case and introduced herself as Deepali. It seemed to me her smile carried enough voltage to light up the whole city.
There were few other cars on the road, but a stream of trucks passed us at speed down the Aurobindo Marg and the night air was thick with dust in their wake. There was no one else outside at this hour. At the lights, the truck drivers were able to stare from their cabins into our car. On seeing the two of us alone in the taxi, there was leering, and jeering. I pulled a scarf over my blonde hair and glanced at the safety lock of the car to see that it was pushed down. Deepali focused her attention on the road ahead, giving no indication that she was even aware of their presence; she started to peel some of the burgundy varnish off her chipped fingernails.
A barrage of questions was forming in my mind: Does this happen often? When you’re alone, too? Do you feel protected, with just the safety lock of the car standing between you and them? What happens if someone attacks you? Whom can you call? What happens when you need to refuel the car? Where do you go to the toilet? What does your father think about your being out on these streets through the night? How old are you, anyway?
In the end, I settled for: ‘Do you like your job?’
To which Deepali replied: ‘I don’t know.’
She drove on in a focused, pensive way to the airport, as if the force of her concentration alone would keep her safe.
From the reassuringly bright lights at the airport’s drop-off point, I watched Deepali’s taxi edge back into the stream of traffic, re-entering the dark and smog and fog of that winter night. I feared for what lay ahead of her until the dawn broke, and marvelled at her youth and courage. I felt ashamed that this journey would stand out in memory for me – an Australian visitor to India – for being subversive and a little frightening, something I wouldn’t repeat if I could help it, whereas for Deepali, this was her daily, or rather nightly, reality.
The international press regularly tells us that India is one of the most dangerous places on the planet to be a woman.
When at home in Australia, I am vocal about my love for India to the point of obsession, and this sparks what has become a rather predictable pattern of conversation. Women in my country are constantly telling me that they’re eager to visit India, but don’t dare, for fear that they might be attacked. The question they want me to answer for them is: If I go there, will I be safe?
Meanwhile, Indians from Jaipur to Bangalore to Cochin to Pondicherry have asked me the same question about visiting Australia. This was true particularly in the wake of the shocking murder of an Indian student in Melbourne in 2010, and other race-motivated crimes against young Indians in Australia around that time, but the questioning continues to
this day: If I go there, will I be safe?
In December 2012, when a young medical student was returning home after an evening screening of Life of Pi in a mall in South Delhi, she and her male companion boarded a bus that was not, contrary to appearances, a public transport vehicle. Rather, a group of young men had commandeered a bus and were cruising the streets looking for some entertainment. They had been drinking. A fight broke out when one of the men admonished the young woman’s companion for being out with her at night, when the two weren’t married. The others pitched in – into an argument motivated by the men’s perceived need for ‘moral shaming’1. The ensuing attack left the boy injured and the girl near-dead after being violently gang raped and thrown from the bus; she later died in a Singapore hospital when her doctors, who had never seen such unspeakable damage to a woman’s body, were unable to save her.
This tragic and horrifying incident sparked a furore across Delhi, and then across India, and then across the world. By stepping into that bus that night, that young woman, who came to be known as Nirbhaya (‘Fearless’) inadvertently changed the course of India’s history.
At the time of Nirbhaya’s death, I was in the emergency ward of an Australian hospital. I had been leading a group of Australian and Indian authors through South India by train for a month in a ‘roving writers festival’ called Bookwallah. I had contracted typhoid, salmonella and dengue fever during that trip, but not found the time while on the trains for the appropriate medical care. On my return to Australia, my mother found me collapsed in her bathroom; she thought I had died.
It’s for this reason that I missed the protests in India – the unbridled outrage that poured out into the city streets. I wanted to be there. I wanted to join my Indian ‘sisters’, to add my voice to their emboldened chorus, to share in this pivotal moment, a kindling of India’s gender revolution.
The heated demonstrations in the streets put such pressure on the government that sexual assault laws in India were changed as a result. I am deeply honoured that this book features a prologue by Leila Seth, the first woman judge of the Delhi High Court and first female Chief Justice of a state High Court in India. She was one of only three members – and the only female member – of the anti-rape commission assembled in direct response to the Nirbhaya case. In her essay here, Leila highlights exactly how those new laws were negotiated and drawn up, as well as the challenges and obstacles faced by the commission along the way. The information imparted in Leila’s contribution underpins, in a sense, all of the stories in this book.
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