One afternoon, a group of women came to see us. They were village women from Rajasthan, accompanied by four urban activists. They brought us a book – the kind of book feminist publishers dream about – created by Rajasthani village women in a series of health workshops as part of a government development program. They asked if we would publish it and imposed certain conditions (like having the names of all seventy-five authors on the cover – ‘We don’t know the concept of individual authorship in rural India,’ they said, reminding us of the collective nature of knowledge). Meant for rural women, the book, called Shareer ki Jaankari (Know Your Body) used illustrations to look at the female body from childhood to old age.
The women told us a wonderful story of how they had tested the first draft of the book in the village: they had been scoffed at for having drawings of naked women and men in it. ‘How can you call this realistic,’ they were asked. ‘You never see naked people in villages.’ And so they went back to the drawing board, and worked out a unique way to draw pictures and cover them up with liftable flaps, so that you could see the human anatomy that lay beneath the layers of clothing. To this day, this remains our bestselling book, though we’ve never sold a single copy through a bookshop. It only ever goes to women’s groups.
Many years later Kali transformed into another avatar: Zubaan. Similar in intent, different in name, open to changes in the women’s movement, and operating now in a changed publishing environment, Zubaan presented new sorts of challenges. By this time, we had been around some twenty years, so we knew we were doing something right, but for me the challenge now was to see if Zubaan could be turned into a feminist workplace. Could we combine flexi-time, the priorities of single mothers, providing office lunches and more with a professional work ethic? Could we consider how workplace relationships might look if they were viewed not from the point of view of the employer but from that of the employee?
Meanwhile, my mother ran her own organisation, small, contained, but committed to helping women fight their battles. Along the way, she picked up many new ‘children’ – everyone she helped basically adopted her. I admired her for her commitment, and her ability to take on even those she knew, if she felt they were being unfair. In the upper-middle-class residential area of Delhi, where we lived, she fought cases on behalf of domestic workers who were badly treated by their employers, daughters-in-law who wanted custody of their children. The local police became her friends, and sometimes her enemies.
At some point she was persuaded – not by me but by a publisher friend at Penguin – to write a book about her experiences of working with women. We worked on this book together – she would write, I would edit and show the edits to her, she’d argue with me, put stuff back into it, and then we’d reach a compromise. She loved making the book, and would laugh and tell her friends, isn’t it strange, my daughter’s a publisher but my book is being published by someone else. She was eighty-one when she wrote The Gift of a Daughter – it was about her experiences of working in the anti-dowry movement. She said writing it gave her a sense of freedom. Her only regret was that my father was no longer around to see the book. ‘Poor man,’ she said, ‘he spent so much time being a bit embarrassed about his feminist wife! But this would’ve made him proud.’
We celebrated the book by doing what we often did together – we went out shopping. We often shared clothes, although of late she’d lost so much weight that I couldn’t fit into anything of hers. She would often forget which clothes were mine and would have tailors take them in to fit her, leaving me fuming, and sometimes laughing.
One day in Zubaan I happened to read a small news item about a book in Hindi, written by a domestic worker, Baby Halder, about her life. Baby’s life was like those of thousands of other Indian women: married at the age of twelve, a mother by thirteen, with a violent husband, poverty – until one day, now a mother of three, she decided to up and leave. She travelled, ticketless, to Delhi and, once there, managed to find a job with an employer who noticed her love of books. He encouraged her to read, and write, and Baby wrote her life. The book, called A Life Less Ordinary, became our biggest success and, for me, the most important thing was the rather piquant fact that it was a poor woman’s story that did that.
A feminist publisher’s life is really all about the books she publishes, and the women who write them. That’s how it was for me: Baby’s book was followed by a novel from a Tamil writer, Salma, a brave woman who battled patriarchy, conservatism and family pressure to make a name for herself as an erotic poet, a novelist and a politician. And then came Anjum Zamrud Habib, a political prisoner who’d been held on charges of terrorism in a Delhi prison for five years and was then let off, a woman who spoke movingly about being in prison, but refused to speak about her torture or any sexual violence that may have happened. ‘The silence helps me cope,’ she said. And she was followed by Revathi, a transgender person who was thrown out of her house by her family, forced to beg on the streets and become a sex worker, who faced ostracism, violence and hate speech, just because she wanted to be the transgender person she is today. And many, many others.
A feminist publisher based in New Delhi can also just sit in her office and access manuscripts written by well-educated, middle-class women and fool herself that she’s doing the right thing. But, for me, it was the Shareer ki Jaankari experience – the book by the women of Rajasthan – that showed me that books weren’t only about those who knew themselves as writers. Other women – the taxi driver who left a violent marriage to make a life, the Muslim women’s group that set themselves up as a women’s jamaat2, the rape survivor who refused to be silenced – in other words, ordinary, everyday women, they too had a story to tell, a story of courage, of resilience, of the fierce desire to change their lives. And it was the feminist publisher’s task to bring these otherwise marginalised voices to public attention.
If that meant running a modest enterprise, earning a bit less, sometimes publishing fewer books, and always being careful about money, well, that was a choice I made. It wasn’t always easy, and perhaps the most difficult part was to ensure that others who worked in this enterprise earned fair salaries – the balancing act was always tough, always challenging.
In some ways, by working with the street vendor, the domestic worker, the washerwoman, the typist, this is precisely what my mother was doing. And for us, one of the most exciting conversations became how we could create books about the lives of the women she encountered.
In 2011 my mother died. She was a week short of her ninetieth birthday. Some six months before she went, she’d stopped going to her office, too weak now to climb those stairs. She was keen that I take over her work but by this time, my own had taken up most of my life and, although she understood this, she was also regretful that there would be one person less to help the many women who needed help.
The day she died, I held her in my arms as the life went out of her, and I like to think that she knew what was happening. Neither of us could have wished for a better way for her to go. Our feminist journeys had begun at the same time, but they’d taken quite different paths. 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.
* * *
1. Young women are sometimes murdered or driven to suicide by their husbands and in-laws, via harassment and torture, in their pursuit of an increased dowry.
2. A gathering or congregation
OVER MY SHOULDER
ANNIE ZAIDI
I had a rather sobering conversation with my grandmother the year I turned seventeen. I was lying beside her, my head resting on her arm, when she asked what course of study I intended to pursue. Before I could make any coherent reply, she asked me to consider the fact that there were only three professions suitable for girls: I.A.S. (Indian Administrative Service), doctor, teacher.
I was spending the summer with my grandparents af
ter the school-leaving exam. It was a quiet house with just the three of us in it. Grandpa spent most of the day reading or writing. Grandma cooked, cleaned, sewed, mended, washed dishes, did the laundry. I spent most of the day reading novels but I was also trying to teach myself to type on Grandpa’s old typewriter. I wasn’t writing anything original, though; I just thought that typing made me a bit more employable.
As a seventeen-year-old middle-class girl in India, I felt remarkably unemployable. My grandmother was literate but never formally schooled and she may have been painfully aware of the importance of a good education. All the kids were sent to the best schools they could afford. She quietly hoped her children and her grandchildren would enter the most highly regarded professions. But for girls, the choices were as narrow as doctor, teacher, I.A.S. officer.
Timidly, I had ventured, ‘There’s also engineering.’
Grandma was not convinced. ‘Engineering is fine for boys,’ she said. ‘They build bridges and dams. But engineers have to be in all kinds of places.’
I heard what she hadn’t quite said. It was not so much that they have to be in all kinds of terrain but that engineers must deal with all kinds of men, and mainly with men. There would be few women colleagues, bosses or subordinates, which made the job unsuitable. What Grandma didn’t quite say was that it might be unsafe.
Most girls in my class said they wanted to be doctors or teachers. A few said engineer, though they must have been aware that studying to be an engineer didn’t mean you actually got to be one. We grew up in industrial townships where nearly all the residents were employed at a factory. There was not one female engineer in sight. The only women who held regular jobs worked at the township school, as my mother did, or at the medical dispensary.
The only other female workers in sight were tribal women who came in from the surrounding villages whenever needed – construction labourers, the occasional milkmaid, domestic workers (cleaners usually, the cooks were often male).
At seventeen, I knew of only the following jobs featuring women:
• ayah/nanny/governess
• sweeper/dishwasher
• receptionist
• typist/secretary
• phone operator
• salesgirl
• hairdresser/beautician
• teacher
• doctor
• nurse
• prime minister
‘Prime minister’ was a curious aside. I was six when a neighbour started teasing me, saying, ‘The prime minister is what you’d like to be, isn’t it?’ I was dimly aware that this was a joke but it was a joke that held a glimmer of the possibilities our nation held for little girls. India did have a female prime minister, Indira Gandhi, who had been recently assassinated.
For all I knew, it was easier to be in parliament than to be a salesgirl. I never saw any salesgirls in local shops. Even in bigger cities like Lucknow, where we went visiting during the school breaks, most of the sales staff were male, even at stores selling women’s underwear. Nor had I heard of women owning businesses, with the exception of Shahnaz Hussain, who started a line of beauty products and salons named after herself.
English novels had informed me that educated girls without an inheritance could become governesses. As for ‘phone operator’ and ‘secretary’, I must have got them from the movies. Few films showed women as industrialists, lawyers or cops, though a television series called Udaan was quite inspiring. The main character was a girl who joined the police force and we followed her trials – from the physically gruelling training process to the problem of wearing a sari just right, lest upper-class women decide that she belonged to the lower middle class – with avid interest. We had never seen any female cops in real life but a few girls had begun to talk about joining the police or the army.
For me, the end of high school was an uninspiring time. I was not interested in beauty products. Nor did I want to build bridges or join the army. I sat for medical and engineering entrance exams since most of my classmates were doing it, but was so uninterested that I drew patterns for dresses on the margins of the answer sheet. Somebody mentioned fashion design and I was toying with the idea. True, all the tailors I’d ever seen were men. But being a ‘designer’ was different, I told myself. Besides, Grandma sewed and so did all the widowed mothers of heroes in Bollywood films. There could be no doubt about the suitability of tailoring.
Clothes weren’t my thing, though. Books were. For college, I moved from Science to Arts. My grandmother must have been disappointed but she assumed I’d end up teaching. Some people even held teaching to be the ideal career for girls. You could do it in any community and could move wherever your husband moved; you’d have time to cook since you wouldn’t be expected to pull late nights at work; you’d have vacations at the same time as your kids; the kids might get discounted or free tuition. More than once I heard people say, ‘At least teaching helps to pass the time.’
The assumption was that as a girl – and future wife – I’d be supported or subsidised by a husband and therefore didn’t need a well-paid job. But my own mother was raising two kids alone, and many teachers at school were either single or subsidising their families. I also knew that teachers were barely keeping their heads above water (some private schools, even now, pay teachers as little as INR 5000 per month1). I had no overwhelming desire to be poor, nor did I fancy being stuck in a roomful of kids, day after day. So what was an ‘Arts’ girl to do?
In my final year of college, Mrs Mathew, one of the English Literature lecturers, pulled me aside and asked if I had a plan. I didn’t. But I was starting to write, and was co-editing the college magazine. According to Mrs Mathew, journalism would be the best way for me to make a living.
I was pleasantly surprised at her interest in my ability to make a living. It was often assumed that the girls (particularly Arts girls) were not very invested in careers. One of the senior-most professors had said as much in one of her famous talk-downs: Most girls just come to this college because it improves their chances at marriage.
It made us squirm, as there was a grain of truth in it. We attended a well-regarded ‘convent’, exclusively for girls, and the matrimonial columns in newspapers did carry advertisements for prospective brides with ‘Convented’ listed among their many virtues. It was also true that some of my batchmates were resigned to arranged marriages. But many of us were also applying for a Master’s degree in something or other. Some tried to crack the highly competitive C.A.T. (the entrance test for an M.B.A. degree at the highest ranked institutes) and once again, I found myself sitting for an exam only because my friends were.
I should have known better by then. A major clue was how I was conducting myself at this time. We had to travel to another city for the C.A.T. exam. It was a bigger city, with bigger, better bookstores. Instead of prepping, I spent nearly all my money on expensive goods like The Collected Works of Saki and didn’t have enough money left for a bus ticket back to college. Mrs Mathew was right. I just didn’t believe her yet.
Meanwhile, some of the girls in college were swirling in more glamorous currents of ambition. In the late 1990s, Miss Indias began winning Miss World and Miss Universe titles. They bagged modelling and acting jobs. They were on TV and in the newspaper. Their parents – many were middle-class professionals – looked proud. Girls began to want ‘portfolio’ photographs, even in smaller towns like Ajmer. One of the local photo studios was run by a man who had the rare distinction of being allowed into our strict convent to take pictures of cultural events. To him the girls went, armed with a change of clothes and diffident make-up.
The portfolio included one sari snap: a full-length picture showing a girl in her traditional avatar. She would often be holding the loose end of the sari on her left wrist, extended, to show off the rich fabric, just like the models in women’s magazines. Then there was a close-up snap – a portrait where she smiled (but not too much). Finally, a ‘Western’ snap, for which a girl would
put on a cobbled-together version of a business suit: black trousers or knee-length skirt with a blazer on top. Some just wore their school uniform blazer; some borrowed a black coat from their dads.
The photos, in soft focus that took away all blemishes of skin, served a triple purpose. First of all, we wanted to hold on to this version of us – young, hopeful, more attractive than we actually were. Secondly, the photos could serve as ‘proposal snaps’. Parents didn’t mind having a picture handy to send out to potential grooms. The third reason was professional. Some had secret modelling dreams and others wanted to be air hostesses. India had just permitted privately owned airlines to operate and there were advertisements in the newspaper asking for applications along with photos. The job was not only well paid, it was a symbol of great freedom. You got to travel without a chaperone. You could be out and about at any time of the day or night!
It was an exciting thought, but not necessarily for parents. A friend’s father was working with an airline himself but he discouraged his daughter’s air hostess dreams. I was thinking of applying although I had heard comments from family members about how air hostesses were just ‘glorified waitresses’.
I still remember the sting of that phrase. Glorified waitress! It was inconceivable for an older generation of parents that a girl may actually want a job waiting tables. Nor did they think that travelling without family in tow was any kind of incentive. Anyhow, I was saved from having to argue about the suitability of air hostessing when I realised I wasn’t tall enough to apply. I did want to do a bit of waitressing, though. I had read about girls in foreign countries waiting tables as they put themselves through college or struggled to become artists. But the fact was, I had never actually seen a waitress in any cafe I’d ever been to.
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