Feeling suddenly shy under their wondering gazes, I handed out coloured pencils and American cookies that stirred much excitement and clapping. I wanted to say something inspiring to them, something about how I wished them well, and how they were off to a great start because they were learning to read and write. But the words that came to my mind – study hard, don’t give up, you can be successful – felt clichéd and inadequate. I didn’t know how to articulate what I really wanted to say: that I hoped their journey into literacy would bring them their own Raziyya, who would inspire them on to their loftiest goals. So, finally, I just hugged the children and told them how happy I was to see them. And then I followed Nafisa out, blinking in the sudden, hot Mumbai sun.
As I walked out of the slums and back into my own life, I thought again of Sarita, who must have lived in a place much like this one – and perhaps still did, if she had cheated death – and how hard she had tried to escape her fate. But my sorrow at the memory was a little less this time. I had something to balance against it: the faces of those balwadi children, bright with learning, and the confidence of the women who blossomed through teaching them, all of us wielding the scimitar of education.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Anita Agnihotri writes in Bengali. Born in Kolkata, she started writing early in her childhood, and in the 1980s, she started publishing both prose and poetry. She has authored over one hundred short stories, several volumes of poetry, and novels and stories for children. Anita also writes on issues of development, reflecting the people’s perspective of reality; the lives of silent, vulnerable and marginalised people lie at the core of her thought. Now author of forty books, Anita has been translated into several Indian languages including English, and into German and Swedish. Married, with two children, Anita lives in Delhi where she also works as a member of the Indian Civil Service.
Anjum Hasan is the author of the novels The Cosmopolitans, Big Girl Now and Lunatic in my Head, and the short story collection Difficult Pleasures; the last three of these titles have been published in Australia by Brass Monkey Books. She has also published a book of poems called Street on the Hill. Her books have been nominated for various awards including the Man Asian Literary Prize, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the Hindu Best Fiction Award and the Crossword Fiction Award. Her short stories, essays and poems are widely published including most recently in Granta and Griffith Review, as well as in Five Dials, Wasafiri, Drawbridge, Los Angeles Review of Books, Asia Literary Review and anthologies such as A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces: Extraordinary Short Stories from the 19th Century to the Present and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. Anjum is books editor at The Caravan, India’s leading magazine of long-form reporting and essays.
Annie Zaidi writes fiction, non-fiction, poetry and scripts. She is the author of Gulab, Love Stories #1 to 14 and Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Crossword prize (non-fiction). She is also the co-author of The Good Indian Girl and the editor of Unbound: 2000 Years of Indian Women’s Writing. Annie’s work has appeared in several anthologies including Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean, Mumbai Noir, Women Changing India, and Griffith Review 49: New Asia Now. Her scripts ‘Jaal’, ‘So Many Socks’ and ‘Compartment’ have been performed in various venues in Mumbai. ‘So Many Socks’ was nominated in several categories including best script for the prestigious META awards for drama. She lives in Mumbai and freelances for various magazines and websites.
Photo by krishna Giri
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning author, poet, activist and teacher. Her work has been published in over 100 magazines and anthologies, including the Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize Stories. Her books have been translated into twenty-nine languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Bengali, Turkish and Japanese, and have been bestsellers nationally and internationally. Her awards include: an American Book Award, a Premio Scanno award from Italy, a PEN Josephine Miles award, and a Light of India award. Two of her books, The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart, have been made into movies. Divakaruni teaches in the nationally ranked Creative Writing program at the University of Houston, where she is the McDavid Professor of Creative Writing. She serves on the Advisory Boards of Maitri and Daya, organisations that help survivors of domestic violence, and on the Emeritus board of Pratham, a literacy non-profit.
C.S. Lakshmi has been an independent researcher in women’s studies for the last forty years. She has a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and has several books and articles to her credit. She is also a creative writer who writes about love, relationships, quests and journeys in the Tamil region and elsewhere under the pseudonym Ambai. She has been writing from the age of sixteen and is a well-known writer in Tamil. Her stories have been translated in three volumes: A Purple Sea; In a Forest, a Deer; and Fish in a Dwindling Lake. The latter shared the Hutch Crossword Award 2006 for translated fiction.
She is currently the Director of SPARROW (Sound & Picture Archives for Research on Women). She lives in Mumbai with her filmmaker friend Vishnu Mathur, who also happens to be her husband, in a small third-floor flat with a view of the sea, along with her nineteen-year-old foster daughter Khintu and her two little brothers Krishna and Sonu who brighten up her life.
Deepti Kapoor was born in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, and grew up in various places across North and West India, studying in Dehradun and Delhi and completing degrees in Journalism and Social Psychology. She worked for a decade in print media in Delhi and Mumbai, first as a reporter and later as an editor. In 2007 she left Delhi for Mysore and later Goa, to study and teach yoga and write. Her first novel A Bad Character (Penguin Random House, 2015) was shortlisted for several awards in India, and was published in translation in France (Seuil, 2015), where it was shortlisted for the prix Médicis étranger 2015. Deepti also writes for various publications including Granta, Condé Nast Traveller and The Guardian, and reviews hotels for travel magazines and websites. She is currently writing her second novel, a multi-perspective narrative about an American yoga student travelling through India.
Photo by Catriona Mitchell
Ira Trivedi is the bestselling author of four books. India in Love, her most recent book, is a seminal work of nonfiction on India’s social revolution and sexual violence. Her first novel What Would You Do to Save the World? was published when she was eighteen. Ira writes regularly for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Times of India, Hindustan Times, The Telegraph and other publications. She has been called one of India’s most important youth voices, and she speaks regularly to media and on forums in India and internationally. Her work on gender and culture has won several awards. Ira won a U.K. Anti-Slavery Day Media award in 2015 for her article on bride trafficking ‘When a Bride-to-Be Is a Bride to Buy’, and was honoured at the House of Lords in England. She holds a MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA from Wellesley College. When not writing, she is doing or teaching yoga.
Leila Seth was the first woman to top the Bar examinations in London, the first woman judge in the Delhi High Court, and the first woman to become Chief Justice of a state High Court. She was appointed as a judge in 1978 and retired as Chief Justice of Himachal Pradesh in 1992. In 1995 she was appointed as a one-member commission to examine the death in custody of Rajan Pillai and to suggest improvements in medical facilities for prisoners. She was a member of the 15th Law Commission of India (1997–2000) and also one of the three members of the committee set up after the gang rape of Nirbhaya in December 2012 (known as the Justice Verma Committee) that gave recommendations to the government on amendments to the criminal law and other matters.
She is the author of three books: On Balance, her autobiography; Talking of Justice, a collection of essays on people’s rights in modern India; and We, the Children of India, a book for children explaining the preamble to the Constitution of India, which she believes should be read by every child in Indi
a.
Margaret Mascarenhas is a multilingual transnational writer, consulting editor and independent curator of Indo-American origin. She is the author of the diasporic novel, Skin (Penguin, 2001), which has been taught in colleges and universities and highlighted in numerous academic papers on post-colonial literature in India, Portugal and the U.S.A. Her second novel, The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos (Hachette U.S.A. 2009), set in Venezuela where she grew up, was the recipient of a Publishers Lunch award and a Barnes and Noble Discover Pick in literary fiction. Triage: Casualties of Love and Sex (HarperCollins India, 2013), is her first published collection of poetry, flash memoir and sketches. She was the founding Director of the Goa Centre for the Arts in 2011, and Convenor of its advisory board in 2015. She is the Founder-Director of the Blue Shores Prison Art Project in Goa. Margaret lives most of the year in Goa, where she has ancestral roots, and where she maintains a residency in the picturesque village of Calvim for working artists and writers.
Photo by Catriona Mitchell
Mitali Saran is a Delhi-based freelance writer. She has never had a shred of ambition, and therefore doesn’t have what you’d call a career, but along the way she has worked full-time for the newspaper Business Standard and for Outlook Traveller magazine, and written freelance for a range of news, feature, travel, and review publications. She is constantly torn between the urge to travel and the urge to curl up with a good book. She now writes two fortnightly columns (‘Stet’ and ‘Inter alia’) for Business Standard, and doesn’t understand why people keep asking what else she does. She thinks that a day spent with friends, playing guitar, and dancing tango is a day as meaningless and doomed as a seriously productive day, but a lot more fun. She fully intends to take the more fun road to hell.
Namita Gokhale is a writer, publisher and festival director. She is the author of twelve works of fiction and non-fiction. Her first novel, Paro: Dreams of Passion, published in 1984, created a furor due to its frank sexual humour. Her other books include: Gods, Graves and Grandmother; A Himalayan Love Story; The Book of Shadows; Shakuntala: the Play of Memory; Priya in Incredible Indyaa; In Search of Sita: Revisiting Mythology; The Habit of Love; and the edited anthology, Travelling In, Travelling Out.
Gokhale is a founder and co-director of the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival and ‘Mountain Echoes’, the Bhutan Literature Festival. She is director of Yatra Books, a publishing house that specialises in translation. She has curated Kitaabnama, India’s only multilingual book show for the national TV channel Doordarshan. As a literary activist, she is passionately committed to showcasing the Indian languages.
Nirupama Dutt is a poet, journalist and translator, as well as an art, literary and film critic. She writes in English, Punjabi and occasionally in Hindi. Her most recent work was an English translation of Gulzar’s anthology of poetry Pluto (HarperCollins, 2015).
She received the Punjabi Akademi Award for her anthology of poems, Ik Nadi Sanwali Jahi (A Stream Somewhat Dark). Her anthology of poetry The Black Woman was published in English (Aesthetics Publications, 2009). Her other books include: Stories of the Soil, an English translation of forty-one stories from Punjabi (Penguin, 2011); Poet of the Revolution, an English translation of the memoirs and poetry of Lal Singh Dil (Penguin, 2013); and The Ballad of Bant Singh, the biography of a Dalit activist and singer. She is currently working on a novel.
She lives in Chandigarh with her daughter and granddaughter.
Photo by Pablo Bartholomew
Rosalyn D’Mello is a widely published freelance art writer based in New Delhi. Her first non-fiction book A Handbook For My Lover, an erotic memoir, was published in 2015 (HarperCollins). Her art reviews and features have been published in Art + Auction, Modern Painters, Passages, Art India, and Take on Art. She is a regular contributor to Vogue, Open, Mint Lounge, Art Review, and Art Review Asia. She was the associate editor of The Art Critic, a selection of the art writings of Richard Bartholomew from the fifties to the early eighties. She was among five writers nominated for Forbes’ Best Emerging Art Writer Award in 2014 and was also nominated for the inaugural Prudential Eye Art Award for Best Writing on Asian Contemporary Art in 2014.
Salma is a writer of Tamil poetry and fiction. Her work speaks about the taboo areas of the traditional woman’s experience. She has published two volumes of poetry: Oru Malaiyum Innoru Malaiyum (An Evening and Another Evening) and Pachchai Devadhai (Green Angel). Her novel, Irandaam Jaamangalin Kadhai (2004), revolving around the lives of women in a Muslim community of rural Tamil Nadu, was considered a landmark achievement in Tamil. When it was later translated into English as The Hour Past Midnight (2009), Salma made her mark as a writer in the rest of India and abroad. Salma also published Saabam (The Curse), a collection of short stories in 2012. A political activist for the cause of women’s empowerment, Salma was Chairperson of Tamil Nadu Government’s Social Welfare Board between 2007 and 2011. She lives and works in Chennai.
Photo by Catriona Mitchell
Sharanya Manivannan’s first book Witchcraft (Bullfighter Books, 2008) was described in The Straits Times, Singapore, as ‘sensuous and spiritual, delicate and dangerous and as full as the moon reflected in a knife’. She was specially commissioned to write and perform a poem at the 2015 Commonwealth Day Observance at Westminster Abbey, London, to an audience that included the British Royal Family. The Altar of the Only World, a book of poetry, and The High Priestess Never Marries, a book of stories, are both forthcoming from HarperCollins India; a children’s book is forthcoming from Lantana Publishing, U.K. Sharanya writes a personal column, ‘The Venus Flytrap’, which appears in The New Indian Express. Her essays, fiction and poetry have been widely published internationally, and she has participated at readings in the U.K., Australia, Indonesia, Germany, Malaysia, Singapore and India. She was born in 1985 in Chennai, where she now resides.
Tisca Chopra is a Bollywood actress known for her unconventional roles. She chooses to be part of stories that she feels need to be told, and has acted more than forty feature films in different languages with many eminent directors, including Aamir Khan, Prakash Jha, Madhur Bhandarkar, Abhinay Deo and Nandita Das.
Tisca got her big break in Taare Zameen Par (Like Stars on Earth) – India’s official Academy Awards entry for Best Foreign Film in 2009 – and received several national and international awards for her performance. Tisca also starred in Qissa, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2013 and won the prestigious NETPAC Award for Best Asian Film. In 2012, Tisca was nominated at the New York Indian Film Festival for Best Actress for her work in 10Ml Love, a film based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Tisca has also worked extensively in theatre with Naseeruddin Shah, Feroz Khan and Satya Dev Dubey.
She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Literature from the University of Delhi. Her bestselling memoir Acting Smart (HarperCollins, 2014) is being translated into Hindi, and she is currently working on a film script that she plans to produce.
Photo by Catriona Mitchell
Tishani Doshi is an award-winning writer and dancer of Welsh-Gujarati descent. Born in Madras, India, in 1975, she received a Masters in Writing from Johns Hopkins University in the U.S.A. She worked in London in advertising before returning to India in 2001, where a chance encounter with the legendary choreographer Chandralekha led her to an unexpected career in dance. She has published five books of poetry and fiction, the most recent of which is Fountainville – a medieval Welsh tale recast among opium dens, gang wars and a surrogacy clinic. Tishani currently lives in a village by the sea in Tamil Nadu.
Photo by Catriona Mitchell
Urvashi Butalia was co-founder of Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publishing house. She is now Director of Zubaan, one of the imprints founded by Kali when it shut down operations in 2003. She has had a long involvement with the women’s movement in India, and writes on a range of issues relating to women and gender in India. She has spent many years teaching a professional course in publishing. Her best-known
publications include an award-winning history of Partition, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (which won the Oral History Book Association Award and the Nikkei Asia Award for Culture), Speaking Peace: Women’s Voices from Kashmir (edited), and Women and the Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays (co-edited). She is currently working on a number of book projects.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My heartfelt thanks go to the contributors to this book who, without exception, agreed to be a part of it because they felt the issues addressed here were important ones. Thank you all for your willingness to take this leap, for probing into your own life experiences in ways that took courage, so that this book could become a kaleidoscope of poignant and pertinent and daring stories about the female experience. For some of you, writing ‘from the self’ meant exploring new terrain, and this brought with it certain vulnerabilities. I thank you for agreeing to share the hidden, the deeply felt, the intimate, the sometimes disquieting details of your lives, so that others might benefit from reading them. Your words will surely resonate with readers in India and beyond, striking universal chords with women’s experiences everywhere.
Namita Gokhale, who wrote the foreword, was an invaluable guide and generously shared her knowledge of Indian language writers. Namita is an inspiration to me and many others with her dedication and belief in fore-fronting women’s voices and her support of writing of all kinds in India.
Walking Towards Ourselves Page 25