Long years ago when Kali for Women, India's first feminist publishing house, set out to publish a volume of short stories by Indian women writers, the task of locating authors was not easy. Existing anthologies had little to offer, most women writing in their own languages in India were not known outside the language group or area. Many saw their own writing as somehow inferior, and preferred to keep it in the background in deference to the work of their writer husbands, or other writers. Thus it was not surprising that the first two anthologies put together by Kali, Truth Tales and The Slate of Life, passed virtually unnoticed. A larger project, begun some years later and covering many different genres of writing, excavated other writers, other work and brought to public attention the wealth of writing by women that lay in obscure libraries or that had been written but not published for lack of attention and importance on the part of the publishing world. Together, the work of feminist scholars and feminist publishers represented the first steps towards the remaking of the canons of writing, and questioned how these canons were made, and indeed who made them.
The kinds of silences that had, for long, surrounded women and women's writing are perhaps best represented by a moving story in this volume. The protagonist of The Story of a Poem' by chanddrika B. is a housewife and also secretly a poet. It is this that provides the oxygen in her life. Whenever the urge to write takes her, she struggles to find time in the little moments of freedom she has between household work, between her daily tasks of sweeping and swabbing and washing and cleaning. One day, her husband and children leave the house, he to go to work and the children to go to school. She quickly finishes her morning chores and goes in for a shower. While there, the first few lines of a new poem come to her. She runs out to pen them down before they go out of her head. Standing naked and dripping by the dining table, she writes her lines. Later, involved in housework, she thinks of another few lines, rushes to where her piece of paper lies, and writes them down. Then, between this and that, other lines are added. As evening falls and the light begins to fade she writes the last few lines and just then, hears her family returning. Immediately, she picks up the paper with the by-now-complete-poem and shreds it to bits, throwing it into the bin. The author now tells the reader that if she wishes to read the whole poem, the only way to do so is to piece it together from the story!.
While Chandrika's story reflects one kind of silence, there are many others, for example of language, of region, of subjects for some subjects were considered 'permissible' for women and others not that meant that women's voices remained unheard. Indeed, a long history of writing on a wide variety of subjects did not, for long, ensure for women the kind of space in the literary scene that their writing so richly deserves. Not only has it been difficult, sometimes almost impossible for women to get published, but even today what they write continues to be seen as marginal, the issues they write about as peripheral. Faced with the difficulty of being taken seriously, many women like Chandrika's protagonist, choose to destroy their writings, or keep them secret. Others hide their gender, assuming a male persona, and still others choose to write on the 'safe' areas, those that remain within the realm of the 'private' and do not encroach on the 'public' the one being seen as female and the other male.
The general truth that women's writing is, by and large, given a subordinate status to men's writing still holds across the world. The time-honoured division of labour ensures that women occupy the domestic space while men monopolize the public, and the hierarchies that attach to this, ensure that women's roles are generally seen as subordinate. Different histories and environments, however, contextualize these histories differently. India's ancient civilization, its rich history of women's writing on a vast variety of subjects, have come down to us through its many languages that have long and well established literary traditions, and literally hundreds of dialects. And writing is only one part of it, for as important as its many writing traditions are India's oral cultures, and its traditions of storytelling on which women play a major role. Add to this a multiplicity of cultures, people's lands, histories and traditions, and you have a writing environment that is rich with possibility. And yet, as many women writers have asked, how many actually have access to everything the environment offers? How many have been able to benefit from it in the same measure as men have? 'A woman's writing,' says Bengali writer Nabaneeta Dev Sen, 'is her gesture, and like all gestures, is subject to social codes.' Social codes, moral sanctions, attitudinal biases, political manoeuvring have all ensured that women have for long remained at the margins of the literary world.
As everywhere else, however, women have not taken this without protest. They have resisted, confronted and negotiated with the world of patriarchal writing. As early as 1940, the Andhra writer, Unnava Lakshmi Bai, walked out of a literary gathering where only male writers had the floor, saying, 'In a thousand years of Andhra literary history, couldn't you even find a single woman? I cannot sit in a meeting which dishonours women thus.' In the 1930s Urdu writer Ismat Ghugtai chose her own form of protest by writing what is by now a well-known story, 'Lihaaf' (The Quilt) about a relationship between two women. For this she was arrested and pilloried, but she remained steadfast and went on to become one of India's best-known writers. Or take the work of Ruth Vanita, Maya Sharma and other younger writers who have dared to speak of same sex love, rescuing many unknown and invisible writers from the past and present, questioning how canons are made and established. Or that of Mridula Garg, a Hindi writer, who was castigated by the literary establishment for writing on the taboo subject of sexuality.
More recently, a strong and dynamic women's movement and its confrontation with the many aspects of women's oppression, has helped to create a hospitable environment within which women's writings are received. Many writers have testified that they felt encouraged to know that there was at least the beginnings of a constituency of readers 'out there' who were interested in their writings. The growth of feminist presses, for whom the project of searching, excavating, presenting and disseminating women's writing, has been both a passion and a single point agenda, has been another major factor in bringing these hidden voices into the public arena. Indeed, it would not be wrong to say that the market for women's writing and women's books in India has, in many ways, been created by feminist publishers. As well, a flourishing publishing industry, growing numbers of bookshops, and the success of a few women authors in both the national and international marketplaces, have meant that publishers are now much more open to publishing women's voices, and indeed, many publishers will agree that these are the books that sell the most out of their entire lists.
In response to the interest in the marketplace, more and more women are writing and getting published. Subjects such as homour, satire, sex, earlier often taboo for women writers, are now being addressed boldly and imaginatively. While there is plenty of writing in the classical mould, a new generation of younger writers is experimenting with language, genre, structure and subject. All this makes for a vibrant writing environment in which the woman writer now occupies an important place.
The Indian literary tradition is not only rich and varied in content and tone but also multi-lingual. However, in the way that these histories unfold in countries that have been colonized, the language of the colonizers, in this case English, becomes the language of privilege and social mobility. So also in India: while writing takes place in all languages, and some languages such as Hindi and Bengali are spoken by millions of people, they still remain, in the terminology of literature, 'regional' languages, at some sort of disadvantage in terms of hierarchy while English, which is spoken by only 5 per cent of the population, remains the language of privilege. The stories in this volume come from some not all of India's many languages, and a relatively larger number come from English. The reality is that these latter make for an easier transition into international translations. But whether Indian languages or English, which is also now another Indian language, they represent a sensibility that is deeply gendered.
The writers who feature here are among some of India's best known women writers. India, as the cliché goes, but like all clichés, this too has some degree of truth in it, is a country of contrasts and contradictions. So the 'truth' of some of the darker stories in this volume is as authentic as the truth of the lighter ones. Each story testifies to women's many concerns, whether with a way of life, or with being caught inside the other than the husband or being caught at the intersection of many forces within a situation of political violence and armed conflict. In one way or another the woman's body becomes a site upon which many battles like place: for control, for power, for progeny, but there is seldom a resolution in which the woman remains a mere victim, or more acted upon than acting. Whether she is in the palace of the gods, or caught in the body of snake, or speaking through the spirit of the countryside which witnessed her rape, the woman's voice is unique, singular and in each story, different. While this gives substance to the cliché that India is a country where many and varied realities exist simultaneously, it gives the lie to the cliché that all women speak with a sameness and a commonality of experience.
Back of the Book
Each story in this anthology testifies to women's many concerns, whether with a way of life, or with being caught inside the four walls of the home, or in a relationship with someone other than the husband, or being caught at the intersection of many forces within a situation of political violence and armed conflict. In one way or another the woman's body becomes a site upon which many battles take place: for control, for power, for progeny, but there is seldom a resolution in which the women remains a mere victim, or more acted upon than acting. Whether she is in the palaces of the gods, or caught in the body of snake, or speaking through the spirit of the countryside which witnessed her rape, the woman's voice is unique, singular and in each story, different. While this gives substance to the cliché that India is a country where many and varied realities exist simultaneously, it gives the lie to the cliché that all women speak with a sameness and a commonality of experience.
Urvashi Butalia is a publisher and writer. Co-founder of Kali for Women, India's best-known feminist publisher, and now Director of Zubaan, she is also author of the award winning oral history of Partition, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Her other publications include: Women and the Hindu Right (co-edited with Tanika Sarkar) and Speaking Peace: Women's Voices from Kashmir (edited).
Contributors: Vandana Singh, Indira Goswami, Temsula Ao, Mridula Garg, Sharma Futehally, Shashi Deshpande, Nayantara Sahgal, Mahasweta Devi, Anjana Appachana, Manjula Padmanabhan, C.S. Lakshmi (Ambai), Bulbul Sharma, Anita Agnihotri, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Githa Hariharan, Chandrika B.
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