Feminist Literature and it’s Impact on India by au-designcenter

Feminist Literature and it’s Impact on India

Copyright © 2022 Saee Joshi All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This is a hypothetical copyright page, made for educational purposes. The complete book is not be published commercially as it is solely made for educational purposes. CREDITS: Photographs from: Wikipedia Pixabay pexels Hindustani times times of india india today Free vectors from: Vector sleezy and Freepik Content from: https://www.thebetterindia.com/278286/must-read-books-to-understand-feminism-in-india/ https://www.thecuriousreader.in/bookrack/indian-feminist-fiction/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism_in_India https://mediaindia.eu/culture/fiery-works-of-indian-feminist-writers/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGFyrAHosAg http://ensani.ir/file/download/article/20121212084505-9578-51.pdf https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/books/features/feminist-authors-you-should-read/photostory/81367558.cms https://www.jstor.org/stable/23339720?seq=2 https://www.academia.edu/33255729/FEMINISM_IN_INDIAN_ENGLISH_LITERATURE_AN_ANALYSIS https://timesnext.com/amrita-pritam-the-first-eminent-female-punjabi-poet/ https://www.britannica.com/biography/Arundhati-Roy https://www.fembio.org/english/biography.php/woman/biography/shashi-deshpande/ https://www.supersummary.com/that-long-silence/summary/

Design and layout: Saee Joshi 4

BEGINING

CONTEMPORARY

MODERN

Index

CONTENTS

01 6

Section 1: The Begining 1. Ismat Chugtai 2. Amrita Pritam 3. Kamla Bhasin 4. Kamala Das 5. Mahasweta Devi

Index

02 03

Section 1: The Contemporary Era 1. Chitra Banerjee 2. Arundhati Roy 3. Shashi Deshpande 4. Anita Desai

Section 1: The Modern Era 1. Ismat Chugtai 2. Amrita Pritam 3. Kamla Bhasin

SECTION 1: The begining

Photo courtsey: Wikipedia

Chapter 1

Ismat Chughtai Ismat Chughtai is considered by many to be the fourth pillar of modern Urdu fiction along with Saadat Hassan Manto, Rajendra Singh Bedi, and Krishan Chandar. In terms of notoriety and fame, controversy and popularity, she is ahead of any other Urdu novelist.

She has also raised the issue of equality between men and women which goes beyond domestic equality. In her writings, Ismat tries to both understand and make her readers understand the issue of carnal desires with respect to human psychology.

Her personality and her writings are complementary to each other and consist of rebellion, compassion, innocence, and sincerity. She made a name for herself in the world of Urdu fiction and novel writing due to her startling themes and realistic style of writing.

“My father realised his daughter was a terror and that there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.”

The microscopic incidents of human life are the subject of her works, but she presents these events with such dexterity and artistry that a complete and vivid picture of daily life comes to the fore. Through her characters, she tries to expel the evils of society and make them a symbol of beauty, happiness, and peace. Her sisters had been married until she gained awareness, thus, in her childhood, she only had the company of her brothers, and she continuously challenged their supremacy.Ismat Chughtai was associated with the progressive movement of Urdu, but unlike other communist writers of her time, she made internal, social, and emotional exploitation the subject of her stories instead of external, social exploitation.

Her stories have an air of a middle-income Muslim household where the everyday woman can be felt by the reader, but Ismat emphasizes on the point that this everyday woman, too, is human, and isn’t merely an object of copulation, she has her own physical and emotional needs which need to be understood and fulfilled. Ismat’s rebellious and fiery tone often leaves our established social construct high and dry. Whether it was playing street football or horseback riding and climbing trees, she did everything that girls were forbidden to do. She studied up to the fourth standard in Agra, and till the eighth standard in Aligarh, but her parents were not in favor of her higher education, instead, they wanted to train her to become a decent housewife.

Early Life, Family And Education

Ismat Chughtai was born into a middle class Muslim family in 1915. And unlike most of the women, especially muslim women of her time, she had an education, worked at a job, married according to her choice. In short, she led a very unconventional life. She was a rebel not only in life but in death as well. She was, as per her expressed desires, cremated and not buried. She had begun writing short stories when she was a student at Aligarh Muslim University. But she was published only years later in 1939 and shot into prominence with the publication of ‘Lihaaf’ which dealt with the theme of women’s sexuality.

By this time she was a prominent member of the Progressive Writers Association. ‘Lihaaf’ created a storm not just in literary circles but also in the public sphere as well. She was charged with obscenity and tried along with another famous short story writer of the time, Sadat Hasan Manto. The trial lasted for four years and both Chughtai and Manto were cleared of the charges of obscenity because the judges could not find a single four letter word in their stories. Chughtai was mentored, earlier on, by Rasheed Jahan who she had met at the Progressive Writers Association conference in 1936. Rasheed Jahan, perhaps the first Muslim women writer, was one of the founding members of the Progressive Writers Association. She was largely instrumental in shaping Chughtai’s early literary career.

Ismat Chughtai

But Ismat wanted to get further educated at any cost, she threatened to run away from home and become a Christian and enter into a missionary school if her education was not continued. Eventually, her father had to kneel in front of her stubbornness and she went to Aligarh and got admission in the tenth standard. In Aligarh, she met Rashid Jahan, who in 1932 together with Sajjad Zaheer and Ahmad Ali, published a collection of stories called “Angare” which was confiscated by the Britishers upon the charge of obscenity and mutiny. Rashid Jahan was a liberal and highly educated MBBS doctor and women’s rights activist, with a communist ideology, who acquainted Ismat to the basics of communism, and Ismat decided to follow in her footsteps by making her her guru. Ismat later reflected, ‘I hated moaning women, who bore illegit children. Fidelity and beauty, which are considered a woman’s virtues; I condemn them. Love is a burden on the heart and nothing else. I learned this from Rashid Aapa.’ Ismat blamed illiteracy for the plight of women. After FA, she enrolled in an IT college in Lucknow where her subjects were English, Polity, and Economics. After arriving there, she got the opportunity to breathe in the open air for the first time and was freed from all the shackles of middle-class Muslim society. Ismat Chughtai started writing stories at the age of eleven or twelve but did not 16

publish them under her own name. In 1939, when her first story titled ‘Fasadi’ was published in the distinguished journal Saqi, people thought it was her brother, a well-known writer, Azeem Beg Chughtai had written this story under a pseudonym. Later, in the same year, her stories like Kafir, Dheet, Khidmatgar, and Bachpan stirred the literary circles, and Ismat became known as an eminent author. In 1941 and 1942, two collections of her short stories came out titled ‘Kaliyaa.n’ and ‘Chuntii.n’. But her most talked-about work came in 1941, ‘Lihaf’ which explored the intimate relationship between two women, and caused havoc in the preservation of Urdu literature. Ismat was tried for obscenity and such the story became the focal point of her life’s work, so much so that it overshadowed all her remaining works like ‘JoDa’, ‘Genda’, ‘Nanhi Ki Nani’, and ‘Bhool-Bhulaiyan’, which were equally well-written. After completing her graduation from IT college, teaching in different places, and some well-talked affairs, Ismat moved to Bombay where she got a job as an Inspector of Schools. There was also Shahid Latif in Bombay who used to write dialogues in Bombay Talkies for Rs. 225. Ismat had met Shahid in Aligarh while he was doing his MA. Arriving in Bombay, their stormy romance began and they got married. Ismat’s attitude towards the idea of love was quite unconventional. She said, ‘I consider love to be a very important thing; it’s the very strength of heart and mind, but a person should not become stingy in it, one should not become

Ismat Chughtai

“In winter when I put a quilt over myself its shadows on the wall seem to sway like an elephant.” - Ismat Chughtai 17

Ismat Chughtai

suicidal for its sake. There is an innate bond between love and sex, gone are the days when loved used to be a pious thing.’ That’s why when Shaid proposed her for marriage, Ismat, owing to her thoughts, replied ‘I am not an ordinary girl. All my life I’ve cut the chains that fettered me, I won’t be able to take up another shackle. Obedience, chastity, and other virtues expected of a woman do not suit me. Lest you repent in the end.’ But Shahid didn’t heed to her admonition. About her relationship with Shahid, Ismat later reflected, ‘A man can offer love, respect, and even prostrations toca

woman, but he can’t give her an equal status; Shahid gave me an equal status’. Shahid Latif had also introduced Ismat to the film industry. He had turned from a screenwriter to a producer. Ismat used to write stories and dialogues for his films which include Ziddi, Aarzoo, and Sone Ki Chidiya. After that, his films began flopping. Even after the death of Shahid Latif, Ismat remained associated with the film industry. She had also written and played a small role in Shyam Benegal’s famous film ‘Junun’.

Ismat Chughtai

Literary Works

In the early 1970s, Chughtai wrote two novels, Ajeeb Aadmi (A Very Strange Man) and Jangli Kabootar (Wild Pigeons) that made use of her knowledge of the Hindi film industry, which she had been a part of for the last couple of decades. Jangli Kabootar, which was first published in 1970, follows the life of an actress and was partially inspired from a real-life incident that had occurred at the time. Ajeeb Aadmi similarly narrates the life of Dharam Dev, a popular leading man in Bollywood and the impact that his extra-marital affair with Zareen Jamal, a fellow actress has on the lives of the people involved. The novel was said to have been based on the affair between frequent co-stars Guru Dutt and Waheeda Rehman; Dutt was married to playback singer Geeta Dutt and the couple had three children at the time. While there are several allusions to real-life figures including Meena

Kumari, Lata Mangeshkar, and Mohammed Rafi, members of the Dutt family and Rehman are never explicitly named. Mumbai-based writer and journalist, Jerry Pinto noted the impact of Ajeeb Aadmi’s initial release saying, “There hadn’t been a more dramatic and candid account of the tangled emotional lives of Bollywood before this.” Writing for the Khaleej Times in 2019, Khalid Mohamed echoed the sentiment. He called the book a first of a kind tellall book about the Hindi film industry, one that was “an eye-opener even for the know-alls of Bollywood”. Mohamed also made a detailed note of Chughtai’s candid style of writing, saying that she had an “instinctive gift for relating stories frankly and fearlessly”.

Ismat Chughtai

A life in words

An Autobiography of the feminist icon, Ismat Chugtai. 20

Ismat Chughtai

A life in Words, a translation of original Urdu work titled Kaghazi Hai Pairhan by Ismat Chugtai, was published in 1994 three years after her death with the initiative of the editor of Aaj Kal. The 14 chapters of the book were earlier published in this journal from March 1979 to May 1980. Kaghazi Hai Pairhan ( A Life in Words and Clothing in Paper) , a fragmentary and disjointed autobiographical work of a radical and revolutionary and the most resolute and realistic Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai wherein she has recapitulated experiences, events, struggles and challenges of a woman growing up in a conservative Muslim family during pre -independent India.

ful assertion against visible and subtle suppressive structures of society attain a wider canvass hence an inspiration for others. The beginning of the memoir sets the discourse of the work as she comes across types of hierarchies- powerful and powerless, man and woman, Hindu and Muslim, child and adult but she simultaneously affirms her faith in powerless also only if they can realize their inherent power and strength and the very process of suppression and exploitation can be reversed. Metaphorically she talks of the power of moss

She reminisces some of the important turning points of her life and also contributes as an agency to bring a change in the position of women especially Muslim women. A revolutionary, Ismat Chugtai faced cultural constrictions and religious tyranny of patriarchal society to get the education and to establish herself as a writer. She defied the institutionalized exploitative practices prevalent from ages through her radical works and became the spokesperson for all socially and culturally oppressed women. In the memoir, her private “self” merges into public and it connects the woman readers to the work so that they take it as a mirror to their own unvoiced aspirations’ ‘. According to EL blaz, in a woman’s autobiography, ‘the eye of the other directs the eye of the author’. Ismat Chugtai’s personal struggle and power21

Ismat Chughtai

and foliage in ruining the beauty of the magnificent palace. On women subjugation, she makes a very apt comment and wants them to resist and oppose it. She says,”As Long as the women of our country continue to suffer oppression without resistance we will be weighed down by a sense of inferiority in political and economic spheres too.” Expressing her views on the advantages of getting education, Ismat tells her cousin Khanam Sahiba, “This is what you get when you become an adult and get yourself an education. Everyone begins to treat you with esteem”. She had no fancy for childhood. For her “childhood exemplifies restriction and deprivation”.

oeuvre of literary writers as a revolutionary and radical feminist who broke traditions to pave the way for the kind of life she wanted to live. By merging her private self into public space, she makes a meaningful interpretation of her struggle to others.

Lihaaf

The Quilt, as bold as it can get

The story “Bachpan ‘’ was based on her own crude childhood experiences and in this, she parodies Hijab ImtiazAli’s romantic portrayal of childhood. She decides to be the sole navigator of her own life boat. In A Life in Words, she asks a very relevant question who decides what is right in this world. Who were the makers of my life? If it is my parents then why did God endow me with intelligence? What can I do with it? Auto/biography has the potential to be the text of oppressed and the culturally displaced, forging both for and beyond the individual. Self-expression in the form of auto/biography can prove empowering and serve as an inspiration to others. Through her qualities of persistence and determination Ismat Chughtai succeeds in making a place among 22

“Lihaaf” (“The Quilt”) is a 1942 Urdu short story written by Ismat Chughtai. Published in the Urdu literary journal Adab-i-Latif, it led to much controversy, uproar and an obscenity trial, where Ismat had to defend herself in the Lahore Court.

Ismat Chughtai

She was asked to apologize and refused, winning the case, after her lawyer pointed out that the story makes no suggestion to a sexual act, and prosecution witnesses could not point out any obscene words: the story is merely suggestive and told from perspective of a small girl. In the coming decades it was widely anthologised, and became one of her most known works, besides Angarey, which remained banned for several decades. [Years later, she mentioned in detail the court trial in her memoir, Kaghazi Hai Pairahan (A Life in Words: Memoir). Though it received attention for its suggestion of lesbianism, it also deals with the insulated and suffocating life of a neglected wife in a feudal society. It became a landmark for its early depiction of sex, still (Jan. 1995) a taboo in modern Indian literature, let alone Urdu literature. Ismat Chughtai places women education at the center of the work. She threatened to run away from home if she would not be allowed to go to Aligarh for further education and ultimately by hook or crook she made her father accede to her demand.

permanent damage done by servitude. Ismat Chughtai’s silences and gaps at many places indicate the impossibility of simply remembering or representing trauma; her silence is also a testimony, it addresses us by reminding us of our own predicament. Violence has no words. It is always difficult to describe/ narrate pain and suffering. She also refuses to be placed linguistically as she moves across different styles and registers- from a highly metaphoric language to oral tradition. Due to diversity and multiplicity of experiences, Women require a different emphasis unlike singular ‘I’ of masculine discourse.

As Virginia Woolf also suggested that “when we write about a woman everything is out of place”.

She applauds the efforts of Shaikh Abdullah and Wahid Jahan Begum to initiate and open educational institutions for girls of the Muslim community. Crooked Line is also a semi- autobiographical work. The author delves deep into the psyche of Shaman brought up in a crowded family. She turns rebellious, fierce and indomitable because of emotional deprivation in her childhood. Shaman becomes a metaphor for the 23

Photo courtsey: Wikipedia

Chapter 2

Amrita Pritam Amrita Pritam was an Indian novelist, poet, and essayist. She wrote in Punjabi and Hindi and is considered to be the first prominent female Punjabi poet, novelist, and so on, who is also the leading 20th-century poet of the Punjabi language. She is loved on both sides of the India– Pakistan border. She produced over 100 books of poetry, essays, fiction, biographies, alongside a collection of Punjabi folk songs. All these have been translated into several foreign languages. She is remembered for her poignant poem, Ajj aakhaan Waris Shah nu, which was an elegy to the 18th-century Punjabi poet. This was like an expression of her boiling Anguish over massacres during the partition of India. Being a novelist, her most renowned work was Pinjar meaning “The Skeleton,” 1950, in which she created her memorable character, Puro, who was an epitome of violence against the women, loss of humanity, and ultimate surrender to an existential fate. When India was partitioned into the independent states of India and Pakistan in 1947, she migrated from Lahore to India, though she remained equally popular in Pakistan throughout her life, as compared to her contemporaries like Mohan Singh and Shiv Kumar Batalvi.

Known as the most important voice for the women in Punjabi literature, in 1956, she became the first woman to win the Sahitya Akademi Award for her magnum opus, a long poem, Sunshade (Messages), later she received the Bharatiya Jnanpith, one of India’s highest literary awards, in 1982 for Kagaz Te Canvas (“The Paper and the Canvas”).

“Kithe? Kis tarha? Pata nahi Shayad tere takhiyl di chinag banke Tere canvas te utrangi Ya khore teri canvas dey utte Ikk rahasmayi lakir banke” The Padma Shri came her way in 1969 and finally, Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian award, in 2004, and in the same year, she was honored with India’s highest literary award, given by the Sahitya Akademi (India’s Academy of Letters), the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship given to the “immortals of literature” for lifetime achievement. She wrote her poems mostly for the partition.

“Yaadon ke dhaage kayanaat ke lamhe ki tarah hote hain”

Early Life, Family And Education

Amrita was born as Amrit Kaur on August 31st, 1919, in the Gujranwala district of Punjab. She was born into the Sikh family to Raj Bibi, who was a teacher at local school and Kartar Singh Hitkari, who worked as an editor of a literary journal. His father was a respected man and served as a preacher during his free time. He was also a renowned scholar. Although she was born into a traditional Sikh family, she lost faith in God at the tender age of eleven, when her mother passed away. After her demise, Amrita moved to Lahore with her father. Post that, Amrita found solace in writing and, thus, began to write at a young age. She became a published writer in the year 1936 when she was just 17 years old.

After releasing her anthology of poetry titled ‘Amrit Lehran’ that is Immortal Waves, she then went on to publish at least six more collections of the poems from 1936 to 1943. The loss of her mother soon turned her into a strong and independent woman who expressed all the audacity in her writings. She then joined the ‘Progressive Writers’ Movement’ to inspire young writers and people through her literary writings. The movement was started during the pre-partition British India, and the members were all left-oriented plus anti-imperialistic. Soon, she came up with a collection of works’ Lok Peed’ translated-People’s Anguish in the year 1944, which criticized British Raj for the ‘Bengal famine of the year 1943’ and for the then wartorn economy of India.

Amrita Pritam

“On the pages of life, your love has left a stamp, but who will pay the dues?” - Amrita Pritam

Amrita Pritam

Literary Works During her good career, Amrita Pritam penned a total of 28 to 30 novels, 18 anthologies in prose, plus five short stories. Many of her works to date continue to serve as an inspiration to many young writers. In the year 2007, an eminent Indian lyricist: Gulzar, released the album, which was a collection of Amrita Pritam’s poetry recited by the great Gulzar. Amrita Pritam passed away on October 31st, 2005, in New Delhi. During her death, she was survived by her long-time lover and partner Imroz, her daughter Kandala, and son Navraj Kwatra, and her grandchildren Aman, Noor, Taurus, and Shilpi. From 1960 onwards, her literary work became more feminist in nature and reflected her unhappy marriage with Pritam Singh and the subsequent divorce. During this period, a number of her works were translated into various other languages, including English, Danish, Japanese, French, and Mandarin, among others. She also came up with a couple of autobiographical works, namely ‘Rasidi Ticket’ and ‘Black Rose.’She also wrote

a number of novels that were later made into films. Some of her works that were made into movies include ‘Dharti Sagar te Sippiyan,’ ‘Unah Di Kahani,’ and ‘Pinjar.’ While ‘Dharti Sagar te Sippiyan’ was made as ‘Kadambari’ in 1965, ‘Unah Di Kahani’ was made as ‘Daaku’ in 1976. ‘Pinjar’ on the other hand became an award-winning movie as it dealt with humanism as its core subject. While the initial phase of her career saw her writing predominantly in Punjabi, many of her works were written in Hindi as well as in Punjabi after the partition of the British India. Later in her career, Amrita started writing on dreams and spiritual themes, which were influenced by spiritual guru and godman Rajneesh, better known as Osho. These works include ‘Kaal Chetna’ and ‘Agyat Ka Nimantran.’ She also wrote another autobiography titled ‘Shadows of Words’ and helped Osho in writing introductions for several of his books, including ‘Ek Onkar Satnam.’

Amrita Pritam

Pinjar

A story about Partition and it’s impact. 32

Amrita Pritam

Amrita Pritam in her writing span of sixty years wrote with words dipped in blood. Literature has received her gift of poetry compositions, short story volumes and numerous novels of Repute.

alienation crept Inside Pooro’s mind. The abducted and rape had altered her psyche. The act of brutality left her Shattered and dejected, robbed of her bright future with her fiancé Ramchand.

She had left Lahore and migrated to India during the partition riots. Pritam has won the janpath Award, Sahitya Academy Award, Padma Shri and many other honors.

The long-term disastrous effects of the tragedy of partition and its aftermath cast a spell on the Lives of victims. Cultural dislocation altered their lives forever. Amrita Pritam in her novel Pinjar (The Skeleton) focuses on the growth of her female characters from submissive to independent. Pooro accepts Pain as a way of life and remains faithful to her husband who is her abductor also.

Amrita Pritam is a Woman writer par excellence. She Has carved a niche for herself in The field of partition literature. The work done on Amrita Pritam Stands high especially to study The effects of partition violence And cultural dislocation in her Novel Pinjar. Pinjar was her debut novel, A saga of suffering of women during pre-partition and partition times. She elucidated on the Memory of partition and violence which kept haunting the future generations. With the sudden Division of the country, people were taken unawares and ran helter-skelter for refuge. Innumerable People were rendered homeless overnight.

Thus, Amrita Pritam Added gleam to partition literature by providing the women’s perspective. Pooro in Pinjar, a victim of cultural dislocation after partition recoils to life because of her innate resilience. It exhibits her strength In adverse circumstances.

Hindu girl Pooro in Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar became a victim Of cultural dislocation after she was abducted by Muslim boy Rashid of the neighbouring village Rattoval. At the same time partition violence had started. With the division of the country she found Herself in Pakistani grounds. She had to undergo pangs of separation from her family, village and Country together. Partition created havoc with her life. Rootlessness, isolation and 33

Photo courtsey: Wikipedia

Chapter 3

Kamla Bhasin Kamla Bhasin was born in Village Shahidawalli in Gujaranwala district in the Punjab, just before Partition, on April 24, 1946. She was one of six siblings. After Partition, her father got a job as a doctor in Bharatpur, so the family moved to India. After going to school in various small towns and villages of Rajasthan, Bhasin came to Jaipur for her final years of school. She finished her college and university education in the city. Her college and university friends remember her as a bouncy, sporty person (she was college sports captain) who was always full of fun. Her laughter filled the corridors. Bhasin studied economics and in 1967 went to Germany to do research. She returned to India to work in the area of water, adult literacy and child development in Sewa Mandir in Udaipur. In Udaipur, she was known as motorcycle-wali: she drove a motobike around the city and in villages for her work, something that people on those parts had not seen a woman do before.Scooters and mopeds yes, but not on motorbikes.

husband moved to Delhi. From being a small town wali, Bhasin soon became a Dilli wali.

“When I’m raped, people say that I’ve lost my honour? My honour is not in my vagina. It is a patriarchal idea that my rape will defile the honour of my community. I’d like to tell everyone, why did you place your community’s honour in a woman’s vagina? We never did that. It is the rapist who loses his honour, we don’t” Having been an eminent figure, Bhasin left an admirable legacy behind her. Her work dates back to 1970, wherein she had always been concerned with issues such as gender, education, human development and the media. Her poem ‘Kyunki main ladki hoon, mujhe padhna hai’ is fairly well known, as is her work with ‘Sangat’ - A feminist network. During a conference in 1995, she recited the popular poem Azadi, but, in a feminized version. She was also the coordinator of One Billion Rising’s South Asia.

By the mid-1970s, she was married and by 1980 had two children. She and her 35

Early Life, Family And Education

Kamla Bhasin (24 April 1946 – 25 September 2021) was an Indian developmental feminist activist, poet, author and social scientist. Bhasin’s work, which began in 1970, focused on gender, education, human development and the media.She lived in New Delhi, India. She was best known for her work with Sangat - A Feminist Network and for her poem Kyunki main ladki hoon, mujhe padhna hai. In 1995, she recited a refurbished, feminist version of the popular poem Azadi (Freedom) in a conference. She was also the South Asia coordinator of One Billion Rising. She resigned from her job at the U.N. in 2002, to work with Sangat, of which she was a founder member and adviser. She believed in a form of advocacy that combines feminist theory and community action.

She worked with underprivileged women from tribal and working communities, often using posters, plays and other non literary methods to get through to communities with low literacy rates. She had always maintained that in order to usher effective change, sloganeering must be accompanied by community mobilization. Boundaries were meaningless to Kamla Bhasin. Wherever she went, she made an impact. Her spirit was what one would first connect with. Her laughter, her Buland awaaz, her singing, her slogans, her poetry, her style of communication mesmerized many. People were inspired by her, took her as their mentor, and became friends with her. Bhasin, who died on September 25, was a leading spirit of the women’s movement, scripting amazing songs, capturing the various ideas and expressions of the movement – songs that traveled across India and the South Asian region.

Kamla Bhasin

“Feminism, for me, has never been anti-men. It has been antipatriarchy.” - Kamla Bhasin

Kamla Bhasin

Literary Works Bhasin had penned down books and booklets that revolved around her understanding of patriarchy and gender. Her work has been translated into 30 languages. A lot of NGOs use them to enable people to understand gender issues. Laughing Matters, one of her books, was first published in 2005 and republished in 2013. It now has a Hindi version with the name Hasna Toh Sangharsho Mein Bhi Zaroori Hai. She co-authored the book with Bindia Thapar. Other important writings by her include Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition which talked about women’s experiences at the time of partition and what their idea of nation was. Understanding Gender is another writing of hers that deals with questions like the relationship between gender and woman, gender and development, gender and patriarchy and much more. What Is Patriarchy? is another booklet by her that attempts to locate women’s struggles for social change with a special

focus on South Asia. Her idea of feminism transcends class, borders and other binary social divisions and that reflects in her writings. Her poem Kyunki main ladki hoon, mujhe padhna hai highlighted the importance of education in a woman’s life. She has written books on issues of gender, justice and ideologies of patriarchy and feminism, which now assist NGOs in creating awareness among people and giving them a better view of the concepts. Some of her famous books are Laughing Matters (co-authored with Bindia Thapar),Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition, Understanding Gender, Understanding Masculinity, What is Patriarchy?, Feminism and it’s relevance in South Asia.

Kamla Bhasin

Borders & Boundaries Women in India’s Partition

Kamla Bhasin

Authors: Kamala Bhasin and Ritu Menon In 1947 India was simultaneously freed and divided. Partition affected everyone in one way or another, but it had a particular impact on women as they struggled to put their lives back together again. How did they find their place in this land of redrawn boundaries? What was nation to them? Religion? Community? Freedom itself? Through the stories of women and an accompanying narrative that locates them in a social and political context we get another view, from the margins as it were of that momentous time, and look anew not only at how history gets written but at those age-old boundaries of religion, community, gender and nation. For a long time, and certainly all the time that we were children, it was a word we heard every now and again uttered by some adult in conversation, sometimes in anger, sometimes bitterly, but mostly with sorrow, voice trailing off, a resigned shake of the head, a despairing flutter of the hands. All recollections were punctuated with “before Partition” or “after Partition”, marking the chronology of our family history.

Those who experienced the brutality and orchestrated fury of the attacks recalled that other cataclysmic moment in the country’s recent past-a past they believed had been left behind. But here was Partition once more in our midst, terrifying for those who had passed through it in 1947 ... Yet this was our own country, our own people, our own home-grown violence. Who could we blame now? It seemed during those days and weeks and months of trying to come to terms with what had happened, that it was no longer possible to think of Partition as something that had occurred in another country, that belonged to time past. Indeed, it seemed that we could hardly comprehend what was in our midst now without going back to what had transpired then, without excavating memory, ransacking history.

How effortlessly does history sometimes manage to conceal our past from us. Growing up in independent India, glorying in a freedom gained through non-violence, our gift to liberation” struggles everywhere, everything that happened pre-1947 was safely between the covers of our history books. Comfortably distant, undeniably laid to rest. 43

Kamla Bhasin

How do we know Partition except through the many ways in which it is transmitted to us, in its many representations: political, social, historical, testimonial, literary, documentary, even communal. We know it through national and family mythologies, through collective and individual memory. Partition, almost uniquely, is the one event in our recent history in which familial recall and its encoding are a significant factor in any general reconstruction of it. In a sense, it is the collective memory of thousands of displaced families on both sides of the border that have imbued a rather innocuous word-partition- with its dreadful meaning: a people violently displaced, a country divided. Partition: a metaphor for irreparable loss. As we travelled from place to place speaking to men and women, we carried with us not only their individual memories but, in an unexpected twist, a “memory” of undivided India. In Amritsar we felt a kind of so-nearand-yet-so-farness about not being able to cross over to Lahore. Or, in Lahore, not being able to visit Sheikhupura or Mianwali, so vivid now from so many memories, not our own. This was only partly a result of listening to stories about old, old friendships and, yes, old enmities and prejudices, too. It was also a kind of rekindling of personal memory which made me locate my grandparents’ home on Nisbet Road in Lahore where I, alone of all my siblings, had not been born. The impatience with memory that had 44

marked my childhood and adolescence was replaced by something so complex that it is difficult to unravel. In Lahore, forty years after Partition, I experienced such a shock of recognition that it unsettled me. These were not places I had known or streets I had walked; they were not the stuff of “my” memories.

Understanding Gender the relationship between gender and women

Kamla Bhasin

The author, Kamla Bashin in his book Understanding gender talk about the concept of gender in feminism discourse deals with such difficult questions as the relationship between gender and women; the difference between ‘women and development’ and ‘gender and development; gender and patriarchy; and how religion, caste, and class affect gender. Bashin tries to bring light on the aspect which many people are not aware of and tries to serve reality to them. Gender and sex are misunderstood, as the same thing but the concept of gender us to share that sex is one thing, but gender is quite another. Everyone is born male or female and our sex can be determined by our genitalia, but the social and cultural packaging that is done for girls and boys from birth onwards is gendering. As in our society discrimination starts right away from the birth of a child if a baby boy is born then there will be decorated with blue balloons in room and many celebrations conducted on the other hand for baby girl pink balloon is preferred And there is no celebration and rituals necessarily conducted. As we can see how gender is associated with even colors. The author tries to make readers understand that there is nothing they do that men cannot do or that men can do and women cannot. Sex is universal but gender keeps changing according to the time and place For example middle-class girl may be limited to home or school while a tribal girl may roam around in the jungles freely.

Every society prescribed different roles for both the gender as dresses in some societies. Women are made to cover their body from top to toe including their faces, while men are allowed to wear them according to their comfort. Attributes in most society’s women are accepted to be soft, caring, and obedient while men are accepted to be strong. Another one is roles and responsibilities’ men are considered the head of the family and all the decisions are controlled by him while women are trained to do household chores and look after the children. This shows the lack of education, employment. Issues like language also gendered have been highlighted by the author. Language is patriarchal and reflects gender biases and inequalities as men can use the words they want but women are always advised to use soft words. For example words of abuse with sexual connotation mostly used by men but if women do the same then it is not considered good. Another example is the words like a nurse, secretary, nursery teacher always assumed to be women whereas boss, pilot, manager, politician, etc refers to men. It shows that public spaces and jobs continue to be dominated by men. Bashin tries to cover patriarchy as an issue as its means male domination. Patriarchy is not the same everywhere it is different in every situation.

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Chapter 4

Kamala Das Kamala Das, one of the outstanding poets of India, writing in English and Malayalam, was born on March 31, 1934 in Malabar in Kerala. Influencd by her uncle Nalapatta Narayan Menon, a prominent writer, she began writing poetry at an early age. A trailblazer in the Indian English poetry, she is the first Indian woman writing in English who openly talks about the sexual desires and experiences of Indian women. She abandoned the secure field of writing about teenage bloodless, unrequited love. According to her, poetry is “the April sun squeezed like an orange juice”, the heat permeates into the mind of reader. Sensitivity is the strength of her poetry. Writing under the pen name, ‘Madhavikutty’, she is one of the foremost short story writers in Malayalam. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature, along literary personalities such as Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing. Her widely acclaimed stories include Pakshiyude Maranam, Neypayasam, Thanuppu, and Chandana Marangal. Her first English poetry was ‘The Sirens’, published in 1964, followed by Summer In Calcutta. She received many awards and accolades including Asian Poetry Prize, Kent award for English writing from Asian countries, Asan World Prize,

Sahitya Academy award and Vayalar award. She has ventured into the restricted and unclaimed territory and set a point of reference for her colleagues. Born into a conservative Hindu family with royal links, in 1999, she announced her decision to convert to Islam and took on the name of Kamala Surayya–another topic of controversy.

“I am sinner, I am saint. I am the beloved and the betrayed. I have no joys that are not yours, no aches which are not yours. I too call myself I.” Her act was dubbed as another of her histrionics meant to grab attention but she defended her decision saying that it gave her a secure feeling to don the Muslim veil. However, later, she also opined that it was not worthwhile to change one’s religion. Although with no family background of politics, she contested for a Parliament seat in 1984 after launching the Lok Seva party but was unsuccessful. On 31 May 2009, at the age of 75, Kamala Das breathed her last in a Pune hospital. Her body was taken to Kerala and buried with full state honours.

Early Life, Family And Education

Kamala Das, Malayalam pen name Madhavikutty, Muslim name Kamala Surayya, (born March 31, 1934, Thrissur, Malabar Coast [now in Kerala], British India—died May 31, 2009, Pune, India), Indian author who wrote openly and frankly about female sexual desire and the experience of being an Indian woman. Das was part of a generation of Indian writers whose work centred on personal rather than colonial experiences, and her short stories, poetry, memoirs, and essays brought her respect and notoriety in equal measures. Das wrote both in English (mostly poetry) and, under the pen name Madhavikutty, in the Malayalam language of southern India.

Das was born into a high-status family. Her mother, Nalapat Balamani Amma, was a well-known poet, and her father, V.M. Nair, was an automobile company executive and a journalist. She grew up in what is now Kerala and in Calcutta (now Kolkata), where her father worked. She began writing poetry when she was a child. When she was 15 years old, she married Madhava Das, a banking executive many years her senior, and they moved to Bombay (now Mumbai). Das had three sons and did her writing at night.

Kamala Das

“Like other women writers of my class, I am expected to tame my talent to suit the comfort of my family.” - Kamala Das

Kamala Das

Literary Works Just around the beginning of the post-Independence era, the second wave of Indian poetry in English emerged, after the romantic tradition in writing showed signs of having receded. The publication of R. Parthasarathy’s Ten Twentieth-century Indian Poets gave voice to these poets. The poems that drew a lot of attention in this volume was the bold writing of Kamala Das who, with her protest against patriarchy, her fervent endorsement of the matriarchal system and the articulation of female desire and sexuality, established herself as an icon of Indian feminism. In the words of a well-known critic, K. R. Sreenivasa Iyengar, Das was perceived as being “aggressively individualistic”. Her writing has been termed as confessional in which private grief and humiliation has been expressed without reservation, with perceptive self-analysis and sincerity of tone and purpose.

Das’s poetry collections included Summer in Calcutta (1965), The Descendants (1967), and The Old Playhouse, and Other Poems (1973). Subsequent English-language works included the novel Alphabet of Lust (1976) and the short stories “A Doll for the Child Prostitute” (1977) and “Padmavati the Harlot” (1992). Notable among her many Malayalam works were the short-story collection Thanuppu (1967; “Cold”) and the memoir Balyakalasmaranakal (1987; “Memories of Childhood”). Perhaps her best-known work was an autobiography, which first appeared as a series of columns in the weekly Malayalanadu, then in Malayalam as Ente Katha (1973), and finally in English as My Story (1976). A shockingly intimate work, it came to be regarded as a classic. In later life Das said that parts of the book were fictional.

Kamala Das

My Story (Ente Katha)

Kamala Das

My Story is an autobiographical book written by Indian author and poet Kamala Das (also known as Kamala Surayya or Madhavikutty). The book was originally published in Malayalam, titled Ente Katha. The book evoked violent reactions of admiration and criticism among the readers and critics. It remains to date the best-selling women’s autobiography in India. My Story is a chronologically ordered, linear narrative written in a realist style. In the book, Das recounts the trials of her marriage and her painful self-awakening as a woman and writer. The entire account is written in the format of a novel. Though My Story was supposed to be an autobiography, Das later admitted that there was plenty of fiction in it. My Story offers a glimpse of the events and forces that shaped Kamala Das’ life and views. Born in 1934 to a prominent Nair family, Kamala Das spent her early years in Calcutta. While her parents were artistic, her childhood was characterised by loneliness and neglect as her father was perpetually busy at work and her mother was “vague, indifferent, spent her time lying on her belly on a large four-poster bed, composing poems in Malayalam”. The lack of a stable home also rankled as she kept shuffling between Calcutta (where her father worked) and her ancestral home in Nalapat, Punnayurkulam, Kerala during her childhood.The author writes poignantly of the discrimination she and her brother faced at the European school they were studying in when the British were still ruling India. Autobiographies can be annoyingly

self-glorifying and hide uncomfortable truths, or they can reveal insights about dysfunctional relationships and flaws in the character of people. My Story falls in the latter category, so it’s no wonder that it aroused intense reactions among her readers and family members. “They took their grievances to my parents who were embarrassed but totally helpless for it had become clear to them that I had become a truth-addict and that I loved my writing more than I loved them or my sons,” she writes. Written in a simple, lyrical manner, the book is an easy read and keeps you hooked till the very last line. The topics remain as relevant today as they were decades ago, perhaps because as a society we still remain cagey about women’s sexuality and their right to make their own choices.

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Chapter 5

Mahasweta Devi

Author of numerous novels, essays and short stories, she received the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour, in 1996.

She was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1997 for her ‘compassionate crusade through art and activism to claim for tribal peoples a just and honourable place in India’s national life’.

Devi used the imaginary space of fiction to begin a conversation about and a conversation with the very real people on the ground that had been neglected all this while.

Mahasweta Devi is not only known for her political writing style but her immense contribution towards communities of landless labourers of eastern India where she worked for years.

“Their crime is they dared to dream... The right to dream should be the first fundamental right of people.”

Mahasweta Devi (1926–2016) was one of India’s foremost literary figures from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—a writer and social activist in equal rights.

Her intimate connection with these communities allowed her to understand and begin documenting grassroots-level issues, thus making her a socio-political commentator of the marginalized community. This led to her editing a Bengali quarterly Bortika – a forum for the poor peasants, tribals, agricultural labourers, industrial labourers and even the rickshaw pullers who had no voice and no such space to represent themselves. 57

Early Life, Family And Education

She was born to Maish Ghatak and Dhairitri Devi, the former was a poet and novelist, and the latter was a writer and social worker. Mahasweta’s paternal uncle was Ritwik Ghatak, and her maternal uncles were Sankha and Sachin Chaudhary, a famous sculptor and the other founder of Economic and Political Weekly of India. She first attended Eden Montessori School in Dhaka but later shifted to West Bengal. There she studied in Midnapur Mission Girls High School. She has also attended Santiniketan and Beltala Girls’ School. She joined VIsva Bharati University to complete her B.A. in English and then went on to earn an M.A. in English from Calcutta University.

She got married two times. On 27 February 1947, she married Bijon Bhattacharya. A playwright and founder of the Indian People’s Theatre Association movement. She has a son with Bijon named Nabarun Bhattacharya, who became a novelist and a political critic as well. She did various jobs in her lifetime, the first being in a post office, but she was fired from there due to her communist ideology. She even wrote letters for illiterate people. In 1962 she married Asit Gupta, but the relationship ended in 1976. She suffered a heart attack on 23 July 2016 and was admitted to Belle Vue Clinic in Kolkata.

Mahasweta Devi

“Time was the arch fugitive, always on the run.” - Mahasweta Devi

Mahasweta Devi

Mother of 1084 translated by samik bandyopadhyay

Mahasweta Devi

Mahasweta Devi’s writing life can be divided into significant phases and the graph of her activities can be mapped beginning with her first book, Jhansir Rani (The Queen Of Jhansi) in 1956, a biography of the woman ruler in a princely state against the British in 1857. Despite lacking a research background, Devi did meticulous research in order to write this book. She was able to do so with help of friends and well-wishers who generously supported her travel to the place to draw from archives, as well as documenting oral traditions of lore and legends transmitted through generations. She wrote voraciously, publishing 96 titles after this first book – not including her non-fiction and political writings, children’s books and the other editing work that she was involved in throughout her lifetime.

andis rather straightforward with her approach to talking about the lived experiences of the marginalized. Her language is simple – an ironic juxtaposition to the complexity of the issues she talks about. In fact, it is precise because she is talking about complex realities that she uses simple language to reach the reader. Her fiction allows the reader to look at cultural practices, social institutions, identity formations, sexual roles and how they operate in spaces with different power dynamics. The arrangement of all these in her narratives come together to display the exploitation of differences in caste, class, and gender. Devi’s work hints at a particular kind of change in the discourse of sexuality where it no longer oppresses marginalized women but becomes the very ground of political liberation.

If 1956 was the start of Devi’s calling as a writer, she wrote in four phases. For the reader to understand the corpus of work, the four phases are as follows: 1956-65 she published 19 titles; 1966-75, 9 titles; 1976-85, 27 titles, and her final phase was the 1986-95, 39 titles. The second phase seems to be the leanest amongst her writing phases. However, it is during this very phase that she produced some of the sharpest and critical writing. The titles were Kavi Bandyoghoti Gayiner Jivan a Mrityu (The Life and Death of Poet Bandyoghoti Gayin), depicting the struggle of a low-caste boy in 15th century Bengal. Devi’s writings are peculiarly devoid of sentimentality. She does not tug at her readers’ emotions 65

SECTION 2: The Contemporary era

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Chapter 6

Chitra Banerjee Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is a contemporary Indian-American writer known for her brilliant exploration of South Asian immigrant experiences. She accomplished her literary career in three genres such as poetry, novels and short stories. The present review article attempts to discuss Divakarunis themes, techniques incorporated in her literary works with the help of research carried out on Divakarunis fiction by various researchers. Her short story collection, Arranged Marriage won an American Book Award in 1996, and two of her novels (The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart), as well as a short story The Word Love were adapted into films.

“Clasping Kuntis hands in her thin, old, ivory-hued fingers, Gandhari whispered, Calm down, calm down, O Mother of the Pandavas! Calm down. Time moves in cycles, circling like the wheels of the chariot. Our life cycle is shrinking. Soon it will be just a dot. And finally even that dot will merge into the void.” She writes for children as well as adults, and has published novels in multiple genres, including realistic fiction, historical fiction, magical realism, myth and fantasy.

“Their crime is they dared to dream... The right to dream should be the first fundamental right of people.”

Mistress of Spices was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Currently, Sister of My Heart, Oleander Girl, Palace of Illusions, and One Amazing Thing have all been optioned to be made into movies or TV serials. Divakaruni’s works are largely set in India and the United States, and often focus on the experiences of South Asian immigrants.

Early Life, Family And Education

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, born in 1957 in Calcutta migrated to United States at the age of nineteen to earn a master’s degree in English from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio and she continued PhD programme in the University of California at Berkley. Indian-American author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has recently published poems, short stories, and novels, all of which generally focus on similar themes: the roles of women in India and America; the struggle to adapt to new ways of life when one’s cultural traditions are in conflict with new cultural expectations; and the complexities of love between family members, lovers, and spouses.

Divakaruni’s work is often considered to be quasi-autobiographical as most of her stories are set in California near where she lives, confront the immigrant experience—specifically, of Indians who settle in the U.S.—and evaluate the treatment of Indian-American women both in India and America. Divakaruni is also an editor of two anthologies, Multitude: Cross-Cultural Readings for Writers and We, Too, Sing America: A Reader for Writers, that include stories concerned with similar issues.

Chitra Banerjee

“I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable but I always was so, only I never knew it!” - Chitra Banerjee

Chitra Banerjee

Literary Works Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, born in 1957 in Calcutta migrated to the United States at the age of nineteen to earn a master’s degree in English from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio and she continued PhD programme in the University of California at Berkley. She began her writing career as a poet with the publication of The Reason for Nasturtiums (1990). Her first short story collection Arranged Marriage won American Book Award, PEN Josephine Miles Award and Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and paved the way for her to become a high-profile writer in English literature. The Mistress of Spices, one of the bestselling novels of Divakaruni has been adapted into a movie with the same title. Her major novels include The Mistress of Spices (1995), Sister of my Heart (1999), The Vine of Desire (2002), Queen of Dreams (2004), The Palace of Illusions (2008), One Amazing Thing (2010), Oleander Girl (2013), Before We Visit the Goddess (2016) and Brotherhood of the Conch Series: The Conch Bearer (2003), The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming (2005), Shadowland (2009). Her Short story collections include Arranged Marriage (1995), The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (2001) and The Lives of Strangers (2005). Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s fiction was based

on her personal experiences as an Indian immigrant in America. Most of her stories set in India and America excelling in themes like alienation, nostalgia, discrimination, feminism, modernism, east-west conflict, multiculturalism, identity crisis, human relationships, etc are analyzed and examined from various perspectives by the researchers and it is discussed in the paper to promote further scope of research. The importance and greatness of Indian culture is revealed through the characters such as Draupadi, Tilo, Anju, Sudha, Rakhi and Mrs.Gupta. In relation to the title of the dissertation Chandra focused on various themes of Divakaruni’s works that has interrelation with one another. Chandra discusses the major themes like feminism, multiculturalism, tradition and modernity, women’s sufferings, human relationships, women relationship with man in all the novels of Divakaruni and finally magic realism in the novels The Conch Bearer, The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming and Shadowland. The article concludes with an idea that immigration ultimately ends in struggle between tradition and modernity, cultural crisis, search for self – identity and alienation.

Chitra Banerjee

The Palace Of Illusions The story of Draupadi, from her own perspective

Chitra Banerjee

Mahabharata, one of the two most famous ancient epics of India (the other being Ramayana) is a virtual sea of stories. It has, in addition, religious value as Lord Krishna is one of the protagonists. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is a wellknown novelist of Indian origin. Her novel “The Palace of Illusions” centers around Draupadi, the female protagonist of Mahabharata. In this impressive re-telling, she aims at realizing a feminist picture of Draupadi to fit into the contemporary socio-psychological context. Her task is rather tedious as the key protagonist Draupadi is bound by the shackles of a patriarchal society that reveres only a pativrata (subservient to husband only) woman, and also by individual predicament that makes her the wife of five brothers.

li, daughter of King Drupad and wife tofive husbands who seek to reclaim their birthright, bestselling novelist Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni gives voice to a bold and sensuous retelling of captivating stories from the Mahabharata. Woven into the fabric of traditional tales from the ancient Indian epic, Panchaali’s destiny is a thread as golden and as fragile as the lotus she discovers. As she endures a fierce civil war, domestic power struggles, and the perils of attraction to elusive men, Panchaali brings a feminine sensibility to her male-dominated world.

To achieve this end, Divakaruni resorts to tweaking the incidents, filling in the minor gaps that she spots and inventing Draupadi’s psyche, but unlike some other authors, she stays loyal, in the main, to the original storyline and sentiment of Mahabharata as told first of all by Vyasa in Sanskrit. In this paper, the author analyses the novel “The Palace of Illusions” to mark the deviations of plot from that of the accepted versions, as also other inventive strategies which go to depict feminist credentials of Draupadi, as for example, her harbouring extra-marital desire, her work for other women, and her castigation of war and environmental degradation. Through the tumultuous life of Panchaa77

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Chapter 7

Arundhati Roy “I got into trouble in the past for my nonfiction,” Roy said, “and I swore, ‘I’m never going to write anything with a footnote again.’ ” It’s a promise she has so far been unable to keep. “I’ve been gathering the thoughts for months, struggling with the questions, shocked by what I’ve been reading,” she said, when I asked if she had begun the essay. “I know that when it comes out, a lot is going to happen. But it’s something I need to do.” In her late 30s, Roy was perhaps India’s most famous writer. The publication of “The God of Small Things” in 1997 coincided with the 50th anniversary of India’s independence.

profiles (“A 500,000-pound book from the pickle-factory outcast”), while magazines photographed her — all cascading waves of hair and high cheekbones — against the pristine waterways and lush foliage of Kerala, where the novel was set and which was just beginning to take off as a tourist destination. “Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.”

It was the beginning of an aggressively nationalist, consumerist phase, and Roy was seen as representative of Brand India. The novel, her first, appeared on the New York Times best-seller list and won the Booker Prize. It went on to sell more than six million copies. “He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.” British tabloids published bewildering 79

Early Life, Family And Education

Arundhati Roy, full name Suzanna Arundhati Roy, (born November 24, 1961, Shillong, Meghalaya, India), Indian author, actress, and political activist who was best known for the award-winning novel The God of Small Things (1997) and for her involvement in environmental and human rights causes. Roy’s father was a Bengali tea planter, and her mother was a Christian of Syrian descent who challenged India’s inheritance laws by successfully suing for the right of Christian women to receive an equal share of their fathers’ estates.

Though trained as an architect, Roy had little interest in design; she dreamed instead of a writing career. After a series of odd jobs, including artist and aerobics instructor, she wrote and co-starred in the film In Which Annie Gives It to Those Ones (1989) and later penned scripts for the film Electric Moon (1992) and several television dramas.

Arundhati Roy

“There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard” - Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy

Literary Works In 1997 Roy published her debut novel, The God of Small Things to wide acclaim. The semi autobiographical work departed from the conventional plots and light prose that had been typical among best-sellers.

Essays (2011), and Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014).

Composed in a lyrical language about South Asian themes and characters in a narrative that wandered through time, Roy’s novel became the biggest-selling book by a non expatriate Indian author and won the 1998 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

The work blends personal stories with topical issues as it uses a large cast of characters, including a transgender woman and a resistance fighter in Kashmir, to explore contemporary India.

In 2017 Roy published The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, her first novel in 20 years.

Roy’s subsequent literary output largely consisted of politically oriented nonfiction, much of it aimed at addressing the problems faced by her homeland in the age of global capitalism. Among her publications were Power Politics (2001), The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2002), War Talk (2003), Public Power in the Age of Empire (2004), Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (2009), Broken Republic: Three

Arundhati Roy

The God Of Small Things Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.

Arundhati Roy

The God of Small Things tells the story of one family in the town of Ayemenem in Kerala, India. Its epigraph is a quotation from contemporary writer John Berger: “Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.” She uses this idea to establish her nonlinear, multi-perspective way of storytelling, which gives value to points of view as “Big” as a human being’s and as “Small” as a cabbage-green butterflies. In Roy’s world, there is no definitive story, only many different stories that fuse to form a kaleidoscopic impression of events. Arundhati Roy’s debut novel, The Good of Small Things, was a bestseller in 21 countries and the winner of the 1997 Man Booker Prize for Fiction—making Roy the first Indian woman to win the award. The novel tells the story of twins Rahel and Estha and their tragic childhood and adult experiences with the Indian caste system, Marxism, love, and death. The story takes place in the southern province of Kerala, India, and follows a nonlinear plot, shifting between time and childhood and adult perspectives of the characters.

is the impetus behind much of the novel’s major events: It is love that propels Ammu to sleep with Velutha; love that fascinates and instills fear in Rahel; the variability of Ammu’s love toward Rahel that constantly plagues Rahel as a child; and it is unfulfilled love that leads to Baby Kochamma’s bitterness, and leads to her tragic betrayal of Velutha, Ammu, and the twins. Ironically, the only person who is “loved” outwardly in the novel is Sophie Mol, a relative the Kochamma family only knows for a few weeks. They fawn over Sophie Mol’s arrival and her death is the ghostly core around which the novel’s plot is told. Pride and shame run strong in the Kochamma family. Both emotions can result from emotional instability, a way of establishing a sort of grounding in the world. Pappachi, in order to keep his pride, buys a blue Plymouth and drives it around the town to appear attractive and worthy of respect.

The God of Small Things received glowing reviews worldwide, but it was also criticized by some in the United Kingdom as well as in India, where claims of obscenity were made against it. Love is an “Untouchable” in the novel, just like the Paravan caste. The emotion 87

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Chapter 8

Shashi Deshpande Shashi Deshpande is one of the eminent novelists of contemporary Indian literature in English. Western readers align her with Anita Desai. Indeed, both writers’ work centres around women’s lives in modern Indian society. However, only Deshpande lives and writes in India, and she explicitly addresses Indian readers, not the international marketplace. Writing did not come to Deshpande as a conscious decision. She had two children, no career, she ”got restless with being just a housewife and mother”. In England she felt isolated, with no friends, and her husband away all day. On their return to India her husband encouraged her to write about this experience. 1972 saw her first short story, “The Legacy”, many more were to follow. Her father advised publication, otherwise the stories would get lost. Thus began a career that would make her a name in India and beyond. Her father had taught her Sanskrit, she also speaks Marathi and Kannada, is well versed in the huge realm of Indian mythology, which she reads “against the grain”, from her own, feminist position. But she writes in English. Her English schooling, and her reading that has taken

her through the better part of English literary history, will add to the subtexts of her own texts. The web of her main text, however, is woven from Indian women’s lives, their day-to-day living deeply impregnated by religious, social, and political traditions, and gender relations determined by male power structures. Her – to date – eleven novels, children’s books, two long stories, and many short stories rest on the complexities of tradition and modernity, a tradition that does not go unquestioned in Deshpande’s work. “Things can never be as they were. It’s astonishing how we comment on change, as if change is something remarkable. On the contrary, not to change is unnatural, against nature.” Deshpande creates figures that take her readers through the social strata of urban society, but her interest comes to centre more and more on women of the middle and upper middle classes; well-educated women who fight for their own space, for their place in the family and in their social and their cultural setting. This setting is the backdrop to her stories, action remains private, even with rape which is, after all, private only to a certain degree. 89

Early Life, Family And Education

Deshpande was born in 1936, in Dharwad. She is the younger daughter of the Sanskrit scholar, novelist, actor and dramatist R. V. Jagirdar (19041984) and his wife Sharda Arya. Under the name of Adya Rangacharya, and also under the pseudonym of Shriranga, he published a huge literary ouevre that includes translations of Sanskrit plays. He enjoyed great success and fame, his work has become part of the national Indian heritage. Desphande grew up in a family that belonged to the upper middle class, and so does her own family. She was given the typical education at a British convent school, moved on to Bombay University and studied economics and political science, took a second degree, in law, in Bangalore, had her first job with a lawyer, then a law reporter.

Finally – she was by then married, with two sons, she added a degree in journalism (1969-1970), and topped that with a Master of Art. In 1962 she married Dhirendra H. Deshpande, a medical doctor. The couple settled in Bombay (later Mumbai), where her husband took up work as a pathologist at G. S. Medical College. In 1968 they went to stay in London for a year. In 1970 they moved on to Bangalore where they settled for good. Their son Raghu will live there too, until his early death in 2017. Their son Vikram lives in the US.

Shashi Deshpande

“A woman can never be angry; she can only be neurotic, hysterical, frustrated.” - Shashi Deshpande

Shashi Deshpande

Literary Works

The themes and topics, the cultural contexts of her novels seem to reflect Deshande’s own family and its cultural setting.

is this that women shape as it has shaped them, that they experience and that they leave behind, through divorce or through separation.

There is literature, Indian myths, traditional Indian music, medicine, an intimate or at least a close relationship to her father, all of this being part of the fabric of A Matter of Time (1999), Small Remedies (2000), Moving On (2004) and, most directly, of Strangers to Ourselves (2015).

Women, in Deshpande’s texts, are not simply victims, of circumstance, of family, of society.

Deshpande’s novels are family novels. Family, in their generational enfolding, in their ramifications, is the groundwork of the novels. Its intricacies, by the way, are more easily understood if readers – in particular Western readers - take to paper and pencil and draw a family tree. The complexities of this groundwork are not just family complexities, they are also the complexities of memory, and it

Over the decades that Deshpande’s work embraces, they have come to stand out as self-assured, self-empowered, articulate personalities. They leave behind limits and limitations, hurt themselves against and cross barriers and conventional norms. The female figure in In the Country of Deceit (2008) enters into a relationship with a married man. There are men who rape women, who are despots, but also remarkable men – lovers, husbands, fathers.

Shashi Deshpande

That Long Silence The story of Jaya.

Shashi Deshpande

The main character of That Long Silence is Jaya, a girl born into a middle-class family. When she is young, Jaya is clever, curious, and bright, all qualities considered unladylike by mainstream society. Jaya’s grandmother encourages her to act more conventionally so she can get a husband when she grows up, explaining that civilized and cultured girls are skilled at cooking, cleaning, and household labor. In addition, she tells Jaya to learn to be more accommodating and to keep quiet when she disagrees. All young women will have to build good relationships with their in-laws at some point and learning to make a good impression will go a long way towards helping her do this in the future.

vited change to her mundane life opens in Jaya a floodgate of emotions that she had carefully kept under wraps during her long marriage. She ponders over her marriage, her role as a career wife, a mother and a writer. The reader is taken through the labyrinths of her brain where she unpacks her long silence. She revisits her journey as a wife throughout the years. The novel has no plot per say with plenty of characters making an appearance throughout the book. I began the book trying to keep track of these but realized it did not matter who they were, what mattered was the principle that Jaya tried to communicate through them.

Eventually, Jaya learns to play the part of a subservient woman, while retaining a sense of individuality. She writes in her free time, though she has failed to become successful as an author. As she grows up, Jaya becomes keenly aware of the fact that people, in general, do not like it when she expresses herself or her individuality, and so she learns to hide it. Jaya refers to this stifling of herself and her ideas as “the long silence” since it stretches across her life from childhood to middle age. Only Jaya’s father encourages her in her writing and sees her as an individual. When her husband, Mohan is caught engaging in dishonest practices at his job, Jaya and Mohan are forced to leave their home and stay in a flat of her brother’s until the situation blows over. This unin97

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Chapter 9

Anita Desai Anita Desai (née Mazumbar) is a critically-lauded 20th-century writer, and her novels on the experiences and inner lives of Indian men and women are known for their compassion, eloquence, and lucid prose. Having come of age when India achieved independence in 1947, Desai weaves politics and gender issues into her works. Desai was born in Mussoorie, India, and spent her childhood in Delhi. Her parents met in Germany when her father was studying there, and they moved back to his home of India in the 1920s. Desai grew up speaking German, Bengali, Hindu, and Urdu; she only learned English when she went to a mission school. She then attended school at Queen Mary’s School in Delhi and received a B.A. in English literature from Miranda House at the University of Delhi. In 1958, Anita married Ashwin Desai, a business executive, and they had four children (Kiran Desai, one of her daughters, won the Man Booker Prize in 2006). Desai published her first short story when she was only twenty years old. Her first novel was Cry, the Peacock (1963). Her other novels include: Voices in the City (1965), Bye-Bye, Blackbird (1971), Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975), Fire on the Mountain (1977),

Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988), and The Zigzag Way (2004). In addition to novels, she has written books for children, numerous short stories that have been collected into anthologies, and essays. “Reality is merely one-tenth visible section of the iceberg that one sees above the surface of the ocean - art remaining nine-tenths of it that lies below the surface. That is why it is more near Truth than Reality itself. Art does not merely reflect Reality - it enlarges it.” Desai has received many awards, including the Royal Society of Literature Winifred Holtby Prize (1978), the Sahitya Akademi of India Award (1979), the Guardian Award for Children’s Fiction (1982), the National Academy of Letters Award, and three nominations for the Booker Prize. “...she used to say she would drown herself in but because she didn’t, because she died, after all, in bed, I felt she was still trying to get there. A person needs to choose his death.” She has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and MIT; she is also a member of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 99

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Anita Desai, original name Anita Mazumdar, (born June 24, 1937, Mussoorie, India), English-language Indian novelist and author of children’s books who excelled in evoking character and mood through visual images ranging from the meteorologic to the botanical. Born to a German mother and Bengali father, Desai grew up speaking German, Hindi, and English. She received a B.A. in English from the University of Delhi in 1957. The suppression and oppression of Indian women were the subjects of her first novel, Cry, the Peacock (1963), and a later novel, Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975). Fire on the Mountain (1977) was criticized as relying too heavily on imagery at the expense of plot and characterization, but it was praised for its poetic symbolism and use of sounds.

Clear Light of Day (1980), considered the author’s most successful work, is praised for its highly evocative portrait of two sisters caught in the lassitude of Indian life. Its characters are revealed not only through imagery but through gesture, dialogue, and reflection. As do most of her works, the novel reflects Desai’s essentially tragic view of life. Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988) explores German and Jewish identity in the context of a chaotic contemporary India. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Girton College, Cambridge and Clare Hall, Cambridge. Anita Desai lives in the United States, where she is the John E. Burchard Professor of Writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. Her most recent book is The Artist of Disappearance (2011), a trio of linked novellas about the art world, each featuring a different kind of disappearance.

Anita Desai

“Greenness hangs, drips and sways from every branch and twig and frond in the surging luxuriance of July.” - Anita Desai

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Anita Desai

Literary Works Desai’s first novel, Cry, the Peacock (1963), is clearly influenced by the writings of Virginia Woolf . It is the interior monologue of Maya, the pampered daughter of a rich Brahmin, who marries the lawyer Gautama. Obsessively attached to her father, she expects her husband to be a father substitute; but he is a cold, rational man who does not understand her. Morbid thoughts plague her, because an albino astrologer had predicted during her childhood that four years after her marriage, she or her husband would die: “In the shadows I saw peacocks dancing, the thousand-eyes upon their shimmering feathers gazing steadfastly unwinking upon the final truth--Death. I heard their cry and echoed it. I felt their thirst as they gazed at rain-clouds, their passion as they hunted for their mates. . . . Agony, agony, the mortal agony of their cry for lover and for death.” She finally kills Gautama by pushing him off a parapet, then commits suicide. Critics saw the work as marking an important phase in the development of the Indian novel in English: a shift away from the recording of external realities to a focus on the inner world of the protagonist.

The poetic quality of Desai’s prose also drew critical attention. Reviewers noted her use of symbols such as the peacocks, the moon, a dust storm, and Toto, Maya’s dog. They also pointed to her use of myth, from the predictions of the astrologer to Gautama’s discussions of the philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita. The mythic mode was taken to provide a counterpoint to the harsh realities propelling Maya toward neurosis, murder, and suicide. More-recent studies, however, focus on Desai’s refusal to conform to traditional structures of belief. Fawzia Afzal-Khan, for instance, describes Cry, the Peacock as the product of a struggle between the romantic aesthetics of mythmaking and the critical-realist insistence on the writer’s commitment to reality. independence of the emancipated New Woman. Otima, who is associated with the powerful, destructive Hindu goddess Kali, explodes the myth of motherhood by rejecting her children and retreating to her childhood home in Kalimpong. The Kali myth also symbolizes the suppressed but potent sexuality of the women in the novel.

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Anita Desai

Clear Light Of Day “A rich chekhovian novel”

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Anita Desai

Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day is a 1980 novel focusing on the tensions and complex relationships among family members living in Old Delhi, India. The novel begins when the main characters are adults and progresses backwards in time to their childhoods, with a final section returning to their adult lives. Exploring themes of family, forgiveness, and the roles of women, Clear Light of Day offers insight into the everyday lives and struggles of an Indian family. The novel is structured in four parts. As adults, the Das family’s children have grown apart. In the opening chapter, Tara Das and her husband Bakul go back to Old Delhi, a trip they make from Washington every three years.

She shows Tara a letter he wrote to her about not raising the rent on the family home, which she believes is condescending. Bim has never forgiven Raja for this letter and is resolved not to go to the wedding. Clear Light of Day shares autobiographical details with Desais’ life-- it is set during her own coming-of-age and in the same neighborhood where she grew up. The novel drew admiration for its depiction of India and familial relationships, with reviewer Karen Ray writing that its spirit “reaches to the very heart of India and of humanity.” It was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize.

Bakul is the Indian ambassador to the US, but often away from his wife, leaving her lonely and dispirited. They stay with Tara’s sister Bimla, or Bim, who still lives at the family home. Bim teaches history and cares for their brother, Baba, who is intellectually disabled and spends every day listening to music on a gramophone. The sisters discuss their brother Raja, whose daughter is getting married soon. Bim and Raja were once close but are now estranged. Bim is angry that Raja never became a poet, as he once dreamed of, but instead married their landlord’s daughter and settled for wealth and complacency. 107

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SECTION 3: The Modern era

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Chapter 10

Meena Kandasamy Ilavenil Meena Kandasamy (born 1984) is an Indian poet, fiction writer, translator and activist who is based in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Most of her works are centered on feminism and the anti-caste Caste Annihilation Movement of the contemporary Indian milieu. As of 2013, Meena has published two collections of poetry namely, Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010). Two of her poems have won accolades in all-India poetry competitions. From 20012002, she edited The Dalit, a bi-monthly alternative English magazine of the Dalit Media Network. She has also represented India at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and was a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom. Apart from her literary works, she is vocal about various contemporary political issues relating to caste, corruption, violence, and women’s rights in more ways than one. She has an influential and regular social media presence, through her Facebook and Twitter handles. She also writes columns for platforms like Outlook India and The Hindu, occasionally. This was primarily brought to light during the beef controversy at the Osmania University in

Hyderabad in 2012. As a writer Meena’s focus was mainly on caste annihilation, feminism and linguistic identity. A fierce critique of academic language, she says, “Poetry is not caught up within larger structures that pressure you to adopt a certain set of practices while you present your ideas in the way that academic language is” and thus, prefers to use it for her activism. One of her first poetry collections, Touch was published in August 2006, with a foreword by Kamala Das. It was translated into five different languages upon publication. Her second poetry Ms. Militancy was published the following year. In this book, she adopts an anti-caste and feminist lens to retell Hindu and Tamil myths. Other works such as Mascara and My lover speaks of Rape won her the first prize in all India Poetry competition. “And the more familiar the stranger becomes, the more strange the familiar appears. That’s how the once-upon-a-time fiery feminist becomes a battered wife. By observing, but not doing anything. By experiencing, but not understanding. By recording but not judging.”

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Born in 1984 to Tamil parents, both university professors. Named as Illavenil by her parents, she developed an early interest in poetry, and later adopted the name Meena. Meena completed a Doctorate of Philosophy in Socio-linguistics from Anna University, Chennai. Meena wrote her first poetry at the age of 17 and also started translating books by Dalit writers and leaders into English at that age. Her debut collection of poems, Touch, was themed around caste and untouchability, and her second, Ms Militancy, was an explosive, feminist retelling/reclaiming of Tamil and Hindu myths. Her critically acclaimed first (anti) novel, The Gypsy Goddess, smudged the line between powerful fiction and fearsome critique in narrating the 1968 massacre of forty-four landless untouchable men, women and children striking for higher wages in the village of Kilvenmani, Tanjore. Meena has debuted as an actress in a Malayalam film, Oraalppokkam. It is the first online crowd funded independent Malayalam feature film.

Meena works closely with issues of caste and gender and how society puts people into stereotypical roles on the basis of these categories. She has claimed her identity as a Dalit woman and presents a fierce critique of Hindu and Tamil myths by using a feminist and anti-caste perspective to retell them through her works. In the preface to her collection of poems titled ‘Ms. Militancy,’ she writes, “So, my ‘Mahabharat’ moves to Las Vegas; my Ramayan is retold in three different ways...telling my story another way lets me forgive you.” She has faced a lot of abuse, hatred and threats for her fearless criticism of the Hindu society, to which she says, “This threat of violence shouldn’t dictate what you are going to write or hinder you in any manner.”

Meena Kandasamy`

“I am the woman conjured up to take on the life of a woman afraid of facing her own reality.” - Meena Kandasamy

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Literary Works Her first book, Touch, was published in 2006. Two of her poems have won prizes in all-India poetry competitions. Her poetry has been published in various journals, including The Little Magazine, Kavya Bharati, Indian Horizons, Muse India and the Quarterly Literary Review, Singapore. She edited The Dalit, a bi-monthly alternative English magazine of the Dalit Media Network in its first year of publication from 2001 to 2002.

ness were not anything that I had to be ashamed of… I wrote poetry very well, aware of who I was. But I was also sure of how I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be taken on my own terms… I wanted to be totally bare and intensely exposed to the world through my writings. I wanted it to be my rebellion against the world.” It meant, she adds, consciously deciding that she wasn’t interested in winning “acceptance, or admiration or awards”.

Kandasamy’s translations include the writings and speeches of Thol. Thirumavalavan, leader of Viduthalai Chiruthaigal or the Dalit Panthers of India (Talisman: Extreme Emotions of Dalit Liberation, 2003) and the poetry and fables of Tamil Eelam poet, Kasi Anandan.

Aware that “the site for all subjugation is (at first) at the level of language”, Kandasamy believes that political poetry has the “pressing responsibility to ensure that language is not at the mercy of the oppressors”.

She is one of the 21 short fiction writers from South Asia featured in an anthology published by Zubaan, New Delhi.

The ways of the status quo are insidious, however, and Kandasamy realises that a politically conscious poet has to be true to herself in order to be a genuine voice of dissent and resistance.

At present, she is working on her doctorate on Caste in the Indian Language Classroom.Kandasamy regards her writing as a process of coming to terms with her identity: her “womanness, Tamilness and low/ outcasteness”, labels that she wears with pride. She knew, she says, that “my gender, language and casteless-

Her work as the editor of a Dalit magazine and her association with the Dalit Panthers of India (a militant activist Dalit organisation) has further honed her awareness of what it means “to be a woman in a caste-ridden nation”.

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Meena Kandasamy`

When I Hit You “a powerful analysis of ‘modern’ marriage”

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Meena Kandasamy`

Kandasamy’s When I Hit You is a powerful analysis of ‘modern’ marriage through the art of fiction. An unnamed narrator takes us into her world of a misogynist husband; a father embarrassed by the shame that a possible divorce would bring, and a mother who tells her this is how things are, to be silent and to accept the situation because the first year of marriage is always hard; a mother who makes a “spectacle” of the narrator’s embarrassment and advises her that time will pass and all her troubles will be forgotten. A crucial aspect this book brings out is the way violence perpetuates in a seemingly “modern”, “love” marriage. We are always told when we question the patriarchy of traditional marriages that “modern marriages are not like that”, “love marriages are not like that”. Kandasamy breaks this myth. The book reveals a lot on the matters of love. The narrator tells us “love is not blind; it just looks in the wrong places.” The narrator escapes the brutality and the curfews imposed on her by writing letters to imaginary lovers. The book is a meditation on love, marriage, violence and how someone who is a feminist gets trapped in an abusive marriage.

of marital rape and the way penetration is used as a weapon against women is numbing. It makes me, as a reader, wonder how we managed to normalize this violence on a woman’s body.The question “What prevents a woman from walking out of an abusive relationship?” is one the author deals with, through a deeply personal narration, urgent and yet poetic. She invokes Elfriede Jelinek, Margaret Atwood, Anne Sexton and many more on various pages. This is not just a story of the abuse that the unnamed narrator faces at the hands of her misogynist husband, but also an account of the struggle a young writer faces in absolute isolation. The book also exemplifies her struggles where she has to remind herself that you are more useful alive than dead, over and over again.

As a reader, this book is a treat with all the poetry the author includes as epigraphs: an exploration of art, love and female desire (which is almost non-existent in our cultural discourse). A woman’s sexuality is for her husband to possess. If not wanted by her husband, the woman is supposed to have no wants and sexual desires of her own. The narrator’s brutally honest account 119

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Chapter 11

Meghana Pant Known as one of India’s best writers, Pant’s books have been published to critical and commercial acclaim. She’s published eight books, including BOYS DON’T CRY (Penguin Random House, 2022), THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, VERY BAD GOOD NEWS (Penguin Random House, 2021), HOW TO GET PUBLISHED IN INDIA (Bloomsbury, 2019), HOLY 100 (Rupa, 2019), FEMINIST RANI (Penguin Random House, 2018), THE TROUBLE WITH WOMEN (Juggernaut, 2016), HAPPY BIRTHDAY (Random House India, 2013) and ONE & A HALF WIFE (Westland, 2012). Pant has been felicitated with various honours and shortlists for distinguished contribution to literature, gender issues and journalism, including the Bharat Nirman Award, Laadli Media Award, FICCI ‘Young Achiever’s Award’, The Lifestyle Journalist ‘Women Achiever’s Award’, FON South Asia Short Story Award, Muse India Young Writer Award, Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, Frank O’Connor International Award and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

over a dozen international literary magazines, including Avatar Review, Wasafari, Eclectica, The Indian Quarterly and QLRS, as well as in several anthologies including Namita Gokhale’s THE HIMALAYAN ARC, where her story Boongthing was critically praised by The Hindu, Telegraph, Business Standard and Hindustan Times. “In Indian society every institution – prayer, education, family, beauty, chastity and career – was a rung of the ladder of life, which had to be climbed to reach the top rung, marriage.” Pant is a vociferous feminist and advocate of gender equality. She curates a popular monthly panel discussion on feminism in Mumbai called ‘Feminist Rani’, and interviews India’s leading opinion makers and change leaders from Shobhaa De to Chanda Kochhar to Kalki Koechlin to Deepa Malik on online shows like She’s The Boss (Firstpost), First Lady (Firstpost), and Get Real (SheThePeople.TV). She has spoken out against domestic violence in her TEDx talks.

“In India there’s no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man’s face and you’ll find an old man’s mind.” Her short stories have been published in 121

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orn in Shimla, Pant spent her childhood in Delhi, her teenage years in B Mumbai, and most of her 20’s in the cities of Zurich, Singapore, Dubai and New York. After completing an undergraduate degree in Economics and Statistics from St. Xavier College, Mumbai, Meghna won a scholarship for a MBA in Finance at Nanyang Business School, Singapore, and a Masters in International Management at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.

After her MBA, Meghna moved on from a job in corporate finance to become a business journalist. She began her career as a TV anchor with Arnab Goswami at Times Now, and went on to work for NDTV Profit in Mumbai and Bloomberg-UTV in New York City, where she reported from the New York Stock Exchange. She has met and interviewed President Obama, Mukesh Ambani, Sir Richard Branson, Hillary Clinton, Ratan Tata and Shah Rukh Khan, among others. Pant is the sister of comedian and author Sorabh Pant. She currently lives in Mumbai with her husband and daughters.

Meghna Pant

“Death has become so predictable that I have neither the youthful reverence of it nor the middle-age fear.” - Meghana Pant

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Literary Works

Her books-The Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Good News, How to Get Published in India, Feminist Rani, The Trouble with Women, Happy Birthday and One and a Half Wife-have been published to commercial and critical acclaim.

nation’s biggest literary festivals and conferences, and has appeared as a panellist on primetime news and international channels to discuss gender issues. She has written articles for and been quoted in leading national and international media.

Pant has been felicitated with various honours and her works have been shortlisted for distinguished contribution to literature, gender issues and journalism. She has won the Bharat Nirman Award, Laadli Media Award, FICCI Young Achiever’s Award, The Lifestyle Journalist Women Achievers’ Award, FON South Asia Short Story Award, Muse India Young Writer Award, Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, Frank O’Connor International Award and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Pant has been invited as a speaker for the

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One And A Half Wife

“simple and elegantly written story of a marriage-obsessed Indian family” 128

Meghana Pant

Meghna Pant’s debut novel is interesting and deals with social and marital issues that the middle class face, but shy away from. It traces the story of Amara Malhotra, who arrives in the US and tries to live her mother’s version of the American dream (posh and polished lifestyle yet Indian in values). Her efforts to impress others by living someone else’s life always meet with failure, and her ‘Indianness’ makes her the bride of an ivy-educated millionaire, being his mother’s choice. Then follows a life of Jekyll & Hyde – trying to be her Indian self from within and seeming to lead the husband-friendly lifestyle from without. She forces herself to compromise on her likes and dislikes and tries to adjust to her husband. She ends up with a double whammy – failing to rise up to his expectations as well as being herself. All her efforts to ‘save’ the marriage prove futile, because her husband never wanted her in the first place. The truth of the failed marriage is something she has to come to terms with and at the same time, face the adversity of her parents and the ostracism of the Indian American community.

glimpse?). Once they reach the land of their dreams it is all about reinventing themselves and trying hard to find a place in a foreign land. The effort they have to put in, just to be “accepted” is nothing short of Herculean, only to be rudely dismissed at critical junctures in life that “you can never really be one of us,” has left an indelible mark on a whole new generation popularly known as American Born Confused Desi (ABCD). The book addresses this painful aspect, rather beautifully. From language, clothing, dining and social etiquette which Indians are forced to adopt and adapt, a far cry from the years of social conditioning that their roots and popular culture taught them. Needless to say the book may or may not be an all pervasive picture of the lives of Indian Americans settled outside, but between conjunction and reality it achieves a space that is perhaps believable.

This is a simple and elegantly written story of a marriage-obsessed Indian family, originally based out of Shimla, who later migrate to US only to find their dream go horribly wrong. The title of the book is unusual, immediately grabbing your attention and the author maintains the mystery about why the protagonist is a one and a half wife, well into the book. In many ways, this story is also about the great Indian Diaspora and the kind of lives they lead outside (maybe a partial 129

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Chapter 12

Nivedita Menon Nivedita Menon is a feminist writer and a professor of political thought at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has previously taught at Lady Shri Ram College and the Department of Political Science at Delhi University. She is known for taking positions on several political issues, including nuclear power and the Kashmir conflict. Her involvement in the 2016 JNU protests led to her being criticized by members of the Bharatiya Janata Party and in the media, and led to her being seen as a symbol of resistance against the Hindutva movement. She is best known for her leftist school of thought, one which has seen her harbour an innate hate against India and Hindus with her persistently claiming India illegally occupied Kashmir. She has also gone onto paint the genocide of Kashmiri Pandits from Kashmir in the 1990s in a hunky dory light and sympathised with terrorists like Yasin Malik, something done in abundance in JNU. During the protests in JNU in March 2016, Nivedita Menon made a speech titled “Nation, a daily plebiscite” in which she discussed nation formation, nationalist aspirations, and Kashmir’s accession to the Indian Union. The lecture was

part of a series about nationalism. The speech was criticized by members of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after a video surfaced of a quote from her speech, in which she stated that “Everyone knows that India is illegally occupying Kashmir. It is said the world over. Everybody accepts”. “If we are all bad women, then patriarchy had better watch out.” The youth wing of the BJP filed a complaint against Menon and Kanhaiya Kumar, saying they made “anti-national” statements. Menon later stated that she had not said anything anti-national. “A feminist perspective recognizes that the hierarchical organizing of the world around gender is key to maintaining social order;” The video clip was highlighted by the news channel Zee News, which labelled Menon “anti-national”. The incident led to her being targeted for her views by the BJP and other groups. “The whole point about ‘romance’ is that the woman is somehow always smaller, more diminutive in a cute sort of way, while the man is adult.”

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Menon is known as ‘Nivi’ to most of her students and peers. She belongs to an upper-caste middle class family, and was brought up in different parts of India, including Mumbai, Kolkata and Delhi. Menon’s sister is the queer activist, Pramada Menon. Their brother is Dilip Menon, who is a historian at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. Menon is a feminist scholar who has taught at the International Studies School of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi since 2009. Before moving to JNU she was a teacher at Lady Shri Ram College for 15 years, and the political science department at Delhi University for seven years.

Menon says that the Indian feminist movement she was exposed to in college, as well as the writings of global feminists, helped her evolve a better consciousness with respect to issues of sexuality and politics. She was greatly influenced by the work of global feminists like Betty Friednan, Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem. Menon has written or edited several books about feminism and politics, including the 2004 volume Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law. She also writes on current issues in the journal Economic and Political Weekly, the online news blog kafila.org, and several newspapers.

Nivedita Menon

“This entire system functions on the assumption that women do housework for love .” - Anita Desai

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Literary Works

Nivedita Menon has written and edited numerous books about feminism and politics including the year 2004 volume Recovering Subversion: The Feminist Politics Beyond the Law. Menon also writes on present issues in the journal Economic and the Political Weekly, the online news blog kafila.org. She also writes for other newspapers, the Power and Contestation: India since 1989, Global History of the Present in 2007 and Seeing Like a Feminist 2012, the Recovering Subversion and Feminist Politics Beyond The Law 2004 Gender And Politics In India Sexualities. Seeing Like a Feminist, released in 2012, received favourable reviews. It also had high sales, partly due to uproar following the 2012 Delhi gang rape. The title of the book is a play upon the title of Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.

policy, and common ideas to explain the many ways the process of “gendering” occurs — here making a distinction between ‘sex’ as the biological characteristics and ‘gender’ as the set of cultural meanings that are arrived at over time.” Writing in the journal Economic and Political Weekly, feminist scholar Mary John said; “Written in a highly engrossing style, [the book] takes on very serious issues while also frequently making the reader smile. Nivedita Menon has managed to condense some of the most complex challenges facing the women’s movement in contemporary India and elsewhere in the form of a series of short reflections that are organized within six chapters.” A review in The Guardian noted that “Menon succeeds in shattering some deeply-ingrained myths, and her efficient gathering of the intersectional strands makes it a breezy but sharp read.”

A review in The Hindu said that the book “[dissected] social institutions,

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Seeing Like A Feminist “The world through a feminist lens”

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Nivedita Menon

For Nivedita Menon, feminism is not about a moment of final triumph over patriarchy but about the gradual transformation of the social field so decisively that old markers shift forever. From sexual harassment charges against international figures to the challenge that caste politics poses to feminism, from the ban on the veil in France to the attempt to impose skirts on international women badminton players, from queer politics to domestic servants’ unions to the Pink Chaddi campaign, Menon deftly illustrates how feminism complicates the field irrevocably.

implemented for women’s emancipation, such laws eventually failed because of the loopholes that were introduced because of homogenization- an approach that was obviously doomed because of our religious diversity. One of the many things that piqued my interest is the subject of marriage. Menon’s views on marriage as an institution of patrilineal virilocality, and on the prototypical family as an institution based on patriarchy are unequivocal.

Incisive, eclectic and politically engaged, Seeing Like A Feminist is not exclusively about the challenges faced by feminism in India; because this is a book on feminism, it belongs to the library of the global and intersectional movements of feminism that has no borders. It covers a wide range of issues like the Hindu Code Bills, the Pink Chaddi campaign that was heavily criticized by the media, ‘gender verification’ tests for the Olympic Games, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, gender performativity, the Women’s Reservation Bill which was never implemented, and the feudal callousness of the Indian middle classes towards their “servants”. What makes the experience of reading this book richer is the author’s emphasis on laws, one of which was The Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, which humorously enough, did not define what was indecent. Although 139

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