Escaping the ghetto of women writers

Editing a collection of Indian women's writing over 2000 years would be an intimidating task - a spunky enterprise in fact, when this follows on the impressive 2-volume tomes edited by Susi Tharu and K Lalita.



Annie Zaidi admits it was a "daunting" prospect, but one is glad she undertook it. Tharu and Lalita's pioneering work had covered vast creative, non-fictional and academic territories, with exhaustive introductions and classifications, but their volumes were not for the faint-hearted or those not engaged in academic pursuits.



Zaidi's anthology, on the other hand, provides a helpful access point to those readers whose interests remain largely literary and who may be unaware even today of the vast body of Indian women's writing through the ages.



Zaidi's introduction raises the question of whether "women writers" should be tagged as such. This ghettoization of women (women writers, women doctors, women lawyers, women politicians, even women's studies) has long been the subject of debate both within and outside feminist circles, with no satisfactory outcome. While Zaidi remarks that patriarchy is essentially domestic ("there is more sex, violence, politics and overall drama in the average household than, say, the average office") she confesses she squirms to recall how she had once dismissed "kitchenized" fiction.



Taking off on this one can only deplore the fact that a demeaning term like "chick lit" still flaunts its acceptability, with even the most exclusive litfests assigning sessions that allegedly represent it.



Reviewing the prejudices women still encounter today (a website discussing Romila Thapar termed her a "BIYATCH…nothing but a whore of the commies"), Zaidi argues for the need to look at women's work in a historical continuum: "Ignorance of the past leads to contortions in our understanding of our present selves."



Diaspora writing set in other countries is wisely excluded from the anthology which groups the selections into 11 categories, some predictable (Spiritual Love, Secular Love), others less so (Food, Work, Identity, Battles). These broad classifications allow for considerable flexibility in interpretation. In the section Work for instance, Vaidehi's entertaining Gulabi Talkies has Lillabai abandoning her profession as a midwife to become a gatekeeper at the women's entrance to a new cinema house. Her new job transforms Lillabai into becoming in turn a movie critic, the local grapevine, and even a means for women to go unaccompanied to the cinema.



Many of the selections inevitably echo Tharu and K. Lalita: the Buddhist theris, the bhakti poets, Rassundari Devi, Pundita Ramabai Sarasvati to name a few. However, they offer glimpses of revolts to readers who are unfamiliar with the earlier volumes (a large majority) and have complacently come to take bigger victories in the women's struggle for granted. Entering a monastic order as the theris did might for instance appear as a somewhat bizarre road to freedom to the uninitiated unless viewed in context, as perhaps the only escape route from domesticity and its discontents.



Zaidi's thematic categories allow past and present to nudge each other within sections with for example Urmila Pawar sandwiched between theris Citta and Vimala, while Sarojini Naidu's spirited case for women's franchise aptly finds a place in Battles. In her Introduction Zaidi describes how Sarojini Naidu's impassioned fight for women's franchise had shaken her belief in the role played by the freedom struggle in women's empowerment. What if there had been no Naidu, Zaidi queries: "Would we be marching down the streets even today… screaming for women's right to vote?" I would rather suggest that we regard Naidu like many of her contemporaries, as a historical accident (albeit an extraordinary one) in the evolutionary process which became India's struggle for Independence.