National Colloquium   A National Colloquium, organized by Women’s World India and Asmita, Hyderabad was held in Hyderabad in July 2001. It was the culmination of several workshops conducted in 10 regional languages between 1999-2001. The Colloquium highlighted the issues raised and discussed by approximately 175 women in the course of these workshops. Presented here are some excerpts of speeches and discussions at the colloquium – VOLGA Dear friends, I welcome you all on behalf of Asmita and Women’s WORLD. This one of the happiest and most memorable occasions for me, for Asmita and for the Hyderabad literary audience. Now we have with us about sixty women writers from 11 different regional languages of India. These are the writers who are breaking long silences, writing with great courage and commitment. This colloquium is the first of its kind and I am very proud that it is happening in Hyderabad. There is a historical background to this. Nine years, in 1992 women writers from all over Andhra Pradesh came to Hyderabad to talk about similar issues at a time when as women writers they faced a lot of censorship in the name of literary criticism. Writing for the first time about their identity and sexuality, 4 were attacked by critics, male critics who called their poetry as blue poetry and branded it as pornographic. They criticised the language used by women writers. Women writers were completely confused. Why this criticism? Why shouldn’t they write this kind of poetry? What was wrong with their language? At that time Asmita took the initiative and organised a two-day workshop. In that workshop for the first time women writers discussed the censorship of literary establishments. At the end of the second day we held a press conference and a public meeting. Many of the people in the audience present now were also present at that meeting. Many things have happened in these nine years. More women are writing but the spaces have shrunk. There is a greater legitimacy to feminist poetry and feminist writing but on the other hand newer forms of censorship are operating. Now the main talk of the city, main talk of Hyderabad and all over the state is there is no more feminist literature coming. They are not writing. It is just a wave and it subsides. Now it is, ‘who is writing? This is not good stuff.’ These kind of comments are appearing in literary discussions and in the literary pages of magazines. For two years now women writers are facing the same questions. “Is any feminist literature coming? Why has it stopped? Is there a feminist literary movement now? Is it a movement at all? ‘Why is it dying’?” these are the kind of questions they are facing. They want to kill feminist literature but since they can’t, they want to create an impression that it was already dead. In this environment as women writers of India we met here in Hyderabad and I think it is the right answer that we are giving. We are now stronger, more powerful and conscious of the various forms of censorship operating on us. Friends, these three days we have shared many ideas, discussed many issues and we are here to share these ideas with our friends in Hyderabad. Let me explain very briefly about the project ‘ The Guarded Tongue’ and gender based censorship. As we, the writers from different languages were talking about it all the three days, I think it will cause no great inconvenience if I talk for five minutes in Telugu about the project. It will be easy for me and for my audience also. I will be very brief. Pradnya Lokhande Friends, whenever one thinks about gender within the Indian reality, one has to think about gender and caste and their inter-relationship. A poignant example is that of Sanskrit plays: even the queen is made to talk in Prakruti, she can’t speak in Sanskrit. So, the space within language and the level women could reach was limited right from the beginning. When we talk about the situation of Indian women, we must be aware that there is no one Indian woman. There is no monolith. We are stratified by caste, by creed, by complexion and I would like to emphasise that. The Buddhist period gave women space because it has ‘therigatha, the expression of women which was noted in that period. Women were given the space to think in the abstract, hitherto the monopoly of men. So women thought about existential reality, looked at this Indian reality of gender and caste and class. The question now is: when one is talking about the global village and also saying that the personal is political, can we really use such slogans to transcend these social stratifications which are a reality. Baba Saheb Ambedkar, when talking about the caste structure in this country, said that women are used as gateways of the caste system. Caste structure and so-called caste purity was protected by investing women with a sense of purity and they were used one against the other within the caste divisions. Not only the caste structure, but the use of female sexuality within tradition was double-edged. On the one hand so-called upper caste women were given the “pativrata” image and many restrictions placed on their behaviour; on the other, dalit women were meant to entertain men, were supposed to be “free” but that concept was within quotes. This dichotomy of freedom is illustrated by the tradition in this part of the country of giving young girls to Yellamma. In the post-Peshwa period, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, the tradition of Tamasha was carried on only by the Mahar community, which was the artistes’ community. But the Tamasha dancer was exploited sexually because she belonged to this caste. It was Baba Saheb Ambedkar who promoted woman-power and provided women with political space. His journals, his morchas, his movement all drew women into important positions. Today’s dalit leadership, however, mobilises women but wants to keep them within boundaries. My generation is asking: why is it that we are accepted as dalit writers when we oppose Manu and the upper caste tradition, but turn into traitors the moment we voice our protest against patriarchy within the dalit caste. I am not speaking only of myself but of writers like Urmila Pawar who was harassed for questioning patriarchy in the dalit movement. We need to confront the caste system as well as patriarchy within the dalit tradition in order to make ourselves heard. C.S. Lakshmi There is the story of a man who goes into the jungle and one of his friends tells him not to be afraid of the animals, especially lions. He said, “You know, when you confront a lion, just stare into its eyes, it will not attack you.” And the man said, “I know that, but does the lion know about it?” There is a constant need to reassure oneself about the knowledge one has and to know whether the other person also shares that knowledge. Which is what we have done in this Colloquium. What we have done is, we have brought others into our language—world and our language- experiences, and we have entered their language-world and their language-experiences. In this group we found a lot of sharing, a lot of differences and a lot to celebrate. Having said that I will now say a little bit about it in terms of my language. I write in Tamil, I live in Bombay, I grew up in Bangalore, I studied in Delhi and I am married to a Rajasthani. So I am a true Indian. So, although I write in Tamil all other language-experiences enter my language. When I began writing in Tamil I was not the first person to write in a particular way—there were many women who attempted this before me, but they entered the language of writing in their own way, with their own manipulation. For this kind of manipulation I have an example. There used to be an Alsatian dog in our house in Bangalore and this dog was not allowed inside the kitchen and puja room. What the dog used to do was, it used to sit with its entire body in the kitchen with only its hind legs and tail outside. It pretended it was not inside the kitchen. Many women who began to write manipulated their spaces like this. They pretended they were writing what other people wanted but they actually were writing what they wanted to. People like us who started writing in the ’60’s were very quick to follow this example. We also used similar methods, but we were always aware that there was constant opposition to us in terms of sensitivity, of subject, of form; in terms of marketing the product and frequently, in terms of how your product reaches the global market. In the course of my research I met a woman who does Rangoli and I asked her, how did you choose this Rangoli? She told me that actually she wanted to be a singer, but what happened was, when she got married and went to her marital family they didn’t want her to do anything that made a noise, so music was out. She started doing this Rangoli which didn’t make any sound. I told her that even in Rangoli you are only drawing the figures of gods and goddesses, you can do so many other things, why are you not doing them? She replied that as long as she drew gods and goddesses people would think she was spending her time usefully. But if she drew a sunrise or a beggar on the street people would tell her that she was wasting it. Look at the levels of censorship she had imposed on herself in terms of choice of subject. So, ours is such a situation that when a woman wants to express herself, there are several hurdles she has to cross in terms of subject, in terms of style. In Tamil when men write certain stories they will be praised for using certain metaphors. There is a very interesting and important writer in Tamil, who was writing about mountains and he said: I looked up at the mountain and the tip of the moutnain looked like the tip of the penis. Everybody said, what wonderful style! What form, what language! But if a woman writes that she saw two mountains and they looked like woman’s breasts, they will say it’s obscene language, how can she use breasts in her writing? The various ways you approach language are different for men and for women. In terms of marketing your book, what happens is that the market is really controlled by men who look at your writing in a particular way. They ask you to write stories in a certain way so that they can market them. They don’t tell you directly, they do it by using certain stories which they market well. Now with the coming in of the global market what has happened is that the global expectation from countries like ours is that it should represent India in a certain way so. I will give you some examples of this. There is an American sociologist who came to give us a talk. We are in search of looking at our own tradition differently, looking critically, analysing critically and understanding the dynamism of tradition. This American woman showed us a picture of Vishnu lying down with Lakshmi at his feet. Then she said, all of you might see that Lakshmi is sitting at the feet of Vishnu and she is subservient to Vishnu. Actually that is not the way to look at the picture. What she is really doing is tickling the feet of Vishnu to inspire him to create the world. So I got up and asked: if she is capable of tickling his feet and inspiring him to create the world, why is she not tickling her own feet? She said no, this is not a feminist way to look at things. I said, we are actually different kinds of feminists, in India we don’t look at it like this. So, the global market also looks at your writing in a particular way, and another thing is that readers in the global market don’t want to make any effort to understand your stories. Everything must be given to them with proper details. If you write idli, there should be a footnote for idli, if you write vada there should be a footnote for vada, and I call this footnoting our culture. I feel that every culture has its mysteries, you can’t iron out all the nuances and phrases and hand it over to them to consume. You can’t do that. All of us have read French and Latin American novels in translation and nobody footnoted them for us. When we didn’t understand something we just passed. I feel that when we enter the global market we should remember all this. Shashi Deshpande Like Lakshmi, when I was asked to speak here, I started thinking about what we have done here these past three days. On one level it’s been a very intensely personal interaction of a very unique kind. I think this National Colloquium is extremely important and I think don’t we ever had this a chance before—it’s only the Sahitya Akademi which could call a gathering of writers from all languages and certainly I don’t think they have had one of women writers. But this kind of an absolutely informal gathering of so many women has been wonderful. So, we have talked, we have laughed, we have joked, we have clapped at each others good times, we have kind of seemed bored if somebody spoke for too long, we have argued, we have got heated up during the discussions. We have done all that. It’s been wonderful, but what has it all been about? I think censorship to me means freedom of expression, and freedom of expression is the most important thing. It is important for all human beings but particularly important for writers. That’s what it’s all about, our work. Unless we are free ourselves we might as well be dead. We have to be free to write what we want to. But it also very important for all humanity that writers should be free because, in a way, the writer is a spokesperson for all humanity, I think that I agree with the socialist who said that a writer who speaks, catches the truth of a nation or a family or an individual, much better than a historian or sociologist or whatever. Because you get at the truth beyond the fact, you can get at the truth beyond the ideology, it is very important that the writer be free to express herself or himself, and of course for women, freedom of expression is enormously important at this point of time. I think now for some years, we have been breaking the silence of centuries, not of decades, not of a hundred years, but of centuries. And it is so important that women should be free to meet until that has been done, because we have always been spoken for, we have rarely been able to speak. Even if we have been, I don’t know whether we have been understood or read. So, for the first time we have been able to speak for ourselves, and of course feminism has played a very great role in this. I always need to speak of feminism because I think of all the movements, it is a unique movement.Yet no movement, no liberation movement has been so scorned, so ridiculed, so denigrated and so underrated as the feminist movement. I think it is one of the greatest movements of the last century because it has meant that one half of humanity is trying to claim its place in the sun. I think it’s a such big achievement, and yet it has been ignored or forgotten. During these three days if one had listened to women and talked to them outside the seminar hall, one would have said these are all wonderfully confident women, they have a sense of humour, they have achieved things, they are very articulate, they can speak. They’ve got to where they are. But when you went inside the seminar hall you felt these women had have been facing only problems. I don’t think the women were putting on an act, inside or outside, because the truth lies in-between. In varying degrees and in different ways, all of us face repression, all writers. The degree depends on which family we are born in, what community we belong to, what caste we are part of, how privileged we are because of the money we have, or our parents or husbands have, it depends on what region of the country we belong to. This makes for so many variations. I was so surprised, even now when Lakshmi was talking, about the problems of a Tamil writer. I have never ceased to be amazed because as a writer in English, I do not face this problem. Regional writers, women writers, face the relentless scrutiny of readers. I think this is extremely clear, that everything they write is absolutely, constantly looked at and judged as the person not the writer speaking. Whereas for an English writer, one’s readership is so distant. I can get away with almost anything. About 20 or 30 years ago I wrote a story about a lesbian relationship. I have written about marital rape. Nobody has said a thing to me. I don’t know whether to be disappointed or pleased about that. I think that much distancing is there, but on the other hand English writers face problems of their own. For me the main problem has been marginalisation. It’s a very, very patriarchal literary establishment in English and a woman writer, especially if you write about women, are so marginalised you become almost invisible. I have had to face this for the last 25 or 30 years of my writing career. I am constantly being reminded that I am only a woman writer. When I write, magazines which gave brief histories or concise plots of the novel, they say my novel’s are about middle-class Indian women. What does that mean? You might as well say that a man is writing about a middle class Indian man or an upper class Indian man. It doesn’t mean anything, but this kind of labelling, this slotting, is one of the most hurtful things in English. And then globalisation has an immediate impact on our writing. Of course we have to bear the burden if we are writing and living in this country, if we are writing about people here without making them seem exotic. And then of course I am not to be taken seriously outside the country. And of course one has to bear a huge burden, if you are a woman writer, of not being Arunadhati Roy or Jhumpa Lahiri. I became conscious of these things in the course of these three days. Beyond all these forces, the state, the family and all that, I would like to say that many of us feel that whatever feminism has given us, it can also be a repressive force. I personally am very grateful to feminism, because of which my writing found a space. Without that it would have been dismissed as women’s writing. I am extremely grateful to feminism for all the writing it has unearthed, for all the meanings in women’s writing that it has been able to draw out. But at the same time I do not want as a writer, to become very idealistic. When critics constantly assess my writing as feminist writing it stifles me, the fact that women’s writing has now become a kind of ghetto. You are a woman writer, you are read by women you are critiqued by women, you are videoed by women. And so it goes on. I have been suffocated by that. I am not writing only for women, I am writing for all humanity, and here I would like to blame male readers who close their eyes, who don’t want to read about women. I am fascinated by books which tell me something about men, I live my life with men, I want to know about them, and obviously about more than my husband would ever admit in his life with me. But no, they don’t want to read. Whenever I am at a signing session, a man comes to me and the first thing he will say is, this is for my wife. The other day there was a bit of a change—two men came to me and said this is for our mothers. I want to ask these men whether the women are the only literate people in their families! It is very strange that they don’t want to know, they have no curiosity. I think it is a very sad thing with men writers. This also another big issue which I am so happy was discussed in the colloquium, that is self-censorship. We do censor our selves. Vaidehi put it very nicely and almost echoed my thoughts when she said that when she began, she sort of controlled herself, didn’t write about things which would be uncomfortable for readers to read. I felt that too at the very beginning, but I think K.R. Usha expressed it better when she said, I feel my mother is standing behind my shoulder, looking at what I am writing. I think that is a feeling a lot of women have. It takes time to get over this. Vaidehi said that and I agree with her, it takes time to conquer this feeling, to know that you are censoring yourself very deliberately. To overcome that, it takes not only time (I mean writing years) it also takes an enormous commitment to your writing which goes beyond relationships. That is very hard for women – to put your relationship at any kind of risk, but I think we have managed to do that, and relationships do survive. What is really important is that I think all of us would agree that what is important is that we write. At the end of the day in the future, when they read our books they are not going to judge us by what hard lives we had, what kind of humiliations we faced or what we had to put up with, they are going to judge us by our writing. I think that’s why victim stories, stories of our own hardship or discrimination are important because they must be articulated, and having articulated them we are clearer about them. It becomes possible to overcome them. I would like to say to all our writers, and I am sure they are saying it to themselves, let us move on. We don’t need to dwell on this any more, we need to write. I’d like to use Emily Dickinson’s phrase: I think it’s time to tell it straight. That’s what we want. Let us say it straight. For me, just to talk to all these women who came here is my form of activism, as I am sure it is for many writers. I can’t do anything about any of these problems but I can write. It is my form of activism and I can tell it straight, I can be honest and I can say exactly what I want to. It’s important that we do that because in future they will want to know how we lived, under what constraints we wrote. They have all endured, they have all gone through the same will and they are able to write. Let me be honest. I must write the way I feel and not let anything or anybody shake me from that. Not the market, not my publisher, not the editor, not my family, and certainly not the State. Himanshi Shelat I am going to talk about something that we dream of in the future. Today I am here on behalf of all those faceless women who have been silenced because of illiteracy, silenced because of their lack of awareness which is perhaps the greatest weapon that has been used against them. I would like to begin with the present – here we are in the much talked about 21st century. Dazed and baffled we look around: has anything really changed? Class wars in Bihar, massacres in Manipur, bloodshed in Kashmir, bomb blasts here, riots there, the forces of destruction and violence remain as powerful as they were in the past. Even the hearts of the most incorrigible optimists would sink confronting such a frightening reality. What is common in this picture of agony and anarchy is the mass of those wailing women who have been shattered; from this end of the earth to the other their language is the same- the language of loss and pain, the expression of intense grief and helplessness in the eyes. They have a common bond, that of silent suffering. We may not like to talk about suffering but it is part of contemporary reality. It is really remarkable that women still survive in a society where all the systems, policies and rules are made and dominated by men. Women have been almost prevented from contributing anything substantial to society, except children, who ultimately are consumed by violence and hatred. Women are never the decision-makers, they don’t control the social or political or religious scene. Glittering fashion shows and breathtaking beauty pageants, the confident smile of a successful business-woman or the strong articulate voices in the political field or in art and literature may create the illusion of a progressive society where women have a voice, but real censorship is imposed on women by illiteracy and lack of awareness. This is the most powerful weapon used to silence a huge section of society. The majority of the illiterate world consists of women; it is not that men are not illiterate but they enjoy many other social privileges that help them cope and inspire solidarity. So many of our sisters do not read, write or speak. They are prevented from being open, from expressing their views. If we dream of a better world, a world where there is more confession and less violence, more beauty and less brutality, we will have to get rid of the censorship imposed by illiteracy and lack of awareness on women. In this vitiated atmosphere of hatred, intolerance and violence, one must trust those who do not have a war instinct will end by reading a few lines by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and it is ironic that even after so many years the scenario remains the same. Her poem is called “Women and War”. WOMAN AND WAR We women teach our sons how wrong and how ignoble wars are… And then you men, you wise, strong men, you leap at one another, mutilate and starve and kill you fellow-men and ask the world’s applause for such heroic deeds You boast and strut; and if no song is sung, no laudatory epic writ in blood telling how many widows you have made Why then, perforce, you say our bards are dead and inspiration sleeps to wake no more. And we, women, what can we do but sit in silent homes and wait and suffer? Not for us the blare of trumpets and the bungles’ call to arms, for us no waving banners, no supreme Triumphant hour of conquest. Ours the slow dread, torture of uncertainty, each day the bootless battle with the same despair. And when at last your victories reach our ears There reaches with them the thought of countless homes made desolate And other women weeping for their dead. O men, wise men, superior beings Say, is there no substitute for war in this great age and era? If your answer is ‘no’ then let us rear our children to be wolves And teach them from the cradle how to kill Why should we women waste our time and work in talking peace when men declare for war? Ella Wheeler Wilcox Vidya Bal I would like to say that I am an editor, but I am also an activist. This has given me an opportunity to look at women as writers, and readers, and as friends who are associated with or who come to Nari Samata Manch. I am privileged by this opportunity. When a child is born biology determines whether it’s a boy or a girl, but when we talk of gender, we speak of the social construct that shapes the sexuality of a person. We speak of the concept of patriarchy. The patriarchal system in society is an all-encompassing system that rules the family, the community, religion, politics and economics. Patriarchy as a system ensures that the man is always and everywhere superior to woman. It’s the kind of politics that rules the world. A woman is subordinated to man at all levels. That is why censorship by gender is quite a common experience for us all, in varying degree. In a country like India, women are stratified at various levels but in spite of all this, what we experienced the last two days, all of us coming from all states, from south to north and west to east, was that our experiences were similar nature and even the language was similar. So there was lot of bonding between us. Women writers from so many states of India came here. Writers who call themselves feminists and those who don’t were invited for the workshop, and in loosely-structured informal workshops, a lot of discussion on censorship took place. It was an effort at breaking the silence. We have been born and brought up in a culture of silence, and the culture of silencing is nothing but gender censorship. All our religious, cultural, and social practices are taught to us in the family and in our environment, and it is here that we internalise ideas of obedience and gender discrimination. So much so that we start believing that these differences are biological, are natural. We start believing that muscle power is the only real strength. Men have this muscle power and that is why they are superior. We have been brainwashed into believing that men are superior in all most every respect to women, and we are the people who see to it that gender censorship continues throughout a woman’s life, in the family and outside the family. This is how the culture of silence, and the culture of men, control women. As writers and editors, and as human beings, we have a responsibility to break this culture of silence. I say this with a lot of conviction because, as an editor, I am helping women to speak out, I provide them with some space to speak out. I do think that they are gaining strength and inspiration by speaking out. There are some who shed their burden by speaking out and others who explore their own positive ways of living. This is just a small stream, but all such streams come together and become a big stream. I remember, last year, Sanjay Sanghvi who has very closely associated with the Narmada Andolan, said. Largely it is said that we are the alternative, not the mainstream. But we must say that we are the mainstream and we also are the alternative.” We too, must endeavour to become that. I also wanted to break the silence about my own life and speak out. At the age of 35 I gradually took up the uphill task of exploring the culture of obedience and silence in which I lived. It humbled me in the beginning, it threatened me, but I went on, through a lot of hardship explored my own self, and quarrelled with myself. I started sharing whatever I had explored with other women and it gave me strength. My personal experience helped me grow and it has also taught me to deal with patience and understanding with others who are going through the same process. That is why I say it is our responsibility to speak out and write, and help others to speak and write. Discussions Topic : State and Street Mridula Garg: The more regressive the state and the more aggressive the mob, and so the two are inextricably linked. Street violence in India has generally not degenerated into book burning—the real violation takes place with regard to films and theatre. But there is a kind of media mob violence that takes place especially with regard to books. Media witch-hunt occurs very often with books. As far as women are concerned, when the charge of “obscenity” is levelled against them it is because they are supposed to be custodians of public and private morality. Jameela Nishat: One thing is clear: in Hyderabad in the 1930s & 40s there were women writers who wrote ghazals challenging purdah and polygamy. Post-Independence, this changed dramatically. Women still write but they have become very conscious of being part of a minority community. In the 1980s women’s writing, which was “chaste and sweet” became even more subdued, especially after the riots in Hyderabad and the demolition of Babri Masjid. Women wrote ghazals that were no threat to either family or society. Our identities were frozen into Muslim & non-Muslim. Rukmini Bhaya Nair: When I went to Ayodhya and wrote the Ayodhya Cantos, I knew that many of the girls who made garlands for the temple were Muslim. Post 1992 these girls refused to tell me their names. This is a very dramatic form of self-censorship. Vasanth Kannabiran: Where is the intelligentsia, the opinion leaders, the constituency that will defend the right of free-speech? Whereas the mob can be summoned at will, and most often doesn’t know what it’s burning/ destroying/vilifying. Ajeet Cour: I remember AFA’s exhibition of Radical Art and the mob reaction to it, and the media’s response which is especially for whipping up the frenzy. Pushpa Bhave (Responding to Mridula Garg): I want to say that “the mob” doesn’t always react illogically or without direction—there is often deep prejudice that is expressed through this collective violence. It is not always the “text” that is attacked, but the person. The Patit/Pavan group or the Shiv Sena are not interested in the “text” at all, in Maharashtra—they attack any ideology or conviction that they don’t like. Professional rivalry is also one reason. On a long term basis we must inculcate long-term democratic values especially in our educational institutions. Bindu Bhatt: In response to Vasanth’s question on how we are to create this space where democratic values are to be inculcated- Take the example of Ghulam Sheikh and my own Mira Yagnik ki Diary: when Fire was screened, the immediate media reaction was that “Bindu Bhatt is the authority on lesbianism”—the idea was to fan the issue and instigate me into creating a controversy. Saroop Dhruv: All progressive writers, painters or creative people must abandon hope of support from the conservative or “silent” majority. Paromita Bannerjee: However sustained, mob action is always faceless, anonymous. As far as we are concerned we have no recourse to any forum or organised resistance, no solidarity with which to counter it. Jaya Mitra: Must say something about Fire—whenever such censorship, state or street, is exercised, it is because such work is anti-establishment and, what’s more, anti-patriarchy. There is a male film-maker in Bengal who made exactly the same film as Deepa Mehta in Varanasi, and passed unharmed. Because he didn’t challenge patriarchy. Saroop Dhruv: The “sniffer-dogs of culture”—the Bajrang Dal, the Hindutva lot, the fundamentalists—are on the prowl. We have to be very vigilant about education material, textbooks that are being rewritten which are very regressive with regard to women. Every municipal school and college in Gujarat has to put up a picture of Saraswati in the schools, as an overt endorsement of a particular Brahmanical role model for women. Vidya Bal: How do we, progressive groups respond to this? Do we use the same tactics as “the mob”? Do we, like them, throw stones to express our disapproval? Do we abandon our democratic values when we confront them? Vaidehi: I was threatened by the mahants and pujaris of all the temples and maths in Udupi for my articles. They said they would break my bones if I continued. I continue regardless. Volga: Party “political correctness” is almost as important as family political correctness—these two patriarchies collude to produce a powerful silencing. Mangai: Caste is a most potent form of censorship, which we will also have to connect to political correctness. We have many fragmented identities gender being one. Krishna Basu: Society of oppressed Husbands in WB is very active against many of us. I wrote a poem on female foeticide and was heckled and harassed for what I wrote B.M. Zuhara: Wrote a column on Muslim women for a weekly magazine in Malayalam. She received a lot of threatening letters from men saying she was misleading their wives because she raised questions about the restrictions on Muslim women. She feels extremely vulnerable as a result. Since most men go and live in the Gulf and their wives remain behind, they feel the need to control them even more. And importantly, Arabic customs find their way into Kerala, which are completely contrary to local culture. B.M. Zuhara: I wrote a column on Muslim women for a weekly magazine in Malayalam. I received a lot of threatening letters from men saying I was misleading their wives because I raised questions about the restrictions on Muslim women. I feel extremely vulnerable as a result. Since most men go and live in the Gulf and their wives remain behind, they feel the need to control them even more. And importantly, Arabic customs find their way into Kerala, which are completely contrary to local culture. K.P.Sudheera: When the writer is a woman the strength of the protest is doubled. The question of a woman’s personality becoming part of the text is common in Kerala. Saroop Dhruv: Gujarat is the laboratory of fascism as well as the state of NGOs. Give the example of a Yugoslav nun who wrote about the oppression of women, and who was vilified by the reactionaries Question and Answer Session Shashi Deshpande: Responding to Anamika’s comment on sharing our suffering—do we always have to dwell on our suffering? K.R. Usha: to respond both Anamika and Shashi both the writer and the suffering woman are fused and cannot be cleanly divided. Rukmini Bhaya Nair: The chest-beating mode and the breast-beating mode of communication are gendered in a way: chest-beating is male, and breast-beating is female. What is it like to be uncensored? To be “free” of breast-beating? Mridula Garg: I’m clear about what freedom from censorship means—it means freedom of expression. In Hindi literature, at least, these days the dadas of the east. want women to breast-beat because in a way that exonerates them. We need, eg. space for a masculinist discourse. Vasanth Kannabiran: This links up to the use of language—abuse and humour, eg., when we talk shared culture, what do we mean? Where is the culture that doesn’t marginalise? We’ve unpacked a whole lot of categories in feminist analysis but we haven’t been able to strike a balance between chest-beating and breast-beating? We are continually attacked by culture. Sonal Shukla: Seems as if the “mob” is outside, not inside, that the writer is an individual. Ritu Menon: Do we carry on? Where do we draw our strength from? Manju Kapur: Where do we go from here? Mangai: Most marginalised discourses are based on hatred. Kaveri Nambisan: Not going to get rid of censorship in a hurry, the question is: how are we going to deal with it in the meantime? What is a “post-censorship” scenario? What is the positive strain we can pursue? Vidya Bal: Shouldn’t dwell endlessly on suffering, but there are thousands who are unaware of this suffering. And, as an editor of a magazine, I know that this, too, is my responsibility. Rukmini Bhaya Nair: Is there such a thing as women’s language? By this I mean an imaginary language not an actual language. Girl children as a linguistically studied category. Disaster-narratives by women Disaster-narratives by men Women's narratives had more explanators Women's narratives had more pauses Women's narratives had more silences Women's narratives had more interruption Women's narratives had more joint tellings Women's narratives had more agreement markers Women's narratives had more specifics As writers we sometimes lose sight of this number of things that are part of women’s speech, how do we strengthen this? Why do we take these qualities as weaknesses? What is trespass: implies territory Implies crossing over For feminists it's patriarchy. All of culture is patriarchal and may be a biological divide, culturally. Questions of biology are not irrelevant to language, women's language. There are ideas, and there are ideologies and there are ideals…
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