IHT Column: Taking back the streets

My second column for the International Herald Tribune's Female Factor series is up. This one's on women fighting back against street harassment and other kinds of violence against women.

"Something familiar emerges in the stories the women share, regardless of their ages or class backgrounds. All have experienced fear on the streets, fear when traveling alone. Few use the term “eve teasing” when discussing their own experiences; nothing about sexual harassment has ever felt like “teasing” to them.”

It doesn't show in the story (and it probably shouldn't), but writing this piece was a surprisingly personal exercise. I spoke to many women, aside from the women quoted in this story, and every conversation turned into something like an analytical catharsis. Gauri Gill and I spoke about how the quality of one's anger changes; the militant, fierce anger of our twenties has given way to a more practical and dispassionate emotion as we approach forty.

There were debates: has the situation improved over the last 15 years (yes), is it anywhere near ideal (hell, no), how much of a role did class play in street harassment, how much difference could better urban architectural planning make in cutting down violence against women in public spaces. There were confessions and sharings; every one of the women (and many of the men) I spoke to had their own scars, stories of assaults weathered and not reported (one of my personal demons), of terrifying train or bus journeys, of anger at being blamed (for one's "carelessness", for one's "looseness", for one's appearance), of helplessness, especially among the men I spoke to, at not being able to change the ground-level situation. The story couldn't capture the complexity of the debate; as more women enter the workforce, public spaces have had to accommodate their presence, but the underlying causes of the violence against women haven't changed or been addressed.

If you're interested in further reading/ action on this subject, here are some links:

The Blank Noise Project blog: Consistently creative in its approach, the BNP has run successful campaigns, from the We Didn't Ask For It campaign to their more recent Action Hero campaign. Many of the debates mentioned are covered in detail by Jasmeen Patheja and other contributors.

The Gulabi Gang: Run by Sampath Pal Devi, the Gulabi Gang now also runs centres for vocational training for young women, and could use your support.

Jagori: In addition to its Safe Delhi campaign and its mapping of safe/ unsafe spaces in the city, Jagori researches many other areas of feminist concern, from the rights of domestic workers to other forms of violence against women.

And please consider sending in an entry--a photograph, a story--for Transportraits, an exhibition curated by Gauri Gill, on your experience of safety in your city. Contributions from women and men welcome, and details here.

The BS column: Damning the Oriental scene

“Reading literature and having a damn good time had become quietly but decidedly uncoupled,” writes Lev Grossman in an essay on the rise of the trashy hybrid novel. He could have been writing about India, where the rise of imitation pulp fiction—the Third World version of Eric Segal, not even the Third World version of Stephen King—and the growth of worshippers at the broad church of illiterature is an alarming, but persistent, trend. These are four things I’d love to see changing about the Indian literary scene in the next decade.

The Booker: It’s so tempting to pin the Indian obsession with the Booker on Arundhati Roy, whose win in 1997 for God of Small Things sparked off the great Indian Booker gold rush. (Blaming Arundhati is now a small cottage industry in its own right, so she may as well take the rap for the Booker. It’s a more interesting crime than hating on the US, sympathizing with the Maoists and never writing a sentence if she can get away with a paragraph.)

But the truth is it’s our fault. If we’re losing interest in the Booker this year because Rushdie didn’t make it to the longlist and there isn’t another Indian/ Asian contender, perhaps we need to ask when we became such insular readers. A century ago, the first Indian writers to claim English as one of their own languages read broadly; their imaginations were fired by their counterparts in Russia, Europe and America. A generation ago, Amitav Ghosh chronicled the practice of using the list of Nobel literature laureates as a kind of reader’s guide—a dreary but worthy way of inviting the world onto one’s bookshelves. What we’re seeing today isn’t just a preoccupation with literary success; it’s an unhealthy self-obsession.

Raise the bar already: One of the reasons why the US and much of Europe consistently produce better literary fiction—more interesting debut novels, more polished short story and essay collections, stellar non-fiction—is that it’s not that easy to get published.

About a decade ago, the hegemony of Penguin India in mainstream publishing gave way to intense competition as four or five publishing houses came up in its wake. This should have led to better work, and better edited books, but what it unleashed instead was a flood of superficial writing that might best be called fake literature, as editors struggled to meet their commissioning quotas.

I’m just as guilty as anyone else in publishing; in my stint at a major publishing house, we played the volumes versus quality game, and as with most other houses, quality sometimes lost. It’s time for publishers to start being gatekeepers again, to step away from the mediocre, the easy successes, the frozen-pizza school of writing—easy to sell, easy to consume, of no nutritional value whatsoever.

Missing: the under-40 “bhasha” generation: (I apologise for using the term bhasha to indicate Indian writers working in languages other than English—it’s terrible but useful shorthand.) Indian writing in English currently suffers from an imbalance—a flurry of literary prizes, the most recent being the Hindu Literary Review prize—without sufficient infrastructure in the way of creative writing courses and writing residencies.

Consider the wealth of Indian languages outside the narrow bandwidth of English—and consider the fact that the two most prominent literary prizes, the Sahitya Akademi awards and the Jnanpith, are reserved for writers in the autumn of their lives. When Ravindra Kelekar received his Jnanpith this week, he spoke of the neglect of Indian-language literature, and of his sense that English crowded out the rest. But in all these decades of complaining about the imbalance, the bhasha literary establishment has done little to encourage young writers, to offer them the early recognition and wider readership that a good first book prize could bring in its wake.

The invisible India: One of the annoying side-effects of living in a world where English is the link language, and where your publishing souks are based in the West, is living with the fact that every now and then, the UK and the US media will discover the obvious.

The success of the Bengali writer Sankar in translation a few years ago offered readers outside India a tiny sliver of what they were missing by reading only Indian writing in English, not Indian writing in translation—akin to reading only Portuguese literature and assuming it stands for all of European literature. It’s been a long time since Adil Jussawalla’s monumental anthology, New Writing in India, or Amit Chaudhuri’s Picador anthology of Indian writing—an updated anthology of Indian writing is overdue.

This year has seen the discovery by the UK media of Dalit writing, and perhaps similar discoveries, even if they seem obvious to those of us who live and work here, will open up the invisible India for the West. If Indian publishers were able to sponsor and aggressively market really good translations, they could change the game.

(Published in the Business Standard, August 2010)

Rants and nymphomaniac kutiyas

I'm reading university vice-chancellor Vibhuti Narain Rai's deeply sexist comments on women writers: "There is a race among women writers to demonstrate who is the greatest prostitute", "feminist discourse has reduced to a grand celebration of infidelity". (More here: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Textual-violence/654764)

He's under pressure to resign now, with women writers (including the redoubtable Krishna Sobti) and womens' rights activists demanding that he be sacked.

It's the language Narain Rai uses that interests me: he calls a character in a book by a Hindi woman writer a "nymphomaniac kutiya", quips that another writer's autobiography should have been called How Many Times in How Many Beds. Behind the classic, well-worn terms of abuse--prostitute, nymphomaniac--are the equally classic male, misogynist fears, of women going out of control, owning their sexuality, stepping out of line. All of his criticism, so to speak, is focused on sexual politics and freedoms. I'm not sure he would have made his remarks if he'd realised how glaringly it displays the anxieties and the fears of men like him: how do we handle these women who refuse to know their place?

In 1979, the writer Mridula Garg was charged for "obscene writing", because her protagonist in Chit Cobra was a self-aware woman who explored her various freedoms, including sexual freedom, with an absolute lack of guilt. It was the absence of guilt that was offensive; what was telling was that for decades afterwards, Hindi male writers often spoke of Garg disparagingly, as the woman who "writes about sex", even though her work covered far wider feminist terrain.

Ritu Menon and others explored the persistence of censorship--informal, but powerful--when it came to womens' writing in The Guarded Tongue: "What is it that women can't write about? There is a pause... Religion, politics, sex. You then wonder: what is there left to write about?"

One way of dismissing a woman writer is to say that her only subject is sex; she is twice-damned, for being a "loose woman", and for having such a narrow mind. I love the way Ismat Chughtai fought back when she was on trial for writing about a lesbian affair in her famous short story, The Quilt. Here's her account of the trial:
"There was a big crowd in the court. Several people had advised us to offer our apologies to the judge, even offering to pay the fines on our behalf. The proceedings had lost some of their verve, the witnesses who were called in to prove that “Lihaf” was obscene were beginning to lose their nerve in the face of our lawyer’s cross-examination. No word capable of inviting condemnation could be found. After a great deal of searching a gentleman said, “The sentence ‘she was collecting ‘ashiqs ’ (lovers) is obscene.”
“Which word is obscene,” the lawyer asked. “‘Collecting,’ or ‘‘ashiqs’?”
“The word ‘‘ashiqs,’” the witness replied, somewhat hesitantly.
“My Lord, the word ‘‘≥shiqs’ has been used by the greatest poets and has also been used in na‘ts. This word has been given a sacred place by the devout.”
“But it is highly improper for girls to collect ‘‘ashiqs,’” the witness proclaimed.
“Why?”
“Because ... because ... this is improper for respectable girls.”
“But not improper for girls who are not respectable?”
“Uh ... uh ... no.”
“My client has mentioned girls who are perhaps not respectable. And as you say, sir, non-respectable girls may collect ‘ashiqs."
“Yes. It’s not obscene to mention them, but for an educated woman
from a respectable family to write about these girls merits condemnation!”
The witness thundered.
“So go right ahead and condemn as much as you like, but does it merit legal action?”
The case crumbled."

In 'The Past Is Another Country', Taslima Nasreen speaks of her belief that Islam is anti-women, of her brushes with the fundamentalists, and of the importance of being a "fallen woman". The easiest way to discredit a woman writer, or womens' writing in general, is to call it obscene, to set yourself up as Narain Rai did, as a morality cop.

Ismat Chugtai had the right answer so many decades ago. Some of us are girls who are not respectable, who are in many ways, out of place, out of control. And much as we make men like Narain Rai, who is, incidentally, a former IPS officer, uneasy, even angry, we aren't that easily brought back into line.