What Women Write
http://www.britishcouncil.org/india-east-connecting-may2005-womens-writing.htm
What Women Write
British Council India launches a new website
Last month British Council India launched a new website, www.womenswriting.com, dedicated to women’s writing from South Asia. The website develops the work begun in February 2003, when in New Delhi we hosted the South Asian Women Writers Conference (www.uksawwc.org), and proposes a virtual space for women’s writing from across the region. Ritu Menon, publisher of Women Unlimited and Chair of the South Asian Women Writers Conference, lays out for Connecting the context for women’s writing in this region and the dire need for a safe space in which women can be read
“Ask anyone about censorship and whether there’s any in India, and they’ll say, ‘No, not really. We’re not like Bangladesh or Pakistan; we have freedom of speech, it’s a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution.’
In a way, they are right. There is very little formal censorship in India. By the state that is. But if this is so, why are we increasingly having to be ‘careful’, to be mindful of what we say? Is it because street censorship has usurped the power of the state and taken it upon itself to police people’s expression? Or is it because, as writer Mridula Garg says pithily, ‘the more regressive the state, the more aggressive the mob’? Perhaps, as Nabaneeta Dev Sen puts it, ‘free speech belongs to the mainstream’, and if you are on the margins, or if yours is the voice of dissent, your speech is censored.
All three - being heard, being seen and being able to communicate - are about breaking the silence that still surrounds a great deal of women’s expression. India has 18 official languages, and women write in all of them but they remain invisible outside their own language areas. Women have been raising their voices against all kinds of censorship - by families, by political parties, by the market and by cultural and social mores. They have talked about state censorship and street censorship; about censoring oneself and being censored by those who object to what they say - but they have mostly been voices in the wilderness.
People will say that this is an exaggeration, that women’s writing is everywhere, filling the bookshelves, spilling over in libraries. Yet consider this: the literary establishment and the market-place are primarily male, and the commonest complaint by women is that they are seldom taken seriously by critics or reviewers. At best, they are patronised. The literary and commercial worlds may well treat women as an homogeneous group, but women themselves write alone, enter the market alone and are usually in competition with each other because most decisions are still made by men.
In South Asia, readers rarely get to read writers from each other’s countries - or even our own, frankly - because they have not been translated into a common language, because communication between our countries is practically non-existent, and because access to each others’ books, periodicals or newspapers is extremely difficult.
And yet, when we do come together in dialogues and animated discussions, we know we can speak in many tongues, across languages and regions. Is English a power language, overshadowing all others in South Asia? Is there such a thing as “women’s” writing? Do women write mostly about the domestic and the private, and men about the worldly and the public? Writing about sex seems to be okay, but not about sexual politics! Can women use abusive language when they write? Probably not. Yet breaking the language taboo is an important part of breaking the silence. “We endure,” says Nabaneeta Dev Sen. “But when we endure and still write, we are at our most subversive…because in patriarchal societies, writing is a subversive activity.”
"Her voice was ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in a woman," says Lear over Cordelia's corpse, but when she was alive and speaking truth to power, he would not listen to a word she said. American writer and activist Meredith Tax says, “In our lifetime women have spoken up to all the crazy old King Lears, challenging their power and folly, and have had the extraordinary, transfiguring experience of hearing our collective female voice raised in political expression of our demands and interests. But, despite all our talk of female agency, few feminist organisations work explicitly on questions of voice. The subject has neither been theorised sufficiently, nor got adequate attention in terms of funding and programmes. It is easy enough to pity a victim and develop programmes to help her, but a woman whose voice is raised, whether in complaint or song, is nobody's victim. She is, at least potentially, a revolutionary agent, hard to control and intrinsically disruptive of established arrangements and conventional thought.”
The www.womenswriting.com site will contain the work of 20 women writers, set to grow by the same number every 3 months, monthly reviews of new writing, news and events in literature in South Asia and the UK, links to relevant organisations in the UK and South Asia who are supportive of women’s writing and a password-protected bulletin board where women writers can share their thoughts, concerns and ideas. The website is edited by Mini Krishnan and Rakshanda Jalil, who helped launch the website in Delhi on 24 March. The evening also celebrated the first results of a new joint venture between Zubaan and Penguin Books India to extend to women’s writing a vital national and international distribution network.For more information on the project, please contact alice.cicolini@in.britishcouncil.org
What Women Write
British Council India launches a new website
Last month British Council India launched a new website, www.womenswriting.com, dedicated to women’s writing from South Asia. The website develops the work begun in February 2003, when in New Delhi we hosted the South Asian Women Writers Conference (www.uksawwc.org), and proposes a virtual space for women’s writing from across the region. Ritu Menon, publisher of Women Unlimited and Chair of the South Asian Women Writers Conference, lays out for Connecting the context for women’s writing in this region and the dire need for a safe space in which women can be read
“Ask anyone about censorship and whether there’s any in India, and they’ll say, ‘No, not really. We’re not like Bangladesh or Pakistan; we have freedom of speech, it’s a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution.’
In a way, they are right. There is very little formal censorship in India. By the state that is. But if this is so, why are we increasingly having to be ‘careful’, to be mindful of what we say? Is it because street censorship has usurped the power of the state and taken it upon itself to police people’s expression? Or is it because, as writer Mridula Garg says pithily, ‘the more regressive the state, the more aggressive the mob’? Perhaps, as Nabaneeta Dev Sen puts it, ‘free speech belongs to the mainstream’, and if you are on the margins, or if yours is the voice of dissent, your speech is censored.
All three - being heard, being seen and being able to communicate - are about breaking the silence that still surrounds a great deal of women’s expression. India has 18 official languages, and women write in all of them but they remain invisible outside their own language areas. Women have been raising their voices against all kinds of censorship - by families, by political parties, by the market and by cultural and social mores. They have talked about state censorship and street censorship; about censoring oneself and being censored by those who object to what they say - but they have mostly been voices in the wilderness.
People will say that this is an exaggeration, that women’s writing is everywhere, filling the bookshelves, spilling over in libraries. Yet consider this: the literary establishment and the market-place are primarily male, and the commonest complaint by women is that they are seldom taken seriously by critics or reviewers. At best, they are patronised. The literary and commercial worlds may well treat women as an homogeneous group, but women themselves write alone, enter the market alone and are usually in competition with each other because most decisions are still made by men.
In South Asia, readers rarely get to read writers from each other’s countries - or even our own, frankly - because they have not been translated into a common language, because communication between our countries is practically non-existent, and because access to each others’ books, periodicals or newspapers is extremely difficult.
And yet, when we do come together in dialogues and animated discussions, we know we can speak in many tongues, across languages and regions. Is English a power language, overshadowing all others in South Asia? Is there such a thing as “women’s” writing? Do women write mostly about the domestic and the private, and men about the worldly and the public? Writing about sex seems to be okay, but not about sexual politics! Can women use abusive language when they write? Probably not. Yet breaking the language taboo is an important part of breaking the silence. “We endure,” says Nabaneeta Dev Sen. “But when we endure and still write, we are at our most subversive…because in patriarchal societies, writing is a subversive activity.”
"Her voice was ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in a woman," says Lear over Cordelia's corpse, but when she was alive and speaking truth to power, he would not listen to a word she said. American writer and activist Meredith Tax says, “In our lifetime women have spoken up to all the crazy old King Lears, challenging their power and folly, and have had the extraordinary, transfiguring experience of hearing our collective female voice raised in political expression of our demands and interests. But, despite all our talk of female agency, few feminist organisations work explicitly on questions of voice. The subject has neither been theorised sufficiently, nor got adequate attention in terms of funding and programmes. It is easy enough to pity a victim and develop programmes to help her, but a woman whose voice is raised, whether in complaint or song, is nobody's victim. She is, at least potentially, a revolutionary agent, hard to control and intrinsically disruptive of established arrangements and conventional thought.”
The www.womenswriting.com site will contain the work of 20 women writers, set to grow by the same number every 3 months, monthly reviews of new writing, news and events in literature in South Asia and the UK, links to relevant organisations in the UK and South Asia who are supportive of women’s writing and a password-protected bulletin board where women writers can share their thoughts, concerns and ideas. The website is edited by Mini Krishnan and Rakshanda Jalil, who helped launch the website in Delhi on 24 March. The evening also celebrated the first results of a new joint venture between Zubaan and Penguin Books India to extend to women’s writing a vital national and international distribution network.For more information on the project, please contact alice.cicolini@in.britishcouncil.org
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