![]() She has written commonly about understanding patriarchy and gender issues. She is well-known for her poem Kyunki main ladki hoon, mujhe padhna hai. Kamla Bhasin, is an Indian feminist activist. This is not an exhaustive watch list, but it is definitely something to start with, to navigate your way towards taking a step forward in constructing a positive discourse to understand feminism.Īlso read: Your Essential Reading List to Understand The Feminist Movement Better 1. This is not an exhaustive watch list, but it is definitely something to start with, to navigate your way towards taking a step forward in constructing a positive discourse to understand feminism. In that case, we have got you covered with some quality recommendations of short talks and interviews by renowned feminist thinkers and activists, which could help deepen your understanding of the subject. One of the most authentic ways is to read about feminism, but many of us find it difficult to read or do not have enough time and resources to pick up a book. I evoke the issue of South Asia itself as the primary site of reception not to make essentialist claims about supposed authenticity but, rather, as a comment on the authors' initial freedom.Feminism as a concept as well as an ideology continues to be misinterpreted and stereotyped. Later, Menon and Bhasin's book was published by Rutgers University Press, and Butalia's by Duke University Press. They were very widely reviewed in India and well received: Menon and Bhasin's was on the top-ten nonfiction list of Asian Age, and Butalia's was on the top-ten nonfiction list of Hindustan Times and has been translated into two other Indian languages. Both books were also published in Pakistan, by Oxford University Press, a testimony to their commitment to widening the debate across the current borders. ![]() Significantly, the three authors chose to publish their work in India first, for a South Asian audience: Menon and Bhasin with Kali for Women and Butalia with Penguin. Although born and raised in India, the authors have parents and siblings born in Pakistan and displaced to India during partition, and Butallia includes personal narratives by her mother and maternal uncle in her book. The books are embedded in the authors' familial experiences, while moving well beyond them. All three are simultaneously active in women's movement groups and networks, and Bhasin is the composer of feminist songs sung collectively at demonstrations, in street theater, and during conferences.īoth books inscribe themselves at the intersection of feminist debates on women agency speech/silence subaltern interrogations of dominant historiographies feminist research methods notions of writing and reception and activist preoccupations with the future of women, of Hindu-Muslim conflict, and Indian-Pakistani relations. Butalia and Menon are cofounders of Kali for Women, the first feminist publishing company in South Asia, based in New Delhi. Menon and Bhasin and Butalia are each the editor, coeditor, or author of several other books on women, gender, and religious-political conflict. The three authors are committed feminist scholars and activists. Both books reinterrogate partition, the exchange of populations, and the violence that accompanied it (as Hindus were displaced from Pakistani territory to India, and Muslims fr om India to Pakistan), from the standpoint of subaltern survivors' personal narratives, which the authors sporadically juxtapose with newspaper accounts and their own meticulous deconstructions of official documents, parliamentary debates, and state practices. Both books place at the center otherwise silenced subaltern subjectivities: women but also (in the case of Butalia) children and Dalits ("oppressed" those whom the British called "untouchable" and Mahatma Gandhi called "Harijan" ). ![]() Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin's Borders and Boundaries: Women in India's Partition and Urvashi Butalia's The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India provide radically alternative understandings of partition, with vital implications for current conflicts and peace. Today, partition continues to be deployed by various constituencies as a trope for constructions of Hindu-Muslim conflict in the subcontinent: to provoke revenge, or for reconciliation and peace. The partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 has long been a subject of contentious debates among scholars of South Asia. ![]()
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