Voices from the Indian Feminist Movement
Urvashi Butalia
In the age of #MeToo, it is hard to imagine that in the 80s, India did not have a single publishing house that focused on women. One young publisher had sought to remedy that. Urvashi Butalia, one of India’s pioneering feminists, strived to make women’s voices heard for over three decades. She founded Kali For Women in 1984, and later Zubaan Books in 2003. Kali for Women was the first exclusively feminist publishing house in India! “When I approached my male bosses [about publishing female authors], they looked bewildered” , she tells me anecdotally. “‘Women?’ they asked. ‘What about women? Do they write? Do they read? Is there anything to say?’” She quickly realised that if men were not going to amplify women’s voices, then she had to.
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Inclusivity has always been a trademark of Urvashi Butalia’s feminism. However, early on in her feminist publishing career, she realised that by being an English-only, Delhi-based publishing house, she was severely limiting her outreach. Her goal of “creating a body of knowledge for women, written by women” was only extending to privileged women. In her words, as long as one continued to do this, “You can hardly call yourselves feminists.”
“‘Women?’ they asked. ‘What about women? Do they write? Do they read? Is there anything to say?’”
“So we decided then to start looking at various [other] languages and publishing in them”, she states. One of her recent landmark publications is a Hindi book titled “Know Your Body”. It was handmade by 75 rural Rajasthani women during a government-initiated programme for illiterate women. The book was “about how women’s bodies change from the time that they are an infant through adolescence, marriage and old age”. This was supposed to counter the culture that stigmatizes comprehensive education about the female body and sexuality. However, the women found that when they had diagrams of women’s naked bodies, their books were called “pornographic”. So, they decided to make the model fully clothed and veiled, like one would see in the village, but with flaps to showcase all the relevant parts of the body. The women set two conditions for the publication deal. “One was that they wanted all 75 names on the book as co-authors. The other was that every copy sold to a village woman will be sold at cost, that we will not make a profit.” Ms. Butalia, ever-committed to her ideals of inclusivity and reaching marginalised women, agreed. Some of the other books
on her publication list include “books by Trans women, Dalit women, young people’s work addressing caste and so on.”
Representation, as we all know, is incredibly important to the success of everyone, especially minority groups and women. After all, we cannot aspire to be someone that we have never seen. Indian women are excelling in higher education and academia, solely because women like Urvashi Butalia decided to question society and take initiative. We owe her a huge debt of gratitude.