Filmmakers Anupama Chandra and Uma Tanuku take us through the journey of the feminist publication formed during the women’s rights movements of the 1980s.
Anupama Chandra and Uma Tanuku take us through the journey of the significant contributors to the feminist movement in India in the 1980s and 1990s — Kali for Women, the publication house founded by Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon.
The Public Service Broadcasting Trust production explores the feminist publication house’s inception in 1984, its landmark books and their authors, challenges and its closure in 2003.
The documentary opens with Butalia’s room, which is overflowing with books. “I always keep books by women… always,” she says, while explaining how she decides which books to keep and which ones to let go. Images of books invariably appear throughout the film, sometimes tucked away neatly in a shelf and at times in the hands of the authors as they read lines from their own works.
The story of inception in black and white footage; the founders’ interviews generating nostalgia as they reveal their humble beginnings in a garage, the designing of the logo by Chandralekha, a dancer, and the lack of profits through most of the years.
Five years ago, in January 2013, Charles Ades Fishman and Smita Sahay conceived of Veils, Halos & Shackles, dedicated to ‘Jyoti Singh Pandey, Nadia Anjuman and the uncountable number of other women and girls who have been victims of gender violence’.
This is a two-part feature consisting of the book review and an interview with Charles Fishman and Smita Sahay. Today we carry the review to be followed by the interview tomorrow.
By Shikhandin
Title: Veils, Halos & Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women Edited by Charles Ades Fishman and Smita Sahay Publisher: Kasva Press, 2016 Buy
On the night of 16th December 2012, in New Delhi, Jyoti Singh Pandey was raped and tortured – which included the removal of her intestines with a metal rod – in a moving bus, and thrown out. She and her friend lay on the road for a long time before anyone stopped to help. She died in Singapore a few days after. For those who would like to know the details, it is here in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Delhi_gang_rape.
New Delhi is a city notorious for its treatment of women, where assault of all kinds occur with alarming regularity, with percentages being somewhat more than in the rest of India. This time, there was such brutality involved that it shook a nation which is normally in a state of extreme torpor with regard to women’s dignity and safety. India erupted into nationwide protests and not just through marches and candle lit vigils. In the hearts of Indian women and sane Indian men, a single voice seemed to rise – ‘Enough!’ The world too, took note, with horror. That was five years ago.
Since then, newspapers, television channels and other media, including social, have regularly reported similar outrages meted out to women and children, both girls and boys. At times it seems like the number of incidents has increased, and that instead of a nation trying to become better, India has regressed into perversion and misogyny. A number of cases have been reported of foreign objects being inserted into girls as young as two. The crime rate seems to be spiking. Women and survivors from other genders braving social media with their protests and stories are being trolled regularly. Parents are still worried sick for their daughters when they come home late or are unreachable on their phones.
Did Nirbhaya die in vain?
The rumble went deeper than imagined. It created fissures at depths where visibility is near non-existent. Nirbhaya was the turning point.
Now people are increasingly open. They refuse to be intimidated into silence. We hear of more cases because more people are reporting them. There is greater support and understanding for survivors and victims not just in India, but across the world, for while India may have a terrible reputation with regard to all those who identify as women, the situation is far from good even in developed and apparently liberal societies.
Across the world, much needs to be done. In India, we are a long way away from being a safe and respectful society towards girls and women and gay men. The change, unfurling all around us, often so quietly we barely note its presence, is shaking the core of our society. However slowly, however timidly. There is protest through vigils and media outcries. Much of it is inner dissent. A lot of it is quiet. Some of it pours out in artistic expressions.
The shape of protest is protean. The colours of its pain and beauty are myriad. Protest’s life span is longer than that of placards, and the decibel level of its call is higher than that of individual angry voices. The storm brewing, gathering and collecting force has a language. One of the languages of this protest is poetry.
This graphic memoir from On A Sunbeam’s Tillie Walden deals with young queer love (and first kisses, competitive figure skating, and being a teen girl. In a Drawn-to-Comics-curated interview with Ngozi Ukazu, Walden says:
“[E]very coming-out story is so unique that I think it’s really important that we share with each other what ours was. And readers have related in really fascinating ways. You know what one of my most common questions at school visits is? ‘How do you come out?’ Kids actually ask me this, in front of their peers and teachers. It’s unbelievable to me, it’s so brave. And I’ve realized that because I talk about this hard moment in my life and I’m showing them that I made it through it, they suddenly feel like they can approach this topic with me. It’s mind blowing. Really.”
This collection of letters from nearly 100 trans women, including Juno Dawson, Isis King, Rhiannon Styles, Laura Jane Grace and Juliet Jacques, is meant to advise and empower women at the beginning of transition. In an interview at Dazed with Kuchenga Shenje, who was also a contributor, Craggs says:
“Most people just don’t know trans people in their day to day life. I didn’t know any trans people when I transitioned. I only met my first trans person when I was like a year or two in. You feel quite alone and you don’t have anyone to ask those questions. You can’t ask your mum or your cis friends because they just don’t know the answers. So, I wanted to create that source of information and inspiration. I call this book an anthology of trans excellence. The girls and the women that I literally clung on to. I researched them and clung on to their stories in early transition, I just didn’t know any other trans people so I read every Wikipedia page. I read every autobiography. I watched every film. I watched every documentary. I watched all the YouTube videos. It’s like a place where I’ve collected all those amazing women to tell the next generation: ‘Yeah, these are the women who you need to know about.”
In her second essay collection, Meaty author Samantha Irby explores The Bachelorette, poop, lesbian porn, family, bodies and more. In an interview atHazlitt with Scaachi Koul, Irby says about her art:
“[M]y approach is always to make my essays poop length. For a couple reasons: one, it’s just practical. I understand that between Instagramming cute dinners and bleeding the planet’s resources dry, people don’t have a lot of time to devote to sitting down with whatever musings I have about my butthole, but everybody poops and most people like to keep a book handy for the toilet, and six or seven pages is just enough time to be entertained while getting your business done without worrying about your butt falling asleep. Same goes for a subway commute or keeping it on your bedside table—I know I’ve got a handful of pages in me before I pass out on top of the book, creasing it into oblivion, and I assume other people are like that, too?”
In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed interrogates the idea of the feminist origin story as a result of rites of passage, and instead argues for feminism as an ongoing action.
For most of her life, Ellen Pao did what you’re supposed to do to succeed. In her new book, “Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change,” Pao describes herself as a “dutiful daughter” of immigrants who excelled at Princeton and Harvard, where she picked up law and business degrees, and then headed west for the tech gold rush. Sure, she encountered some creeps along the way, and at times she felt underappreciated. But as she tells it, it wasn’t until landing at blue-chip venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — which she famously, and unsuccessfully, sued for gender discrimination and retaliation — that she began to question whether she had been set up to fail.
“The culture, I began to realize, is designed to keep out people who aren’t white men,” she writes early on in “Reset.” That sort of systemic critique is heretical in Silicon Valley, where wealthy men talk a big game about a meritocracy and transforming the world through technology. Never mind that a 2015 survey of 200 women at tech companies found that 60 percent had experienced sexual harassment, twice the rate of a separate study across industries. As Pao’s book persuasively shows, men in the tech industry love to exalt the notion of “disruption,” but those at her venture capital firm chafed at a woman disturbing their comfort. She paid the price.
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Pao’s book is most astute when it portrays a subtler form of discrimination. Pao writes, “When venture capitalists say — and they do say — ‘We think it’s young white men, ideally Ivy League dropouts, who are the safest bets,’ and then only invest in young white men with Ivy League backgrounds, of course young white men with Ivy League backgrounds are the only ones who make money for them (they are also the only ones who lose money for them, but who’s keeping track of that?)”
