A first of its kind, this book brings together the writings of women from Arunachal Pradesh in Northeast India. Home to many different tribes and scores of languages and dialects, once known as a ‘frontier’ state, Arunachal Pradesh began to see major change after it opened up to tourism and once the Indian State introduced Hindi as its official language. In this volume, Mamang Dai, one of Arunachal’s best known writers, brings together new and established voices on subjects as varied as identity, home, belonging, language, Shamanism, folk culture, orality and more. Much of what has been handed down orally, through festivals, epic narratives, the performance of rituals by Shamans and rhapsodists, revered as guardians of collective and tribal memory, is captured here in the words of young poets and writers, as well as artists and illustrators, as they trace their heritage, listen to stories and render them in newer forms of expression.
Contributors: Ayinam Ering | Bhanu Tatak | Chasoom Bosai | Doirangsi Kri | Gedak Angu | Gyati T. M. Ampi | Ing Perme | Jamuna Bini | Karry Padu | Kolpi Dai | Leki Thungon | Mamang Dai | Millo Ankha| Mishimbu Miri | Nellie N. Manpoong | Ngurang Reena | Nomi Maga Gumro | Omili Borang | Ponung Ering Angu | Rebom Belo | Rinchin Choden | Ronnie Nido | Samy Moyong | Stuti Mamen Lowang | Subi Taba | Takhe Moni | Tine Mena | Toko Anu | Tolum Chumchum | Tongam Rina | Tunung Tabing | Yaniam Chukhu | Yater Nyokir
MAMANG DAI is a poet and novelist. A former journalist, she has worked with World Wildlife Fund in the Eastern Himalaya Biodiversity Hotspots programme. Her first book, Arunachal Pradesh: The Hidden Land, received the State Verrier Elwin Prize. She is a recipient of the Padma Shri (Literature and Education) and the Sahitya Akademi Award. She currently lives in Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh.
The essays in this volume explore the relatively new field of women and law from interdisciplinary, feminist perspectives and help to develop an understanding of feminist legal studies in India. As a collection, the book offers insights about women and law as addressed by feminists from the standpoint of both legal and non-legal disciplines. Individually, the different essays explore the legal terrain through historical and cultural analyses of issues such as women’s human rights, gender discrimination, feminist legal scholarship, prostitution, conjugality and the representation of female outlaws in cinema. This varied and contextualised approach explodes the understanding of law as an objective, external, neutral truth. Instead, each writer lays open the contradictory nature of law and shows how it frequently becomes a site of political and ideological struggle.
RATNA KAPUR is an advocate, an activist researcher and a Visiting Professor of Law at Queen Mary University of London. She is co-founder of the Centre for Feminist Legal Research, Delhi, and was formerly Visiting Faculty at the National Law School of India University in Bangalore, Professor at Jindal Global Law School in Delhi, and Senior Faculty member at the International Global Law and Policy Institute at Harvard Law School. She also serves on the international advisory boards of the academic journals Legal Studies and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and has written widely on the subject of women and law. Her other publications include Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl (2018), Makeshift Migrants and Law: Gender, Belonging and Postcolonial Anxieties (2014), Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism (2005), and the co-authored volume Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Women and Law (1996).
Popular representations of the women’s movement in India have created many misconceptions about its size and scope—from the assertion that the movement relates exclusively to urban, middle-class women, to the claim that there is no ‘mass women’s movement’ to speak of. Debates within the movement itself take in these issues, but go one step further in posing a different set of related questions: what, if any, is our definition of a women’s movement? How far has the movement been able to address the issues of caste and class? What has been the relationship between ‘feminism’, non-party, autonomous women’s groups and the left? How far have activists within the movement been able to build a theoretical perspective, to conceptualize issues that tie in at the base of the struggle? What, in other words, has been the ideology of the movement?
The essays in this collection address these questions both directly and indirectly. Written by activists from within the different movements, as well as by researchers, they deal with popular movements over the past few decades in which women have participated in large numbers. The ways in which such movements have had to define struggles and issues to ‘accommodate’ women in their ranks have charted out new dimensions for women’s struggles in India. These dimensions have not only gone beyond existing definitions of ‘feminism’—a concept that has acquired a value-loaded connotation of being ‘narrow’—but have also exploded the common left standpoint that women’s issues do not matter in larger struggles against class exploitation. It is argued here that an understanding of the nature of these struggles becomes important in order to gain a perspective on the women’s movement that is more truly representative of the aspirations of the generality of Indian women than most currently available feminist theory.
ILINA SEN was a professor of sociology, trade union activist and President of the Indian Association of Women’s Studies (IAWS), as well as a faculty member at the Mahatama Gandhi Antarashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalya, Wardha, and the Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She was also a Senior Fellow in the Nehru Memorial Library, and was closely associated with women’s and mine-workers’ movements, such as with the Chhattisgarh Shramik Sangh in Madhya Pradesh. Her other books include Inside Chhattisgarh: A Political Memoir (2014) and Sukhvasin: The Migrant Woman of Chhattisgarh (1995). She was affiliated both with the Indian Council for Social Science Research and the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, and published on demography, women’s work, and the theory and practice of the women’s movement in India.
Manipur has a rich tradition of folk and oral narratives, as well as written texts dating from as early as in 8th Century AD. It was however only in the second half of the twentieth century that women began writing and publishing their works. Today, women’s writing forms a vibrant part of Manipuri literature, and their voices are amplified through their coming together as an all-woman literary group. Put together in discussions and workshops by Thingnam Anjulika Samom, Crafting the Word captures a region steeped in conservative patriarchy and at the centre of an armed conflict. It is also a place, however, where women’s activism has been at the forefront of peace-making and where their contributions in informal commerce and trade hold together the economy of daily life.
THINGNAM ANJULIKA SAMOM is an independent journalist, writer and translator based in Imphal, Manipur. Her journalistic writing focusing on gender, con ict and developmental issues in Manipur has been published in many online and print publications in India as well as outside the country. She is the recipient of the Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitivity 2010–11 (Eastern Region). She also translates literary works from Manipuri to English and was given the Katha Award for Translation in 2004. A few of her poems are part of the anthology Centrepiece (2017) published by Zubaan.
A grandmother’s tattoos, the advent of Christianity, stories woven into fabrics, a tradition of orality, the imposition of a ‘new’ language, a history of war and conflict: all this and much more informs the writers and artists in this book. Filmmaker and writer Anungla Zoe Longkumer brings together here, for the first time, a remarkable set of stories, poems, first-person narratives and visuals that reflect the many facets of women’s writing in Nagaland.
Written in English, a language the Nagas — who had no tradition of written literature — made their own after the Church came to Nagaland, each piece speaks of women’s many journeys to reclaim their pasts and understand their complex present.
ANUNGLA ZOE LONGKUMER can best be described as a free individual discovering her way through creative pursuits in music, writing, filmmaking, and folk traditions. Having travelled and lived outside Nagaland during most of her life, she is currently based in Dimapur, Nagaland, where she freelances doing some content editing, music and filmmaking. She is the author of Folklore of Eastern Nagaland (2017), that comprises translations of folktales, folk songs and real-life accounts, collected from the six tribes who inhabit the more remote districts of Eastern Nagaland.
This book examines the structures of governance as they impact women in five conflict zones in South Asia: Swat in Pakistan, the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, the Northern Province in Sri Lanka, and Kashmir and Manipur in India.
Despite their different historical and political contexts, the five studies included here throw up some common patterns. War and conflict have weakened and eroded existing formal structures and institutions of governance. New formations, whether made up of militant groups, or more ‘secular’ state institutions like armies, do not see women as rights-bearing actors. Further, the authors argue, the impact of war, conflict, settlerism and militancy can make state structures more distant and sometimes incomprehensible to citizens, leaving women’s specific gender concerns unaddressed.
Taken together, the essays show that women’s relationship with governance institutions is complex, and combines dependence on such institutions with the challenge of dealing with new forms of patriarchy that take root as structures transform and change. The gendering of governance policy and practice therefore, is of crucial importance.
CONTRIBUTORS: Amena Mohsin | Delwar Hossain | Nazish Brohi Saba Gul Khattak | Malathi De Alwis | Udhayani Navaratnam | Nima Lamu Yolmo | Shaheena Parveen | Ayesha Parvez | Seema Kazi
The Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia research project (coordinated by Zubaan and supported by the International Development Research Centre) brings together, for the first time in the region, a vast body of knowledge on this important – yet silenced – subject. Six country volumes (one each on Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and two on India) comprising over fifty research papers and two book-length studies detail the histories of sexual violence and look at the systemic, institutional, societal, individual and community structures that work together to perpetuate impunity for perpetrators.
Disputed Legacies focuses on Pakistan, examining law, pedagogy, medical practice and the situations that arise when ‘secular’ law comes into conflict with traditional practice and belief. The contributors to this volume trace the often-troubled interaction between the state and its women citizens and examine the structures and social systems that enable impunity for perpetrators of sexual violence to gain strength.
CONTRIBUTORS: Sahar Zareen Bandial | Nazish Brohi | Iftikhar Firdous | Huma Qurban Fouladi | Neelam Hussain | Hooria Hayat Khan | Zainab Zeeshan Malik | Noreen Naseer | Zahaid Rehman | Fahmida Riaz | Rubina Saigol | Zahra Shah | Sarah Zaman | Afiya Shehrbano Zia | Maliha Zia
This book brings you a wealth of stories, in words and images, from a part of India known as the Northeast, a term that is widely contested for the ways in which it homogenizes a region of great diversity. It is also a term that has come to be a marker of identity and solidarity by many who are of the region. Here, 21 writers and artists look at the idea of ‘work’ — from street hawking to beer brewing, from mothering to dung collection — and describe their lives or those of others with humour and compassion. Parismita Singh’s wonderful compilation of the works of women asks: what are the different ways of telling a story? What if we were to attempt these tellings through poetry and portraits and essays, older traditions like textile art and applique and new genres like hashtag poetry tapped into a smartphone? Where would it take us, what would the world look like?
Contributors: Zubeni Lotha | Minam Apang | Alyen Leeachum Foning | Aheli Moitra | Soibam Haripriya | Gertrude Lamare | Rini Barman | Nitoo Das | Thingnam Anjulika Samom | Parismita Singh | Dolly Kikon | Ayangbe Mannen | Aungmakhai Chak | Jacqueline Zote | Meena Laishram | Prashansa Gurung | Shreya Debi and Bilseng R Marak | Mona Zote | Nabina Das | Mamang Dai | Sanatombi Ningombam | Kundo Yumnam
The states in the northeast of India have been subject to multiple protracted conflicts. In the cases where the gendered nature of these conflicts is considered, stereotypes of women as passive victims or natural peacemakers tend to be reproduced, and scholars follow the establishment’s cues in employing analyses from a conventional security studies perspective, focusing on ceasefires and surrender packages for militants, male-dominated negotiations over autonomy and statehood, and ‘homeland’ politics. Even as women have become increasingly vocal in civil society attempts to resolve conflict and build peace in the region, their voices and work are ignored. The media has turned its spotlight on activists like the Meira Paibis and Irom Sharmila, but has yet to acknowledge the significance of women’s everyday resistance, activism and agency – and this lack of attention is a further aspect of their marginalization.
This volume sheds light on the successes and failures of the women’s movements in and of the region; women’s responses and engagements with conflict and peace-building; as well as their challenges, aspirations and experiences as agents of change. It adds important insights into the debate on gender and political change in societies affected by conflict. Moreover, by engaging critically with the ‘women, peace and security’ literature, the volume takes a fresh look at ‘universalist’ feminist and interventionist biases, questioning the notion that peace processes should be treated as windows of opportunity for women’s empowerment and positing that it is crucial to understand gender relations during conflict as historically contingent, complex and multifaceted, and intertwined in the social fabric.
In 2008, when the Azad Foundation, an NGO based in Delhi, began training poor women to become drivers of commercial and private vehicles, most people thought they were somewhat out of touch with reality. Poor, illiterate women, many of them from violent homes, some of them single mothers, others from families and communities which had never allowed women to step out of the home – how could these women take the wheel, drive around in unsafe cities, be confident and competent, earn money? At the time, there was only one known woman auto driver in Delhi. When Azad turned to radio cab companies to suggest they take in women drivers, there wasn’t much interest. Today, more than 300 women drivers have received training from Azad and are on the roads of several cities. Nine years after radio companies turned Azad away, special services or women with women drivers are being introduced within these same companies. In 2015, the Delhi Transport Corporation got its first woman driver, and in 2016, the Delhi Commission for Women recruited 25 women drivers to be part of their women’s helpline. Clearly, things are changing.
Lady Driver maps the journeys of twelve women from poor, marginalized communities who have transformed their lives by taking up the challenge of becoming women drivers. Each story is unique; there’s no Cinderella effect here. Reality does not change overnight. Instead, as the women featured here painstakingly claim a relationship with the road, it translates into claims for identity, for dignity, for a livelihood. Their stories are about beginnings, but have no endings – there is still quite a way to drive.
Feminist Subversion and Complicity interrogates a specific form of feminist practice, that which has involved engaging with state and international institutions to insert gender knowledge in their development interventions. Bringing together contributions from eight feminists located in very different kinds of institutions and spaces from Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India, this book is the outcome of a deeply reflexive process to produce a critique from within of this present day feminist practice. An array of experiences and encounters are scrutinised from bringing feminist perspectives to governmental projects on education, health, and legal reform to transformations in the discourses and practices of women’s movements and feminisms as they encountered developmentalisms. The writers show that feminist politics is not merely assimilated in governmental projects but that it interrupts these projects even as it is assimilated; a feminist politics in which complicity is often a subversive activity, is destabilizing and contesting of meaning.
The Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia research project (coordinated by Zubaan and supported by the International Development Research Centre) brings together, for the first time in the region, a vast body of knowledge on this important – yet silenced – subject. Six country volumes (one each on Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and two on India) comprising over fifty research papers and two book-length studies detail the histories of sexual violence and look at the systemic, institutional, societal, individual and community structures that work together to perpetuate impunity for perpetrators.
This volume, the second on India, addresses the question of state impunity, suggesting that on the issue of the violation of human and civil rights, and particularly in relation to the question of sexual violence, the state has been an active and collusive partner in creating states of exception, where its own laws can be suspended and the rights of its citizens violated. Drawing on patterns of sexual violence in Kashmir, the Northeast of India, Chhattisgarh, Haryana and Rajasthan, the essays together focus on the long histories of militarization and regions of conflict, as well as the ‘normalized’ histories of caste violence which are rendered invisible because it is convenient to pretend they do not exist. Even as the writers note how heavily the odds are stacked against the victims and survivors of sexual violence, they turn their attention to recent histories of popular protest that have enabled speech. They stress that while this is both crucial and important, it is also necessary to note the absence of sufficient attention to the range of locations where sexual violence is endemic and often ignored. Resistance, speech, the breaking of silence, the surfacing of memory: these, as the writers powerfully argue, are the new weapons in the fight to destroy impunity and hold accountable the perpetrators of sexual violence.
