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?

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PARISMITA SINGH is a writer, graphic novelist and educationist. Her graphic novel The Hotel at the End of the World was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award (2009-10). She helped conceptualise the Pao Anthology of Comics. Her publications include graphic novels for children Mara and the Clay Cows, Crab Chronicles and Fat King Thin Dog. She has been working on a primary school education project in Assam with the NGO Pratham since 2009.

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 Continue Reading Centrepiece: New Writing and Art from Northeast India

Continue Reading Women, Peace and Security in Northeast India

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. Continue Reading Lady Driver: Stories of Women Behind the Wheel

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. Continue Reading Feminist Subversion and Complicity: Governmentalities and Gender Knowledge in South Asia

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. Continue Reading Fault Lines of History: The India Papers II

With independence, India experienced a dramatic social rupture but also a recuperation of political autonomy and a new sense of optimism that promised opportunities. The country became a crucible for experimentation in modern and utopian architecture with new buildings, cities and museums giving public face to the nation. Indian architects and architectural projects claimed international attention, and a generation of women entered professions such as architecture and design that had previously been closed to them. They emerged as a pronounced political force, and important patrons of art, architecture and public space.

The mid-19th and 20th centuries saw a significant increase in women acting as arbiters of taste and shapers of the built environment. The emerging groups of female designers and female patrons were enabled by new norms for women.

The essays in this volume address these developments, posing the important question : did, and do, women produce art and architecture that reflect a feminine perspective ? How did women, otherwise invisible and denied attention in the public sphere, gain voice? The writers look at these questions through both the political frame of gender as well as through family lineage and dynastic connections, and their importance in women’s patronage of the arts. Continue Reading Woman’s Eye, Woman’s Hand: Making Art and Architecture in Modern India

“This book is a must-read—for it gives a human face to a complex political problem. It should be read on both sides of the border. … Through the testimonies of ordinary and extraordinary women, it brings forth the complexities of a situation where the question of what is right and what is wrong is not as simple as leaders on both sides would have us believe.” — The Hindu “…leave no page unturned, no essay or sentence unread. Each word wounds, each story hurts, each incident of molestation and rape angers. And after you put it down, ask yourself this question: how can we even begin to imagine after what has been inflicted on them that ‘they’ would want to be part of ‘us’ ?” — Outlookindia.com

Continue Reading Speaking Peace: Women’s Voices from Kashmir

Water management is not an engineering matter alone, it involves ecological, socio- political, administrative and legal concerns. Gender is a key factor but has been neglected both conventionally and in recent water reform policies and structures. Yet, a cross-section of South Asian women have challenged socio-cultural norms and crossed personal and professional boundaries to make a profound impact on water and sanitation management. Their inspiring stories have scarcely been documented.

This book is the first to profile women from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka — women at the grassroots or with NGOs, women activists, journalists, administrators, scientists, academics, action-researchers — who have faced challenges related to water with courage and determination. Complementing the 32 women’s voices is data compiled from an analysis of the situation of women water professionals in the region. Written in an engaging manner, this book will be of interest both to the general reader and to academics and practitioners in water management and gender/women’s studies. Continue Reading Women Water Professionals: Inspiring Stories from South Asia

This multi-layered and thought-provoking collection offers a new and alternative view to the cosy images of motherhood that we so often assume. Motherhood for the writers in this collection is by no means a simple state but involves searching questions about identity, writing, one’s place in society – the very nature of the self.

Questions of adoption, childlessness, surrogacy, bereavement and abuse figure alongside poems and stories that explore the tender, the funny, the uplifting aspects of this most vital relationship, between children and their mothers at any age. Contributors include: Manju Kapur, Shinie Antony, Jai Arjun Singh, Jahnavi Barua, Meena Alexander, Mridula Koshy, Kishwar Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Bulbul Sharma, Tishani Doshi, Shalini Sinha, Jahnavi Barua, Smriti Lamech, Nisha Susan, Humra Quraishi, Sarojini N., Vrinda Marwah, Sarita Mandanna, Anita Roy, and others. Published in association with Save the Children India

“It’s to novelist Jaishree Misra’s credit that she, as editor of this volume, was able to draw out so many different voices, some highly reputed, on a rarely-explored theme.” –– Smruti Koppikar, Hindustan Times

Continue Reading Of Mothers and Others: Stories, essays, poems

Toilets, trees and gender? Can there be a connection?

Is there a gender angle to a business story? Is gender in politics only about how many women get elected to parliament? Is osteoporosis a women’s disease? Why do more women die in natural disasters?

These are not the questions journalists usually ask when they set out to do their jobs as reporters, sub-editors, photographers of editors. Yet, by not asking, are they missing out on something, perhaps half the story? This is the question this book, edited and written by journalists, for journalists and the lay public interested in media, raises. Through examples from the media, and from their own experience, the contributors explain the concept of gender-sensitive journalism and look at a series of subjects that journalists have to cover – sexual assault, environment, development, business, politics, health, disasters, conflict – and set out a simple way of integrating a gendered lens into day-to-day journalism. Written in a non-academic, accessible style, this book is possibly the first of its kind in India – one that attempts to inject a gender perspective into journalism. Continue Reading Missing Half the Story: Journalism as if Gender Matters

Lifelines is an enthralling collection of short stories that will take you on some unforgettable journeys —journeys that span continents and decades, transgressing social boundaries and raising ethical dilemmas along the way.

The protagonists of these tales find themselves re-drawing their own destinies as they map their lifelines in unique, often unanticipated ways. The rapidly changing realities of the 21st-century require these individuals to navigate through uncharted waters, in a world increasingly shaped by the forces of globalisation, development and migration. One where the old ways are being challenged as never before, even in the traditionalist heartlands of South Asia.

Lifelines portrays the trials and triumphs of men, women and children who find themselves facing unexpected challenges—and discover that the decisions that they take, for better or worse, have consequences they never envisaged. Continue Reading Lifelines: New Writing from Bangladesh

What is contemporary women’s writing in Hindi all about? How far does it reach beyond the commonly perceived limits of feminine experience or feminist ideology?

The stories in this anthology provide the answers to these questions. From legendary writer Mannu Bhandari’s “The Cremation Ground” which satirises the sentimental notion of eternal love, young author Alpana Mishra’s superbly crafted “Homeless in the Cantonment”, a devastating chronicle of army life, to Pratyaksha’s sensual narrative of infatuation–“The Hunt” –they dissect numerous aspects of human existence with a startling incisiveness, exploding myths, raising issues and offering new takes on oft examined themes. Apart from the three mentioned above, it features the work of highly regarded stalwarts Mridula Garg, Rajee Seth, Chandrakanta, Mamta Kalia and Chitra Mudgal besides presenting exciting and resonant new voices like Manisha Kulshreshtha, Kavita and Vandana Rag – some of whom are appearing in English for the very first time. Continue Reading Her Piece of Sky: Contemporary Hindi Stories