Women Writing in India at the Turn of the Century

- Nabaneeta Dev Sen

-
It’s a fortunate moment for us all, women writing in different comers of our country, to meet
and talk. Talk about ourselves, about our work, our growth, our time. We have dealt with life
on our own terms, in our own different ways, but much as we have wanted writing to remain
the centre of our lives, I am afraid most of us have not managed to achieve that goal.
Nevertheless, we are writing life as we witness it, while the twentieth century carries us into
the twenty-first. Let’s hope we have managed to make the task a little lighter for the women
writers of tomorrow, the way our mothers did it for us. There are still many practical
questions that eat into our hearts, maybe we can resolve a few during our dialogue over the
next three days, without getting trapped into the academic jargon of feminist theory.
Critical jargons, a patriarchal practice, very often distract our attention and create an
academic distance between ourselves and our reality.

We are doing three things here at this seminar: (1) discussing the state of women writing at
the turn of the century, (2) telling each other how we grew up as women writers, and (3)
listening to each other’s work. All three are important, important because it will help us to
get to know one another, it will tell us who we are, how we became what we are, where we
stand in time, and what we write.

Women writing in India.

Well, it’s a hard task, everyone knows it. Writing is male territory, has been so right from the
beginning, women are latecomers, and trespasser. Writing involves the mind. Who does
not know that we, women, do not possess a mind - we have a body, and they, men, possess
a mind. The woman who writes has stepped out of her own area of the senses, and
appropriated a male gesture. Language deals with verbal signs which are decoded through
the intellect….The woman writer’s appeal therefore is directly to the mind and not to the
senses, which is a women’s allotted territory. But the woman who sings, or the woman who
dances, appeals first to our senses, to the ear, to the eye and remains within their own
social space. That’s why Shubhalakshmi is a Singer, Bala Saraswathi is a Dancer, but a
Balamani Amma is a Woman Writer. Her gender is specially mentioned because the
moment she takes up the pen, the power position is reversed, she commits an act of
transgression against the accepted social codes. She has trespassed into the male world
of intellection, and given rise to a silent hostility, an unconscious resistance among the
readership which happens to be primarily male.

This unselfconscious patriarchal resistance- has sharply affected women’s writing, not
merely in India but all over the world. It has been expressing itself in a variety of ways, in
different efforts at silencing the female voice. I shall touch upon seven of the commonest
tactics.

1. It has tried to make us faceless, to snatch away our individual identities, by bundling
us together.
2. It has kept us out of the mainstream, tucked away on the margins.
3. It has tried to keep us out of the historical process.
4. It has tried to silence us by refusing to read us, thus depriving us of our deserved
recognition.
5. It has tried not to acknowledge our contributions to literature by refusing to write
serious critical reviews.
6. It has made the woman writer a part of her own text to be consumed.
7. And finally, our families have joined hands with the patriarchal conspiracy in
silencing the woman within the family.

Once mentioned none of it is news to you, and we prefer to wish it away by thinking
positive. It is obvious too that at the turn of the century women have managed to gain some
ground, some recognition, things are not as bad as they used to be. Patriarchy has taken
notice of us and has produced sensitive womanist men who in their generosity organise
seminars like this one.

Yet things have not changed as much as we pretend to think. There are always exceptions,
there are always the luckier ones. But there is also the rule I will try to give you few
examples of the above patriarchal tactics from my experience.

Probably as a result of this unselfconscious resistance one tricky problem I have

repeatedly found myself in, is the problem of garbled identity. I do not know how many of
you have gone through that. Men do not actually read what women write. They just glance
though it, surf the pages and then, conversations like this take place.

1. “Hi Nabaneeta, I liked that earthquake poem of yours in Desh this week.”
–“Ah! Did you? Thank you!. I liked it too. It is not mine, though, Bijoya wrote that one.”
“Ha ha, is that so? I thought it was you.”
Incidentally, we write in very different styles.
2. Since I am the woman who writes funny stories, I have been regularly complimented
for the last ten years for the single humorous piece ever written by Kana Basu Misra.
 I have stopped correcting people now and have humbly appropriated the authorship
of the story, to make life simpler for every one. Except Kana, of course.
3. But you must know what happened when we went to a lavish farmhouse party
thrown by a writer friend some lavish farmhouse party years ago…. Because there
was a huge gang of writers, our hosts had made this little arrangement for us to
entertain ourselves by reading. A smart young person was inviting the guests to the
microphone. I suddenly heard the name of Kabita Sinha being called, though she
was not present that evening…. I wondered why. Then I saw the Master of
Ceremonies frantically signalling to me. I was a bit confused at first, then I knew
what the problem was. Here I was, a woman poet. He knew one woman poet’s
name. It did not matter whether the face went with the name, in any case weren’t we
all the same?

So I went up, took the mike, and gently corrected the announcer, saying, “Sorry, there has
been a slight mistake, I am not Kabita Sinha, my name is Mahashweta Devi, and I do not
write poetry. But I shall be happy to recite to you the whole of my award winning novel,
Aranyer Adhikar.” Sunil Gangopadhyay was present among the guests. Being the peace
loving gentleman that he is, he stopped me right there, and the evening was saved. But no
one can save us women writers from being bundled together, a bunch of nameless wild
flowers.

The woman writer.

No matter how hard I try to place the writer before the woman, it does not work. The woman
rushes in and grabs the seat first and the writer comes tumbling after. In life and in work.

As the act of writing is in itself an act of transgression for women, it is not surprising that
Agatha Christie was the Queen of mystery novels, but Hitchcock was not the King of
mystery films. He was only doing his own thing, and doing it well, but she was a woman
fighting men on their own grounds, and winning. She deserved special mention.

When women succeed, transgression turns into transcendence. Then she crosses the line
of control, and gains recognition. The highest recognition, of course, comes when her
critics exclaim: “She writes like a man!" Because man spells excellence, man sets the
artistic standards. In the nineteenth century, when Mary Ann Evans wrote under the
pseudonym of George Eliot to gain entry into the male world of literature and became the
assistant editor of Westminster Review, she was never formally acknowledged as such,
and the greatest compliment paid to her by her writer and critic friends was “She writes like
a Man.”

She writes like a Man.

We, in India have not moved very far from that position in our literary criticism. We have
been hearing for two decades now, “Mahashweta Devi writes like a man.”

It's the ultimate compliment for a woman writer, coming from men. And literary criticism
has remained a male domain in the regional languages. What does “writing like a man”
mean? It means powerful writing, it means strength of ideas, and strength can only be
masculine…. It brings to my mind Rodin’s sculpture of the Thinker. Yes, that is what a writer
who "writes like a man” looks like to me, muscular, concentrated energy, merged in self, all
alone. Women who write actually possess a different kind of diffused energy, a power
which goes out of self and includes others in it. In fact, this is why no woman evero far
writes ‘like a man’. Mahashweta was trying to explore a hitherto unexplored area, breaking
the silence of the tribal people, bringing the marginal within the purview of literary canon,
thus empowering them. She was functioning outside the women’s allotted I space,
occupying male territory, therefore doing a man’s job…. Besides, a consciously taken
political stance becomes an extra-literary source of strength. And strength, we know, is
manly. Remember, there was a time when Indira Gandhi was referred to as the only Man in
her Cabinet?

But Mahashweta has become the mother of the starvers. Her activism is a form of powerful
nurturing. Incidentally I think nurturing is a wonderful word and I have reclaimed it from the
western feminists. How can we be poets – if we are not nurturers? Creative energy
demands nurturing.

Writing in the margin.

There is no category known as men’s writing. Because it came first, it existed as the rule. All
writing is male… Women’s writing appeared much later, as an exception to the rule. Hence
the labelling. But who likes to be labelled?

In the fifties, Kabita Sinha fought tooth and nail against the marginalization of women
writers. She was Bengal’s first radical feminist writer, but she did not like the literary
grounds to be gender-demarcated. Mahashweta Devi also objects to being called a woman
writer; in fact she regards herself not a feminist but a humanist, an activist. I have heard
Sivashankari say “I am not a feminist but a humanist”. Krishna Sobti has said that she is
“basically a writer, who happened to be born as a woman'. Qurratulain Hyder, too has
declined to be stamped as a feminist writer. (Even I, in the early 80s, had declared in an
interview ‘I’m a writer, I happen to be a woman’). Clearly, most of us wish to belong to the
mainstream, rather than be ghettoed and go down in history branded as someone who
belonged to the margin.

In the harem.
Before feminist criticism appeared and created a new respectable genre of ‘Women’s
Writing’, the expression ‘women’s writing’ had an air of condescension about it. It meant
you belonged to the margin, society was putting up with you, making room for a second
rater, allowing you a bit of space as a special favour. In this connection, I must tell you
about one of the standard reference works - History of Bengali literature, Dr. Srikumar
Banerji’s Banga Sahitye Upanyaser Dhara. (History of Bengali Novel, first published in 1938,
my edition updated in 1965). He dutifully dedicates two whole chapters to women, one to
the pioneers, another to the contemporary women novelists, writing 24 subsections, one
on each of them, discussing their feminine qualities, keeping them separated from their
male counterparts. Apparently, while updating the book, he had his doubts about including
Mahashweta, because she did not quite fit into the thematic scheme of women’s novels
that he had prepared. However, she does; in the end, appear in it with her early historical
romances as her new avatar had not taken shape as yet.

Thus, thanks to a leading academic, a bunch of major Bengali novelists suddenly found
themselves tucked together into a special women’s room, in a harem, lifted out of their
general historical context. They have no role to play in the interactive historical process, in
the growth and development of Bengali novel as a whole, they remain suspended in midair,
out of time, out of place, not seen as a part of the live current that flows through literature,
branded like animals by their gendered identity. Talk of marginalization? Talk of gender
equality in the academia? This book still remains the standard history of Bengali novel, a
required reading in every university syllabus. To this day, no questions have been asked, no
challenges made, no objection filed. Because no one cares, no one notices. Not even the
feminist critics. This is only one example. The list is endless. I would imagine similar cases
are not lacking in the other regional literatures at the turn of the century. It is time women
started writing histories of literature, and, womanist men came into the field.

I have not read her as yet.

Women’s success in the outside world is hard to digest. It has always been hard for us to
get recognition in the world of literary critics, and it still is. An interesting case of this
suppression is Ashapurna Devi. When she received the Jnanpith in 1975, United Nation’s
year for women, I was shocked to read the comments of a youthful reviewer (Sanatan
Pathak), writing about the award in Desh, “I have not read her as yet, but I plan to do so
soon and I would advise you to read her, as well.” This insult was possible because most
unfortunately the all-male world of Bengali literary criticism had misread and
misrepresented the deep and complex subversive style of Ashapurna as simple woman-to-
woman scribbling domestic details that do not deserve serious literary (read male)
attention.
Ashapurna was the most powerful as well as popular fiction writer in Bengali at that
moment and no matter how unmindful a young reviewer might be, he must have known her
stuff right from his childhood. But planned denial is a technique of rejection.

It is an age-old male political act of silencing the woman writer by ignoring her. By refusing
to see her you wipe her out from your vision.

If I can’t shut you up, I shall shut up about you. You may have readers but no reviewers. This
is still the story of most women who write.

It was interesting to note that Mahashweta’s efforts at lending voice to the silent minority
was noticed by the same critics as a political act, because it was clearly a literary space so
far uninhabited by women, she had no predecessor. But no one had noticed that
Ashapurna too was writing about a marginalised group, the middle class women, very
definitely a horrendously oppressed group, but not observed as such. The depth and
harshness of their pain and oppression, and their ability to withstand it within the middle
class reality was labelled as the ‘narrow domestic scene’, and accepted (rejected?) as t’
regular pattern of middle class existence. The women’s power of subversion, the irony and
the sarcasm, their cruelty to other women and self-denial, all went unnoticed. Ashapurna’s
works were flatly labelled as women’s reading material, and rejected even by the feminist
critics as trivia. Her personality contributed to it. She took pride as a homebound person,
hiding her sharpness, her real critical self behind a dangerously deceptive simplicity. There
is still no critical work available on her.

Times have changed. Indian women writers draw a lot of media attention in today’s world,
especially if they write in English, and do not call themselves feminists. But it is not the
same story in the regional languages. We demand womanist critics in our regional
languages, both men and women, to read us, to review us, to represent us in the right light,
to give us our due at the turn of the century.

Which group do you belong to?

There are two groups of writers in our country, one is crowded by twenty-one members, and
the other stands tall and strong all by itself, though it’s the youngest.

More and more Indian women are writing in English these days, within and outside India
Naturally. There is much more freedom in that foreign language. So much more power…..
So many difficult things you could easily blurt out in English. Things you could never write
down on paper in your mother tongue. Eroticism, for example, is on your fingertips if you
use English. Mother tongue stands over you like Mother herself, at least in my case, keeping
me and eroticism apart, inhibiting my verbal expressions. That’s the way it Is with most of
us. In Tamil, in Hindi, in Urdu. But English is a different story. Anything goes. Just about
anything. It has grown in a different soil, and brought its own social mores with it. Every
language, like a snail, carries its home on its back. And you’ll get 21 times more readers.
And more money. Just think of the unearthly amounts! Ever get it from your regional
publishers? And the fame. World Wide Web of fame. Why write in a regional language at all
if you can manage to write in English. Makes a difference. Specially for us, women. We are
in a double bind, subjugated by our society, also by our language. So, buy freedom, liberate
yourself from your roots, ditch your tradition, go English. It’s the language of tomorrow. We,
the regional tongues will soon become sisters with Pali, Prakrit, Apabhransh etc. We are
moving backwards to the Charyapada days. The days are near enough.

A feminist? A post-feminist? A womanist? A humanist?

I am sure all of you are asked in media interviews, Are you a feminist writer? But feminist
criticism has already entered the post feminism era. So? Are you a post-feminist writer,
then? What? You were never a feminist writer to begin with. And writing such a lot about
women! Doesn’t matter, it is already out of fashion anyway. Literary fashions keep
changing, critical jargons keep withering, and dropping off the tree of wisdom. Only the
problems remain. Are you dealing with women’s problems my dear friend? You don’t have
to give it an academic name or a foreign address. Even that is out of fashion these days. Be
ethnic. Do it your own way, the traditional Indian way. Mahadevi Varma, Ashapurna Debi,
Krishna Sobti, Qurrutulain Hyder, Mahashweta Devi, - have all worked on their own. Going
way back to Akka Mahadevi and Mirabai, they have firmly grabbed the bull by its horns in
their strong female grip, without using any fancy English term for the struggle. Surely we
can follow suit. The feminist is giving way to the womanist, who is giving way to the
humanist.

I am not a feminist, but…

Have you noticed something? Most women creative writers begin their speeches
concerning women, with a gentle disclaimer saying “I am not a feminist”. This is an
insurance against rejection because most men, even women, will shut off their minds if
they think a feminist is speaking to them. Thanks to the screaming furies frothing in the
mouth, (though doing nothing frantic in actual life), radical feminism has become an
unfriendly term, having disastrous connotations. Now that Family has once again gained
academic importance just as the family values are disappearing into old peoples’ homes in
our fast disintegrating social structure, the term ‘feminism’ is becoming a false threat to
family peace.
How can we follow the western canons blindly and shout: these are our post-feminist
days? When did we go through the feminist phase, in life or in literature? All that history
happened Over There. Across the oceans: Not over here. Not with dowry deaths and bride
burning, female infanticide and the high rate of death at childbirth, selling of daughters and
child prostitution. We have not even entered the feminist era outside some university
departments, and fashionable NGOs. But we can perhaps do away with it anyway. What we
urgently need in life and literature today is the gentle, balanced womanism of men and
women. Yes, we need dedicated womanists to hold up our literature at the turn of the
century, as we try to change our lives.

A lot can be explained if we look into the contract that exists between the writer and the
reader, the producer of literature and the consumer of it. The contract is actually between
the male reader and the male writer, and the commodity sold more often than not is the
woman in the text. There is a tacit understanding between the male reader and the male
writer which does not exist between the female writer and the mostly – male readership.
The contract between them differs from that with the male author, depending on the
cultural attitudes and expectations.

When a woman takes up writing as her profession, it becomes her own gesture, and it falls
a victim to all the social codes of conduct that apply to women’s gestures. Both the reader
and the writer accept the contract and function within it. The woman through her
repressive education has been taught to be culturally silent. For an Indian woman,
modesty, a sense of shame, is one of the ultimate values. She is supposed to walk, talk,
look, smile, eat, drink, laugh, weep all in a modest fashion, in a reserved manner (Her eyes
should be lowered, voice should be low, her steps should be short, her mouthfuls small,
mustn’t laugh out too loud, mustn’t sob too hard either) as her voice, her vision, all her
gestures are extensions of her body and must not occupy too much space. Because space
means power. Her mental space is curtailed by depriving her of education, and
information. Information is power. We who write are clearly women who are after power,
writing is an aggressive act for us, and we know it in our bones the way patriarchy knows it.
That is why the question of subversion arises.

When Aparna Sen, Debarati Mitra gave vent to female sexuality, they were chastised,
because they were challenging the status quo, they were threatening the system. But our
society has changed a great deal in the last ten years. Today Taslima can get away with her
frank expressions of sexuality. Mandakranta can celebrate a woman’s desire.

Times have surely changed. In the last thirty years great changes have taken place in
women’s use of language, in our choice of subject matter. In the early seventies a young
woman poet was harassed by her readers for writing a beautiful, and powerful erotic poem
celebrating the joy of oral sex. The same magazine had published another poem in the
sixties by a young man on the very same subject where the language was sexually more
explicit. But while Sunil Gangopadhyay had received accolades for his courage, Debarati
Mitra was harangued for her immodesty.

But at the turn of the century the readers’ reactions have changed. Taslima Nasreen’s
detailed descriptions of both her parents’ sexual behaviour outside marriage, her own
adolescent experiments with lesbian sex were lapped up by the critics, young and old.
Young Mandakranta Sen’s outspoken erotic poems about a young girl’s incestuous affair
made her extremely popular at the poetry readings. For a year she enjoyed the attention,
then realised there was something wrong. She herself was becoming a part of the text,
when reading those poems. She was entertaining the audience not merely by her poetic
excellence but also by her personal presence. Though she has many stronger, more
powerful poems, those erotic poems are the ones the audience keeps asking for. She has
now made a conscious decision to stop reading those poems in public.

The producer, the consumer and the consumed.

Come to think of it a bit more deeply, has the readership really changed? Yesterday they
had chastised Debarati for they had spied her young woman’s body in the sexual act within
the poem. Today they may be encouraging Mandakranta for the very same reason. At that
time, they had disapproved of it on moral grounds, today, they are enjoying it. Maybe this is
worse The woman writer cannot get away from her created text. Her body remains tied to it.
But the man is free, he easily stands outside his art. Why is this so? Because there is a tacit
consent between the male producer of art, (literature, painting, film), and the male
consumer of it. Woman, usually, is the product that is sold. Such a contract does not exist
when the producer is female and the consumer male. Then the producer herself becomes
a part of the product to be consumed. This is true not only of women’s writings, it is also
true of women's films. When Satyajit Ray makes Piku, a telefilm about adultery, no one
thinks it is about Ray’s personal life. The same year Aparna Sen makes Parema, about
adultery, and everyone starts gossiping, it must be about her personal life. Ray was not a
part of his product, he stood outside it, so did Sunil, but Aparna was bound product, like
Debarati was.

Gilbert and Gubar had mentioned that women writers are in a double-bind, they have to
construct their own identity, and also their heroines. But what happens here is the
overlapping and merging of the two identities. No matter what, the woman writer/director is
identified with the heroine/protagonist.
The readers seem to nurture an unhealthy curiosity for the private personal story of the
woman who writes. This was one reason why I turned into a prose writer. It was a conscious
decision. I moved away from poetry into humorous prose when my marriage broke and I
returned to India with my children. People were trying to read personal tragedy in my
poems. With smart, self-deprecating humour you can always be on par with. If not one-up
on your reader. If you laugh at yourself, others laugh with you, not at you. The question of
pity does not arise. Reader response has continually changed my literary career, opened up
new possibilities, pushed the horizon further back. What could have been negative and
destructive has turned into a positive source of power. That is often the case with us
women.

Facing the Mirror.

Days have surely changed, and in some areas quite drastically. Indian women’s courage in
self-expression has come a long way. The first collection of lesbian writing in India has
come out in the sun. [Not a clandestine Grove Press edition, but a Penguin India
publication, a fat volume full of personal writing]. Facing the Mirror (1999) is a hallmark in
Indian women’s writing at the turn of the century.

All of it is genuine lesbian speak in English. Some are signed, some have used
pseudonyms. I don’t know when a similar collection will be possible in a regional language.
The Mumbai crowd’s response to Deepa Mehta’s Fire is not forgotten as yet.

But in Bengali there does exist a beautiful, slim volume of poetry by Sanjukta
Bandyopadhyay called Arabya Upanyaser Meye, baa Meyeder Bratakatha (1996) with
sixteen powerful poems, openly lesbian. This is the very first book of gay/lesbian poetry in
Bengali that I have seen. Its not an easy experiment, there maybe problems with your job as
well. In the forties, in Lahore, Ismat Chughtat was sued for writing “Lihat” in Urdu, but she
won the case. Around the same time, in Bengali, Bani Roy had written a sensitive story
called “Sapho”, which created hostile waves, but she was not personally harassed,
probably because in that story lesbian love loses out to heterosexual love. Sanjukta’s book
has not attracted hostile attention so far. And that really speaks a great deal about the
changing values of the Indian middle class family. It has opened up a lot. It can now take in
a lot. The family has learnt to adjust with their women poets. Sanjukta lives with her in-laws
and has a perfect relationship with her parents.

But going back twenty years, I must confess my own work has suffered deeply from my
sense of loyalty to my family. There were so many little things about life and relationships
that I was itching to write, even ten years ago, but I could not. It was nothing as challenging
as lesbianism, but important to my development as a human being, and as a writer, but it
could not be written, because of my family. Self-censorship was harsh in my case.
Strangely enough, mine is a liberated family: both my parents were poets; my mother was a
major woman poet in Bangla when I started to write. But there were huge differences
between our times. My child-widow mother did not live the life I lived as a young woman.
She wrote a literature I could never produce. She had to fight her own fights. And she was a
winner.

But when it came to me she was not liberal any longer. As a young woman she had the
courage to remarry, but in her old age she could not accept my divorce. My mother’s idea of
our family honour stood firmly between me and my pen. My voice was throttled. Not only
mother. I had to think of my daughters. Their friends. Their teachers. Their estranged father.
Distant relatives. Everyone mattered. Neighbours, students, colleagues, servants. Each
face inhibited my pen. Adjusting to the system as the mother/daughters of a divorcee was
hard enough for them, to be the mother/daughters of a sexually explicit rebel would be
much too much. Speaking up would be an act of betrayal Silence was the only way. My
heart wanted to scream, my pen made fun of my want. Today’s women worth her salt will
not let herself be blackmailed by her family, she will not suffocate from an overdose of
loyalty to her family and make her writing suffer. I beg you to be free. You will surely find
your way with words. Let it be our family’s turn now to adjust to our needs, let them learn to
bear a bit of pain. We have borne it long enough.

Androgyny is the mantra of tomorrow.

Today, at the turn of the century, we keep coming across many different types of feminist
vision in India, hear so many different voices. There are the aggressive, militant voices, like
Ranganayakamma, Taslima Nasreen (I am including her because all her books are
published and sold and awarded in India, not in Bangladesh), Krishna Basu, Mallika
Sengupta; the open, outspoken tones of Kamala Das, Mamoni Raisom, Volga, Ruth Vanita,
and the sensitive, non-conformist androgynous writers like Krishna Sobti, Lakshmi Kannan,
Mridula Garg, Mannu Bhandari, the subversive, self-critical ones like Shivani, Sivashankari,
Bani Basu, the insensitive, commercial talents, like Shobha De, along with the sentimental,
patriarchal, feminine voices purring in the women’s magazines, the academic analytical
writing of feminist politics, the critical, historical studies of the Women’s Studies, and
finally the creative vision of the dedicated feminist publishers, like Kali for Women, or Stree,
of Thema.

We have seen many alternatives, and newer alternatives will appear. Old ideals are
crumbling, old systems will not produce useful results. At the turn of the century, we need
to reconsider our past achievements and our present strategies, fix new destinations,
invent new routes, make new connections. We must ask ourselves a few basic questions:
Who publishes us? Who sells us? Who are our buyers? Who reads us? Who reviews us?

Those who publish us may not necessarily be the miner popular booksellers

Those who have the buying power may not be those who read us.

Those who read us are surely not those who write the reviews.

Do we get fair reviews?

Who are we writing for? What are we writing for? Are we getting the full benefit of our talent
and hard work? These are important questions that we need to discuss.

Hara-Gauri
In order to make the fullest use of our talents, I genuinely feel, we women writers need to
be androgynous in our hearts. Androgyny is the mantea favoured. In order to be good
womanists, or even good humanists, we need to follow the Hara-Gauri image as our motto.
Great art demands androgyny. Its one thing to be gender-conscious, another to be gender-
bound. Being gender-bound by choice is a self-defeating act today. Our lives have made us
in many ways. We, the writing women, are not the kind of helpless homebound females
that we read about in old novels, and in the newspaper shock stories. In the practice of
literature we need not be imprisoned by our gender. If we want men to be free of their
chains of masculinity, we too need to look beyond our gender identity.

We need to be read and known by our fathers by our husbands, our lovers, our sons. If we
want to change the system, we must work together as family units. It’s a period of transition
that we are passing through and we must carry our families with us. Our life work must not
look like a proselytisation plan, the change should come from within, as a natural process
of development in the family structure. We shall always remain women writers, no amount
of backlash can put us back into our shell again. It is broken. Once for all we know who we
are. We want to know what the whole of life is all about. Not only ours, but theirs as well.