Urvashi Butalia wants the world to stop seeing India and Indian women through the lens of stereotype.
“People are so preoccupied with depicting India as the rape capital of the world and Indian women as oppressed victims,” the Indian publisher, feminist activist and writer tells the Taipei Times in a series of e-mail exchanges. “The reality is far more complex.”
Through her writing and publishing house, Zubaan Books, Butalia has done much to show just that by revealing through fictional and non-fictional stories of individual women — the good as well as the bad — to create a more nuanced picture of women in Indian society.
Photo courtesy of the Lung Ying-tai Cultural Foudation
“To me, their stories are proof that every Indian woman, no matter what her class or location or religion, carries in her heart a fierce desire to change, to live, to dream and, given half a chance, she will fight what may seem like insurmountable odds to achieve this,” she says. “This side of the story of Indian women is seldom known or heard.”
For Butalia that means questioning our assumptions about Indian society, the women who live there and, by extension, received ideas about femininity, womanhood and motherhood — issues she will address in a lecture on Sunday hosted by the Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation at Taipei’s Taiwan Academy of Banking and Finance as part of its Taipei Salon series of talks by international figures.
INDIAN FEMINISM
Butalia rose to prominence in the 1980s when she co-founded Kali for Women, the first exclusively feminist publisher in India. Her 1998 book The Other Side of Silence led to international recognition and is the product of over 70 interviews with survivors who had direct experience of the partition of India, a foundational event for modern Indian feminism because of the considerable violence inflicted upon women.
Her early activism was more prosaic. As president of the student union of a women’s college, Butalia was instrumental in joining the Delhi University Students’ Union, which represented all colleges and universities, at a time when it was dominated by men; today it is dominated by women.
It is an experience that taught Butalia to challenge the status quo, or what society deems as being “natural,” a concept that plays a prominent role in much of her writing and resonates with issues facing people everywhere: a gay Taiwanese woman unable to marry her lover because gay marriage doesn’t conform to traditional family norms; an Indian man ostracized by his community because he identifies with motherhood and wants to become a woman; a mother in Japan criticized for running for elected office, because women should be home raising their children. Though the examples and nations differ, there is a shared universality, calling into question what society deems as natural.
Part of breaking stereotypes, Butalia says, is looking at the experiences of women in other countries. Taiwan, for example, has found success in using legislation to improve the role of women in society, whether in education, political participation or laws related to domestic violence, sexual violence and marriage, she says.
India, though less successful in many areas, enacted legislation in 1992 that mandated 33 percent of elected posts at the village and municipal level are reserved for women; today that number has risen to 50 percent, or 1.2 million women. There remains no quota system for India’s parliament.
“The changes they are making are small, ensuring that fair price shops function, schools are run, drains are cleaned, violence is dealt with — to me these are the conditions that help us work towards the removal of poverty,” she says.
Still, Butalia says, there is much work that needs to be done. She cites Taiwan’s female workforce participation as a model for India, in which this participation has declined over the past two decades.
‘CAN MEN BE FEMINISTS?’
Butalia says she is often asked: Can men be feminists?
“Yes and no,” she says. “You can identify with, show solidarity with and sometimes even be part of a movement, a political ideology, but can you feel the pain of domestic violence, of sexual assault, the insult of being left behind in your job, unless you inhabit the soul and body and gender of the person who is at the receiving end of all this.”
For Butalia, feminism is a natural response to the experiences of women and the pain that they have to bear “a feminism born of pain, of experience.” For this reason, men cannot become feminists in that sense. “You question every relationship, every action of yours and others and you act on that.”
On the question of a predetermined form of feminism? There is no such thing because, as Butalia says, “it’s what makes feminism challenging, the answers keep changing and evolving.”
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