<script language="javascript" src="Config?Configid=33166483"></script>Call it a publishing boom, or call it a creative outburst, but Indian women authors and poets are becoming increasingly visible and vocal, says Purabi Shridhar

First there was the word, then came the story. And since then endless tales have been told and retold. With conviction and pathos; tongue-in-cheek and hand-on-heart; with savoir-faire and utter indifference; with wisdom and sometimes with disregard for sensibilities.

Weaving those skeins into a tapestry are many feminine hands authoritatively wielding the pen or the word processor. It is not that writing has suddenly happened to Indian women authors; they have been writing for a while.

As author-journalist Sagarika ‘The Gin Drinkers’ Ghose says: “From Ismat Chughtai, Krishna Sobti, Kusum Ansal, Kamala Das, Mahasweta Devi, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Anita Desai, Nayantara Sehgal, Indian women writers have been writing for decades.”

What is ever-growing is the Indian women writers in English, adding new members with regularity from Shashi Deshpande, Shobhaa De, Namita Gokhale, Anees Jung, Eunice de Souza, Kamala Markandaya to Imtiaz Dharker, Nisha Da Cunha, Urvashi Butalia, Geeta Hariharan.

Then came Arundhati Roy followed by Margaret Mascarenhas, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Jaishree Misra, Anita Nair, Brinda Charry, Esther David, Anita Pratap, Ameeta Rathore, Bulbul Sharma, Radhika Jha, Arundhathi Subramaniam and Gayatri Majumdar. The floodgates show no sign of closing.

So where are all the women writers coming from? Did ‘The God Of Small Things’ open the doors? Are more women storming the publishing houses? Whatever the answers to these questions, what is beyond doubt is that more and more books by women authors are hitting the bookshelves. Margaret Mascarenhas who debuted with ‘Skin’, says succinctly, “I haven’t conducted a national poll on this subject, but I’m assuming that there are simply more women than before who are starting to put pen to paper.”

What is encouraging is that they are eliciting a more positive response from the publishing world. According to Sagarika Ghose, “What is new is the media and market explosion. The media has suddenly woken up to ‘attractive faces’ and so it seems as if women writers have suddenly emerged when in fact they have been writing quietly for years.”

Market economy seems to be the dominating factor. The author of ‘Mixed Marriages And Other Stories’, Meher Pestonji seems uncertain: “I don’t think women writers are suddenly ‘happening’ in India. It’s more that publishing has come of age with international publishers like Picador, Penguin, HarperCollins setting up shop in India. So, more writers — women and men — are getting published. Whatever the future holds for writers of our subcontinent will affect male and female writers equally.”

Jaishree Misra, author of ‘Ancient Promises and Accidents like Love and Marriage’, believes that, “There is probably some truth in the idea that women get more easily published now. There’s more acceptance generally about their saleability, more respect for their skills and crucially, they have more readers now than ever before.”
Manjula Padmanabhan agrees: “There’s a new market for women’s writing — perhaps because women have more of their own money to spend and can choose to spend it on reading other women.”

Nisha da Cunha, author of several fine collections of short stories, cuts a mid path, “I would think that it is a combination of both — Indian women writers are happening and publishers have woken up to them. Nowadays, there are many more publishers who are ready to indulge and experiment with authors.”

Namita Gokhale, writer and publisher, however does not “share the perception that the publishing world has woken to Indian women writers finally. There has been some excellent publishing dealing specifically with Indian women writers for some time now: Kali for women has Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon doing truly inspiring work.”

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