I’m back from the Sahitya Akademi Women Writers Conference in Patiala. It was one-and-a-half days of frenetic talk and poetry with about 50 women from 21 states descending on the gorgeous and formidably well-maintained campus of Punjabi University. The opening speech by Sukrita Paul Kumar was far more interesting than one expects keynote-type speeches to be. She actually managed to clear the path towards many of the later discussions by easing into the feminism theme gently and bringing up some very useful points. The two that I remember:
Sukrita Paul Kumar
1) the necessity of a more androgynous identity in writing and in life with reference to the Ardhanarishwara myth. I was impressed that she actually said ‘androgyny’ to this seemingly conservative audience without blinking. I also thought of this when I had to take the bus from Patiala to Amritsar and I chose to wear jeans. I find it extremely difficult to travel in salwar-kameez or saree and I think this has much to do with my associations with these garments as feminine, delicate, and therefore, vulnerable. In jeans, I feel less bound by my gender and therefore less bound by the constrictions placed on it by society. But this meant that I would have to do my reading, which was right before I caught my bus, wearing the same thing. Most of the others were dressed rather more traditionally. This makes me wonder about clothes, how loaded they are with gender constructs, and what a truly gender-neutral garment would look like.
2) the need for women’s writing to be mainstreamed in education as opposed to being treated as a niche subject. It’s astonishing that such a simple thing needs to be pointed out and fought for, but it’s true that women writers are, by and large , relegated to the women’s studies / feminism papers. I remember reading Toni Morrison and Attia Hossain in college as part of exactly such a paper. As if they were not part of the larger literary history / canon but only significant as ‘women’ writers. The other five papers we did, as far as I can remember, did not have a single text authored by a woman.
There was a session on ‘Why I Write’ which had five writers talking about their locus and labours. The common thread here seemed to be that writing is a a compulsion. It has a je ne sais quoi quality, a “I write because I must” sort of motivation. The only voice that was different was Marathi poet and writer Dr Jyoti Lanjewar who was rather strident about the necessity for socio-political engagement in writing. ‘How can I write romances when there is so much going wrong around me,’ she asked. Which was fine in itself but she also seemed frankly judgmental about those who do write said beleaguered romances. I have arguments with that sort of logic. Surely there is space for all kinds of writing. The more various, the merrier. I don’t see why people who live in terrible times and places should be deprived of their romance or fantasy or humour. If anything, they probably need it more. Such prescriptive approaches put me off but gatherings of this sort always bring out the vehement best (or worst) in people. Speech-making is inherently so conducive to extreme positions that people tend to shear out any tentativeness from tone. But life is tentative at the best of times. (I’m tempted to add an ‘isn’t it’ at the end of that statement but I won’t because of this article.)
There was a symposium on ‘feminism in the Indian context’ in which I read a paper. There were some interesting points made about stereotypes perpetuated by religion, the silences of women affected by partition and so on. We were all coming at it from reasonably various viewpoints, which was good because it meant we didn’t say the same things. Some speakers relied heavily on examples from literature and there were at least two references to Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas. My talk was pretty simple and focused on the need to examine our own prejudices especially towards other women who we perceive as different. I drew more from posts and discussions we’ve had at Ultra Violet as opposed to literary texts–and later wondered why. Perhaps, because UV seems more ‘right here, right now’, a constantly updated motion picture? Apparently, some people in Punjabi heartland found some of my suggestions about sharing public spaces with sex workers and not expecting daughters-in-law to be deferential a bit ’shocking’. Or so I was told later by one of the Akademi people. Funny because I was actually trying really hard to keep it tame (without actually slipping into bovine). Maybe next time I’ll talk about what I really think of the traditional institution of marriage. That should be fun.
More on the poetry in the next post…