Ultra Violet is a place for Indian feminists. It’s a place for sharing stories and views and questions. It’s a place for exploration, opinion and information. It’s a place where we can come together to understand what other feminists around the country–or around the world–are saying. If you want to write for UV, please read this. More about UV here.

We’re Talking About…

July 01, 2010

The Redemption of Elizabeth Gilbert

LIKE MANY WOMEN, my reaction — or shall we say relationship? — to Elizabeth Gilbert’s juggernaut bestseller Eat Pray Love (first published and 2006 and by 2008 a global sensation) was complicated. On the one hand, the book is mildly embarrassing; Eat Pray Love falls squarely in the chick [...]

March 01, 2010

Marriage and Feminism

By Sreeparna Chattopadhyay
OVER THE LAST FEW decades, sociologists and economists have been exploring the consequences of marriage for men and for women. Many of the studies indicate that married people are happier, healthier and richer than single or divorced people. Sometimes this masks the fact that marriage has more advantages for men than for women [...]

January 19, 2010

Two Poems

By Janice Pariat

Bertha & I
Tonight I feel like Bertha Mason
with a fire and sadness in my soul.
I pace my room – this attic of madness –
it keeps me sane. I think it keeps me
whole, somehow. There’s no breeze
through the window, just an empty
vastness of night and shadow and
half-lights. And the knock on my door,
well, it [...]

October 16, 2009

Two poems by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming

To Get Myself Some Water
~Translated from Ellen Lai’s ‘Grassland’, written in Chinese

Our love toils about one period.
On the bloody and lusty grassland
You transform me into your self-pitied crippled rabbit.
When you finally discard everything you have
That is inside your permanently bulging equipment,
You turn your back
And ride towards the flat horizon
On a white horse
Whose tail is momentarily [...]

September 14, 2009

Two Poems by Aditi Machado

Iris and the sun
Iris thought of the sun as a stain
on the sky; it spread so keenly
when it set, perhaps the lake
was blotting paper.
Why she paid to sit in a boat,
no one knows. The oars scratched
at the surface — relentless nibs –,
disturbed the hulking dusk-yellow
ever so minutely, and nothing
was written that night.
*
Ragini to ex-lover
I am [...]

September 08, 2009

Dev.D through the Gender Prism

By Aditi Srivastava

“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic [...]

February 12, 2009

Saturday: Protest in Bangalore

DEFEND THE RIGHT TO LOVE
Date: Saturday, February 14, 2009
Time: 12:00pm – 2:00pm
Location: Mahatma Gandhi Statue on MG Road at 12 o’clock. We will walk through MG road and Brigade road

February 12, 2009

Fri and Sat: Protests in Delhi

AISA and AIPWA organised protest on Valentine’s day in Delhi.
Say NO to the ‘Morality Police’!
On February 13, on the eve of
VALENTINE’S DAY

September 16, 2008

On Marriage

HELLO UV READERS! I’m excited to be writing my first post here. And going by the old feminist slogan, “the personal is political”, my first post is about something that is intensely personal: marriage. My views on marriage have always been ambivalent. Even as a child, I recognized that most marriages I saw around me [...]

January 30, 2008

Daring to Divorce

A CLOSE PERSON has been toying with the idea of a divorce for over two years. She has left her husband several times. The most recent attempt seems the most likely to result in divorce—she talked to her husband seriously, met with a lawyer and got all the gory details of how the law stipulates [...]