Even as I write this, I am NOT, repeat NOT PMSing. I understand there are some women who experience physical and emotional fluctuations in the days preceding Leak Week. I, fortunately, am not one of them. I do not cramp, I do not moan and I certainly don’t have my menstrual cycle whirring my tear ducts into overdrive. Tell me I’m PMSing, though, and I’ll ask you how you’d like your eyeballs for breakfast.  (And yes, I vaguely get the self-fulfilling prophecy here.)

When exactly did it become kosher to fling PMS in a woman’s face? In my experience, the worse the man’s behavior has been, the more likely he is to resort to the PMS argument, probably in the fervent hope that the woman in question will fall prey to the crazed hormones theory and let him off the hook. And in that case, not only have you offended my estrogen, but also my IQ.

The man-rational/woman-irrational stereotype has been done to death and Ballistic Betsy is so 1980s, so what’s next? Whatever happened to disappearing behind the newspaper? Can we have escapism back, please? It’s less messy, for one thing. And everybody goes to Hell with their eyeballs intact.

What about you folks? Have any of you been at the receiving end of pseudo PMSympathy and how do you typically respond?

Oh, and while we’re talking about our bodies, here’s Go Girl that tells us not to take life sitting down. Now can we finally scrap penis envy from those textbooks?

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 came before – today, tomorrow,
or never, who knows. Tonight I am
Bertha Mason. I see her in the mirror,
lifting her hand to strike the match,
to knock the lantern over. I wait for
the crackle and hiss of wood, the empty
kiss of lapping flames. Yet all around
me is darkness, darkness. What burns
is a fury for what’s come before
and will again.

***

To Sylvia

When I put away Ariel
I cannot sleep, though
the night is as you describe
it – black, blue. With the moon,
a white knuckle and terribly
upset. Do you still brood
like a rook in winter,
somewhere behind flowering,
mystical clouds? Or walk
a dark landscape beneath
gothic yew trees? Has the
terror come to life in death?
If so, you could not
have escaped, except for
the aged face in the mirror
that now lies forever youthful;
in the back of your poetry books.
I wonder if you still drag your
marble-heavy bag full of god.
If you still hate as much as you
used to. Or has it all magically
faded and made you pure as
a pane of ice? A gift to the stars.
In the distance, I think I see Ariel
– the hurl of mud from hooves,
the brown arc of neck – and you
alongside, running towards morning.

***

Janice Pariat is a freelance writer now based in her hometown Shillong after many years of being away in Delhi and elsewhere. She studied English Literature in St Stephen’s College and Communications at Westminster, London. At the moment Janice is working on several projects – a graphic novel set in Shillong, a first novel as well as a collection of poems based on women literary characters and writers.

The festival will be held at the Alliance Francaise de Bangalore on 26, 27 and 28 February 2010.

The BQFF 2010 is a non-ticketed free event aimed at providing a venue to screen films based on themes related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex (LGBT or Queer) communities across the world. This is the second edition of the Bangalore Queer Film Festival.

The event is presented by Good As You (a support group for LGBT people, est. 1994), SWABHAVA (a non-profit organisation working with LGBT issues in Bangalore, est. 1999) and WHaQ! (a support group for queer women, est. 2009).

While sincerely apologising for this short notice, the organisers request you to send in films for consideration/preview as early as possible. For more information please contact the organisers at blrqueerfilm fest[at]gmail.com. 

Mothers Sing a Lullaby
(after the 1994 Rwandan genocide)

Mothers sing a lullaby
As the dark descends on trees
Shutting out shadows.
The sensuous voices swish and swirl
Around shrubs and overgrown grass
Hiding mountains of decapitated dead
And the glint of machetes
That slashed shrieking throats.

In these camps without happiness
Mothers maintain the melody of life
Capturing wistful wind
To sing strength into the souls of children
Who have never known
The taste of morning porridge
Or heard the chirrup of crickets in the evenings.

Mothers sing a lullaby
For the staring faces
Who cringe at the sound of footsteps
Whose playmates are grinning skeletons.

Mothers become a lullaby
Silencing the sirens of sorrow
Restoring compassion to the nation.

***

My Mother in Three Photographs

Her face looks out
flawless
her sexuality electric
in a mini dress and sheer satin stockings
the girls of the 1960s
beautiful beyond belief.
She is looking through the camera
like her space is here and beyond
enchanting and enchanted
by the times when dreams of freedom were young
the fortunes of Uganda
hot and sizzling.

My mother in the 1970s
More sombre but her skin
Still flawless
The abrasive years gentle on her youth.
Her body wrapped in a long nylon dress
stopping her ankles and
full sleeves touching her wrists
hooded sorrow in her posture
the flowing dress
is not because
she is a widow (which is by government action)
but it is a government decree.
Her magnificence and elegance
Seem to support the given name of the dress
Amin nvaako.

My mother in the 1990s
neat short hair
luring in its intricate curls.
She wears a busuuti
a sign of the times
a return home, a finding of
uncertain peace
a maturing of a woman and nation
an endorsement of a recognition of the troubles
she has weathered
a sitting down to count her losses and blessings
and a hand over of the future.

P.S. Amin Nvaako means Amin let me be or Amin leave me alone

***
Susan Nalugwa Kiguli is a Ugandan poet and academic. She holds a PhD in English from The University of Leeds sponsored by the prestigious Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Makerere University, Uganda, and has served as the chairperson of FEMRITE, Uganda Women Writers’ Association. She is published widely in national and international anthologies and journals.

IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY devoured every one of the three books in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, you have at least heard of it: the story of the girl with the dragon tattoo who plays with fire or kicks the hornet’s nest. She is Lisbeth Salander, abused child, accused adult and unlikely crusader along with Mikael Blomkvist of the magazine, Millennium.

Over three books, the story is one of a giant cover-up to protect a secret organisation within Swedish intelligence. It is about the blind eye that is turned upon a mafia dealing in, among other things, human trafficking; the involvement of those in power and the denial of a woman’s human rights just so that a long-forgotten secret can remain buried. The sub-text of the series – made clear through telling epigraphs to each section – is of violent crimes committed against women in the name of national security or in the interests of keeping up appearances. It is a tale in which the silence surrounding the crimes makes society complicit in them.

The Millennium Trilogy is fiction. There are protagonists whose lives align with the investigations they conduct with varying degrees of commitment and interest. They can stand against the State because it is in their interest to have the truth brought out into the light and written about. And because it is fiction, people will listen and are capable of examining their society afresh in light of the new facts they are shown. Justice is possible in crime fiction as it is often not in real life.

Consider now a story closer to home: Two women leave one morning and do not return. The older of the two is marr

ied to the brother of the younger. Because they live in a place where it is not safe to be out after dark, the man – husband of one and brother of another – calls up a search party to look for them. With the police, they search every place theyknow to until well after midnight but they don’t find the two women. The police promise to resume early in the morning. At 5.30 the family begins to search again and, an hour later, are joined by the police. Almost immediately,a policeman finds the bodies of the two women in a shallow naala – one woman’s body has drifted further downstream

, but they are both there. The naala is in a well-guarded area, surrounded by manned and alert checkposts of various kinds. Nobody saw these women pass the previous day, and yet there their bodies are this morning, in a place the search party had checked earlier.

The police do what they do well: ruin the scene of crime by fishing the bodies out before photographing them as found, without cordoning the place off or collecting evidence from the surrounding area. The bodies are sent for two kinds of post-mortem: in one, a lung flotation test shows that death was not caused by drowning; the other post-mortem shows injuries and contusions to the faces; it also includes vaginal swabs that could have shown that the women had been raped.

Why the doubt? Either they had been raped or they had not. Surely forensic science has advanced even in India to prove rape without the shadow of a doubt?

In the days and months that follow, the doctors who did the post-mortem are either discredited or go back on their earlier testimonies; witnesses who say they heard women shouting from inside an army vehicle retract their statements. The family and elders of the place form an association to protest the course of the investigation.

Policemen are suspended; there are commissions and investigating teams; bails are applied for and granted; the bodies of the women are buried, exhumed months later and buried again. There is a lot of press, a lot of uproar. There are bandhs. Finally the investigation is handed over to the CBI.

Yes, this is Shopian. On the 14th of December the CBI filed its report in the J&K High Court, and not surprisingly, it said the women drowned to death in the naala they were found in. If their report contains answers to all the questions that people have been asking since May this year, we do not know it.

Independently of the CBI, in the knowledge that its report will say what it does, a group of women called the Independent Women’s Initiative for Justice went to Shopian to talk to the people concerned and came back with their own report, which they released days before the CBI report came out. Download the full report from here.

I was sent the report by a friend, with whom I was discussing this a few days ago, after reading a news report in the Hindu. He said, “There was a word used to sum it up: impunity. It’s not in the article.”

No, it’s not a word newspapers use, but it is one we are getting used to inferring in the context of any conflict.

In the first book of the Millennium Trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Blomkvist explains to Salander why Harriet Vanger ran away to Australia. Salander is angry and says, “If she had done something in 1966, Martin Vanger couldn’t have kept killing and raping for thirty-seven years.”

Among all the other troubles that have beset Kashmir for the last two decades, the ones that are least spoken about are the ones that the women have to bear: a proxy war that is fought through them and their bodies and the consequent loss of their liberty, their right to education, work and free movement when and where they please; their right, in fact, to a life lived without fear.

Inaction allows criminals to continue committing crimes with impunity: we know this; but we accept it more readily in fiction than in real life. This could be because in fiction we know someone else will take up the mantle of crusader on our behalf and justice will be done. Outside the pages of a book, it is never clear how an individual is to proceed and what, if anything, the outcome of any action will be.

Shopian is not Mangalore – we can achieve nothing, especially not ridicule, by sending anyone pink chaddis. What it could be is a test of our empathy and imagination, our ability to see ourselves in the women of Shopian and take action upon it because to remain silent would be to allow more such crimes to take place.

***

Sridala Swami’s poetry has appeared in various journals including Chandrabhaga, The Little Magazine, New Quest, Wasafiri, Asian Cha and the Creative Writing Issue of The South Asian Review (28:3, 2007). Her work also features in The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (ed. Jeet Thayil, UK: Bloodaxe, 2008) and in Not A Muse Anthology (ed. Katie Rogers and Viki Holmes, Hong Kong: Haven Books, 2009). Her first collection of poems, A Reluctant Survivor, published by The Sahitya Akademi in June 2007 and reprinted in 2008, was short-listed for The Shakti Bhatt First Book Award in 2008. She has written three books for very young children, which were published by Pratham in 2009. Swami’s photographs, Posting the Light: Dispatches from Hamburg, was exhibited at Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad, in November 2009. She lives in Hyderabad, India. She blogs at Spaniard in the Works.

EARLIER THIS MONTH, the ‘Staying Alive: Third Monitoring and Evaluation Report 09’ on the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 (PWDVA) was released in Delhi. The report tracks the implementation of the Act for the third year in a row and has become a way to document jurisprudential development of the law and create a monitoring system. Findings are shared at a national conference annually at which civil society organisations can question state officials and examine progress. This has inadvertently come to operate as a social audit. The naming and shaming as well as applauding and deriding of state departments in a public forum fosters accountability and drives state governments to take necessary action. For example, this year, Minister for Law and Justice M. Veerappa Moily recognised the need for fast-track courts to deal with cases of violence against women, easy availability of free legal aid and prioritisation of women’s cases in courts.

This annual report is authored by Lawyers Collective – Women’s Rights Initiative (LWCRI) and the International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW) in collaboration with the National Commission for Women (NCW) and supported by the UN Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women. Three states were studied this year: Delhi, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. A survey conducted in Delhi and Rajasthan with police and protection officers (POs) assessed their knowledge of the law, the practices they followed and attitudes towards the PWDVA and women. Data was gathered from the judiciary and women who had used the law were contacted to understand their experiences and expectations.

Questions centered around some of the key provisions of the PWDVA such as: categories of women the law protects (i.e. the applicant), who can the woman file the case against (i.e. the respondent), what acts qualify as domestic violence, what is the objective of counseling under the PWDVA, and the right to residence. For attitudinal assessment, several questions and statements were posed to gauge their attitude and gender bias, such as “Domestic Violence is a family affair”; “Women before filing a complaint of domestic violence should consider how that would affect their children”; “Women deserve to be beaten in certain situations”.

This assessment police exposed possible barriers or facilitators in women’s access to the law. It also tried to evaluate if the law is serving its normative function by transforming societal norms and internalising the unacceptability of violence against women in the private sphere.

The PWDVA in many ways is a path-breaking law, not merely because it is an independent civil law that identifies violence against women in the shared household as ‘domestic violence’, but also because it provides women the right to reside in the shared household and protects women in non-matrimonial relationships. The right to reside in the shared household irrespective of any right, title or interest in the property safeguards women from dispossession. It also challenges the moral assumptions infused in other Indian laws by protecting women in non-marital relationships. The law provides protection, maintenance, residence, compensation and custody orders to the woman who has so far been relegated to the status of a ‘mistress’ with little or no rights, without passing judgment or denying her merely because she falls outside the ‘morally acceptable’ institution of marriage. The PWDVA also goes beyond marital relationships. It protects mothers, sisters, daughters, widows and women who are in relationships in the nature of marriage. The objective of recognising relationships in the nature of marriage was to offer protection to women whose ‘marriages’ are not valid in law or fail to meet the requirements of a legally valid marriage.

The study captured the knowledge and acceptability of some of these key provisions. For instance, a certain percentage of POs in Delhi and Rajasthan felt that women in live-in-relationships, bigamous and fraudulent marriages should not be provided protection under the Act. When their knowledge on what acts come under the definition of domestic violence was tested, they recognised most acts of physical, verbal, emotional and economic violence but there was ambiguity surrounding forced sex in marital relationships.

The report also examined how well participants understand the objective and spirit of the legislation by asking questions about the motive of counseling. The purpose of counseling under the Act is to build the confidence of the woman and counsel the man to stop violence, as opposed to the common, incorrect perception of ‘saving families’. It was found that some percentage of the police in Delhi and Rajasthan saw counseling as a way of striking a compromise between couples. This perception trivialises the severity of domestic violence and reestablishes the need for training and sensitisation of key contact agencies such as the POs and the police. The orders from Gujarat show that in many cases, parties have reached a ‘compromise’ or ‘settled the matter’. Whether this settling happened with the consent of the woman or because she was pressurised ‘to save the family’ is not known.

Similarly, the recognition of sexual abuse as domestic violence in relationships, especially in marriages, still needs to gain acceptance. Sex as a conjugal right of the man is a widely accepted patriarchal view. The study revealed that knowledge on the subject was low among participants and sexual abuse was alleged in few orders. The inclusion of sexual abuse in the Act which includes sex without consent is a breakthrough in Indian law. (Indian law did not recognise marital rape.)

This study will hopefully become an effective model to ensure implementation of the law and determine what areas need attention in sensitisation programs. Regular audit of the law and state functionaries influence states to adopt novel methods for better implementation and promote transparency and accountability through public forums.

Please refer to the report for a detailed discussion on the data gathered this year.

***

Sonal Makhija is a Bangalore-based lawyer and legal consultant. Her areas of interest are gender, human rights and anthropology of law.

YESTERDAY, I WAS LOOKING

It reminded me of this time I was talking to someone about writing for UV. She’s a quiet, dark-eyed girl who rarely gets emotional. On this occasion, she did. ‘What’s the point of all this talk?’ she said suddenly. ‘We just become more and more aware of our rage. And don’t know what to do with it.’

This sense of inchoate rage twinned with helplessness — I’ve often heard feminists talk about it. I suspect it’s why more women don’t write for UV (but maybe they just hate the super, dynamic masthead). God knows there’s hardly a dearth of issues to talk about in this country.

The feeling intensifies, I think, when the problem is at a remove. Not only is there a sense of ‘what can I do?’ but there’s also the fear that one doesn’t know enough or really understand. It can make one feel like a tourist in someone else’s battlefield. A bystander who’ll tell the story, then brush its dust off and walk away unscathed. This adds guilt to the dense mix. Robert Hass has talked about this problem of feeling like a voyeur or a tourist in relation to writing political poetry but it can be applied to any writing. Especially for a site such as this which does have an express political purpose. It affects what some of us choose to write about. It certainly affects me. How to talk about problems that have never touched my life, and most likely never will?

It’s easier to stay silent, stick to a few safe issues. Easier to talk about the personal.  Easier to remain within the margins of one’s limited knowledge and even more limited control. Yet this can lead to a baffling silence about other things, a disturbing silence. A silence which at its heart may just be careful, but in its effects may end up being plain wrong. As a blogger, I’m constantly conflicted by this. I don’t think I’m likely to find any answers soon but I wanted to put it on the table, a live thing for us to look at.

At any rate, I do believe in this: even when there are problems that we can do nothing about, it’s important to know. To note. To remember. Because forgetting would be the last nail in the coffin, the final bone burned to cinders.

So here are the excerpts:

• India holds the last position (134th) in the health and survival subindex. A huge factor contributing to this is poor maternal health, with only 42% of births in the country supervised by health professionals. Close to 300 Indian women die every day during childbirth or of pregnancy-related causes.
• India also has among the worst sex ratios at birth in the world. The strong preference for sons and the disproportionate sex ratio at birth make India one of the few countries where males significantly outnumber females and the imbalance is getting worse.
• Close to 245 million Indian women lack the basic capability to read and write. Almost twice as many girls as boys are pulled out of school or never sent to school.
• Women’s labour force participation, is at 36%, less than half of the labour force participation rate of men (85%). Women’s estimated earned annual income is less than a third of men’s income. Women make up only 3% of legislator, senior official and managerial positions.
• Over time, we’re closing the education gap but the health gap is getting worse.

You can download the full report here (pdf). There’s lots more info there including some cheerier stuff like the high level of political participation. Here’s an interesting related report at IPS. And she’s hoping Clinton will help change things.

The world premiere of Eve Ensler’s ‘I Am An Emotional Creature’ was some things expected and many not. It began regularly enough, with the usual spine-tingling statistics on female abuse, neglect and violations. Essayed as a relentless spiral of separate pieces without an intermission, the portrayals of women from around the world shifted from mediocre to spectacular as the play progressed. Moments of intense pain in “Free Barbie” were interspersed with a more defiant stance in “The Refusers” and stories of prostitution in Eastern Europe, military sex slaves in Ghana, bulimia in North America, child labor in China and forced cosmetic surgery in Iran tumbled out unapologetically, amidst joyous expressions of dance and womanhood. Woman cried, laughed, screamed, spoke, vented, explained, twirled and chanted their right to be emotional creatures and engage in the feminine act of dance as a form of expression.

Which left me wondering if this wasn’t stereotyping my gender just as much as any other descriptor. Are all women truly emotional creatures? More than men? Do we feel more intensely? Need to express more urgently? Or are we as much victim to this erroneous belief as to the acts perpetrated on us worldwide? Do all women desire to dance? Is feminine expression primarily manifested through physical acts? I, for one, certainly feel no need to plunge into a waltz each time I absolutely must say what I feel.  I am born of a mother who clicks her tongue at being “too emotional” and believes it clouds practicality and better judgement. My friends are women who rarely cry, even when they have much reason to. Are performance and feeling necessarily the domain of the XX? Could we not be harming ourselves by tarring all women across the world with the same brush and insinuating that a woman’s natural response to a situation is based on her feelings first and intellect later, if at all?

I could empathize with individual tales but not with the premise. And while I wish women power to overcome their tormentors, human and situational, I also hope that they strive to stand apart from the cluster of characteristics that haphazardly—and often thoughtlessly—define their gender.

~~~

To view a short clip about the play, go here.

IQBAL HASAN’S PAINTING of a young woman sitting on a chair with an older woman standing beside her makes for the cover of Anuradha Marwah’s third and latest novel Dirty Picture. As a reader and someone who has seen these paintings in a plush Lahore restaurant called The Cuckoo’s Den, incidentally located in the  heart of the city’s red light area, I immediately identified it as one of several painted by the artist to document the lives of prostitutes in this area. Most locals are shy of admitting to the existence of prostitution in the city. For them, the red light area in the forted city still has certain mujra performances by ‘artists’ and nothing else. The painting illustrates in brush strokes what Anuradha Marwah documents in words – exploitation of women and the lower classes through a deep-rooted mechanism of inequitable gender constructions often obfuscated by ill-disguised hypocrisy.

The novel has been read as a fictionalised documentation of the Ajmer Sex Scandal of 1992. However, Dirty Picture, tracing the personal narratives of two sisters Reena and Bharti, uses the incident as a site to critique exploitation at the levels of gender and class.

Reena and Bharti live very different lives yet their narratives absurdly merge into each other’s forthright questions about notions of love and consent. Reena, divorced from a man who was struggling with substance abuse, is engaged to the married CEO of the company that

employs her. She lives a seemingly comfortable life in the cosmopolitan city of Mumbai weaving dreams of a married life with her boss, Suhas, a middle-aged man inebriated by the power he wields.

In Ajmer, Bharti lives a life driven by idealism and a desire to make a difference to the parochial town and its regressive outlook. To gain clout in college politics, she befriends local politicos Anish and Sarosh, which in itself is a scandal as these are Muslim men. Sucked into a vortex of political intrigue, Bharti finds herself involved in a sex racket with no one to turn to and nowhere to go. She looks at her sister

for help in the hope of escaping an Alcatraz of impending shame but Reena is caught up in her relationship, which she realizes will never evolve into more than that of mistress.

A novel that gains momentum with each word hurtling towards its fatalistic conclusion, this reads more like a journalistic account than a work of fiction. The universe of Dirty Picture has no clean edges to it. The world of Reena and Bharti leave the readers with a keen sense of discomfort. The journalistic gaze gains strength in the section on the making of the blue film where the writer assumes a stationary camera angle and pens an otherwise traumatic imagery in monotone, thus de-fetishising the woman’s body. De-sensationalising the issue was the writer’s concern and the literary tools that she uses to describe the sexual scenes in the novel achieve the purpose quite effectively.

Marwah’s writing has often been called manly. This refers perhaps to the way she handles sex in her works. According to her, when people say she does not write like a woman, they mean her writing is not internal and domesticated. She says this is only a perception about fiction by women. She herself finds writing an exercise in androgyny. The demeanour of the book as well as the attitude to writing seems like a simultaneous exercise in involvement and objectivity for the writer.

Unlike her first two novels, The  Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta and Idol Love, which negotiate the space between the personal and the political without locating a concrete political centre, Marwah’s third novel is honest, brave and candid. She fleshes out each character — even the ‘villains’ — so non-judgmentally that they could be any of us. The nonchalant prose disallows prejudice as reader’s judgments too are suspended and deferred, nudged towards a desire for deeper analysis. During her extensive research for the novel, the writer came across a number of reactions and observations to the scandal. She documents some of these in the introduction to her novel: ‘Ajmer tapes’ are still freely available in the blue-film circuit. Muslim men consider it their obligation to ‘spoil’ Hindu girls. The real culprits have escaped; the arrested men are scapegoats. The real culprits are bureaucrats and politicians; the arrested men are scapegoats. Why did the girls keep going back to their tormentors? Could it be that they were enjoying the sex act? Certain Hindu sub-communities have issued whips against their boys marrying girls from Ajmer. Three of the girls involved in the sex scandal have committed suicide. It wasn’t suicide; the families murdered their girls to escape the stigma. What else could they have done?’

The victims of the scandal either committed suicide or are leading their lives in anonymity denying any association to the scandal that shocked the whole country. The victims have been coerced by the same socio-political paradigms to erase or at least pretend to erase all memory of the event. Dirty Picture challenges such an erasure, the coercive structures that first conceive and then erase such shameful memories, the facade of notions of women’s emancipation within such structures, and most importantly, the networks that centres of power operate to veil their existence.

As Manju Kapoor, the author of Difficult Daughters writes, “This is a story that needs to be told, but because of its complexity, it is not an easy story to tell. But Anuradha persisted, and we all owe her a debt of gratitude that she did. This particular incident at least will not be covered by the dust of ages.”

Dirty Picture, Author: Anuradha Marwah, Delhi: Indialog Publications November 2008, Price: Rs 195.

***

Sanyukta Saha has just completed an MA in Theatre and Development Studies from the University of Leeds (UK). She received the Inlaks Scholarship last year to pursue this degree. She is part of a feminist activist theatre group called ‘pandies’ in Delhi and has been involved with a number of amateur and professional productions in India.

One phrase from her rebuttal is particularly striking: I believe that the history of women can be seen, in some ways, as a history of language. Language, of course, is more than just words – it’s phrasing, intonation and intent as well as vocabulary. The uproar over Trunk’s tweet went well beyond shock that she had reacted with relief to the miscarriage – it was really more about the fact that she had trespassed some code of conduct by which women are expected to speak, or keep silent about, certain things. And even the way we’re expected to feel those things.

What the controversy throws light on is how in spite of many taboos about speaking about personal experience becoming obsolete, how they are discussed can still scandalize and shame the speaker/writer. If Trunk had tweeted, for instance, that she was devastated, or returned after a few tweetless days and sadly and diffidently “confessed” that the miscarriage had put her out of action, it’s almost impossible that such a storm would have brewed. The problem was honesty about an experience, outside the fray of acceptable understandings and acceptable retellings of such experiences.

Nobody is above bias, and we both judge and are judged. I considered what this means in my own life. On the one hand, what this means is that (with big thanks to Eve Ensler) I can say “vagina”, and not have anyone bat an eyelid, but if I say “cunt”, my own preferred word in both conversation and writing, I get nothing but disgusted looks – instantly, my upbringing, intelligence and feminism are questionable. It means that if I ask that someone dismiss my cattiness as PMS, it’s okay, but if I write a poem about how I love the experience of menstruation (as I did some years ago, to horrified reactions), something’s wrong. On the other hand, however, if someone uses the phrase, “that female” to refer to a woman or girl, my hackles get raised, indifferent to the fact that in India, the usage is not derogatory. Similarly, I am sanctimonious about people who define sex in heteronormative or phallocentric terms, in spite of knowing that they may have never been exposed to alternate paradigms of thought.

What about you? How are you limited – whether by your own expectations or by others’ – by the notion of singular ways to experience or express certain things? How does it affect your experiences as, or viewpoints towards, women?

Of relevance is Chimamanda Adichie’s speech about “the dangers of the single story”, which you can watch here.