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…

August 23, 2009

An Independence Day Autocritique

INDIANS ACROSS THE WORLD celebrated their independence day with dampened fervour over the past week, to salvage nationalist pride out of the economics of infection and pathology of recession. While all this was happening, two incidents caught my attention.
First, was a talk show on CNN-IBN discussing whether independent India is open to homosexuality, aired during [...]

January 27, 2009

Interview with Madhu Bhushan (cont…

THIS IS Part 2 of the two-part interview with Madhu Bhushan of Vimochana.
UB: The feminist movement has always been very critical of militarism and war. Can u tell us more about your involvement with these issues?
MB: While Vimochana’s specific concern was and is the socially sanctioned personal forms of violence perpetrated on women within [...]

August 18, 2008

Same-Sex Love: In Conversation with Dr Ruth Vanita

DR RUTH VANITA (b.1955), is a renowned academic and author specializing in lesbian and gay studies. Some of her acclaimed books include Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society (2002), Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West (2005), and Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and [...]

July 10, 2008

Scavengers As Models: Exploitation Chic or Empowering?

I FOUND this news story about Indian “sanitation workers” (scavengers, if we avoid the euphemism) modelling in New York pretty bizarre. I do hope you’ll read the article before proceeding to comment, but in a nutshell: 36 Indian sanitation workers were invited to a conference as part of the UN’s International Year of Sanitation. In [...]

March 29, 2008

Childbirth and Choices

WHILE THE FEMINIST movement may have focused more on the right to abortion than other reproductive rights, there is a growing acknowledgment in the US and elsewhere that women’s right to safe, natural childbirth is being severely threatened by the imposition of the medical model. In the medical system, pregnant women are treated as ’sick’ [...]

January 24, 2008

Of Need and Exploitation: Domestic Workers in Karnataka

‘I BEGAN WORKING when I was ten. I used to look after a child for which I was paid ten rupees a month. Today I am almost forty and I continue to work as a domestic maid. The difference is that my bones ache and I do not have the same energy. This is what [...]

August 27, 2007

Launching Ultra Violet

IT’S A TIME of intense and rapid change in India. Women are stretching their wings, exploring new spaces and testing the boundaries of old ones. With more women working, traveling, living on their own or managing high-powered careers, new challenges have emerged. Some women are coping with increased independence or living alone. Others are trying [...]