Mistaking one work of fiction to represent all women in a country is rather blinkered and when it’s a country of the diversity and complexity of India, it borders on the ridiculous. Compounding this by attempting to pontificate on a subject about which you clearly know nothing and circulating this in an international newspaper should be a libelous act. I refer to Anand Giridharadas’s recent piece ‘A feminist revolution skips the liberation’ in the column ‘Letter from India’ in the International Herald Tribune. The writer begins innocuously enough by reviewing Meenakshi Madhavan Reddy’s book ‘You are Here’. The trouble begins when Madhavan Reddy’s fictional protagonist Arshi, drawn from her blog, begins to represent all Indian women–or at least all Indian urban women and what he calls ‘Indian feminism’. [Read More]