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 lit category, a schmaltzy fairytale-like admission [...]

Escape

WHERE EVERY FAMILY wants a hundred sons, but not even one daughter, where infant girls are killed using many ingenious methods, or even simpler, not allowed to be born, in such a land, what is the future of womankind? Manjula Padmanabhan’s recently published novel, Escape is the dystopian vision of such a society where the [...]

“Frida To Sharanya”

Sleep wherever is most convenient for you. Whoever and whatever is left in the morning, take home. Be kind. All the world is yours for the taking, long as you know that your little heart is theirs for the breaking. Leave lipstick on their china and on your letters. Make sure they know that you’re [...]

The Secret Lives of Women

THE HADEES he had read yesterday talked about how it was Shaitan who always tried to corrupt us. If we escaped his attempts, we would surely go to Heaven. In Heaven, rivers of milk and honey flow, thousands of Houri women serve the men and make them happy. As she remembered this, she wondered, if [...]

Indian Feminism 101

By Shilpa Phadke 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 [...]

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 [...]

The God of Male Things

WESTERN FEMINIST movements in the early 1970s confronted an uncomfortable truth: the notion that God was male dominated every aspect of religion. As feminist philosopher Mary Daly summed up, “If God is male, then the male is God.” The question of gender, religion and faith has been a very contentious one. Feminists have looked into [...]

In Conversation: Dr Gail Omvedt

DR GAIL OMVEDT (1941) is an American-born Indian sociologist and human rights activist. Some of her notable books are: We Shall Smash This Prison: Indian Women in Struggle (1979), Gender and Technology: Emerging Asian Visions (1994), Dalits and the Democratic Revolution (1994), and Dalit Visions: the Anticaste movement and Indian Cultural Identity (1994). In this [...]

Balancing Work and Womanhood

I CONFESS, I AM reading Dr. John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: Together Forever. His insights are valuable, in a generalising “men are like this and women are like that” kind of way (though he does make disclaimers that not everything he says fits with everyone, just like different outfits may [...]

What Happened to All The Women?

THERE IS A STORY about a Sufi saint who used to wander the city streets and people around him called him a madman. One day, he was wandering the streets near the palace on a donkey. He suddenly got off and walked up to a board in front of the palace. The board said: ‘This [...]

The Woman, the Witch and the Goddess

THIS STORY is both old and new, traditional and modern. The scapegoating, finger-pointing and name-calling of those who are different, those who threaten the social order, those who happen to have a female face. In the past two months, there have been at least two instances of witch lynching in India reported in the mainstream [...]