Taking the Stitches Off

THE HIGHEST COMPLIMENT in my grandmother’s book was “What a sweet girl! She keeps her mouth stitched up.” Of course, in Bengali, this has a nicer ring to it but it essentially means a girl who keeps quiet, who is silent in the face of adversity (and torture and ill-treatment), who endures. I grew up [...]

Menstruating Goddesses

WHEN IT WAS announced recently that the first batch of non-Brahmin students were being ordained for priesthood in Tamil Nadu, there was great reason to cheer and celebrate that priesthood has been “officially” thrown open to all the castes and that Brahmin exclusivity was set to break (at least theoretically). But what is disappointing is [...]

Dangerous Dalit Women and Witch-Hunters

ON MARCH 28, Lalpari Devi, a 45-year-old Dalit woman was accused of being a witch by caste-Hindu, feudal villagers in Bihar who mercilessly beat her up, paraded her through the streets, tied her to a palm tree, cut her hair and smeared her face with limestone paste. She was saved from certain death by [...]

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 [...]

Shedding the Ghunghat

THIS REPUBLIC DAY, newspapers and TV channels said with much elation that the first Indian woman President was taking the Republic Day salute. But the image of the president in ghungat (veil over the head) itself was disturbing. (Ironically, Prathibha Patil kicked up a controversy during the run-up to the presidential election by commenting against [...]

The Fair and the Lovely

THE STEREOTYPES: homemaker, femme fatale, bold and beautiful, supermom, sex bomb. The creators: television, cinema, advertisements, magazines. All depict women who can be beautiful only if they are white-skinned, reed-thin and look like Barbie dolls. Take mainstream Indian cinema. What is common across most of it is the depiction of women, who can never look [...]

Laugh A Big Laugh For Me

Smile. Ah! A little more and then, yes, a somewhat twisted smile and then…just a small laugh…a sound, almost the tinkle of a bell heard far away. Yes, that’s the way most women laugh (or pretend to) in the company of men making lewd jokes or ridiculing someone. This is particularly true of women who [...]

The Other ‘F’ Word

FEMINISM n. Belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.
Oh wait. That was the dictionary definition.
Let’s get real for a minute here.
Feminism n. Strong, (therefore threatening), militant, bordering-on-violent, man-hating, bra-burning females.
Which one do you think runs through the average person’s head when [...]