And in India, compared to earlier years, there are a lot of women What is distinctive about women’s writing is that though it began not very long back, it is now very confident. Themes change, narrative styles change, etc. It’s not just women’s writing, all writing keeps changing it can never remain static. How has women’s writing changed in India? It can’t be called being ‘confined’, because it is a movement whose spread is wide it embraces many issues which affect women and is connected to every aspect of women’s lives. Feminism did not deal with one particular wrong, like the Suffragettes who fought for the vote. Whether it’s the law, or social rules, or medicine, or religion, or customs and traditions, or women trying to find a place in the world-all of these went against women. It came into being to try and redress these wrongs. I think it would be more difficult, what with an increasing number of people taking to writing.įeminism came out of a consciousness of the injustice done to females in many ways through the years. Since then I have had no problems getting a publisher. How difficult or easy is it to get published in India? Finally, a writer is a writer gender does not come into it. All the voices that are part of a novel will find a place in it. As for ‘dismissing’ voices, it is the most unlikely thing any writer will do. Nobody can, or should, tell a writer what or who to write about. The trouble is that writing about women is somehow considered an aberration, if not a bad habit! Time we moved away from this way of thinking. When, in fact, women constitute one half of the human race! It’s part of the denigration of women’s writing to call it ‘limited’.
I don’t see anyone asking men why they write, only or mainly, about men, or calling their writing ‘limited’. Women were on the sidelines, they were ‘written about’. Besides, let’s remember that men have been writing mainly about men for centuries. Through one woman, one man, one family, a novelist can evoke the world. A novelist, at least a good novelist, reaches the universal from the particular. They do not write about a class of people, but about particular individuals.
Have you ever felt that this limits the range of your work? Does it sometimes entail dismissing other voices in the same space?Īll writers are limited in one way or another.