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Vogue India •

At 85, this feisty Supreme Court advocate still won’t back down from a fight

There are no vestiges of Supreme Court advocate Indira Jaising’s professional life or the landmark cases she had fought over six decades. Nothing about Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation, which led to a landmark judgement being passed in favour of pavement dwellers’ rights; nothing about her role in convincing the court to strike down the Triple Talaq; nothing about the long fight for justice for victims of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. Her living room is instead a picture of tidy miscellany:...
The Hindu •

Review | The Witch by Marie NDiaye is a darkly absurd tale of motherhood and magic

This is no ordinary vision of a witch. There is no broomstick or cauldron, nor is she a spinster or a widow. Lucie is entirely ordinary, living a most banal existence in this year’s International Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, The Witch, by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump.Immured by her husband’s punishing gaze, Lucie leads a domestic life in suburban France, struggling with her middling powers and diminished role as a mother. Critics have noted that the translation of...
Vogue India •

Asako Yuzuki writes women she knows you won’t like. ‘Butter’ and ‘Hooked’ are proof she won’t stop

From her early work, ‘Forget Me, Not Blue’, to the award-winning Butter and now Hooked, Yuzuki has constructed a world where female friendships begin to unfurl. Exchanges between women are taut as they size each other up based on ideas borrowed from men, and compare their bodies and successes in the workplace and at home. In her novels, as it is in the real world, women’s bodies are no longer theirs for pleasure and joy. They become flawed, insatiable and in need of constant correction through d...
UpBeat •

How women’s unpaid labour in livestock care has become a source of livelihood

At 2,000 metres above sea level, even before the cowbells begin to ring at five in the morning, women in 40 villages around Darlaghat–41 kilometres from Shimla–are already on the move. They milk the cows, then climb the slopes to the nearest road to deliver the milk to an Amritdhara Milk Co-operative van.This daily exchange in these hills is indicative of more than a routine, it is also a reflection of who earns, and how.Women have always been a key part of agriculture, even if their labour has...
Hindustan Times •

Love at first deadlift: How weightlifting changed my life

15% concentrated power of will /5% pleasure, 50% pain /And a 100% reason to remember the name…”Shivani Kumra often listens to rap by Mike Shinoda as she deadlifts 70 kg at the gym.Dumbbells fascinate her, says the 41-year-old, laughing.She was a 24-year-old MBA student when she began to wonder what lifting weights might do to her body, says the 5’2” executive.Could they be the thing that turned her from an underweight weakling, as she saw herself, into the mean machine she wanted to be? At the t...
Hindustan Times •

Home is where the hurt is: Talking to Palestinian-American writer Hannah Lillith Assadi

Eventually, in America, he meets Sarah, a Jewish woman whose love brings both refuge and pain. What has it been like to reckon with this legacy? Excerpts from an interview.It traces the journey of a five-year-old Palestinian boy named Sufien from his ancestral home on a hilltop in Safad (now part of Israel) — a place where the family had lived for so many centuries, they had no memory of ever being anywhere else — to a refugee camp in Syria, a tiny flat in Kuwait, then life as a student in Italy...
The Hindu •

Exiled Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipur on her International Booker Prize-nominated novella

In writing Women Without Men (Zanan bedun-e Mardan), Shahrnush Parsipur gave her female characters a freedom that cost her her own. Set against the CIA-backed 1953 coup in Iran, the novella follows five women — a sex worker, a schoolteacher, a menopausal housewife, and two unmarried women — all seeking escape from the religious diktats governing their lives. In the book, virginity is divorced from honour, and shame is cast aside to create identity.The vision was radical for its time. Published i...
Vogue India •

Sunita Williams knows exactly what she wants to do post-retirement

Like a character in an Arundhati Roy novel, I wait by the silver-green backwaters of Kozhikode. The leafy riverbank is hushed, save for a lone boatman dipping his oars into the water,­ sending ripples fanning out like rays of the sun. Soon, voices drift closer. I turn and spot her, emerging from behind slanting coconut fronds, her hand extended.The first thing I notice about Sunita Williams is her smile: sunny and wide enough to reassure people around the world when her eight-day mission stretch...
Nature •

I encourage women to claim their space in astrophysics and beyond

Theoretical astrophysicist Debarati Chatterjee has always seen gender for what it is — a social construct. Despite witnessing domestic violence as a child, experiencing sexual harassment as an undergraduate and a PhD student, and being one of the small proportion (around 20%) of astronomers in the world who are women, she hasn’t let her gender define her career. Leaving her home country of India to start a postdoctoral position in Germany in 2010, she saw that prejudices based on race, class and...
UpBeat •

AI In Reproductive Health: Can Chatbots Promote Safe Abortions Among Rural Indian Women?

“In 2020, when Covid-19 hit, our youth leaders – who educate young people, especially women on sexual and reproductive health (SRH) – had to pause their routine visits to the villages. We started receiving phone calls, sometimes frantic ones, asking for guidance, especially on safe abortion practices. That’s when we thought – why not a chatbot,”’ says Anisha Aggarwal, senior director, strategy and development, Ipas Development Foundation (IDF). Since 2001, IDF has been working with national and...
Vogue India •

Banu Mushtaq wrote ‘Heart Lamp’ for 33 years. Now, it’s nominated for the International Booker Prize

The rebellious writer has blazed a path in a rural Muslim community that most do not understand. She attended university when most of her peers were tying the knot in their teens, married for love at 26, became a reporter for the award-winning vernacular paper Lankesh Patrike, then an activist in several protest literary circles including Bandaya Sahitya and eventually an advocate; not to miss her two terms in the municipal council. The daunting prospect of owning her writerly voice only came to...
Vogue India •

Three Indian female historians discuss how it is not only the future that is female but also the past

History, by default, has been a male dominion. Tucked inside school textbooks are tales of valour and conquests, wars and spoils, almost always performed by men. Reading about fearless souls striding onto the battlefield or flouting societal expectations, be it Akbar the Great, Bhagat Singh or Kabir, has always felt manly.After all, who has ever got their blood pumping over Mirabai’s Sita-like devotion or Sarojini Naidu’s role in the freedom struggle with her docile title, the ‘Nightingale of In...
Vogue India •

Bilquis Mir is the first Indian woman on the Paris Olympics jury. Her journey started in the deep end

In less than 10 days from now, Bilquis Mir will become the first Indian woman on the Paris Olympics jury. Not just Indian but she will also be the first Muslim, the first Kashmiri and the first canoeist from India. In marking all those firsts, Mir will defy the odds of coming from a patriarchal society, a state in perennial turmoil and a cricket-obsessed country that has yet to encourage other sports with the same gusto.“When I am asked about what I do and I reply that I am a kayaker, pat comes...
OPEN Magazine •

Rise, Ladies

METOO #INCLUSIONRider #BeBoldForChange… The battlefront may have changed from marches to hashtags, but the fight for gender equality continues to be waged. Proof lies in Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s recent column for The Guardian, where she wrote, ‘Even today, after a century of feminism, we can’t fully be ourselves, don’t belong to ourselves. Our defects, our cruelties, our crimes, our virtues, our pleasure, our very language are obediently inscribed in the hierarchies of the male, are punis
OPEN Magazine •

Everyday Heroines

THE BEGINNING OF a novel is always a blank page. Kiran Nagarkar’s latest, Jasoda, too has its introductory pause after which its eponymous protagonist appears on stage for a brief moment. In that glimpse, she unyokes the cows, takes off her ghagra, lets her son play with the drawstrings and gives birth to a baby girl, a girl she strangles to death.

Another blank page hits us, for the novel hasn’t even begun. It’s just the prologue.

Jasoda is the woman in parenthesis here, a woman who belongs t
Scroll.in •

‘We are not survivors but everyday semi-privileged women’: Laaleen Sukhera, editor of ‘Austenistan’

It is a truth universally acknowledged that it is impossible to talk about Jane Austen without quoting Jane Austen.

Pakistani journalist Laaleen Sukhera, who runs the Jane Austen Society of Pakistan (JASP), decided to follow tradition. She saw Lizzy Bennets, Emma Woodhouses and even Lady Susans all around her. And so Sukhera, along with six other members of the JASP wrote seven short stories about these modern-day Austen heroines, sporting Chanel and sipping champagne under a shamiana.

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