As a young teen and adult, my relationship with books was almost sexual. There was an endless search – for something, not quite sure what. In pre-liberalisation India, in a pre-internet world, the search for a name for my feelings, the search for a rendition of those feelings was urgent and amorphous. At New Book Land, the circular bookshop in Janpath, I remember buying for ten rupees a book of short stories by an Egyptian writer, Ahdaf Soueif, and feeling thrilled by what I read. In the British Council library I borrowed two books, because one’s cover entranced me, full of fairy tale circus images, and the other’s name delighted me – Sexing The Cherry and Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.
Walking on the street in New York, I bought for one dollar a copy of Bell Hooks’ Black Looks. I had no canon to go to, no website with a list and no older person to tell me books I could read. Yet there must be some mystical algorithm that helped me find these books or the books find me, even before I had found the word feminism in any meaningful way. The finding of books, the finding oneself through books, was matched only by the excitement of sharing them with friends. The love poetry, the novels, the philosophical essays – we were fired by them and dying to share and discuss.
Romances and detective novels quickened my blood and I inhaled them, the library, my drug source. On my shelf, like the shelf of many young women like me, was a dokra figurine – woman reading a book on a charpai (I had bought it for 40 rupees at Cottage Emporium, after saving up a little). Last week, I saw it at the Heaven and Earth Spa in Bombay’s Terminal 2. It made me laugh as well as sigh. Urvashi Butalia, who collects these figurines, told me that they probably came about as a result of the women’s literacy movements – rural women were to be found reading all the time and the artists began to depict it. It’s a nasha, we know that. The women figurines read as they suckle their babies, as they comb their own hair, or as they just loll in the afternoon.
I think many of us are made through the chance encounters with books and the almost illicit inability to leave one, the luxuriating and over-indulging is what makes us feel more alive. Following our minds, following our hearts, following our bodies as we follow someone else’s words. Committing those words to memory, writing them down in notebooks, sometimes just caressing the cover of the book or smelling it – we do this only with lovers and children after all.
For feminism, the business of books was an Olympic conversation. It was turning to someone and telling them, “Let’s talk about sex, knowledge, feminism, politics, war, the world.” It was filling up the world with women’s experiences and changing not how we thought of it, but how we thought of ourselves in it. These books changed the mainstream through their sheer exuberance and energy. They did not wait to be accommodated or ‘acknowledged’.
When I started making the documentary, Unlimited Girls, I was 30 and these worlds of books seemed inextricably tied to the world of feminism. The two seemed to come in and out of each other and from time to time, through this, activism, academia, art and life too seemed to get braided. So came the interviews with Urvashi Butalia, co-founder of Kali for Women along with Ritu Menon (today they run separate feminist publishing houses, Zubaan and Women Unlimited). It felt like a way of being able to represent many more women in the film than a film could accommodate.
Below is the transcript of the interview with Sonal Shukla, who co-founded Vacha. As a library it ran from her living room at first and then they got a big space in a municipal school where the interview was shot.
INTERVIEW WITH SONAL SHUKLA DONE IN 2001
Sonal: Vacha is a women’s resource centre. It’s part of the women’s movement. It has grown out of (the) women’s movement. It started out as a library and cultural centre.
Q: Why is it important to have books or a library?
Sonal: (Laughs) Why do you think? Women like to read about women’s issues. We need information. Information is so important. Women were kept away from knowledge, definitely about themselves but also about other things. They did not have the right to read Vedas, they did not have the right to say the gayatri mantra. It’s about time we took knowledge, information and women’s issues seriously.
Q: You have all kinds of books here, right?
Sonal: Yes. You know what? With those old feminists, we would get a lot of books, acquire a lot of books and what happens usually – if someone borrows 5 rupees from you, that person will remember to return it but a book borrowed, it just goes. So, some of us just pooled in our books to create this library.
Q: You also have detective fiction and Shobhaa De and stuff?
Sonal: Yes we do. Why not? It’s women’s writing, it’s exciting (laughs). We are not here just for breast-beating, we are here for fun. We like detective fiction. Lots of women do and lots of women write detective fiction and they write good detective fiction, so we have it here. Otherwise why would people come? Only these careerist researchers will come and … there are people who love books and then some books read better than fiction. Take this book ‘Demon Lovers’, the woman is a poet but the book is on women and terrorism, and their relationship with terrorism, but it reads better than a novel, I would say. It’s a favourite book here.
Q: You have many members?
Sonal: Ya. Several. The college students come here only unfortunately to do their projects. It’s older women who come to read for pleasure. But I think it is also because they have more time, especially if they have jobs as college teachers or homemakers. Also today is the age of television, network, computers and so on, people read less. But they’ll get older don’t worry. That’s the best thing about age, everyone is going to get older (laughs).
Q: What were the goals of the Indian women’s movement?
Sonal: To change the world, nothing less, really. You’ll read the memoirs…Dalit ke saath mein, Shramik ke saath mein… The feminist movement was very active in supporting the textile strike and concerned about many things about democratic rights issues, environmental issues, ecological issues, peace of course… all kinds of things. What we got coverage for and what took up most of our time and energy was dowry and rape and domestic violence… but we also created women’s studies, so there were a lot of things like that.
See, movement when you say, it’s a political thing. And in some sense it is also a vanguard kind of thing. A lot of initiatives, and no resources available and you become resourceful. People don’t understand one thing that you can’t be part of the women’s movement or an NGO about women without for instance, reading about women. I’m amazed you know, that people don’t read. They don’t want to see what has gone into the debates about gender about women’s issues in India. You do anything else – economics, law – you would have to read you know. Here, just because you are a woman and you were associated with some women’s work and have some feelings about things and so on, you feel you can make statements on that.
Q: How do you distinguish between poetry written by a woman and feminist poetry?
Sonal: There are three kinds, whether it is poetry or novels or any kind of literature and you should talk to a feminist critic about this but… And when you are doing something on the women’s movement you shouldn’t keep out women academics, women’s studies people, otherwise this film will be incomplete – that’s part of (the) women’s movement. There are women writers…or writers that happen to be women, then there are women who write in the feminine. They write as women. Their experience is important and they depict that. And the third is feminist writing, which is committed to a certain worldview and is committed to change. It still has to be literature. Which means it has to meet the norms of good literature, not norms laid down maybe… in a very constricted way, masculine norms…but it still has to have the validity as a work of art as a work of literature. So there are these 3 kinds.
Q: I found very few books on the history of the women’s movement. Why is there such a dearth?
Sonal: There is a dearth of books in general on Indian women. We women don’t have purchasing power so how will people publish it? Publishers also have a problem. So there is that.
Q: Also there is a dearth of visionary writing… I would read bells hooks and feel inspired but I didn’t find that…
Sonal: And yet the first feminist utopian novel is written in India. Directly in English by a Muslim woman of Bengali origin, called Sultana’s Dream. It’s a fantastic book. And that was written by Rukhaiya Sakhawat Hussian who lived and grew up in Dhaka, married young to a man in Bihar who encouraged her to learn English. He was an officer in the British Army, and then he died and she was a young widow and she moved to Calcutta. She has written usually in Bengali, but this book because she was learning English and she wanted to impress her husband, she wrote this book and put it where he would remove his hat and shoes. He saw that, read it right there and then and said … “What a revenge!” They had a very loving and affectionate relationship. This was published in 1905 in an English language women’s journal that was published from Madras. So until this came to light, people used to think that Charlotte Perkins Gillman, great writer, her book Her Land was the first feminist utopian novel that was published in 1915. But no, it was an Indian Bangladeshi woman who did this.
Q: So either that there are women writing in other languages that do this or that we don’t know about…
Sonal: Why? Because we don’t read other languages and there is no interest. Once there is sufficient interest, the translations start happening. What supports English should be made available to the vernacular so to say. It is now, that these translations are taking place from these rich languages…
PV: How did you get involved with the feminist movement and come to start Vacha?
Sonal: There was a shortage of space in Bombay and by our middle class standards we had an extra room. There was this woman… a friend of someone I knew and she didn’t have space to live. So I said ok, let her stay here. Today she is a lawyer, Gayatri Singh. She was working with working class people, and she had already been part of the women’s movement, so she and Vibhuti Patel and various other women used to meet here and they formed the first Socialist Women’s Group, and called a National Seminar for all those women who were interested. And I attended that workshop. And they formed a Feminist Network, which published the first journals in catalogue form in English and Hindi. Same time as Manushi came out in Delhi. That was published from here. Feminist Network was supported from here, from my house. So (I was) mainly a supporter, an outside supporter.And when I read feminist literature, sort of penny dropped you know. Many times when you read these things you say…this is what (it is)… but you never articulated it that way. It was very exciting as it always is. Never mind things people say about feminism, when a feminist comes and speaks, women respond to her.Then the Mathura rape case thing happened. Right. So that’s when I realized you can be an outside supporter of tribal struggles and working class struggles or something but you can’t be a woman and be an outside supporter. So when this letter came about the Mathura rape case judgment that four lawyers had sent, two women made 50 copies of it and sent it. I was one of the women who received it and 49 women finally turned up for that meeting.And immediately (the) Forum Against Rape was formed, which is now (the) Forum Against Oppression of Women. And I was already in my mid-30s. I could have lost the chance. Women in my generation… are very few in this movement. Then later on (the) Women’s Centre was formed here and other organizations worked from here.
This is how I became part of it. Having friends, having shared something, having some background, so it is always a combination, Paromita, it is never one thing.
Q: What was it do you think about you as a person? Because it could have been that it happened in your house and it didn’t have much of an impact on you?
Sonal: (Looks thoughtful, smiles) I think you always don’t do things for others, there is no altruism there… I was growing with it. I was finding fulfillment. Here were women and you could discuss lots of things with them, you know. Men are impressed (makes a sarcastic face) if you know today’s headlines from the newspaper, and I’m sure that they like your…intellectual inputs that you receive every morning from newspaper headlines (smiles). But the fact that you are a woman, doesn’t go out of their heads.
Whereas with other women, I have discussed things. More ideas followed. I come from a family where there are trained singers and professional singers …they couldn’t use my voice. But I had some sense of music, of something so I could create songs and we all could get together and do things.
Plus in my language, Gujrati there was hardly anything. So I began to write. So I think I became a writer and began publishing only when I was about 38, 39. For 20 years I wrote a feminist column in a newspaper which appeared on an editorial page and so on. I recovered old friends like Neena Haims and we did so much work together, for instance this video on forgotten women leaders from the Nationalist Movement, and a book about her aunt who was the first woman to top the list of matriculation in 1905 which we published…
I grew. How many women or men get opportunities to grow in their 40s or 50s? That was it. (laughs) Paromita,…the generation of happiness is a very important thing. It should be a happy experience, then only the creativity comes, you know?
Today, Vacha has once again had to move to a smaller space because of resistance from the authorities to allow organisations to use municipal school spaces. One of the things Sonal Shukla said to me, when she turned out to have an old poster I’d been searching for was: always keep friendship with old women, you never know what you might find.
Friendship with books is a friendship with older women in a way. Sometimes in it, I’ve found myself.
Interview with Sonal Shukla as it appears in Unlimited Girls (2002)
The complete film can be found at:
https://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/watch-online/play/452/Unlimited-Girls