actress Posts

On Priyanka Chopra delivering the Penguin Annual Lecture ( 26 Dec 2017)


...[it is a ] culturally awkward relationship between the voice of women and the public sphere of speech-making, debate and comment…the fact that women, even when they are not silenced, still have to pay a very high price for being heard, we need to recognise that it is a bit more complicated and that there is a long back-story.”

Mary Beard Women & Power: A Manifesto 

On 26 December 2017, actress Priyanka Chopra delivered the annual Penguin Lecture — “Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Chasing a Dream”. The invitation came with the following note:

One of the most prestigious and eagerly awaited cultural events on the calendar, the Penguin Annual Lecture, hosted by Penguin Random House India, was started in 2007 as an initiative to bring leading writers, artists, thinkers and key personalities from India and across the world in direct contact with audiences and admirers in India. The first such event to be organized by a publishing house in India, the Penguin Annual Lecture is immensely popular with readers, book lovers, and the youth in particular. This will be the eleventh edition of the Penguin Annual. Lecture; over the past ten years, speakers have included thought leaders like His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, Professor Amartya Sen, Thomas Friedman, Amitabh Bachchan, Ramachandra Guha, and beloved authors from both India and abroad like Dan Brown, Jeff Kinney and Ruskin Bond. Through the Penguin Annual Lecture, Penguin Random House India aims to spread the thrill of fresh ideas to a new generation of readers, thinkers and future achievers.

The fact that this invitation to speak at a publisher’s annual lecture had been extended to a woman speaker for the first time, that too a popular Bollywood-transiting-into-Hollywood desi actress, caused a great deal of furore. ( Scroll and Feminism India ) Even feminist publishing house Zubaan Books released a series of tweets questioning the decision to invite Priyanka Chopra instead of the more established Indian women writers — referenced in the links provided. All had valid reasons for their objection.

Now hear Priyanka Chopra’s speech:

 

Penguin Annual Lecture 2017

#Throwback to the time Priyanka Chopra delivered the #PenguinAnnualLecture and told us how to be fierce, fearless and flawed.

Posted by Penguin India on Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Unfortunately what irks a larger group of people is that Priyanka Chopra has no credentials as an author. Even when she was being introduced at the lecture there was no mention of her as an author though during the speech Priyanka Chopra fleetingly refers to herself as one. Many of the critics are disappointed that no woman writer was considered as is evident from the many names shared on social media. In fact on previous occasions some of the prominent male authors were flown in from different parts of the world to deliver the lecture. Surely such arrangements could have been made to locate an equally prominent woman speaker? Mary Beard, for instance, who is quoted at the beginning of this article, or PRH writers like Elif Shafak, a popular novelist and TED talk speaker — “Politics of Fiction” ( 2010) and “The revolutionary power of diverse thought” (2017). An extensive list of possible women writers — whether from India or abroad —  can easily be drawn up from within the PRH stables itself!

Having said that the lecture borders on being motivational. Priyanka Chopra speaks well. She speaks forcefully and clearly. However she may couch the words, the fact is Priyanka Chopra is living her feminism by negotiating her spaces every single day. Years ago, when she was a relatively new to Bollywood, she gave an interview where she did not mince words about the fees she charged, the quality of her work and the fact she had to pay bills and needed to earn well to do so. It was refreshing to hear her say this. She continues to be frank and honest about her opinions. In a sense she is also representative of the second wave of feminists — the modern generation. Women of today who may not like to believe they are feminists as they do not necessarily practise it in the activist mould, and yet celebrate and believe these spaces are their birthright –ironically spaces which were made visible and won by many of the very same activists modern women shun. Yet they live it, imbibe it and continue to make choices which challenge boundaries — constantly. Priyanka Chopra symbolises this generation of women and is a fine role model for many. She also have the gift of being able to communicate as is evident from her interaction with the audience.

Penguin Random House India like many other publishing firms at this point of time are in the process of evolving, responding to  new market forces, the alignment of the hyper-local publishing programme with the global scenario as in emergence of new business models. At the same time the brand identity of the firm has to be maintained and strengthened. This can only be done by reaching out to newer audiences that will in the long run ( hopefully!) convert to new readers as well. The fact remains Penguin Random House India with this event has ensured its brand recall has only became stronger irrespective of the animated conversations that have taken place in the past few days. It is a complicated space to be inhabiting today and for now, the celebrity publishing space has PRH India at its helm. This despite the actress’s biography by well-known film critic Aseem Chhabra is to be published by Rupa Publications in 2018.

Ultimately Penguin Random House India did well in their choice of speaker — it made good business sense!

Update ( 5 January 2018)

Writers Kiran Manral and Anil Menon have pointed out that in 2013 the superstar Amitabh Bachchan was invited to give the Penguin Annual Lecture. At the time there was little outrage as has been expressed now at inviting a Bollywood star to the event. Anil Menon adds “I don’t remember anyone complaining then, even after he pointed out in his discussion with Rajdeep Sardesai that ‘I would never have imagined 50 years ago that a publishing house would invite a film actor to speak’. The Penguin Annual Lecture is not a celebrity event. It is an event where someone who is famous for something other than just being famous is called to talk about books. That is a good thing.”

4 January 2018 

Updated on 7 Dec 2018 

Mary Beard has released an updated version of her book Women and Power. The new edition has an afterword written after the #MeToo movement that unleashed a flood of testimonies or as she sees them, “self-empowering” narratives. Beard’s essay reflects when as a PhD student she was travelling in Italy for research and was towards the end of her stay when she was raped in a train. This happened over four decades ago.

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“…in some respects, the Me Too movement fits my arguments in this book uncomfortably well. As I have tried to show, right back to Philomela ( who wove denunciation of her rapist into her tapsestry), women have often been allowed a limited voice, at least, in raising questions of their own treatment and abuse as women. #MeToo has made a gratifingly loud noise that, for once, has been transmitted over most of the planet, but it still falls into that general category. Even more to the point, the root cause of the harassment that women have suffered (and the root cause of the earlier silence of so many) surely lies in the structures of power. If so, then the only effective remedy lies in a change to those structures. While fewer than ten per cent of the directors of the top Hollwood films are women (that was the case in 2017), men will remain the gate-keepers of success in the film industry, and the effect of women’s voices on its sexual culture — however loudly those voices have now been raised — is likely to be limited.

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Mary Beard will also be one of the speakers at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2019.

India’s Women Writers, from the Early 20th Century to Today

I wrote a long essay on India’s women writers from the early 20th century to today for Bookwitty. Here is an extract from the essay:  

India has a tradition of fine women writers, and some of the earliest established names among them were also pioneers in fields beyond literature. Roekya Sakhawat Hossein (1880-1932) was a leading Bengali feminist in at the turn of the 20th century. Her sci-fi utopian novella, Sultana’s Dream (1905), was decades before her time and is a delight to read even now. Cornelia Sorabji (1866-1954) was both the first woman to read law at Oxford, and the first Indian national to study at a British university. During her career as the first female lawyer in India, she advocated for women in purdah and children. She wrote a dozen books including her memoirs, India Calling (1934). Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949) known as the “Nightingale of India,” was not only a poet, but also the first female governor of an Indian state, and the first woman president of the Indian National Congress. Her debut collection of poetry, The Golden Threshold, was published in 1905.

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Sarojini Naidu with Mahatma Gandhi

at the 1942 All India Congress Committee Session

Despite our strong tradition of women writers in the early 20th century, to my mind it was the 1974 publication of the “Towards Equality” Status of Women in India Report that marked a watershed moment for women’s movements, and in turn, women’s literature. Though Indira Gandhi, the first woman prime minister, had been in power for years, it was the Report that gave more women a voice and an opportunity to express themselves.

Another literary turning point came in 1984, when Indira Gandhi was assassinated and thousands of Sikhs were massacred in retaliation. For the older generations, this violence brought back memories of the 1947 Partition of India; young writers and social activists including Urvashi Butalia began recording their stories. Butalia eventually wrote a seminal book, Other Side of Silence (2000), based on these oral histories as well as her own family’s story of moving to India from Lahore, now in Pakistan. Around the same time Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin’s groundbreaking Borders and Boundaries (1998) was published, documenting women’s experiences of Partition, about which until then it seemed a collective amnesia had existed.

1984’s violence and revisiting of the past coincided with a maturation of the Indian publishing industry. In that year, Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon set up the first independent women’s publishing firm in India (and indeed, in all of Asia), Kali for Women. They looked at a range of literature from fiction to non-fiction, including reportage and oral histories. Kali for Women, and its founders’ subsequent projects, Zubaan Books and Women Unlimited, have published many women writers in original English and in translation, such as the brilliant short story and spec-fic writer Manjula Padmanabhan (Three Virgins, 2013) food and nature writer-cum-illustrator and delightful storyteller, Bulbul Sharma (Eating Women, Telling Tales, 2009), environmentalist Vandana Shiva (Staying Alive, 1998), and numerous other writers, historians and freedom fighters.

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Vandana Shiva at the 2009 Save the World Awards

Along with independent publishers, little magazines were on the rise, while multinational publishers like HarperCollins and Penguin also began establishing offices in India. Meanwhile, a growing recognition that the work of women writers had sales potential meant more opportunities for them to be published. In 1992, Oxford University Press (OUP) India published an unprecedented memoir by a Tamil Dalit Catholic nun, Bama, who had left the order and returned home. Karukku proved to be a bestseller, and has remained in print. At this time OUP India also published the seminal volumes on Women Writing in India: Volume 1: 600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century(1991) and Volume 2: The Twentieth Century (1993), a collection of hundreds of texts representing the rich variety of regions and languages in India.

Indian women’s writing hit a new high when Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for her 1997 debut novel, The God of Small Thingsexploring forbidden love in Kerala. (Roy’s second novel, 2017’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, addresses some of the most devastating events in India’s modern history. It has enjoyed a global release with enviable media hype, further demonstrating the remarkable progress in how women’s writing is received by critics and the public).

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Arundhati Roy in 2012

Soon, an increasing body of women writers representative of groups that have been marginalised on the basis of sexuality, language, caste, and religion began to be published. These included Urmila Pawar(The Weave of My Life, 2009), and Tamil Muslim poet Salma whose memoir The Hour Past Midnight (2009) was made into a documentary (Salma) and screened at the Sundance festival. Once housemaid Baby Haldar’s memoir, published in English 2006 as A Life Less Ordinarybecame an international bestseller, many more memoirs and biographies began to be published—including those of novelist and entrepreneur Prabha Khaitan, academic and activist Vina Mazumdar, actress and singer Kana Devi, trans activist A. Revathy, and activist and actress Shaukat Kaifi.

Such robust publishing by and for women has ensured that the contemporary generation of writers is far more confident of their voices, experimenting with form as they explore a range of issues.

In particular, these writers are exploring and interrogating the concept of the strong woman. Most of these stories depict an ordinary woman negotiating her daily space, thus defining herself and by extension living her feminism, whether she chooses to acknowledge it or not. Just a few of the modern writers who are contributing to this conversation in English are: Namita Gokhale (Things to Leave Behind, 2016), (Chitra Bannerjee Divakurni (Palace of Illusions, 2008), Balli Kaur Jaswal (Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, 2017), Scaachi Koul (The One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, 2017), and Ratika Kapur (The Private Life of Mrs Sharma, 2015).

Adding to this conversation, there are many relevant writers now becoming available in translation, including Malika Amar Shaikh (I Want to Destroy Myself, 2016—more on this memoir below), and Nabaneeta Dev Sen (Sheet Sahasik Hemantolok: Defying Winter, 2013).

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Nabaneeta Dev Sen in 2013

A number of women writers are addressing family and domestic issues with humor, notably Manju Kapur with Home (2006), her Jane Austen-like novel about family dynamics; Andaleeb Wajid with My Brother’s Wedding (2013), a gorgeous novel about the shenanigans of organising a Muslim wedding; celebrity Twinkle Khanna with Mrs Funnybones (2015), based on her delightful newspaper column; and Veena Venugopal with a powerful collection about The Mother-in-Law: The Other Woman in your Marriage (2014).

Meanwhile, other authors have been exploring the theme of the strong woman in harrowing—though by no means unusual—circumstances. Samhita Arni retells the Mahabharata war saga from a woman’s point of view in Sita’s Ramayana (2011). K R Meera’s multi-layered novel Hangwoman (published in English in 2014) is about a woman executioner who inherited the job from her father. Meena Kandaswamy’s autobiographical novel When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017) reveals devastating and isolating violence in a marriage. In the same vein, Malika Amar Shaikh’s aforementioned I Want to Destroy Myself: A Memoir explores the horror of living with a man who in his public life spoke out for the rights of the oppressed, but showed none of this humanity at home.

Building on the tradition of more than a century, today there is a long list of women writers in the Indian sub-continent who are feisty, nuanced in their writing and yet universal in many of the issues they share. They are fully engaged with themes such as independence, domesticity, domestic violence, professional commitments, motherhood, parenting, sexual harassment, politics, and identity. This is undoubtedly a vibrant space of publishing, and this article has just about explored tip of the proverbial iceberg.

For more recommendations, please explore the Related Books carousel below. And as always, please join the conversation: use the comments section to add any further books to the list.

India’s Women Writers, from the Early 20th Century to Today” , published on Bookwitty ( 3 August 2017) 

10 August 2017 

Ashwin Sanghi, “The Sialkot Saga”

The-Sialkot-Saga

Bollywood actress, Kajol, and Ashwin Sanghi unveiling the book cover of “The Sialkot Saga” at Jaipur Literature Festival 2016.

Some animals hunt. Others hide. And a few hunt while they hide.

Ashwin Sanghi’s latest novel The Sialkot Saga will be released on 5 April 2016. It is a greatly anticipated thriller whose cover was unveiled with great fanfare by the Bollywood actress, Kajol Devgn, at Jaipur Literature Festival 2016.  The Sialkot Saga  is a retelling of modern Indian history through the lives of a Muslim Mumbai underworld don, Arbaaz Sheikh, and a Hindu Calcutta Marwari businessman, Arvind Bagadia. Basic premise being money matters, nothing else — it is a dhanda after all. As is the fashion nowadays in modern novels a family saga spread across at least two generations is a must and is evident in Sialkot Saga too. There are neat historical details beginning with Partition interspersed with brutal violence and unscrupulous plans to gain money. Politics, land deals, hawala, narcotics, films etc. Anything as long as there is a healthy profit margin to be made. There are some descriptions of violence particularly horrifying since they challenge the boundaries of ethics. But the acts described are so very plausible that the horror is compounded manifold. It strikes a sense of fear. Surprisingly the boldness of these criminal minds also makes one chuckle. 300-odd pages into the novel it begins to seem like a manual on the rise of corporate India. It becomes a little convoluted with its business descriptions. An account of the birth of companies like Reliance, Satyam, Infosys to the formidable place they hold today as the gems of Shining & Incredible India. The chorus of the opening pages soon to be forgotten as the plot builds is “Some animals hunt. Others hide. And a few hunt while they hide.” Attention does begin to flag but every writer writes from their strong point and being a successful businessman is one of Ashwin Sanghi’s strengths.

The second is his avatar as a modern mythographer. It is evident in the tenuous tale he weaves about the sanjeevani. It seems a bit convenient but once again it is Ashwin Sanghi’s forte to pull together myths and present them in a modern setting. It is his trademark. And one that his many readers will be waiting for. ( Till date he has sold over a million units of his previous books.)

Here is the link to the book trailer: https://youtu.be/1qv_tk5i9kM . It is a wonderfully edited movie clip but is not true to the book at all.

Undoubtedly Ashwin Sanghi’s “Sialkot Saga” is immensely readable for its tremendous insight into the Indian brand of businessmen. There is no word for their inventiveness in their greed for money and this is matched by the phenomenal storytelling of the novelist. It is quite remarkable. Setting his story in the historical backdrop of modern India proves that irrespective of political ideologies and government policies, money always wins. Having said that there is a lot of testosterone flowing through this book with the few women characters taking on fairly conventional roles. Even the breakaway character of Alisha as an example of the millennial generation does not quite live up to promise. I am not even going to nitpick about historical accuracy since it does not purport to be a historical novel. It is just a great story.

Read it!

Ashwin Sanghi The Sialkot Saga Westland, Chennai, 2016. Pb. pp. 584. Rs 350

31 March 2016

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