Writing a new chapter for women

Q&A/ Ritu Menon

Women's World is an international free speech network of women writers, journalists, editors and publishers, that addresses issues of gender-based censorship. It began in New York in 1994 in defence of Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen, and today has a presence in South Asia, Latin America, Africa, Russia, and Europe.

Ritu Menon, publisher of Women Unlimited and a founder member of the India chapter, answers some questions posed by Mitali Saran ahead of the Women's World (India) South Asian Women Writers' Colloquium, 'The Power of the Word', to be held on February 21-23 in New Delhi. American feminist Gloria Steinem will also speak.

What is the mandate of the Women's World project?

The project grew out of the PEN Women Writers' Committee. It works on free speech issues with women writers who are under pressure. It does legal defence work and provides safe haven, and financial assistance if necessary.

The project is independently funded. The India chapter began in 1999. We work on free speech within the Indian context, which is multicultural and multilingual, looking at the context in which women writers function.

What are the themes of the Colloquium?

'Writing in a Time of Siege' asks whether the writer has a social responsibility. 'Closing Spaces in an Open Market' looks at the fact that, even as the world looks to a liberalised India for a kind of cosmopolitan writing that travels freely across the world, there is also a kind of devaluation of writing in the regional languages.

Translation is laborious and expensive, and English is the language of power. So is the open marketplace open only for some kinds of writing? 'Exclusionary Practices' is about the constraints of being a woman writer of a certain caste, class, sexuality, and ethnicity.

'The Guarded Tongue' is about the fact that the subject matter of women's writing is circumscribed: sexuality, religion and family exposes are all major taboos. And 'Censorship and Voice' explores not formal censorship, but women's self-censorship in the face of family pressure, the phenomenon of the mob and so on.

We held a national event in 2001 in Hyderabad, but this is the first time writers from four other South Asian countries are also coming together. This South Asian Colloquium is the second phase.

Who is part of Women's World (India), and who are the participants of the Colloquium?

Women's World is the first attempt to do any work with Indian women writers in all languages. We've worked with about 200 authors, 20 each in 10 Indian languages and English. We never have more than 20 people in a workshop and try to include a cross-section of age, genre, community, religion, and kind of writing.

In this Colloquium we have women from five South Asian countries, as well as from the US, Peru, Russia and Zimbabwe. We've tried to balance 20 Indian women writers with 20 non-Indians, but in this instance, the selection of authors is to some extent arbitrary as it inevitably is, all the authors had to be comfortable in English and their work had to be available in translation.

All of the Indian authors participating in the colloquium have been in our workshops.

What commonalities are likely in this gathering?

Our contexts are so diverse that writers don't often have the chance to discuss the circumstances in which they write, so this is an important opportunity to do that.

We'll have to wait and see what it throws up, but universal themes that often emerge include constraints of time, compulsions of domesticity, lack of space, and inability to write certain kinds of things, such as autobiography.

Through this event we hope to foster women's freedom of speech, of mobility and of association.