Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon ran India’s first feminist publishing house for nearly two decades. Pioneers of any kind tell a distinctive story, as Arpita Das finds out
In early 1984, when Ritu Menon and Urvashi Butalia were on the verge of starting Kali for Women, their friend and fellow publisher, the late Tejeshwar Singh told them, ‘Well, rather you than me to have taken such a risk.’ However, these two determined young women went on to start a press which rapidly became a phenomenon not only in Indian publishing but in the largely untapped field of feminist writing in South Asia. It is surprising, therefore, to hear them both say that they came to publishing ‘by accident’. Says Butalia, “My first job in publishing was as a paster-upper in Oxford University Press (OUP).” Menon too went looking for a job in New York after completing her MA in Literature, and found one with Doubleday as part of their newly formed market research team.
While at OUP, Butalia became involved in the burgeoning women’s movement in Delhi. It was evident that a mainstream press would not concern itself with the movement and with titles informed by a feminist perspective. Her next publishing job at Zed Press, London, where she actively worked on developing a feminist list, set the stage for the inception of Kali for Women. Butalia reminisces, “I hadn’t thought of a name then and it was while talking with friends from Zed and others that the name Kali emerged.”
Menon had in the meantime moved back to Delhi. She worked with Orient Longman and then with Vikas Publishing House where she was commissioned for what was perhaps the first women’s imprint in the country — Shakti. Keen to take this further, she got in touch with Butalia when she heard that the latter was thinking of returning to the country to set up a feminist press. In April 1984 the two finally met to formalise matters and Kali for Women was born. Menon says, “We wanted to cover the entire spectrum and publish not just academic writing but activist texts as well as fiction — this was something completely new in the trade here and there were many who told us to be more ‘defined’. But I do believe that was the best decision we ever made at Kali.” Indeed with its first few commissioned works itself — a contributed volume on Women in Media, a collection of stories by women writers of India called Truth Tales, Radha Kumar’s The History of Doing and Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive, Kali straddled the entire gamut of women’s writing in the subcontinent — academic with a focus on development, creative writing as well as activism. Both Kumar’s title and Shiva’s went on to acquire classic status, reprinted even today after 25 years. Shiva became the poster woman for ecofeminism and Staying Alive was translated into more than 11 languages. Says Menon, “It was quite clear to me early on that women’s writing and activism went hand in hand.”
Another important work published by Kali in the early years was Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, edited by Sudesh Vaid and Kumkum Sangari, (Kali for Women, 1989) which continues to be part of every reading list even today within the country and outside on gender and colonialism in South Asia. Butalia remembers ‘trapping’ the two editors in her flat and babysitting Sangari’s young child while they finally wrote up the introduction to the book which had been delayed for long. Another early book which established Kali’s reputation as a cutting-edge feminist press was a Hindi title called Sharir ki Jaankaari (The Knowledge of the Body) which was authored by 75 village women, and on their insistence, sold at a special price below cost to women from villages. Almost 70,000 copies of the book have been sold to date.
By this time, Butalia and Menon were also thinking of turning to writing themselves. Both cite the Sikh massacres in Delhi and North India in 1984, and their experiences of talking to survivors, as what prompted them to write. Butalia soon published The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Viking, 1998) while Menon co-wrote Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (Kali for Women, 2003) with Kamla Bhasin. Both became critical works which brought to the forefront a history hitherto rendered invisible, the history of women in Partition, and in their own voices. Butalia says, “The fact that we were not career academics was actually liberating since we were working with a genre which had not really been explored much then, that of oral histories.” Menon adds wryly, ‘Indeed, it fell to us two women without any disciplinarian credentials to explore the much neglected genre of oral history.’
After running Kali for Women together for a little short of two decades and creating an enviable corpus of feminist titles spanning creative writing, activist tracts and scholarly texts, Butalia and Menon decided to go their separate ways in 2003. There has been much speculation about their decision in the book trade and outside; however, the lists that they subsequently developed at Zubaan and Women Unlimited put to rest any whispers about the ‘death of the feminist press’ in India. Both presses have grown beyond Kali for Women while keeping the original commitment to self-aware women’s writing intact. Menon says, “Issues have become much more complicated although I must say that the preoccupying issues are much the same — poverty, violence and conflict.” She mentions security, and militarism and gender as areas Women Unlimited is increasingly interested in. “Is national security to be equated with the security of the citizenry? We are also doing more books on terrorism and gender — as a matter of fact, feminists have been looking at this issue since much before 9/11.” She adds, “The real work is to keep anticipating the issues and keep alive the political edge.” Butalia too talks of the evident expansion of the Zubaan list in the past few years: “While the bedrock of academic work remains, we have also started bringing out fiction, more trade titles, titles for young adults and children, and buying rights for more international titles. The idea is to reach out to a larger, interested audience. As a matter of fact, with the young adult list, we have had our first consistent breakthroughs in language publishing.”
Menon would however like to keep the word ‘feminist’ alive; as she puts it, “there is no politics, no whiff of the struggle, in the word ‘gender’”. Butalia demurs, stating that “it is impossible to hold back change, and it is equally important for independent presses to keep adapting.” Both, however, agree that the women’s movement is far from dead. While Menon holds that the movement has simply become allied with other social movements which have emerged in the last decade or so, Butalia feels it is the street-level activism in urban areas that has died, but the movement is very much alive in rural India, although modes of expression and resistance have undergone a change.
With Women Unlimited and Zubaan, and their own writing , they continue to address such changes in the way women and their lives are perceived in South Asia with the same feisty determination that distinguished Kali for Women. Butalia’s recent book Speaking Peace: Women’s Voices from Kashmir (Zubaan, 2002) looks at the increasingly critical engagement of women with conflict through interviews with Kashmiri women and Menon’s Unequal Citizens: A Study of Muslim Women in India (OUP, 2006) which draws on the first-ever national survey of 10,000 Muslim and Hindu women in India to dispel common misperceptions about the status of Muslim women in India.
Having inspired other independent and feminist publishers to enter the fray, Butalia and Menon have become iconic figures for the women’s movement as well as the movement for alternative and independent writing and publishing in South Asia.
[The writer is co-founder and publisher, YODA Press]
