Writing in a Time of Seige

In May this year, about 25 women writers, critics and media women from Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat in India, representing seven languages met in Hyderabad to discuss the question of writing in a time of siege.  All the writers present underlined the importance of the topic in view of a sharp rise in violence across the world and within India.  The immediate concerns, of course, were the war on Iraq and the carnage in Gujarat.

This regional meeting was intended primarily to link writers with women’s organizations, publish newsletters or booklets, perform street plays, etc.  Given the present context, where the right to communicate—especially secular, feminist, progressive work—is under threat, building support and solidarity is an urgent need.

Our discussions focused on the writer’s role in society, on protests, on the public/private divide that defines women’s writing, the conflicting pulls of gender, community, caste and political affiliations, and on the crippling effect of frustration that many women were experiencing.  The issue of the appropriation of women writers, the barriers to solidarity and the apathy that writers often suffer were also discussed.  Rising communalism and right-wing mobilization, street censorship, culture policing were common concerns, as were the gendering of literary spaces and the strategies used to marginalize or co-opt women.    

Many women present remarked that although women writers took part in protests and meetings as individuals they had no collective voice as women writers, making them invisible as social actors.  Perhaps because of their socialization they participated as individuals when invited, but seldom took the initiative themselves to organize.  On the other hand the few who did write on critical current events neither got published nor heard.

One question that came up repeatedly was why women were not writing about issues like the Iraq war.  One response was that all fiction is social history, and writing itself is a political statement—the political content of the private is itself a critique of the system.  Social responsibility lies not only in writing but also in reading and responding to issues. But why had women not been able to write significant historical novels? The discussion dwelt on the problems of solidarity and sisterhood, about how women were pulled in conflicting directions by their political or community affiliations. Women writers lacked support both from the women’s movement as well as from women’s studies centers.  And, of course, they get hardly any support from society in general.  Another issue that was raised was the gendering of literary spaces.  Literary meetings are often held in bars, and drunkenness and vulgarity serve to keep women writers away.  Do writers have a social responsibility?  Should they intervene, use their writing subversively?  Can writing be subversive in a communally charged climate—or is it just dangerous?  Sarup Dhruv from Ahmedabad, still traumatized by the violence against Muslims in Gujarat in February 2002, recounted how a women’s writers’ group, Kalam (set up after our Gujarat Workshop in 1999) simply fell apart post-Godhra.  Its members simply couldn’t agree to speak up against the government and the party in power.  Some writers were worried that writing about issues like Gujarat would dissipate their creative energy; others said the difficulty is that creative writing can’t respond to issues as easily as journalistic or analytical or theoretical articles can.  This led to the questions:
Is creative writing organic?

What makes writing artificial?
How is it that most fiction is social history?
How does one balance the need for creative space and the importance of responding to social issues?

Isn’t a writer’s social responsibility as important as her right to individual freedom?
Isn’t writing in a male-dominated, caste-ridden society also a political issue of survival?
Some writers challenged this, asking whether an insistence on social responsibility might not be a form of censorship itself. While social responsibility is imperative for both men and women, only a couple of women had had the confidence to write about Gujarat.  In the current situation people tend to become self-centered, reluctant to risk their peace of mind—women writers are no exception.  
On the issue of rising fundamentalism there was a suggestion that writers should produce material that could be included in the curriculum for value education—this could be a new kind of activism for communal harmony.  The need to use a language that will reach out to people is important, while the presence of so much fanaticism in society means that there is a great need to reaffirm secular points of view.   
The issue of street censorship came up again and again.  The vernacular press and rightist cultural nationalist groups are appropriating women’s protests against obscenity, while at the same time doing nothing to protect those genuinely under threat.  Minority women writers’ forums, for example, are often vulnerable to all kinds of attack from so-called guardians of public morality.  

The need for a strong network at the national level was acknowledged, particularly in view of a writer’s powerlessness in a hostile social environment. Sharing information, informal and formal meetings, and cross-language exchange were seen as essential to building solidarity.  Writers need a forum even to come together to protest in a crisis.  Emotional and financial support is also required.  Apart from this, a network can facilitate cross-language translations.  It was decided that small state-level committees be formed to coordinate state-level networks.  We also agreed that a series of anthologies and a journal in regional languages could be brought out to facilitate cross-language sharing.
An immediate creative response to Gujarat—which was uppermost in everyone’s mind—would be to put together an anthology of prose and poetry by women, from ten languages, on Gujarat.  We hope to release the book in Ahmedabad as part of an event that would include different art forms – dance, drama, paintings, etc.—and the event itself would be a reiteration of women writers’ commitment to communal harmony and peace.

Our meeting ended with the launch of Storylines: Conversations with Women Writers which is the first volume of interviews with women writers that Women’s WORLD has published.  The warmth and happiness of the event were a wonderful reminder of women’s creativity in the face of great odds, and everyone—almost 75 people had gathered from all over Hyderabad—was delighted with the evening.
By Ritu Menon and Vasanth Kannabiran of Women’s WORLD/Asmita