To really know our India, read women writers

GJV Prasad

WHEN I was asked five years ago to be on the jury of a prize for women writers from India who write novels in English, my first thought was that women writers themselves may not like the idea. After all, writers are writers, whatever gender they identify as. There are no separate awards for men writers to my knowledge. Also, most of the Indian writers I like are women — their works seem to speak to us with greater urgency and offer deeper and varied insights. We can all think of major women novelists in English in Independent India, starting with Nayantara Sahgal (whose 1985 novel ‘Rich Like Us’ is a classic). Shashi Deshpande, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai, Githa Hariharan, and Arundhati Roy will occur to most people. Some of them may not have lived/live in India, but that has always been an issue with Indian writing in English. The fact is that many of these names occur to us because they have either a body of work that makes us aware of them or they have won the Booker or been on the shortlist, or won the Commonwealth Prize.

If we take into account the Sahitya Akademi Award winners, the list will also give us Rama Mehta (who won it in 1979 for another classic ‘Inside the Haveli’), Sunetra Gupta, Rupa Bajwa, Malathi Rao, Esther David (a major writer who writes as a Jewish Indian woman), Mamang Dai (who is from Arunachal Pradesh and has a wide range from the comic to the mythic), Namita Gokhale (who began in the 1980s with the cult novel ‘Paro: Dreams of Passion’ and has gone on to write historical novels), and Anuradha Roy (one of our best contemporary writers who has also won the Sushila Devi Award whose jury I serve on).

Already, many readers would have encountered names they don’t know. However, what is important to note is that there are many more women writers who write brilliantly and need to be recognised by us. Writers like the late Shama Futehally whose ‘Tara Lane’ is one of the novels I recommend to all, Manju Kapur (whose first novel ‘Difficult Daughters’ was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize for best first book), Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (who may already be a famous name among us), Anita Nair (a writer who can write brilliantly in any genre but whose ‘Inspector Gowda’ books I recommend), Kavery Nambisan (an incisive writer who gives us layered regional novels), Shobhaa De (much under-rated but fun to read and she gave us ways to use our English in contemporary times before Rushdie did), Anuradha Marwah (who can write humorously about the most serious situations), Amruta Patil (a graphic novelist who has made an indelible mark), Anuja Chauhan (again someone who I recommend to everyone, a writer who gives us a comic look at contemporary India), and Madhulika Liddle (if you haven’t read her historical detective novels featuring the detective Muzaffar Jang, you must!). I can add Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Sharanya Manivannan, Meena Kandasamy, Shubhangi Swarup, Avni Doshi, Anukriti Upadhyay, Nilanjana Roy, Sakoon Singh, Sumana Roy, Janice Pariat, Anjum Hasan, Easterine Kire, Temsula Ao, Mitra Phukan, Malsawmi Jacob, and Daribha Lyndem (all of whom write good literary fiction) to the list. I purposely put at the end writers from the various states of Northeast India because most of us in the rest of the country have no awareness of any writers from the region.

But this is not an exhaustive list at all. It is just to remind ourselves that from literary fiction, to popular fiction, to detective fiction, to graphic novels, women writers have done it all.

Having wondered about the necessity of a prize exclusively for women writers, I now feel happy that I agreed to serve on the jury. I realise that the unacknowledged patriarchy at work in the world of literary awards means that many women writers are sidelined and erased from our reading lists. I would not have read so many of our contemporary women writers in English if the award had not made me aware of the ways in which women were writing about India now with surgical precision, using their pen to trace our various trajectories, to cut through the slack and show us up for what we are. If we don’t read them, we don’t really know our India.

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