This book brings together sixteen comic artists, all women, from India and Germany to explore how women see the world and themselves, and how that is similar and different across cultures. In the striking, surprising, often funny drawings featured here, the women take apart received ideas of identity, power, love, sex, family, and bodies, putting them to new purposes to yield a rich interweaving of the personal and the political. Bold, original, outspoken, and thought-provoking, The Elephant in the Room is the perfect tonic for our dark times: affirming and entertaining but never less than powerfully political.
The fashion industry in India is huge, employing more than sixty million people and, at $70 billion, accounting for a sizable chunk of the nation's economic activity. Despite that, it remains a startlingly unprofessional industry--particularly when it comes to the work of modeling, and how the women who perform that work are viewed and treated. With Mannequin, Manjima Bhattacharya takes readers into the world of fashion in India to show what the work of a model is like and the difficulties it entails, from the struggle by trade unions to organize models to the fundamental question of whether fashion objectifies women or acknowledges their agency. Spanning from the 1960s to the present, and taking account of changes from globalization and shifting beauty standards, Mannequin is an up-to-date account of fashion's forgotten workers.
In 1970s Karachi, where violence and political and social uncertainty are on the rise, a beautiful and talented painter, Tahira, tries to hold her life together as it Shatters around her. Her marriage is quickly revealed to be a trap from which there appears no escape. Accustomed to the company of her brother Waseem and friends, Andaleep and Safdar, who are activists, writers and thinkers, Tahira struggles to adapt to her new world of stifling conformity and to fight for her identity as a woman and an artist. Tragedy strikes when her brother and friends are caught up in the cynically repressive regime. Faced with loss and injustice, she embarks upon a series of paintings entitled 'the empty room', filling the blank canvases with vivid colour and light. Elegant, poetic and powerful, The Empty Room is an important addition to contemporary Pakistani literature, a moving portrait of life in Karachi at a pivotal moment in the nation's history and a powerful meditation on art and the dilemmas faced by women who must find their own creative path in hostile conditions.
In the mid-nineties, Birjees Dawar Ali returns to Pakistan to seek out a history left unfinished long ago; one from which, nursing heartbreak and betrayal, she had previously fled home to partitioned India. Will she find the family that so generously gave her succor, the home that became her own, and the unquestioning love she found there? Or will these certainties have crumbled with the march of history? A deeply moving narrative of love and loss, All Passion Spent is set in the continuing aftermath of the 1947 partition of India and the subsequent emergence of India and Pakistan as two separate countries. Zaheda Hina's richly layered narrative, brought alive in this lyrical and poetic translation by Neelam Hussain, touches on the many complexities that surround this painful history: a profound sense of grief and displacement in the subcontinent, the lives sundered midstream, lost friendships, and the quest for new roots and lands.
On February 6, 2003, Anjum Zamarud Habib, a young political activist from Kashmir, was arrested in Delhi, convicted under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and sentenced to five years in Delhi's notorious Tihar jail. Her crime? Being in the wrong place at the wrong time, as well as being the chairperson of the Muslim Khawateen Markaz and a member of the Hurriyat Conference, which disputes India's claim to Jammu and Kashmir. In this passionate and rare first-hand account by a Muslim woman in Tihar jail, Habib describes the shock and bewilderment of arrest; the pain of realizing that there would be no escape for years; the desperation for contact with the outside world; and the sense of deep betrayal at being abandoned by her political comrades. Prisoner No. 100 provides an inside perspective on the impact of the Kashmir conflict on real people's lives and offers a searing indictment of draconian state policies, while telling the courageous story of one woman's extraordinary life.
July 15, 2004: An amazing scene unfolds in front of the Kangla Fort in Manipur, the headquarters of the Assam Rifles, a unit of the Indian army. Soldiers and officers watch aghast as twelve women, all in their sixties and seventies, position themselves in front of the gates and then, one by one, strip themselves naked. The imas, the mothers of Manipur, are in a cold fury, protesting the custodial rape and murder of Thangjam Manorama, a 32-year-old woman, alleged by the army to be a militant. The women hold aloft banners that shout, 'Indian Army Rape Us', 'Take Our Flesh'. Never has this happened before: the army is appalled. Hundreds of thousands of people around the country, watching the drama unfold, are shocked. Can this be possible? A naked protest in India? By mothers? The imas of Manipur are known to be strong, self-sufficient. It is they who by and large run the economy of the state; here, though, they are doing something different. Manorama's death is the trigger for their renewed protest against the Draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act 1958, which is used with impunity in the state and excuses all sorts of army excesses. Manipur has witnessed several decades of low-intensity war with more than twenty militant outfits operating in the state. In this unusual book, journalist Teresa Rehman, tells the story of the twelve women, of how they took the momentous decision - in some cases unknown to their families - and how they carried it out with precision and care. The story of the mothers of Manipur reflects the larger history of the conflict-torn state and of the courage and resistance of the people in the face of overwhelming odds.
In the last 15 years, queer movements in many parts of the world have helped secure the rights of queer people. These moments have been accompanied by the brutal rise of crony capitalism, the violent consequences of the 'war on terror', the hyper-juridification of politics, the financialization/managerialization of social movements and the medicalization of non-heteronormative identities/practices. How do we critically read the celebratory global proliferation of queer rights in these neoliberal times? This volume responds to the complicated moment in the history of queer struggles by analysing laws, state policies and cultures of activism, to show how new intimacies between queer sexuality and neoliberalism that celebrate modernity and the birth of the liberated sexual citizen, are in fact, reproducing the old colonial desire of civilizing the native. By paying particular attention to the problematics of race, religion and class, this volume engages in a rigorous, self-reflexive critique of global queer politics and its engagements, confrontations, and negotiations with modernity and its investments in liberalism, legalism and militarism, with the objective of queering the ethics of our queer politics.
Feminist Subversion and Complicity brings together contributions from women in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and India who, while working at diverse kinds of institutions, are all closely involved in the intersection of development policy and gender. They offer critical feminist perspectives on governmental education and health projects, as well as legal reforms in these regions. As a whole, the essays reveal that, in general, feminist politics are not merely assimilated into governmental projects, but as part of the process of assimilation, they often serve as a subversive interruption, destabilizing and contesting orthodox meanings and assumptions.
Offering vital new perspectives on the role of sexual violence as a weapon of war in Pakistan, Disputed Legacies examines the situations that arise when secular law comes into conflict with traditional practice and belief and how this directly affects policy, pedagogy, and medical practice. Focusing specifically on Pakistan, a country with a long history of internal and external conflict, the contributors to this volume trace the often troubled interaction between the state and its female citizens and examine the ingrained and pervasive structures and social systems that enable impunity for perpetrators of sexual violence to gain strength. Disputed Legacies is part of the Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia series, which brings together a vast body of knowledge on this important--yet suppressed--subject. It will be essential reading for scholars of women's studies and sexual violence.
Fault Lines of History is the second volume in Zubaan's Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia series, to focus on India. This volume addresses the question of state impunity, arguing that when it comes to the violation of human and civil rights, particularly in relation to sexual violence, the state of India has played an active and collusive role, creating states of exception, where its own laws can be suspended and the rights of its citizens violated. Drawing on patterns of sexual violence in Kashmir, Northeast India, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, and Rajasthan, the contributors focus on the histories of militarization in regions of conflict, as well as the histories of caste violence that are often ignored out of convenience. The essays come together to offer an urgent call for action. Though the contributors acknowledge the difficult odds facing the victims and survivors of sexual violence, they urge resistance and an end to silence as the most important weapons in the fight to hold accountable the perpetrators of sexual violence.
A Czechoslovakian Jew who was imprisoned at Auschwitz, Dina Gottliebova-Babbitt (1923-2009) was saved by her artistic abilities. Gottliebova painted the walls of the children's barracks with images of the Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. When Josef Mengele discovered her talent, he commissioned her to paint watercolor portraits of Roma prisoners. After the war, Gottliebova worked as an animator for Warner Brothers for many years, eventually marrying Walt Disney animator Art Babbitt. Many years later, Gottliebova's Auschwitz paintings were recovered and displayed at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. When the artist requested that her paintings be returned, her request was denied. The dispute escalated into an international scandal with the American and Polish governments becoming involved. Gottliebova passed away in 2009 without having her works returned. Watercolours is Gottliebova's story. Journalist Lidia Ostalowska reconstructs Gottliebova's time in Auschwitz, with an eye to broader issues of historical memory, trauma, racism, and the relationship between torturer and victim. Drawing on hundreds of accounts of the hellish camp, Ostalowska tells the story of one remarkable woman's incarceration and battle for survival.
Rabia is growing up in a conservative community in southern India. One day, she and her friends sneak off to the pictures. Caught on her return home, Rabia gets a beating from her mother, Zohra, who cries as she beats her daughter into submission. Firdaus is beautiful and of marriageable age. A groom is found for her, a wealthy man who lives abroad. On her wedding night, she takes one look at him and says, 'I'm not going to live with you, don't touch me!' Inside their male dominated world, Rabia, Zohra, Firdaus, and many others make their small rebellions and compromises, friendships are made and broken, families come together and fall apart, and almost imperceptibly change creeps in. Salma's beautiful, evocative, poetic novel recreates the sometimes suffocating, and sometimes heartbreaking world of Muslim women in southern India. The Hour Past Midnight is translated into English by Lakshmi Holmstrom.
Fateema Lokhandwala, a young Muslim woman in present-day Gujarat. A member of the Muslim minority, she struggles to carve out a place for herself, seeking her true identity and encountering triumph and tragedy along the way. This book is a critique of the damage caused by Indian identity politics.
The midnight knock on the door and the disappearance of a loved one into the hands of authorities is a 20th-century horror story familiar to many destined to "live in interesting times." Yet, some stories remain untold. Such is the account of the internment of ethnic Chinese who had settled for many years in northern India. When the Sino-Indian Border War of 1962 broke out, over 2,000 Chinese-Indians were rounded up, placed in local jails, then transported over a thousand miles away to the Deoli internment camp in the Rajasthan Desert. Born in Calcutta, India, in 1949, and raised in Darjeeling, Yin Marsh was just thirteen years old when first her father was arrested, and then she, her grandmother and her eight-year-old brother were all taken to the Darjeeling Jail, then sent to Deoli. Ironically, Nehru - India's first Prime Minister and the one who had authorized the mass arrests - had once "done time" in Deoli during India's war for independence. Yin and her family were assigned to the same bungalow where Nehru had also been unjustly held. Eventually released, Marsh emigrated to America with her mother, attended college, married and raised her own family, even as the emotional trauma remained buried. When her own college-age daughter began to ask questions and when a friend's wedding would require a return to her homeland, Yin was finally ready to face what had happened to her family.
The first volume to come out of a South Asia wide research project entitled Sexual Violence and Impunity (supported by the International Development Research Centre, Canada), this book focuses on Bangladesh and showcases some of the best writings on the subject. Contributors include new and established scholars who look at areas as wide-ranging as the law and its histories, nationalism, memory and sexuality, the status of minorities, religion and its directives, universities as sites of gender-contestation and more. A comprehensive overview of the situation in Bangladesh since the 1971 war of liberation, written by acclaimed scholar Meghna Guhathakurta provides an entry point to help the reader understand the complex realities of the ways in which impunity for sexual violence has come to acquire so much resilience in Bangladesh in particular, and South Asia in general.
The second volume to come out of a South Asia wide research project entitled Sexual Violence and Impunity (supported by the International Development Research Centre, Canada) this book focuses on India and showcases new, pathbreaking research on the subject. For the first time in recent history, young and established scholars come together to explore areas such as medical protocols, the functioning of the law, the psycho-social making of impunity, histories of sexual violence such as in Kashmir and the northeast of India, the media, sectarian violence, the use of stripping and parading and much more. Peer discussed and reviewed in a series of workshops, the essays here present much that is new in research.
Acts of sexual violence are also acts committed with impunity. Those who commit them do not consider their actions consequential, and this is as true of perpetrators in the social realm, as it is of state actors. Such impunity is sustained by what it refuses: shared humanity and the recognition of suffering. Yet throughout history impunity to do with sexual violence has been challenged by fearless, just and compassionate speech, in courts of justice and outside of it. Those who did do, and continue to do so, not only advance a politics of accountability but also an ethics of recognition, of suffering and hurt. This book explores the contours of such politics and ethics in the modern South Asian context. It takes a historical lens to our collective struggles with sexual violence and the question of impunity, and builds an archive of speech, partial silence and of the unspeakable, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It examines closely explicitly feminist responses from the region: drawing from the latter, it suggests that sexual violence and the impunity it claims for itself are best understood in the manner they relate to the sexual everyday in our cultures.
Sitting among the serene hills of the Ardhanareeshwara temple in Thiruchengode in Salem district, Revathi, a transgender woman and author of a path-breaking autobiography, The Truth About Me, and Nandini Murali, a writer and researcher, begin a conversation about what it means to live on the margins of society, to find ways to live a 'normal' life when your identity does not find an easy fit in the acceptable binaries of society. Revathi discusses her life in an NGO, Sangama, that works with transgender persons, and the journey of her rise from an office assistant to the director of the organisation. She describes her research into the lives of those who make the transition from female to male identity; her efforts to provide a voice to those who do not fit the gender binary; and her travels around the world to discuss the community's experience. Talking about her decision to quit Sangama and continue her struggle as an independent activist, Revathi speaks about her collaboration with an activist theatre group that has been performing a play based on her autobiography across Karnataka. She reflects on the recent Supreme Court judgement that provides legal recognition to the transgender community and how to make it a powerful instrument of social change. This unique book provides insight and nuance into one of the least talked about subjects in our society from the point of view of a person most qualified to talk about it.
In her sequences of pictures, the author illustrates such scenes as feminist gatherings against violence and discrimination, the encroachment of large corporations in farmlands, and what the world may look like to a poor woman in a village in India.
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