What Price for Women’s Rights?
Anita Sethi - who features in events revolving around the role of women in society and literature – tells of the issues that will be thrown up for discussion.
“What price for women’s rights?” is the question at the heart of the event I am chairing with writer Sonia Faleiro, whose heartrending new book, Beautiful Thing, exposes the lives of exploited female bar dancers in Bombay. Yet even amidst extreme suffering, the narrator finds the wryness, humour and warmth essential to her survival.
How particular and how universal are the struggles facing women? We will be discussing the issues arising from a vividly conjured locality in the context of the centuries of struggle for women’s rights in Britain and around the world. What price for the right to write at all? We see women who challenge the label of “women writer” and in doing so, writing by women (and featuring female characters) has changed and evolved over the years. The South Asian women at work today draw on a rich literary history while forging unique voices of their own.
“Trying to be a girl is not easy. There are few comforts that you are born with or can achieve. I know, they dress you in frocks and put ribbons in your hair, bangles on your arms, anklets on your feet, teach you to sing and dance and bake cakes, but what about the Inside-you?” – so says a character in Kishwar Desai’s Witness the Night. Desai and Faleiro lay bare that “Inside-you”, depicting both complex interior lives and the exterior world with which these characters are so often in conflict.
These stories that come in all shapes and sizes: there is non-fiction, there is fiction, there is poetry, reflecting experience through a myriad of exhilarating linguistic forms. These writers unflinchingly tackle the most brutal injustices in society, such as the “tradition of culling our girl children”. In this new generation, voices ring with all the force of life – and the possibilities of literature.
All proceeds from the event ‘What Price for Women’s Rights’ go to the Consortium for Street Children.
For information on the writers and events, click here:
The Dancing Girls of Bombay
October 19th, The Women’s Library, 6.30pm
Sonia Faleiro, Anita Sethi, Surina Narula
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