December 29, 2002

“I FELT the need to open up a space for women,” says Urvashi Butalia, who along with Ritu Menon, founded the first feminist press in Asia, Kali for Women. She goes on to add, “I found very little was being published by women and began to think of setting up my own publishing house.”

Urvashi’s long lasting romance with the publishing world began with Oxford University Press which she joined after doing her MA in English literature. She started her publishing career pasting Indian names onto foreign books meant for teaching English in India. She moved up to the production department and from there to editorial. Her face comes alive when she says, “As I made my way into the publishing world, I realized how much I loved publishing.”

Urvashi studied English Literature only because it was considered a fashionable subject. She found Shakespeare and Milton of no relevance to India and had no desire to take up a teaching job. When an opportunity to teach a course in publishing at Delhi University came up she could not turn it down.

En route to Hawaii on a scholarship from East-West Centre she stopped in London. Zed Books (then Zed Press) offered her a job. She gave up the scholarship, abandoned the idea of doing a PhD and stayed on in London to do what she loves doing. After all these years, her eyes still sparkle when she says, “I thought about it for the briefest of whiles and decided this was what I really wanted to do.”

In 1984, she came back to India and teamed up with her friend Ritu Menon to establish Kali for Women. In Hindu mythology female power has many manifestations. Kali is the destroyer of wickedness and the patron Goddess of Tantra. She is the Mother who destroys and bestows.

From a small beginning in Ritu Menon’s garage with a list of 75 imprints, Kali for Women has grown into a well established publishing house. It has many outlets in India and distributors in England, America, and Europe. The main office in Delhi is not easy to find. It is hidden at the back of a house on the first floor of the building in a posh neighbourhood with no signboard or any other directions. In some way it is symbolic of women’s unrecognized contribution to society. Kali being the first publishing house of its kind, there was no competition when Urvashi started her venture. There was however plenty of scepticism. Some made sarcastic remarks, “Do you think there are women who write.” An editor of a well known academic publishing house told her, “Women’s books, they are just a flash in the pan. Who will buy them? And how will you sustain yourself?”

Within 10 years the turnover had increased 25 times. Although Kali is a trust, a non-profit organization, it does make a profit which is put back into the organization. It is a very small operation with only six full-time workers. They work hard to put out good quality books at a reasonable price. What distinguishes their imprint is the choice of manuscript and the care taken to develop a title.

“Urvashi Butalia has toned up the standard of publishing in India,” says Ram Advani, owner of Ram Advani Bookseller in Lucknow.

Kali imprints are not limited to Indian writers. They maintain close contact with academics and activists. Fatima Mernissi’s Muslim women’s Paradise was published by Kali. With the growing interest in gender relations, sales of rights abroad have been high. In India, Kali has opened up a new market for novels and short stories in English. English translation of works by Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Hyder have sold well.

Kali works in cooperation with publishers in the UK, the USA and elsewhere. It sells rights of its books to publishers abroad who print the book with their imprint on it. Or Kali prints the book with the imprint of foreign publishers. This arrangement gives Kali a bit of money and publishers abroad get the book at a reasonable price because they don’t have to do any editorial work.

Publishing at Kali is a matter of integrity and identity. Their primary focus is on third world women: adding to the existing literature on them and providing a forum for women writers. They also publish material in social sciences, humanities, general nonfiction and fiction.

Apart from being a publisher, Urvashi Butalia is also a writer and an activist. She has edited more than one book. The most recent one being Women speaking peace: voices from Kashmir. It captures the impact of the conflict in Kashmir on the lives of women.

She has been writing for a long time. Initially, she wrote on women, media, publishing, and communication. Later on, her political involvement led her to write on questions of identity, fundamentalism, sectarian strife, and nationalism. Her book, The other side of silence, is an outstanding contribution to the existing literature on partition. It narrates the history of partition from a human perspective. It documents the violence, the trauma and the immense human cost of partition about which not much is known in the subcontinent or in the world.

In her biographical sketch, she writes, “When you compare the scale of partition to that of the holocaust and then look at the place the holocaust occupies in world history, you wonder whether this neglect, this ignoring of histories of other nations, has something to do with taking the occident as the centre of the world and everything else as its periphery.”

From very early in life, Urvashi has been writing on women’s issues. In 1995, along with Tanika Sarkar, she edited the book, Women and the Hindu right: a collection of essays. With Ritu Menon, she has written or edited other books on women’s writings: The slate of life: a collection of short stories; Truth tales: stories by Indian women; In other words: new writings by Indian women and Making a difference: women’s writing and publishing in the south.

Fighting for women’s rights comes to her naturally through her feminist mother. “Feminism came to me before publishing.” She asserts. As a university student, she actively participated in forming women’s groups, publishing a women’s magazine and taking up women’s issues with the authorities. The real awakening came after finishing university when she heard the screams of a woman being killed by her husband and mother-in-law. The incident turned her into an activist taking up the cause of women through street plays, demonstrations, and women’s groups.

She is not afraid to call herself a feminist, but feels that it carries a western connotation. The word immediately brings images of strident bra burning females. Bra burning of course never happened. And as Urvashi says, “Bras are far too expensive to burn.” It is one of those myths circulated around to discredit the women’s movement.

Nowadays, she does not go demonstrating on the streets, but gets her message across through writing, public speaking, and participating in different women’s and human rights activities in India and abroad.

She came to Pakistan to attend the conference held to commemorate the 25th anniversary of army action in Bangladesh. She believes in people’s power and recalls the moments when at the conference Pakistani women apologized to the Bangladeshi women. She realizes that nothing was gained in a materially substantial way, but feels that it still had a wonderful impact. The women’s initiative did pay off. Many years later, when President Pervez Musharraf went to Dhaka he apologized to the people there for the events of 1971.

She is convinced that people-to-people dialogue can be effective. She thinks that you can stop one or two people, but not hundreds of human rights activists, journalists and other concerned citizens.

She lives in her own apartment in the same house with her mother. She takes care of her mother; she loves being an aunt; she has a wonderful time with her extended family particularly her nieces and nephews.

How does she feel about her life? “I am truly fortunate to be able to do professionally what I am capable of doing, tie it with what I politically believe in and that I am personally interested in,” is what she had to say. “And to have a supportive family on top of it!”

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