Clearing through some backlog from the last few months when I wasn’t posting anything… back in June my article ‘Indian Feminist Publishing and the Sexual Subaltern’ was published in Rupkatha, an open-access academic journal of interdisciplinary humanities. The full article can be downloaded here, but here’s the abstract:
‘The discussion of queer politics, identities and “sexual subalterns” in India has, after 2009,entered a new phase. Discourse on sexuality was once largely focused on law and health policies; now, such discourse is better able to address positive identities and their multitude of
articulations. The relationship between queer and feminist discourse has become more
productive. This article examines independent feminist publishers as a representative of Indian
feminist discourse on sexuality and sexual subalternity. Such publishers are significant mediators of feminist scholarship and discourse, so analysing their work can reveal much about
‘mainstream’ forms of feminism. The December 2013 Supreme Court judgment to uphold Section 377 is concerning to many, but in the four and a half years that homosexuality was effectively legal in India, the visibility of the sexual subaltern broadened to the extent that it may be difficult to return to a pre-2009 state.’
Poisoned Arrow, by Ibne Safi, translated from Urdu by Shamshur Rahman Faruqi. Chennai: Blaft, 2011. Originally published in 1957. Purchased for Kindle.
I have just been reading an interesting article by Will Evans in The Brooklyn Quarterly, entitled ‘I Want You to Start Your Own Publishing House‘, which discusses the terrible lack of translations of world literature into English. The following passage made me think of Poisoned Arrow:
“It’s an awful process for foreign writers to try to crack the English-language market, there are only so many publishers who publish any translations at all, and there are precious few who will publish beyond the confines of the most commercial or the most highbrow of world literature.”
This is where Chennai-based Blaft comes in. Publisher of a number of titles common in bookshops throughout India, including two volumes of Tamil Pulp Fiction,The Obliterary Journaland Stupid Guy Goes to India, they go push these boundaries. Not that Evans is wrong to write what he does–quite the opposite, if Blaft is a fairly isolated example of a publisher willing to take risks. They translate pop/pulp fiction from a variety of languages–Tamil, Urdu, Japanese, Hausa–so yes, one could say that they are sticking with the commercial, but the genres and the themes of the books they publish could hardly be considered mainstream-popular to Anglophone readers, so their publishing practices really are commendable.
But, to the book in hand: Poisoned Arrow by one of Urdu literature’s best-selling authors, Ibne Safi, who had a large following in both India and Pakistan. This short crime novel was originally published as Zahreelay Teer in 1957, and was translated into English by Urdu scholar and writer, Shamshur Rahman Faruqi (whose enormous The Mirror of Beauty I am trundling my way through at the moment). I find the production and dissemination of such a massively popular Urdu author from the mid and late twentieth century into English fascinating, but I’m afraid that’s where my interest in this book lies. Not only was the genre not to my taste–sensationalist crime–but I just felt it wasn’t very well written, my personal disinclination towards the genre aside. Poisoned Arrow is not a long book, and is written in accessible English, but the plot was so fast-paced that there was no time for detail, meaning I couldn’t visualise what I was reading about, couldn’t concentrate on the plot, and didn’t enjoy it much at all.
Not Blaft’s best publication, but I life what they’re doing. I’m glad to see there’s a second volume of The Obliterary Journal out now, and I’ll look out of that next time I’m in India.
Himal Southasian ‘Reclaiming Afghanistan’ cover, March 2014
The new issue of Himal Southasian, the first for 2014 and titled ‘Reclaiming Afghanistan’, is nearly with us! Take a look at the preview on our website. In the coming month, a series of web-exclusive articles will be published on our website, and the hard-copy (containing different articles) will be available to purchase/subscribe to on our website shortly. Or, if you happen to live in Kathmandu or Delhi, they will also be available in several good book shops–including Bahrisons at Khan Market in Delhi, and all the big names in Kathmandu.
I’ve just had an article published in Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, an open-access academic journal. It’s called ‘Reconciling Feminist and Anti-Caste Analyses in Studies of Indian Dalit-Bahujan Women’, and looks at the work of three publications by Indian feminist presses. It’s a modified and shortened version of one of the chapters of my PhD thesis.
This article is a good example of why I chose to leave academia (nothing to do with the article itself! But the publication process.) I first submitted this two years ago. I had to have my final changes made at the end of 2012. My final proofs were done in mid-2013. Yet it is only now being published. I’m not blaming anyone involved, but the whole academic publishing process means that studies are not reaching their target audience in a timely manner, even when there aren’t the physical logistics of printing and distribution involved–Intersections is an online journal. The system really needs an overhaul, but is unlikely to get it anytime soon. For example, I wrote this long before the author of one of the books discussed, Sharmila Rege, died last year. I wouldn’t necessarily have changed what the article contains after the news of her death reached me, but I may have wanted to add some kind of footnote in recognition of it.
But, all is well that ends well. Here is an extract from the article, and the rest of the article can be read by everyone (I love open-access academic journals, especially now that I’m no longer based at a university!) here.
“In the west the catchphrase ‘all the women are white, all the blacks are men’ came to capture black women’s feelings that they were alienated from both the feminist movement and the black civil rights movement. In India, there has been a ‘masculinization of dalithood and a savarnisation [upper-casteing] of womanhood. This paper examines three book-length studies of women’s involvement in anti-caste struggles that go some way in reconciling feminist and anti-caste positions concerning dalit-bahujan women: We Also Made History: Women in the Ambedkarite Movement, by Urmila Pawar and Meenakshi Moon (Zubaan, 2008), Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Reading Dalit Women’s Testimonios by Sharmila Rege (Zubaan, 2006), and The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Write Self-Respect History, edited by K. Srilata (Kali for Women, 2003). All three books were published by leading Indian feminist presses. This paratextual fact is central to a key argument of mine—that recent, feminist-inspired histories of dalit-bahujan women are trying to reconcile the fissures between feminist and anti-caste analyses, but are not always entirely successful because one of the two modes of analysis remains dominant over the other. Feminist and anti-caste modes of analysis have not always complemented each other in activism or scholarly discourse, with ‘mainstream’ feminists often believing that their movement is caste-neutral, and lower-caste women believing that the feminist movement does not provide a space for their particular grievances, heavily marked by caste. I argue that these feminist studies attempt to reconcile a feminist analysis with an anti-caste one—that is, the authors and views expounded in the texts are informed by feminist and anti-caste positions. But, it is still evident that the two modes of analysis have an ambivalent relationship with each other. ‘Feminist’ often remains synonymous with ‘upper-caste.'”
Delhi-based feminist press, Zubaan, has just announced that its books are now available in Kindle, Kobo and i-pad formats. This is very exciting news for me, being in Nepal and unable to get many of the books I want in physical copy, and only being able to electronically get what Amazon Australia deigns to share for Kindle.
My PhD on contemporary Indian feminist publishing featured Zubaan a great deal, so this development would’ve been even more exciting for me several years ago, but hey, late is better than never.
Most of what I’ve been reading on Penguin India’s decision to withdraw and pulp Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History is fairly similar: outraged and persuasive. I even wrote such a piece myself. But Eric Gurevitch’s analysis on the Asymptote blog is something a bit different, putting the controversy in a much more focused literary context. Worth reading here.
Change, by Mo Yan. Translated from Chinese by Howard Goldblatt. London, New York and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2012 (2010). (Purchased in Nepal).
Chinese? Yes, a radical departure from what I normally read, let alone review. I spent far too many years restricting my reading while completing my PhD that expanding it to other places and genres and even genders still feels a bit naughty but also quite liberating. This short piece of autobiographical fiction/ fictional autobiography (?) by one of China’s pre-eminent authors was published by Kolkata-based Seagull Books, and it is really this fact that drew me to it (and motivated my inclusion of it here).
Seagull Books is a very interesting press specialising in publishing translations of radical writers, or non-fiction on ideas that many mainstream publishers overlook. They have published a large body of Mahasweta Devi’s work in English translation; produce a series on censorship (which includes a title on censorship and Islam penned by Kamila Shamsie); as well as curate the series that Mo Yan’s Change belongs to, provocatively titled “What Was Communism?” and edited by Tariq Ali.
Seagull Books deliberately positions itself as an international publisher based in India, rather than an ‘Indian publisher’ which, rightly or not, is a label that can suggest inferior quality to outsiders (though certainly less so these days, with the entry of many international publishers to India). Seagull’s production quality is not only good, it is excellent–eye-catching and innovatively designed. The cover art on their books by Mahasweta Devi is iconic, and this series on communism is just as distinctive, with bold red and yellow designs.
And what about Change itself? Described as a “novella disguised as an autobiography (or vice versa)” I’m not sure it was the best introduction to Mo Yan, who I had been intending to read for some time. The interest in an ‘autobiography’ of a writer whose other work one hasn’t read is limited. But it is certainly a title fitting to this series, as the narrator (whether that is Mo Yan himself, or some fictionalised avatar) recounts growing up in an often illogically rigid communist China. More of Mo Yan’s titles, translated by Howard Goldblatt, appear in the series.
southasiabookblog 