Ritu Menon | |
---|---|
Nationality | Indian |
Occupation(s) | publisher, author |
Ritu Menon is an Indian feminist, writer and publisher. [1] [2]
In 1984, Menon co-founded Kali for Women, India's first exclusively feminist publishing house, along with Urvashi Butalia, her longtime collaborator. In 2003, Kali for Women shut shop due to lack of commercial viability compounded by irreconcilable personal differences between Menon and Butalia. Thereafter, Menon independently founded Women Unlimited, another feminist publishing house. [3]
She has also written numerous newspaper articles and op-eds. Her writing focuses on violence against women, religion's take on women and the gender divide across the society from a strongly feminist and left-wing perspective. [4]
Over a Zoom call, she talked about Address Book: A Publishing Memoir in the time of COVID, which she wrote during the pandemic without an explicit plan to publish a book. “It became a form of putting down what I was going through, remembering, thinking, reading, and worrying about,” she says (13 July 2021). [5]
In 2000-2001, she served on the International Advisory Board of the Raja Rao Award for Literature. [11] In 2011, Menon and Butalia were jointly conferred the Padma Shri, India's fourth-highest civilian award, by the Government of India. [12]
The partition of India in 1947 was the division of British India into two independent dominion states, the Union of India and Dominion of Pakistan. The Union of India is today the Republic of India and the Dominion of Pakistan, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and the People's Republic of Bangladesh. The partition involved the division of two provinces, Bengal and the Punjab, based on district-wise Hindu or Muslim majorities. It also involved the division of the British Indian Army, the Royal Indian Navy, the Indian Civil Service, the railways, and the central treasury, between the two new dominions. The partition was set forth in the Indian Independence Act 1947 and resulted in the dissolution of the British Raj, or Crown rule in India. The two self-governing countries of India and Pakistan legally came into existence at midnight on 14–15 August 1947.
Indian Union Muslim League is a political party primarily based in Kerala. It is recognised as a State Party in Kerala by the Election Commission of India.
Sheikhupura also known as Qila Sheikhupura, is a city and district in the Pakistani province of Punjab. Founded by the Mughal Emperor Jahangir in 1607, Sheikhupura is the 15th largest city of Pakistan by population and is the headquarters of Sheikhupura District. The city is an industrial centre and satellite town, and is located about 38 km northwest of Lahore. It also borders Sialkot, Gujranwala, Nankana Sahib and Kasur districts of Punjab, Pakistan.
Aruna Asaf Ali was an Indian educator, political activist, and publisher. An active participant in the Indian independence movement, she is widely remembered for hoisting the Indian National flag at the Gowalia Tank maidan, Bombay during the Quit India Movement in 1942. Post-independence, she remained active in politics, becoming Delhi's first Mayor.
Urvashi Butalia is an Indian feminist writer, publisher and activist. She is known for her work in the women's movement of India, as well as for authoring books such as The Other Side of Silence: Voices from and the Partition of India and Speaking Peace: Women's Voices from Kashmir.
Feminism in India is a set of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and opportunities for women in India. It is the pursuit of women's rights within the society of India. Like their feminist counterparts all over the world, feminists in India seek gender equality: the right to work for equality in wages, the right to equal access to health and education, and equal political rights. Indian feminists also have fought against culture-specific issues within India's patriarchal society, such as inheritance laws.
The Rashtra Sevika Samiti is a Hindu nationalist women's organisation that parallels the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) for men. Even though it is often referred to as the "Sister" of the RSS, the organisation claims that it is independent of the RSS while sharing its ideology. Membership and leadership is embraced to women and its activities are directed to nationalist devotion and mobilisation of Hindu women.
Sadhvi Rithambara is a Hindu Vestal (Sadhvi), public speaker and nationalist ideologue who is the founder-chairperson of Durga Vahini, the women's wing of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), established in 1991. She gained national prominence with VHP in the late 1980s through the Jan Jagran Abhiyan, and in the 1990s during the run up to the Babri Masjid demolition. Subsequently, she was named an accused in the Liberhan Commission report, though later acquitted by the CBI court in 2020.
Kali for Women was a start-up feminist publisher in India. Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon set up Kali for Women in 1984, arguably the first Indian publishing house dedicated to publishing on and for women. When they decided to take this step, Butalia had worked with Oxford University Press and Zed Books in Delhi, while Ritu Menon was a scholar. They started with very little capital but with an urgent sense that they had to make Indian women's voices heard, through academic publishing and activist works, translation and fiction. They were followed by other Indian presses concerned with gender and social issues, such as Bhatkal and Sen who publish the imprints Stree and Samya and Tulika Books.
Zubaan Books is India's second feminist publishing house, set up in the year 2003. It is based in New Delhi and publishes fiction, nonfiction, academic and children's books for, by and about women in South Asia. It was founded by Urvashi Butalia and is an imprint of Kali for Women.
The 1964 East Pakistan riots refer to the massacre and ethnic cleansing of Bengali Hindus from East Pakistan in the wake of an alleged theft of what was believed to be the Prophet's hair from the Hazratbal shrine in Jammu and Kashmir in India. The salient feature of the pogroms was its urban nature and selective targeting of Bengali Hindu owned industries and merchant establishments in the capital city of Dhaka. This resulted in unending waves of Bengali Hindu refugees in neighbouring West Bengal. The refugee rehabilitation became a national problem in India, and hundreds of refugees were resettled in Dandakaranya region of Odisha & Madhya Pradesh.
Pakistan Zindabad is a patriotic slogan used by Pakistanis in displays of Pakistani nationalism. The phrase became popular among the Muslims of British India after the 1933 publication of the "Pakistan Declaration" by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, who argued that the Muslim minority in British India—particularly in the Muslim-majority regions of Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan—constituted a nation of an irrevocably distinct nature from the rest of India on "religious, social, and historical grounds" owing primarily to the issue of Hindu–Muslim unity. Ali's ideology was adopted by the All-India Muslim League as the "two-nation theory" and ultimately spurred the Pakistan Movement that led to the partition of British India. During this time, "Pakistan Zindabad" became a widely used slogan and greeting within the Muslim League, and following the creation of Pakistan, it was also used as a rallying cry by Muslims who were migrating to the newly independent state from India as well as by those who were already within Pakistan's borders. The slogan is commonly invoked by Pakistani citizens and Pakistani state institutions on national holidays, during times of armed conflict, and on other major occasions.
Hindustan Zindabad is a Hindi phrase and battle cry most commonly used in the Republic of India in speeches and communications pertaining to or referring to patriotism towards India, and has been used since the British Raj in the colonial India. It translates to "Long Live India". It is a nationalistic slogan, and has been used in nationalist protests such as radical peasant movements in post-colonial India. Another variation of the slogan is Jai Hind. Such slogans are common while cheering the Indian team in cricket matches.
During the Partition of India, violence against women occurred extensively. It is estimated that during the partition between 75,000 and 100,000 women were kidnapped and raped. The rape of women by men during this period is well documented, with women sometimes also being complicit in these attacks. In March 1947, systematic violence against women started in Rawalpindi where Sikh women were targeted by Muslim mobs. Violence was also perpetrated on an organized basis, with Pathans taking Hindu and Sikh women from refugee trains while armed Sikhs periodically dragged Muslim women from their refugee column and killing any men who resisted, while the military sepoys guarding the columns did nothing.
Kamla Bhasin was an Indian developmental feminist activist, poet, author and social scientist. Bhasin's work, that began in 1970, focused on gender education, human development and the media. She lived in New Delhi, India. She was best known for her work with Sangat - A Feminist Network and for her poem Kyunki main ladki hoon, mujhe padhna hai. In 1995, she recited a refurbished, feminist version of the popular poem Azadi (Freedom) in a conference. She was also the South Asia coordinator of One Billion Rising.
Nivedita Menon is a writer and a professor of political thought at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She previously taught at Lady Shri Ram College and the Department of Political Science at Delhi University.
Kalpana Kannabiran is an Indian sociologist, lawyer, human rights columnist, writer and editor based in Hyderabad, India. In March 2021, after a decade-long tenure, she retired from the post of Professor and Regional Director of the Council for Social Development, Southern Regional Centre, a research institute recognised by the Indian Council of Social Science Research. She is amongst the founding faculty of NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, and is a co-founder of the women's rights group, Asmita Resource Centre for Women, established in 1991 in Hyderabad. She was nominated as the Civil Society Advisory Governor for Asia by the Commonwealth Foundation, London in January 2020 for a term of three years. At present, Kannabiran is a Distinguished Professor at the Council for Social Development.
Uma Chakravarti is an Indian historian and filmmaker. Beginning in the 1980s, Chakravarti wrote extensively on Indian history highlighting issues relating to gender, caste, and class, publishing seven books over the course of her career. Her body of work mostly focused on the history of Buddhism, and that of ancient and 19th century India.
Nighat Said Khan is a Pakistani feminist activist, researcher and author. She is the director and founder of the Applied Socio-Economic Research (ASR) Resource Centre and a founding member of the Women's Action Forum.
The Kolkata Partition Museum is an initiative dedicated to documenting the Partition of India from the Bengal perspective. Dissimilar to the Punjabi context, the Bengal province had been divided twice: once in 1905, and then in 1947. The aftermath of the second partition, as recorded by many historians, unfolded distinctly in postcolonial Bengal vis-à-vis Punjab. Not only was the impact long-drawn and can be witnessed even 75 years after the Partition, its affect can also be seen in the neighbouring states of Bengal and the rest of the country owing to refugee resettlements spread out to as far away states such as Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh. The idea behind the Kolkata Partition Museum is to preserve and present the vanishing memories of partition, to emphasise both the "rupture and continuities between West Bengal and Bangladesh – in terms of language and literature, food, fabric, and the performing arts – and to encourage collaboration between them." The museum aims "to do so by involving public participation in its programs and gearing all its activities in a way that makes it more accessible and interesting to the public at large."