Uma Bhatt

Last updated

Uma Bhatt (born 1952) is an Indian scholar, writer, and founder-editor of a magazine for women. She is involved in political issues in her home state of Uttarakhand.

Contents

Education

She obtained an MA and a PhD from Agra University. [1]

Magazine

In 1990 she founded the magazine Uttara which is "women-centric". [2] As well as publishing poetry and fiction it addresses social issues in Uttarakhand, and features the stories of "ordinary" women who have dared to challenge taboos. [2] While Bhatt has been said to "spearhead" the project, [2] there were also co-founders Kamla Pant, Basanti Pathak, and Sheela Rajwar.

Politics

In the 1980s Bhatt wrote a six-page article for the feminist magazine Manushi about the "Anti Liquor Movement in Uttarakhand": a campaign involving women who felt strongly about the negative effects of the alcohol business on family budgets and women's safety. [3] Women from this popular campaign were encouraged in the 1990s to support the movement to separate from Uttar Pradesh, which in 2000 led to an independent Uttarakhand. Bhatt has said they were betrayed by male politicians who made promises about several issues of great concern to women but who then backtracked. She also criticised the way men expected the women who had contributed to the independence movement to go back to a less politically active life once the new state was established. [4]

Scholarship

Dr. Uma Bhatt is a linguist in the Department of Hindi at Kumaon University, Nainital, with a specialist knowledge of Himalayan languages. She co-edited The Languages of Uttarakhand as part of the People's Linguistic Survey of India. [5] This is a series studying both current and dying languages in India. The publisher says the work "addresses the need to look at the languages of indigenous people, minority communities, and the marginalised." [6] Her fellow editor on this project was Shekhar Pathak, a historian, who is her husband. [7] They have also co-authored a book about the 19th century explorer Nain Singh. [8]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nain Singh</span> Pundit who explored the Himalayas for the British

Nain Singh, also known as Nain Singh Rawat, was one of the first Indian explorers employed by the British to explore the Himalayas and Central Asia. He came from the Johar Valley in Kumaon. He surveyed the trade route through Ladakh to Tibet, determined the location and altitude of Lhasa in Tibet, and surveyed a large section of Brahmaputra. His reports were initially made under the code name Number 9. He walked "1,580 miles, or 3,160,000 paces, each counted."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chipko movement</span> 1970s Indian forest conservation movement

The Chipko movement is a forest conservation movement in India. Opposed to commercial logging and the government's policies on deforestation, protesters in the 1970s engaged in tree hugging, wrapping their arms around trees so that they could not be felled.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Uttarakhand Kranti Dal</span> Regional political party of Uttarakhand

The Uttarakhand Kranti Dal, is a registered unrecognised regional political party in Uttarakhand, India. Founded in 1979, the party was built upon the aim of establishing a separate hill-state to combat administrative neglect and ensure sustainable development with respect to the sensitive ecology of the Himalayan region. Through the 80s and late 90s UKD became the principal leader of the Uttarakhand Statehood Movement and is credited by for bringing about the separation and creation of Uttarakhand as the 27th state of India on 9 November 2000.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kumaoni language</span> Indo-Aryan language of Central Pahari branch spoken in India and Nepal

Kumaoni is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by over two million people of the Kumaon region of the state of Uttarakhand in northern India and parts of Doti region in Western Nepal. As per 1961 survey there were 1,030,254 Kumaoni speakers in India. The number of speakers increased to 2.2 million in 2011.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Garhwali language</span> Central Pahari language spoken in India

Garhwali is an Indo-Aryan language of the Central Pahari subgroup. It is primarily spoken by over 2.5 million Garhwali people in the Garhwal region of the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand in the Indian Himalayas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Udham Singh Nagar district</span> District in Uttarakhand, India

Udham Singh Nagar is a district of Uttarakhand state in northern India. Rudrapur is the district headquarter. The district consists of nine Tehsils named Bajpur, Gadarpur, Jaspur, Kashipur, Khatima, Kichha, Nanakmatta, Rudrapur, Sitarganj. The district is located in the Terai region, and is part of Kumaon Division. It is bounded on the north by Nainital District, on the northeast by Champawat District, on the east by Nepal, and on the south and west by Bareilly, Rampur, Moradabad, Pilibhit and Bijnor District of Uttar Pradesh state. The district was created on 29 September 1995, by Mayawati government out of Nainital District. It is named for freedom fighter and Indian revolutionary Udham Singh.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nainital district</span> District of Uttarakhand in India

Nainital district is a district in Kumaon division which is a part of Uttarakhand state in India. The headquarters is at Nainital.

Manushi: A Journal about Women and Society is an Indian magazine devoted to feminism as well as to gender studies and activism. The magazine was founded in 1978 by Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita, two scholars based in New Delhi. It is currently published as a bi-monthly; a total of 157 issues have appeared by the end of the year 2006. Manushi is also a publishing house which prints not just works on the status of women in India but also novels and short stories with a less direct connection to gender issues.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chandi Prasad Bhatt</span> Indian environmentalist

Chandi Prasad Bhatt is an Indian environmentalist and social activist, who founded Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh (DGSS) in Gopeshwar in 1964, which later became a mother-organization to the Chipko Movement, in which he was one of the pioneers. For his work Bhatt was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1982, followed by the Padma Bhushan in 2005.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shekhar Pathak</span>

Shekhar Pathak is a historian, editor, publisher, activist, and traveller from Uttarakhand, India. He is known for his extensive knowledge of the history of colonial and postcolonial social movements and contemporary environmental and social issues in Uttarakhand, and colonial exploration in the Himalayas and Tibet. He has also been engaged in activism for various social and environmental causes since the 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Garhwali people</span> Indian ethno-linguistic group in the Garhwal region of the Indian state of Uttarakhand

The Garhwali people are an Indian ethnolinguistic group native to the Garhwal, in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, who speak Garhwali, an Indo-Aryan language.

Shanta Kalidas Gandhi was an Indian theatre director, dancer and playwright who was closely associated with IPTA, the cultural wing of the Communist Party of India. She studied with Indira Gandhi at a residential school in the early 1930s, and remained close to the prime minister in later life. She received many government awards and sinecures under the Indira Gandhi administration, including the Padma Shri (1984) and being made chairperson of the National School of Drama (1982–84).

Renana Jhabvala is an Indian social worker based in Ahmedabad, India, who has been active for decades in organising women into organisations and trade unions in India, and has been extensively involved in policy issues relating to poor women and the informal economy. She is best known for her long association with the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), India, and for her writings on issues of women in the informal economy.

Buksa, also known as Buksari and Bhoksa, is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Buksa people in parts of Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh, India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarla Behn</span> English Gandhian social activist

Sarla Behn was an English Gandhian social activist whose work in the Kumaon region of India helped create awareness about the environmental destruction in the Himalayan forests of the state. She played a key role in the evolution of the Chipko Movement and influenced a number of Gandhian environmentalists in India including Chandi Prasad Bhatt, Bimala behn and Sunderlal Bahuguna. Along with Mirabehn, she is known as one of Mahatma Gandhi's two English daughters. The two women's work in Garhwal and Kumaon, respectively, played a key role in bringing focus on issues of environmental degradation and conservation in independent India.

The People's Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI) is a linguistic survey launched in 2010 in order to update existing knowledge about the languages spoken in the modern republic of India. The survey was organized by the NGO Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, Baroda, founded by G. N. Devy, a social activist, and was conducted by 3500 volunteers, including 2000 language experts, social historians. It has identified 780 languages in India. The 35,000 page survey is being published in 50 volumes. The first six volumes were released at the Bhasha Vasudha Global Languages Conference in Vadodara on January 7, 2012. The survey was completed in December 2012 and several of its volumes are being published by the publishing house Orient Blackswan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kamla Pant</span>

Kamla Pant, born, Chamoli (Uttarakhand), is a feminist, politician and women's rights activist. She is also known for her work in the Uttarakhand movement, which resulted in Uttarakhand becoming a separate Indian state in 2000.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jaunpuri dialect (Garhwal)</span> Northern Indo-Aryan dialect of India

Jaunpuri (जौनपुरी) is a Northern Indo-Aryan dialect spoken in parts of the Garhwal region in the state of Uttarakhand, India. Its speakers are found in the Jaunpur development block in the east of Tehri Garhwal district. Although a separate identity for Jaunpuri has been claimed, it is most commonly considered to be a dialect of Garhwali.

References

  1. ↑ "Uttarakhand ki bhashayein (Orient Blackswan) - About the Author". www.orientblackswan.com. Retrieved 13 September 2023.
  2. 1 2 3 An equal gender, The Hindu, 13 March 2014
  3. ↑ Uma Bhatt, "Give Us Employment, Not Liquor", Manushi Vol 24
  4. ↑ Telegraph of India, 4 Feb 2002
  5. ↑ The Languages of Uttarakhand, Volume 30, 2015
  6. ↑ People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI)
  7. ↑ List of PLSI volumes
  8. ↑ Pundit Nain Singh Rawat (1830-1895): Life, Explorations and Writings, 2007
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.