Amrita Pritam was an Indian novelist, essayist and poet, who wrote in Punjabi and Hindi. A prominent figure in Punjabi literature, she is the recipient of the 1956 Sahitya Akademi Award. Her body of work comprised over 100 books of poetry, fiction, biographies, essays, a collection of Punjabi folk songs and an autobiography that were all translated into several Indian and foreign languages.
Miranda House is a constituent college for women at the University of Delhi in India. Established in 1948, it is one of the top ranked colleges of the country and ranked number 1 for consecutively seven years.
Tanika Sarkar is a historian of modern India based at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Sarkar's work focuses on the intersections of religion, gender, and politics in both colonial and postcolonial South Asia, in particular on women and the Hindu Right.
Manjula Padmanabhan is an Indian playwright, journalist, comic strip artist, and children's book author. Her works explore science, technology, gender, and international inequalities.
Shashi Deshpande is an Indian novelist. She is a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Padma Shri Award in 1990 and 2009 respectively.
Suniti Namjoshi is a poet and a fabulist. She grew up in India, worked in Canada and at present lives in the southwest of England with English writer Gillian Hanscombe. Her work is playful, inventive and often challenges prejudices such as racism, sexism, and homophobia. She has written many collections of fables and poetry, several novels, and more than a dozen children's books. Her work has been translated into several languages, including Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Chinese, Korean, Hindi and Turkish.
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.
Amrita Basu is an American academic and political scientist. She currently is a professor at Amherst College where she holds affiliations in the departments of Political Science, Sexuality, Women's, & Gender Studies, Asian Languages & Civilizations, and Black Studies.
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 2004. It is based in New Delhi and publishes fiction, nonfiction, academic & children's books for, by + about women in South Asia. It was founded by Urvashi Butalia and is an imprint of Kali for Women.
Lotika Sarkar was a noted Indian feminist, social worker, educator and lawyer, who was a pioneer in the field of women's studies and women's rights in India. She was a founding member of Centre for Women's Development Studies (CWDS), Delhi, established in 1980, and also Indian Association for Women Studies, established in 1982. Starting in 1951, she taught law at Faculty of Law, University of Delhi till 1983, and also remained the head of the law faculty; thereafter she taught at Indian Law Institute. She was the first Indian woman to graduate from Cambridge University, and later in 1951 she also became the first woman to receive a PhD degree in law from the university.
Ritu Menon is an Indian feminist, writer and publisher.
Achamma Mathai was an Indian social worker, women's rights activist, a co-founder of Dr. John Mathai Centre, an institute of Information Technology, Economics, Management, Theatre Arts and Music under the University of Calicut and the wife of John Mathai, the first Railway Minister of India and a former Finance minister. During her stay in Delhi, when her husband was serving in the Union Ministry, she was reported to have been involved in activities related to children's education. During the riots that followed Indian independence, she worked alongside Sucheta Kripalani for the rehabilitation of the riot victims. She served as a member of the Advisory Committee for Libraries in 1955 and as the chairperson of the Central Social Welfare Board in the early Sixties. The Government of India honoured her in 1954, with the award of Padma Shri, the fourth highest Indian civilian award for her contributions to the society, placing her among the first recipients of the award.
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.
Towards Equality was the title of the report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India (1974–1975). This 1974 document is said to lay the foundation of women's movement in independent India, highlighting discriminatory sociocultural practices, political and economic processes. The findings of the report reopened the women's question for government, academia and women's organisation. Its authors included Vina Mazumdar and Lotika Sarkar, who later founded the Centre for Women’s Development Studies in Delhi.
Syeda Saiyidain Hameed is an Indian social and women's rights activist, educationist, writer and a former member of the Planning Commission of India. She chaired the Steering Committee of the Commission on Health which reviewed the National Health Policy of 2002, till the dissolution of the body in 2015, to be replaced by NITI Aayog.
Wajida Tabassum was an Indian writer of fiction, verses and songs in the Urdu language. She wrote 27 books. Some of her stories have been made into movies and Indian television serials. Her controversial 1975 story titled "Utran" was made into a popular soap opera on Indian television in 1988. "Utran" was reprinted in English translation as part of an anthology of 20 short stories titled Such Devoted Sisters in 1994, and from there was made into a movie in 1996 under the title Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, with a script by Mira Nair and Helena Kriel.
Padma Anagol is a historian known for her work on women's agency and subjectivities in colonial India. Her work broadly focuses on gender and women's history in colonial British India. Her research interests also include a wide spectrum of topics such as material culture, consumption and Indian middle classes, theory, historiography and periodization of Modern India and comparative histories of Victorian and Indian patriarchies over the issues of social legislation.
Priya Sarukkai Chabria is an Indian poet, translator and novelist writing in English, and a curator. She has written four poetry collections, two speculative fiction novels, translations from Classical Tamil, literary nonfiction, and a novel. She has edited two poetry anthologies. She is also founding editor of Poetry at Sangam, an Indian online literary journal of poetry.
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."
