I grew up in awe of feminist writers like Ismat Chughtai, who wrote of lesbian passion in 1942, and Mahasweta Devi, who wrote of women unde...
I grew up in awe of feminist writers like Ismat Chughtai, who wrote of lesbian passion in 1942, and Mahasweta Devi, who wrote of women under colonisation and caste oppression. I came into adulthood in a time of the courage of Bhanwari Devi, the rural grassroots activist of a scheduled caste, who tried to stop an upper-caste family from marrying off their infant daughter. As punishment, she was gang-raped by upper-caste men.
Bhanwari Devi and her husband had the gall to go to the police. She was ostracised by her people, abused by the police, and brutally rebuked by the justice system. But her case finally won a victory when the Supreme Court of India recognised that she was targeted for her work as an activist, which then led to changes to sexual harassment laws in India. When asked in an interview how she overcame the shame of rape, Bhanwari Devi said: “What wrong did I do? It’s their shame, not mine.”
Both heartbroken and heartened by such feminist stories in my homeland, I now live in America, working – alongside white feminists and feminists of colour, trans feminists and cisgender feminists, straight and queer feminists – to tailor a beautiful, sleek,...
