Renowned author and scholar, UrvashiButalia, taught the course, ‘Women, Society and Changing India’ to the Naropa Fellows on 13th and 14th March. Urvashi is the co-founder of India's first feminist publishing house, Kali for Women (1984), and now heads Zubaan, an imprint of Kali, which was set up in 2003. She has a long involvement in the Indian women's movement and has written extensively on issues to do with gender, feminism, history, violence against women and more. Among her best-known publications is the award-winning oral history of partition, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (winner of the Oral History Book Association Award 2001 and the Nikkei Asia Award 2003). She is a visiting faculty at the Ashoka University, Vedica Scholars Programme for Women and Anant National University.
During her course at the Naropa Fellowship, Urvashi discussed the gendered politics of history-making and how women are not given their fair due. She looked at the lives of some very important women in Indian history, and explained the concept and need for oral history. Delving into the India-Pakistan partition, she chronicled various aspects of the lives of women in those times and how that shaped modern-day Indian feminism. Looking at important junctures in the rise of Indian feminism since independence, Urvashi also analysed our Fellows' LAPs and introduced gendered perspectives to the same.
