Feminisms as Experience
Thought and Narratives

Neera Desai has undertaken a quest to understand the women’s movement and the women actively involved in the movement in this book. It is a journey that takes us through more than three decades of struggle to raise and understand women’s issues. The voices that emerge from these narratives are not a chorus in unison. They are voices that agree and disagree and they define and delineate in different languages of experience. But their core concern is similar and genuine. There is also nothing conclusive about what is spoken in these narratives. They are open-ended narratives. As one of them states, one can have the right questions but not always all the answers. There is the possibility that the right questions will, in future, lead us to a variety of right answers.

The World of Maya

Maya Kamath was a trained painter who later took to drawing cartoons. Her cartoons were not only witty but also extremely thought provoking and gender-sensitive. She worked on her cartoons almost until her last moments. She made sure that her last cartoon for Asian Age was ready before she died. This book contains some 1000 of cartoons and also some illustrations and drawings of Maya Kamath with a long introduction by Deepa Kamath, her daughter. Her cartoons cover a wide range of themes from family to international politics.

Allan
Her Infinite Variety
by Roshan G. Shahani

Allan P.Gimi (1904-1997) lived a long life and lived it fully and on her terms. She was a teacher and a mother of two daughters and a son. At a time when many women preferred to be housewives, Allan chose to study and enter college and then become a teacher. Married to Jamshed Mistri who used to be her teacher, Allan filled her life with teaching, literature, music and travel to distant lands. This book by her daughter not only opens up the interior spaces of a Parsi woman but also sets her in the context of her times, times when some women dared to create a space for themselves both at home and outside.

From The Land of a Thousand Hills
by Veena Poonacha

Ponamma (1866-1943), Subamma (1890-1940) and Neelamma (1921-1991) are three generations of women hailing from Kodagu or Coorg known as the land of a thousand hills. Writing their life stories is Veena Poonacha, the fourth generation woman. She paints their portraits drawing from many sources, including ballads, folk songs, proverbs, family genealogies, family stories, personal letters and photographs. Set against the background of the cultural and social history of Coorg, with ballads which sing of women as slayers of tigers and equals of men and captors of enemies of the land, the portraits of these three women emerge in firm tones, deep colours clear lines.