Feminist, publisher and writer Urvashi Butalia recounts her days in Ambala, Delhi University, a serendipitous flight to Hawaii, and little chances that led to Zubaan

I grew up in Ambala and spent the first 10 years of my life there. My parents moved to Ambala when The Tribune moved from Lahore to Shimla, and finally to Ambala, if I remember correctly, because the owner was holidaying in Shimla. Ambala was an ideal place for children. It was a small town at that time and we knew everyone. My brothers, sister and I were known as the “Four Bs” (our nicknames began with B). As siblings we were close—emotionally and chronologically—with only a gap of six years between the eldest and the youngest. Apparently, my father wanted a dozen children, while my mother gave up after four. Even then, I wonder how she managed all four of us, taught in a school and ran a household consisting of four kids, a husband, a mother-in-law and a handful of brothers, sisters and cousins. She ran it on a tight purse, as my parents had modest incomes to boast of. However, I don’t remember being unhappy or wanting anything. Even at a young age, the four of us were already moving in directions we were meant to take in our later lives. My older brother was a table tennis fan, playing regularly, and sports was a passion in his later life as well. My younger brother was tinkering with cars (at that time he wanted to be a mechanic!). I was following my father to office and watching him work in the press. I had also started writing smaller pieces for school magazines and assignments. My sister dreamt of being an artist. She was presenting her artwork to anyone interested. As for my parents, they never pressurised us to be big or famous. My mother was an independent, working woman, who was used to living alone at a time when it was unthinkable. She came without any “dowry”—naturally, my father’s parents disapproved of the union. They got married despite the opposition. In their ways, my parents were ahead of their times. They were both fairly liberal and unconventional, though I believe if my father could help it, he could have been pretty conventional. But, he grew up around strong women. He was a different sort of a man—not particularly ambitious, not patriarchal at all, and quite laid-back. My mother had left Lahore for a teacher’s post in Punjab before the partition. During partition, she went back for her brothers, sister and mother. She managed to return with one of my uncles and aunt, as her eldest brother chose to stay back and kept my grandmother with him. It is no wonder then that I grew up with stories of the partition. They were like a leitmotif: I heard them, but never listened— not until I was old enough to understand their significance. My father would often talk of his last day in Lahore: how he and his team released the last edition of The Tribune, took the early morning delivery truck to cross the Wagah border to India on the August 14, 1947. It’s no wonder that the stories found a prominent place in my later life, especially when Kali For Women began. At that time, a group of friends were making a documentary on the partition and asked me to help, simply because I hailed from Punjab. My experience during the documentary made me rethink my family’s past. Then the riots of 1984 happened.And old wounds resurfaced and new narratives began—people who had made narrow escapes then started to talk of the partition again. It was then that I decided to revisit the themes of migration and displacement once more, with my family as the core. I travelled to Pakistan to meet my uncle, who had stayed back. His story impacted me strongly. I thought that if so many people were affected within the smaller confines of a single family, then the split must have been pronounced on a larger scale. I became obsessed with the theme. But it took me a long time to compile all that in a book. Back in blissful Ambala we were sent off to two schools—the first one was called Airport School, a co-ed institution adjacent to a bombed-out church. I can’t remember which war led to its state, but I distinctly remember it standing in all its inky blackness. There must have been some wonderful stories surrounding it, as we were instructed not to play around it. In the early 1960s, my father took up a job in the Times of India and moved to New Delhi. My mother packed up and joined a year later with the whole family in tow. Because our parents knew that eventually my father would be moving to the city, the four of us were shifted to a bigger school in Ambala—Jesus and Mary Convent. In Delhi, I joined Miranda House in 1968. My elder siblings were already in different colleges of Delhi University, so we all had a vast network of friends between the four of us. My friends were also my younger brother’s friends and vice-versa. Those were wonderful times to be a student in Delhi University—young people were getting into political discussions, looking closely at the Left movement thanks to the Naxalbari unrest happening in Bengal. The air was rife and alive with discussions and discourses: on whether women’s colleges should join the Delhi University Students’ Union (associated with dirty politicking and disputes and therefore with masculinity). Several of us were raising questions of women’s safety in buses and hostel conditions. One could say that there was also a parallel women’s movement that was growing. Students were reading more. In such a time it seemed right to form an umbrella group—Samta—which could do a range of things to bring together smaller initiatives. We approached Veena Mazumdar, the then Head of the Centre for Women’s Studies and working with ICCR, which had released the first post-independence report on the state of Indian women. She agreed to lend us the centre premises occasionally for meetings. Along with Mazumdar, Samta also received the support of Latika Sarkar and J.P. Nayyaik, among several others. Samta would meet to share ideas, plan campaigns; one of the outcomes was Manushi, the journal. There were 18 of us who were part of the founding editorial team, including Saiba Hussain, who currently works with the Janwadi Mahila Samiti. The group also branched off to form Stree Sangharsh, a theatre group that performed plays on dowry deaths, domestic violence, etc. Our signature play was Om Swaha, which we performed all over Delhi. The play was based on the lives of two women— Tajwinder Kaur and Hardeep. Those were simpler times, we would board a bus, get off and perform. It was out of these performances that Saheli, a women’s counselling and help centre, was formed. Often, after our performances we were approached by audience, especially women. They would share their stories with us. Such encounters eventually led to the question: what could be done? Thus, Saheli. By the time I finished post-graduation in English, I was impatient with literature. Though I was writing for college magazines it was not satisfying my soul nor was it reflecting the feminism I was getting more and more involved with or my campus or Jungpura home reality. Around this time I realised that friends, family and teachers expected me to gradually become a teacher. Though I had no issues with teaching, formal education was frankly beginning to bore me. I was really keen to do something that didn’t throw me back into what I was trying to escape—teaching literature. I came across a freelance assignment at the Oxford University Press. A friend who worked there asked me to apply. I got through and thus began a six-year-long affair. I started rather ingloriously, as a “paster upper”. My task was to change British names into Indian ones (Tom conveniently became Ram) in English textbooks adapted into Indian schools. I would also cut-off tops of double-decker buses to make them more “familiar”, and coloured blonde hair and blue eyes, black. I did that for six months, till Oxford offered me a post and a scope to train under them. I stayed on for six years, till I started to get a bit disillusioned (yes, again). I was not going anywhere, whereas my male colleagues were. More importantly there was a disparity between issues that were so alive in the real world and the books that I was editing. That is when the idea of an exclusive publishing house, dealing with issues relating to women, germinated. I guess I was not ready as yet to start. By 1978, I had started getting more and more involved in the women’s movement and simultaneously started teaching publishing in a college of vocational studies. In 1982, I was sanguine that I wanted to setup my own publishing house. At the same time I was given a Fulbright scholarship to study in Hawaii—in my 30s, there was no way I was going to say no. Interestingly, I never reached Hawaii. I made a small stopover in England to meet a few friends I had made during my Oxford days there while completing a part-time Master’s course and working for Oxford University Press. During that stay, I happened to interact with people in the publishing business. The lovely people gently pointed out that if I could neither swim nor surf—I could not do either at that time—I should probably head back and do what I really wanted to do. So, I dumped the scholarship and stayed on in England for two years working with Zed Press. Also, I used up the days to work out Kali For Women in my mind. At the end of 1983, I adopted a unique way of convincing myself— by letting every one else know of my plan. When they could take it no further, my friends were forced to ask me, “When are you going to start the damn project?” And what would I call it? I set a date and blurted “Kali”. Sitting at a bar in England, it seemed a dark and empowering name. I came back from England in April of 1984 and Kali started in July. Back home, Ritu Menon—who later became a partner in Kali—and I, had begun corresponding over the idea. When she showed interest, we both believed that it was wiser to work together. She was in the publishing business and I was involved in the women’s movement. Granted, both of us were slightly worried about how our differences would work out, but we did carry on working in tandem for 19 years. It was those years later, as it happens in relationships based on political and ideological premises, we found that there were differences in opinion. It seemed sensible to try something else: a separate structure. So, we gradually moved towards a split. In hindsight it as a wise move. After the split, both felt released to prioritise and do things that we had interests in. It also helped us realise that the market was big enough for both of us. Thus, Zubaan came into being: I knew I wanted a name or a label that did not have a religious connotation. India was a fairly religiously polarised place and I did not wish the endeavour to belong to a particular community.

I Wish I Could...

If one could take both the publishing and writing bit out of my system, I guess I would basically be very bored. Jokes apart, I am an adaptable person: if I am disallowed both the pen and the paper, I would take to the press—my childhood dream of running a small press. I would print political pamphlets or Little Magazines for penniless publishers. I am publisher more than I am a writer. I do love to write of course, but what I do much more is publishing. Writing is not a struggle but it does not come easily. There are days on end when I struggle with an idea and till I let it pour on paper, there is no respite. I believe I wrote one fiction piece in my life for a children’s magazine— Target—with Rosalind Wilson as its editor. Though I was satisfied with the story, I never tried my hand in fiction again. I do not think I have the capacity to create a plot and characters. One of the things which I dislike about writing is that it is a lonely, and a deeply self-absorbed, task. There have been instances when I have shunned company to just write. I am by nature a social person. I have told myself that for me publishing and writing could not always go hand-in-hand—so off late, writing has taken a backseat. As a publisher, it is my obligation to publish people’s work if they approach me. If anything, I would put the feminist and publisher at a par and the writer would come just a little later. Publishing and writing are usually at loggerheads in my mind—I wish there was a way to breach this impasse. For the last two years Zubaan has been readying itself for me to move out and for the next person to come in place. Once that happens and I am free from publishing, then I will perhaps make space for writing.