Urvashi Butalia
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Urvashi Butalia is an Indian feminist and historian. She is the Director and Co-founder of Kali for Women, India's first feminist publishing house.
Butalia was born in Ambala India in 1952. She earned a B.A. in literature from Miranda House, Delhi University in 1971, a Masters in literature from Delhi University in 1973, and a Masters in South Asian Studies from the University of London in 1977.
She worked as an editor for Zed Publishing and later went on to set up her own publishing house. Her writing has appeared in several newspapers including The Guardian, The Statesman, The Times of India and several magazines including Outlook, the New Internationalist and India Today. Butalia is a consultant for Oxfam India and she holds the position of Reader at the College of Vocational Studies at the University of Delhi. Her main areas of research are partition and oral histories. She has also written on gender, communalism, fundamentalism and media.
Kali for Women
Kali for Women, India's first women's publishing house, is concerned primarily with publishing Third World studies on women. Kali was set up in 1984 as a trust to increase the body of knowledge on women in the Third World, to give voice to such knowledge as already exists, and to provide a forum for women writers, creative and academic
The Other Side of Silence
The Other Side of Silence has been one of the most influential books in South Asian studies of the past decade. The book is the product of more than seventy interviews Butalia conducted with survivors of the Partition, and emphasises particularly the role of violence against women in the collective experience of the tragedy.
Butalia's book is widely taught in classes in anthropology, South Asian literature, and Women's Studies classes. The work is based on the fact that the Partition occurred in the shadow of the independence of Pakistan and India in 1947, and resulted in the largest mass-migration in human history. Twelve million people relocated in the course of a few months, and in the violence that accompanied the dislocation of so many, about 1 million people were killed. Butalia points out that the Partition is, like the holocaust, still very much a "living history", in the sense that many survivors are still around and can be interviewed. In contrast to the many projects that have undertaken the documentation of oral histories of the Holocaust, however, no comparable initiative has been undertaken in India.
Bibliography
- Making a Difference: Feminist Publishing in the South, Chestnut Hill, MA: Bellagio, Pub. Network, 1995.
- Women and the Hindu Right: A collection of essays, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995.
- Women and Right Wing Movements: Indian Experiences, London: Zed Books, 1995.
- In Other Words: New Writing by Indian Women, Boulder, Westview Press, 1994.
- Speaking Peace: Women Voices from Kashmir
- The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India