by DR. SAROJINI SAHOO
While speaking on the topic ‘Reclaiming Language, Space and Body: Women Writing in Odia’ during the Second Literary Festival arranged by Samanvay at IHC, Delhi on November 4, 2012, I stumbled upon some strange reactions from some of my colleagues. This predisposed me to think how poor our ideas are in such areas. As the topic was related to ‘body’ and ‘women writing,’ I marked many of the participants mingled the term ‘body’ (or exactly to say ‘woman’s body’)with sexuality. And amusingly enough, they had very limited ideas about female sexuality. As a result, the total discussion roamed round the merits and demerits of extramarital affairs. It could have been so much more…
In my speech, I related, we have a very blunt idea about sexuality. Common people in India can’t think more than a ‘passion’ or ‘lust’ or ‘erotica’ or ‘pornography’ while relating the term ‘female body.’ But the term is more allied with social issues primarily affecting women in our culture such as birth control, abortion, the family, sexual discrimination and harassment, and rape.
In one of my essays discussing ‘discrimination with the female body,’ I have written, “In Asian and African countries, it’s a regular practice to breastfeed girls for a shorter time than boys so that women can try to get pregnant again with a boy as soon as possible. In the case of adolescent girls, they are provided with less food than their brothers by their own mothers. As a result, girls miss out on life-giving nutrition during a crucial time in their development, which stunts their growth and weakens their resistance to disease.
Sunita Kishor published a survey report in the “American Sociological Review” (April 1993). In her article “May God Give Sons to All: Gender and Child Mortality in India,” she writes, “despite the increased ability to command essential food and medical resources associated with development, female children [in India] do not improve their survival chances relative to male children with gains in development. Relatively high levels of agricultural development decrease the life chances of females while leaving males’ life chances unaffected; urbanization increases the life chances of males more than females…Clearly, gender-based discrimination in the allocation of resources persists and even increases, even when availability of resources is not a constraint.” Is this not gender discrimination as related to the body of a female?
(See: ‘Seeking a Voice for Open Questions About the Sexual Rights of Women’ from http://sarojinisahoo.blogspot.in/2011/01/seeking-voice-for-open-questions-about.html)
Reacting to my speech, one Kannad poetess Mamta G.Sagar commented, from the audience, she was opposing any feminist voice in literature and stated a writer should not be a feminist but rather a humanist. I clarified my position on how anyone could expect a discussion on the topic of ‘body’ wouldn’t reach the arena of feminism? And I also clarified my view that I think it’s a vague statement to say a writer should not be a feminist but a humanist. It sounds as if feminists are not humanists and the authors who believe in patriarchal milieu are the real humanists.
But after that seminar, when I tried to know more about Ms. Sagar, I came to know from Muse India that she likes to introduce herself for her work on Women and Gender politics. In her Wikipedia page, she mentioned she had acquired her Ph.D. degree in “Gender, Patriarchy and Resistance: Contemporary Women’s Poetry in Kannada and Hindi (1980-2000).” This moved me to write the following.
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