by DR. SAROJINI SAHOO
South Asian writer Sarojini Sahoo SOURCE/Scent of Own Ink
In cyberspace I met a true member of Gyna sapiens. A writer from Orissa, who writes in her mother tongue, Oriya, and also English. Dr. Sarojini Sahoo, is a humanist, in the sense that she is writing against the domination of human-over-human, as described by Murray Bookchin. The feminists talk about domination of man-over-woman, but in reality there are women who dominate other women too. Sarojini’s struggle is not just for the women in Orissa, or the Dalits and the scheduled castes or the women in India. Her struggle is for the emancipation of all who are under domination, men, women and children.
It is because as a woman, she feels. She feels the pain and suffering of the women and children, and even the men who are less equal and less powerful. Women have to lead this struggle.
Women are more intelligent, more capable, more courageous than men. They also live longer than men, everywhere on earth. If Gyna sapiens too behaved like Homo, humankind would have disappeared from the face of the earth thousands of years ago. They would not have been able to survive. Even today the woman outlives the man, under most conditions, in the most sophisticated social conditions in a city of a ‘developed’ country, or in the most underdeveloped village in an Asian or African country.
Critics and the media try to compare Sarojini Sahoo with Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf and Judith Butler. But she responds, “I consider myself more a writer and as a writer, I think I am always a genderless entity. A writer should not have any gender.” Having said that, she puts the question to us, “But still, patriarchal society has prevailed; is there any possibility to have a genderless society?”
Sarojini believes that “BOTH (her emphasis) men and women are subjected to oppression and stereotypes and that these oppressive experiences have a profound effect on beliefs and perceptions.” She is “against the patriarchy role model of society but says it does not mean that she wants to replace a matriarchal role model of society in place of the existing patriarchal one.”
Daily News for more
Sensible Sensuality: A Collection of Essays on Sexuality, Femininity and Literature
Author: Sarojini Sahoo
Publisher: Authorspress, Delhi
Reviewed by: Dr. Sujatha S.
Sarojini Sahoo is an accomplished novelist, short story writer, critic and academician. She is a trendsetter of feminism in contemporary Indian Literature and always fond of analysing the inner dynamics of feminist sensibility. Sexuality is a device to
question patriarchy in her works. Sahoo is unlike other theorists of feminism as her assertions and assumptions are free from abstractions and technical jargons. There is no attempt on her part to examine power relations in texts and in life. To her, reading is not a political act. An engaging transparency and straightforwardness characterize her feminist ideology. It is not her concern whether men and women are different because of biology or are socially constructed as different.
The Criterion for more