Searching for definitions

My mother started the oldest voluntary organisation for women’s literacy in Rajasthan,” says Marwah. “While growing up in Ajmer,I was averse to her Gandhian feminism and wanted to define an identity away from all her work.”

She left Ajmer for Delhi at the age of 22 and started teaching English literature in 1988. She wrote her first comic novel,The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta,in 1993,and dabbled a bit in TV production before writing her second novel,Idol Love (1999),which is a dystopic vision of India in 2062.

I always considered my mother’s idea of women’s empowerment as regressive–her philosophy did not want to challenge the norms of society,but simply empower women through gender sympathy,” she says. But when the time came,and her mother’s 40-year-old Ajmer Adult Education Association was going to shut down,Marwah overlooked her cynicism and signed up as the secretary of the organisation. “My mother’s death in 1997 brought me back to my roots and to her work. I rediscovered Ajmer and the importance of my mother’s organisation–what they did back then helps us now,” she says. While working for the organisation,Marwah also authoured a novel,based on real life incidents in Ajmer,called Dirty Picture (2008) .

Marwah has now been with the organisation for 13 years and has also been teaching literature at Zakir Husain College for 22 years. She has also been with the Pandies theatre group,known for its social activism and feminist bias,for the last 10 years. Recently,her first full-length script,Sarkari Feminism,was staged at the Shri Ram Centre for Performing Arts. The play is a multi-layered dark comedy and analyses the government’s progress in its contradictory feminist policies.

On one hand,the government claims to be working for the empowerment of women,” she says,“but there is such an overemphasis on the traditional concept of what a family and a marriage ought to be,that there is no room for women solely as a woman. Unless you are married or part of a traditional household,the government does not consider you.”