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Journalism of Courage
In her essay, Stomping on the Cookie Cutter, journalist and sports writer Sharda Ugra writes that the 2011 Census reported that the number of urban single women was 27 million. “Of those 27 million, even if we assume that only 10 per cent are single by wild, wilful choice, it’s still 2.7 million women, the populations of Lithuania, Jamaica and Qatar. We are certainly not alone,” she writes. Ugra is joined by 12 other women in an upcoming anthology, Single by Choice: Happily Unmarried Women! (Women Unlimited), which explores why some Indian women, mostly living in urban centres, consciously decided to live single lives. Excerpts from a conversation with Kalpana Sharma, who edited the anthology:
One of the things that some of the contributors to the anthology have addressed is how the concept of ‘growth’, whether it is career or personal, is limited to men; that they get to ‘find themselves’, but women should be anchored to the home, lest we get lost. Sharanya Gopinathan’s piece touches on this desire to stay single so that she can discover who she is as a person over the years.
Yes, and it’s quite something for a 26-year-old woman to say that with such clarity. As I was editing this anthology, I found that the older generation of women like me didn’t approach the single life thinking that we won’t get married. It wasn’t a question of choice, it was happenstance. Some of us rejected arranged marriage, and some of us became feminists and began to question the institution of marriage. Young women today have already thought those things out and what they want, partnership and equality, are hard to attain. They are making demands as women, and most men in India aren’t ready for that.
Regardless of age, all the essays touch upon how crucial financial independence is to a single woman and how it threatens patriarchy.
It is, and it has its own levels as well. The financial independence that Sharda Ugra or Bama experience — they made a home for themselves — is different from those of us who, while staying single, became caregivers of our ageing parents. We were unmarried but there were restrictions, so some of us experienced being truly single much later.
Do you feel that your career as a journalist informed your experience of singlehood?
Yes, very much. I became the editor of Himmat magazine at a very young age, and it was during the Emergency. My feminism was located within the ambit of human rights, because of the Emergency; that’s also when the women’s movement took off, there was a real ferment.
For women journalists, being single gives you the freedom to do more reporting and go out. Some professions demand more from women compared to others, where it’s an advantage to be single.
One of the most hard-hitting essays in the book is by the Tamil writer, Bama. It reminds me of what Malcolm X meant when he said, “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman”. She talks about the ways in which patriarchy really works without once using the word.
It is an absolutely fantastic essay not only because of the writing, which is without any jargon, but also because it is truly intersectional; she’s writing about her experiences as a Dalit Christian woman and a feminist. It shows us that there is no homogeniety among women — and the incidents she writes about are seared into one’s mind. As a writer, Bama has looked into life, herself, society at a much deeper level than most of us have.
In the course of editing the anthology, was there anything that you had not thought of before?
The essays by Freny Maneckshaw and Sherna Gandhy informed me about the kind of pressure Parsi women face to marry and produce children. It made me think of what women from small communities or minorities face on a daily basis. Aheli Moitra is a journalist based in Nagaland, and her piece brings out a lot of interesting facts about the struggles of Naga women who choose to be single — we have such a different idea of those who live in the hills or in tribal societies and the reality is quite different. What I realised after reading all the pieces is that there is a world of women who can’t write their own stories, but we have to go and meet and write about them.
