Sensibility knows no gender difference

South Asian women writers:

The general misconception, probably created by the male of the species, is that literature is dominated by men writers all over the world. The truth is, the theme of women writers is too vast to be discussed within a limited space.

Daya DISSANAYAKE

In a supposedly male dominated literary world it is Enheduanna who is still accepted as the first writer among ‘man'kind. In South Asia, there have always been women writers, of equal prominence as the males.

Though this article is about women writers, the approach is not from a ‘Feminist’ view, because feminism is an alien concept to the South Asian culture. Women always had an equal or a dominant position in our cultures, and even in pre-historic cultures throughout the world. The myth about a hunter-gatherer and provider of the family has been exploded and there is evidence to believe that the woman was the provider of all food and who took care of the family. The men were only there for protection and to provide an occasional supply of meat from a hunted animal. Contradicting the myth about the subservient position of women in South Asia, we find numerous inscriptions of donations of caves and temples made by women.

However, when readers and even scholars discuss South Asian women writers, they always take up the role of post-colonial writers, talking about how they have moved away from “traditional enduring, self-sacrificing women searching for identity”. But that is because these readers are only exposed to the diasporic writings and writing in English. Had they been aware of real “indigenous” writing by women in South Asia, they would have realized the true position of these women and their role in culture and arts.

It should be noted that the Asian woman did not consider her domestic responsibilities as a burden, as “chores”, but she did it out of her love and devotion for her family. It is the ignorant and conceited men who considered that the women were slaving on their behalf, because the women were inferior.

The oldest surviving women writing from South Asia are accepted as the Therigatha from the 6th century B.C. There could have been previous writings, which have not survived, or had been suppressed or destroyed by their male rivals.

However, there is a school of thought that some of the Vedic hymns were written by women. Among them is Ghosha, the granddaughter of Dirghatamas and daughter of Kakshivat, who were both composers of hymns in praise of Ashwins. Ghosha has 14 verses in praise of Ashwins, another was a personal prayer for married life after she is cured of her lifelong ailment. Lopamudra was the wife of the sage Agasthya who is credited with two stanzas in the Rig Veda. Maitreyi, one of Yajnavalkya's wives, had written 10 out of the Rig Veda hymns. Gargi, daughter of sage Vachaknu, was also a Vedic prophet (or should we call her a prophetess?)

Sangam Age (100 B.C. to A.D. 250) writings are considered the oldest South Asian secular poetry, and out of the 2,381 surviving poems 154 are by women. Susie Tharu and K.Lalita believes that most of the anonymous works would also be by women. In the West sometimes women had to write under male names. Even Joanne Rowlings had to appear in a more masculine guise as J.K. Rowlings. In Sri Lanka it once happened the other way round, when Alexander Welivita write under the name Swarnalatha Vaduge Kumarihami. (Palliyaguru & Kularatne).

The oldest university on earth, founded at Nalanda around the 1st century B.C. gave women equal status, but any writing made by them were destroyed when the university was burned down.

The seventh century poet Vijjaka or Vidya from the present day Karnataka has written “without knowing about me, Vijjaka, dark, like the petal of the blue lotus,

That the poet Dandin (vainly) said that the Goddess of learning was all white”.

In the ninth century, Avantisundari, wife of the poet Rajasekhara, had written poetry in Prakrit. Rajasekhara had written in ‘Kavya Mimamsa’, “women also can be poets. Sensibility and sophistication know no difference of sex”. Hemachandra used quotations from Avntisundari in his Deshiamamala in the twelfth century.

The Tamil poet Karraikal Ammaiyar is the earliest of the women-poet saints

of the Bhakti movement. Bhakti poets wrote in their regional languages, breaking the religious and literary hold of Sanskrit. Many of the Bhakti poets were women, among them 12th century poets, Akkamahadevi and Sule Sankavva, who “wrote poetry that could startle contemporary sensibility with its combination of the sacrosanct and the sacrilegious” (Vijaya Dabbe) Janabai, who belonged to the Sudra community, orphaned at a young age, became a servant in the household of a Varkari devotee, and later became the ‘dasi’ of a son of the family. Yet she wrote over 340 devotional songs, which survived as her master Namdev, who himself was a Varkari poet, saved them.

She considered her god ‘Vitthal’ (an incarnation of Vishnu), as her mother, her fellow servant and ultimately as herself. In one poem she addresses her God Vitthal,

“You leave your greatness behind you,
to grind and pound with me.
O Lord you become a woman,
washing me and my soiled clothes,
proudly you carry the water
and gather dung with your own hands”

The Bhakti movement was spread all over the Indian subcontinent. Janabai wrote in Marathi. Rami wrote in Bangali, Gangasati and Ratnabai in Gujarati, Atukuri Molla in Telugu and Gul-badan Begum in Persian.

Some of the well known women in Kannada literature include Triveni, (1928 - 1963), Rajalakshmi N. Rao (Sangama), N. V. Bhagyalakshsmi (Berala Sandiya Baduku), Vina Shanteeshwar (Higondu Kathe) Tahru and Lalita discuss the issue of “Colonial Rearticulation of Gender”, when “Women artists were delegitimated and marginalized”, like the Vishnava poets. An extraordinary number of biographies had been written by women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mainly in Marathi and Bengali, Pandita Ramabai, Lakshmibai Tilak, Rassundari Devi among them.

Sarojini Naidu (1879 - 1949), born in Hyderabad, though well known as a great poet, wrote in English, during her early years. Later she had devoted her full time for politics and the Independence struggle. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880 - 1932), born in Pairaband in present day Bangladesh also wrote in English (Sultana's Dream, 1905). But Sughra Humayun Mirza (1884 - 1954) and Janaki Bai (1889 - ?) wrote in Urdu.

A list of 20th century South Asian writers could begin with Kuntala Kumari Sabat who wrote in Oriya, Kamla Choudhry in Hindi, Ashapurna Debi in Bengali, Lalithambika Antherjanam in Malayalam, and Shyamal Devi in Kannada.

In Sri Lanka the first women writers could be authors of the Deepavamsa, the oldest known chronicle, which is claimed to have been written by a team of Bhikkhunis. There is reference to the Twelve great poets, and we do not know if any of them had been women. We know there were many women who wrote poems on the Mirror like wall of Sihigiri.

The first woman writer in English in Sri Lanka is accepted to be Rosalind Mendis (Mystery of a Tragedy). The Sri Lanka Directory of Women Journalists and Writers lists 500 profiles of our writers. There could be many more, who have not been listed, who have been here before our time.

The place of Sri Lankan women writers in Sinhala has been convincingly proven by Sumithra Rahubadda, Sunethra Rajakarunanayake, and others, by consistently winning awards for their creative writing, outclassing the male writers.

Women authors writing in Tamil include fiction writers, Kokila Mahendran, Annaladchmy Rajadurai, Yoga Balachandran and Padma Somakantahn and poets, Sivaramani, Urvasi, Maithayi, Sankari, Kasthuri, Auvai and Zulfika. (Lakshman & Tisdell)

Pakistan women writing in Urdu include Alfat Fatima (Dastak Na Do), Bano Quisia, Fatima Suraya Bajia, Fehmida Riaz, Haseen Moin and Umaira Ahmad. Attiya Dawood writes in Sindhi. There are many more women who write and publish for their readers in Pakistan, doing a silent service for their arts and literature.

Taslima Nasreen is the most well known writer from Bangladesh, who shot into the international limelight after ‘Lajja'. There are many other women writers.

The first version of the Ramayana by a woman writer appeared in the 16th century, by Chandravati, paying tribute to Sita. This is the Bengali Ramayana or Chandravati Ramayana, described through the lives of Sita, Mandodari and Chandravati herself. Other writers are Mahasweta Devi who won the Magsaysay award in 1997. Baby Halder, from West Bengal, abandoned by her mother at 7, married off at 12, escaped to Delhi with her three children. She wrote her memoir ‘A Life Less Ordinary’, which has been translated into several languages including English.

Aminath Faiza (1924 - 2011) was a Malidivian poet who wrote in Dhivehi, who was awarded the National Award of Recognition (1980) and National Award of Honour (1996) for her contribution to Maldivian poetry.

Kunzang Choden is from Bhutan, studied in Delhi and Nebraska. She writes in English on Bhutanese oral traditions.

Manjushree Thapa was born in Nepal, lives in Kathmandu, but had studied in Canada and her higher education in Washington, writes in English.

A list of South Asian Women Writers is available at http://www.sawnet.org/books/authors.php

It is time that men started writing and discussing Male writers too, or someday they too would have to complain about being dominated by female women writers.

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Women should be focus of energy expansion plans- UN

Women should be the focus of efforts to bring access to modern energy to those who lack it, a new United Nations report has found, as bringing energy to women and girls helps lift communities out of poverty and improves health.

But the report also warned that providing energy alone was not enough to combat poverty, and programmes to provide energy access work best when they are accompanied by help for people to access other key services such as microfinancing and education.

Providing energy to the poor has long been seen as key to addressing poverty levels, and over the last 20 years there have been scores of programmes that attempt to bring energy services for lighting and cooking to deprived communities, particularly in rural areas. But too many of these have focused only on supplying access to villages, towns and homes - often a question of just putting in the cabling or generating equipment.

Women prepare food using a solar cooker in Mali.

Martin Krause, leader of the climate and energy team for Asia Pacific at the UN Development Programme (UNDP), said his study showed this was not enough. “Energy services are often not affordable by the rural and urban poor, and on their own have little impact.

The poor need support to generate income so that energy becomes affordable, which in turn will improve household living standards.” He called for the provision of “energy plus” services that would provide access to sustainable and renewable energy sources but also assistance for people to supplement their incomes and improve their education.

The UN has launched a new campaign called Sustainable Energy for All, in an attempt to bring the benefits of cleaner energy access to poor communities.

Currently, more than a fifth of people around the world have no access to electricity, and twice that many rely on biomass - usually in the form of wood, charcoal or animal waste - for cooking and heating.

The indoor air pollution from cooking fires leads to more than a million deaths and many more cases of ill health every year.

Focusing on women is a way to cut this high number of deaths, and it also frees up women and children from spending hours every day in the hunt for fuel, a time-consuming task that is one of the reasons girls in developing countries often spend less time at school than boys.

The soot from cooking fires is also a significant contributor to global warming (pdf), according to a UN Environment Programme report published last year, and cutting it could delay dangerous climate change.

As part of the new UNDP report, entitled Towards an Energy Plus Approach for the Poor, the authors studied 17 energy access projects in the Asia-Pacific region to find what was successful.

They found that energy access programmes should be set up in conjunction with other development initiatives such as microfinance, transport infrastructure, telecommunications, schools and health facilities, and that giving people access to renewable forms of energy could also help to lift them out of poverty.

They pointed to success stories such as a solar lantern rental scheme in Laos, providing cleaner and cheaper lighting than the kerosene lamps they replaced.

Biogas from animal waste is also a key potential new technology. By clubbing together, poor people can also gain better access - by ensuring a minimum number of guaranteed customers, schemes encourage providers such as solar panel-fitters to enter the market, for instance.

But the authors also found a clear role for regulation, pointing to measures such as China's new laws stipulating more renewable energy, which has led to a dramatic growth of clean energy across the country.

Access to energy alone is not enough to combat poverty, says UN report, it needs to be allied with microfinance and education programmes.

-Guardian.co.uk