Imagining (an)other – Men Writing Women

A conversation with writers Amitabha Bagchi, Chandrahas Choudhury, Deepak Unnikrishnan , Mahesh Rao anchored by Karthika Nair was initiated with the fundamental question – “How do men write women characters? Is gender the greatest distance you have to traverse while writing your characters?”

 

Chandrahas who is the author of ‘Clouds: A Novel’, said that he actually did not think that gender was a large gap to bridge. He felt comfortable writing about women characters but found the character of a tribal boy in his book hard to crack. He said that this was because he had not lived that life or had any first-hand experience of it, so even though it was a male character he found it hard to get into his mind and write about him.

 

Mahesh who is the author of the award-winning book ‘The Smoke is Rising’, said that for him, gender was the least distance to cover. He said that he writes from observed experience. He watched and learnt from the different women in his life and it came quite naturally to him. He further added that he never thought that it was odd for a man to write from a woman’s point of view. He believed that a writer needed to inherit his characters complexity, irrespective of gender.

 

Amitabha, author of ‘Half the Nights Gone’ then pitched in to say that men become men by answering questions raised by women. He said that essentially if a man can understand the place of origin of the questions and make an honest attempt to answer them he can quite easily assess a woman’s perspective, get into her mind and form female characters for his stories.

 

Deepak who is the author of ‘Temporary People’ shared a personal anecdote with us. He said that as a young boy growing up in Abu Dhabi, he went to school in the afternoon when the girls would leave and when he and his friends stood at the gates watching the girls walk out of the gates, they would cook up stories about them. He stressed about how they knew nothing about these girls but were able to perceive what kind of life they probably led. He further reflected how finding a voice for his characters was important to him and how he reached into his memory to find the voice of his grandmother and his great grandmother which he later used in his characters.

 

Wrapping up the session, Karthika then brought up a very important question to all the writers on the panel, asking whether post the “Me Too” movement they would think about how they wrote their female characters. Almost unanimously the panel said that yes they do think about these things and police themselves to make sure they are not creating stereotypes or writing poorly about women. They felt that this should have happened earlier itself and it probably did in pockets, but now that it has all come out in the open, it was important for all writers to think about how female characters lend themselves to the story.

 

 

About the Author: Pashmi Dutta is a reader, writer, political enthusiast. Trying to talk with ease about things that make us uneasy, she has her blog at PashmiBlog and currently writes for TheSeer.

Early Indians

The audience seated at the Yayati stage arena on the first day of the Bangalore Literature Festival’19 were greeted by Tony Joseph, the author of the best-selling book, ‘Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From’ for a 30-minutes session alongside Chandrahas Choudhury, novelist and columnist based in New Delhi who moderated the session.

 

Tony spoke about the contents of his book, ‘Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From’ which is an account of the origin of modern Indians. There were varied discussions on what brings us together and on the ancestry of growth, not thought. Several questions on the disappearance of ancient civilisations of the Harappans, the Mesopotamians, etc. and whether they were our ancestors or not was also addressed. Tony’s book answers these questions and discusses these subjects in elaborate detail. He also touched upon how the Harappan civilization is known to grow naturally by agriculture and that further answers several other intertwined questions such as – ‘who were the first farmers and the first Indians?’.

 

He elaborately discussed three sets of migration that has great contribution in understanding the ancestry of the modern Indians and Chandrahas remarked how we were the first Indians to learn about those Indians from history Tony had written about in his book.

 

The session was concluded with general remarks on how geneticists in the modern times are capable of finding ancient DNA that has in turn changed our understanding of origin and brought in significant developments which in a nutshell can be explained in terms of ‘archaeology and encounter of technology’.

 

 

 

About the Author: Upasana Mahanta is an MA in English with Communication Studies student from CHRIST (Deemed To Be University) – Bengaluru, who firmly believes that there is nothing more exhilarating and liberating as poetry. She finds solace in writing poems and travel blogs and has amongst her laurels a 1st Prize in the English category of the All India Poetess Conference, Meghalaya Chapter’s Seventh Poetry Competition cum North East Poetry Festival. She currently writes for TheSeer.