What’s a common thread that connects remarkable women such as Tun Tun, Bibha Chowdhury and Pandita Ramabai?

That they were born, lived and worked between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, when being a woman was a challenging experience, shaped by caste, religion, place of residence, class and occupation. These women dared to go against social conventions and made their mark in traditionally male-dominated spaces and professions, paving the way for the women of today.

A Star Named Bibha and Other Stories is a collection of short biographies of thirty such trailblazing Indian women who have broken the glass ceiling, and done it in style. Read about Durgabai Kamat, Amrit Kaur, Amrita Pritam, Fatima Beevi and many other such inspiring women of India.

The authors of this stunning new book write about how and why they wrote it, and answer why you should read it too!

As children, all the three of us loved to read life-stories. A few months back, one of us pulled out some of those books from a dust-laden bookshelf, wishing to present those to her seven-year-old daughter. She stared at the portraits of freedom fighters, reformers, scientists and authors and was basking in the same awe that she used to feel, about three decades back.

This time, however, she felt that something was missing. She realised that there were very few women in these books. When she narrated this incident to us, we learnt that all of us grew up in this lacuna.

As we talked and researched on this, we found that, the world has seen a number of good children’s books that describe the lives of important women across the world and also in India. But, at the same time we felt that they were incomplete.

There were few women from marginalised social groups in these books. This was largely because these books have focused, perhaps obsessively, more on the “first”/ “early achievers” in “respectable”/ “conventional” fields. But we know that constraints and opportunities for women vary across their social locations.

We used our disciplinary trainings to look at these issues in our academic work on what we call ‘intersectional inequalities’. But children cannot read that stuff, though we strongly feel that they need to. Thus, we decided to write a children’s book, a collection of short biographies of 30 women from diverse backgrounds and various fields, who lived and worked in India.

Who Are We?

We, Anwesha Sengupta, Supurna Banerjee and Simantini Mukhopadhyay, research and teach at Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata. Additionally, all of us regularly write in the media on social issues.

Anwesha has a PhD in history from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She teaches a course on gender and history to students as a part of the coursework for MPhil and PhD.

Supurna has a PhD in Sociology from University of Edinburgh. She works on and teaches gender inequalities. Using qualitative research methods, she looks into intersectional inequalities in the Indian context.

Simantini received her PhD in Economics from University of Calcutta. She uses quantitative methods to measure inequalities across gender, caste and class.

The Book We Wrote

We have written a collection of short biographies of trailblazing women of India, for children above 10 years. Most of them were born and worked between late 19th century and mid 20th century.

While writing we keep in mind that being a woman was a diverse experience, shaped by other identities such as caste, religion, region of residence, occupation, and class. We feel that the existing books which focus more on first achievers in ‘respectable’ and conventional fields, do not adequately address the structural deficiencies of the Indian society. Therefore, we tried to strike a balance.

We distinguished our book in terms of three features.

  1. Intersectional Approach:

    We wish to sensitize the young readers about the diversity of human conditions in a society like ours from a feminist perspective.Therefore, the early woman medical practitioner and a remarkable village midwife with no formal education are equally important to us; so is a great woman social reformer like Pandita Ramabai and Prabhabati Bhore, a trade union leader who rose from the rank and file of labour union.

  2. Situate the lives in the right surroundings:

    The biographies that we have seen often narrate the lives of their protagonists in vacuum. That, we believe, does not give a proper sense of their struggles and achievements.The glass ceilings that TunTun, the first woman comedian of Hindi film industry, broke and the fights that physicist Bibha Chowdhury had to fight can only be fully appreciated if we situate them in their surroundings.

    For that, we need to understand the world they inhabited. Being trained social scientists ourselves, we are equipped to take up this challenge. Situating these remarkable women in their spatial and temporal surroundings will also develop historical consciousness among the children.

  3. Removing the separation between “Respectable” and “Non-respectable” Professions:

    Third, we are eager to break this false separation between professions. Therefore, the selection includes scientists and circus artist, architect and film actor, doctor and midwife, social reformer and trade unionist, writer and environment activist, pilot and parliamentarian.The idea is to talk about women who fought patriarchy and worked for a just, equal world. We expect that the young readers will learn to respect all professions and appreciate their challenges.

Why we chose 30 women to write about?

Questioning the concept of singular story, our stories are multiple, of women from diverse regional, religious, caste, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. We hope this diversity of selection will bring about a culture of celebration and respect of diversity.

Further, the diversity itself also teaches that it is not a level playing field and the temporality of achievements clearly demonstrates that the odds our achievers faced were distinct to their social location.

Our book is not a propagandist piece, but it is explicitly feminist and intersectional. The multiplicity of the women’s marginal lives is written about with the hope of encouraging children to ask questions, to interrogate institutionalised inherited understandings as knowledge.

Some of the stories included in our book:

  1. The woman who tamed the tigers: Sushila Sundari (1879-1924): Sushila Sundari was one of the first women to perform in a circus. She worked in the famous Great Bengal Circus and was popular for her performances with two tigers. Sushila could ride horses, was an expert gymnast and a trapeze artist. She became a nationalist icon during the Swadeshi Movement.
  2. Setting off from the film set: Durgabai Kamat (1899-1997): At a time when acting in films was a taboo for women, especially for women from upper caste families, Durgabai Kamat, a single mother chose acting as her profession. She faced lot of opposition from her community, but she carried on. Her daughter, Kamlabai Gokhlae was the first child actor in Indian cinema.
  3. A star named Bibha: Bibha Chowdhury (1913-1991): She was one of the earliest women astro-physicist. She was the only woman student in her master’s class. Despite her brilliance, she was denied her rightful glory simply because she was a woman. But such was her achievement that a star is named Bibha in her honour.
  4. The mother of all: Sulagitti Narasamma (1920-2018): She delivered more than 15,000 babies for more than seven decades without charging any money for her services. In the remote locations of Karnataka where medical amenities were scarce, it was her skill which saved mothers and babies. She did not go to school but learnt the traditional method of delivering babies from her grandmother. She also learnt how to prepare natural medicines for pregnant women from nomadic tribes who took shelter in her village and put them to use.
  5. The queen of comedy: Tuntun (1946-2003): Uma Devi Khatri was Bollywood’s first female comedian and playback singer. Hailing from a modest family in a UP village she made a career initially with playback singing. She then went on to become a very successful comedian breaking many stereotypes like women are not funny.
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