21 Under 40: New stories for a new generation
edited by Anita Roy
Zubaan, 2007
An anthology of short stories appeared earlier this year touting the courage of young Indian women fiction writers to candidly talk about sex. Supposedly, these women herald a new era of Southasian feminism, a feminism that has shunned its self-serious habit and learned to just "have fun". But there is a hint in these claims of an underlying assumption that scurrilous feminism is even more threatening to men. On the contrary, if editor Anita Roy had ballyhooed the concept well and loud, and if the cover and the title of 21 Under 40 had not been so extraordinarily unenticing, sex-starved straight men could very well be queuing up to get their hands on it.
But, as a good adage teaches us, let us not judge the book by its cover. After all, this volume is no feminist smut, but rather an honest literary endeavour. Not sexy writing but rather women's writing was the publisher's original interest, even if that is the kind of interest that typically and mechanically presupposes that 'women's writing' is not sexy. 21 Under 40 was put out by Zubaan, an imprint established by Urvashi Butalia, co-founder of the erstwhile feminist publishing house Kali for Women. These imprints have undoubtedly advanced erudition on Southasian women, while documenting the remarkable spiralling of the Subcontinent's women's movement over the past two decades. They have also strived to – and very often succeeded in – injecting into public debates an uproar of women's 'marginalised' voices.
The themes of agency and experience, present even in Anita Roy's introduction to 21 Under 40 – the title presumably setting out Zubaan's definition of the 'new' generation – have constituted the bedrock of most feminist endeavours around the world. These themes may explain Zubaan's increasing fascination with the "words" and "writings" of women, and hence the foray into fiction. A commentary on the significance of language as a battleground for gender politics is unnecessary here. But even so, Roy's emphasis on women's writing harbours a very romantic notion: battered as India is by the crassness of local and global economies, the power and ability to write creatively offers an alternative world, where some kinds of freedom s are possible. Roy's enthusiasm for women's writing is such that, if one finds liberation unattainable in the real world, she must then simply write.