Linked with When culture kills – Urvashi Butalia’s View From the South, and with Pratham.org – India.
She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.
Urvashi Butalia, born 1952 in Ambala in Punjab, is the face and voice of feminist literature and publishing in India. In 1984, she set up Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publishing house, from a little office in a garage and with almost no funds. Two decades later, Kali has succeeded in bringing to the fore the marginalized voices of Indian women. Her parents, Subhadra and Joginder Butalia, had relocated to what became India after Partition when The Tribune, where Joginder worked, had shifted there. Her mother began as a teacher, and taught both at school and university.
She says: « Early in my life I realized that knowledge is a most powerful weapon, and the silence of women across the world was premised on the denial of knowledge and information ».
Find her on wikipedia.
She is a consultant for Oxfam India.
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Urvashi Butalia – India
She works for Kali for Women (Feminist Publishing in Asia), which is part of Zubaan Books.
The third of two brothers and a sister, Urvashi was brought up to believe in honesty and self-reliance. Her mother worked even as she bore four children, and looked after her own brother and sister, who became refugees after Partition. Urvashi’s parents brought up their children with no thought to gender inequity.
They were all educated in a co-educational school. When her father was offered a job with The Times of India in Delhi, Urvashi and her sister Bela went to a girls’ school where their mother taught, and where education for them was free.
Urvashi earned a Masters in literature from Delhi University in 1973 and a Masters in South Asian Studies in 1977 from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Involved in student politics while at university, she became leader of the students’ union in her college, Miranda House, and worked for women and girl students. She was the vanguard of a campaign for women’s colleges to become members of the Delhi University Students’ Union, until then the preserve of male students.
Urvashi participated in crusades to make the university a safer place for women, for better hostel conditions for girl students, against the commodification of women through beauty contests, and several other campaigns. It was this that led, in the early 1970s, to her involvement in the then nascent women’s movement in India, where she was initially part of a large umbrella group called Samta (Equality), the parent group that founded the journal Manushi.
Urvashi was on the original founding collective of this now-legendary journal.
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