Urvashi Butalia

Urvashi Butalia (* 1952 in Ambala, India) is an Indian writer, historian, publisher and feminist. With Ritu Menon Urvashi Butalia founded the first feminist publishing house of India Kali for Woman. Since the amicable separation of the two founders in 2003 derives Butalia their own publishing house Zubaan Books.

Urvashi Butalia speaks several Indian languages ​​( Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali ) and English, French and Italian. She lives in New Delhi.

Education and Publishing Career

Urvashi Butalia acquired in 1971 a Bachelor in Literature at the University of Delhi and then the Master in Literature at the same university in 1973. A Masters in South Asian Studies she earned in 1977 at the University of London.

She began her journalistic career as an editor at the Oxford University Press in Delhi and later spent a year in the office of the publisher, Oxford. Returned they taught about publishing at the University of Delhi. In 1982, she joined with Zed Books London and helped their offer list for women 's and gender studies build.

Private literary creation

Butalia focused its own activity as a writer on the modern history of India and the partition of India and oral traditions in particular. She has also written about gender, communalism, fundamentalism and the media.

Her book The Other Side of Silence is one of the most influential books on South Asian Studies of the last decade. It remained for more than six months at the helm of the Indian bestseller list and won the Oral History Book Association Award in 2001 and the Nikkei Asia Award for Culture in 2003. The book is the result of more than 70 interviews Butalia with survivors the partition of India has carried out, and in particular emphasizes the role of violence against women in the collective experience of tragedy.

Butalia writes in several newspapers, including The Guardian, The Statesman, The Times of India and several magazines, including Granta, Outlook, New Internationalist and India Today. On their German texts were first published in the cultural magazine Lettre International.

Social commitment

Butalia has actively participated in the Indian and global women's movements, among others, Samta, an organization that advocates for change in the Indian laws on violence against women, dowry and rape. She has worked as a consultant for various national and international organizations.

Works

  • Making a Difference: Feminist Publishing in the South, Chestnut Hill, MA: Bellagio, Pub. Network 1995.
  • Women and the Hindu Right: A collection of essays, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995.
  • Women and Right Wing Movements: Indian Experiences, London: Zed Books, 1995.
  • In Other Words: New Writing by Indian Women, Boulder, Westview Press, 1994.
  • The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, Penguin Books India, December 1, 1998
  • Speaking Peace: Women Voices from Kashmir, 2002

In German language:

  • Women in India, German Taschenbuch Verlag, ISBN 978-3-423-13508-5

Articles and essays

  • Blood ties. The separation of India and Pakistan: a family history, in Lettre International 37, 1997
  • An inevitable journey. Visit to the old Sikh Bir Bahadur in the villages of his childhood, in Lettre International 59, 2002
  • Father's bones, in Lettre International 67, 2004
  • Fasting against corruption in India, in Lettre International 95, 2011
  • An unannounced act of violence, in Lettre International 96, 2012
  • Cartoon and paranoia, in Lettre International 97, 2012
  • Wheels of justice, in Lettre International 98, 2012
  • The veil falls, in Lettre International 99, 2012
  • Women in India, in Lettre International 100, 2013

Swell

  • Http://www.lettre-ulysses-award.org/jury06/bio_butalia.html (main source during the initial creation of the article)
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