Meet the Gujarati women writers who wrote innovative fiction, memoirs, and poetry

But what about our women?

Gujarat has the dubious honour of having the highest school dropout rate for girls in India, in contrast, Kerala has the lowest dropout rate for girls. Kerala is a state Gujaratis love to ridicule because it is frequently ruled by communists and many Malayalis work abroad, conveniently ignoring that so do Gujaratis. Among 16-year-olds, only 29 per cent of girls attend schools in Gujarat, while in Kerala the figure is 93.6 per cent.

Govardhanram Tripathi was conscious of the absence of women in Gujarat’s literary pantheon. In his address as the president of the first Gujarati Sahitya Parishad, he listed 70 well-known poets he had identified between the 15th and 19th centuries. As if to suggest diversity in Gujarati writing, he pointed out that “only” 30 among them were Brahmins. There were nine Banias, six Kanbis, nine sadhus, four Jain priests, one Marathi writer, and then he said, almost as an afterthought, that there were six women. In fact, a survey of almost 1,000 writers by the literary scholar Deepak Mehta showed that only 88 among them were women.

“There are more published women authors now, but many are from upper castes or elite classes. They include fine writers such as Dhiruben Patel, Varsha Adalja, Kundanika Kapadia, Ila Arab Mehta, Himanshi Shelat, Sarup Dhruv, Panna Naik, Sharifa Vijaliwala, Pratishtha Pandya, Mona Patrawala, and Manisha Joshi. Of them, Dhiruben who died in 2023, is special. She had started writing early, at seven. She was a multifaceted writer, known for her plays, novels (Vadvanal, 1963, and Aagantuk, 2002), and essays. She wrote the script for Ketan Mehta’s breathtakingly original debut film, Bhav-ni Bhavai (1982). The story goes that when the author Gulabdas Broker asked her to write a short story for a collection he was editing, she said she did not have one, but could he wait two hours? And submitted a flawless story two hours later, which was also used in textbooks.

Dhiruben wrote about rural life with empathy and wore khadi; her family was Gandhian too, but she refused to call herself Gandhian. “I love Gandhi because he was not a Gandhian,” she quipped once. Nor did she like to call herself a feminist, even though her writing was centred on women. “I don’t believe every man is a demon, nor every woman an angel. I am not a feminist because the world is not black and white,” she said.

Two daughters of Gunvantrai Acharya, who wrote pioneering novels about seafaring Gujaratis, also became leading writers. Ila Arab Mehta wrote dozens of novels, including Trikon-ni Tran Rekhao (1966), Batris Putli-ni Vedna (1982), and Vaad (2011), which Rita Kothari translated into English as The Fence. Her sister Varsha Adalja has written more than 50 novels, including Atash (1966) about the Vietnam War, Mare Pan Ek Ghar Hoy (1971) which became the talk of Gujarati neighbourhoods in the 1970s as it was serialised in a leading newspaper, and the multi-generational saga, Crossroad (2016).

Atash was a landmark. It emerged from a searing image Adalja saw of children who had died in an American bombing raid on a school in Vietnam. The photos inspired her to write about mothers desperately looking for their children amidst the rubble. Adalja was a college contemporary of my mother’s, and her daughters were a few years younger than me at my school. She told me she would write from 3 am, before her daughter woke up, and those quiet hours were the best part of the day as she plotted her novels.

In the 1970s I also met Kundanika Kapadia, when I was working on a school project on Gujarati poets. I wanted to learn about Makarand Dave, the poet who lived in Gondal. He wrote spiritual, rhythmic poetry about people who sang and danced to divine music, using words from talpadi, or rural colloquial language. He was known most for his translation of the pithy, satirical poem by Kahlil Gibran, “Pity the Nation”, which was in our Gujarati textbook, as “E desh-ni khajo daya”.

Kapadia was married to Dave. My mother suggested I meet her. She was confident Kapadia would see me even though I was still a schoolboy. And she welcomed me. She was the editor of Navneet Digest at that time. As I got to know her, I learned about her own writing, and I later recall the excitement among Gujarati women who eagerly awaited her novel, one of the most important Gujarati feminist novels of all time, Saat Pagla Akashma, about the protagonist Vasudha and the multiple lives she led as a sister, wife, and mother. It won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1985.

I read Saat Pagla Akashma a few years later, and in it, I saw the finest articulation of a middle-class Gujarati woman seeking her identity while trying to preserve the order that was cruelly and unjustly imposed on her. Like in Dhiruben’s writing, there was no stridency in her feminism. She raised profound questions about the burdens on a middle-class Gujarati woman to please others even if it meant ignoring her own needs, as though we hadn’t moved from Sarasvatichandra. Sonal Shukla told me that the burden Govardhanram placed on Gujarati writers was unshakeable. It was the inner life, of secrets remaining hidden, the dreams getting crushed, and novelists like Patel, Adalja, Mehta, and Kapadia were breaking barriers.

At one point in Kapadia’s novel the protagonist Vasudha reflects: “What kind of a man would you like? Someone who would let me be whole.... Who would be a friend, not master, who would walk with me hand in hand,” she says. Elsewhere, she wrote: “He wants me to cling to him day and night, doesn’t want to give me any space. That’s addiction, not love.... To admire a woman’s looks, or to praise her cooking, is like saying, stay beautiful and keep cooking.” The woman’s unhappiness stays hidden in the dark corners of the kitchen, she wrote. “Nobody sees it; the other rooms in the house are lighted and airy, but the kitchen, where women spend most of their time, is small and gloomy. There is no place to sit. There are fans in other rooms but often not in the kitchen, which is hot,” she added.

Later, Kapadia wrote a book of prayers, Param Sameepe. Teach me how to live well, she asked God in one poem; how to laugh; how to stay calm; how to persevere. Like Mirabai in another era, she treated God as a friend, addressing him with the more intimate “tu”, not the more formal “tamé”, and certainly not the obsequious “aap”. Kapadia writes, realistically, that you cannot prevent old age; the sun will set; the flower will die. She doesn’t want eternal life, she wants the maturity to understand life. The poet Suresh Dalal wrote: “Most people believe that prayer is our oral application to God, seeking what we need, as if its purpose is transactional. (Kundanikaben) shows that a prayer is in fact a conversation with God, a dialogue, a meeting of minds with divinity.”

Other Gujarati women writers have taken on a more aggressive form of writing. Himanshi Shelat, in particular, has been vocal in defending dissenting voices. And Saroop Dhruv has been a fierce advocate of secularism, progressive values, and feminism. Another writer to raise profound issues is Usha Sheth, who wrote with quiet, dignified passion about the death of her daughter to cancer, in Mrutyu Mari Gayu (Death Has Died), which critics compared to John Gunther’s 1949 memoir of his son who died, Death Be Not Proud.

Among poets, one of the outstanding voices is Panna Naik, who has lived for more than half a century in Philadelphia. Her nostalgia is suffused with colour – during the bleak winter of America’s northeast, she pines for the gulmohur and dreams of Vasant Panchami. Gini Malaviya, who lives in New Jersey and writes about Gujarati literature, said recently that Naik’s poetry speaks to her so clearly that she feels she is discovering her own voice. Naik considers the American poet Anne Sexton as her inspiration. Gulmohur and daffodils, flame of the forest and cherry blossoms, rain and snow, coexist in her poetry.

Over in California, Manisha Joshi writes with verve and passion about life, her lyrical poems revealing bold sexuality in seductive language. She also writes in Hindi and has carved out a niche, writing evocatively about the life left behind as well as the new life she has embraced.

Another original voice in Gujarati poetry is that of Pratishtha Pandya – the Bengaluru-based poet has written with quiet indignation about the erosion of secular and progressive values, becoming a conscience keeper by speaking up when migrant workers die on rail tracks during the pandemic, or by invoking mythological and religious characters to focus on the injustices of the present. Pandya grew up in Ahmedabad and taught at Ahmedabad University. Now she works at the People’s Archive of Rural India, with a network of writers who focus on issues the mainstream media ignores. “I write about the issues that touch me,” she said. “Poetry is the only space where we can talk,” she added, because it can be elliptical. Her poetry has a sense of outrage and urgency, her voice is the lens through which we see the unfairness, inequality, and misery around us.

Excerpted with permission from The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community, Salil Tripathi, Aleph Book Company.