Walking Towards Ourselves by Catriona Mitchell

I think it would be unfair to call them just stories - these are lives, some relatively privileged, some fighting for survival.

In the context of this book, I also see it as the journeys of the women who have been featured in it, and how they are all somehow connected in the struggle of just being a woman, and finding their own free expression of it. The title is courtesy a renowned artist, feminist and environmentalist (and the niece of Sardar Vallabhai Patel) Chandralekha - a phrased she used to describe the connection between art and life. It covers just about every cross section that you can think of - language, age, geography, class, caste, skin colour, sexuality, and yes, circumstances and perspectives. Just about because I don't know if it sufficiently captures the distinctness and the variety. The flap describes it as a kaleidoscope of distinct and varied real-life stories, and I think that is just about accurate. That it took Catriona Mitchell, born in Switzerland, and raised in UK and Australia, to edit and publish this anthology - about and by Indian women - is perhaps a statement in itself. Told with startling honesty, piercing insight, moments of poetry, and flashes of humour, Walking Towards Ourselves explores what it means to be a woman in India in a time of intense and incredible change. Reaching across different strata of society, religion and language, this anthology creates a kaleidoscope of distinct and varied real-life stories. Walk with them as they report from Mumbai’s streets alone at night, as they grapple with domestic violence, as they search for love through marriage brokers, as they learn to speak their minds, as they lay claim to their bodies, as they choose to be partnered or not, to become mothers or not, to make art, to make love, to make meaning of their lives. From the film sets of Bollywood to a closeted marital home in a Tamil Nadu village from the slick boardroom of an online dating app to a makeshift bamboo house in the post-cyclone Sundarbans from a beauty parlour where skin bleaching is the norm, to a home for abandoned girls in Karnataka, walk with them. Walk in the shoes of some of India’s finest women writers, and go on a journey into their intimate lives in Walking Towards Ourselves. But behind the headlines, what is it really like to be a woman in India today? India is one of the most dangerous places on the planet to be a woman – or so the international press keeps telling us.

Walking Towards Ourselves by Catriona Mitchell