Female Genocide in India: and the 50 Million Missing Campaign

First published in Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific
Issue 22, October 2009

Female Genocide in India
and the 50 Million Missing Campaign

Even before I had initiated ‘The 50 Million Missing Campaign’ in December 2006, it was clear that one of the toughest challenges for the campaign would be to overcome public skepticism both within and outside India, about the veracity of its claim. How could fifty million plus women just disappear from a country in a period that spans less than a century? That number is about the size of the entire populations of Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Portugal put together.

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Sex and Power: Defining History, Shaping Societies (Non-fiction Book)

Sex and Power: Defining History, Shaping Societies

Published by Penguin Books, India, 2008

Released by Penguin Global, 2009.

An extraordinary take on a subject..still a taboo.. a new interpretation of Indian history. — The Telegraph

This book will place place Rita Banerji’s feet firmly and solidly on the world stage…in the position of people like Frederick Douglas…Simone De Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem. — The Word Worth Magazine (U.S.A.)

Long-listed for the Vodaphone Crossword Non-fiction Award

NO.1 ON THE CROSSWORD BESTSELLER LIST IN MARCH 2009

Why does a society's concept of sexual morality change over time? This is the question this book asks using India as a paradigm.

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Grandmother's memories (essay)

First published in Word Worth: World magazine of ideas and arts, October 2008, Vol 8, No.10

Grandmother’s Memories

My grandmother’s only picture from before her marriage is a studio portrait in sepia which offers little information of the time. In fact, but for the processing, it could have been shot today. She is in a dark sari, sitting, with a serene, expressionless face, looking into the distance…I hear from second-hand sources that the picture was taken just before grandma was leaving for college. At a time when most women in India were unlettered, my grandmother’s father, a barrister, had encouraged her to continue her education, just as he had taught his own wife to read and write.

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The Role of Media in the War between Environment and Development

First published in the Global Media Journal October 2009

The Role of Media in the War between Environment and Development

In 1992, while I was an ecology student at a University a block away from the World Bank in Washington D.C., an incident occurred that caused the well-heeled Bank a good deal of embarrassment, and gave us environmental beatniks, much cause for hilarity. A memo by the then chief economist of the Bank, Lawrence Summers, got leaked out to the public. In it he commended the “economic logic” of “dumping a load of toxic waste” on the poorest countries as “impeccable” and recommended that the Bank come to terms with the idea.

The memo in essence summed up the prevailing attitude in government and corporations towards the environment at large. An attitude that was largely dismissive of environmental conservation and pollution management as the whim of neurotic tree-huggers who in Reagan’s famous words wanted to keep the world hot in the summer and cold in the winters. The real goal of business and government was seen as economic growth – for therein was the answer to society’s problems and the key to the nation’s triumph. In the process it mattered little what the cost of the environmental fallout would be, or who would bear the brunt. Read more here

For Rita's other published works go to www.ritabanerji.com

Memory of an assassination

First published in The Times of India, 11 Nov 2009.

Memory of an assassination

At the time I lived in Washington DC, and shared an apartment with a Taiwanese friend in the suave Foggy Bottom neighbourhood. Every morning at 7, I would sit at the breakfast table and watch people stream into the city to work - stiff grey and black suits, striding briskly, decisively, towards their destination. Each strider maintained an impervious bubble of personal space, taking care never to collide bubbles or intrude into another. And in-between the bubbles was the city’s uninhabited space -organised, methodical, clinically sterile. It is why some think of it as an impersonal city - a transit lounge where people disembark temporarily to participate in some momentous event of national or international significance.

Early morning on 21 May in 1991, my roommate, came rushing to my bed, newspaper in hand. “Look, an African woman has killed your prime minister!” Still disoriented, I scanned the front page trying to avoid the gory photo there. “He was not our current PM and she is not African.” Read more..

My Life Without T.V. (essay)

First published in Word Worth: World magazine of ideas and arts, September 2008, Vol 8, No.9

My Life Without T.V.

A childhood without television may be inconceivable today – but that’s how I

grew up. And no, I wasn’t a deprived child; none of the inhabitants of the small Indian

towns I grew up in owned a T.V. In the absence of canned entertainment,

children had to get imaginative with their time between homework and school. We

organized cultural shows and fetes, invited the adults and charged them for ‘tickets.’

We investigated our fields and forests. We raided fruit orchards. And we read –

voraciously, competitively – competing for the number of books we read, how fast,

and how big the words were. Read the full essay here.

The Schizophrenia of Moral Systems

First published in Word Worth: World magazine of ideas and arts, September 2006, Vol 6, No.10

The Schizophrenia of Moral Systems

A question that a Swiss friend recently set before me is what got me thinking on this issue of schizophrenia of moral systems, including the one I was raised in. As someone who grew up in India I find it extremely distressing that an estimated fifty million women have already been intentionally targeted and weeded out from India’s population. This is India’s silent genocide… My response thus far has been one of outrage directed largely towards what I regarded as a ruthless and self-obsessed patriarchy. But the query that my Swiss friend put to me, for the first time made me wonder about the internal thought processes of this patriarchy. What my friend wanted to know was how Indians reconciled this genocide with the basic Hindu concept of karma? Would this not amount to an accumulation of bad karma for the nation? Read the full essay here.

The Boxed Identity

First published in Word Worth: World magazine of ideas and arts, October 2008, Vol 8, No.10

The Boxed Identity

Delineating human identity—be it national, state or cultural—by drawing lines on the face of the earth is perhaps one of the most illogical and peculiar activities that the human species engages in. Perhaps no other animal species feels such a compulsion to self-assort…In reality, boundaries are nonexistent. They cannot be touch or seen. Their existence is on paper only and precariously dependent on human desires and conflicts. History shows us these lines shift often. New nations are born. And old ones disappear. And like there was a magic pen involved, the lines are erased and redrawn. The new lines enclose new identities—and this is what makes them particularly illogical and bizarre.

Three Poems

First published in The Word Worth Magazine Vol 2, No.6, June 2002, under the pen name Ilina Sen.


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Poem Titles:

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Twenty Eggs

The Last Monkey Dance

From Sex to the Supreme Bliss (essay)

First published in The London Magazine: A Review of Literature and the Arts, April/May 2003 pp.56-63

From Sex to the Supreme Bliss

The erotic sculptures of the magnificent 13th century sun temple of Konark in eastern India, and the 11th century temples of Khajuraho in central India, probably generate more sensation and debate today than they did a thousand years ago. For these sculptures and temples were unquestionably not anomalies in their own time. Between 100 B.C. and 1500 AD there were temples built all over India that as a matter of normality sculpted into their walls exquisite and detailed carvings of men and women in various positions of love-making.

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The Pink Turban (short story)

First published in the New Orleans Review, Vol 31, No.1, 2001 pp41-56.

Pink Turban

One evening in 1972, sitting in her courtyard, stirring a large cauldron of boiling lentils, Guddi, with her practiced eye, studied the sun outside. The sun that maneuvered the affairs of the Siwalik Valley then, hasn’t changed much since; but nor has much else.

The sun Guddi was regarding looked very red and pregnant, as if anytime it might plummet like a dead bird into the dark belly of the hills.

“It is almost time,” she announced loudly. “The procession will be here soon. We must hurry, Goonga, else we’ll miss them. The dough still needs to be make. The lentils?” She plucked a plump yellow grain from the cauldron and squeezed it between her thumb and forefinger. “O dear Rabba! The lentils are still raw.”

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As I Am A Woman

First published in Women's Era, Jan 2005

As I Am a Woman

I balance on the beam
of the round moon as it wanes
exulting in the fullness
of my radiance,
resting in the hollow
of my dark.

I ride the white crest
of the ocean waves,
rising and falling
with the cycle of tides,
celebrating the power
of my formidable might,
reflecting in the depth
of my soul.

I circle the earth
with the time of seasons,
bearing the life
that bursts from my womb,
burying the dead
so they rest in my tomb,
feeding the weak
to help them grow,
weeping for the weary
who couldn't wait till tomorrow.

But the sun will rise again,
this I know,
surely as it will set,
the tides will rise again
surely as they will fall,
spring will knock anew
surely as winter will bid adieu.

This I know
for I am the sun, the moon,
the tide, the earth, the seasons.
This I know surely
as I am a woman.
This I know
as I am the rhythm of existence.

Ask the Moon

Ask the Moon

© Rita Banerji 2002

Last night, to my head on the pillow,

you sent a letter

through an eighth century Chinese poet.

I read it

with my eyes closed.

I didn’t even know I knew Mandarin.

You said, each moon in the sky

brings me to you,

because it comes

only after

I have lain my eyes on it.

My father died: you said,

just like that,

abruptly.

I will be afraid to ask

should our roads cross again,

and should I discover

that you really did send that letter,

and that we were never really apart.

The moon is witness.

Without Headstones

First published in Word Salad, Spring/summer 2002, Vol 8, No. 3.

Without Headstones


Skulls of dead flowers
strung up together.
Garlands
leaking
their last breaths
of life.
I smelt
and stopped,
to buy
for my living God.

Undressing

First published in Obsessed With Pipework: highwire poetry, Issue 16, Autumn 2001. (published under the pen name ‘Ilina Sen’)

Undressing

I ripped them off
one at a time,
painfully,
layer after layer
of identities
woven into the fabric of my being
since birth.
And each time I thought
I had stripped to the core
there was always one more.
When will I be done?
I ache
to stand naked in the sun.

Here it is online....

The Call of Home

First published in The Asian Age, August 01, 2004



The Call of Home


Like a homing pigeon
I return home.
Again and again,
dark,
cold.
No one to welcome me at the door,
a few grains of sand to peck,
a dish of dirty water.
No one to hold or stroke
my weary feathers.
The Hand of Fate
flew me to the land of warmth,
where the grain grew in fields,
the river ran clear and free,
love encircled me,
and the sun always shone.
I like it,
but I had to leave.
I had to return home.