Author: Anees Jung
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1987
Language: English
Pages: 128
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0140103449
Description
This book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the women of India. The women in this narrative tell of marriage and widowhood, unfair work practices, sexual servitude, of problems of bearing and rearing children in poverty, religion, and other forms of exploitation.
The Women in this book are not extraordinary or famous, and yet their stories and testimonies, narrated here by one of India’s best-known women journalists, provide a passionate, often deeply touching, revelation of what it means to be a woman in India today.
The women tell of marriage and widowhood, unfair work practices, sexual servitude, the problems of bearing and rearing children in poverty, religion, discrimination, other forms of exploitation…Yet they also talk of fulfilling relationships, the joys of marriage and children, the exhilaration of breaking free from the bonds of tradition, ritual, cast, religion….Interwoven with all this is the story of one woman’s journey—of how Anees Jung, the author, brought up in ‘purdah’, succeeded in shaking off the restricting influences of her traditional upbringing to become a highly successful, independent career woman, still a comparatively rare phenomenon in India.
As such, the book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the women of India—the silent majority that is now beginning to make itself heard.
An evocative picture of women in India.
—Financial Express
The poignant authenticity of (the) book reveals (Anees Jung) as an intensely sensitive poet….
—Mulk ran Anand in the Times of India
Contents
Introduction
Outside the frame
The Journey begins...
Gods and god
Women and men
Marriage and love
Mothers and children
City women
Women in the country
In her own words
Women find a name
Glossary