We?ve just emerged from a talk by Malavika Karlekar on early photography in Bengal, where one of the issues concerns the hidden subtexts of apparently candid shots. The way a woman stands next to her husband can indicate tension, or resistance; or it can indicate comfort, modernity, ownership.
I?m telling a historian friend about this at a book party, and she nods. ?Feminist history is about recovery,? she says. ?We look for forgotten texts, tease out meaning from absences and silences; we work with fragments, photos left to languish in cardboard boxes.?
A 20-something journalist bounces up to us. She and her friends are what the old media often calls The New Face of Indian Womanhood. And they?re constructing confident histories for themselves ? on weblogs. Blogs aren?t a new phenomenon, but it?s only recently that Indian blogging took off.
Media stories have focused on the rise of desi ?chicklit?. But chicklit is to the blogs of young Indian women what hooch is to Premier Cru.
Anita Bora?s very popular Just A Little Something functions like a diary ? complete with pictures of her trip to Auli and references to her friends. It takes a while for the charm of her blog to sneak up on you, but once it does, it?s like staying in touch with an old friend.
Bridal Beer is a pseudonymous blog about a young woman dragged from New York to India in search of arranged marriage heaven. Bridal Beer, whose blogger pals claim is real, sent out a gentle plea to readers: ?The Internets tell many tales and if my identity is revealed, I will age unmarried. Character-Checks are voices, inevitable, whispers, unwiped by software? Mixed report, sorry, no match, no marriage. And so in the interest of a dubious posterity, please let me remain anon.?
Meanwhile, The Compulsive Confessor is deeply delighted that someone actually didn?t guess her identity for a while. Like many of the women bloggers online, she has attitude in spades: she hangs out at TC?s (Turquoise Cottage), questions the whole marriage game, tosses in little asides on friendship, and book launches, and fashion shows, and old boyfriends. The only person in the whole world who?s banned from reading her blog is her mother. Dancing with Dogs and Dwarf at Large are more contemplative; Known Turf is a journalist who asks tough questions, dissects her development-gone-bad stories and throws in the odd, beautiful riff on rickshaws, or International Woman?s Day ? one lousy day? She wants the whole damn year!
There are so many of these young women growing up in front of an audience of anything from just a few close friends to, literally, thousands. I love listening to them, being corrected in my generation?s stiff assumptions about their cynicism (greatly exaggerated) and their concerns (greatly underestimated). Even those who need the purdah of a pseudonym are upfront when it comes to sharing their histories. And some day, when some future historian comes around to write the story of this generation, she would be well advised to start with these blogs.
