Stories from the Margins
There is an old African proverb that goes “Unless the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.” If we only hear stories from certain parts of the society—stories written by the “victors”—how many stories are we missing out on? Here, we bring you stories that do not often take the spotlight—stories of communities or places that are often kept at the margins.
In a country as large and diverse as ours, mythologies are multifaceted and ever-changing, and often kept alive by oral tradition. We are richer and more nourished than ever knowing that folk mythology has a thousand different versions in different languages. ‘Chandrabati’s Ramayan,’ translated from Bengali by Nabaneeta Dev Sen, is a 16th-century retelling of the great epic of Ramayana entirely from Sita’s perspective, and told to us in the voice of Chandrabati, widely considered to be the first published woman poet in Bangla. ‘Folktales from India’ by AK Ramanujan contains one hundred and ten tales of folklore, collected from across India and translated from twenty-two languages.
In our understanding of history, who is getting left out of the story? ‘Lady Doctors’ by Kavitha Rao collects the untold stories of India’s first women in medicine. ‘Women In The Picture’ by Catherine McCormack is an art historian’s research into the long history of picturing women, in paintings, sculptures, and photographs, and how women artists have offered us new ways to picture and imagine identity and power.
And stories by marginalized communities come alive in these titles, which provoke questions of identity and society. ‘A Word With You, World’ is the memoir of Dalit poet Siddalingaiah, a political and poetic account of his life in Bangalore. ‘The Adivasi Will Not Dance’ by Hansda Sowvendra Shekar is a set of short stories, mostly focusing on the Santhal people of Jharkhand, questions of identity, and the tensions between tradition and modernity. This gift box collects three tales from different communities of India, a glimpse of the immense diversity of people, experiences, and beliefs in our country.
There is no single experience of life, and books can remind us of that, to place ourselves in someone else’s shoes and see things through their eyes. Queer stories, stories of caste, and feminist works can be immensely powerful, opening our eyes to a diversity of experiences and ways to be alive.