TROUBLED TIMES TEST THE WRITER

Abstract

I started my writing career as a journalist and then moved to short stories before writing my first novel. As a Parsi writer in India, not just I, but publishers and readers who had certain expectations, demanded that I write a “Parsi novel” such as those being written by Bapsi Sidhwa, Boman Desai and Rohinton Mistry. This is one of the first resistances I decided to offer. Then the fact that I had been involved in feminist issues as a journalist brought about the resistance to patriarchy. My experiences during the Babri Mosque demolition riots in Bombay in 1992–93 exposed me to complicated issues of religious fundamentalisms. My novels and stories have come from these experiences and not centrally from my Parsi birth.

Keywords:

• Parsi
• women
• exploitation
• rape
• riot
• fundamentalism

Notes

1 Nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century nationalists; Naoroji was the first Indian to be elected to the British parliament; Cama the first to display an Indian national flag at an international forum; and Mehta the first Indian mayor of Mumbai.

2 Ayodhya in the Northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, according to Hindu beliefs, is the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram. In the 1980s Hindu right‐wing organizations began demanding that the Babri Mosque, which they alleged stood on the very spot where Lord Ram had been born, should be demolished and a temple built on that spot. Since then the matter has remained with the judiciary. However, on 12 December 1992, Hindu right‐wing party politicians, after having whipped up sentiments through an all‐India tour, finally led a frenzied mob that demolished the Babri Mosque without intervention by the police.

3 The riots in Gujarat broke out in 2003 as a result of the alleged torching by Muslims of a railway carriage full of Hindu pilgrims at the Godhra railway station.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Meher Pestonji

Meher Pestonji grew up in Bombay where she still lives with her two daughters. Since the mid‐1970s she has been a journalist, participating in activist movements: campaigns to change rape laws, for slum dwellers’ housing rights and for a better understanding of the needs of street children. The post‐Babri Masjid communal riots of 1992–93 fuelled her resolve to fight all shades of communalism and parochialism, including that encountered in her small Parsi community. In 1999 she published a short story collection Mixed Marriage and Other Parsi Stories, and since then two novels, Pervez and Sadak Chaap, and a play, Piano for Sale.