CHENNAI : I used to be the person who could be found reading at every given opportunity, a book in my purse and my nose in a book. This then became a book in my phone and my eyes glued to it all the time, before it dwindled to endless saved articles and scanned book titles and my hands working away to accumulate more material to be read. The night I realised that reading which was regarded my second nature had been reduced scrolling my Facebook feed I dreamt of the authors of the multiple unread books that filled my room pointing accusing fingers at me. I woke up feeling the enormous burden of my bookshelves on my mind, and having run out feeble excuses that the time reserved for books was being eaten into by social media, short articles and responding to SMS.
I signed up for my first reading challenge in which I could set an end-figure of the number of books and choose which ones I wanted to read. Though I failed to meeting the goal more times than not, I was pleased to note that at least I was keeping myself in check — social media time was clocked, Netflix was controlled and reading was happening. I even chided my mother in my self-righteous mode because a book that she had wanted to read was attracting pamphlets, quotations from plumbers in it, magazines atop, and an assortment of stationery around everything but her attention. Soon thereafter, I stumbled upon the very politics of a woman reading, and not just stopping chiding her, but also changed the way I read.
Reading is certainly a privileged act, for want of time and resource which most women in the world cannot spare or access respectively. Even today in some parts of the world, reading is a daring act and historically women found with books have even been sentenced to death. A woman’s quest for knowledge has been so much a threat for the patriarchy, so much so that ‘novel reading’ is one of the reasons in the infamous list of those that warranted a woman’s admission into an asylum in the nineteenth century. At least once you must have heard someone say to a woman, “Don’t read too much, no one will marry you then.” That’s how terrified we are of women with opinions, and opinions are begotten from books.
I began to see my mother as a victim of this system that discourages women from reading by burying them with familial and household responsibility, and myself not as indulgent as she liked to call it, but subversive because I was doing what it took to put my time on top — reading to me became self-care, self-preservation, self-teaching. So I’m not far off the mark when I call read subversive, because every woman making time for herself is. I began reading to challenge myself, to seek out and devour books that I may have never chanced upon if not for recommendations from a community of readers worldwide.
The challenge became harder when it hit home that there were few women we were reading. Not having enough women on our shelves is yet another way of keeping women from communicating with other women, a tried and tested method to keep them feeling free and seeing their lives on paper instead of the usual caricatures of the male fantasy that they are made out to be. Feminist book clubs became the obvious solution to this, and I joined a bunch of them. Even as I revelled in seeking solitaries and snatching snippets of their feminist lives online and exchanging ‘Bama’ for a Bitch recommendation, I yearned to meet and connect with the reader sisters that books brought together.
At the first Chennai meeting of the Sanskaari Girls Book club, an (Indian!) feminist book club that has chapters in different cities, I felt like it had been achieved — the name for all it is meant to be and not takes the cherry. As we gathered around discussing The Fabulous Feminist, I thought how fabulous that we are here together, thanked the feminists that made it possible for a bunch of women to meet and discuss books, and knew that we could shape opinions in a world that would for us to have none. I feel like my search for the best co-readers has ended, but my best reading journey is just about to begin. What’s your
reading story?