BANGALORE: Journalist and author Gita Aravamudan has explored the various facets of what it means to be a woman in a country like India where gender bias is all too prevalent. For instance, in Disappearing Daughters: The Tragedy of Female Infanticide, she examined the reason for the sex ratio in India being alarmingly low; in The Healing, she dealt with the changing attitude towards women in a traditional Tam Brahm joint family living in Chennai; and in Unbound: Indian Women @ Work, she tried to understand how working women are negotiating freedom and responsibility at their work places.
And now, she has released her latest book Baby Makers: The Story of Indian Surrogacy, tracing the role surrogacy plays, evolving from being a secretive and socially unacceptable procedure to becoming a multi-million dollar industry today. She states, “Couples from all over the world come to India to have their IVF procedure done and have the embryos planted in Indian surrogates. Surrogacy also has spin off industries like trade in other human genetic materials like eggs and sperm and even embryos.”
The book, she says, is of narrative journalism. She has consolidated her field research and narrated it in the form of the stories of couples in various stages of surrogacy. She has also interspersed this with material pulled out from publications, research papers and scientific journals.
As an erstwhile journalist, Gita has reported crimes against women and written about feminist and gender issues for over 40 years now. What does she have to say about the way media has taken up the issue of crime reportage in the present day and age? She strikes at the heart of the issue which is media sensationalising crimes. “I cannot tell if there has been a rise in crimes against women, but there has certainly been more coverage and more sensational coverage at that. The problem is sensationalising crime does not necessarily result in a decrease. What we need is more sensitisation, not just of the men and women at large, but also of the media itself and the police and other agencies that have to handle these crimes. I also don’t see any perceptible change in attitude towards women,” she opines.
Her own journey as a thought activist and writer was fraught with personal challenges, but there were triumphs too. Gita says, “The pioneering American feminist writer Rebecca West wrote in 1913, ‘I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.’ And that I think is true of most of us, especially in India. In the 1970s when I was just embarking on my journalistic career, the feminist movement was at its peak in the US. But in India it was still nascent and it also had a different agenda. It was not the sex object image women were fighting here but the doormat one. And no, I did not burn my bra!”