Finding her voice

For years women's voices in art and culture that challenged social mores and moral codes were silenced. A few artistes are making them mainstream again

It is doubly ironical that in a country where both speech and wisdom are goddesses (Vac and Saraswati respectively), strident female voices in poetry, prose, worship and other spheres have been either erased from public spaces or nudged into the cracks. Be it the women varkari poets of Maharashtra, who composed songs in praise of Vithoba (a pastoral folk deity), or the poems of mystic Lal Dedh in Kashmir, or Andal’s works in Tamil — the silence around their words is universal and systemic. But a group of writers, performance artistes and curators is drawing their work out into the