By Deepika S
Have you seen a recent book on powerful Indian women without profiles on Chanda Kochhar, Naina Lal Kidwai, or Indra Nooyi? No? And if the thought of one more of those books makes your eyes roll, hang on a bit. A new book called She Walks, She Leads: Women Who Inspire India (priced at Rs 599 on Flipkart) by first-time author Gunjan Jain, introduces her like (we hope) no one has ever done before: it begins with a paragraph about bandhani saris, and how they’re part of her heritage, before going on to say:
“Yet between jetting around the world and presenting endless power-packed presentations — whenever she gets the luxury of a few minutes of quiet reflection — her thoughts must surely turn to the role that the much-coveted bandhani saris and Indian traditions have played in her life.”
You may roll your eyes now. Naturally, that’s what one of India’s highest-paid bankers is thinking about “whenever” she has time to reflect.
Nita (described here by business tycoon Sanjiv Goenka as the “complete woman”) and Kochhar aren’t by any means the only casualties in this book. Under “Altruism & Other Interests”, each piece on the five women in this section contains an interview with their husbands. No doubt because they’re the better, sorry, other half. Heaven forbid they be complete on their own.
Jain, described on the book’s jacket as an “inspired writer, speaker and thought leader”, writes about 24 ‘cool’ women, but each profile is followed by an interview with a man, with only two exceptions. Designer Anamika Khanna’s piece is followed by an interview with her “muse”, actress Sonam Kapoor. For Olympic medal-winning boxer MC Mary Kom, Jain interviews (in what is only one of several amazingly tone-deaf moves in the book) actor Priyanka Chopra: a mainlander who played Kom in a biopic on her and whose features were digitally altered to appear Manipuri. In the marvellous domino game that this book is, Chopra herself becomes the subject of a separate essay in this book, and the Q&A endorsing her is not with one of the many amazing female actors across generations in Bollywood, but with Ranveer Singh.
Perhaps it’s unfair to expect a book that aims to highlight role models and to be “a celebration of womanhood” to step beyond the same old tropes used to talk about successful women. But it is alarming that Jain’s book sounds uncomfortably like the parody Twitter account @manwhohasitall, whose creator, staying in character, has authored a new book that will be out in October: From Frazzled to Fabulous: How to juggle a successful career, fatherhood, ‘me-time’ and looking good. In this, Jain is by no means alone:
In 2015, Kidwai herself put together a book called 30 Women in Power: Their Voices, Their Stories. It’s a valuable book for its generous doling out of advice by women at the top of their respective fields. In many of these accounts, the women talk about dealing with their families and children too. However, their work is the main focus and their personal lives, when they mention them, are revealed more as windows of insight into their working lives, complete with tricky points, failures and regrets – as possible blueprints for women who may be interested in charting similar careers for themselves. Certainly not as celebrations of their charming abilities to kill it at work while looking amazing and being paragons of motherhood, where applicable.
Another book about conventionally successful Indian women is Corporate Divas, by Sonia Golani, published in 2014, which also includes Kochhar, Kidwai, Mody and other women with unquestionably great accomplishments. It’s just a pity that such books don’t think very far beyond the women we already hear about.
Perhaps we’d all have more amazing role models if we expanded our vision; not just in terms of our gaze on successful women, but widening our very definition of this term.