By Urvashi Butalia
On Saturday the 13th of July Zubaan lost one of its most wonderful authors and friends. Sharmila Rege, a much-loved teacher and scholar, died at the age of 48 in a Pune hospital, surrounded by her husband, her relatives and her colleagues and students who had kept watch over her as cancer invaded, took over and then destroyed her body.
Sharmila’s life and work are difficult to describe – she touched so many people, reached out to them with a generosity and unselfishness that is as rare as it is precious. As an academic, she constantly pushed against the boundaries and questioned entrenched knowledge systems, posing hard questions about the invisibility of caste and non-brahmin perspectives on caste. Why, she asked, had the world of academics remained so willfully ignorant of what she called the divide between the ‘theoretical brahmans’ and the ‘empirical shudras’. Going further, she pointed out how important it was for feminists to engage with caste. Indeed, her work on caste and patriarchy was – and remains – perhaps the single most important contribution to the feminist understanding of, and engagement with, caste.
But Sharmila was so much more than just an academic: she was a teacher for whom nothing was more important than her students. She taught and spoke to packed halls, she encouraged her students to question, to write, to work in fields related and unrelated to their subject areas, she lobbied all her friends and acquaintances to take her students on as interns, to give them what she called ‘exposure to a different world’, and insisted that those who took them on make the students work hard.
The Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Studies Centre at Pune University became, with Sharmila’s support, one of the most vibrant, intellectually stimulating and active centres in India, organizing lectures, seminars, discussions, plays etc., with regularity, and offering up pathbreaking research projects. More recently, Sharmila had begun to widen her ambit and look at South Asia and she was keen to create a new syllabus which took in comparative perspectives on gender and women in South Asia.
With her characteristic warmth and generosity, she had drawn in a number of women across India to contribute to the discussions on this and was keenly involved in preparing to take the project forward. There will, no doubt, be many other things in which Sharmila was involved, and where her contribution would have been crucial. One such was with us: advising Zubaan on a research project on sexual violence and impunity in South Asia, Sharmila offered to take on a literature review and, before anyone else had even begun their work, she had submitted her first draft. And once again, typically – and so many of Sharmila’s friends will recognize this – on the 25th of July, probably days after her cancer was discovered, she wrote to us to say that a ‘severe malignancy’ had been diagnosed and that she would be out of action for a few months. At the time, perhaps there was still some hope of recovery but very soon afterwards, she requested Uma Chakravarti, a friend and historian, to take over the project and complete it for her, so that she could keep her commitments. Sharmila’s friends will know this as typical Sharmila behaviour. Ever concerned for others, she also requested her feminist sisters to give the same kind of time and commitment to her beloved centre and her students as they had done in the past.
At Zubaan, we interacted with Sharmila for several months when we were working on her book, Writing Caste/ Writing Gender: Narrating Dalit Women’s Testimonios (2006), and were struck by her constant good humour and her willingness to listen to suggestions, to offer to rework, and to be gently bullied. We often shared a joke about her somewhat quirky use of tenses and my constant battle to change these – a fact she mentions in the introduction to the book.
It’s a truism to say you will miss someone badly – someone who has been so central to the world of feminism, to feminist scholarship, to pedagogy, and someone who has created a different model of participative, cutting edge, against the grain writing. But like all truisms, this one too bears repeating. Sharmila was devastated at the loss of another wonderful feminist, Vina Mazumdar, who died a few weeks before her. Reading a poem I had written as a tribute to Vina Mazumdar, Sharmila wrote how much she had liked it. She said: ‘we are going to start the semester by reading out your poem and pledging to work in the directions charted by Vinadi for all the reasons your poem maps… I was infatuated with her.’
In the past few weeks we have lost both Vinadi and Sharmila. Sharmila will not be around to read the poem on Vinadi to her students, but her legacy, her work, her spirit will continue to inspire us.
Urvashi Butalia is a feminist, historian and founder of Zubaan Books.