Kali for Women
Kali for Women was an important start-up feminist publisher in India. Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon set up Kali for Women in 1984, arguably the first Indian publishing house dedicated to publishing on and for women. When they decided to take this step, Butalia had worked with Oxford University Press and Zed Books in Delhi, while Ritu Menon was a well known scholar. They started with very little capital but with an urgent sense that they had to make Indian women’s voices heard, not just through academic publishing but also through activist works, translation and fiction. They were followed by other Indian presses concerned with gender and social issues such as Bhatkal and Sen who publish the imprints Stree and Samya and Tulika Books.
Widely regarded as India’s answer to Virago Press, Kali for Women published some pathbreaking books such as the Hindi reference book Shareer ki Jankari (‘About the Body’). Shareer ki Jankari was written by 75 village women and sold by the women themselves at a special price in the villages. Butalia and Menon were committed to social change through publishing and, almost as a byproduct, they also innovated in the ways they produced and sold their books. Shareer ki Jankari was also extremely frank about sex and women's bodies including issues such as menstrual taboos, leading to some commentators being shocked. Till then academic presses had largely ignored the markets for cheap, mass literature. [1] Kali for Women also published The Other Side of Silence by Butalia (an account of Partition through women’s oral histories), Radha Kumar’s The History of Doing, the ecofeminist Vandana Shiva’s landmark work Staying Alive, and Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid’s landmark work Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History.[2]
In 2003, the founders decided to part ways, with Butalia setting up Zubaan Books in partnership with Penguin, and Menon founding Women Unlimited. Both firms are still active.