Last week, something very important happened that is very close to my heart. The Chameli Devi Jain Award for outstanding women journalists was announced and a book with essays written by the previous years’ winners was released. I won the award way back in 1993, and am the only person till date who has got it for writing on the Arts. So I am sharing a small part of the essay:
Naïve as I was in the early 80s, fresh out of college, the only thing that I ever wanted to become was a journalist. I joined The Indian Express. Those were the days when women in newspapers were not expected to do night shifts and bring out editions. And of course if you didn’t do night shifts, you couldn’t be promoted to a chief sub-editor.We insisted on doing night shifts ...And we paid the price: Bad marriages, no social life, no kids, indifferent health et al. Yet our commitment to journalism was unshaken.
Then I joined The Times of India. Times changed and so did we. Age and experiences taught us to retreat. And yet the fight didn’t completely go out of us. The young brood of women journalists being churned out of colleges and media institutes rather than the anvil of the newspapers will perhaps laugh at our battles as part of folklore.
They whiz around driving their cars with ears firmly glued to their cellphones, willing to outdo each other in justifying any means to get to their ends. Not for a minute am I envious of the freedom and equality that they take for granted and we fought for. I, for one, am glad we had the courage and sense of responsibility to stand up for our place in a male-dominated profession. I had learnt what not to write on the desk and was itching to write on the Arts not sporadically, but deal with it like news. The Pioneer gave me the chance to do that. The Arts is one arena that is a storehouse of so much news and most of it never gets out and I felt it needed to be told. There were times when I would feel like shaking editors when they didn’t understand that with such high-profile artists and artistes who have such a desperate need to remain in the limelight, how could news be far behind?
Besides, I felt that culture was one aspect that was of such intrinsic importance, especially in the context of the new generation that it needed to be recorded.
The painful struggle to remain an artist or a performer when poverty knocks, to sustain one’s space in the spotlight after having made it, are all such an intrinsic part of the arts. I felt all these real life stories needed to be recorded for posterity. It was one of the most meaningful phases of my life. I worked from 11 am to 11 pm for seven days a week, come hail or high water. Did investigative stories about art institutions, fearlessly blew the lid of their skewered functioning, met and interviewed artists, dancers, musicians, theatre artistes that one had just seen on stage and revered as great performers and discovered their clay feet, understood their creative processes, and did reviews occasionally, became the toast of the art town.
It was during this phase that the Chameli Devi Award was bestowed on me for my writing on the Arts. I felt that all these years of working tirelessly and courageously had been worth it. I was euphoric.
Then began the process of recreating myself. I joined the National Literacy Mission (NLM) as a media consultant. I wrote, edited and produced material for policy makers of literacy, created books of international quality. I curated art shows with literacy and education of women and their empowerment as core themes. It turned out to be a huge turning point of my life. I was awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Award during this period. This included a fellowship to study art curation at the Goldsmith’s College in London. I became India’s first trained curator.
During these lonely days in London, I rediscovered painting and plastered my hostel room walls with colours of India that I so sorely missed. It was when I took to painting in a big way. Now, I could write, curate and paint But in a way are they not part of the larger whole?
The difficult part has been to make people understand this. Also all the enemies I made as a fearless journalist — artists, gallery owners and other stakeholders of the Arts were unwilling to accept this new role of mine. It threatened them and was a perfect time to settle scores. I have devoted nearly three decades of my life to the Arts — books, paintings, writing, chronicling, researching, doing multi disciplinary work — and in many ways very ahead of my time. I have lived the glass ceiling that gender sensitive writers talk about. It is not easy. But then who said that life was meant to be easy?
Alka Raghuvanshi is an art writer, curator and artist