Madurai book fair ignores women speakers

This is the foremost question that haunts activists today since the organisers, they argue, are not fair to women. Their main grouse is that the festival, which hosts daily evening meetings at its venue– Tamukkam Grounds- unfortunately, does not have a single woman speaker even as scores of them are available.

Though the stalls in the fair showcase the works of women writers, its organisers have chosen to make a wilful default of not inviting a woman speaker. All the 10 days have only male speakers.

And, a woman’s services, as usual, is utilised only for compering. “A casual look at the invite comes as a slap in the face, for not a single woman personality has been invited as a guest. Leave alone the 33 per cent, there is not even a token representation.

The callous attitude that a public forum is the privilege of men and women can be called if the subject pertains to their gender and children is predominant everywhere. But when a platform such as this, where so-called progressive minds are involved, denies women their due space, it is more worrying,” rues social activist S. Selva Gomathi who is the deputy director of Soco Trust.

But the organiser, Booksellers’ and Publishers’ Association of South India, has no qualms. Its secretary, K.S. Pugazhenthi, said, “We need crowd-pullers. There are not many eminent women speakers who can inspire the general public to visit the exhibition to listen to their speech and buy books. They are only a handful. And, we did make efforts to invite them as guest speakers but they were not available.”

However, he admits that women speakers were not given adequate importance or space in the previous years too.

Tamil writer and poet A. Vennila, who was a guest speaker at the Madurai fair some three years ago, refuses to buy his orthodox theory. “There are many speakers and contemporary writers among women who can keep the audience spellbound,” she asserts. Vennila finds the Chennai book exhibition, too, is dominated by men.

Differing with Pugazhenthi, blogger K. Ariaravelan opined, “Not many, except perhaps those wanting to listen to writers like Su Venkatesan, who come over to hear speeches and buy books. The organisers bring in speakers according to their whims and fancies.”