Ritu Menon: feminist publishing and women’s Partition history

A feminist publisher

Ritu Menon is a publisher and author whose work includes women’s experiences of the 1947 Partition. In an interview with the London School of Economics Review of Books, she describes feminist publishing and is identified as a co-founder of Kali for Women and founder of Women Unlimited. The history published by Zubaan records that Menon and Urvashi Butalia established Kali in 1984. A publishing house is a collective undertaking involving writers, editors and readers as well as its founders. Interviews and institutional histories offer different perspectives on how such projects begin and develop.[1]

Borders and Boundaries

Menon wrote Borders and Boundaries with Kamla Bhasin. The CiNii library catalogue lists their 1998 Kali for Women edition as Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition and records that it includes personal narratives.[2]

A Rutgers University Press edition uses the subtitle How Women Experienced the Partition of India. Its publisher describes the book as bringing first-hand accounts and memoirs into conversation with official records. The co-author and edition matter when citing the book: a catalogue entry establishes bibliographic details, while the book itself provides the evidence and interpretation.[3]

Women’s accounts and historical evidence

The book’s focus places women’s experiences within the history of Partition rather than treating political negotiations as the whole story. Its use of personal narratives offers one way to examine how violence and displacement affected individuals, while official accounts can show how institutions described events and made decisions. Neither kind of evidence is a complete record on its own. Menon’s interview about publishing offers another route into her work: it connects the production of books with questions about whose writing is available. Readers can compare this study with other oral histories and scholarship on Punjab and the wider subcontinent.[3]