One of our readers, N. Pavithran, wanted me to look into the new project launched by The New York Times. To mark International Women’s Day, the NYT on March 8 began “Overlooked”, a series that chronicles the stories of women whose contributions went unrecorded during their time. It began the series with the obituaries of 15 women from diverse fields ranging from sports to science, and from photography to social activism, and included the enigmatic Madhubala. It has invited readers to nominate candidates they think should be included in the series.
“I think this is one of the greatest lessons for today’s journalism industry,” wrote Mr. Pavithran. “It allows people to get a gist of those long-lost characters and will pave the way for the rediscovery of people from the past. A case in point is the inclusion of Henrietta Lacks, who contributed some tissues from her body which ultimately changed the way scientific experiments are conducted in cancer biology. Today, it will be impossible to spot a mammalian research lab that doesn’t use HeLa cells (named after HEnrietta LAcks).”
Expanding the project
Amisha Padnani, the editor of this project, was researching an obit for a woman in the tennis world. She discovered the story of Mary Ewing Outerbridge, a woman who introduced tennis to the U.S. There was no obituary for her. A reflection on this silence gave birth to “Overlooked”. Ms. Padnani and her colleague Jessica Bennett wrote: “Obituary writing is more about life than death: the last word, a testament to a human contribution. Yet who gets remembered — and how — inherently involves judgment. To look back at the obituary archives can, therefore, be a stark lesson in how society valued various achievements and achievers.” Though the project came to existence because a substantial number of NYT’s obits were of white men, there is a conscious decision to expand the lens beyond women.
In “The importance of an obituary” (July 4, 2016), I had looked at some major Indian artists who had not been given a decent written farewell in our newspapers. I referred to a beautiful passage of K.G. Subramanyan: “To live constantly in the presence of only one’s self should be a petrifying bore. So we choose to come out, bend over the balcony and whistle at the stranger. And, I presume, the stranger is happy to whistle back. We may not get very far, but we will still be all the better for even these imperfect encounters.” My contention was that a well-crafted, earnest and insightful obituary is a whistle for meaningful encounters and it is the media’s job to keep it audible.
The act of remembering
But last week’s events gave a new meaning to the act of remembering. A stalker killed a college student, the highest court in the country had to intervene and restore the matrimony of an adult woman, and statues of leaders who reshaped modern polity were vandalised. How can one make sense of this absurd world where even statues must feel insecure? Much before the vandalism against Lenin’s statue and a vigilante threat to Periyar’s statue, Chennai witnessed the disappearance and reappearance of the statue of Kannagi, the heroine of the Tamil epic Silappatikaram.
Apart from the existing daily feature “From The Hindu archives”, which gives a glimpse of what happened 100 years and 50 years ago on that day, a new weekly feature on individuals who contributed to building an inclusive, non-discriminatory society may help in fighting the amnesia that is spread by television news. I learnt much more about Partition than I did from any history book from Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, which documented the voices of people who were never invested with power but were witness to a great tragedy. Another interesting book on silence is The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self Respect History, edited by K. Srilata. It talked about the largely unnoticed women Self-Respecters and the issues they raised and fought for.
Milan Kundera, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, observed that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. I invite readers to come up with an Indian list of the “overlooked” to retrieve our space for plurality.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in