The Human Rights Watch award (Lillian Helman-Dashiell Hammet) for "courage shown by a woman writer" has gone this year to Hindi novelist Mridula Garg, who was hauled up in court 21 years ago for an explicit sex scene in her novel about guiltless adultery, Chitta Cobra. The trial dragged on until it was dismissed by the Supreme Court. But the stigma stayed, despite the six novels and seven anthologies of short stories that followed Chitta. "What upset my readers was not the sex," explains Garg, "but that the woman had switched off, thinking of other, philosophical things. Is it so hard for men to accept that cerebral women are equally capable of the Big O?"
Australian writer Bem Le Hunte, author of the spiritual potboiler, The Seduction of Silence, about aghoris and sages and the Himalayas, doesn't seem to believe much in the powers of silence herself. Introduced to Indian writer Bulbul Sharma at her launch party at the Australian High Commission, the lady queried innocently: "Are there many Indian writers in India?" What say!
