Unearth stories of India's revolutionary women through this podcast

(From left to right) Mukesh Bansal and Manu S Pillai in a moment from the podcast. Pic Courtesy/Youtube

Flip any book of Indian history and you will immediately recognise some of its favourite and much talked about figures, with an overwhelming chance that most of them are men. A procedural flaw, but our podcasters for the week delve deep into the nooks and cracks of the past, harsh as it was to the women of this country, to unearth a bunch of lesser-known stories of some of the most sharp-witted, clever and revolutionary women that this country has birthed.

Our pick for the week centres on an interesting, over an hour long anecdotal conversation between entrepreneur Mukesh Bansal and writer-historian Manu S Pillai for the third episode in the history series of Bansal's podcast SparX. Right from the times of Razia Sultan and Nur Jahan, to the Devadasis of pre-colonial era to the prominent political figures of modern history like Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and Indira Gandhi, the discussion strays from the usual route to talk about how women dissented against oppressive norms, often straddling the rigid boundaries that dictated the gender roles for men and women. They also discuss the selective erasure of these women from history because of orthodox social attitudes.

(From left) Indira Gandhi ; Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. Pics Courtesy/Wikimedia Commons

Pillai and Bansal reflect on how these women, unfamiliar with the ideas of feminism as we know today, practised dissent in homes, ruled states with unmatched vigour, played key diplomatic roles in political events to establish a place for themselves in history, which unfortunately did not reach us in the same fervour and authenticity as the tales of their male counterparts, but remains significant for history nonetheless. Listening to all of this we were reminded of Virginia Woolf's words, "For most of history, anonymous was a woman." Incidentally, the podcasters also reveal an interesting fact connecting the British author to India at the end of the podcast.

Available on SparX, Spotify, YouTube