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<h1 class="centre">This collection of profiles covers four women in distinct fields, who have been the architects of women’s liberation. This could mean being firmly situated in collective action, political justice, and legal wins, or in the quieter spaces of self and sex. We talk loosely about ‘women’s movements’ and ‘the patriarchy’ as if they are as vast and unpinnable as air. But these women have found particularities from which they are fighting to breathe afresh. The work is vertiginous, and the path is fraught. Of course it is. This collection asks what it means to sustain a career fighting against gravity for freedom. It asks how cultural, political, economic, and sexual injustices can be met with somatic bravery, intellectual hard work, and joy as much as resilience. Looking to fight the good fight? This is what (some) resistance looks like.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture.” - Joan Didion</h1>

<h1 class="centre">In the electrified, electri-fried age of information-on-demand and stories for sale, what does it mean to tell the truth? What does it mean to search for the truth, over and over, a strand of hair’s distance from action, eyes transcribing as the brain computes? Anubha Bhonsle’s career is one answer to these questions. She has spent two decades flanked in conflict, power, and resistance, covering everything from the militarised Manipur to rubble in Uttarakhand.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Bhonsle has worked at NDTV, The Indian Express, and CNN-News18, as a prime-time anchor, political editor, and later, executive editor. She has accumulated a trove of awards and fellowships. Now, she runs her own studio, Newsworthy with AB. Her reporting has ranged across the country, but her full-throated, meticulous coverage of Manipur has become one of the defining chapters of her career.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">Manipur, Long Conflict, and Self-Expression</h1>

<h1 class="left">In 2016, she published Mother, Where’s My Country?, a painstaking account of Manipur’s long conflict, Irom Sharmila’s 16-year hunger strike, and the ways in which women’s bodies became both the terrain and the weapons of war. “Manipur is a strange land,” Bhonsle tells me. “Women’s bodies have been victimised. But it has also been a place where women have come together in peacemaking fairly easily.” She alludes to the Meira Paibis, the mothers who stripped naked in front of the Kangla Fort in 2004 to protest the rape and killing of Thangjam Manorama by the Assam Rifles. Her book also describes pamphlets handed out in schools, instructing young girls what to do in the event of rape. “It’s a land where women’s bodies have been used for state-sanctioned violence,” she says, referring to the historic complicity of the government and military in exacerbating and perpetrating violence. “And now they’re being used to make ethnic points.” But she is wary of implying that this is anomalistic or singular, for even in times of ‘peace,’ women’s bodies remain sites of violence. While exacerbated by war or conflict, the battlelines on bodies are always drawn.</h1>

<h1 class="left">In the process of writing Mother, Where’s My Country?, Bhonsle spent months meeting with Irom Sharmila, the ‘Iron Lady of Manipur.’ Sharmila undertook the longest hunger strike in history against AFSPA for 16 years. “You never felt a lack of zest for life in her,” Bhonsle says. “Even when she was being force-fed through a nasal tube, there was a brightness, a curiosity.” Sharmila’s act of defiance was heavily mythologised and extensively documented, in part because of its viscerality in turning the epistemic object of violence inwards, onto the self — or more accurately, the body. She took on the state with her body.</h1>

<h1 class="left">In 2016, when Sharmila ended her fast, she was met with widespread disillusionment and hostility. Activists, journalists, and the people of Manipur had an intimate symbolic relationship with her. Bhonsle tells me about how various groups had claimed her as their own: “You could have an anti-AFSPA [Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act] movement because there was an Irom Sharmila.” Sharmila’s decision to choose a different life for herself (one that Bhonsle hints she had wanted for a while) involved marrying and eventually having children. I ask, delicately, whether the news disappointed her. Bhonsle pauses, and then confesses that part of her immediately, reflexively wanted to ‘cover’ it, having known Sharmila for some time. But a larger part simply smiled: “I almost felt joyous; she should just live her life. She's chosen it, and she's been so strong for years.” The choice to take up the fast was her decision as an act of self-expression, and then, years later, here was another one, mediated by control and want. Good for her, the sentiment seemed to be.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">Making Meaning, Checking Facts</h1>

<h1 class="centre">I ask Bhonsle about how she encounters being so close to intimate accounts of violence, trauma, and injustice as an occupational necessity. To be a successful journalist is to find, smelter, and weld the world into stories by following them to a place of truth. Bhonsle tells me that this instinct, and the emotional toolkit that must accompany it, needs to be cultivated. When she was just starting out in her mid-20s, she remembers the first time she froze. While covering a New Delhi fire, she was confronted by the smell of human bodies burning: “I understood what a human body smelt like. While I'm talking to you, I can smell, I can recall that smell.” At the time, she didn’t think deeply about the discomfort. It was par for the course, she thought. This belief that it was an intrinsic and valuable part of the journalistic process to gloss over the disconcertment stayed late into her career. There was a rhythm and tempo to her ambitions in the newsroom, one that didn’t leave space for admissions that may have sounded weak in the face of opportunity. Traumatising, vast tragedies were only processed with the frame of craft, and a particular, abstracting view on the essence of journalism.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">She recalls covering the New Delhi gang rape case in 2012, hearing account after account of violence until they blurred into one ugly, unending film reel. She recalls being at a protest and seeing a father holding up a small, blue passport photo of his daughter, Tuba. Curiosity pricked like a switch, she went on to uncover that Tuba was a survivor of an acid attack. Bhonsle got the story international attention in the New York Times, and ran a successful campaign for justice. It was, by all accounts, a watershed success for her professionally, and as an agent of resistance. But the process had left invisible marks: “Every time I had an argument with a man after that, I’d think he was going to throw acid at me,” she admits. “If someone took out their phone, I’d instinctively cover my face.” It took her months to seek help and be able to name what was happening.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">There is, however, no regret in the way she speaks about her past. Even the worst of it—the sleepless nights, the years spent barely eating, the trauma she absorbed—she looks at with a kind of earned satisfaction, as if she had been willing to meet the craft’s demands. This ambition, that drive to be present, to go beyond what she says her friends call the opposite of “white bedsheet journalism”— where a reporter will only go as far as they can still return to a clean hotel at night. “I have no complaints,” she says. “Even the nights spent not on white bedsheets gave me something. Even if that something was not always a good story.”</h1>

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<h1 class="left">Pivots, Podcasts, and Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks</h1>

<h1 class="left">In the past few years, Bhonsle has stepped away from traditional journalism to build her own platform, where she has had to learn a different vocabulary and play a new game. “I joke that I have a TV-reporter voice in my head,” she says. “And no one talks like that anymore.” But the shift has also given her clarity. She has tremendous respect for the young women in her employ who have the self-assuredness and confidence to say no to stories they do not feel comfortable doing. And it allows her to lead a modified culture with intention: “I don’t want a newsroom where people start at 6 AM and work till midnight, where they’re scared to say no. I’ve been in positions of power where I pushed people too hard.” Now, with a team that pushes back when necessary, she is course-correcting.</h1>

<h1 class="left">When I ask her for books that have shaped her, she names Oliver Sacks’ Gratitude and Deborah Levy’s trilogy, particularly Real Estate. “And Didion,” she adds. “Always Didion. I reread her all the time.” For Didion, wild curiosity, steely research, and an authoritative voice turned journalism into a noble craft. At the close of our conversation, as we joke about Bhonsle’s supplementary diet of tech bro podcasts which she consumes with half-irony half-intent-to-learn-unearned-confidence, I can see why she likes Didion, difficulty, and sometimes-corny self-improvement podcasts. “Even now,” she clarifies, “I would struggle to say no to a story.” She sees truth-telling as an imperative, but also a choice: “I went the extra distance, not because anyone forced me, but because I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I didn’t.”</h1>

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<h1 class="left">CREDITS:</h1>

<h1 class="left">Editor-in-Chief: Kshitij Kankaria</h1>

<h1 class="left">Words by: Sanjana Sheth</h1>

<h1 class="left">Digital Editor: Shriya Zamindar</h1>

<h1 class="left">Managing Editor: Anurag Sharma</h1>

<h1 class="left">Art Director: Tia Chinai</h1>

<h1 class="left">Graphic Designer: Rishika Sikder</h1>

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<h1 class="left">G Ode Team:</h1>

<h1 class="left">Creative Direction: Nimi Raja</h1>

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