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Indian Express
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
From Chandannagore to Bloomsbury: Virginia Woolf's unexpected ‘Bengali connection'
For as long as I can remember, Virginia Woolf has been one of the most revered British writers in the history of English literature. As a self-proclaimed fangirl, I told myself I would only consider myself truly literate the day I could fully understand Woolf's writing. Just a few days ago, as I closed the final page of A Room of One's Own, a familiar discussion resurfaced, one that had first made waves in 2022 during the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival. William Dalrymple had claimed Virginia Woolf had Bengali roots. 'I can share something about Virginia Woolf that no one knows much about the fact that she was part Bengali. We both have Bengali ancestors, and much like her, I am half-Bengali too. We have a mutual great-grandmother who was born in Chandannagore. Virginia came from Franco-Bengali origins, and we have the marriage certificate of her Bengali grandmother and a Frenchman. Her grandmother was very aware of her Bengali and Hindu origin, even when living abroad.' Dalrymple went on to say that Woolf's facial features resembled those of a Bengali woman. This is also true of her writing. Her works that are lyrical, introspective, and use stream-of-consciousness, bear a certain resonance with the literary voices of the Bengal Renaissance. But resemblance and shared lineage do not necessarily translate into perspective. While critics and readers alike have compared the call for autonomy in A Room of One's Own to Bengali author Rassundari Devi's early memoirs, arguably India's first female autobiography, the broader implications of Woolf's feminism extend beyond personal identity. She called for literal, emotional, intellectual space for a woman to flourish. She wrote for a woman, and in doing so, gave voice to every woman. Still, reading her as an Indian woman, I cannot help but wonder what if she had known about her supposed Bengali origins? Would it have altered her worldview? Would her perception of the so-called 'third world' shift? There are unsettling moments in her writing that reflect the unconscious biases of her time. In Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa recalls hearing that Peter married an Indian woman: '…and then the horror of the moment when someone told her at a concert that he had married a woman met on the boat going to India! Never should she forget all that! Cold, heartless, a prude, he called her. Never could she understand how he cared. But those Indian women did presumably—silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops…' Was this jealousy? A satirical critique? Or a reflection of Woolf's own internalised imperial gaze? As an Indian reader, I find it both fascinating and dissonant that someone who might have descended from the very culture she 'others' would depict it so unkindly. Yet, even within that discomfort, I return to the power of her pen. Her language, lucid yet elusive, invites me into her mind, her contradictions, her struggles. And I wonder had she been aware of her lineage, would she have written differently about the Indian woman? Woolf remains, for me, a literary icon, not because she was perfect, or fully inclusive, but because she dared to write what she felt, and in doing so, allowed us to question what remains unsaid. Her work continues to shape how I see myself. As John Dewey once said, 'Art is experience.' And perhaps, so too is identity. (As I See It is a space for bookish reflection, part personal essay and part love letter to the written word.)
Atlantic
04-07-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Lunch With Virginia Woolf
For many years, I did not read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. I suppose the thesis seemed so familiar, so foundational to feminist thinking, that I never felt the need to actually open the book. Of course a woman needs personal space and financial security in order to create art! But the truth is it was more than that. When I showed up at college in the '90s—a working-class Latina plopped onto an Ivy League campus—I didn't think feminism had much to offer me. I was juggling schoolwork with multiple jobs, preoccupied by economic survival and the stigma of affirmative action, while the college women's center seemed focused on eschewing bras and makeup and organizing Take Back the Night events. 'Feminism' seemed less a political framework for equity than a rebellious identity for privileged white women. And Virginia Woolf was their patron saint. Instead of Woolf, I read Cherríe Moraga, bell hooks, Ana Castillo, Alice Walker—writers and thinkers who understood the challenges of being a woman and living at the intersection of economic, racial, and social circumstances that each press in on you in different ways. Many times, I felt I had to set aside my interests as a woman in favor of my interests as a person of color, and I blamed much of that on the exclusionary white lens that, until recently, dominated feminist discourse. And I placed all this emotional baggage onto poor Virginia Woolf. But that was a long time ago. In the subsequent years, life taught me that I could put other aspects of my identity first but that society would almost always put women last. And so last year, I finally cracked open A Room of One's Own. I knew that the book—technically a long essay—was based on two lectures Woolf gave in 1928, just a few months after universal suffrage was passed in England. I knew that Woolf argued that the right to vote was less crucial than financial independence. And I knew that the essay had been rediscovered in the early '70s by second-wave feminists. But now, page by page, what had once been to me nothing but a totem to feminist history revealed itself to be what I should have realized it was all along: a piece of another woman's soul. In one afternoon, Woolf became known to me, and all my years of blind grievance melted away. Her honesty and fire and rage at the limitations put on women's minds dissolved all the layers of feminist signifiers that she had been freighted with and all the distance between us. Oh, to spend an afternoon in thrall to her brilliant, incandescent mind! Woolf makes an elegant argument about the many ways that women's voices have been silenced, suppressed, and otherwise forgotten. And she's a beguiling polemicist, shifting easily between allegory and assertion. I found she had plenty to say to this moment, in this country where, on the one hand, I can cast a presidential ballot for a woman for the second time in my life, but on the other, my citizenship is still valued less than that of my male compatriots. I felt myself both encouraged by all that has changed and enraged by all that has remained the same. For instance, stereotypes about what men and women can write are still going strong. A man's fictions—novels, stories, plays, films—are still more likely to deal with matters of sport or disaster or battle. And a woman's are still more likely to be concerned with domestic matters. 'This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war,' Woolf wrote. 'This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.' The dismissal of women's storytelling persists. More important, we are still asking ourselves, a full century later, Woolf's central question: Why are women poorer than men? Woolf was disappointed not to have found 'some important statement, some authentic fact' to explain this. Now we have concrete data: White women are paid 83 percent of white men's wages; Black women and Latinas, only 69.8 percent and 64.6 percent of white men's wages, respectively. We can precisely measure the gap, and yet the gap persists. The media reports on it and legislation is proposed, but the will to change is never strong enough. Woolf knew why. The patriarchy, she wrote, depends upon man's 'feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief sources of his power.' Reading this, I found myself nodding so vigorously I nearly strained my neck. The book is, of course, limited by the blind spots of Woolf's era and experience. She is addressing her peer group: upper-class white women whose families were so bold as to allow them to be educated. Yet I still felt that, if seated across from me today, Woolf—who understood the link between the economic control of women and the control of our minds—would embrace the intersectionality that is crucial to feminism's present and future. Early in the lectures, Woolf introduces us to the character of Mary. She is idling by a river on the campus of a university when she is struck with an 'exciting' and 'important' idea. She rushes off to write it down, but when she is stopped and scolded by a university official for walking in an area where only men are allowed to stroll, she loses her thought. I cursed the official, mourned the lost idea, and wanted to tell Woolf about Toni Morrison. During a university lecture in 1975, Morrison spoke not of gender, but of racism, and specifically its role in limiting productivity. She warned her listeners about 'the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.' As I read of Mary being shamed and turned away from the library for being a woman, I thought of Jim Crow. I wanted to tell Woolf about the reading tests given to Latinas to block them from the voting booth, and of all the other institutionalized methods of shaming and othering that have arisen since her time on earth. Mary has a succulent lunch at the men's college, only to return to her poorly financed women's college for a paltry supper. 'One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well,' Woolf writes. I wanted to tell her about my life during the recession years, when my phone rang more frequently from debt collectors than from friends, and I had no energy to write. And so in Mary's journey, I saw parallels not just to the upper class and highly educated, but to the socioeconomically and racially marginalized as well. If I could sit across a lunch table from Woolf now, I would also point out—lovingly—that she has probably overestimated the coddling required for a woman to produce art. Woolf, you see, hated to work. Her Mary has inherited £500 a year—the equivalent today of about $55,000. Now she need not do anything but sit in her room and think. But before the inheritance, Mary had to earn money teaching kindergarten or addressing envelopes or reading to old ladies. The work forced her to live on a budget, which she disliked, but worse 'was the poison of fear and bitterness' over having to do 'work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave.' I rolled my eyes. Inheritances don't grow on trees, and many women writers have been quite productive while working. Morrison wrote Beloved while sitting in traffic, commuting to her job at Random House. Ada Limón wrote three poetry collections while working in the marketing department of Condé Nast. I wrote much of my first novel while commuting to Hunter College to work as a fundraiser. Working, I might argue, actually helps the writer/artist access a different kind of truth in her fictions. I might press Woolf to consider an additional requirement for freeing a woman's mind: time. Women today can obtain money and, with it, a room with a door and a lock. But this does not mean they will have the time to spend there. Since Woolf's era, time has become perhaps the rarest commodity of all for women. After the time spent earning the money, many of us run households, even when we have a partner. We are still the primary caregivers for our children and older relatives. We have more freedom than Woolf ever had, but do we have the freedom to while away time by a river so that our thoughts can go out like so many fishing lines until they catch onto something real? Well, when that happens, it still feels as elusive and magical as it did when she gave her lectures.
Economist
26-06-2025
- Sport
- Economist
How Wimbledon gets its grass so green
Britain | Turf wars And why many British gardens are giving up on lawns Lie down. A good way to understand Centre Court at Wimbledon is to put your cheek on the grass behind the white line where, next week, the toes of the world's top tennis players will be. The first thing you will notice is that the grass is cold, dew-damp and bristly, like fake grass—not silky, like a lawn. It is also unnaturally level. Flattened by laser-guided levellers and cut daily to 8mm by robot lawnmowers, it feels less horticultural than architectural, its stripes like an artistic exercise in vanishing-points. The next thing you might notice is an approaching security guard. They do not, says Neil Stubley, Wimbledon's head of courts, like people 'rolling around' on it. England is the land of the lawn. In English literature, history and life the lawn looms large. England swathed its country houses in lawns; took tea on them; invented and perfected games—like tennis and cricket—to play on them. It filled its land with lawns (there are around 24m gardens in Britain, many mostly grass). And it filled its literature with them. Evelyn Waugh's characters lounge on them; P.G. Wodehouse's cavort on them; Philip Larkin killed a hedgehog on one. The lawn was so sacrosanct that for decades English gardeners less gardened lawns than guarded them. In Oxford and Cambridge, beside each inviting-looking lawn stands an uninviting sign: 'KEEP OFF THE GRASS'. What caused this fad? Partly it is history: from the 1740s Capability Brown, a landscape designer, ditched French-style geometry for gardens that demanded the adjective 'sweeping'—then his style swept the country. Partly it is serendipity: dull English skies keep such sweeping lawns well-watered. Partly it is biology. Lawn enthusiasts like to ponder which came first, the lawn or the lawnmower? The answer is: the sheep. A lawn, says Maria Vorontsova, a grass expert at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is simply 'pretty pasture' that has been 'eaten by lawnmowers'. Snobbery played a part too: keeping grass cut short costs. Once it cost because it was so low-tech: sheep don't come cheap, and scything is slow and heavy work. Later it cost because it was high-tech: the first lawnmower, invented in Britain in 1830, cost £1,000 ($1,360) in today's money. Now, on Wimbledon's centre court, between the 'KEEP OFF THE GRASS' signs, a man crouches with a pair of steel scissors, snipping at stray strands of grass—a horticultural haircut, and, given hourly wages in London, a costly one. Lawns started to represent hierarchy as well as horticulture. In 'A Room of One's Own' Virginia Woolf's narrator is booted off an Oxbridge lawn: only men, and scholars, were allowed on the grass. It also became an eminently exportable form of Englishness. Die in the English army and, for the past 100 years, wherever you fell, your body was likely to be covered by lawn, since the organisation that buries Britain's war dead aimed for the look of an 'English churchyard' in its cemeteries in Ypres and elsewhere. Life as an Englishman might leave you. Lawns would not. The lawns at Wimbledon are not merely cut, watered, primped and preened. They are also executed when the tournament ends. Like little grassy gladiators, their lives end with the entertainment. To ensure infections don't take hold and the grass next year is young, the court is covered with plastic, and superheated steam is piped in at 190°C (so hot that it boils the water in the surface of the soil). Every blade dies. Wimbledon's grass is green. Its processes are dark. Haughty culture Which is perhaps why lawns are changing. Rewilding has become fashionable. 'No Mow May' is spreading. To understand how much lawns are changing, go to King's College, Cambridge. There, behind one of England's most famous chapels, lies another of its most famous lawns. Today, it is barely a lawn at all; it certainly does nothing so dignified as sweep. It waves in the breeze, it buzzes with bees, it is filled with butterflies. Walk through barefoot and it will tangle your toes and scratch your legs. It will smell, faintly, of marjoram. A lawn is a subservient, almost dead, stretch of grass. Walk through this and, says Steve Coghill, the head gardener at King's, 'the whole of the meadow is alive.' It began in 2018 when King's decided to turn part of its lawn into meadow. Cambridge being Cambridge, they didn't just stop cutting the grass: they involved soil scientists and botanists and ecologists and horticulturalists, all sorts of -ists, to ensure the right seeds were sown in the right way. They sowed the seeds (with students and mulled wine); then harvested them (with shire horses and, later, more wine). Then they published a scientific paper about it. The results were astonishing. Bats had increased threefold, invertebrates by 25 times. Each week, at dawn, student lepidopterists record the moths they have trapped overnight. Their names—the Grey dagger, the Nut-tree tussock—are, says Mr Coghill, 'like the poetry of 'The Faerie Queene''. (Cambridge being Cambridge, its gardeners talk like that.) Where Wimbledon executes plants, King's has resurrected them. 'The soil', says Mr Coghill, 'has memory.' Seeds of plants—clustered bellflowers, lizard orchids—that have lain dormant in Cambridge's soil for centuries have come back to life. In the soil is a memory of another era. At one edge of the meadow is a small steel sign reading: 'KEEP OFF THE GRASS'. Hidden by thistles, it is barely legible.
Indian Express
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
The Third Edit: Mrs Dalloway at 100: She can buy herself flowers
A century ago, writer Virginia Woolf handed readers a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs Dalloway, and in doing so, rewrote the possibilities of fiction. Not with grand events, but with the quiet rhythms of a woman's heart. 'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,' and as she set out from her elite Westminster home, the simple act became an existential event, an examination of her interior life, her longing and loneliness and the way she shrinks and expands with the roles society has placed upon her. Through the narrative, Woolf gave depth to what was so peremptorily dismissed in reality as well as in fiction at the time — the lives of girls and women — and refused to look away. In an era when intellect was coded male and the literary canon dominated by the external and the action-driven, Woolf was in every way an outlier. She challenged the primacy of plot with a stream of consciousness that flowed unapologetically through doubt, memory, and fragmented desire. In Mrs Dalloway, time bent and buckled to accommodate emotion; in A Room of One's Own (1929), she declared space and income the foundations for female creativity. These were radical acts of reclamation. She wrote with the full force of a mind that refused to compartmentalise intellect and emotion, and made room for a new language for both feminism and fiction. A century and many movements for women's rights later, the questions Mrs Dalloway raised continues to be relevant still: How do women stitch meaning into days that ask them to be beautiful, dutiful, but not necessarily whole? How do women live truthfully in a world that so often mistakes performance for presence? In an age of curated selves and constant noise, Mrs Dalloway pulls people back to the politics of thought, the necessity of empathy. Woolf's work endures not simply because it was ahead of its time, but because it continues to meet each generation exactly where they are — searching, unsettled, and yearning for more.
The Hindu
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Women in design unite
Just like the novel A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, where the author explores the need for women to be financially independent and have personal space to create art and achieve intellectual freedom, a house too resonates with identity, memory, and intention. For women, curating a space becomes a form of storytelling — creating environments that reflect artistic style, safety, emotion, and care. However, for men, the focus is more on the aesthetic and utilitarian aspect. Honouringwomen who shape the world through design and authentic expression, 'Room For Her' — presented by Adeline Graham, a French entrepreneur and interior designer — was hosted at her Fern & Ade showroom in Chennai last week. While the name of her showroom is a tribute to her grandmother Fern, Graham says she has been inspired by the fashion and culinary worlds as opposed to drawing inspiration from just one person. The talk featured artist Parvathi Nayar, photographer and urban gardening enthusiast Shefalii Dadabhoy, and Sripriya Ganesan, co-founder of Studio Neon Attic as the speakers, and was moderated by Shakthi Girish, founder of Galatta magazine. Topics ranged from how women shape the art world to how to bring a feminine perspective into architecture. The showroom itself was a blend of modernity and warmth, with the evening light filtering through its minimalist decor. For Graham, who offers 'a European sensibility — softer colour palettes and refined lines — that complements the richness of Indian homes, including their vibrant artwork and intricate woodwork' the occasion was the perfect opportunity to bring together women from different walks of life. 'Design and creativity go far beyond just interiors; they're woven into every aspect of how we live — from the art we choose to the food we serve and the way we nurture our outdoor spaces,' she said. When it comes to the influence of women in art, Nayar, who recently premiered her show Limits of Change at Chennai's Lalit Kala Akademi, said that she wouldn't want to be typecast as a woman artist who would only work with fabric or embroidery or on women's subjects. This would be reductive and limiting. 'I embrace the fact that I'm a woman and that sensibility makes its way into my work,' she added. Meanwhile, Dadabhoy, who is known for her work as a home chef (the city loves her artisanal floral brownies), has also been lauded for her efforts to transform Chennai into a sunflower city. 'How you wear your clothes in the morning, how you lay your dishes, how you serve, art is designed from that aspect. Getting flowers onto my plate of food was just a natural progression of that. We have to let nature be the painter, and we become the curator,' she explained. For architect and interior designer Ganesan, whose Studio Neon Attic showcases design and integrates traditional craftsmanship with contemporary aesthetics, femininity is not a sense of aesthetic, but is layered and emotionally intelligent. 'Who is going to use the space? If you are looking at a workspace, are we looking at a workspace where women feel safe… this is what women bring into design. Spaces have always been designed keeping men in the picture, which is very basic, functional, and monumental,' she said. Names that inspire Textile designer Sonali Manavalan, founder and head designer of Manavalanan Co — a multidisciplinary design house — confessed that she draws inspiration from Sarah Sham, owner of Essajees Atelier, a global design company. 'I came across her on Instagram. She is a boss lady. One of the things that inspired me was how she handles massive projects. More than the finished products, it's the fact that she has done all this work while raising two children,' she observed. Both Sakthi Bhuvaneswari, of The Civic Studio, and Ganesan are inspired by architect Zaha Hadid, the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize. 'Her designs are unapologetically her. I got into architecture because I wanted to shake up the design space just like her,' shared Ganesan. 'As I practise sustainability, I also look up to Chitra Vishwanath [of Biome Solutions, Bengaluru]. In Chennai, I like the work of Shilpa Architects,' added Sakthi Bhuvaneswari. Cherry picking furniture At the store, both Bhuvaneswari and Kalpana Rao, owner of OCD Space Studio, favoured the RFH armchair by &Tradition, a Danish brand that focuses on originality. 'Small in footprint, part of the chair's charm lies in its low and compact form, offering a lounge piece with a striking silhouette that can be placed anywhere,' Graham described later. For Purva Bhende, associate architect with ED+Architecture, the side table with a rotating disc was the winner. 'I tend to focus on the visual appeal as opposed to comfort. If you are sitting and are bored, fiddling with it is something that you are meant to do.'
