Sir Vidia has cocked a snook at women writers by labelling their works “feminine tosh” and claims their writing reflects “a narrow vision of the world”. He believes a woman is not a complete master of a house and that comes across in her writing too.
However, women writers feel that their writing might show a slight tilt towards sentimentality, but they don’t focus only on emotional and sentimental issues. So is it fair to draw gender brackets and boundaries in the field of writing? Does gender have any role to play in the creative realm?
Author Mohyna Srinivasan feels that such a comment degrades one’s writing because it slots it within a gender bracket. “My writing definitely has me in it or it is not my writing. So if I am female (not just in gender but in outlook too) then my book will be more ‘feminine’. But what I don’t understand is why he calls it feminine tosh,” she says, adding, “Readers don’t pick a book on the basis of the gender of the writer. That is why writing of all kinds exists and it is fair that it exists.”
Writer Anjana Basu too rubbishes the gender debate and says people write what they’re know and are comfortable writing about. “Austen wrote about the world she was confined to and studied it in depth. Yes, no woman has embarked on War and Peace but Margaret Mitchell did do a Gone With the Wind. As a female writer my main characters are women and my books explore the dynamics between them — men kind of perform on the sidelines in one way or another. So in that sense it is a feminine viewpoint. But then, I have known men who wrote about women too and wrote fairly sensitively.”
For novelist Manisha Lakhe, talent comes first, whether it is male or female, it does not matter. She says, “How can gender play any no role in creativity? Men have as much empathy as women and women can be as sharp and decisive as men. But gender-bias less thankfully, does not mean boring.”
On the other hand, Ira Trivedi agrees with Naipaul that women and men write differently as their brains function differently and that women can easily do the same job as men, but they choose to be different. “Naipaul is not all wrong, a woman’s perspective is different from how a man looks at things. But that doesn’t mean we draw gender boundaries and say that one is superior to another.”
Writing comes out of experience and there are differences in male and female perceptions of the world, inevitably so because men and women are situated differently, seconds author Manju Kapur, whose books delicately deal with relationships. She elucidates that the word ‘sentimental’ has derogatory overtones — excessively or weakly emotional, and obscures the fact that the best writing is one that evokes an emotional response. She says, “My writing is not sentimental. As I write to reflect the world around me as I see it, this does involve a strong emotional component — I wouldn’t have it otherwise. You have to be particularly skilled in order to do this — a skill that goes beyond gender. My belief is that it is not what you write that makes you a good or a great writer, but it is the approach to the issue wherein creativity lies.”