Globalization, Feminism and Publishing
Ritu Menon

I would like to preface my comments by saying that in my view it is actually impossible to speak about globalization without simultaneously speaking about the global and the local.  This idea is actually quite elusive, not something that comes easily to all of us because we are given to making broad generalizations. We like to be able to see simple relationships between processes, especially between economic and social processes, but this is not always the case. Globalization impacts the local everywhere, in other words it impacts the local in every place that it reaches. What I would like to do today is to speak about this simultaneous global and local dimension of what is happening in one very significant area of the production of knowledge, worldwide. But I am speaking about it with a narrow focus, and my canvas is India.
I would like to begin by giving you a few figures because these are not generally known to the public. We all take book production and writing for granted and it is generally assumed to be a fairly apolitical activity, to be quite neutral in its rami-fications, but as I hope to demonstrate, this is a misperception.  Let me first clarify that. I am speaking only of English language publishing and I will tell you why.  Generally when one speaks about media the immediate association is with mass media whether, print, broadcast or electronic—newspapers, television, radio, and so on. But I am speaking about book publishing because that is actually where a society’s, a culture’s intellectual output is measured. In India book publishing is a very small industry. We have no accurate figures because the book trade doesn’t record them, but estimates are that the entire industry’s output is valued at around Rs. 2,500 crores.  That is nothing—
that is Reliance’s turnover in just one company. Of this the State sector, which includes all educational publishing in this country, accounts for Rs. 1,500 crores and the non-State sector accounts for Rs. 1,000 crores, and this includes the import of books.  I have given you these figures because we are speaking about the local and the global. What is at work here?
The Rs. 1,000 crores of non-State expenditure includes imports which account for 40 per cent of that figure, so what we are saying is that of Rs. 1,000 crores of non-State purchase, 40 per cent is accounted for by imports and of that 40 per cent, 25 per cent is made up of general books and 75 per cent of educational books.  This is how this sector is divided up.  Why English language?  The most current figures that we have for English as a world language is that an estimated one billion people worldwide speak it. It has official or special status in at least 75 countries of the world; around 80 per cent of the world’s electronically stored information is in English and three-quarters of the world’s mailing is written in this language.  Again, over two-thirds of the world’s scientists read English.  In Britain the estimate is that language products are worth over 500 million pounds a year. I am mentioning these figures because we are speaking about the economics of this activity, and of course books and related materials are linked to that. Let me now get to the subject of my talk.
I would like to speak about autonomy, about controlling the medium and the message, about ownership and capital, and about the role of the media intervening in social and public life, by which I mean intervening as an agent of progressive social change. Why women’s publishing? The short answer is because it is about publishing for society.  It is not merely writing about women from a social welfare concern, not merely about focusing on women as objects of charitable scrutiny, but as I said, it is publishing for social change. It is about resistance. It is about redefining ideas and concepts.  It is about challenging accepted wisdom. It is about reinterpreting and rewriting. It is about dissent, and it is about changing the status quo. Ultimately it is about changing power relations and therefore it is subversive. So what does this have to do with globalization, you might ask?  Can a generally marginal activity like feminist publishing, especially in our part of the world, be seriously affected by eco-nomic processes that are far more wide-ranging in their scope?
Let me repeat that I am speaking about book publishing as an important segment of the media, but even more importantly, about intellectual capital and those who control it; about the production of knowledge and who controls that. We are speaking, crucially, about space available in the print media for the dissenting voice and the marginal voice. We know how drastically this space has shrunk and how it is gradually being wiped out in the mass media. There is not too much debate on this, there may be some difference of opinion, but over the years we have seen gradual shrinking and erasure of space in all mass media of the dissenting voice, or the marginal voice or the oppositional voice. By and large the media are now preoccupied with the concerns, the commodities, the priorities and preoccupations that the eco-nomically and politically powerful mainstream endorses. I am speaking about being outside the mainstream. Globalization has forced us to recognize how the mainstream, or what we sometimes call the dominant culture, has pushed marginal voices even further to the wall.
In this context, then, where is the space for the marginal, the alternative, the progressive, even the radical voice for change, and how in the globalized market-place do women raise their voices? A fact that is not commonly known is that today the greater part of book publishing in the whole world in the English language is controlled by three major conglomerates, which is to say that they effectively control world intellectual output. Now I am speaking really about control—and perhaps in the discussion we can elaborate on this a little bit more—but what it means is that those apparently discrete, local, national, distinct, separate entities that we assume reflect local and contextual or regional preoccupations, are controlled by three conglomerates in the world: one German, one Canadian and one American. Now the implications of this are enormous, because the economic power of this kind of control has ramifications for everybody. It has even more major ramifications for small publishers, that is, for those people, for that intellectual output, for that production of knowledge, that is outside the mainstream. Where and how does it function? What place does it occupy and what is this interaction with this dominant economically powerful mainstream? Those are the questions that concern all the smaller players, all the independent, autonomous players in a globalized market-place.  And this globalized market place exists everywhere. It is not a problem peculiar to South Asia, it is a problem for small, alter-native, marginal players worldwide.
Let me now shift the focus a little bit to understand how this force, as it were, specifically affects activities in different locations. The women’s movement worldwide has been a very significant movement for social change. There have been many others but, worldwide, only two or three movements have had a major impact on society and politics in twentieth century, and women’s movement is certainly one of them. The environmental movement is another, the peace movement is a third and the movement for civil liberties, for democratic rights, against racism, of course, are others.  The women’s movement is significant because it has insisted on intervening for progressive social change, and insisted that society and culture and politics take note.  A lot of this has come about because of feminist research and writing and activism and a very determined, conscious and deliberate dismantling of structures of power as well as structures of knowledge.  It has shown how knowledge is built, how perspectives are shaped, how biases and prejudices are reinforced.  It has insisted that the accepted wisdom of centuries and ages be challenged and forced to accommodate a perspective that demands that its experience and its location in society be acknowledged.
A great deal of this, about 80 per cent to 90 per cent of this re-articulation, redefinition, rewriting has come about as a result of a very active collaboration between the women’s movement, those who write and those who disseminate what is written.  It has been, I think, singularly the one movement, which has produced a body of work that has had such a significant impact on education and educational institutions.  Again, this is world-wide.  There is a way, let us say even in India, where the introduction of women’s studies or the recognition of its potential and its importance have been a direct result of women’s activism. I am speaking not only of it as a political activity but of its institutionalization.  I am speaking of its institutionalization in women’s studies centres, in the UGC, in fellowships, in  departments, in extension work, and so on.  India is unique in having the distinction of explicitly stating that women’s studies and women’s activism is the third arm of education. This is something that is quite radical in its articulation.
The important role that this writing and publishing has played is to extend the political nature of this activity—because all social change is fundamentally a political activity. Now, as I said, 80 per cent to 90 per cent of it has been done by very small under-capitalized, voluntary-labour publishing houses, world-wide.  The creation of this enormous body of knowledge was done by very small, very modest, groups of women for whom the production of this kind of material and its dissemination was very much a part of their activity and their movement work.  The politics of this kind of publishing has always been primary, and the commercial aspect of it or the profit-oriented or economic aspect of it has always been secondary.  This is true of every single country in the world. In the 1980s, and 1990s it became an enormously successful venture, not only politically but economically.  This is its paradox. It became so successful, economically, because it reached a huge constituency—it reached half the world.  It became enormously successful and then it was co-opted by the mainstream.
This is yet another fact of this particular kind of publishing because today 80 per cent of what is produced in women’s studies, whether it is academic or popular or general interest, is produced by the mainstream, by the economically powerful mainstream that is controlled by those three conglomerates I spoke earlier. In the space of about 10-15 years the balance has tipped almost totally away from the 80 per cent of small, politically committed activist production of knowledge, an alternative perspective that worked primarily for social change, and moved into being an 80 per cent activity oriented towards profit. Now this is where we have to see the role of global economics and the global production of knowledge. We know that the labour-intensive work of social change, of any developmental activity is anathema to profit—it can neither afford it, nor is it interested in it.  The exploratory, the developmental, the back-breaking work of opening up an area of study, an area of concern, insisting on a perspective, is not a profit-oriented activity.  That it has become profitable is a happy development but, as I say, now that 80 per cent of this is being done by the mainstream, by the economically powerful mainstream, it ceases to have that interventionary potential.  It is no longer imbued with the same politics; in other words the interest of the mainstream is in the movement as market, not the movement as resistance.
    So what happens to the dissenting voice? I am speaking specifically now of women’s voices but please take this to include all marginal voices, because it is true of all marginalized voices.  Where does that voice find its space?  Where are forums for that voice? Where is it that it can be accommodated?  Of course, because of the worldwide decline of feminist publishing, there are only a handful of autonomous, independently-owned feminist publishing houses in the world today, the rest have been bought over by the mainstream for economic reasons obviously.  Why this happens is another interesting and very curious feature of success, because in the end, what we have to take note of is voice, where is it going to be heard most powerfully and how it will communicate its message? If this very powerful, committed, alternative forum is lost, where then does such voice make itself heard?  It is a generally accepted truism that the structures of wealth and power are structures that were, and, are being dismantled by the dissenting voice—it is the arrangement of power, political, economic and social, that any movement of social change insists on altering.  The structures of wealth and control in publishing, in the production of knowledge, in the creation of intellectual capital, are now part of global publishing empires and their policies are aimed at maintaining the status quo, economically—that is, keep wealth in the hands of the few.  Politically, it is conservative and exclusive; intellectually, it is hidebound, or reactionary, and as far as gender relations are concerned, is highly unequal. Now we may think that we are outside their reach simply because we are too small to be counted, but mechanisms like TRIPs and TRIMs and the regulation of intellectual property rights and of intellectual copyright don’t distinguish between big and small, North and South, because the global market-place can have only one form of regulation.  This is undeniable.  There will only be one form of regulation.  That is what the regulation of world trade is about.
Unless we see the global and the local working in tandem, unless we situate ourselves locally but are also able to con-textualize ourselves in the global, there is no way in which we can actually see how these ramifications develop and work.  For me, the most crucial dimension is this: how does this local in terms of production of knowledge and intellectual output—and in that I foreground, always, the marginal voice for change—how is it impacted by the globalized market-place in which intellectual output is controlled by three conglomerates in the North and West?  I will end here and I hope one can have a discussion in which some elaborations can take place.

Discussion

Q. Have there been some studies conducted on the unorganized sector?
Ritu Menon
Very few that I’m aware of.  There are some, mainly on home-based labour and the impact of the voluntary retirement scheme on female labour in the organized workforce, labour that has then been pushed into the unorganized sector.  There have been some studies on women workers working in gem-stone cutting and in embroidery, agarbattis, sewing button-holes, etc., for the garment industry.  The world garment industry is a completely decentralized activity now, which is to say, production takes place in about a dozen different centres in the world, most of them staffed by female labour and most of them protected by trade tariffs, which puts them into economically free trade zones.  A free trade zone is a zone where no unionizing is allowed by law, and most of them are peopled by gendered labour.
A very well-known company like Benetton, for example, has broken up its production of a single garment into 6 or 9 discrete production units, so one arm is produced in one place, the top is produced in a second place, the colour coordination is centralized in a location that nobody knows about because it is all done electronically. Nobody knows where the centralized instructions issue from. In other words, there is no location.  If you work to unionize and resist you would not know who to resist because production is completely decentralized. This is a strategy that is increasingly being followed by the garment trade worldwide, and is also being picked up by others.
Let us take media.  There was a time 8-10 years ago when in India we resisted the negative portrait of women in the media and we knew whom to target.  We knew that it was either Doordarshan or All India Radio or individual newspaper proprietors, because the control was identifiable.  Today, if we want to resist it we do not know whom to target.  Ownership is not anonymous but it is highly concealed so that if I were to protest against Baywatch or Bold and the Beautiful or even programmes that Doordarshan or cable networks carry, I would not know whom to protest against because ownership is not known. That is the single most disturbing feature of global capital, apart from its economic ramifications—its ability to conceal itself!

Q. My name is Ramesh Shukla. Marginalization through global-ization is likely to get worse.  Does Internet open up new opportunities for you?

Ritu Menon
The short answer to that is, very few.  It opens up very little principally because it has very limited reach. Nationally, the reach is very small and globally, although it is theoretically possible for it to have huge reach, in actual fact it does not.  I can say this with confidence for e-commerce in India is not a viable prop-osition.  More interesting is the fact that it has not proved to be beneficial for the book trade even worldwide. Perhaps you are familiar with something called Amazon.com which made a huge name for itself as an e-retailer of books, which offered huge discounts, and basically did away with the middle-man.  Now, I have no problems with doing away with the middle-man or woman, but the problem is that the profits and the volume of trading were highly exaggerated. And today Amazon.com has been listed by any number of Wall Street companies as being almost permanently in the red on book-retailing. It makes its money on other things, because merchandizing is merchandizing, but as far as book retailing is concerned it has been declared to be in the red for the last five years.
It is much worse news for small retailers because what it has done is to wipe out the independent retailer, that small book-shop that caters to local need, and this is in the US.  This is why I say that globalization has an impact, locally wherever it is.  We may think that it emanates from one place and impacts another but actually it impacts locally as well.  I can give you some figures on that, not for every small publisher but certainly for women’s publishing.  What happens is this: high volume trading operates on very high discounts, that is, the margins are huge.  The only way you can achieve that is to cut down on every single over-head that you have.  This has made for the feminization of the labour force in publishing and it is another very interesting development—the subcontracting of labour to a home-based mostly female workforce.  Talk about pushing them out of the organized sector into the unorganized sector, all over the Western English language book publishing world; the editorial work, the labour-intensive work is done by women at home.  That is to say, they are not employed by publishers as full-time employees.  They have a computer, they have Internet, they work from home. What does this mean? No benefits, no security, no regular employment.  At a conservative estimate, 75 per cent to 80 per cent of editorial work done in the world’s publishing houses is done by women from home. This home-based labour is called ‘shadow work’, in the industry and it is primarily female. When the conglomerates take over, ‘rationalization’—this is a word that you must have heard very often when discussing the economics of all this—rationalization takes place because overheads are spread across huge expenditures, over huge areas.  They can only be done if there is high volume. But what it means is that smaller independent people get thrown out of the business. The large players control the market so there is no space left for the marginal.
Never mind Internet, never mind any new technologies that are supposed to be democratic—we are talking about the democratization of the means of communications, that is what Internet is supposed to be doing.  Of course we know that it is available to very few people because it is itself a privileged domain from the very outset; for our societies, at least even if not for developed societies, and it is creating inequalities even within our societies.  That is something that a lot of NGOs are working on especially those who are involved with com-munication and dissemination, and so on, but all this is still at a very early stage.  The ownership and sales of independently owned feminist book shops in North America, for example the US, has dropped by 50 per cent to 75 per cent in the last 8 years.  That is a huge drop.

Q. Mohini Anjuman: I teach sociology at Jamia Millia. I agree with you when you say that feminist writing has been taken over by the mainstream, the conglomerates that you mention because it became very attractive and economically viable. If that is the case why is it that gender studies has not become part of mainstream disciplines? It is always considered peripheral to mainstream sociology, mainstream economics, mainstream history, mainstream political science, although all this publishing has provided enough groundwork for building up feminist studies.

Ritu Menon
That is really a question for educationists to answer, I can only venture a few comments on this. One country in the world that has been extremely proactive on women studies is, of course, the US, where on the last count, I think, there were about 55,000 courses in women studies, so its institutionalization has been very successful there, and it has happened primarily because of women educationists within the academy insisting on it. But I will say that, this has been, in one sense, responsible for the decline of feminist publishing, because the minute it is institutionalized in that way it is fair game for the mainstream.  And so it should be, why not?  Why should the mainstream not be a part of it?  That is one point of view.  After all, part of the endeavour has been to ‘mainstream’ women’s studies.  When it does incorporate it, however, it also co-opts it. You may acknowledge the voice but you should not appropriate the voice. This trends to happen.
In India, for example, there have been huge debates about whether women’s studies should be a separate discipline or part of the mainstream disciplines that you have mentioned. There has been such enormous resistance from mainstream disciplines, generally speaking, that the UGC has now more or less aban-doned any programme of introducing women’s studies as a separate discipline. The main reason given for not according separate status to women’s studies is that there would be no takers for such a course, it would just be an extension of home science. The fear of academics is that women’s studies would become a ghetto area, it would be taken mainly by women, and there would be no job opportunities for those taking such courses. It is important to keep this in mind when you offer a degree course. We know, from experience, that this was true of vocational training in this country. The problem with incor-porating it into mainstream courses is that individual departments are autonomous and have the prerogative to decide whether to include it or not, and most decide not to, and they give the same reason: no funds. What funds there are, they say, should go to the more popular courses and degrees. The one exception is the 33 women’s studies centres in the country, including Jamia. The only places where it is offered as a degree course (at the postgraduate level) is at the University of Lucknow, at the Isabella Thoburn College in Lucknow at the Masters level, and at Mother Teresa College in Coimbatore.

Q. What about the situation in the non-English languages? What are the linkages if any with the English language world?

Ritu Menon
I can’t speak for all the languages since there are 22 official languages, but what I can say is that the material that is produced—I don’t use the term publishing because it is much wider and larger than any publisher could produce—is produced by NGOs, whether it is primers, handbooks, etc. That is the single most important characteristic of this literature in all the other languages. I know of no regional language publisher, by which I mean publishing house, which publishes material from a gender perspective as part of its regular publishing, as is now done by a number of houses in English from OUP to Sage to Manohar to Permanent Black. There are two reasons for this. All higher education work in this country is in English, second, there is enormous resistance to this material. We at Kali tried to publish in Hindi, and there were plenty of takers for free hand outs but great resistance to buying it even at cost, which is all we were looking for. So we virtually give it away for nothing. But efforts are being made to promote such work in other languages and it is being done in very innovative ways, because the outreach is much greater. But this kind of work will be done by groups like ours not by big publishing houses, because there is no money in it.

Q. The feminist movement is really represented by a small margin of Westernized women which do not represent the reality of women in India. Doesn’t this cause problems?

Ritu Menon
That may be the general perception but, as in many other cases, general perceptions can be quite mistaken. On the issue of representation, it is not possible to represent everybody. Let me give you two examples. The two most politically significant changes that have taken place in the last 20 years as far as Indian women, society and politics is concerned, are 33 per cent reservations for women at the district, panchayat and municipal level, and the recognition of women’s contribution to the eco-nomy through the unorganized sector. These two developments are major because they have completely transformed the recognition of women’s contribution to society. Which women were responsible for promoting these two developments? How did this happen? As far as the informal sector is concerned, it was the beedi workers, rag-pickers, street-vendors, household domestic labourers, etc., who insisted with international organ-izations like the ILO that their labour be recognized, and it be recognized as an economic output of the country. It was really the poorest of the poor who did this. As far as the reservations issue is concerned, it was, again, the most dispossessed and most disadvantaged who persevered for years and organized in the grass roots for this reservation. The Congress introduced the 83rd Amendment but it was in response to their struggle, it did not happen as a benevolent patriarchal act.

More Questions and Answers

Q. Sri Prakash: There is an expansion of the middle class to include more women as a distinct social feature. How do you see the emergence of a middle class among women, or more women among the middle class, affecting Indian society and politics?

Ritu Menon
It can make for huge change provided other things also change, otherwise it can also be quite retrogressive. We have to remember that 60 per cent of India is poor and globalization is affecting them adversely. Education is being privatized. Primary education at the district level in six or eight states is being funded by outside agencies like the World Bank. In UP, the largest state, it is funded by US Aid—both are agents of globalization and liberalization. What is the gender-specific feature of this? The gender-specific feature is that in UP, Bihar, MP, Tamil Nadu, and one or two other states, the DPEP (District Primary Education Programme) has a direct link to the family planning programme. That is its agenda and it has been incorporated in the programme. This is phenomenal because it has not been part of district primary education for men. But why not? Reproduction cannot take place with one sex alone? It is the gender component of the DPEP, targeted at women. This is not an issue for women but for society as a whole. So women who may otherwise be eligible for panchayat elections suddenly find they are not because they have three children.
    We see a direct link here between globalization, education and gender. In other areas, there may not be a direct link but the subtle one is more pervasive. How do we unravel this to work more effectively for social change?
Q. What is the image of women in India, particularly in South Asia, in relation to the West? Are they better or worse situated? What is the role of globalization in social change?
Q. There is a hue and cry among Third World feminists that globalization is not evenly felt. Do you have any specific experience of being twice or thrice marginalized in this com-petition? Regarding the production of knowledge relating to gender, given the resistance in the Third World, perhaps this is not the knowledge that we need. How is this reflected in the world of feminist publishing?

Q. G.M. Shah: Madam, women as such are not a homogenous category. If we take the theory of hierarchy of needs, we can divide women into four distinct categories. Starting from the bottom are the women who need caloric power, the women below the poverty line. Then there is another category of women who need both caloric power and also knowledge power. Then there is another, third category, of women who need economic power—employment—who have attained the knowledge but are not employed. And then in the last category we have women who need political power. Taking this generalization into con-sideration, and also the composition of society in the Third World, which we categorize as impervious societies because these are caste-ridden and class-ridden and feudal societies, the benefits of the State do not normally percolate to the bottom strata because there are these mechanisms to trap all the benefits for the upper layers.
We need to fuse a top-down with a bottom-up approach. Women who need calories and knowledge cannot be con-scientized through this written material. It is only through the voluntary and the local languages, if at all, that we have the mechanisms through which we can mobilize this sector. Look at the relationship of women with respect to one particular programme, that is, the Anganwadi programme. It was started by the government to feed those who live below the poverty line, their children. In order to give more service to women we should give more emphasis upon the needs of the downtrodden, which is about 80 per cent of the women, rather than just talking about the higher level. This is my simple point.

Q. I am Sunanda Sen. I think the speaker started from this basic issue that feminist writings were primarily geared to social change and that is how at some local level some small publishers came up. Then there comes a question of mainstreaming versus marginalization and you have given an account how the small publishers have been marginalized because it has turned out to be profitable. Now my first question is do you see a shifting of the agenda? What kind of writings are coming out from the mainstream publishers as contrasted to the independent publishing houses like yours?
Now the second issue of this mainstream versus margina-lization comes at the level of academic versus women studies. I feel that as far as the social activism part is concerned, probably the academic bodies, academic departments are not well equipped for this. At the same time, I don’t see why education or sociology or economics cannot have one compulsory paper, which is on distribution in the case of economics, which is on social change in the case of sociology, or disparity in the case of education, etc. So this can come as a suggestion from the women’s education department. There is also the issue of mainstream vs. marginalization and language. I am from Calcutta originally, and I have seen Ananda Publications, for example, is bringing out books like that of Taslima Nasreen, and so on. Desh publications also produce women’s work. So there is space here in the regional language press.

Q. We do have a paper called ‘Women and Society’ in our Department of Sociology, M.A. This paper is optional in our department and the very practical thing that has happened is that students who opt for this paper do so only when they did not find any other option available. But even after having this paper there is not so much reading material available for it. What do you think?

Q. Ameena Saeed: I am from California. I don’t have a question. I just have some observations that I would like to share with you about America. I would like to make some points about gender and salaries/wages in America. There is a pattern. The Bush administration conducted a study for almost three years and it found that there is very much a glass ceiling. It means there is a glass ceiling through which you can see the top but you cannot reach it and this ceiling is differently situated for different people at different levels. People at the top are almost all white males and below are Southern European white males and below that are Asian males. Below that are black males and below that are white women and below that are black women. Black women are at the bottom of the wage structure across the board, whether it is the public sector or the private sector. It is amazing how they do it, even at the government level because of ‘the power of negotiation’ which the white man has over the black woman and that the white woman does not have.
For example, the three years study in private and public enterprises came up with the result that not only was there a glass ceiling, but that we perhaps have cement walls also. It might interest you to know that a white male with a degree in B.A. earns more than a black woman with a Ph.D. The second point is that elite women have less power as compared to Asia where elite women have more power like Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Haseena Sheikh, etc. So in our country, power is generally neutral. Gender does not at the top play a big role. But at the bottom level and at the lower middle class, lower class level, there is a very distinct diversification via gender and the women here in this part of the world are more marginalized than the women in America.

Ritu Menon
I will just take the most direct questions, rather than all the comments. The names of the three conglomerates which control the major part of world English language publishing are a German company called Bertelsmann—which, by the way, owns a great deal of North American publishing—Time-Warner which is American, and Longman-Pearson which is Canadian. This is in the English language. Let me say, on this subject, because we are all educationists here, we know the importance of academic journals in publishing and in publishing new research. Their importance in education and in educational publishing is acknowledged worldwide. Journal publishing in English language is concentrated in two or three hands whether it is science, technology, medicine, philosophy, the arts or the social sciences. The entire genre of academic journals publishing is also controlled by two to three publishing houses in the world, which in turn are owned by conglomerates.
But the interesting part is that they own the copyright on everything you write as well. This is a very major question, the question of ownership, of intellectual property.  What I am saying is that, without our knowing it, intellectual property as a right has already been appropriated by these companies, without half the world being aware of it.  In other words, if you or I publish in any of the reputable academic journals abroad, we must relinquish copyright on that material. They own it but they pay you nothing for it.  The whole notion of property, which is to be able to exchange it for a consideration just as you exchange labour for consideration, does not operate here.  So you are not selling it, you have gifted it.  You have gifted over intellectual labour from which profit is made by those who now own it.  So it is not just intellectual property, it is intellectual labour, and this is why I say it is very important for us to know how the globalization of the production and control and dissemination of knowledge works in the world.  We don’t know it because most of us are only too happy when we are published by these companies, without realizing what the dynamics is.  Not just the economic dynamics, but the dynamics in the whole production of know-ledge and thus intellectual labour. I think we should be more aware of it even if we can’t do very much about it.
Now this business of local language and local issues, there is no gainsaying this though there may be a difference of opinion, but I am speaking about the production of academic knowledge. Ananda and Desh do not publish academic work. That is where the question of English as a world language is relevant. It goes without saying that local languages and local issues are important, there is no way in which English can appropriate that, nor should it, but having said that I am answering this gentleman who says that the only way you can conscientize and mobilize is by using a local language.
Well, I think not; because if it was only a question of language, then mobilizing would be a very easy thing. Especially for women, it is not the way to mobilize them. With women, as has been proved again and again by any number of NGOs, any number of activists working on the ground, there are a myriad strategies for mobilizing. Let me give you the example of SEWA, Ahmeda-bad, which now has a membership of more than 85,000 women who are the poorest of the poor. I am repeating this because the general impression is that upper middle class, especially privileged women, are speaking for the huge mass of, under-privileged and dispossessed.  I take the example of SEWA because the great majority of its women members are illiterate.  That does not mean that they don’t have knowledge. This is the second misconception.  Being literate doesn’t make you the custodian of knowledge just as being illiterate doesn’t mean that you have no knowledge. So mobilizing does not necessarily depend on how much literacy or knowledge you have. The women of SEWA in Ahmedabad are a very interesting example because 50 per cent are Muslim and 50 per cent Hindu, roughly. They have singing sessions in the evening because they were not allowed to leave their families, not allowed to go outside their houses for anything else and so Bhajan Mandalis or singing groups were organized and that was how they were mobilized.
I would also not hierarchise your power categories in this way.  There is absolutely no reason why caloric power, knowledge power, economic power and social power cannot be simul-taneous, nor do they follow one after the other. Yes, of course, if a woman has poor health it is difficult for her to do anything else or have other forms of empowerment. But it is not necessary that she first have caloric power before she can avail herself of all the others. Nor has it been known to happen only in that way.
Regarding the role of globalization and its impact on the status of women in South Asia and the West. It is not possible to speak generally about the West, South Asia, women, and so on. There are huge sections of the marginal and disadvantaged in the West made up of the very poor, the blacks, the Hispanics, the South Asians, the Turks, the Algerians, the Moroccans, and so on and poor white women as well. So there is no such thing as ‘the woman in the West’ or ‘the woman in South Asia’. What has been the impact of globalization on their representation? The honest answer is that we don’t know yet. What we are seeing as a result of some changes in the media is not necessarily the image of women in South Asia but another image of women altogether and that is what we have to look at.
Now the question about the effect of globalization on feminist publishing—has it been evenly felt over the world?  No, it hasn’t. I would say we are in a better position here than in the West largely because publishing is a marginal activity here, and it is not owned by conglomerates.  t is still family owned. There are about 1,000 active publishers in India at the moment and they are mostly family owned businesses, or they are professionally run if they are subsidiaries of Western publishing houses. The change that has taken place, which is extremely important, is in the ownership pattern because, with liberalization, foreign ownership is back. Every single subsidiary of every foreign publishing house now is allowed more than 50 per cent equity, which means that they can have ownership. Till five years ago they could not own more than 49 per cent of equity, in other words, ownership was Indian. Now it isn’t. Once you have foreign equity and that foreign equity is allowed to exceed 50 per cent, ownership is theirs.
We don’t have time now, otherwise I could tell you how this has impacted the publishing decisions of the largest houses here. Speaking for feminist publishing, the impact on us has been the total decline of feminist publishing in the whole world. This is the community with which we work and it is a very important community. Once that community disappears then our interaction is solely with the commercial market. There is no longer a political engagement or a shared commitment to a political cause, which was social change, so there has been a very major change in this complete loss of community with a shared social and political concern.

Chairperson’s Remarks
It has been a very nice, interesting discussion and I am really happy to have participated. I have never thought of publishing and feminism. Mostly we social workers work with downtrodden people, with Adivasis, with child labourers, etc. So we have our own perception of women’s problems. People at that strata also have a lot of problems. But what I would like to say is just as at one time ten years ago there was a concern for feminist writing and publication houses that was part of the fashion then and that has now come down because of the pressure of the market, maybe later on it may emerge again as a strong movement. That is all I wanted to add.

Thank you very much.