Urvashi Butalia and the journey of a small press

Zubaan is an independent publishing house, with a strong academic and general list. It was set up in 2003 as an imprint of India’s first feminist publishing house Kali for Women, and continues to publish books on, for and by women in South Asia. 

Butalia began by tracing her journey from the 80s, reminiscing how print technology at the time was essentially transitioning from letterpress printing, hot metal and cold metal typesetting, and how the publishing house has covered an entire arc from phototypesetting to offset printing and computers, a voyage through technologies. 

“My journey began with a printing press. I instantly fell in love with the idea of something coming alive under the press, and that something being something for the brain,” she said. 

She spoke of what she calls the most important book of her press, called Shareer ki Jankaari, which means Knowledge of the Body. The story of the book is a touching one. A group of village women, part of the women’s development programme of Rajasthani women in the 1980s conducted health workshops and created the book. The book was about menstruation, sex and bodily autonomy. When the women came to Zubaan, Butalia and her team were thrilled, especially because it was village women who had created it.  

The women had non-negotiable conditions; firstly that the book could never be sold to a village woman at a profit, and secondly the names of all 75 authors had to be printed on the cover. The publishing house agreed and had the opportunity to hear all the wonderful lore about how the book came to be created. 

The women stated that initially, the book had included diagrams of the naked man and the naked woman, side by side. However, when they attempted to test it on other villagers, they were scoffed at, stating that ordinarily, one would never see a naked person in the village. The authors then came up with the ingenious solution of having a woman completely covered from head to toe, but when you lifted little flaps up, you could see her entirety, her breasts, and when you put the flap down, she was still modest.

“The book, Shareer ki Jaankaari, is what prompted Zubaan to start thinking about the margins — marginalised regions, languages, and religions and we start to build our books around those things,” said Butalia. “We found ourselves looking at books by Dalit writers and we started to publish them slowly.”

Today Zubaan boasts of a collection written by Kashmiri women, Dalits, Muslims and those from the North-East. Another prominent book is Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? about the mass rape in Kashmir in 1991. 

“We try to live our feminism,” said Butalia. “When we put up job announcements, we often do it for those of reserved castes/ spaces. It’s important for us not to be people of privilege.” Zubaan is now a workforce sourced from all over India, a matter of which the team is proud.

The future of Zubaan however, is ambiguous. The organisation is a founder-led one and Butalia herself is 75 years old. That the organisation lacks funds provides no ray of brightness either. The options seem stark: selling the company or shutting down. 

Zubaan’s dream, however, is to digitise everything; create an online library of all the books that they have published and then offer that to libraries across the world, to preserve their legacy.

As Butalia said, “It’s all about the importance of hearing voices that we have ceased to hear.” After all, there are so many Zubaans that continue to be unheard.