When Bidisha Mahanta received her first Zubaan book, it was not from a fellow activist or a mentor in the women’s movement. It was from an American friend who had come to India for research. The book was an English translation of an Assamese novel, The Bronze Sword of Thengphakhri Tehsildar by Indira Rao Sanguswamy, about a Boro woman’s resistance during colonial India. “You grow up not reading about yourself enough,” Bidisha recalled. “You are not taught about yourself in your history books, in your social studies books.” That moment, she says, felt like “a different world had opened up.” It was also her first introduction to Zubaan.
Today, Bidisha Mahanta is the Executive Director of Zubaan Trust, the NGO arm of one of India’s foremost feminist publishing houses, Zubaan Publishers. Working at the intersection of gender, knowledge, and community for nearly nine years, Bidisha has led Zubaan’s expansion into research, archiving, translation and grassroots documentation. Her work rests on a single conviction: that stories are not passive things. They are, in themselves, a form of resistance.
Growing Up in a Conflict Zone
Bidisha was born and raised in Guwahati, Assam. “In the Northeast, we don’t wake up and think we are in a conflict zone,” she said, speaking to The Logical Indian. “When we talk on our morning calls, one of my colleagues will say: I had to go get vegetables, but the market was closed. There was some firing.” The conflict is background noise. Everything else, weddings, exams, music, art, happens against it.
Assam is often cited as more gender-equal than many other Indian states, without the dowry demands seen elsewhere or the high rates of bride burning recorded in the 1970s and 80s. Bidisha is careful about that framing. “You are told that you have it better,” she said. “But as a person, you know that you don’t.” The bias and discrimination is more insidious because it is couched in a language of “care and concern” even when they are fundamentally structural. And there is only so much that can protect one from gendered violence both within and beyond the domestic space.
The sharper realization came when she moved to Delhi to study. On Independence Day, friends wanted to go to India Gate. Her parents called from Guwahati to say she could not. Back home, the 15th of August was a bandh day, often marked by violence. “You realize that you did not grow up in equal circumstances,” she said. “You realize your parents put everything together to send you out because they wanted you to have a better shot at life.”
The Pull Towards Stories
Before Zubaan, Bidisha worked in the human rights space through research and documentation, including with an organization that recorded the lives of widows of gun violence in the Northeast. That experience changed how she thought about data.
“We are not just statistics,” she said. “Our lives are not numbers. They have stories behind them.” She was drawn to qualitative research because she believed a single testimony was enough to establish that a problem existed. “Tens of thousands of women don’t have to face domestic violence to be told that it is a structural issue. Even if one dies, that is an issue.”
This thinking connected to something older. Her grandmother was the keeper of herbal remedies and oral traditions, knowledge passed through telling rather than writing, and routinely dismissed even in a household where formal medicine was central. Formal education, she noted, never taught her about the neo-Vaishnavite movement or women’s roles in shaping her own cultural history. That knowledge arrived, if at all, through grandparents. “So how do we bring these worlds together?” she asked.
The Zubaan book answered that question. A story about a Bodo woman, from a community even more marginalized than Bidisha’s own, had crossed centuries to find her. “This woman has travelled through hundreds of years to talk to me and others like me” she said, “and the only way she could do that is through stories.”
Zubaan and Its Roots
Zubaan traces its origins to Kali for Women, founded in 1984 during one of the most active periods of India’s women’s movement, an era of widespread organizing against dowry, bride burning, and domestic violence. Kali’s co-founder, Urvashi Butalia, came from publishing and had seen how little space existed for women’s voices in that world. In 2003, Kali split and Urvashi founded Zubaan as a separate entity. Bidisha leads its not-for-profit arm.
In conversation with The Logical Indian, Bidisha described how Zubaan’s scope has expanded over the decades. It no longer publishes only women. “Our publishing arm brings out books by queer people, trans, non-binary persons,” she said. The organization now pays particular attention to writers from marginalized castes and ethnicities, thinking carefully about what it owes these stories and how to publish them responsibly. As Urvashi is known to joke, the publishing division has yet to turn a profit since it was formally established as a business in 2015.”It’s not as though people are lining up to read feminist literature,” Bidisha said. “But it is where your heart is, and you have someone like Urvashi do this for forty years.”
Preserving What Others Let Disappear
In 2005, Zubaan launched Poster Women, a project to locate and preserve visual materials from the women’s movement of the 1970s and 80s. What they found was that most of it had already disappeared.
“A feminist poster is like Schrodinger’s cat,” Bidisha said. “Is it there? Is it not there? Who knows truly?” The reference is to the thought experiment in which a cat in a sealed box is simultaneously alive and dead until someone opens it to check. Bidisha uses it to describe how a feminist poster exists in a state of uncertain survival: present until proven missing, and often missing before anyone thinks to look. Working with around 160 groups, Zubaan collected and scanned approximately 1,200 posters. That archive is now among the only surviving visual records of a significant stretch of Indian feminist history.
The same pattern of erasure shaped the research Zubaan conducted after the 2012 Jyoti Singh Pandey case, a study on sexual violence and impunity across five countries: India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Fifty-five young researchers participated and eight books emerged. The findings were, in part, a documentation of institutional failure. Medical textbooks had not been updated in several decades.
The two-finger test, ruled inadmissible by the Supreme Court, was still being used in government hospitals because awareness of the judgment had simply not reached the ground. Bidisha cited an interview with Suzette Jordan, conducted before her death, about how even a woman with education and social standing was dehumanized when she tried to report sexual assault. “This is someone with education and power,” Bidisha said. “We can only imagine the other kinds of marginalization that exist.”
The research went out as theatre performances in medical schools, law schools, and colleges across India and Nepal. A piece rooted in experiences from Nagaland found resonance in Punjab. They also created what Bidisha described as “the alphabet of violence and resistance,” using visual art and an A to Z format to make the findings accessible. “F is for family,” she said, “how family can also be a site of violence.”
No Space for Work
One of Zubaan’s most consequential projects began with what seemed like a striking contradiction. In 2016 and 2017, government data showed women’s workforce participation in India at around 17 percent, the lowest in South Asia. “Have you ever seen a woman not working?” Bidisha asked. Everyone already knows the answer. So, what was wrong with how work was being counted?
The answer was structural invisibility. Agricultural laborers whose names were not on land documents were not counted as laborers. Domestic work was unpaid and absent from data. Women on construction sites who made tea, cleaned, and were sometimes subjected to sexual coercion saw none of that being recognized as work or as workplace violence.
Zubaan responded with the No Space for Work project, collaborating with women’s unions and collectives so that workers could document their own working lives. At first, many did not know what there was to say. “I wake up, I do my housework, then I go to work, then I come back,” was a typical early response. But when asked to describe their days in full, the material expanded dramatically. One finding concerned phones: many women did not own theirs independently. Husbands or sons took the phones, permitting only calls or messages. “The inability to access technology in a household that claims to be technology-friendly is also a form of violence,” Bidisha said.
The project also challenged a core assumption of academic research. “The notion of objective research is challenged by feminist research,” she said. An outside researcher is considered objective precisely because they have no connection to a community, which also means they may not care how that community is represented. A close friend of Bidisha’s, conducting visual documentation for her PhD in the UK, discovered photographs of her own indigenous community on display in a London museum. “How do I bring you home?” she wrote in a paper about it. When the same people write about themselves, Bidisha said, “it has an entirely different quality. You are talking about your own people. There is care in it.”
The findings were shared back in formats communities could actually use. A ten-page graphic narrative replaced the 200-page book. Short audio stories, seven minutes each, were produced in the style of old radio programmes. “An ASHA worker from Assam can learn from an ASHA worker from Karnataka when it comes to movement building,” Bidisha said. “She may not read a 200-page book. But she might listen to a six-minute story.”
The Long Arc
The question of impact is, Bidisha said, her least favorite. But she has a clear answer. “Impact is about the long arc,” she said. “It is a long arc, and it cannot be easily measured.” She pointed to the Vishakha petition of 1992, in which Urvashi Butalia, as part of Kali, was a petitioner, and traced the line to the shifts in public conversation about sexual violence after 2012. That shift happened, she argued, because documentation existed, because books existed. Without them, “the world would look very bleak, because I would not be able to see how much has changed.”
She pushed back firmly on the idea that publishing and research are passive activism. “I would not call it passive. It actively contributes to the movement.” What it gives, she said, is imagination. It establishes that other ways of living are possible, that matrilineal communities exist, that greater equality is not abstract but documented. “Without books, there would be no imagination left,” she said. “There would be no feminist imaginaries of what is possible.”
Zubaan is currently in transition. Urvashi Butalia is stepping back and a younger team is taking over. The question Bidisha sits with is what the work leaves behind. “What else can you leave behind that is tangible?” she asked. “Most of my memories are the stories my grandmother told, and they will remain with me. If I can document her knowledge, the things she passed on, so that it does not disappear into invisibilized history, that is all you can leave behind.”
The Northeast young researchers’ grant, running for nearly nine years, has produced more than 100 essays on subjects ranging from herbal knowledge passed through grandmothers to music cultures being displaced by mainstream sounds to how communities aged through the pandemic. These are not essays about conflict. They are essays about living, with conflict as a background presence. “My hope is that it gives them some respite from the onslaught of the everyday,” she said of future readers, “and some hope that others have been here before them.”
If Zubaan were to fail someday? Urvashi’s answer was simple: it’s okay. “We did a good job. We had a good run.” Bidisha carries that permission. “I would want to give that space to someone too,” she said. “Zubaan would give you that space: the permission to fail, to pick yourself up, and to keep going. As long as the work gets done. As long as the stories get told.”
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
At The Logical Indian, we believe that change is built as much in archives and libraries as it is on streets and in courtrooms. Bidisha Mahanta’s work at Zubaan is a reminder that the act of recording a life, a struggle, or a community’s knowledge is itself an act of purpose. In a media landscape that measures impact in clicks and cycles, her insistence on the long arc feels not just necessary but urgent.
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