It is amazing how ever so often labels get bandied about in conversation. Yet again, an article that uses "Women Writers" freely.
For a start, there's the category itself. "Woman writer!" exclaims Hariharan. "It's not a terribly useful label if it just becomes lazy, a way to ghettoise." Moggach says: "I don't really like separating women from men novelists. Most female novelists of any calibre are not writing novels that remotely suggest that they're written by women." Kapoor hotly counters this view: "Of course women's writing is different from men's," says the best-selling author of Difficult Daughters, and professor of English at Delhi University. "It's bound to be. Our experiences are different." Malavika Sangghvi, journalist and author, springs to her defence. "The God of Small Things, Brick Lane and On Beauty couldn't have been written by a man, just as Midnight's Children couldn't have been penned by a woman," she says. "Women have a 'heart' rather than a 'head' approach, a decidedly female sensitivity."
And I disagree with the generalization that women have a heart rather than a head approach. I think writers, as a larger category, are a great combination of seeing the heart through the head and tailoring their words to express their observations accordingly. So it does not seem fair to say a certain book could not have been written by a woman or a man. If an author (male or female) has written a certain book in a certain way, it is likely that no one can write any other book quite like it. There may be good imitations or good tributes but those will be coloured by its own author's touch.
