A WAY WITH WORDS
While studying narrative theory at the Ohio State University in USA in 2010, author Priyanka Mookerjee, who was 19 then, embarked on the journey of writing a book—a process she didn’t know would take seven long years. She was turned down by a lot of publishers before being accepted by Penguin Random House and describes the time as “years of getting all manner of rejections before luck and circumstances landed it on my commissioning editor’s desk.” She chose to accept the rejections in a positive spirit.
Mookerjee’s protagonist, Tara, in Hedon, her debut novel, addresses feminism in a somewhat skewed way. “Because she’s a teenager and prone to navel-gazing, her feminism comes out less as a stated belief and more as something you can see the story lean towards—her unhealthy relationship with her own looks and her frustration with the social pressure to get married—this points towards someone dissatisfied with the status quo, which is the first step towards questioning it,” says the author.
What about her beliefs in person? What does feminism mean to her? “To me, it is not just a movement but a way of understanding the world we live in versus the world we should live in. Once you start deconstructing the ways social, political and economic structures sideline women, you can’t help but feel rankled even by the small, seemingly insignificant details. In my opinion a better equilibrium between the sexes is our right, not a privilege,” she says.