When we say that the woman who works at home and the outside is caught between the two, we are offering a rather simplistic and oppositional relationship of the home with the outside. The real matter of gender is far more complex and nuanced; it is fluid. Shorirtari bhitore poran naamer ki jeno ke thake, taari daake ami ghar bahir kori. There is a thing called life which lives within my body; it is what calls me out, it is what draws me in. It is this ghar-baahir kora, the in-betweenness, the simultaneity of wishing to stay and wanting to leave that I have experienced all through my life, that I want to talk about. I envisage this session to be conversational, more in the spirit of sharing our experiences, and learning from one another.

The sculptor Meera Mukherji used to apparently say: don't call me a 'woman' artist, just call me an artist. What was it that the artist was trying not to be? Perhaps she did not want to be put into a box and then be either patronised or rejected because of her gender? She did not want to 'come first among the girls' I suppose. But then, wasn't Meera Mukherji's life and art also marked by her experiences as a woman? Such questions resonate with me as I am sure that they will do with many of us who will share our stories at this session. (It is not as though am ignoring the other, further marginalised genders; it is just that they did not come into this particular story but they can and should come into our discussion.)

As a singer and writer who has worked in the field for decades, travelling, recording and archiving songs and stories from the road, Moushumi Bhowmik will talk about how she slowly began to realise the importance of voices besides her own, and how she also realised that listening is not a given, but something we arrive at, through practice and empathy. It is the lessons in listening that she has been taking from the road that she will talk about in this colloquium.