Herstory
About the book
Herstory is a new collection of poems by Neha Bansal, a civil servant, providing a fresh perspective on the lives of others.
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About the Book
Herstory is a new collection of poems by Neha Bansal, a civil servant, providing a fresh perspective on the lives of others.
Book details
- Format
- Paperback
- Publisher
- Sahitya Akademi
- Weight
- 100 grams
- ISBN-13
- 9789355483126
- Pages
- 77
- Reading time
- ~3 hrs
- Age
- 18+
- Country of origin
- India
- Dimensions
- 21 ร 22 cm
- Language
- English
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Herstory by Neha Bansal is a rare document: poetry written from inside the Indian bureaucracy, where witness and empathy meet the constraints of administrative language. Published by Sahitya Akademi, this collection refuses the distance of reportage, instead inhabiting the silences of women encountered in field postings โ rural women petitioning offices, colleagues navigating glass ceilings, survivors whose stories rarely surface in official records. Bansal's civil service career furnishes not just subject matter but a prosody of restraint: her poems hold tragedy without melodrama, dignity without romanticisation. The title itself โ Herstory โ signals an archival ambition, reclaiming narratives erased by patriarchal documentation. Each poem functions as counter-testimony, offering what desk files cannot: the emotional register of dispossession, resilience, and quiet rebellion. For readers drawn to poetry that bridges institutional observation and intimate human truth, Herstory offers a singular achievement in contemporary Indian verse.
What kind of reading experience does Herstory by Neha Bansal offer?
Herstory offers a reading experience of controlled emotional intensity, where each poem unfolds like a case file reconsidered with compassion. The pace is deliberate, the tone neither sentimental nor detached โ Bansal writes with the precision of someone trained to document facts but haunted by what facts leave out. Readers will feel the tension between bureaucratic observation and lyric empathy, as the poems inhabit voices of women whose stories official language flattens. It rewards close attention to quiet craft, the way restraint amplifies grief or defiance in a single image.
Who should read Herstory, and what background does it expect?
- Readers interested in feminist poetry that centres Indian women's lived realities beyond urban liberal discourse.
- Those curious about how civil service experience shapes literary voice โ bureaucracy as both subject and aesthetic constraint.
- Anyone drawn to socially engaged poetry that refuses easy outrage, preferring witness over polemic.
- Readers familiar with contemporary Indian English poetry will recognise Bansal's debt to plain-spoken intimacy, but no prior knowledge is required.
Why is Herstory culturally significant to Indian readers today?
Herstory arrives as India reckons with persistent gender violence and the bureaucratic machinery that often fails women petitioners. Bansal's dual identity โ poet and administrator โ makes visible the gap between policy and lived experience. The collection speaks to a generation demanding that women's histories be recorded with nuance, not statistics. At a time when women's testimonies in courtrooms, gram sabhas, and social media challenge official narratives, Bansal's poems perform a parallel act: documenting what survives beyond files, what the state sees but cannot speak.
What makes Neha Bansal's approach to women's stories distinctive?
Bansal writes from within the institutions she critiques, giving her work an insider's access and an insider's moral burden. Unlike activist poetry that addresses power from outside, Herstory inhabits the discomfort of being both witness and functionary. Her poems do not offer solutions or slogans; they linger in the silence after a petitioner leaves the office, the detail that haunts a case note. This double vision โ administrative and empathic โ produces a rare ethical texture, where restraint becomes a form of respect for subjects who rarely control how their stories are told.
What does Herstory leave with the reader after finishing it?
Herstory leaves readers with a heightened awareness of the stories hidden in plain sight โ the women who populate government offices, village surveys, news items, then vanish from collective memory. Emotionally, it instills a patient, dignified sorrow, free of melodrama. Intellectually, it challenges the reader to consider how language itself can be an act of archival justice. Culturally, it affirms that poetry can perform the work of testimony when official records fail, offering a counter-archive built from lyric attention rather than administrative efficiency.
