Writings Between and Beyond the Silences

When I was invited to review Beneath Magnolia Skies: Writings from Sikkim and Darjeeling Hills, edited by Mona Chettri and Prava Rai, my first instinct was to approach it as a research scholar, expecting to offer a conventional academic critique. Yet as I moved through its pages, that framework began to feel insufficient. The collection spoke to me in ways that extended far beyond my academic or professional role. It resonated with me as a reader of literary fiction, as a woman, as a daughter-in-law, a wife and a mother, as a migrant and as someone who calls Darjeeling home. Beneath Magnolia Skies is, in many respects, a rare gem: unfiltered, raw, painful, and richly evocative. It offers myriad possibilities for anyone seeking to understand what it means to be a woman in Sikkim and the Darjeeling hills, and beyond. The book presents a powerful collection that foregrounds women’s perspectives on life in the Himalaya without reducing the scope of what that may mean. In their introduction, the editors pose a deceptively simple question: as the world changes, is it also changing for women in the Himalaya and what might such change mean for traditions, patriarchal structures, inequality and violence, as well as women’s agency and self-definition? What struck me first was the sheer number of chapters and contributors, bringing together 42 women writers. It signalled the timeliness of the volume and filled me with a sense of pride-women in these hills want to speak, they want to create, to express, and to share. And they do so with a quality that kept me captivated across all 303 pages. A quick glance shows that there are academic essays-often anchored in biographical and narrative interviews focussing on the lives and viewpoints of the women involved in the fieldwork-alongside works of prose fiction, reflective autobiographical essays, and poetry. Some contributions include photographs or artworks. Such an openness to different writing styles, but also to alternative ways of knowledge production within one book is rare and enriching. Additionally, the editors did not stifle the expression by favouring English over local languages. While the book is published in English, several contributions were submitted in Nepali and then translated by other contributors and the editors, giving importance to the role of translation in knowledge-making as well as establishing the anthology as a space of collaboration and solidarity among women.

These editorial decisions are not merely technical; they are a statement in itself. They honour the diversity of being, self-expression, and knowledge creation. This is empowering and much needed in the context of Sikkim and the Darjeeling hills. While this region is complex and diverse, shaped by histories of shifting borders, allegiances, and people, these political and ethno-cultural entanglements coexist with pressures to flatten cultural, historical, and ancestral narratives or impose uniformity. Against this backdrop, the anthology’s editorial ethos feels like its credo: to let women speak for themselves, unapologetically and without censorship. 

What affected me most were the silences written within or between the lines. These silences made me angry, sad, and unexpectedly vulnerable, because they resonated with some of the experiences in my own everyday life. I realised that writing through these silences is how women’s stories are often told, and this anthology does so with remarkable honesty. I read the contributions through this lens, through how women are silenced, how they silence themselves, and how they may silence others. I am acutely aware, therefore, that the lines and passages I draw from the writings and the way I weave them back together-reflect the contours of my own interpretive lens. They do not, and cannot, capture the full range of possibilities the authors may have intended, nor do they encompass all the readings these pieces invite.

Silence takes on many forms. It originates in social sanction and norms, it is imposed by restrictions, internalised restraint or behaviour. The silent acceptance of traditions that treat women as property to be owned, used, discarded, and repurposed by men threads through the narratives, as does the silent existence of caste-based violence, shown through the innocent question of children in Hitaishi Gautam’s “Kanchi” (90): “Hajurama le kina hamro matai khutta na dhognu bhako tika lagayera?” (“Why did grandmother not touch only our feet after applying the tika?”). The contributions call to mind my own weary efforts to keep such deeply entrenched injustices from seeping into the fabric of my own home life.

Shockingly (or maybe not?) many contributions capture the public silence surrounding male sexual violence-a silence that normalises such violence, often fuelled by alcohol, leaving women vulnerable and dependent, without a way to escape unless in silence or death. The normalisation of male violence is deeply entangled with notions of female purity and impurity that erupt in internalised shame and victim blaming. Here, I am reminded of the magnolia on the cover. As in the Himalaya the plant is associated with dignity and purity, it becomes an apt symbol for the contradictory pressures placed on women’s bodies: revered as sites of purity, yet continually subjected to scrutiny and the weight and violence of the male gaze. While reading about the mothers and daughters in this anthology, as a mother myself, I carry an undercurrent of icy fear, knowing that I as well might not always be able to protect my own daughter.

Aspirations and the pursuit of dreams thread through many of the pieces, rooted in hope much like the magnolia blossom that announces spring and the promise of new beginnings. However, time and again, the writings show how control over the female body and its silenced and normalised enforcement-regulates women’s options shaping their dreams and diminishing their imaginary horizons. Avinam Manger’s questions to Baari, a migrant women worker, capture this poignantly: “[…] do you have enough choices? Have you had enough opportunities to make proper use of them? (71) […] Baari, has your life now stretched into your dreams, too? Have these nightly visions killed your aspirations?” (73). Control over the female body regulates women’s movements, pace, and self-conception rendering the world, or at least the cities, “a graveyard for those dreams”. The need to control the female body is deeply rooted in the male gaze that reduces women to objects of desire. Radha Panday challenges this gaze by urging readers to look beyond male lust and instead recognise in women the possibilities of love, nature, and creation. Her call evokes female strength and grace, qualities that echo throughout many of the narratives in Beneath Magnolia Skies.

Resilience can be grounded in strength, as Munga Rai’s Woman of Kali Yuga states “I am the epitome of power of self, my soul’s resilience is my strength and belief, […] my resilience is my protector, I am one, because I am a twenty-first-century Woman.” (233). It can emphasise endurance and adaptation, making a life worth living or flourishing despite the most challenging experiences. But yet again silence also reveals resilience’s deceptive darker side. Women are expected to carry dukkha, pain and sorrow, with grace and dignity, in the local context especially within roles of the buhari (the dutiful daughter-in-law) or the obedient daughter, sometimes also stumbling entangled in their own dreams. These local variations add another facet to a global glorification of female resilience, of women as the silent bearers of pain. 

Silence also emerges through self-regulation, the conscious or unconscious concealment of one’s authentic self or one’s desire to meet expectations of others   This is felt most acutely by women who do not fit into the heteronormative gender roles or those who do not belong to the majority community of “Nepalese”. In this context, I become aware of my difference-perhaps my privilege. Though my upbringing was not free of gender bias, I was not taught to regulate my body, desires, or aspirations to the extent expected of many women in these hills. Because of this, I move differently through these social expectations-perhaps because they weigh less on me-my otherness and independence offer a form of protection. This awareness deepens my respect for women who pursue lives that do not conform to prescribed roles. Alyen Foning, for example, illustrates with great sensitivity what it means for a woman to shape her own trajectories, along with all the vulnerabilities and consequences such choices entail.

Silence also erases women’s knowledge, as if their importance was forgotten and their deep wisdom of creation and procreation meaningless. Women carry and embody knowledge of their ancestors, but it is often overlooked, perceived too small or too ordinary to be worth articulating, as indicated by women migrants from Nepal in Nangshel Sherpa and Shuvangi Khadka’s contribution. Mridu Thulung Rai bridges the silence surrounding her grandmother through conversations with photographs, while Amala Subba Chettri recovers the story of Mujingna Khiyangma, the first Limbu, counterwriting the loss of ancestrally transmitted knowledge. Similarly, Alyen Foning reminds that passing on ancestral wisdom requires responsibility, respect, and reverence. As a socio-cultural anthropologist, these contributions resonate with me, because they centre women’s knowledge, trace lines of female ancestry, and demonstrate how women today actively create and transmit knowledge in alternative ways-with reflexivity and care.

Amidst and through these silences, the anthology uncovers relationships among women, in all their complexities as poetically captured in Apsara Dahal’s poem “Mirabhai says “Listen Radha”. While these relationships can reproduce patriarchal norms and pass down the structural violence and suffering, stylised in the figure of the mother-in-law they also reveal support and care, whether with the wish to free the next generation of their restraints, with the solidarity of a mutual traditional Sangini songs, or in shared laughter behind shabby green curtains. Some contributions centre female relationships free from the immediate frame of patriarchy, relations of nurture, safety, and intergenerational care, even if intertwined and complicated, packaged in food, bottled preserves, and memories, or supported by an ancestral spirit. 

Beyond the pain and violence, beyond the silences that weave through these writings, I read Beneath Magnolia Skies as an invitation to readers to imagine and even begin to shape spaces of women’s solidarity and healing, both within and beyond Sikkim and the Darjeeling hills. It is an invitation worth accepting.