Urvashi Butalia is an Indian feminist and historian. She is the Director and Co-founder of Kali for Women, India's first feminist publishing house.
Butalia was born in Ambala India in 1952. She was the third of four children of Joginder Singh Butalia and Subadhra Butalia. She earned a B.A. in literature from Miranda House, Delhi University in 1971, a Masters in literature from Delhi University in 1973, and a Masters in South Asian Studies from the University of London in 1977.
She worked as an editor for Zed Publishing and later went on to set up her own publishing house. Her writing has appeared in several newspapers including The Guardian, The Statesman, The Times of India and several magazines including Outlook, the New Internationalist and India Today. Butalia is a consultant for Oxfam India and she holds the position of Reader at the College of Vocational Studies at the University of Delhi. Her main areas of research are partition and oral histories. She has also written on gender, communalism, fundamentalism and media. She is also a well-known columnist for a B2B publication dealing with the print and publishing industry - Indian Printer and Publisher. Recently, she was also conferred a Padmashree by for her contribution to the nation.
Urvashi Butalia started Zubaan, a renowned publishing house in 2003. Zubaan is an imprint of Kali for Women.
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Kali for Women, India's first women's publishing house, is concerned primarily with publishing Third World studies on women. Kali was set up in 1984 as a trust to increase the body of knowledge on women in the Third World, to give voice to such knowledge as already exists, and to provide a forum for women writers, creative and academics.
The Other Side of Silence has been one of the most influential books in South Asian studies of the past decade. The book is the product of more than seventy interviews Butalia conducted with survivors of the Partition, and emphasises particularly the role of violence against women in the collective experience of the tragedy.
Butalia's book is widely taught in classes in anthropology, South Asian literature, and Women's Studies classes. The work is based on the fact that the Partition occurred in the shadow of the independence of Pakistan and India in 1947, and resulted in the largest mass-migration in human history. Twelve million people relocated in the course of a few months, and in the violence that accompanied the dislocation of so many, about 1 million people were killed. Butalia points out that the Partition is, like the holocaust, still very much a "living history", in the sense that many survivors are still around and can be interviewed. In contrast to the many projects that have undertaken the documentation of oral histories of the Holocaust, however, no comparable initiative has been undertaken in India.