The book ‘If Not Now, When? Disquieting Feminist Questions clearly belongs to the last category. Edited by Astrid Lobo Gajiwala, Kochurani Abraham and Prashant Olalekar SJ the anthology raises serious questions, it discomforts, it makes demands. The title says it all: disquieting feminist questions! If taken seriously, it challenges the reader to get out of one’s complacency, comfort zone! It is a must-read and a ‘must-act-upon-now’ book!
The book is divided into three sections, all inter-related :1. Voices from the Margins 2. The Personal is Political and 3. Patriarchy, Power and the Catholic Church. Twenty-five essays, interviews and insightful articles fill the almost three-hundred pages tome. The contributors belong to the entire spectrum of society: different voices but one in heart, soul and mind! In fact, all the articles merit independent reviews. The style throughout is racy, without being superficial, raising pertinent questions and simultaneously providing possible answers, the contents are provocative yet dynamically positive. For a discerning reader, it does not make for comfortable reading – it is not meant to do so- it is meant to ‘disquiet’ and it does so with brutal questions enveloped in sensitivity and finesse! Given the way clericalism and patriarchy are steeped in church and country, there will certainly some (or many?) who will not take kindly to the book. This is perhaps on expected lines! It will only go to prove the points made by the authors!
In her ‘Editorial’, Astrid Lobo Gajiwala gives the DNA of the book, “this collection of essays is a chorus of feminist voices who speak truth to power, reclaim suppressed spiritualties, and dare to dream and to dissent. It brings to the centre, voices from the margins, in the form of conversations (some translated from other languages) and stories of unlettered and unknown women who have paid a heavy price for refusing to be “silent spectators”….

-Fr Cedric Prakash SJ