‘Girls Who Said Nothing and Everything’: Meera Vijayann’s affecting snapshot of Indian girlhood
· Scroll
In June 2014, journalist Meera Vijayann gave a talk at the TEDx Houses of Parliament about her experience of sexual assault as a girl in India. By doing so, she hoped to get a difficult but essential discourse started, showing other women that it was okay to speak up; in fact, it was essential that they break the silence around harassment that was passed down, along with the trauma through generations. This was also her plea, asking “communities to participate in their systems through citizen journalism.”
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The video went viral, with over 1.1 million views. It was a fitting culmination of years of her speaking out. In the epilogue of Vijayann’s recently released debut memoir-in-essays collection, Girls Who Said Nothing and Everything, she writes about how, between 2012 and 2015, she spent three years alone in Bangalore without her parents or her younger sisters. The family had emigrated to Canada, but as a non-dependent, unmarried applicant, her visa was rejected. These years would be “instrumental in shaping [her] as a young woman.”
“I became outspoken about what it meant to face gender-based discrimination and sexual assault. I attended protests, I recorded video blogs that appeared on CNN-IBN and reported stories for the Guardian, Forbes, and the Deccan Herald.”
Four years later, she was...