Those were exciting times. The Naxalite agitation was at its peak and the women’s movement was just taking off. In the midst of it all, Urvashi Butalia was studying English literature ? and dreaming of books.

Some three decades later, Butalia ? who now runs Zubaan, a publishing house she founded in 2003 ? still remains a lover of words. “I love publishing,” says Butalia. “The whole process of printing and publishing gives me a high.”

Born in Ambala in Punjab, Butalia moved to Delhi in 1961. After completing school in Mater Dei Convent, she went to Miranda House to get herself a bachelors degree in English literature. “At that time, the university was a very exciting place,” Butalia recalls. “Amidst the political and feminist environment, we were involved in things like bettering hostel conditions for women and making the university a safer place,” she says.

The involvement, in a way, was Butalia’s initiation into gender equality and other related issues. And she went on to fuse ideology with profession. It was while working with a group called Samta after completing her MA that Butalia got a job as a ‘paster upper’ at Oxford University Press (OUP). That was when OUP was adapting textbooks used abroad for Indian schools, and Butalia’s job involved changing Western names to Indian ones, and pasting ‘Ram’ and ‘Sita’ over ‘John’ and ‘Mary’. “That was my glorious job!” she says. “I was earning Rs 700 per book.”

While she loved her job, Butalia realised it was keeping her away from gender-related activities. Having trained in production and promoted to assistant to the production manager by then, Butalia decided to quit her job at OUP. While she kept herself going by teaching a publishing course at the College of Vocational Studies and freelancing for publishers, Butalia became a part of a group called Stree Sangharsh, which dealt with issues like dowry and rape. Soon, she found herself on the editorial board of Manushi, which was introduced to deal with similar issues.

In the early Eighties, Butalia bagged the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to pursue a PhD programme. But midway on her journey to Hawaii ? where she was headed for her thesis ? Butalia changed her mind and stayed in England. “I realised that academics was not my calling,” she says.

During her two years in England, Butalia worked for a publishing house called Zed Books. Besides editorial experience, it also made her familiar with promotion and marketing, which were vital if she were to realise her dream of having a publishing house of her own.

“I had already decided on the name,” she says of Kali, the house she would go on to set up in 1984. “My soon-to-be business partner Ritu Menon quit her job at Vikas Publishers to collaborate on the project. Following the publicity we got at the first International Feminist Book Fair in England that year, we got Kali going,” she says.

While funding was sparse to begin with, Kali scored because it had the active support of several wellwishers. “They helped with publicity and promotion and, more importantly, bought a lot of the books we published,” Butalia says.

“We did only two books a year and were thus not very well-known to booksellers. But when women began walking in and specifically asking for books published by Kali, they sat up and took notice,” she says.

Over the next two decades, Kali was to become a publishing house to reckon with, especially in the field of gender-related issues. But differences between Butalia and Menon prompted them to head their own ways. On Butalia’s part, it meant the setting up of Zubaan. Lack of funds, yet again, posed a serious hurdle. But the Nikkei Asia Award for culture, which Butalia won in 2003, proved to be a stitch in time. “It came with $25,000, so I thought there must be a God somewhere!” she says.

With the establishment of Zubaan, Butalia also broadened her scope of publishing. “At Kali, gender was the main concern,” she recalls. “At Zubaan, however, we look at other issues such as marginalised communities and gays, apart from those related to women in particular.”

These days, apart from work, Butalia likes to spend time with her family. “My four nieces and nephews are absolute favourites,” she says. She also keeps herself immersed in reading. The other thing Butalia fancies is writing. “If I could somehow get to do both, it would be great,” says she.