How does a working woman write? For novelist-translator-playwright Shanta Gokhale, the answer was this: in her company’s lawns, during the lunch break, with a chapati roll in one hand and a pen in another. That’s how she wrote her first Marathi-language novel, Rita Welinkar in 1995. Thirty years later, chapati rolls have been swiftly replaced with smoothie bowls, social media doctrines on work-life balance abound, and women in at least English-language publishing are not a rare sight anymore. But, can a working woman still shut out the world and just write?  

The Shashi Baliga Memorial Session at the Godrej LitLive in Mumbai tackled this question through the lived experience and the literary creations of three women authors — Jane Borges, Amrita Mahale, and Pronoti Datta. Moderated by Godrej DEI Lab’s Supriya Nair, the panel was appropriately titled On Balance as a hat-tip to the balancing act women must do between the words on a page, and the responsibilities off it. 

It’s a balancing act that can often feel impossible when you’re writing at your job and then have to write again, according to Jane Borges, author of the quintessential Mumbai novel, Bombay Balchao (2019). Borges narrated the relief of finishing edits on her upcoming novel, Mog Asundi (forthcoming, 2025) while balancing a demanding job at the newspaper, Mumbai Mirror. She wrote much of her new novel while on a sabbatical from a job she self-confessedly loved, but the demands of writing made it imperative for her to take a break. Outlining the ways in which women encounter work – both at home and in the world – Borges spoke of the myth of work-life balance for most working women by saying, “As women, we’re always working. And most of the work is unpaid.” 

It was a sentiment echoed by fellow panelist, Amrita Mahale, whose first novel, Milk Teeth came out in 2018 to both critical acclaim and adoring fans. For her second round as a novelist, she faced a major life change which affected her relationship with words – she was now a mother and couldn’t ignore the chaos and duties of early motherhood. “For one-and-a-half years after my son was born, my brain wasn’t working. And now, this is something I say with pride. Because my brain is different from what it was before I was a mother.” And this difference, Mahale said emphatically, has made her a different writer. 

The influence on a woman writer can also be linked to the city they find themselves in – the freedom that it offers, and the culture that it invites one into. For Pronoti Datta, a self-confessed Bombay enthusiast, the city was the backdrop and the protagonist of her first novel, Half Blood (2022), where a journalist in her thirties finds herself interrogating her roots and uncovering surprising histories of the Parsi community in Mumbai. Her second book, In The Beginning There Was Bombay Duck (2025) also focuses its lens on Mumbai; mapping its history through the Koli community, the Pathare Prabhus, and the post-Partition refugees, among others. Datta herself started getting an understanding of the city through her time as a reporter writing on food, theatre, and culture for publications like Time Out Mumbai, The Times of India, among others. Speaking at the panel, she narrated how her day job gave her the context, the language, and the stories that influenced her to become the writer she is – wherein her work became a stepping stone to finding an authorial voice and a community. 

The importance of a community for a woman writer emerged as an important theme through the evening. Both Borges and Mahale, for example, published their books within a few months of each other and found themselves on panels at literary festivals, leading to an informal camaraderie. (That their books were also clubbed together as seminal Mumbai books perhaps helped!) For all three women authors onstage, friendship and the community it provides became an alternative structure of support, as they navigated the complexities of publishing, marketing, and branding that comes with the territory of being an author.

So, what of the titular “balance” referred to in the name of the lecture? As the allotted hour for the discussion winded up, I was reminded of a paragraph in Devaki Jain’s memoir, The Brass Notebook (2020). At an early point in her marriage, frustrated by the onerous task of finding balance between her academic work and managing a household, she tells her husband, “What I need is a wife.” It’s a need that echoes a pattern of the oft-invisible women behind the oft-genius man. But if the genius is a woman – or indeed, just a woman who wants to write and make a living off of it – must she also look for an invisible hand to have uninterrupted swathes of time? Or does she, like Gokhale, make do with what little breaks she gets? Perhaps, like the three women authors onstage reiterated in their words and also in the solidarity they extended to each other, for a woman who writes, her “wife” is somewhere else.

A community she can call her own – friendships, mentors, and that one Whatsapp group.