In 2012, the gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh in New Delhi, and the protests that followed, shook Japleen Pasricha deeply. She was twenty-three, living in Delhi, and like many women of her generation, she was forced to confront once again how ordinary violence against women had become. As women and girls poured into the streets demanding justice, she found herself thinking more urgently about women’s safety, rights, and why so many voices still went unheard.

Japleen was left feeling restless. She did not have a clear plan yet, but she knew she wanted to do something. A Facebook page was simple, immediate, and within reach. It was a way of responding right away, before she knew that the impulse would grow into something much bigger.

She started a page called Feminism in India (FII), a space where women could speak honestly, name what was unfair, and not be dismissed as too much.

She started a page called Feminism in India (FII), a space where women could speak honestly, name what was unfair, and not be dismissed as too much. ‘I didn’t start this as a profit venture,’ she says. ‘I didn’t have a business plan or revenue streams figured out. Nothing. It was just an inner calling.’ She followed it with a personal blog, where she wrote about feminism, gender, and her own experiences, including the casual sexism she had lived through in relationships. ‘It was mostly my personal frustrations and rants,’ she says.

At the time, the twenty-three-year-old was finishing an MPhil in German Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), on what was meant to be the path to a PhD. But by the time she submitted her thesis in 2014, she knew she wanted to work on gender and women’s rights instead. Eventually, she found work at a non-profit working on gender-based violence. Part of what got her the job was the Facebook page she had already built.

While working full-time, she kept thinking about turning FII into something more substantial: a website, a proper platform, something that could outlast personal frustration and become a shared space. She had been reading American feminist sites to understand more about feminism but they felt distant from Indian realities. She kept asking herself a simple question: where are the Indian feminists?

She wanted to document as well as connect them. She wanted younger feminists, especially those outside traditional activist networks, to be able to find one another. She also knew that a lot of feminist writing remained inaccessible, either buried behind paywalls, dense with jargon, or too far removed from everyday life. She wanted something plainer, more immediate, and closer to lived experience. 

At that time, a lot of mainstream media still treated gender as a subsidiary issue, something to be covered episodically, often after a spectacular act of violence. What she wanted instead was a space where feminism could live in everyday language and in everyday experience, without losing political sharpness.

She wanted feminist writing that felt less like entering a closed room and more like hearing someone speak clearly about a life you recognized. At that time, a lot of mainstream media still treated gender as a subsidiary issue, something to be covered episodically, often after a spectacular act of violence. What she wanted instead was a space where feminism could live in everyday language and in everyday experience, without losing political sharpness.

In August 2014, with little money and no formal structure, Japleen launched the website with help from a friend. She invited bloggers her own age to contribute. ‘I said, hey, I’m starting this website. It’ll be a space for all of us to write about our experiences. Would you be interested?’ Slowly, people came in.

That same year, while still working full-time, she ran FII’s first major digital campaign, inviting women to submit personal stories of sexual harassment as part of the 16 Days of Activism campaign. She led with her own account of being molested on the Delhi metro. Sixteen stories came in. In 2015, the campaign won the Laadli Media and Advertising Award for Gender Sensitivity.

The response confirmed to Japleen what she already knew: women were ready to speak. They needed a space that would take their experiences seriously, which would not reduce them to either trauma porn or tidy empowerment. Where their stories did not have to be translated into a more acceptable language before they could be heard.

By the end of 2015, FII had begun to grow into a bilingual, intersectional feminist media platform that published articles, conducted campaigns and workshops, and held conversations across caste, queerness, disability, mental health, and gender.

In 2016, Japleen quit her job and moved back in with her parents so she could give FII her full attention. She did not want to build it through advertising or investor pressure, so she began applying for grants instead. The early years were slow and uncertain: administrative paperwork, finances, legal structures, endless questions. But the platform kept growing. What had begun as a Facebook page and blog became, gradually and painstakingly, a real institution.

Today, FII is run by a young team and has published thousands of articles by hundreds of contributors. But for Japleen, the more important fact is simpler: the platform exists, and has kept existing, in a media landscape that has little patience for independent feminist work.

Today, FII is run by a young team and has published thousands of articles by hundreds of contributors. But for Japleen, the more important fact is simpler: the platform exists, and has kept existing, in a media landscape that has little patience for independent feminist work. ‘I started the Facebook page around the time I was figuring out my own feminist journey,’ she says. ‘Today, we’re a team of twelve women under thirty-five running FII English and FII Hindi.’

That growth has not come easily. Funding is precarious, and an independent feminist platform is rarely seen as an obvious thing to support. Japleen has often found that money comes with conditions, spoken or unspoken: soften the politics, make it more palatable, say less about caste, gender, sexuality, power. She has not wanted to build something acceptable at the cost of making it honest. The pressure is rarely dramatic. More often, it comes as a suggestion, a tone of discomfort, the hint that feminist work is welcome only so long as it does not unsettle too much. To keep a platform like FII alive without giving in to that pressure has meant treating survival itself as part of the work.

At its heart, that is what FII has tried to hold on to. It was never meant to be a neutral platform in the way mainstream media platforms often claim themselves to be neutral. Japleen is clear that the work is political because the lives it covers are political. What women wear, where they live, what violence they face, what choices they can make, what they are asked to tolerate—none of that sits outside politics.

Japleen is clear that the work is political because the lives it covers are political. What women wear, where they live, what violence they face, what choices they can make, what they are asked to tolerate—none of that sits outside politics.

‘I’d rather do the right thing than chase donors who expect silence,’ she says. Japleen did not come from media, journalism, or the non-profit world. Her father ran a small business; her mother was a homemaker. Most of her relatives ran small businesses. There were no insider networks, no family friends in publishing, no one who could tell her how any of this was supposed to work. ‘I had no roadmap,’ she says. ‘I’m the first in my family to walk this path.’

For Japleen, building FII was not only about having the politics right. It was also about learning everything else from scratch: how to register something, how to manage finances, how to hire, how to apply for grants, how to keep a team going, how to make an idea survive long enough to become an organization. 

The difficulty of that path is not unique to her. Women in India are still far less likely to have the money, backing, or networks needed to start something of their own. Japleen knew that not as a statistic first, but as a lived fact. She had no safety net to lean on and no clear example to follow. What she had was urgency, stubbornness, and the refusal to wait for permission. ‘I built this with my own hands,’ she says. ‘And if we’ve managed to swim against the tide for a decade, that’s no small thing. We’ll keep swimming for as long as we can.’ 

Excerpted with permission from ‘Why The World Needs Angry Women’ by Nilanjana Bhowmick, Aleph Book Company.