Item: Call Her Freedom
Rating: 3.5
Author: Catherine

Call Her Freedom by Tara Dorabji
Published by Simon & Schuster
Publication date: January 21, 2025
Genres: Debut, Fiction, Cultural, Historical

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A small village in the Himalayan foothills is the setting for Tara Dorabji’s debut novel, Call Her Freedom. Aisha’s mother is a midwife and teaches Aisha all about childbirth and herbal remedies when Aisha is not in school. An outstanding student it’s been her mother’s dream to see her go to university in the city. But when her mother falls ill the only way to save their family’s land is for Aisha to marry a young local man. She agrees, foregoing her own future to stay on the land she knows and to help her mother.

Call Her Freedom is a family saga spanning from the 1970s to the present day in Kashmir. Aisha gives up her dreams of an education and a life away from their village, but comes to love her life with her husband and their children despite the hardships of living in the midst of a war zone. Kashmir is an occupied country, its people snared between a colonial government and the militants fighting for freedom. Every character in the novel is impacted by this violence and each has choices to make. Aisha herself pays a high price for resisting a soldier’s demands.

This story has a wobbly start, uneven pacing, and the early chapters have more explaining than experiencing—not completely surprising for a debut author. It isn’t until shortly after the halfway point that Aisha‘s life and the world around her started pulling me in. Sadly, it’s at this point that things take a turn for the worse. Call Her Freedom descends into the hopeless cycle of brutality that comes when people are fighting for their independence. Small villages and their residents are caught in the middle of a war they can’t win and that they have no part in. It’s disheartening and impacts Aisha, her children, friends, relatives, her entire village and their way of life. She suffers, even in regards to knowing where her loved ones are in the year 2000. In 2020 being a journalism major is enough to warrant government surveillance and possible detainment.

But while this is a difficult and almost impossible to believe way of life the resilience of the characters is palpable. Even as the government is trying to eradicate their way of life they refuse to let go of their identity. Dorabji ultimately does an amazing job immersing the reader in a time and place. I was so deep into what was happening in Call Her Freedom that when I finished and looked up from the page, I was surprised that I wasn’t in the midst of a dry, dusty hot Asian village.