Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the early twentieth century


Book Description

Includes songs by Buddhist nuns, testimonies of medieval rebel poets and court historians, and the voices of more than 60 other writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Among the diverse selections are a rare early essay by an untouchable woman; an account by the first feminist historian; and a selection from the first novel written in English by an Indian woman.




Family Fictions and World Making


Book Description

Family Fictions and World Making: Irish and Indian Women’s Writing in the Contemporary Era is the first book-length comparative study of family novels from Ireland and India. On the one hand, despite an early as well as late colonial experience, Ireland is often viewed exclusively within a metropolitan British and Europe-centered frame. India, on the other hand, once seen as a model of decolonization for the non-Western world, has witnessed a crisis of democracy in recent years. This book charts the idea of "world making" through the fraught itineraries of the Irish and the Indian family novel. The novels discussed in the book foreground kinship based on ideological rather than biological ties and recast the family as a nucleus of interests across national borders. The book considers the work of critically acclaimed women authors Anne Enright, Elizabeth Bowen, Mahasweta Devi, Jennifer Johnston, Kiran Desai and Molly Keane. These writers are explored as representative voices for the interwar years, the late-modern period, and the globalization era. They not only push back against the male nationalist idiom of the family but also successfully interrogate family fiction as a supposedly private genre. The broad timeframe of Family Fictions and World Making from the interwar period to the globalization era initiates a dialogue between the early and the current debates around core and periphery in postcolonial literature.




Science Fiction and Indian Women Writers


Book Description

Science fiction, as a literature of fantasy, goes beyond the mundane to ask the question: what if the world were different from the way it is? It often challenges the real, builds on imagination, places no limits on human capacities, and encourages readers to think outside their social and cultural conditioning. This book presents a systematic study of Indian women’s science fiction. It offers a critical analysis of the works of four female Indian writers of science fiction: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Manjula Padmanabhan, Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Vandana Singh. The author considers not only the evolution of science fiction writing in India, but also discusses the use of innovations and unique themes including science fiction in different Indian languages; the literary, political, and educational activism of the women writers; and eco-feminism and the idea of cloning in writing, to argue that this genre could be viewed as a vibrant representation of freedom of expression and radical literature. This ground-breaking volume will be useful for scholars and researchers of English literature. It will also prove a very useful source for further studies into Indian literature, science and technology studies, women’s and gender studies, comparative literature and cultural studies.




Women Writing in India: The twentieth century


Book Description

The second volume following on from the first, which spanned the years 600 BC to the early-20th century, this book offers a new reading of cultural history that draws on contemporary scholarship on women and India. The books cover over 140 texts from 13 languages.




Writing Caste/Writing Gender


Book Description

'The women tell it like it is... So riveting is the narration that it is difficult to put down the book until their stories are finished. For a non-fiction academic work this is no small feat.’ — The Hindu Sharmila Rege’s path breaking study of Dalit women’s writings and lives offers a powerful counter-narrative to the mainstream assumptions about the development of feminism in India in the 20th century. Extensive extracts from eight Dalit women’s writings cover issues such as food and hunger, community, caste, labour, education, violence, resistance and collective struggle. The voices that resound throughout the book, reveal that Dalit feminism, far from being ‘silent’ as so often presumed, is rich, powerful, layered – and highly articulate. Published by Zubaan.




Writing Gender, Writing Nation


Book Description

This book explores the gendered contexts of the Indian nation through a rigorous analysis of selected women’s fiction ranging from diverse linguistic, geographical, caste, class, and regional contexts. Indian women’s writing across languages, texts, and contexts constitutes a unique narrative of the post-independence nation. This volume highlights the ways in which women writers negotiate the patriarchal biases embedded in the epistemological and institutional structures of the post-independence nation-state. It discusses works of famous Indian authors like Amrita Pritam, Jyotirmoyee Devi, Mannu Bhandari, Mahasweta Devi, Mridula Garg, Nayantara Sahgal, Indira Goswami, and Alka Saraogi, to name a few, and facilitates a pan-Indian understanding of the concerns taken up by these women writers. In doing so, it shows how ideas travel across regions and contribute towards building a thematic critique of the oppressive structures that breed the unequal relations between the margins and the centre. The volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers of gender studies, women’s studies, South Asian literature, political sociology, and political studies.




Un Bound


Book Description




Being Single in India


Book Description

Today, the majority of the world's population lives in a country with falling marriage rates, a phenomenon with profound impacts on women, gender, and sexuality. In this exceptionally crafted ethnography, Sarah Lamb probes the gendered trend of single women in India, examining what makes living outside of marriage for women increasingly possible and yet incredibly challenging. Featuring the stories of never-married women as young as 35 and as old as 92, this book offers a remarkable portrait of a way of life experienced by women across class and caste divides. For women in India, complex social-cultural and political-economic contexts are foundational to their lives and decisions, and remaining unmarried is often an unintended consequence of other pressing life priorities. Arguing that never-married women are able to illuminate their society's broader social-cultural values, Lamb offers a new and startling look at prevailing systems in India today. "This pathbreaking book offers a vital analysis of the rising but unrecognized category of single women in a marriage-minded society such as India. Through beautifully rendered and diverse stories, Sarah Lamb challenges conventional wisdom." -MARCIA C. INHORN, William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, Yale University "For fans of Lamb's evocative narratives on Bengali widows, her new book provides another rich look at the negative space of marriage: the rare demographic of single women in Bengal across class and caste." -SRIMATI BASU, author of The Trouble with Marriage: Feminists Confront Law and Violence in India "This lively ethnographic account makes several key contributions to feminist anthropological appraisals of marriage as an institution. Lamb renders a compelling, detailed, and sensitive portrait of compulsory heterosexuality and patriliny as seen from the margins." -LUCINDA RAMBERG, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Cornell University.




Desiring Women Writing


Book Description

In a set of readings ranging from early-sixteenth- through late-seventeenth-century texts, this book aims to resituate women’s writing in the English Renaissance by studying the possibilities available to these writers by virtue of their positions in their culture and by their articulation of a variety of desires (including the desire to write) not bound by the usual prescriptions that limited women. The book is in three parts. The first part begins by pursuing linkages between feminine virtue and the canonical status of texts written by women of the period. It then confronts some received opinions and opens up new possibilities of evaluation through readings of Aemelia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and poems, plays, and fiction by Aphra Behn. The second part studies translation as an allowed (and therefore potentially devalued) sphere for women’s writing, and offers accounts of Margaret Roper’s translation of Erasmus and Mary Sidney’s of Petrarch to show ways in which such work makes a central claim in Renaissance culture. In the third part, the author explores the thematics and practices of writing as exemplified in the women’s hands in an early Tudor manuscript and through the character of Graphina in Elizabeth Cary’s Mariam. Throughout, possibilities for these writers are seen to arise from the conjunction of their gender with their status as aristocrats or from their proximity to centers of power, even if this involves the “debasement” of prostitution for Lanyer or the perils of the marketplace for Behn. The author argues that moves outside the restriction of domesticity opened up opportunities for affirming female sexuality and for a range of desires not confined to marriage and procreation—desires that move across race in Oroonoko; that imagine female same-gender relations, often in proximity to male desires directed at other men; that implicate incestuous desires, even inflecting them anally, as in Roper’s Devout Treatise.




Post-Colonial and African American Women's Writing


Book Description

This accessible and unusually wide-ranging book is essential reading for anyone interested in postcolonial and African American women's writing. It provides a valuable gender and culture inflected critical introduction to well established women writers: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood, Suniti Namjoshi, Bessie Head, and others from the U.S.A., India, Africa, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and introduces emergent writers from South East Asia, Cyprus and Oceania. Engaging with and clarifying contested critical areas of feminism and the postcolonial; exploring historical background and cultural context, economic, political, and psychoanalytic influences on gendered experience, it provides a cohesive discussion of key issues such as cultural and gendered identity, motherhood, mothertongue, language, relationships, women's economic constraints and sexual politics.