Women Writing in India, Volume II: The Twentieth Century

by Susie J. Tharu (Editor), K. Lalita (Editor)

These ground-breaking collections offer 200 texts from 11 languages, never before available in English or as a collection, along with a new reading of cultural history that draws on contemporary scholarship on women and on India. This extraordinary body of literature and important documentary resource illuminates the lives of Indian women through 2,600 years of change and extends the historical understanding of literature, feminism, and the making of modern India. The biographical, critical, and bibliographical headnotes in both volumes, supported by an introduction which Anita Desai describes as "intellectually rigorous, challenging, and analytical," place the writers and their selections within the context of Indian culture and history.

Volume II: The Twentieth Century features poetry, fiction, drama, and autobiography by 73 writers born after 1905, some widely appreciated in their own time, others neglected or ignored. These works bring into the scope of literary discussion a whole new range of women's experiences in and responses to society, politics, desire, marriage, procreation, aging, and death.

Genres: Feminism, India, History, Short Stories, Literature, Nonfiction, Indian Literature

336 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1993

About the author

Susie Tharu (born 1943) is an Indian writer, publisher, professor, editor and women's activist. Throughout her career and the founding of several women's activist organizations, Tharu has helped to highlight those issues in India.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Aravind P · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible collection of several known, little known women writers from North and South India (For unexplained reasons the editors have not included a single work from North East!, though they expressed their regret in the introduction). The initial 120 pages gave a glimpse of various feminist awakening and how the Indian and western influence the literary movements that inspired the women empowerment. Later part introduced me to several writers and a part of their writings (poetry, short stories, chapters from novel etc) which gave a good insight to the existing social issues.

[Somanand Saraswati · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maps the paradigm and attempts to locate and map women authors from India. Archival study students should reach this

[Dr.J.G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection contains writings of women from since various times, and often the writers are not professional - which is not new for India or indeed anywhere for that matter. In India there have been various poets who simply sang their verses as they did housework and other work, men and women, and often those verses became famous due to their popularity which in turn was due to their high worth, subsequent to which they got written and recorded. But this collection is not of those well known works, rather is about a good many works of very astoundingly good quality that lay about in corners after or without publication.

The couple of stories that stick in mind after all these years are one about a woman despised by her husband who wanted a posh wife, and later came to find her not only worthy but attractive - but he was now married to another woman (there was no divorce then, Hinduism has no divorce in tradition and the nation had not yet legalised such a provision for Hindus, but polygamy was still legal), and moreover, as he found to his surprise, his first wife (who was still a virgin albeit legally his wife) spurned him strongly out of not a mere revenge or anger but a self respect he found astounding, and moreover a sense of morality that she declared made it impossible to allow them to cohabit since he not only had declared he could not see her as his wife but also had married another woman, now her friend.

The other one is about a woman who learned to write long after she was married and had children, and she writes about her life, amongst the details of which one is about how she was simply unable to have any food for three days at one time due to various small details of household life, although she was cooking for the whole household of over a dozen people all this time.

[Ambica Rajagopal · Rating 4 out of 5]

always a joy...inspite, i must add, of the bad translations..

[Uday]

fEF

[Kuljeet Singh Rawat]

nice and good