Volume 66, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Voices of Their Own: South Asian Women’s Writing / Guest Editors: Cecile Sandten and Ranu Uniyal

Contemporary Indian women’s writing is a challenge to existing male ethos and sexual ideology based on unequal power relations. Earlier domesticity and sexual relations were couched in silence and acceptance; today, they have become an intrinsic part of feminist discourse. Indian women poets converse in a language that threatens the status quo and propose to open up a separate space for those on the margins. The paper examines the essence of power dynamics in contemporary Indian women’s poetry in English. Poetry with its hidden metaphors and lilting images demonstrates an urge to dissolve the barrier between speech and silence. It also demands to be read differently. The desire to write leads to the ability to act with courage.

Critical engagements like the first autobiography written by a Bengali woman, Rasasundari Devi, and the non-fictions by Kailashbasini Devi, Krishnabhabini Das, and other women writers in the second half of the nineteenth century contested the imagined idealization of the Hindu domesticity and conjugality as spaces of loveableness and spiritual commitment. They criticized coercion in child-marriages and the forceful injunctions of the Hindu scriptures on both married and widowed women. Such rhetoric of quasi empowerment needs to be disaggregated to perpetuate issues of ‘double colonization,’ ‘dual-hold’ in feminism in India. The question is whether there can be any grounds of women’s agency in the Indian tradition. Eurocentric critiques are ill-equipped to politicize all modalities of a culture of social exclusion in Hindu imaginaries. Henceforth, as questions of equality, emancipation, and empowerment are fiercely debated in the public domain in contemporary India, we need to argue how immanent dissenting woman subjectivity can originate to counteract multiple patriarchies formed in Indian immediacies.

This paper looks at the formation of colonial print publics in Punjab, the gendered subjectivities that emerged in this new discursive space, and middle-class women’s deployment of print to articulate the self. This will be done through a close reading of one of the first novels in English, Cosmopolitan Hinduani , which was published in Lahore, Punjab, by a woman in 1902. The essay examines the narrator’s notion of a gendered cosmopolitanism and the subject position that it affords, her attempt at going beyond the fault lines of religion to articulate a liberal and modern political subject, while reworking the cosmopolitan/local binary. How does her insertion of herself as a gendered subject in the provincial, national, cosmopolitan imaginary reflect in the author’s choice of language and genre? My attempt will be to see the novel and its author as part of a literary culture in which she made certain choices about the form, language, content, and audience.

This paper addresses the position and culturally loaded presentation of the South Asian woman writer in two colonial Bengali texts. Through a comparative analysis of Rabindranath Tagore’s “Nashtanir” (1901) and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream (1905), it explores the way in which both texts sought to engage with debates surrounding the education of women in the early twentieth century. It argues that the development of Charu’s extra-marital relationship in “Nashtanir,” coupled with Tagore’s representation of her as simple, superficial, and dangerous, gave weight to the claim that women’s education may contribute to a waning interest in domestic duties and facilitate the capacity to engage in extra-marital relationships. However, the analysis of Sultana’s Dream alternatively shows that the woman writer in colonial Bengal used her position to protest the barriers to women’s education in this context. By generating a text that invited its readers to engage in wider educational practises, Hossain produced a politically charged appeal which served to challenge misconceptions surrounding women’s education in colonial Bengal.

Multiple patriarchies have attempted to circumscribe women within the private sphere, encrypting their identities with broader definitions of class, caste, community, and nation. Malashri Lal in The Law of the Threshold has suggested the threshold – a real as well as symbolic bar that patriarchies place before women – as a tool for literary criticism. The paper takes up Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column to examine negotiations of women from varying classes and communities with the dynamics of the threshold and their positioning inside, on, and outside the threshold. Issues of gender and the transgression of the controls and harness upon women’s sexuality are examined with the intersecting paradigms of class, community, and the changing face of the nation. The forces and anxieties emanating from opposing pulls of the inner world of the traditional order and the outer modern Western world that pre-empt the move outside the threshold are also traced against a colonial backdrop.

Anita Desai’s novel Clear Light of Day , published 33 years after the Indian subcontinent’s Partition, lays its focus on markedly ‘female’ experiences of Partition, wherein the importance of national history is negotiated within the framework of gendered family history. What role such familial (social) memories play within the larger canon of ‘Partition narratives’ will be analyzed exemplarily through the novel in this paper. Looking at the way the family house is depicted in Clear Light of Day is important to mark out its chronotopic value, i.e. the house contains as well as evokes spatial memories and triggers the mnemonic processes of the female protagonists that eventually facilitate the overcoming of past conflicts. Finally, the narrative technique of internal focalization, repeatedly deployed in the novel, will be scrutinized in order to reveal the inner turmoils and the personal (traumatic) experiences of the female protagonists.

The dialectics of tradition and modernity in the South Asian context often focus on the female body. Developing this discourse, Sunder Rajan [Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari (1993). Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism . London: Routledge.] discusses a new brand of woman that features in contemporary culture: the “New Indian Woman.” This figure is able to perfectly harmonize the conflict between tradition and modernity and negotiate seamlessly between the public and private spheres. Based on close readings, I will extend Sunder Rajan’s analysis of the New Indian Woman to Shashi Deshpande’s 1980 novel The Dark Holds No Terrors . Informed by ideas of embodiment, silence and performance, this paper considers how the unobtainability of the New Indian Woman myth in Deshpande’s novel results in a splitting of the self for the protagonist, Sarita. I argue that the splitting of the self occurs on two levels: while represented as a psychological breakdown experienced by Sarita, I contend that it is also reflected as a corporeal act through the violating literary depiction of rape.

This paper looks at three Indian crime fiction series by women writers who employ different types of female detectives in contemporary India. The series will be discussed in the context of India’s economic growth and the emergence of a new middle class, which has an impact on India’s complex publishing market. I argue that the authors offer new identification figures while depicting a wide spectrum of female experiences within India’s contemporary urban middle class. In accordance with the characteristics of popular fiction, crime fiction offers the possibility to assume new roles within the familiar framework of a specific genre. Writers also partly modify the genre as a form of social criticism and use strategies such as the avoidance of closure. I conclude that the genre is of particular suitability for women in modern India as a testing-ground for new roles and a space that helps to depict and accommodate recent transformations that connect to processes of globalization.