Contemporary Indian Women’s Writing

Contemporary Indian Women’s Writing , edited by Varun Gulati and Mythili Anoop, examines some of India’s canonical figures, including Ismat Chughtai, Anita Desai, Narmita Ghokale, Manju Kapur, Manjula Padmanabhan and Nayantra Sahgal, as well as diasporic writers Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Jhumpa Lahiri and Shani Mooto. The collection is organized in three sections: Section I, “Dwelling in the Archive: Historical Representations,” includes five chapters on questions of women’s historiography and gendered histories; Section II, “Reflections of Feminism: Critical Discourses on Select Doyennes,” includes six chapters featuring close readings of literary works with an emphasis on Indian female subjectivities; and Section III, “Transferences: Interrogating Women’s Bodies and Psyches,” includes four chapters that take up psychoanalytic or feminist readings of individual works. The chapters bring to view a wide range of historical contexts and contemporary concerns, including Partition history, Assamese insurgency, middle-class metropolitan India, and the shifting nature of gender roles in (the mainly) U.S.-based diaspora. Two anomalous nonliterary chapters include an illuminating discussion, by Etienne Rassendran, on Indian women’s historiography, and a reading, by Kaustavi Sarkar and Paul Boyce, of Odissi dance from the vantage point of queer and performance studies

Art · Art history · Biography · Diaspora · Feminism · Historiography · Life writing · Literature · Queer · Sociology · Irish and British Studies · South Asian Cinema and Culture · South Asian Studies and Diaspora · Gender Studies · History