Women Writing in India: 600 B.C to the Present.

Edited by
Susie Tharu and K. Lalita. Volume 1: 600 B.C to the Early
Twentieth Century. New York: Feminist Press, 1991. Volume 2:
The Twentieth Century. New York: Feminist Press, 1993.

Priyamvada Gopal

I was angry with myself for wanting to read books. Girls did not read...
Anyway, I was pleased that I was able to perform this impossible feat
at least in a dream. My life was blessed!
'Amar Jiban'

As we follow Rassundari Devi's slow and arduous journey from a

secret longing to read the master's book through to the amazing
scenes of self-teaching, and the writing of her life in 'Amar Jiban'
(My Life) after she learns to write 'in secret, by scratching the
letters of the alphabet on a blackened kitchen wall' (190), issues of
women's writing in India take on a significance that subsume and
go beyond academic arguments about alternative canons and
multicultural curricula. As Rassundari's and many other texts
compiled in Susie Tharu's and K. Lalita's meticulously researched
and edited anthologies Women Writing in India: 500 B.C to the
Present demonstrate, the act of women's writing or reading, in
various contexts and through different historical periods, has
subversive connotations that have to do with more than any
perceived resistances within narrative content alone. These two
volumes have been published at a time when the dynamic tremors
of the debate on the Western literary canon and on recovering and
re-presenting hitherto marginalized voices have settled into the
regulatory rhythms of business-as-usual in literature departments
in the Anglo-American academy. The institutionalizing of feminist
studies, ethnic studies, and more specifically, post-colonial studies,
means that this pioneering compendium of writing by women in
India that spans 2400 years and has been translated into English
from eleven different Indian languages will find an established and
growing constituency of readers in the West as well as in India. It
288 Oxford Literary Review

will be instrumental in giving more definite contours and direction

to nascent feminist research in these areas. Further, its editorial
content clearly aims to contribute to, and to reframe, theoretical
debates within feminist and colonial/post-colonial studies.
For the editors themselves, the polemical project at hand is
clear: they are not primarily interested in 'the refurbishment of
canons' since the interests of literary studies 'as it stands are ones
we wish to transform, not entrench' ('Introduction', 38). Both
volumes carry the same general introduction (page references to it
in this review are from Volume II). Tharu and Lalita present a
detailed but somewhat totalizing critique of what they call Western
feminist criticism and define their own project in terms of (what
they see as) its sharp variation from that of the former. They aim
to reconstruct 'the changing ideological configurations in which
women wrote and were read' ('Introduction', 38) and create a context
in which 'women's writings can be read ... as documents that display
what is at stake in the embattled practices of self and agency, and
in the making of a habitable world, at the margins of patriarchies
constituted by the emerging bourgeoisies of empire and nation' (39,
original emphasis). This is facilitated by the densely researched
section introductions and biographical notes which provide excellent
historical and political background to each writer; Tharu and Lalita
are also careful to point out that women's texts are not always
subversive of the status quo and even when they are, can be so in
problematic or unexpected ways.
It is not clear, however, why they need to provide such an
extensive and often careless discussion of Western feminism (not
even feminisms). To point out that certain strands of feminist
thought in the industrialized West neglect to take the hegemonies
of class, caste, and race into account, universalize women's experi­
ences, or refuse to read 'the complicity of white women and middle-
class women in the structures of domination' is salutary, but by
over-generalizing and leaving out a lot more than Hazel Carby's
work (which omission they acknowledge), Tharu and Lalita replicate
the very strategies they indict. No significant distinctions are made
between even broad categories like radical, postmodern, materialist,
and liberal feminisms, and we are finally expected to take seriously
the conclusion that Western feminism is basically essentialist in
Priyamvada Gopal 289

thrust and that is why these editors must dissociate their project so
completely from it: 'Liberal feminists ... argued for a privileged
affinity between women and peace or women and nature, the body
or the unconscious....Since the kind of feminist criticism that
naturalizes the experiences and issues of Western feminism is so
easily co-opted by the academy and so widely circulated among third
world scholars ... we must explain in more detail why we find the
subsuming of a critical method into a celebration of female nature
so disturbing* ('Introduction', 34). The point here is not to apologize
for some of Anglo-American feminism's obvious blunders but to
suggest that sophisticated post-colonial feminist critiques will now
need to do more than identify well-documented lapses in Anglo-
American traditions. In some ways, to do so is to continue to address
those traditions in ways that reify its authority and scope; ironical­
ly, this is what Tharu and Lalita claim that practitioners of
gynocriticism do when they address the patriarchal literary
institution to Voice their grievances' ('Introduction' 27).
The collections in the two-volume anthology themselves are
testimony to painstaking archival work, thoughtful editing by Tharu
and Lalita as well as a team of eleven language editors, and
generally readable translations made by an immense network of
translators (one of the many achievements of this project is surely
that of creating a community of literary and cultural workers across
the country). The first volume (600 B.C. to the Present), is naturally
somewhat more thrilling with regard to archival work than the
second (The Twentieth Century) which provides significant insights
into recent social and cultural history. The section on ancient and
medieval literature in the former contains excerpts from nuggets
like the Therigatha (Songs of the Nuns) composed by Buddhist nuns
in the 6th century B. C , from Gul-Badan Begum's history of
Humayun's reign, and Muddupalani's notorious erotic classic
Radhika Santwanam (Appeasing Radhika) whose history of
marginalization, censorship and retrieval is for Tharu and Lalita
largely emblematic of the story of women's writing in India. The
range of genres which comprise the selections for the section
'Literature of the Reform and Nationalist Movements' is noteworthy:
there are transcripts of speeches made both by women as well
known as Sarojini Naidu and as anonymous as the author of 'A
290 Oxford Literary Review

Speech Made by a Woman at a Women's Meeting Organized by the

Prarthana Samaj, Bombay;' short stories, Utopian fiction, satirical
attacks on male hypocrisy, letters, tribal song and dance perform­
ance or jhumur; sociological records like the excerpt from Pandita
Ramabai's The High Caste Hindu Woman and another anonymous
author's 'The Plight of Hindu Widows as Described by a Widow
Herself, and of course, autobiography, of which, as the editors point
out, there are a large number in this period. This variety is in
striking contrast to the composition of the second volume which
comprises mainly short stories and poetry. The reasons for this,
which I will discuss shortly, are implicit in both historical changes
and possibly, in editorial strategies determined by Tharu and
Lalitha's reading of these changes.
While in Volume 1 the emphasis is on placing 'women's literary
initiatives against the restructuring of patriarchy and gender that
was taking place' and in Volume 2, against 'the major reorientation
in the social imaginary that took place' ('Introduction', 40) in the
later twentieth century, Tharu and Lalita's generalized project is to
read resistances: 'we might indeed learn to read them not for the
moments in which they collude with or reinforce dominant ideologies
of gender, class, nation, and empire, but for the gestures of defiance
or subversion implicit in them' (39). The question of resistances is,
of course, always a vexed one both in terms of textual semiotics and
of literary production as revolutionary practice. One of the ways in
which third world and other feminist theory can make the shift
away from Eurocentrism is to reconsider and further theorize the
notion of 'writing' and to reevaluate its relationship to women's
cultural production. While we should continue to examine the
marginalizing and unavailability of women's writing and attempt to
retrieve that which does survive, it is important to bear in mind
that much of what we are considering are cultural terrains where
writing (in the narrow graphemic sense rather than the broader
Derridean reinscription of the term) is only a proportionally small
constituent of cultural production and transmission at large. For
instance, in ancient India, not only folk culture but liigh' texts such
as grammars and scriptural treatises were transmitted orally and
committed to memory (hence, the broad use of mnemonics). I am not
just making the somewhat banal argument that writing is a
Priyamvada Gopal 291

Western construct (just as reactionary elements will argue that

feminism is a Western and, hence, alien concept), but suggesting
that an understanding of its evolving social status and function will
help us better understand both its use as, and in, revolutionary
practice, as well as its limitations.
And thus, Rassundari's words take on fresh significance: 'One
needs a lot of things if one is to write: paper, pen, ink, ink-pot and
so on. You have to set everything before you. And I was a woman,
the daughter-in-law of the family. I was not supposed to read or
write' (1: 202). Few other texts demonstrate as starkly the material
conditions which determine not only women's lack of access to the
real and symbolic power of the discourse of literacy but their entire
subjectivity and sense of self. Considering that Rassundari and her
descendants belong to a class which ultimately did allow women
access to education—albeit a policed access—it is salutary to keep in
mind that a large percentage of the female (and male) population in
India still does not have the material means to write. This has two
implications: first, as cultural critics, we will have to read other
kinds of texts to find resistances, and second, we should consider
questions of ideological interpellation and authority through all that
takes place at the site of the dissemination of learning. In other
words, we need to recognize the ways in which language is an
instrument of empire, and the extent of our complicity in the
ideologies of the bourgeois project of education.
This is powerfully illustrated in Ramabai Ranade's account of
learning to read and write with her husband as pedagogue. (Such
an acknowledgement will certainly prevent slightly absurd critical
claims such as 'no one who has read Gulbadan Begum's history ...
can think of the women in the Zenana as repressed' since they had
access to learning (63)). Clearly, however, writing also has an
enabling strategic power and as Tharu and Lalita point out, to read
resistances in texts like these is to look for the ways in which
women 'tactically redeployed dominant discourses, held onto older
strains and recharged them with new meanings and even introduced
new issues, new emphases, new orientations' (1: 154). Thus,
Mokshodayani Mukhopadhyay writes a rejoinder to attacks on
stereotypical female attributes and mocks the man who 'becomes
Brahmo to emancipate women/ Drags out of seclusion the ladies of
292 Oxford Literary Review

his clan' (1: 220); Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain uses inversion to take
what her husband terms 'a terrible revenge on men' (340) and a
grim Tarabai Shinde performs 'A Comparison of Men and Women'
(221). It is the same education which allows Pandita Ramabai to
read the Shastras against the grain (226) and Bandaru Accham-
amba to write early feminist history (323).
One of the questions which shapes a project like this and indeed
frames much contemporary debate is that of the relationship of
social to literary text. Tharu and Lalita see Women Writing in India
as helping to develop 'an aesthetic that must undo the strict
distinctions between the literary and the social text' as well as 'a
critical practice that is by no means restricted to literature'
('Introduction', 39). Lalithambika Antherjanam's 'Praticaradevatha'
(The Goddess of Revenge) is a compelling retelling of a true incident
which dramatizes this possibility by literally breaking a social
silence around the incident and resurrecting the silenced woman.
The story of Thu-Tatri who becomes a prostitute to take revenge on
her womanizer Namboodiri husband triggered off'an ethical debate
which rocked Kerala to its very foundations' (499). Lalithambika
ends the story on an uncertain note; it is unclear whether individual
action works on a symbolic level powerful enough to effect social
change, and thus the writer-character's opinion oscillates as it
addresses Tatri: 'In truth, you are not an individual anymore; you
are society itself.... Consider now, what good did it do to society, that
hurricane you set into motion?. . . An affair that certainly created
a turmoil, but did not succeed in pointing the way to anything
positive.... But Namboodiri society can never forget Tatri. From the
heart of a great silence, you managed to throw out an explosive
burning spark ... a cry of victory' (500).
This question of the social Imaginary is the main editorial
concern in Volume II, which deals largely with 'Women Writing the
Nation' (43) in the period just before Independence to the present,
and is premised on the understanding that culture and politics
interacted to perform 'the profound rearticulation of the political
world and imaginative life that took place in the forties and fifties
with the birth of the Indian nation and continues in many ways to
underwrite culture and politics into the nineties' (II: 43). The stories
in Volume II are placed specifically in the context of Swadeshi, the
Priyamvada Gopal 293

Progressive Writers Association, and liberal electoralism, as well as

the women's movement in India. As mentioned earlier, this volume
contains mainly poetry and short stories written by educated
middle-class women (an astonishing number of whom have doctor­
ates or Master's degrees specifically in English Literature and also
in other regional literatures) and who are doctors, journalists,
academicians, or professional writers. Tharu and Lalita point out
that even those stories that are about those at the margins are 'all
the same, stories of the center, told by the center' (83). The notable
exceptions are the actress Hamsa Wadkar's excerpted autobiogra­
phy, Baby Ramble's 'Jina Amucha' (Our Wretched Lives) and
'Dudala Salamma, Khila Shapur', the Telengana People's Struggle
participant whose story was transcribed by the Stree Shakti
Sangathana and who asks a still pertinent question: 'I have
survived to tell you all this—you hold the pen—it all comes from my
stomach. What is the use of your holding the pen?' (222).
In general, however, the selection of texts for this volume
collectively works to demonstrate the ways in which women's texts
are co-opted into a universalist and nationalist framework, and yet
are 'engaged in a bitter and difficult debate about women and the
kind of hospitality gender received' within it (94). Jaya Mehta's
cynical reading of democracy in 'Lokshahiman' (In a Democracy) is
apt here: 'The ocean framed in a picture/ Is free to toss its waves ...
Sheep driven by the Shepherd/ Have the freedom to march in line'
(366). Other memorable selections include Binapani Mohanty's 'Asru
Anala' (Tears of Fire) and Anupama Niranj ana's 'Ondu Ghatane
Mattu Anantara' (The Incident and After), for their compelling
examination of female sexuality and anger. Mahasweta Devi's
'Shishu' (Children) about tribal repression and the revenge extracted
by the hunted and shrunken Agarias is underplayed and chilling
and intensely powerful. Malini Bhattacharya's 'Meye Dile Sajiye' (To
Give a Daughter Away) is the only dramatic text in the collection.
It provides an exciting glimpse of the power of theatre in a progress­
ive cultural politics and raises questions about women's presence in
the field of playwriting. Varsha Adalja's 'Bichari Champudi' (Poor
Champudi) and Jeelani Bano's 'Tamasha' (Fun and Games) are
chilling exposes of the quotidian callousness that characterizes
social behaviour towards young female street children.
294 Oxford Literary Review

Of the many stories that explore modern conjugality— another

recurrent theme in this volume (in contrast to the first one)—note­
worthy are Veena Shanteshwar's 'Avala Svatantrya' (Her Indepen­
dence), Sarah Joseph's 'Mazha' (Rain) and Saroj Pathak's 'Saugandh'
(The Vow), the last of which looks at celibacy in tandem with
new-found conjugal love as a possible way of life. Many of these
stories were first published in women's magazines and a too
pessimistic reading of their relationship to culture and politics must
be qualified by an understanding of the ways in which these
magazines did provide women with a forum for self-exploration and
expression, both individual and collective. A similarly complex
relation to cultural politics informs the translation of some of these
stories into features for television. It is true that these texts can and
have been co-opted in the interests of state-sponsored feminism, but
the 'women-oriented' serials of the late 1980s did engage with
questions concerning feminism. Especially when read in the context
of explicitly masculist commercial cinema, and now the even more
crassly macho, racist, homophobic and pseudo-global culture offered
by Star TV, they do offer some liberating possibilities.
The two volumes clearly are clearly invaluable contributions
towards cultural and critical inquiry in feminist and South Asia
studies. The editors' hope that they will not be used 'to perform the
same services to society and to nation that mainstream literature
over the last hundred years has been called upon to do' ('Introduct­
ion', 38)—and we may add, the services that alternative canons have
been called upon to perform in the last ten years—is a laudable one,
but whether it is heeded will depend on the collective efforts of all
those engaged in the enterprise of reading differently for a different
cause.