Anglophone Indian Women Writers 1870 1920

The result of extensive archival recovery work, Ellen Brinks's study fills a significant gap in our understanding of women's literary history of the South Asian subcontinent under colonialism and of Indian women's contributions and responses to developing cultural and political nationalism. As Brinks shows, the invisibility of Anglophone Indian women writers cannot be explained simply as a matter of colonial marginalization or as a function of dominant theoretical approaches that reduce Indian women to the status of figures or tropes. The received narrative that British imperialism in India was perpetuated with little cultural contact between the colonizers and the colonized population is complicated by writers such as Toru Dutt, Krupabai Satthianadhan, Pandita Ramabai, Cornelia Sorabji, and Sarojini Naidu. All five women found large audiences for their literary works in India and in Great Britain, and all five were also deeply rooted in and connected to both South Asian and Western cultures. Their works created new zones of cultural contact and exchange that challenge postcolonial theory's tendencies towards abstract notions of the colonized women as passive and of English as a de-facto instrument of cultural domination. Brinks's close readings of these texts suggest new ways of reading a range of issues central to postcolonial studies: the relationship of colonized women to the metropolitan (literary) culture; Indian and English women's separate and joint engagements in reformist and nationalist struggles; the 'translatability' of culture; the articulation strategies and complex negotiations of self-identification of Anglophone Indian women writers; and the significance and place of cultural difference.

The result of extensive archival recovery work, Ellen Brinks's study fills a significant gap in our understanding of women's literary history of the South Asian subcontinent under colonialism and of Indian women's contributions and responses to developing cultural and political nationalism. As Brinks shows, the invisibility of Anglophone Indian women writers cannot be explained simply as a matter of colonial marginalization or as a function of dominant theoretical approaches that reduce Indian women to the status of figures or tropes. The received narrative that British imperialism in India was perpetuated with little cultural contact between the colonizers and the colonized population is complicated by writers such as Toru Dutt, Krupabai Satthianadhan, Pandita Ramabai, Cornelia Sorabji, and Sarojini Naidu. All five women found large audiences for their literary works in India and in Great Britain, and all five were also deeply rooted in and connected to both South Asian and Western cultures. Their works created new zones of cultural contact and exchange that challenge postcolonial theory's tendencies towards abstract notions of the colonized women as passive and of English as a de-facto instrument of cultural domination. Brinks's close readings of these texts suggest new ways of reading a range of issues central to postcolonial studies: the relationship of colonized women to the metropolitan (literary) culture; Indian and English women's separate and joint engagements in reformist and nationalist struggles; the 'translatability' of culture; the articulation strategies and complex negotiations of self-identification of Anglophone Indian women writers; and the significance and place of cultural difference.

Global and cosmopolitan since the late nineteenth century, anglophone South Asian women's writing has flourished in many genres and locations, encompassing diverse works linked by issues of language, geography, history, culture, gender, and literary tradition. Whether writing in the homeland or in the diaspora, authors offer representations of social struggle and inequality while articulating possibilities for resistance. In this volume experienced instructors attend to the style and aesthetics of the texts as well as provide necessary background for students. Essays address historical and political contexts, including colonialism, partition, migration, ecological concerns, and evolving gender roles, and consider both traditional and contemporary genres such as graphic novels, chick lit, and Instapoetry. Presenting ideas for courses in Asian studies, women's studies, postcolonial literature, and world literature, this book asks broadly what it means to study anglophone South Asian women's writing in the United States, in Asia, and around the world.

About the book: The book Indian Women Novelists in English: Art and Vision is a volume of twenty five research articles on contemporary Indian women novelists and their works ranging from Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Manju Kapur, Shobhaa De, Meena Alexander, Githa Hariharan, Arundhati Roy to the younger generation of novelists Anita Nair, Kiran Desai and Jhumpa Lahiri along with two less explored novelists Rita Garg and Nayeema Mahjoor. Three regional writers- Sarah Joseph, Qurratulain Hyder and Mahasweta Devi are also part of this volume, though their write-ups are in regional languages, yet their translated works in English have earned wide popularity. The volume with its diversity of topics will instill knowledge into the critical minds and open many unopened doors from where many unexplored regions of knowledge will be revisited. About the Editor: Dipak Giri- M.A. (Double), B.Ed. - is a Ph. D. Research Scholar in Raiganj University, Raiganj, Uttar Dinajpur (W.B.). He is working as an Assistant Teacher in Katamari High School (H.S.), Cooch Behar, West Bengal. He is an Academic Counsellor in Netaji Subhas Open University, Cooch Behar College Study Centre, Cooch Behar, West Bengal. He was formerly Part-Time Lecturer in Cooch Behar College, Vivekananda College and Thakur Panchanan Mahila Mahavidyalaya, West Bengal and worked as a Guest Lecturer in Dewanhat College, West Bengal. He has the credit of qualifying U.G.C.-N.E.T. two times. He has attended seminars on national and state levels sponsored by U.G.C. Along with this book on Indian women novelists in English, he has also edited four books: Indian English Drama: Themes and Techniques, Indian English Novel: Styles and Motives, Postcolonial English Literature: Theory and Practice and New Woman in Indian Literature: From Covert to Overt. He is a well-known academician and has published many scholarly research articles in books and journals of both national and international repute. His area of studies includes Post-Colonial Literature, Indian Writing in English, Dalit Literature, Feminism and Gender Studies.

Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

Contributed articles presented at a seminar hosted by Andhra University on 20th century women authors from India.

This book presents how Nation and Narrative are bound together through the figure of the "N/native" as it appears in the non-fictional writings of Cornelia Sorabji, Grazia Deledda, Zitkála-Sá, Virginia Woolf, Victoria Ocampo, and Gwendolyn Bennett. It addresses two questions: How did women writers in the early twentieth century tackle the entangled roots of political and cultural citizenship from which crises of belonging arise? How do their narrative negotiations of those crises inform modernist practice and modernity, then and now? The "N/native" moves between "born in" and "first in" in the context of the modern nation-state. In the dominant discourses of post-imperial as well as de-colonizing nations, "Native" is relegated to Time (static or fetishized through nostalgia and romance). History is envisioned as active and contoured, associated with motion and progress, which the "native" inhabits and for whom citizenship is a political as well as a temporal attribute. The six authors' identities as Native, settler, indigenous, immigrant, or native-citizen, are formed from their gendered, racialized, and classed locations in their respective nations. Each author negotiates the intertwined strands of Time and History by mobilizing the "N/native" to reclaim citizenship (cultural-political belonging). This study reveals how their lineage, connections to land, experiences in learning (education), and their labor generate their narratives. The juxtaposition of the six writers keeps in focus the asymmetries in their responses to their times, and illustrates how relevant women's/feminist production were, and are in today's versions of the same urgent debates about heightened nativisms and nationalisms