From Publishers Weekly
While the introduction's history of feminist literary criticism is often tangential, with its rehashings of Kate Millet's Sexual Politics and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic , the selections themselves (derived from 10 regional languages and English) and the editors' accompanying essays give valuable insight into 2500 years of daily life on the subcontinent, subtleties of caste and religion, and the legacies of language from pre-Aryan through the Vedic age, the Mughal empire, up to the penultimate days of the Raj. The literary quality of many of the writers, such as Swarnakumari Devi (once a leading figure in modern Bengali literature but later eclipsed by her younger brother, Rabindranath Tagore), is notable. While Tharu, an English teacher at the Central Institute for English and Foreign Languages in Hyderabad, and Lalita, a political scientist, present a number of obscure writers, they never yield to the inaccessible. Few women could be more remote from us than Sumangalamata, a 6th century B.C. Buddhist nun, but still her sentiment is familiar: "A woman well set free! How free I am, / How wonderfully free, from kitchen drudgery. / Free from the harsh grip of hunger, / And from empty cooking pots, / Free too of that unscrupulous man."
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Book Description
Anita Desai, writing in the New York Review of Books, called the publication of these two volumes, a landmark . . . revolutionary . . . presents a view of India in life and history never coherently put together before." 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 I: ! 600 B.C. TO THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY was hailed as a "monumental achievement by Library Journal. It includes songs by Buddhist nuns, testimonies of medieval rebel poets and court historians, and the voices of more than 60 other writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Among the diverse selections are a rare early essay by an untouchable woman; an account by the first feminist historian; and a selection from the first novel written in English by an Indian woman. 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 womens experiences in and responses to society, politics, desire, marriage, procreation, aging, and death.