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Mahadevi Varma was one of the leading poets of the romantic movement in Hindi poetry during the 1920s and 30s. She was also a writer of prose sketches, a translator of Sanskrit, and a literary theorist. This study combines intellectual history, biography, and literary criticism to create a vivid portrait of this important writer and her era.
Mirabai, an iconic sixteenth-century Indian poet-saint, is renowned for her unwavering love of God, her disregard for social hierarchies and gendered notions of honor and shame, and her challenge to familial, feudal, and religious authorities. Defying attempts to constrain and even kill her, she could not be silenced. Though verifiable facts regarding her life are few, her fame spread across social, linguistic, and religious boundaries, and stories about her multiplied across the subcontinent and the centuries. In Mirabai, Nancy M. Martin traces the story of this immensely popular Indian saint from the earliest manuscript references to her through colonial and nationalist developments to sch...
This collection, a part of Katha Studies in Culture and Translation Series, brings to the reader 11 incisive and insightful essays on the plight of the Indian woman. Recipient of the Padma Bhushan and Bharatiya Jnanpith Award, Mahadevi Varma is a celebrated Hindi poet. These essays offer a host of perspectives on the circumstantial obligations of Indian women.
The essays collected in this Reader represent some of Mahadevi Varma's most famous writings on the "woman question" in India. The collection also includes an introduction to her life, with biographical notes, an analysis of her importance in the field of Hindi letters, as well as a selection of her poems. The editor has included essays that reflect not only Mahadevi's ideas about the place of women in the home and the world during the nationalist period in India, but also articles that reveal her dreams and hopes for the future (and the past) of the Hindi-Urdu language. While many of these essays were written during the 1920s and 1930s when Mahadevi served as editor for the literary journal Chand, some of them appear to have been written much later, after India gained independence. The translators have tried to remain faithful to the Hindi, often keeping the syntax of the Hindi original.
Considers the meaning and nature of life history narrative in India.
Female Infanticide in India is a theoretical and discursive intervention in the field of postcolonial feminist theory. It focuses on the devaluation of women through an examination of the practice of female infanticide in colonial India and the reemergence of this practice in the form of femicide (selective killing of female fetuses) in postcolonial India. The authors argue that femicide is seen as part of the continuum of violence on, and devaluation of, the postcolonial girl-child and woman. In order to fully understand the material and discursive practices through which the limited and localized crime of female infanticide in colonial India became a generalized practice of femicide in postcolonial India, the authors closely examine the progressivist British-colonial history of the discovery, reform, and eradication of the practice of female infanticide. Contemporary tactics of resistance are offered in the closing chapters.
Now available in English for the first time, Mahadevi's poignant memoir-tales bring to life the degrading experiences of the faceless and nameless multitudes. Whether it is Binda, the lonely orphan girl victimized by her stepmother; Bhabi, the emotionally and physically abused child widow barred from any contact with the outside world; or Sabiya, the poor sweeper woman deserted by her husband shortly before the birth of their child, the subjects of Mahadevi's memoir convey her universalist vision to resurrect the inner dignity of "these wounded and mauled lives". Through her recollective tales, Mahadevi connects the exploitation of her characters with the subjugation of all women, indeed of all oppressed people. Her compelling memoir transcends the borders of culture and time.
An engaging and informative exploration of four women poets writing in Hindi and Urdu over the course of the twentieth century in India and Pakistan. Anantharam follows the authors and their works, as both countries undergo profound political and social transformations. The book tells of how these women forge solidarities with women from different, castes, classes, and religions through their poetry.
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.