Edited by K. Lalitha and Susie Tharu

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.

Reviews:

“When you read the riches within these covers, you’ll know that a Western male bias has left all of us culturally deprived. No library or school or caring reader should be without this volume.” —Gloria Steinem, author of My Life on the Road

“This splendid anthology makes visible for the first time the contours of a veritable subcontinent of women writing. The selections are wise and revealing; the introduction, meticulous and seminal. It should establish once and for all that in the study of Indian cultural history the importance of gender, far from being marginal, is profoundly structural.” —C.M. Naim, founding editor of Journal of South Asian Literature

“This volume is remarkable for the extensive research that has unearthed hitherto unknown texts, the sensitive translations, and the informative, analytical, and elegantly written introductions to each section. Without simplifying the complexity and heterogeneity of India, this anthology makes its literature accessible even to those outside its culture. The rich and diverse material—mystical and earthy, joyous and sad, serious and funny—opens out a densely textured, vibrant world that does not always confirm Western notions of Indian women.” —Meenakshi Mukherjee, author of The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English

“This rich and various collection of women’s voices from different South Asian eras, languages, and social conditions is much more than a dutiful supplement to an imaginary library of world literature. Responding to American feminist literary theory as well as the long history of British interpretations of Indian culture, Women Writing in India is a bold critical statement and a work of original and far-ranging discovery.” —David Lelyveld, author of Aligarh’s First Generation

ISBN-13: 978-0-19-563195-1

Published first by The Feminist Press, New York (1991). Oxford University Press later published it in 1993. Their 10th edition was published in 2007.