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A Genre of Her Own makes a claim for feminist literary beginnings in life narratives during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in India. It demonstrates a range of aesthetic intonations and self-determinations by women in varied genres including pamphlets, letters, travelogues, essays, autobiographies and novels. Paying close attention to style and intentionality in select pioneering texts, this study traces complex affective notes such as pride, despair, wit, lament, nostalgia, anger, hope and celebration. As active participants in the print culture of their times, the writers were often self-reflexive about their overlapping identities as writer and woman, and actively sought to create a full-fledged gendered formalism in conversation with the normatively male literary milieu. The writers overtly engage with the centrality of writing, the dangers and secrecies involved, the precise global horizons that the textual mode access-of marriage and motherhood, domestic labour and caretaking, romance and sexuality, public service and intellectual prowess, illness and aging, religious quests and scrambles for livelihood, and an everyday effervescence of humour and desire. It is within these lived and recollected perspectives that this study is anchored, especially as they emerge, coalesce, and evolve over time through morphing sites of literary production.
List of contents
Note Introduction: Contravention of Beginnings 1 The Pamphleteer, the Letter-Writer and the Essayist
The vitality of just anger: Tarabai Shinde's
Stri-Purush Tulana (1882)
Letters for an eavesdropping public ear: Anandibai Joshee's letters (1883 - 1884)
Assertions, contradictions and speaking of law: Rukhmabai's "Reply" (1887)
2 The Memoirist, the Dramatist and the Novelist
The interlocutor of dreams: Rashsundari Debi's
Amar Jiban (1897)
A literary staging of operatic interiorities: Binodini Dasi's
Amar Katha (1912)
The novelty of romancing in prose: Swarnakumari Debi Ghosal's
Kahake (1898)
3 The Elegist, the Diaryist and the Traveloguer
Elegiac landscape for the unruly body: Krupabai Satthianadhan's
Saguna (1888)
Journaling for an audience of sisters: Atiya Fyzee's
Zamana-i-Tahsil (1921)
All roads and words lead to the King: Dosebai Cowasjee Jessawalla's
The Story of My Life (1911)
Conclusion: The Poet and the Chorus Savitribai Phule's
Kavya Phule (1854), with Sunity Devee, Parvatibai Athavale and Haimabati Sen
Notes Bibliography Index About the Author
About the author
Gayathri Prabhu is a Professor at the Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), Karnataka, India. Her professional experience of over ten years in film and television includes assisting in direction and screenwriting. She is the author of
Vetaal and Vikram (2019),
If I Had to Tell It Again (2017),
The Untitled (2016),
Birdswim Fishfly (2006) and
Maya (2003). She has published in
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature,
Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication,
Transnational Literature and
Ecloga.
