Mothering India

Description

Mothering India addresses this lack and concentrates on early Indian women's fiction written between 1890 and 1947. It not only evaluates the influence of women authors on the rise of IWE, but also explores how they reassessed and challenged stereotypes about womanhood in India, adding their voice to the larger debate about social reform legislations on women's rights. Moreover, in choosing to write in the colonizer's language, they seized the attention of a much wider international readership. In wielding their pens, these trendsetting women stepped into the literary landscape as 'speaking subjects', refusing the passivity of being 'spoken-of objects', and thereby 'mothering' India by redefining her image.

About the Author

Susmita Roye is an associate professor of English at Delaware State University. Her articles have been published in such journals as English Studies, Callaloo, Kunapipi, and South Asian Research. She has also contributed to numerous volumes of essays, including Emerging Voices: Essays and Interviews of South Asian Women Writers, Critical Anthology on Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, Postcolonial Indian Fiction in English and Masculinity, and Subaltern Vision: A Study in Postcolonial Indian English Text, and has written entries for encyclopedias, including General Themes in Literature.

Table of contents

Timeline
Introduction: Mothering India
Burning Matters: Sati
Sin of Survival: Widow
Young Shoulders, Mighty Responsibilities: Child-Wife
Pain of Privacy: Purdahnashin
New Ideal Womanhood: Bharatiya Nari
Afterword: Legacy of Mother India
Appendix I: Brief Biographical Information on the Writers discussed in this Book
Appendix II: Glossary
Bibliography