Five Novellas (By Women Writers)

$46
Item Code: IDK919
Publisher: Oxford University Press, New Delhi
Author: Nabane eta Dev Sen, Mrinal Pande, Vaidehi, B.M. Zuhara, and Saniya
Edition: 2008
ISBN: 0195697022
Pages: 334
Cover: Hardcover
Other Details 9.0"X 5.9"
Fully insured
Fully insured
Shipped to 153 countries
Shipped to 153 countries
More than 1M+ customers worldwide
More than 1M+ customers worldwide
100% Made in India
100% Made in India
23 years in business
23 years in business
Book Description
From The Jacket
Bringing together five novellas written by five Indian women writers in five languages, this volume explores the complex and multi-layered world of women's writing in India. Written by Nabaneeta Dev Sen in Bengali, Mrinal Pande in Hindi, Vaidehi in Kannada, B.M. Zuhara In Malayalam, and by Saniya in Marathi, these novellas reflect the universal themes of loneliness, loss of love, childhood, and melancholy and aging. Presented for the first time in translation, they reveal with candour and spirit the experience of being a woman in contemporary Indian society.

Nabaneeta Dev Sen's Defying winter is a series of cross- cutting narratives of woman living in an old age home. While Mrinal Pande's A Woman's Farwell Song explores the mind of an again matriarch, Vaidehi's Temple-Fair evokes bittersweet memories of life in simpler times. Moonlight by B.M. Zuhara reveals the mindscape of a woman whose unremarkable married life stands in stark contrast to her glorious childhood, Finally, Saniya's Thereafter is an unsentimental look at a woman who finds the strength to life on her own finds the strength to live on her own terms after her husband abandons her.

Translated by Tutun Mukherejee, Mrinal Pande, Nayana Kashyap, Vanajam Ravindran, and Maya Pandit, this volume also includes an insightful introduction by feminist historian Uma Chakravarti.

Five Novellas by Woman Writers will be of value not only to students and teachers of modern Indian literature, gender studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies, but also to general readers interested in regional Indian literature in translation.

Publisher's Note
Till very recently much of the world's literature was dominated by a canon that downplayed women's writing. In recent year's the counter-canons that have emerged as a result of this exclusion have helped to establish women's writing in mainstream culture. The first of its kind, this volume showcases the works, of five leading Indian women writers: Nabaneeta Dev Sen in Bengali, Mrinal Pande in Hindi, Vaidehi in Kannada, B.M. Zuhara in Malayalam, and Saniya in Marathi.

Written within the last quarter century, the selected novellas focus on the experiences of women in India. Choosing the novella over the novel or the short story for anthologizing may not be obvious: the absence of the restraints of short fiction and the extended challenges of the novel afford the kind of freedom essential to convey the many silences in the long history of women's creative writing in India and the range of artistic consciousness it reflects.

This project was initiated by Mini Krishnan, who worked on getting the right mix of novellas and the appropriate translators.

Five Novellas by Women Writers is a tribute to women's literature in India , which has evolved over the years to show common experiences, a range of shared emotions, and a sense of camaraderie that question the different masks of patriarchy.

I was about seventeen and had just finished schools when I discovered the joys of reading. In those days – this was in the late 1950s – there were not too many other 'distractions' – no TV, with a hundred channels, not even tape recorders, CDs or DVDs, and of course, no malls to hang out in. there was cinema. Of this I had more than my fair share: one could catch morning shows of old movies at half rates, and find some means of making to the new releases, either with friends, or by persuading generous aunts to take you along. But reading, unlike the cinema, did not cost much. Desperately short of money (I was one of seven children and my father was trying to give us a good education on a meagre pension), I nevertheless had a bicycle; everybody rode around in Bangalore those days to get from one place to the other, and so I could access all the existing libraries – the famous public library in Cubbon Park, the USIS library which had a few restriction but allowed you to take books home, as did the British Council Library when that opened, all without a user fee. Thus books became my entry into the space of creativity, into a variegated and rich world of experience, feeling, and dramatic intensity. I read everything that caught my attention – biographies ( I was committed history student), political accounts, art books, travelogues, but above all, fiction. And through I was eclectic in my taste in books – reading, for example, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill, William Saroyan's Dear baby, J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zoey, Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night (many of these books were made into films later and then enjoyed in that form), and other such works that my student in Miranda House (where I later taught) had scarcely even heard of in the 1990s – I developed a particular interest in narratives located in India… almost a fascination which meant that however good, mediocre, or unrealistic I thought a book was, I would read it till the end.

As I look back at those days, it is clear to me that this was my special way of accessing regions, classes, and people that were normally not part of my world. And through my friends who were also reading or listening to accounts of books, I became aware of literatures in other languages – Kannada, Hindi, Bangla, Tamil, and Malayalam – and came to read many books in translation. I do not remember being hampered by arguments about the inevitable losses in translation, or of how the authenticity of the original could never be captured in translation; if you found a translation of a book in any of the languages that you could read, you just got hold of the book and proceeded to dig into it. I read classics such as Marali Mannige and Chamana Dudi Translated from Kannada; Chemeen, Devdas, Biraj Bahu, and Srikanta Translated from Bangla; and almost all the works of Premchand, Agyeya, and Phanishwarnath Renu in their original Hindi.

Over the years, reading became a way of bonding, a way being led into fields that may have passed you by had someone not brought them to your notice, and it became an intrinsic part of my friendships. I cannot now think of friends without remembering what they suggested I should read and what, in turn, I suggested they should read; for example, I discovered Doris Lessing through a feminist friend, and then acquired Lessing's entire oeuvre because of the effort my brother put in by tramping the pavements of Bombay, scouring secondhand bookshops for her works (I could have written her Nobel prize summary for the newspapers!). Another deeply political friend introduced me to the works of Lilian Hellman, which he possessed and which I persuaded him to give me forever so that I could re-read them whenever I wanted; other have sent me books from across the world if they were too expensive or too difficult for me to acquire locally.

But, you might well ask, what does my personal history of reading have to do with my introduction to this collection of novellas? Is it not an unnecessary digression? My answer is that here I am trying to capture the 'secret' pleasure of reading that I have experienced, perhaps especially so as a young woman growing up in a middle class world and refusing to be part of the normal circumscriptions of what one can do, and should or should not do. And in this I am not alone. Reading has for many women been an escape, almost subversive in its appeal; I remember my mother using all the days spent in hospital following her deliveries to read everything she could get hold of from the hospital library; this was an act that shut us out made us feel almost resentful as we felt abandoned at home while she seemed to be enjoying herself in the hospital! Now, however, it makes perfect sense to me as whenever I get the chance, I read almost non-stop till I get to the end of a novel, and if the novel is too long, I cheat the end before I complete reading it in the normal course! It is the subversive, dangerous quality of women who read that was widely recognized and which led Kalighat painters to parody it in their drawings of sleeveless-bloused women immersed in novels – that immoral genre of writing which diverted them for their domestic responsibilities – and in women's journals like Saraswati and Chand published from Uttar Pradesh (UP) during the first half of the twentieth century.

Reading practices are as important as women's writing indeed, the latter would not exists without the former and need to explore these practices in the context of women as much as we need to unravel the meanings of women's writing. Readers are important – writers would not exits as writes without them; and while writers may write to express themselves, giving form to their creativity, readers read for a variety of reasons–to entertain themselves, to escape from the everyday world they live, in and also to expand their horizons by entering a world of emotion, sentiment, and images. In a sense, readers read to re-live their own lives metaphorical, sometimes differently, and therein lies both the power and the danger of reading, something that has led to the novel being seen as a peculiarly female form and also condemnable as such, as Terry Lovell has argued in her book Consuming Fiction, a feminist analysis of the emergence of new genres of writing from the eighteenth century onwards in England. The production and consumption of the noval was, in fact, closely linked to women–both as its producers and as its major consumers. Novel reading was attacked in literary journals as a 'dangerous' pastime and the fears it engendered were akin to contemporary fears about TV viewing. Young women were regarded as particularly risk-prone in reading novels, and the moral critique of the novel highlighted the role of women in its production and consumption. A journal in 1773 said: 'This Brach of literary trade appears now to be almost engrossed by the ladies,' neatly combining the double slur against the novel. The fact that it is ladies who are engrossed in it confirms its literary worthlessness. As Lovell (1987) points out:

The proportion of readers who were may have been exaggerated, yet there can be no doubt that women as readers created a level of demand which acted a major stimulant to the fiction industry from the very First. Those who attacked the novel as poor literature, as well as those who drew attention to its moral dangers were like influenced by the belief that the novel was, in some sense, a feminine form, one particularly adapted to women's interest both as writers and as readers…[since] the novel was a form without any established tradition it was regarded as a genre that anyone could have a try at. The fact that women succeeded in this form merely confirmed its intrinsic lack of seriousness…. They easy seductive pleasures of novel reading would, it was feared, drive out good literature which required greater effort on the part of the reader (pp. 9-10).

Alarmists calculated the amounts of time wasted by women in novel reading which, even at a moderate two hours a day, would make for an 'awful' number of years of wasted time that was precious, and would make women unfit for their lives as wives and mothers. The unfortunate thing is that this particular aspects has not been seriously examined. Indeed, in India, except for the work of A.R. Venkatachallapathy, there has not, to my knowledge, been much work on this. We have yet to seriously examine the reading practices of men and women in India even through we have a fairly long history of writing, reading, and publishing from the nineteenth century on wards. These circuits need to be outlined more fully to provide a context fore women's writing in India.

Contents

Publisher's Notevii
Introductionix
Nabaneeta Dev Sen Defying Winter (Translated By Tutun Mukherjee)1
Nrinal Pande A Women's Fareweel Song (Translated By The Author)79
Vaidehi Temple-Fair (Translated By Nayana Kashyap)105
B.M. Zuhara Moonlight (translated By Vanajam Ravindran)167
Saniya Thereafter (Translated By Maya Pandit)225
Notes on Translation305

Frequently Asked Questions
  • Q. What locations do you deliver to ?
    A. Exotic India delivers orders to all countries having diplomatic relations with India.
  • Q. Do you offer free shipping ?
    A. Exotic India offers free shipping on all orders of value of $30 USD or more.
  • Q. Can I return the book?
    A. All returns must be postmarked within seven (7) days of the delivery date. All returned items must be in new and unused condition, with all original tags and labels attached. To know more please view our return policy
  • Q. Do you offer express shipping ?
    A. Yes, we do have a chargeable express shipping facility available. You can select express shipping while checking out on the website.
  • Q. I accidentally entered wrong delivery address, can I change the address ?
    A. Delivery addresses can only be changed only incase the order has not been shipped yet. Incase of an address change, you can reach us at help@exoticindia.com
  • Q. How do I track my order ?
    A. You can track your orders simply entering your order number through here or through your past orders if you are signed in on the website.
  • Q. How can I cancel an order ?
    A. An order can only be cancelled if it has not been shipped. To cancel an order, kindly reach out to us through help@exoticindia.com.
Add a review
Have A Question

For privacy concerns, please view our Privacy Policy