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Literature of Colonial South Asia: A Digital Archive Main Menu Author Profiles Profiles of authors whose works are featured on this site Chronological List Of All Texts On This Site Indian Travel Writers in the West: the Colonial Period (1794-1947) Texts by Indian or South Asian Writers Who Visited England, Ireland, Canada, and the United States during the Colonial Period Fiction by Western Women in Colonial India Overview and links to Fiction by Western Women in British India Literature of the 1857 Mutiny / 1857 Rebellion Literature relating to the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny Representations of Illness and Famine Literature representing various famines occurring in South Asia between 1850-1930 Writers of the Bengal Renaissance: an Overview Interracial Romance and Multi-racial Anglo-Indian Community Writings that feature cross-racial romance or mixed race people

South Asian Women Writers (1870-1930)

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This collection features a number of writings by South Asian women in British colonial India.

First, one might note that in comparison to Western women writing about India, there are fewer authors on this list than there ought to be! Gender biases within South Asian families often led to young women remaining uneducated, meaning that most Indian women during the British colonial era were illiterate. Even those who did receive educations often struggled for full professional parity with their male peers (Many of these barriers were also of course in place in England as well: Cornelia Sorabji had to wait 25 years after studying Law at Oxford to receive her formal degree as a Barrister.)

One interesting pattern with the list of Indian women whose works we have been collecting is that many of them grew up in families of Christian converts, or converted themselves. This is true for Cornelia Sorabji (her father was born a Parsi but converted), Pandita Ramabai (who converted as a young adult), and Krupabai Sattianadhan.

A second pattern to note might be that two of the women whose works are collected here died quite young of tuberculosis: Krupabai Sattianadhan and Toru Dutt both fell victim to the disease; one can only speculate what they might have gone on to write had they lived longer.

Finally, it's striking that several of the women whose works are included here were not simply interested in careers as "writers"; they were active reformers who built important institutions, some of which persist to this day (Rokeya Hossein founded a school for girls; Pandita Ramabai founded a school for child widows, Shardi Sadan; Cornelia Sorabji was a tireless reformer and advocate for women; Sarojini Naidu became quite active in the nationalist movement and joined the Indian National Congress; beginning in 1941, she spent 21 months in prison for her participation in the Quit India movement).

Some of these names may be familiar to readers. Cornelia Sorabji, for example, achieved considerable success and was highly visible in her time, as the first Indian woman to be granted a law degree, and because of her extensive social and reform oriented work on behalf of Indian women. (Among other things, she frequently represented Purdahnashins -- women who were 'behind Purdah' [women living in segregation, who did not generally appear in public] -- in questions of property and civil law.) Sorabji wrote many books, though most were nonfiction.

Her first book, a collection of short stories called Love and Life Behind the Purdah (1901) is in our collection, as are detailed summaries of the stories.
We also have a version of her 1918 book Sun Babies: Studies in Colour here (first published as Sun-Babies: Studies in the Child-Life of India in 1904). There is also a detailed summary of the book here.
We also have an edition of her 1934 memoir, India Calling, where she describes her hybrid upbringing -- with her family's Parsi heritage but Christian identity and her legal career, with many colorful accounts of representing poor women in legal cases in Princely states. She also expresses her ambivalence about the Indian nationalist movement; in contrast to Sarojini Naidu (described below), Sorabji never joined the Indian National Congress, and remained supportive of the idea of British rule in India throughout the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. The full text of the memoir is here, and a detailed summary of it is here.

Sarojini Naidu was also quite prominent in her time, though in recent years her work has received less attention from scholars than it likely deserves. Her first book of lyric poetry, The Golden Threshold, was published in London in 1905 -- before Tagore's Gitanjali -- and contained a portrait of the author by W.B. Yeats. Another book of poetry, The Bird of Time (1912), shows greater maturity and engagement with modern, urban life in India. It also contains a few poems with an emerging nationalist sensibility. The embrace of socially engaged poetry comes into full flower with Naidu's third book, The Broken Wing (1917). That latter collection contained a poem honoring Indian soldiers who fought for the British in World War I, as well as a poem dedicated to Mohammed Ali Jinnah ("Awake!"), which Naidu recited at the meeting of the Indian National Congress in 1915. There is also a poem dedicated to M.K. Gandhi (not yet "Mahatma"). After 1917, with her increasingly direct involvement in the activities of the Indian National Congress, Naidu published less poetry, though she came to play a key role in the protest and organizing activities of the Indian nationalist movement.

More recently, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's Sultana's Dream -- a feminist utopia -- has been rediscovered, becoming a celebrated and widely read text, often assigned as an early instance of a feminist utopia. (The conceit of Sultana's Dream is a reverse Purdah -- where men are forced to live in a segregated part of the household [the 'Mardana']. Hossain also explores and challenges many misogynist stereotypes and tropes (I.e., men have bigger brains so they must be more intelligent). Hossain also wrote a good number of other works of literature, most of them in Bengali. Some, like Padmarag, have been translated into English and are now receiving attention and interest from scholars.

Pandita Ramabai is a well-known feminist reformer, and relevant to this collection, though she only wrote nonfiction. After many of her family members died during the Madras famine of 1876-78, she and her brother found their way to Calcutta. There she was noticed by scholars and drawn into contact with Christian missionaries. The missionaries arranged for her to be sent to England, where she formally converted to Christianity. After a brief stay in England, Ramabai toured the United States extensively before returning to Maharashtra to start a school and social support network of widowed women. Several of her texts are included in our collection. Also see our detailed author profile of Pandita Ramabai here.

And readers may also be familiar with Toru Dutt, a poet who was largely raised in England and France. She published quite a bit in a life cut short by tuberculosis. We have Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan in our collection.

However, there are some other writers whose works will be featured here who may be less familiar. One such is Krupabai Satthianadhan, who grew up as a Christian in southern India after parents had converted. Though initially she was not formally enrolled in school, she benefited from the support of a brother who supervised her education. Her novel Saguna, A Story of Native Christian Life is thought to be essentially an autobiography; see a detailed summary of it here.

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Literature of Colonial South Asia: A Digital Archive Amardeep Singh
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