Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present, V: 600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century

While the introduction's history of feminist literary criticism is often tangential, with its rehashings of Kate Millet's Sexual Politics and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic , the selections themselves (derived from 10 regional languages and English) and the editors' accompanying essays give valuable insight into 2500 years of daily life on the subcontinent, subtleties of caste and religion, and the legacies of language from pre-Aryan through the Vedic age, the Mughal empire, up to the penultimate days of the Raj. The literary quality of many of the writers, such as Swarnakumari Devi (once a leading figure in modern Bengali literature but later eclipsed by her younger brother, Rabindranath Tagore), is notable. While Tharu, an English teacher at the Central Institute for English and Foreign Languages in Hyderabad, and Lalita, a political scientist, present a number of obscure writers, they never yield to the inaccessible. Few women could be more remote from us than Sumangalamata, a 6th century B.C. Buddhist nun, but still her sentiment is familiar: ``A woman well set free! How free I am, / How wonderfully free, from kitchen drudgery. / Free from the harsh grip of hunger, / And from empty cooking pots, / Free too of that unscrupulous man.'' (Feb.)