This book is an alternative account of literary beginnings in modern India through women's writings

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02-07-2025

'If an unskilled potter makes a lovely pot of his imagination, and if it becomes crooked while drying or heating in the kiln, he still puts it for sale in the market. Similarly, I have written this book to the best of my insufficient ability and placed it before you.'
In this foreword to her first novel, Kashibai Kanitkar (1861–1948) dons the unassuming persona of 'an unskilled potter' to highlight two interconnected challenges – the toil of turning the manuscript into a book, and the trial of new authorship. The novel, Rangarao, began to appear in instalments in the Marathi magazine Manoranjanani Nibandha-chandrika in 1886 and stayed incomplete when the magazine closed down. Kanitkar managed to complete the novel over a decade later in 1898, but would not be able to publish it till 1903.
The author explains the delay: 'Both the author and the owners of the printing press have suffered severe domestic problems, which is why the book is being placed before readers in this form. I am sorry about this but am unable to make amends.' Kashibai Kanitkar laces her apology about the unexplained domestic troubles with humour, submitting that any reader who takes upon the task of criticising her book or finding errors would find themselves with 'errata that would make a book of 800 pages, while the original [Kanitkar's novel] has only 400'.
Kashibai Kanitkar actively worked towards building a body of work that included a posthumous biography of a contemporary, a collection of short stories, several essays as well as translations. In other words, we have a literary enterprise: an oeuvre that represents one author's strivings and vision but also extends a claim to a collective output – other writers, other women. At hand is thus a literary-historical moment of authors who are not isolated voices but remain interconnected in their reflexivity, in their measure and (uneven) participatory engagement with each other, as well as their purported audience – predominantly female – both within the diegetic space of the text and beyond.
The growing presence and consistent influence of print culture in India induced a significant output of printed texts in English and native Indian languages in the 19th century. The proliferation of printers and printed material took place in simultaneous engagement with a growing literate audience, and the corpus of printed material continued to be predominantly religious or polemical in nature (driven by social reform motivations, such as pamphlets propagating widow remarriage). This ensured the centrality of print for public debates around the 'women's question' even as literary texts by women began to receive increasing public attention and appreciation from the mid-19th century.
Around the 1890s, a noticeable acceleration and close succession of publications by women can be said to form distinctive literary constellations. Over the next four decades, a combination of factors contributed to a growing literary tradition, 'a feminist inheritance more powerful and complex, but at the same time more troubling, than narratives of suppression and release might allow us to suspect'. In fact, an elucidation could be offered for the inauguration of a distinct clustering of literary creativity, with its most delineated enunciation in the autobiographical frame – the 'I' that speaks to/of its literariness (of voice, structure, device, subtext) and demonstrates its confidence in the immediacy and reliability of the life narrative.
The writers and texts studied in this book attempt varied formulations of the experiential first-person voice, either through shorter compositions (essays, letters, speeches), biographical studies, book-length autobiographies or even autobiographical fiction. The disparate backgrounds and inclinations of these writers defy easy classifications, offering instead a tapestry of revelations: an ardent student of both biomedicine and English literature (Krupabai Satthianadhan), a woman in her seventies who sets off to travel the world (Dosebai Cowasjee Jessawalla), the daughter of a social reformer who becomes a princess (Sunity Devee), a celebrated stage actress in Calcutta (Binodini Dasi), the first woman from India to complete her law education in England (Cornelia Sorabjee), a writer who strives for literary visibility in a celebrated family of writers (Swarnakumari Debi Ghosal), a young woman whose travelogues carry an unsaid tale of passion and failure (Atiya Fyzee), an educator of unprecedented social insurgency whose also seeks reform in poetry (Savitribai Phule) and so on.
Several of these writers are self-taught, while others benefited from structured institutional education, but the shared commitment was to the written and the published word. Publishing meant the inevitability of public response, though this was more likely to invite censure rather than celebration for the author. The texts selected for study here offer two explicit assertions about narrative voice: firstly, a claim to writing as an act and an identity, and secondly, the gendering of both act and identity by the reflexive references to the author being a woman. For the first time, both personae – I am a writer and I am a woman – were being claimed in the Indian public sphere in a manner that was desirable and exciting, in that it had almost no precedence.