summary of "Women Writing the Nation" by Susie Tharu & K.Lalitha

Women Writing the Nation

Susie Tharu & K.Lalitha

The essay “Women Writing the Nation” is an extract from the introduction of the book titled The Twentieth Century: Women Writing the Nation written by Susie Tharu & K.Lalitha. They talk about the Indian women writing, its theme and style especially after independence. The introduction part advises the readers to read women writing against the conventional methods in order to understand the challenges undergone by the women writers.

The essay begins by stating the decades 1940s and 1950s concluded the long and unhappy period of imperial domination. Moreover those decades presented the initiation of new authorities and hence new skills were circulated among the Indians. It resulted in the establishment of imaginative geography of India. Such established notions/ skills were extended and reworked in the second half of the twentieth century. At present people expect a feminist literary history to project the forces/struggles the women writers underwent to read and write literary texts during their hard times instead of giving it as repetition of rebellious act or as a dream to win. They expect the feminist literary history to present a different approach by highlighting the women writers’ conflicts in the then determined world and about women’s position. Such history should read literary texts to point out the real world’s task, rather focusing upon the aesthetic effects. In addition the writers want the feminist literary history to present schemes of the nation by reading such texts in unconventional way. Thus women’s writing enables the readers to know a history of feminist initiatives, its situations.  Such reading will reveal a literary text as a source of information about the debate, protest and negotiation which are closely connected to women in each historical moment.

The narratives of women across the nation contribute powerful articulation through which the world is recreated. The book The Twentieth Century: Women Writing the Nation focuses on three major themes:  

1.     Questions the emergence of caste and communalism during Swadeshi Strand                  of the Nationalist Movement

2.     Raises the issue of gender and class in the context of the Progressive Writer’s Associations

3.     Women’s movement of the 1920’s and 1930’s which is shaped by the liberal electoralism.

By dwelling on these three major themes, the work attempts to understand gender and nation –in process, to provide the narrative and analytical context especially to the works from the 1970’s, the third phase of the modern women’s movement. The authors believe that such reading will illustrate the construction of gender. Moreover they aim to bring out the transformation of themes and languages of the women writing in the cultural politics of each period. It enables the readers to understand the difficulties and challenges inherited by the women writers of the 1970's.