It is a universally acknowledged fact that there is a discernible overt or covert ‘difference’ between the writing of men and that of women. Initially, after women became literate and thereafter educated, they began writing about their own lives as lived histories, recording the micro-politics of daily living in their memoirs, diaries and letters. That women would opt for life-writing or autobiographies as the preferred literary genre to any other was inevitable according to Virginia Woolf, as women’s lives were ones of confinement within the domestic. Basic education and very little opportunity to travel made women writers concentrate on domestic politics, which emerged as the central discourse in their literary writing. But late nineteenth century onward, women were exposed to both critical and creative reading material and in some degree to the public domain, which enriched and liberated their minds. So Woolf commented that women were eventually able to write as creative artists rather than diarists, and that ‘reading and criticism may have given her a wider range, a greater subtlety. The impulse towards autobiography may be spent. She may be beginning to use writing as an art, not as a method of self-expression’ (Woolf 86).
The book includes ten outstanding essays that showcase known and not-so-known texts by women writers. The heterogeneous texts represent a diverse cross-section of Indian society located at different places and times. The juxtaposition of the macro historical context and the micro life histories of women represented in this volume comprises ‘a Mughal princess, a famous courtesan from Hyderabad, an ascetic from a minor sect in Punjab, a Bengali housewife, a singer from Bombay’s Bohra community, an Urdu novelist from north India, an educationist from Hyderabad, several Indian and Pakistani novelists, and even female impersonators in colonial Indian theatre.’
This apparently disparate selection of women life-writers, spanning a period of over four hundred years, breaks free from the clichéd stereotype of mostly nineteenth and early twentieth century urban, middle-class women as first generation learners, who recorded their life experiences in memoirs, diaries, letters and autobiographies. The striking exception in this volume is the inclusion of novels and verse as autobiographical tracts. The editors argue that women’s writing grew out of lived experience and they used writing as a medium of self-expression, catharsis and confession. Therefore, breaking free from the western strait- jacketed traditional definition of autobiography, South Asian women’s narratives critiqued in this volume deconstruct the known contours of autobiographical writing, through the robust inclusion of mixed-genre life writing, from poems, songs and letters to diaries, memoirs and novels.