In contemporary Indian literature, modern sensibility could only assert itself through a strong denunciation of what has been considered traditional, of what has been regarded as sacred. Without the strong note of iconoclasm, a writer could not claim to be modern in any meaningful sense.
Like Scent of Wet Earth in August, Feryal Ali Gauhar’s second novel, No Space for Further Burials, began as an idea for a film. It was to be based on the aftermath of the 1989 Soviet pullout from Afghanistan and the three-year war between the Serbians and Bosnians that began in 1992.
By the early nineteenth century the Urdu language had perfected and polished itself to such a sheen that it shone like burnished gold. It had honed its vocabulary to express the noblest emotions and refined its syntax to convey the most complicated expressions with ease and finesse. As a language, it had come of age.
Leela Gandhi’s Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship is a quintessentially Gandhian essay, and not simply because she is a Gandhi. It is Gandhian in its ethical surplus, in making a religion out of morality.
The core of Playing with Fire is formed by the English version of the Hindustani Sangtin Yatra (2004), a moving and powerful reflection by seven women, village-level workers and activists, on their fraught lives and work in Sitapur district, in the Awadh region of Uttar Pradesh.
An important task for all those interested in tracking the trajectory of Women’s Studies in India would be to undertake a review of the many different discourses on women generated by feminist scholarship, women’s activism and the institutionalization of Women’s Studies.