Emerging South Asian Women Writers

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Illustrations

Figure 1. Nisma Zaman, Hanan as Bengali/Indian
from the Ethnic Ambiguity series, 1992. C-print, 11 in. × 14 in.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 2. Nisma Zaman, Hanan as Arab from the
Ethnic Ambiguity series, 1992. C-print, 11 in. × 14 in.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 3. Yasmine Gooneratne. Photo by Effy Alexakis.

Figure 4. Susan Visvanathan. ← xi | xii →

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Acknowledgments

We express sincere appreciation to those who have assisted in the publication of this volume. First and foremost, we thank the authors for their contributions and for their patience as we have worked on this book. We are also grateful to international scholars who have participated in the peer review process and who have provided useful feedback for some of the essays and interviews. We acknowledge emerging South Asian women writers who have inspired the collection and who are an important focal point in the articles and interviews. It is our desire to recognize their efforts and to help their work become better known.

Some of these essays and interviews were included in a Special Topic Issue of the South Asian Review 29.1 (2008), “Perspectives on South Asian Women’s Writing,”guest edited by Feroza Jussawalla and Deborah Weagel. We are grateful in particular to Professor K.D. Verma, former general editor of the Special Topic Issue, for providing support and editorial advice. We also deeply appreciate Professor Pradyumna S. Chauhan, current editor of the South Asian Reivew, for permission to reprint and revise the following essays from that particular issue:

Chanda, Geetanjali Singh. “‘Womenspace’: Negotiating Class and Gender in Indian English Novels.”

Ganapathy-Doré, Geetha. “Speech-Act: An Interview with Susan Visvanathan.”

Herrero, M. Dolores. “Chandani Lokuge’s If the Moon Smiled: Female Subjectivity and Trauma at the South Asian/Australian Cultural Crossroads.”

Jussawalla, Feroza. “South Asian Muslim Women Speak for Their Rights and Resistance.”

Jussawalla, Feroza, and Deborah Weagel. “Guesteditors’ Introduction.”

← xiii | xiv →Malik, Seema. “Injustice, Resistance and Subversion: A Study of Selected Plays by Indian Women Playwrights.”

Ryan, Laurel. “Constructing ‘Home’: Eros, Thanatos, and Migration in the Novels of Anita Rau Badami.”

Weagel, Deborah. “Language, Diaspora, and Identity: An Interview with Yasmine Gooneratne.”

We thank our colleagues at the University of New Mexico for their encouragement and support.

Ezra Meier has been particularly helpful with editing and proofreading assistance. Feroza Jussawalla expresses gratitude to Senior Vice Provost Carol Parker and the UNM Dean’s Office for support.

Finally, we would like to acknowledge Dr. Jamsheed Choksy, the series editor, and the staff at Peter Lang Publishing who have helped us to bring our efforts to fruition. They have provided significant assistance with this project.

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Introduction

FEROZA JUSSAWALLA AND DEBORAH FILLERUP WEAGEL

Writing by men and women of South Asian origin has received considerable attention in the western publishing world and with the reading public over the last few decades. Much of this attention can be traced to the success of Salman Rushdie’s groundbreaking work Midnight’s Children (1980), for which he received the Man Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers in 1993, and the Best of the Bookers in 2008. Arundhati Roy also gained recognition for her novel The God of Small Things, for which she was awarded the Booker Prize in 1997. The novel was on the New York Times bestseller list for approximately thirty-six weeks and was named one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year. On both sides of the Atlantic, major literary lists, publishers, and prizes have borne witness to the fecundity of South Asian creativity, making whatever we want to call it—“postcolonial literature,” “world literature written in English,” or “national literature in English” (such as “Indian literature in English” or “Bangladeshi literature in English”)—central to contemporary literary production. These literatures have also become central to the literary dialogues current both in the media and in academia. Consequently, these literatures have also become central to the academic study of literature per se, bringing with them the theoretical perspectives that have been used to understand them, from the early approaches such as Commonwealth Literatures, focusing mostly on the development of national identities, to the more complex theoretical approaches that constitute postcolonial criticism.

As Professor K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar’s seminal work Indian Writing in English,published as far back as 1962, shows, literature in English from South Asia and particularly from India, in English, is a not a novel phenomenon. Since the 1800s there have been major writers in English literature emanating from India, and women have been at the forefront of writing. Indian literature in English is largely identified by the writings of R.K. Narayan, ← 1 | 2 →Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, and Khushwant Singh, who were widely read both in India and abroad. Familiar names of women authors include Aru and Toru Dutt, Cornelia Sorabji, and Sarojini Naidu, all of whom have been very well known. It was not until the work of Kamala Markandaya (1924–2004) and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927–2013) that South Asian women’s writing started to be recognized on a larger scale.