ABOUT THE AUTHOR:- Dr. K. Purushotham is Professor of English and Registrar, Kakatiya University, Warangal. A literary critic and a translator, he works in the areas of women writing, Indian writing, Dalit writing and critical pedagogy. His recent books include The Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing (co-ed), Interrogating the Canon: Literature and Pedagogy of Dalits (Kalpaaz), Black Lilies: An Anthology of Telugu Dalit Poetry (Critical Quest), English for Fluency (Orient BlackSwan), English for Employability, (Orient BlackSwan). He has translated poetry, fiction and non-fiction from Telugu to English, and brought out translation anthologies. He has edited literary journals and served on the editorial boards as editor, guest editor, consulting editor and associate editor of prestigeous national and international journals. He has carried out funded research projects on language and literature. His works are prescribed in different universities at the undergraduate and the postgraduate levels. Prof Purushotham has been a recipient of several national and international awards such as State Award to Meritorious Teachers, Government of Telangana and Fellow of the Royal World of Scribes (FRWS), Pentasi B Philippines World Poetry Festival, in recognition of his teaching and research.
About the Author
ABOUT THE BOOK:- Women autobiographies, a generic term for life narratives, histories, memoirs, testimonios and hagiographies , has emerged as a genre, consequent to the postmodernist thrust on the identity and the attendant politics surrounding it. Primarily aimed at communicating the subordinated predicament of women, the writings claim the agency. Based on memory, experience and identity, women narrators reproduce the cultural modes of self-narrating, simultaneously critiquing the status quo. When it comes to the personal lives of the women, there is nothing personal about women's personal lives: the personal is political too. Women, writing the autobiography is a means of finding the agency. It is, therefore, worth exploring as to what compels women write autobiographies. Ahead of their Times : Essays on Women Autobiography in India is an attempt in this direction. The work focuses on select women autobiographies covering those autobiographies written from 1876, the first woman autobiography ever written, to the ones written in the new millennium, encompassing a period of century and a quarter. It includes the works of Indian women autobiographers that include Rassundari Devi, Pa Visalam, Urmila Pawar, Laxminarayan Tripathi, Pinki Virani, Manju Bala, Anjum Jamarud Habib, A. Revathi, Binodini Dasi, besides several other Dalit and transgender writers. The autobiographers in the book are from either the marginalised or the stigmatised sections of the society. This book merits significance because of the fact that the writers of the essays selected those women autobiographers, who are least discussed or not discussed earlier. The women autobiographers in question challenge the hegemony in all the forms, including class, caste and gender, re-locating their own identity in respective categories. They debunk the set patterns of female writers. The authors of the essays present the analyses of the histories of politicised selves in respective autobiographies. What is unique about the interpretation is that instead of reading the autobiographies as the usually known creative or imaginative writing, the authors explore the works in opposition to the masculinised, rational and objective form, which infact, undermines the experiential category. They set up impersonal protocols of the public and political disputes. The authors see how women actually end up breaking into these formal structures, and thus change the rules of the game.
Contents : -
Acknowledgements . 7 Contributors . 9 Introduction: The Narrating Self and the Narrated Self . 11 — K. Purushotham 1. “Aaydan1(Weave of our Lives): Caste, Gender, and Feminism in Dalit Women’s Writings in Western India” . 21 — Varsha Ayyar 2. Towards an Inclusive Transgender Autobiography . 61 — Akshaya K. Rath and Ananya Parida 3. First Person Singular: Reading Rassundari Devi’s Amar Jiban(My Life) . 75 — Sanjukta Dasgupta 4. Indian Lesbian Writing and the Question of Genre . 91 — R. Azhagarasan 5. Recognition of ‘Transgender’ as ‘Third Gender:’ Some Reflections . 99 — Sanjiv Kumar 6. Pa Visalam’s Autobiographical Novel . 109 — Meera Rajagopalan 7. Narrativizing Rape: Issues, Challenges and possibilities in Aruna’s Story . 121 — Lahari 8. The Politics of Representation: Revisiting Dalit feminism in the context of Dalit women autobiographies of Maharashtra . 139 — Aparna Lanjewar Bose 9. The Dynamics of Dalit Fiction and Autobiography: A Reading of Manju Bala’s ‘Dwando’ (Conflict) . 157 — Indranil Acharya 10. Analysis and Performance: The Pedagogy of Autobiographies . 169 — H. Kalpana Rao 11. Incarcerated in Person but Not in Spirit: Prison Narrative of Anjum Zamarud Habib . 179 — Vandana Pathak 12. A World Beyond Pink and Blue: New Perspectives on Gender Roles . 197 — Neha Arora 13. Text as Socio-cultural Archive: A reading of Binodini Dasi’s My Story and My Life as an Actress . 213 — Ujjwal Jana Index . 219
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