Identities and Histories: Women's Writing and Politics in bengal

About the Book

Interrogating different kinds of selfhood by focusing on what Bengali middleclass women wrote in leading literary and political journals of the 1920s to the 1950s: Probasi, Saogat, Jayashree, Mandira, Gharey-Bairey and in the daily newspaper of the Communist Party of India, Swadhinata, Sarmistha Dutta Gupta explores the interface between women's writing and politics and studies gender identities in their shifting interrelations with other categories of identity like class and religion. Probasi founded in 1901, encouraged women to bring their refined femininity to the outside world; Saogat made writers out of Muslim women within the confines of their homes since 1918. Jayashree and Mandira, founded in the 1930s by leading women of Bengal's revolutionary groups, were committed to expanding the political consciousness of women in colonial India. Begun in 1948, Gharey Bairey's prime founders were early Communist women of the Mahila Atmaraksha Samity, the women's selfdefence association formed in 1943 during times of the Second World War and the Bengal Famine. Swadhinata, founded in 1945 by the Communist Party of India, addressed the Bengali working-class women for the first time.