READING AND COMPOSITION - India in the Writers Eye

Women in Modern Indian Literature 

This course will focus on constructions of women articulated by both male and female authors in Modern Hindi-Urdu and Bengali literature in English translation. We will read a variety of literary forms––such as poetry, short stories, novels and essays––in an attempt to explore and analyze the multifarious constructions of women’s subjectivity, the ways in which women subvert and/or uphold traditions that posit their inferiority and the social consequences of these actions. A selection of the literature we will read includes but is not limited to: Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World and A Grain of Sand, Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay’s short story “Devi,” the poems of Suryakanth Tripathi (a.k.a. “Nirala”), Mahadevi Varma’s poems and essays and the short stories of Razia Sajjad Zaheer.