In So Many Words: Women's Life Experiences from Western and Eastern India

This volume marks a new trend in understanding women's varied experiences of life: individual introductions situate the narrator in a context - and then her voice takes over, with no intervention from the editors. Carefully chosen photographs gleaned from personal collections provide an important visual context to the many worlds that the women inhabited.
The melange includes memoirs, published articles, 'portraits from memory', a collection of essays, and an oral interview. In all, the Self is the focus. The writings of Sailabata, Li Gotami and Shakuntala go beyond a recounting of their lives and deal with spiritual and travel experiences. Three of the essays are excerpts from published autobiographies - Sarala Devi cnauonuranrs Jeevaner Jharapata (Life's Fallen Leaves), Kalpana Dutt's Reminiscences and Sailabata Das's A Look Before and After. Vidyagauri Neelkanth's writings are essays, with a selection of amazingly candid letters exchanged with her husband. Anasuya Sarabhai's is an interview with niece Gira and Monica's a selection from an unpublished memoir. Li Gotami, whose original name was Rutty Petit, travelled to Manasarovar, and a few of the magazine articles on th is amazing journey have been reproduced here.
The personal narrative - be it an autobiography, a letter or a diary - has come to be recognised as an acceptable source of information in history and the social sciences. The readings of personal narratives included here help in painting various images of lives that we can only know at second hand.
It will be of interest to those interested in gender and feminist studies, literary criticism, colonial and post-colonial Indian history, politics, sociology, apart from the general reader.

Aparna Basu is currently Patron of the All-India Women’s Conference, and Chairperson, Lakshmibai College, Unversity of Delhi. Her publications include Growth of Education and Political Development in India, 1898-1920 (1974); and A Rebel With a Cause: Mridula Sarabhai (1996).

Malavika Karlekar is Editor of Indian Journal of Gender Studies. Her publications include Poverty and Women’s Work: A Study of Sweeper Women in Delhi (1982); Voices from Within: Early Personal Narratives of Bengali Women (1991); Re-Visioning the Past: Early Photography in Bengal, 1875-1915 (2005).