By Ellen Brinks
Ellen Brinks examines the Anglophone literary works of Toru
Dutt, Krupabai Satthianadhan, Pandita Ramabai, Cornelia Sorabji, and Saroini
Naidu, women deeply rooted in and connected to both South Asian and British
cultures who found large audiences in the West and in India in their public
roles as writers, reformers, activists, and cultural translators. The
received narrative that British imperialism in India was perpetuated with
little or no cultural contact between the colonizers and the colonized population
is complicated by all five women's professional and personal lives.
Brinks’s close readings of these texts suggest new ways of
reading a range of issues central to nineteenth-century transnational and
postcolonial studies: the relationship of colonized women to the metropolitan
(literary) culture; Indian and English women’s separate and joint engagements
in reformist and nationalist struggles; the “translatability” of culture; the
articulation strategies and complex negotiations of self-identification of
Anglophone Indian women writers; and the significance and place of cultural
difference. Informed by extensive archival research, Brinks’s close
readings of their works suggest new ways of understanding late nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century English-language literary history, women's history, and
the history of empire.
Available through Ashgate
