Women writers & education
The book explores the various ways in which women in India responded to education, especially English education, and the efforts they took to step out of the traditional space society enforced on them.
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N her introduction to Influence of English on Indian Women Writers: Voices from Regional Languages, the book’s editor, K. Suneetha Rani, presents a comprehensive bird’s-eye view of the English discourse in India in the 19th and early 20th centuries to throw light on how the education of women was discussed and debated from different perspectives, with the main focus on English education.
She points out how a dichotomy was created when women were provided English education to make them better wives, daughters and daughters-in-law where previously they had been denied education because it was felt that it would corrupt them and lead to the collapse of the institution of the family. Thus, voices raised for and against English education targeted the domesticity of women.
Citing women writers, Suneetha Rani shows how women took to English to use it as a weapon against prejudices and a way towards change. Although education did not immediately bring about any significant change in the status of women or remove social evils and prejudices, it threw open new areas of knowledge and skill.
The introduction serves as an excellent backdrop to the 12 essays in the volume that examine the English discourse and the woman question from different angles as put forth by women in their writings. The volume also discusses movements that influenced women’s issues in the regional context and their response in different languages and genres.
In the first chapter, “Language, Reform and Nationalism: Indian Women’s Writing in the Nineteen Century”, C. Vijayasree probes the subtexts of the books written by 19th century women writers to show how they were influenced by the dominant discourses of their time. She supports her argument by analysing Swarnakumari Devi’s Kahake and Shevantibai Nikambe’s novel Ratanbai: A Sketch of a Bombay High Caste Hindu Young Wife.
In the next chapter, titled “Women of Reform”, Alladi Uma addresses the question of “education as reform” for women with a special focus on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She compares Dasigal Mosavalai (Web of Deceit, 1938) in Tamil by Muvalur Ramamirthammal (who was born in a non-devadasi family but forced into prostitution) and two books in English, My Experience as a Legislator (1930) and Autobiography (1964), by Dr S. Muthulakshmi Reddy (who was born of a devadasi mother and a Brahmin father) to Kanyasulkam (1897/1909), a Telugu play on the evil practice of child marriage by Gurajada Appa Rao (a Brahmin male writer interested in social reform). She makes the point that education made housewives better and helped devadasis free themselves from “institutionalised slavery and exploitation” and that men took to reforming courtesan women to save the man and the family woman.
The seventh chapter, “Writing Self: Writing for others”, also examines these two books by Muthulakshmi Reddy. Paromita Bose presents Muthulakshmi Reddy as a doctor, legislator and social worker in an attempt to understand the close connection between her personal life, her identity and her involvement in the women’s movement.
In the third chapter, “Colonised: The Bengali Woman Writer in British India”, Sanjukta Dasgupta draws the reader’s attention to the fact that woenglish