Women Writing in India: Towards a Literary History of Women's Writing

In 1991, feminist critics Susie Tharu and K. Latita published a masterful anthology: Women Writing in India, which aims at revealing Indian women's literary voices, and questions both the genre itself (literary history or anthology?), and the definition of "Indian Literature" and "Women's writing". In the light of these volumes, this article aims to underline the delicate issues such militant literary history encounters, including the transnational agenda of Western feminism, in order to show the way it develops a subaltern ethos which bears witness to the diversity of the forms of oppression affecting the subaltern subject, whether it is woman, Indian, literary, postcolonial and/or vernacular.