These ground-breaking collections offer 200 texts from 11 languages, never
before available in English or as a collection, along with a new reading of
cultural history that draws on contemporary scholarship on women and on India.
This extraordinary body of literature and important documentary resource
illuminates the lives of Indian women through 2,600 years of change and extends
the historical understanding of literature, feminism, and the making of modern
India. The biographical, critical, and bibliographical headnotes in both
volumes, supported by an introduction which Anita Desai describes as
"intellectually rigorous, challenging, and analytical," place the writers and
their selections within the context of Indian culture and history.Volume I: