Narrating Lives, Narrating Selves. Women’s Autobiographies in Hindi

In the second half of the 1990s more than a dozen women published their autobiographies in Hindi. It was a new development as far as Hindi was concerned and the sizable growth in the number of published autobiographies seems to have been quite sudden. The research, presented in this book, examines possible reasons for the emergence of these auto narratives in Hindi. It looks also at some theoretical debates on the autobiographical modes of expression in relation to identity, subjectivity and agency as concepts significant for both the feminist and the postcolonial discourses. Finally, it presents close reading of four autobiographies written by women in Hindi (Kausalya Baisantri, Maitreyi Pushpa, Prabha Khaitan and Chandrakiran Sonrexa).