Pandita Ramabai: through her own words
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patriarchal ideologies. Yet despite her defiance of Brahmanical norms regarding marriage, as especially manifested in her choice to marry a non-Brahmin, and her sustained critique of the harsh treatment of Hindu women, especially widows, which she saw as being sanctioned by mainstream Hindu society and its laws and mythology, Ramabai apparently derives her own ideas regarding the proper role for women from Hindu mythology. In scoping out such complexities, Kosambi also critiques Ramabai’s essentialization of the oppressed Indian woman, which, as she argues, remained firmly entrenched within a Western, Orientalist framework. While such a critique is insightful, identifying and elaborating for the readers the particular strands of Orientalist thought that impressed Ramabai would enable a more critical understanding of this complex connection. Such elaboration would also complicate further our reading of Ramabai’s views on a variety of subjects pertaining to women and religion, caste politics, women’s education, widowhood, Sati and the position of Western women – subjects that were of central importance to colonial and nationalist debates in late 19th-century India. In recent years, the issue of translation has also received significant attention in colonial and cultural studies and warrants some commentary in the context of this book. While scholars such as Tejaswini Niranjana have cautioned us to view translations with suspicion, especially colonial translations that became sites for constructing the colonial subjects as inferior, Kosambi’s project points to the productive aspects of translation. Not only does it enable an excavation of obscured histories; it also provides us with new information and insights on the contributions made by women such as Ramabai during the Raj. In so doing, projects such as this one serve as social histories of women and their relation to nationalist and colonialist thought. For this reason, Kosambi’s translations of Ramabai’s essays are a welcome addition to the expanding corpus of recently uncovered and translated stories about and by women such as the late 19th-century actress Binodini Dasi, and housewives such as Rashsundari Devi, whose Amar Jiban has been identified as the first full-scale autobiography in the Bengali language. Overall then, the book makes a significant contribution to translation studies, women’s studies, and scholarship exploring the links between culture and colonialism.
Nandi Bhatia doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400105
Old wives’ tales: feminist re-visions of film and other fictions Tania Modleski; I.B Tauris, London and New York, 1999, d14.95, ISBN 1-86064-386-8 (Pbk) How women tell stories within patriarchal structures that exclude their voice is a question that feminist scholarship has wrestled with for some time. Recent
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feminist review 74 2003
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