Bringing together the work of five highly accomplished contemporary Indian women writers - Mrinal Pande, Saniya, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Vaidehi, and B.M. Zuhara - this collection of novellas from five Indian languages revolves around the lives of women from various walks of life. With the novellas translated in English for the first time, the book includes a critical introduction by Uma Chakravarti.
Five Novellas by Women includes Nabaneeta Dev Sen's 'Defying Winter', a brilliant exposition on how women living in an old age home rebuild their lives, Mrinal Pande's 'Farewell Song of a Woman', which explores the mind of a matriarch who gains freedom only through the ultimate release - death, and Saniya's 'Thereafter', about a woman whose husband leaves her after years of marriage. Vaidehi's 'Temple Fair', a joyous and bittersweet evocation of the memories of a fair in small town Karnataka and B.M. Zuhara's 'Moonlight', which dwells on how a woman spends her adulthood in a nuclear family by re-imagining her childhood constitute the other two works in the collection.
This book will be of value not only to general readers interested in Indian writing in translation, but also to students of modern Indian literature, gender studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies.