The Literature of Power and the Power of Literature [Jasodhara Bagchi]

asodhara Bagchi, a member of that exceptional generation of Indian women whose life and work, bridging this country’s transition to independent nationhood and the constitution of its democratic and intellectual protocols, has left an enduring impact on various scholars, as women, and as citizens. This collection of her literary essays, one of two volumes, remembers that legacy as it brings together short and longer essays written at different stages of her career. It represents a wide range of literary interests, but also illustrates a trajectory that embodies her personal movement through centuries of European thought towards a critical period of Indian cultural history, on which she emerges as a powerful and influential commentator. Her critique of certain “progressive” tendencies within colonial modernity is ultimately linked to her social, feminist and gender studies concerns.