Bodymaps: Stories by South Asian Women

The body as social and cultural text provides a rich site for creative experimentation in this collection of short stories by contemporary women writers of South Asia. In a world that tends to equate the body with biology, and femininity with the reproductive function, these writers from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka interrogate these assumptions and reinscribe the body as a source of resistance and self-empowerment. Identity, history, myth, scientific experiment, social hierarchies, sexuality, nationalism, violence, ethics and ecology are interwoven issues for which the body in these stories becomes a powerful signifier. Together, these bodymaps chart a subversive female geography that startles with its boldly inclusive vision.

CONTRIBUTORS: Indira Goswami | Amrita Pritam | Bhuwan Dhungana | Ismat Chughtai | Mahasweta Devi | Ambai | Yashodhara Mishra | Kunzang Choden | Kathleen Jayawardene | Manjula Padmanabhan | Selina Hossain | Asha Kardaley | Easterine Kire | Zaheda Hina | Kamala Das

TRANSLATORS: Hina Nandrajog | Manjushree Thapa | Anjana Srivastava | Lakshmi Holmstrom | Mahasweta Baxipatra | Vijita Fernando | Keerti Ramachandra | Muhammad Umar Memon | V.C. Harris | C.K. Mohamed Ummer

RADHA CHAKRAVARTY is a writer, translator, and Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi. She received the Dr. Radhakrishnan Memorial Award in 2006, and was nominated for the Crossword Translation Award in 2004. She has translated the writings of several major Bengali writers from India and Bangladesh into English, as well as editing a number of anthologies of South Asian literature. Her previous publications include Feminism and Contemporary Women Writers: Rethinking Subjectivity (2008), Novelist Tagore: Gender and Modernity in Selected Texts (2013), and the co-edited volume The Essential Tagore (2011).