Luke > Recent Status Updates

Janaki Bai (1889-?, Urdu) - "...[W]e do have evidence she was a highly sought-after composer and singer of ghazals...In the 1920s and early 1930s when her career was at its height, she was able to demand a much higher fee than other artists for a performance."

Nanjanagudu Tirumalamba (1887-1982, Kannada) - "Apart from being the first major woman writer in modern Kannada, Tirumalamba was also an activist. She...in 1916 started Karnataka Nandini...the first magazine for women in Kannada...[and] a publishing company, Satihitaishini...which not only published her books but also featured translations from other Indian languages..."

Sughra Humayun Mirza (1884-1954, Urdu) - "Sughra Humayun Mirza was a fairly prolific writer and...one of the first women activists of Hyderabad. Though she faced a great deal of opposition at every stage, Sughra Begum never gave up her battle to help women discover their rights and live a life of dignity and self-confidence."

Nirupama Devi (1883-1951, Bengali) - "The kitchen pantry, where she spent most of her time, was her study. Yet, in the character of Suroma, the protagonist of her best-known novel, Didi (Elder Sister), 1915, Nirupama created a figure that was, in one form or another, to grip the Indian cultural imagination in a powerful and continuing hold and reappear in the work of several other writers."

Bahinabai Chaudhari (ca. 1880-1951, Marathi) - "She was not literate, but as is obvious from her philosophical poetry, she was far from uneducated...referring to the rich oral tradition of religious literature recited in the katha kirtans, but to that she might have added her experience as a cotton farmer, a woman, a mother, and a friend."

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932, English) - "In her witty utopian fantasy, "Sultana's Dream," 1905, probably the first such work in Indian literature, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain describes a world where men are confined to the murdana and women have taken over the affairs of the country."

Ugh this edition's so beautiful. Sorry NYRB Classics, but you've got some catching up to do.

...She says that she has never yet written a book without making an enemy...

My class schedule's going to be all gender experimentation and narratives of colonial resistance and it's going to be GORGEOUS. GORGEOUS I SAY.

If the cosmos is not in order, what hope is there for ethics?

"Why is it that all my university mentors want me to do research-work at the expense of fiction, and my literary mentors fiction at the expense of history?"

Thank you, you kind kind soul who dealt with my panic over getting back into UCLA under Bioengineering rather than English and letting me know that first comes readmission, then change of major. I'm still in freaking out after effect mode, but I should calm down when the major change is squared away.

England, panic-stricken, was frantically raising the military age to fifty...

It's rather strange that my local Starbucks is selling copies of Just Mercy, but that didn't stop me from buying one.

Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949, English) - "Though she may be remembered chiefly as a poet, Sarojini Naidu was deeply involved in politics, played a colorful role in the struggle for Independence, and had a talent for witty repartee...In 1914 she met Gandhi and worked closely with him for many years. In 1925, she was elected president of the Indian National Congress."

Bandaru Acchamamba (1874-1904, Telegu) - "Acchamamba had planned a magnum opus in three volumes. In the first, she would research and write about the lives of great women in India; in the next, about the women in the Vedas and the great epics; in the third part, about the lives of great women in other countries."

Lakshmibai Tilak (1868-1936, Marathi) - "Literary historians speak of Lakshmibai's chatty, humorous autobiography more as a work of art than as a record of a life. Though Lakshmibai has written little else, her autobiography, which is one of the earliest in modern Marathi literature, ensure she is among the few women writers unfailingly mentioned in mainstream histories of Marathi literature."

Cornelia Sorabji (1866-1954, English) - "Cornelia had been the first woman to graduate from Bombay University; the next one did so only twenty-four years later, in 1911. Similar experiences were to await her when she finally got to Oxford in 1889. She wanted to study law, but was told that no woman might do so...until thirty years later in 1923..."

Binodini Dasi (1863-1941, Bengali) - "Her autobiography is a major document of the Bengali theater and among the earliest first-person records we have of a woman who remained single and worked for a living. In it we are taken behind the scenes of her spectacular reputation to witness what it cost this warm, courageous, and gifted actress."

...as though we could somehow compensate the dead by remembering them regardless of expense.

A public service announcement for anyone with a passing or greater interest in Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell. To start you off, Park, contrary to what the title implies, is a Korean surname.

How differently did the Golden Virgin of the Basilica in Albert, with its precariously steepled position and auguried status, feel in Boyden's Three Day Road. I wonder if Brittain ever considered the part Canada played in WWI, or had the faintest clue of how war is fought by the indigenous populations of colonizing countries. True, she had her grief, but not grief's sole ownership.

Recognizing how totally ignorant you are is the only honest way to deal with people who've been through something traumatic.

Why is literature work so easy and eating so hard. At this rate I'm going to start dating so I can find someone who's willing to both cook my meals and remind me to eat them.

Ramabai Ranade (1862-1924, Marathi) - "From 1918 to 1923 she worked actively for equal political rights for women. She was a popular speaker who drew, to everyone's delight, freely on her wide reading in English and Marathi. In 1904 she was elected president of the Rashtriya Parishad (National Conference), where women from all castes and different religions came together."

Krupa Sattianadan (1862-1894, English) - "In 1878, Krupa joined the Madras Medical College, which was the first in India to open its doors to women...To their credit, when this young girl, the first to join a medical college in India, entered the class, the other students rose and cheered. By the end of the year she had stood first in every subject except chemistry and won many prizes."

Sarat Kumari Chaudhurani (1861-1920, Bengali) - "Although she is relatively unknown today, Sarat Kumari was an important writer of her time and a great favorite of Rabindranath Tagore...The story we have translated for inclusion, "Adorer na Anadorer" (Beloved, or Unloved?)...is a remarkable analysis of the neglect and abuse girls are subject to in a society that considers only the male as human."

Kashibai Kanitkar (1861-1948, Marathi) - "She met Hari Narayan Apte...He encouraged her to write and obviously discussed his work with her...They read and discussed Shakespeare, Mill, Spenser, and Gibbon as well as Dnyaneshwar, Tukaram, and Shivahi. It was with Apte that she ventured to read Kalidasa's Shakuntalam in the original Sanskrit."

Pandita Ramabai Saraswati (1858-1922, English) - My words and not the book's, mind you, but this is some de Beauvoir shit right here. And this is around 60 years before Second Sex was doing anything anywhere.