Famous Indian Women Writers and Their Works: Exam Notes

Questions on Indian women writers reach a General Awareness paper from two directions. In the books-and-authors set a writer has to be matched with a work; in the awards set the same names return as Jnanpith, Sahitya Akademi, Booker or Pulitzer winners. The names below are the ones that repeat, arranged by period and by the language each wrote in, with the work each is remembered for.

The first generation of women's writing

Writing by Indian women begins with reform-era prose rather than with the novel. Rassundari Devi wrote Amar Jiban in Bengali, the first full-length autobiography by an Indian woman. Tarabai Shinde of Maharashtra published Stri Purush Tulana in 1882, a tract that compared how society judged men and women, and it is counted among the earliest feminist texts in an Indian language. Pandita Ramabai wrote The High Caste Hindu Woman in English in 1887 and founded the Sharada Sadan for widows. Toru Dutt, who died at twenty-one, left A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields and Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan. Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain wrote Sultana's Dream in 1905, a feminist utopia in which women govern the state and men are kept secluded.

Sarojini Naidu, the poet of the national movement

Sarojini Naidu is the one poet from the freedom struggle whom papers ask about almost every year. She is called the Nightingale of India, and her three collections are The Golden Threshold (1905), The Bird of Time (1912) and The Broken Wing (1917). A later volume, The Feather of the Dawn, appeared after her death. She presided over the Kanpur session of the Congress in 1925, the first Indian woman to be Congress president, and she was afterwards Governor of the United Provinces. The usual question gives one collection and asks for the poet, or gives the poet and asks which title is not hers.

Writers and the works they are asked with

The award winners

• Ashapurna Devi was the first woman to receive the Jnanpith Award, in 1976, for the Bengali novel Pratham Pratishruti, the first part of a trilogy on three generations of women.
• Amrita Pritam received the Jnanpith in 1981 for the Punjabi collection Kagaz Te Canvas. She had earlier been the first woman to win the Sahitya Akademi Award for Punjabi, in 1956, for Sunehade, and her Partition novel Pinjar is asked separately.
• Mahadevi Verma, the one woman among the four pillars of the Hindi Chhayavad movement, received the Jnanpith in 1982 for Yama.
• Qurratulain Hyder in 1989 for Aag Ka Darya, Mahasweta Devi in 1996, Indira Goswami in 2000, Pratibha Ray in 2011 and Krishna Sobti in 2017 are the other women Jnanpith laureates that papers name.
• Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize in 1997 for The God of Small Things, set in Ayemenem in Kerala; Kiran Desai won the same prize in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss.
• Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000 for the story collection Interpreter of Maladies; her novels The Namesake and The Lowland followed.
• Geetanjali Shree won the International Booker Prize in 2022 for Ret Samadhi, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, the first book written in Hindi to win that prize.
• Nayantara Sahgal for Rich Like Us in 1986 and Shashi Deshpande for That Long Silence in 1990 are the Sahitya Akademi winners in English most often asked.

Novels, memoirs and the writers behind them

Kamala Markandaya wrote Nectar in a Sieve in 1954 on a peasant family squeezed by a tannery and by famine. Anita Desai was shortlisted for the Booker three times and wrote Fasting, Feasting and In Custody. Kamala Das wrote poetry in English under her own name and Malayalam prose as Madhavikutty; her autobiography My Story is the title examiners use. Mahasweta Devi joined writing to activism among tribal communities, and Aranyer Adhikar, on the Munda uprising led by Birsa Munda, won her the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1979. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni retold the Mahabharata through Draupadi in The Palace of Illusions. Sudha Murty is asked for Wise and Otherwise and Dollar Bahu. Among memoirs, A Princess Remembers is by Gayatri Devi of Jaipur and The Scope of Happiness by Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit.

How to revise this list

Learn the pairs in threes: writer, language, work. Then add the award and its year only for the eight or nine names that carry one, because that is where the second mark lies. Finally, note the pen names and titles that are used as traps, such as Madhavikutty for Kamala Das, the Nightingale of India for Sarojini Naidu, and the two Desais, Anita and Kiran, who are often swapped in the options.