Speech and Silence: Literary Journeys by Gujarati Women

This anthology is not only about what Gujarati women speak, but also what they don’t. In a state that registers increasing cases of violence against women, what kind of truths does its literature embody? If malestream writing in Gujarat seldom mirrors its everyday truths, do the women risk unplesantness? Kothari’s introduction builds upon such premises and leads the reader to a trajectory of women writers from the beginning of the reader to a trajectory of women writers form the beginning of the twentieth of a dancer at the end of the day, starting with the journal entries of a dancer at the end of the nineteenth century, to the journal entries of an academic woman at the end of the twentieth. The wide range of stories and fictional experts show Gujarati women inhabit their fictional worlds. The trajectory hints at an imperceptible shift from muffled voices to more candid ways of being, and yet it never loses completely the middle-class genteelness that characterizes literary discourses in Gujarat.