Hearing her Own Voice

Abstract

Those working with women’s texts are as much aware as those engaged in colonial studies that words like ‘voice’ or ‘authenticity’ are not innocent signifiers, imbricated as they are with possibilities of insidious complicity with, or co-option by, the prevailing literary culture. In both cases the dominant and the resistant impulses tend to operate simultaneously in constructing the subject, rendering inconclusive any attempt at locating an unsullied or pristine ‘voice’. In reading, as I propose to do in this essay, two women poets who lived in colonial India — Toru Dutt (1856–1877) and Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949) — and who chose to write in the language of the rulers, we find that the issues of gender, language, identity and nation get tangled, throwing up knots, some of which remain unravelled even in our seemingly emancipatory post-colonial dispensation.