1 Quoted in Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, 1971; London: Virago Press, 1977, p. 99.

2 Much has been written on the different response to home from radical feminists of colour, see for example bell hooks, “Homeplace, a Site of Resistance”, in Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, Boston: South End Press, 1990, pp. 41-9 and S. Grewal et al., eds, Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women, London: Shebe, 1988, especially pp. 9-11.

3 Quoted in bell hooks, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center, Boston: South End Press, 1984, p. 1.

4 Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993, p. 54.

5 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, London: Virago Press, 1977.

6 Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, 1970; London: Flamingo, 1993.

7 See Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London and New York: Routledge, 1985, p. 167.

8 Feminist analyses have unveiled different faces of Woman. Gillian Rose has investigated the “feminization of place” - the employment of Woman, spoken in terms of a lost (m)other to represent home, community and nation (Feminism and Geography, pp. 57-60). Rosemary George has written about the use of Indian women as “symbols of nation, of tradition, of modernity, of suffering, of strength (as Durga), of love and self-sacrifice (as Mother India), of destruction (as Kali) but never as important in themselves”, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996, p. 137.

9 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonising Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Durham, NC, London: Duke UP, 2003, pp. 85-105.

10 Feminism and Geography, pp. 194-7.

11 Both Pratt’s and Cliff’s effort to reject “home” as a “repressive space built on the surrendering of all responsibility” (Feminism Without Borders, p. 92) is reminiscent of Adorno’s epigram, “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home”, quoted in Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, London: Granta Books, 2000, p. 184.

12 Caren Kaplan, “Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse”, Cultural Critique, 6 (1987), 197-8.

13 One last caveat: the Hindi word for “home” ghar can also mean “house”; this semantic range allows for unsettling the implied meaning in each poem, problematizing the easy equation between “house” and “home”. In my English translation this rich ambiguity is, unfortunately, lost.

14 This title is borrowed from Feminism and Geography, p. 25.

15 Wendy Doniger and B. Smith, trans., The Laws of Manu, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, p. 197.

16 All the translations of the Hindi poems are mine.

17 Anamika, Kahti hain auraten, Allahabad: Itihas Bodh Prakashan, 2003, p. 152.

18 For the Nature/Culture debate, see Sherry Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” in Jessica Munns and Gita Ranjan, eds, A Cultural Studies Reader: History, Theory, Practice, London and New York: Longman, 1995, pp. 491-508, and Feminism and Geography, pp. 68-9.

19 Kahti hain auraten, p. 139.

20 Quoted in Feminism and Geography, p. 147. See also pp. 144-7 on the geography of confinement, and The Politics of Home, pp. 131-70, on the confinement experienced by elite female protagonists in Indian novels written by women.

21 Kanta, Jo kuch bhi dekhti hun, Hyderabad: Navhid Publications, 1960, p. 46.

22 Amrita Bharati, Sannate men dur tak, Delhi: Bharatiya Jnanpith Prakashan, 1992, p. 96.

23 Jyotsna Milan, Ghar nahin, Delhi: Jnan Bharati, 1989, p. 26.

24 ibid., p. 14

25 ibid., p. 57.

26 See The Politics of Home, p. 23.

27 Porteous, quoted in Feminism and Geography, p. 21.

28 Tuan, quoted in Feminism and Geography, p. 22.

29 Vyanas, quoted in E. Ralph, Place and Placelessness, London: Pion, 1976, p. 39.

30 Feminism and Geography, pp. 53 and 57.

31 Katyayani, Is paurushapurna samay men, Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 1999, p. 67.

32 Freud is the first to point out the connection between heimlich and unheimlich: “the ‘uncanny’ is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.”, Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature, Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997, p. 217.

33 Is paurushapurna samay men, p. 68.

34 Jyotsna Milan, Apne age age, unpaginated ms.

35 Is paurushapurna samay men, p. 68.

36 Ghar nahin, p. 29.

37 Feminism and Geography, p. 56.

38 Feminism Without Borders, p. 103.

39 The equation of feminist rebellion with madness is somewhat reminiscent of Gilbert and Gubar’s “madwoman in the attic”, see Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd edn, New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. (First published in 1979.)

40 Is paurushapurna samay men, p. 69.

41 Jyotsna Milan, “Jyotsna Milan se Jayshankar ki batcit”, Sakshatkar, September 1995, 19-38.

42 Ghar nahin, p. 26.

43 Sannate men dur tak, p. 97.

44 Susham Bedi, Shabdon ki khirkiyan, unpaginated ms.

45 “A member of the fourth and lowest division of early Indo-Aryan society”, see R.S. McGregor, (ed.) The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary, Oxford, Delhi: OUP, 1993, p. 954.

Not a Home: Hindi Women Poets Narrating “Home”

Abstract