Identities and Histories : Politics and Women\'s Writings in Bengal

Sarmistha Dutta Gupta is a scholar, translator and activist who has published earlier with Stree has a new book out. In Identities and Histories: Politics and Women’s Writings in Bengal she explores the interface between women’s writing and politics and studies gender identities in their shifting interrelations with other categories of identity like class and religion. Focusing on what Bengali middle-class women wrote in leading literary and political journals of the 1920s to the 1950s: Probasi, Saogat, Jayashree, Mandira, Gharey-Bairey and in the daily newspaper of the Communist Party of India, Swadhinata, the author interrogates the fashioning of different kinds of selfhood of women through papers subscribing to different ideologies.