UGC-NET-Paper1

Women writers were rare in pre-British India, and there was none in the first half of the nineteenth century. A few women poets came into prominence in the medieval period: Andal and Karaikkal Ammaiyar in Tamil Nadu, Lalla Ded in Kashmir, Mahadeviyakka in Karnataka, Mirabai in Rajasthan. Madhavi Dasi in Orisssa, Padmapriya in Assam, and Chandrabati in Bengal. All of them must be treated as exceptions. There is hardly any evidence to show that social patronage was available to the women poets. On the contrary, the great corpus of nursery rhymes. vratakatha, fairy-tales. festival songs and various types of labour songs were created partly, if not entirely by women. Although this body of literature was enjoyed by all members of society. it was preserved and transmitted mainly by women. One should believe either that the creative faculty of women operated exclusively within these literary forms and did not trespass into other forms of literature, or that many of the women writers who ventured into other genres preferred to remain anonymous.