Lover, Mother, Warrior: Women in Premodern Indian Literature

This course aims to explore conceptualizations of womanhood and femininity in the precolonial Indian subcontinent and its performance across various media (literary works, comic books, and films) in current times. We will attempt to identify constructions and performance of womanhood and femininity in public and private domains, as inner experiences, and between or beyond the exigencies of culture and body. Challenging the universality of current feminist and attendant theories, we will move to an array of literary, religious, prescriptive, and medical texts in Sanskrit, Persian and vernacular languages (all in translation) to uncover gender relations in this period. From the fierce goddesses Durga and Kali, and the gender-bending god Vishnu, we move to the Kamasutra and Ayurvedic texts before gradually moving to colonial ruptures and the subsequent modern imaginings of premodern women across various media.