| Chapter : | Editor’s Introduction |
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facilitated (in other contexts) a practice of public politics otherwise inaccessible to them behind the institution of purdah (seclusion).13
Given these historical circumstances of the early decades of Mahadevi’s life in Allahabad, her refusal to live with her legally betrothed husband comes to have political significance beyond merely the personal. Moreover, her adopting the white khadi sari very early in her literary career in deference to Gandhi’s call (in 1929) and travelling from village to village in order to spread education in Hindi are telling of her practice of this politics.
A situated reading of Mahadevi’s writings shows the different “voices” that she was able to find in her chosen modes of creative expression—these reflect the peculiar combination of her sociopolitical milieu as well as her complicated public presence and social standing as a single woman. In her prose works, her unwavering admiration for the past often evinces an awkward construction of Indian womanhood. Her construction of “tradition” and the “past” is a product of, as scholars have shown, the larger discourse on “Indian womanhood” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in colonial India. We can see the influence of this thinking in Mahadevi’s writings as well. For example, in her essay “Hindu Stri Ka Patnitva” (Wifehood of Hindu Women), Mahadevi is critical about social traditions that grant women only two options for sovereignty, wifehood and motherhood. She proceeds to attack the institutions of child marriage and bride selling, and she speaks out against the conditions of wifehood for Hindu women. At the same time, she also praises the status of these very women in some idealised past. Within a few pages of making these bold “feminist” statements, she says the following about women choosing their life partners:
Mahadevi’s move to praise women’s position in an undefined “past”, where women roamed as freely as the sages, is precisely the discursive