| Chapter : | Editor’s Introduction |
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could explore the eroticism of love and desire simultaneously as both literary and feminist aesthetics.
Mahadevi’s poignant explanation of the isolation and loneliness that women feel, caught as they are between the world of domesticity and “conventions”, on the one hand, and the “call of the new age in front of them”, on the other hand, reveals that she was concerned primarily with the lack of social structure for educated women both inside and outside the home.52 As Mahadevi wrote, “Old-fashioned men look down upon them with contempt; modern-minded men support them but are unable to help them actively; and the radicals encourage them but find it hard to take them along. Truly, modern women are more alone than traditional ones”.53 While “sexual” loneliness is not explicit in Mahadevi’s statements about these problems plaguing modern, educated women, her poetry takes up and substantially develops this theme of female sexuality and eroticism through the classical and conventional tropes available in Sanskrit, Braj Bhasha, and Urdu literature.
In his reading of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), Suresh Sharma suggests that Gandhi did not seek in tradition “the resource for a better and more powerful variant of modernity”, but rather chose to discuss the contemporary challenges facing Indian society through “a traditional framework of validation”.54 Through Sharma’s theoretical lens, Mahadevi’s own contradictory views on modernity and Indian womanhood take on a new political urgency hitherto ignored by Hindi literary criticism. Mahadevi lays out the contours of the debate regarding women’s oppression as a social and historical phenomenon in her critical essays by taking into consideration both the subjective forms of women’s oppression and the external manifestations of their subjugation. In a now famous editorial essay, “Hamari Shrinkhala Ki Kariyan” (The Links in Our Chain, 1936), Mahadevi describes the different notions of womanhood that men have thrust upon women; men have either deified women and worshipped them, or they have considered them worthless and hence neglected them.55 These different projections about what women are and should be, according to Mahadevi, had resulted in the inability of Indian women (unlike their male counterparts) to assert their