Contents: Publishers Note. 1. Introduction. 2. Nabaneeta Dev Sen: Defying Winter/translated by Tutun Mukherjee. 3. Mrinal Pande: A Woman's Farewell Song/translated by the author. 4. Vaidehi: Temple-Fair/translated by Nayana Kashyap. 5. B.M. Zuhara: Moonlight/translated by Vanajam Ravindran. 6. Saniya: thereafter/translated by Maya Pandit. Notes on translation.

"Bringing together five novellas written by five Indian women writers in five languages, this volume explores the complex and multi-layered world of women's writing in India. Written by Nabaneeta Dev Sen in Bengali, Mrinal Pande in Hindi, Vaidehi in Kannada, B.M. Zuhara in Malayalam, and by Saniya in Marathi, these novellas reflect the Universal themes of loneliness, loss of love, childhood, and melancholy and aging. Presented for the first time in translation, they reveal with candour and spirit the experience of being a woman in contemporary Indian society.

Nabneeta Dev Sen's Defying Winter is a series of cross-cutting narratives of women living in an old age home. While Mrinal Pande's A Woman's Farewell Song explores the mind of an aging matriarch, Vaidehi's Temple-Fair evokes bittersweet memories of life in simpler times. Moonlight by B.M. Zuhara reveals the mindscape of a woman whose unremarkable married life stands in stark contrast to her glorious childhood. Finally, Saniya's Thereafter is an unsentimental look at a woman who finds the strength to live life on her own terms after her husband abandons her.

Translated by Tutun Mukherjee, Mrinal Pande, Nayana Kashyap, Vanajam Ravindran, and Maya Pandit, this volume also includes an insightful introduction by feminist historian Uma Chakravarti. Five Novellas by Women Writers will be of value not only to students and teachers of modern Indian literature, gender studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies, but also to general readers interested in regional Indian literature in translation." (jacket)