There is no field that is untouched and unconquered by women’s presence. There is no doubt that India has produced some of the finest authors in the world. Today we discuss some of the famous Indian women writers and their books.
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Arundhati Roy
Suzanna Arundhati Roy, an Indian novelist, is best known for her 1997 novel The God of Small Things. Following its Man Booker Prize for Fiction victory, this book quickly rose to the top of the bestseller list among Indian authors who are not much experienced. She is an advocate for political concerns and human rights, and the environment. Writing screenplays for both television and film launched the literary career of Roy, one of the most well-known Indian women writers in Indian English-language literature.
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Arundhati Roy Best Books –
- The Algebra of Infinite Justice
- Listening to Grasshoppers
- Broken Republic
- Kashmir – the case of freedom
- The end of imagination
Kiran Desai
Desai, a National Book Critics Circle and Man Booker Prize winner, skillfully fuses socio-political realism with magical realism in her writing. Her use of themes like alienation, cultural disputes, displacement, and exile to depict the enormous canvas of contemporary society in the context of globalization is what makes her work so fascinating. This enduring nature of her work is demonstrated by the critically acclaimed book “The Inheritance Of Loss” by her.
Kiran Desai Books –
- The pack 2003
- Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
- WinQSB Version 2.0
- Emblems of Transformation
Jhumpa Lahiri
Lahiri, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, is one of the most well-known contemporary Indian women writers in the world. Her stories typically address delicate issues encountered by Indians, with a focus on the diasporic realities of migrating Indians. She is an Indian-American by birth. Stories of women who faced difficult life decisions can occasionally be found hidden in the plot. For instance, her Italian piece “In Other Words” gives a voice to a woman whose voice has been silenced by the weight of her responsibilities to others.
Jhumpa Lahiri Best Books –
- The Namesake
- The Lowland
- Whereabouts
- Only Goodness: Family Snapshots
- The Clothing of Books
- One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories
- Interpreter of Maladies
Meena Kandasamy
Ilavenil Meena Kandasamy is one of India’s most fearless young voices, as well as a poet, fiction writer, and activist. Her writings often focus on feminism and the Caste Annihilation Movement of modern-day India. She has a Ph.D. in sociolinguistics and has written the novels “The Gypsy Goddess,” “Touch,” and “Ms Militancy,” as well as two poetry anthologies. When I Hit You Or A Portrait Of The Writer As A Young Wife, her most recent book, is a brilliant and thought-provoking story about an abusive marriage.
Meena Kandasamy Best Books –
- When I Hit You, Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife
- Exquisite Cadavers
- This Poem Will Provoke You
- The Gypsy Goddess
- Ayyankali: A Dalit Leader of Organic Protest
Nayantara Sahgal
Sahgal is a well-known novelist and political columnist who is also Jawaharlal Nehru’s niece. Her work, most of it concerned with India’s elite and how they responded to political events surrounding them, illustrates her strong relationship with the country’s power structure. Sahgal received the Sahitya Akademi prize for his novel “Rich Like Us,” which is set in India between 1932 and the mid-1970s, a period of intense political instability.
Nayantara Sahgal Best Books –
- Storm in Chandigarh
- The day in shadow
- This time of morning
- Mistaken identity
- When the Moon Shines by Day
Anita Nair
English author Anita Nair has authored a wide range of works, including mystery fiction, short tales, poems, and even children’s stories. Her books “The Ladies Coupe” and “The Better Man” are her best-known works. Nair also brought to life in fiction the experiences of the typical Indian lady through works like “Mistress: A Novel,” which highlighted the evolving connection between a woman and her husband.
Anita Nair Best Books –
- Cut Like Wound
- Lessons in Forgetting
- Alphabet Soup for Lovers
- El vagón de las mujeres \/ Ladies Coupe
- Chain of Custody
Kamla Bhasin
Kamla Bhasin is a well-known Indian woman writer, poet, social scientist, and developmental feminist activist. For 35 years, Bhasin has worked on topics like gender, education, human development, and the media. Her most famous works include the poem Kyunki main ladki hoon, mujhe padhna hai, and her involvement with the South Asian feminist NGO Sangat.
Kamla Bhasin Best Books –
- Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition
- Understanding gender
- Malu Bhalu
- What is patriarchy?
Sunetra Gupta
In addition to being a well-known novelist, Sunetra Gupta is a professor of science at the University of Oxford and teaches theoretical epidemiology. Her fifth book, “So Good In Black,” was named to the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature longlist in October 2012. Perhaps her most famous piece is “The Glassblower’s Breath,” in which she takes the reader on a trip through the sexual, intellectual, and emotional experiences of a woman. A woman’s effort to fit in with society’s expectations is captured in the tale of one day in her life, which is laced with thoughts, recollections, goals, and ambitions of a woman who married a wealthy guy.
Sunetra Gupta Best Books –
- Memories of rain
- A sin of color
- So good in black
- Calcutta
- Moonlight into Marzipan
Bharati Mukherjee
Indian American-Canadian author Bharati Mukherjee served as an adjunct professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
Through publications like “The Middleman And Other Stories” and “Jasmine,” she masterfully probed the internal cultural struggles of characters, the majority of whom were immigrants. Her female protagonists’ journeys of self-discovery often travel in intriguing directions, and in the ensuing crisis, a new self develops with a variety of responses to the question: Who am I?
Bharati Mukherjee Best Books –
- Jasmine
- Desirable daughters
- Wife
- The holder of the world
- Miss new India
Sarojini Naidu
Sarojini Naidu, sometimes called The Nightingale of India, was a poet, independence warrior, and young prodigy. The Golden Threshold (1905), The Bird of Time (1912), and The Broken Wing (1917), three collections of her poetry, retain a prominent place in the history of Indo-Anglian poetry and are renowned for their lyricism, symbolism, imagery, and mysticism. In Naidu’s poetry, a variety of topics, including nature, love, life, death, and patriotism, are extensively explored.
Sarojini Naidu Best Books –
- The Golden Threshold
- The Bird Of Time
- In the Bazaars of Hyderabad(poem)
- Speeches and Writings of Sarojini Naidu
Ismat Chughtai
The renowned Indian Urdu author was renowned for both her unwavering spirit and her strong feminist work. Chughtai, one of Urdu’s most talented fiction authors, embodied the greatest traits of Urdu’s female writers of the 20th century: they were progressive, iconoclastic, intelligent, and feminist. Her most well-known and contentious work, “Lihaaf,” tackled the subject of female sexuality at a time when Urdu writing rarely dealt with themes of sensuality.
Ismat Chughtai Best Books –
- One drop of blood
- A fearless voice
Urvashi Butalia
Indian author, historian, and feminist named Urvashi Butalia. She founded Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publishing firm, which is currently an imprint of Zubaan Books. The most well-known of Butalia’s works, “The Other Side Of Silence: Voices From The Partition Of India,” tells the tales of thousands of women and children who died during and after the 1947 India-Pakistan partition, is also one that she has written.
Urvashi Butalia Best Books –
- Women and partition
- Katha
- How the firefly got its light
- Les Voix de la partition Inde-Pakistan
Shashi Deshpande
In the sphere of famous Indian women writers, she is well-known. 1978 saw the release of Sashi Deshpande’s first collection of short tales, and 1980 saw the publication of her debut novel, “The Dark Holds No Terror.” For the book “That Long Silence,” she received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1990. In 2009, she received the Padma Shri award.
Shashi Deshpande Best Books –
- The Binding Vine
- Matter of Time
- That Long Silence
- Dark Holds No Terrors
- Small remedies
- Writing from the margin
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Kamala Das
Her reputation as the pioneer of modern Indian English poetry precedes her. She was the first Indian woman to write about Indian women’s sexual encounters in the English language. Summer in Calcutta, her debut collection of poetry, is renowned in Indian English poetry. The main themes in her writings were love, its infidelity, and the misery it causes. Even more frank was her second collection of poems, “The Descendants.” In 1984, she was both nominated and shortlisted for the Nobel Prize.
Kamla Das Best Books –
- My story
- Only the soul knows how to sing
- A doll for the child prostitute
Shobha Rajadhyaksha
She is an Indian journalist and novelist also known by the name Shobhaa De. She is now regarded as the “Jackie Collins of India.” She primarily addresses themes relating to modern society. She also emphasizes the various facets of urban Indian society. She makes an effort to represent the larger society through each of her characters.
Shobha Rajadhyaksha Best Books –
- Speedpost: Letters to My Children about Living, Loving, Caring, and Coping with the World
- Spouse: The Truth about Marriage
- Superstar India: From Incredible to Unstoppable
Savitribai Phule
One of the pioneering first-generation modern Indian feminists, Poet Savitribai Phule, was also a social reformer who, along with her husband, worked tenaciously to overthrow the prevalent caste system. During her lifetime, Phule produced a lot of poetry criticizing discrimination. If you want to learn more about the lives of one of India’s first female teachers, you must read her two posthumously released collections of poems, Kavya Phule (1934) and Bavan Kashi Subodh Ratnakar (1982).
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