Imagining a New Nation: Perspectives of Two Women Novelists in Tamil Krithika (1915 – 2009) and Rajam Krishnan (1925- 2014)

<strong>CENTRE FOR WOMEN'S STUDIES, JNU</strong> a Seminar on <strong>Imagining a New Nation: Perspectives of Two Women Novelists in Tamil Krithika (1915 – 2009) and Rajam Krishnan (1925- 2014)</strong> By <strong>Dr. V Padma (A Mangai),</strong> (Visiting Faculty, CSLG, JNU) For long and even today, the comment that women write of a world that is domesticated, interior and personal persists in the world of literary criticism. And no doubt many women wrote works of that kind. In Tamil however the fifties saw a new wave in terms of representation of women by both male and female writers and exploration of new themes related to the new nation-state of India. Krithika aka Mathuram Boothalingam opened a new vista of literary horizon with her complex understanding of the industrialization and modernisation in the newly independent young democracy called India. With her access to bureaucracy of this young nation, she explored newer avenues with psychological depth. Beginning to write in the 1950s around the same time Rajam Krishnan looked at the same phenomenon from the other side of the spectrum. She chose to write of the nation, community, development, ecology and human resources from the point of view of those in the bottom most rung of the social ladder. It took her to unknown areas, to people who spoke different languages but her restlessness to talk back to the system persisted. Between the two one finds the utopian dream of a new nation and the misgivings simultaneously. <strong>Date: 7th April 2016</strong>