Monika Browarczyk, Narrating Lives, Narrating Selves: Women’s Autobiographies in Hindi

Monika Browarczyk’s book directly confronts the long-standing assumption in Western scholarship which regarded autobiographical writings to be the product of the historical legacy and cultural specificity of the West and considered individualism and notions of the Self as an exclusively Western attribute. By focusing on women’s writings, it further demolishes the myth of autobiographies as principally male-oriented narratives of bourgeois culture. In doing so, it adds fresh perspectives to the recent research which highlights the diverse ways in which South Asian societies in general, and women in particular, articulated selfhood and subjectivities across historical periods.