Portraits from Memory - Softcover

Varma, Mahadevi; Vanita, Ruth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9369890904 ISBN 13: 9789369890903

Publisher: Harper Fiction, 2025

About this title

About the Authors

MAHADEVI VARMA, generally considered the greatest Hindi woman poet of the twentieth century, was born on Holi in 1907. She took an MA in Sanskrit from Allahabad University, and became residential principal (later, vice-chancellor) of the pioneering women's institution, Prayag Mahila Vidyapeeth. She worked in the Gandhi-led movement for independence, and edited several journals, most notably the women's magazine Chand. She was one of the four pillars of the chhayavad movement in Hindi poetry, and authored several collections of poems, such as Nihar (1930), Rashmi (1932), Nirja (1933), Yama (1939), and Deepshikha (1942). Her prose works include reminiscences, pen portraits, essays on women's predicament (Shrinkhla ki Kariyan, 1942), and works of literary criticism, such as Sahityakar ki Astha (1962). She translated numerous works from Sanskrit to Hindi. She founded a trust to support writers in need. In 1979, she was the first woman to be made a fellow of the Sahitya Akademi. Among other awards, she received the Jnanpith Award in 1982, the Padma Bhushan in 1956, and the Padma Vibhushan in 1988. She died in 1987.

RUTH VANITA was educated entirely in India. She taught at Delhi University and later at the University of Montana. She is the author of two novels, A Slight Angle (2024) and Memory of Light (2020), two poetry collections, and many works of non-fiction, including Shakespeare's Re-Visions of History: Social Collusion, Violence, and Resistance in Nine Plays (2025), The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics: Debates on Gender, Varna, and Species (2023), Love's Rite: Same-Sex Marriages in Modern India (2005; 2021), Gender, Sex and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry 1780–1870 (2012), and Dancing with the Nation: Courtesans in Bombay Cinema (2017). She edited On the Edge: 100 Years of Hindi Fiction on Same-Sex Desire (2023) and co-edited the pioneering Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History (2000). She has translated several works from Hindi to English, including fiction by Premchand, Rajendra Yadav, and Mannu Bhandari, and Mahadevi Varma's Mera Parivar, which is about the poet's animal companions, as My Family (2021).

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper Fiction
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9369890904
• ISBN 13: 9789369890903
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272