Scripting a New Gender Politic : Telugu Women's Journals 1883–1960

Led by an awareness of their duty to lead the women’s movement for change, women intellectuals focused on key issues: debates on child marriage, widowhood and widow remarriage, a reformed domesticity, lack of civil and political rights for women, and modern education for women.

In the nineteenth century, spurred by colonial criticism of Indian social practices, Indian male intellectuals embarked on a project of social reform, at the heart of which was improving the condition of women. Education was central to their efforts, and as print cultures flourished across the subcontinent, the reformers launched Telugu-language journals and magazines that focused exclusively on women readers. From the first journals—Sathihitha Bodhini and Telugu Zenana—to the later Hindu Sundary, Andhra Mahila and others, they became a site for new discourses on the ‘woman’s question’. A comprehensive history of Telugu women’s journals from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, this book highlights women’s own engagement with the social reform movement. While the initial publications were spearheaded by Western-educated male social reformers, from 1903 onwards, women in Andhra emerged as editors, managers and publishers of women’s journals.