Tense Past, Tense Present

Suggesting that women are 'reshaping English' as Rushdie suggests, Kuortti interviews 7 women writers to find out why they write in English, which cannot be neutral. As a colony, the language was inescapably associated with class, race and power; after independence it has grown in power and status, yet the problematic of English as the language of the hegemonic West remains. Even so a new canon of women writing in English is being formed. Interviewing the writers Shashi Deshpande, the late Shama Futehally, Githa Hariharan, Lakshmi Kannan, Sujatha Mathai, Anuradha Marwah-Roy and Mina Singh, Kuortti also presents extracts from their writings.