ABSTRACT
This chapter tries to trace how the historical influences seen, have changed the status of women over the years in some ways. The focus is mainly on Kamala and Saguna who can be viewed as images of ideal women of their society.
This paper attempts a critical study, for the first time, of two novels that appeared at the end of the nineteenth century: Saguna, the Life of a Native Christian, and Kamala, the Story of a Hindu Life. Krupabai Satthianadhan, who wrote both these books, spent the first half of her life in Maharashtra, and the second half in Tamil Nadu, imbibing the essence of both her native Hindu and adopted Christian concepts of life and living. Satthianadhan’s books happen to be the only nineteenth-century works available to us that are written by an Indian woman writer in English that were further translated into Tamil. The paper looks at the process of translation and examines the forces that played a part in it. For instance, the language of the texts is, for the most part, the formal, Sanskritised language of the missionaries; however, it is at times also poetical or colloquial. This paper identifies a mixture of different cultural and linguistic styles which makes these two translations landmarks in the development of language use in Indian literature, as well as in the development of the art of translation.
