ABSTRACT
Indira Goswami wrote in Assamese and the chapter deals with a collection of her short stories. Goswami has written two kinds of stories, those that can be called broadly humanist – where she can have a male protagonist – and others dealing with unfulfilled feminine sexuality. Having been born Brahmin and being widowed early, many of her stories deal with the plight of Brahmin widows. In one story the widow of a Brahmin priest (with children) survives as a prostitute since her land is cultivated by tenants who do not pay what is owing to her. In another a single woman teacher in Delhi takes in a Dalit boy to have him educated but finds him judging her conduct with men who are also revealed to be crudely lascivious. Being a good essayist she is able to tweak travel writing into fiction with the same concerns as in an exquisite story called ‘Ishwaree’ about the happenings in a Ramayan group travelling to Nepal. A factor about Goswami’s writing is her identity as a Hindu Vaishnavite without being ‘Indian’ featuring as part of her identity. The chapter also speculates on the upper-most Brahmin caste guarding the chastity of its women, why this was so, since it has a bearing on the notion of unfulfilled feminine sexuality.
