ABSTRACT
Writing just a decade after Toru Dutt, however, Krupabai Satthianadhan's work also encompasses strikingly different worlds from Dutt's translations, revealing her divergent literary interests and writerly strategies. This chapter describes the complex landscape of reform in the second half of the nineteenth century. It shows how Satthianadhan rejects the simplistic paradigms by virtue of showing women from different castes and classes in a plethora of spaces public and private, material and phantasmatic. The chapter focuses on the novels reformist agenda within the context of the debates of the 1880's and 1890's on the question of child marriage and the Age of Consent controversy. It considers how Satthianadhan stakes out her own symbolic site, a position within debates on Hindu child marriage and conjugality, along with the related issues of women's education, exogamy, divorce, the treatment of widows, and widow remarriage.
