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Guest Editors' Column

This year's conference theme holds a special meaning to us personally as well as politically. We both have had a long-standing and official association with women's and gender studies at our respective institutions. In our own work we have combined the intersectional modes of analysis modeled by feminist critics that we admire in South Asian and postcolonial studies. The South Asian Literary Association's ninth annual conference on the theme "Gender and Sexuality in South Asian Literature and Culture" encourages us to think of gender, a critical category of analysis, by bringing together sexuality, a recent area of emphasis, in conjunction with the feminist criticism that has enjoyed a longer historical trajectory in analysis of South Asian literature and culture. Partha Chatterjee's formulation of the private and public dichotomy, the material and the spiritual, or the "inner" and the "outer" domains, is one of the more famous discussions of the masculine and feminine spheres in colonial India. Significantly, Chatterjee's argument hinges on Rabindranath Tagore's The Home and the World, a foundational work of literature from South Asia that represents how a nationalistic political agenda falters on the axes of gender and female sexuality. Concomitant with the process of developing new models of analysis such as Chatterjee's have been several projects: historical recovery of neglected voices of women writing during colonial times (Pandita Ramabai, Cornelia Sorabhjee, Kruppabai Sattianadhan, among others); a revaluation of writers who attained notoriety for discussion of taboo sexualities during their times (Ismat Chughtai, Saadat Hassan