From memory to archive, women’s writing creates new ways to narrate the past

Over the years, women’s writing has engaged in both creative expression and historical excavation. Probing the gaps and omissions in traditional historiography, it has produced new ways to narrate, archive, and comprehend individual and collective life. Weaving strands from history, literature, ethnography, and memoir, it unsettles the boundaries between the subjective and the analytical and challenges conventions long shaped by institutional archives and male-dominated narratives by bringing in lived experience, especially that of women.

In her Nobel Lecture, delivered in 2022, Annie Ernaux articulates this project with powerful clarity: “I will write to avenge my people.” For Ernaux, writing is an instrument with which to strip off surface layers and reveal deeper truths about gender, class, and time. Reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, she came to recognise that the world was made “by men and for men.” Searingly personal experiences — a backstreet abortion, her father’s death, her mother’s Alzheimer’s, and the relentless weight of class — are crafted into narratives that go far beyond the individual. “All these factors,” she writes, “brought me back…to my ‘people’, and gave my desire to write a quality of secret and absolute urgency.”

Ernaux is sharply aware of the limits of writing as a corrective to injustice. Personal accomplishment cannot erase centuries of oppression and humiliation, of being “the last in a line of landless labourers, factory workers and shopkeepers, people despised for their manners, their accent, their lack of education.” Nevertheless, she can still bear witness. Going beyond memoir, her writing becomes a form of historical witnessing in which memory operates as an archive of loss and longing. Literature is her “continent,” and her mission is “nothing less than the possibility of transfiguring reality.”

Documenting individual histories

Contemporary ethnographic work similarly documents individual histories in everyday lived experience. Asiya Islam’s A Woman’s Job: Making Middle Lives in New India follows the lives of young lower-middle-class women through education and employment in cafes and call centres in globalising Delhi. At the crossroads of modern aspirations and traditional constraints, these young, educated, urban women move in an unstable middle space circumscribed by expectations about caste, class, gender, and sexuality.

Sheela, a café barista, has studied up to Class 12 but could not go further due to a lack of money. Her mother is a domestic worker in multiple homes; her father is unemployed. Knowing a few standard English phrases — “Good morning, sir/ma’am”; “What can I get for you?”; “Have in or take away?” — she is aware of her lack of options: “I’ll continue here because I’m unable to get out of it. If I leave this, I’ll have to sit at home.”

Jahnavi’s parents are presswallahs, like her grandparents. She gets paid ₹9,000 per month but tells her family she gets less, saving the rest. Fired from her first job for “not talking nicely” to a male manager, she now works at a specialty tea café.

Ranjini juggles a 10-hour shift in a fast food chain, a distance BCom, and housework; she also wakes up early to prepare for Delhi Police selections.

In these narratives of young women in new India, ethnography makes visible what is overlooked by dominant narratives. These stories, while intensely personal, also point to the structural.

Studying and writing history

The question of who writes and interprets such histories remains key. This brings us to another dimension of women’s engagement with history: studying and writing it. Women Writing History: Three Generations, by Romila Thapar, Kumkum Roy, and Preeti Gulati, brings together the voices of three Indian women historians across three generations.

Romila Thapar’s entry into the field of history was accidental. Starting college in Pune, her education was interrupted by her family’s move to Delhi — it was believed a young girl could not stay in a college hostel in the 1950s. At the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, she was taught by Arthur Basham. Reading de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was “a big milestone in terms of how it anchored me.” Listening to Eric Hobsbawm made her question who writes history and why. London exposed her to currents of change in the ideas of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and others. She became curious about the role of the individual in history. This question led her to research Ashoka, and her first book was published in 1961. “There were no book launches in those days, thank God.”

Kumkum Roy grew up in Calcutta amid political discussions. College brought freedom. Moving to Delhi in the 1970s was different. The university included impressive women faculty – Thapar, R. Champakalakshmi, K. Meenakshi, Shereen Ratnagar, and Suvira Jaiswal. But a Sanskrit guru refused to teach Kumkum Vedic Sanskrit as she was a woman. Harassment was common on Delhi buses: “We learnt to use our shoulder bags as shields and our elbows as weapons…Carefree commuting was out of the question.” She also experienced harassment within the academic space. “I could not help thinking about how slowly things change, if at all they do.”

Preeti Gulati, too, recalls harassment on the Metro. Within the family, too, gender norms were slow to change: “My Nani cried at the birth of every single girl child.” Her interest in history began with silences around the Partition in her own family. About her work as a historian, she reflects: “I think I subconsciously refuse to place gender at the forefront of my research because it occupies so much of my present and my everyday that I might risk losing my mind if I give it more space.”

(Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta is in the IAS)

Published – March 30, 2026 08:30 am IST