Suvarnarekha

Dr. Nandini Sahu's preoccupation with poetry began very early in life, and today she is a major voice in contemporary Indian English poetry. A double gold medalist in English literature, she was award winner at the All India Poetry Contest, has been honoured with the Shiksha Ratna Puraskar and has to her credit the coveted Bouddha Creative Writers' Award. A doctorate in English literature under the tutelage of eminent poet and academic, Late Prof. Niranjan Mohanty from Visva Bharati , Nandini's creative output has been widely published in India, U.S.A, U.K., Africa and Pakistan. Her published volumes of poetry include The Other Voice, The Silence, Silver Poems on My Lips, and Sukamaa and Other Poems. Presently, she is Associate Professor of English at Indira Gandhi National Open University [IGNOU], New Delhi. Broadly, her research interests pan across Indian Literature, New Literatures, Folklore and Culture Studies, American Literature, Children's Literature and Critical Theory. She has authored/edited volumes like Recollection as Redemption; Post-Modernist Delegation to English Language Teaching; The Post Colonial Space: Writing the Self and the Nation; Folklore and the Alternative Modernities (in 2 Vols), all titles that cumulatively bring out the range of her oeuvre! She is Chief Editor/Founder Editor of Interdisciplinary Journal of Literature and Language (IJLL), a bi-annual peer-reviewed journal in English. She is presently shaping Sita (A Poem), which promises to be a whole new take on the Indian epic. Nandini's is a mind that is incessantly at work, and snippets of this can be seen at www.kavinandini.blogspot.com

Editorspeak

In a review titled, “The Empire writes back with a vengeance”, Salman Rushdie says that some of the best writing in English today is coming from the peripheries of the erstwhile British Empire. The pleasant task of editing this volume has given me the conviction that Rushdie's words ring so true of Indian women poets writing in English, from Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu to our own contemporaries. Across generations, these poets flamboyantly articulate epochal feminine sensibilities that both validate and interrogate the nitty-gritties of our culture, while genuinely revealing the marginalization of their gendered identities as also their responses to this inevitability. In doing so, they create a milieu for divulging and affirming their individuality. It is important to reckon the role of the early poets who worked in this medium and charted pathways for the progeny. Carrying forward that historiography, contemporary Indian women poets in English have been exploring female consciousness with eloquence, confidently expressing their selves with the contention of their ability and uniqueness. That way this anthology of women poets has been named Suvarnarekha, the river flowing from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal. Originating from the River Saraswati, Suvarnarekha is physically life replenishing; metaphorically it is the fount of sagacity and wisdom. Suvarnarekha, the anthology, epitomizes womanhood—life-giving, perennially-flowing, nourishing, a source of ecstasy and beauty, a reservoir of mysticism and sustenance. Here's hoping this anthology would validate new dimensions in our approach to women's poetry in English in India.