Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa: Laidlaw Summer 2021
For my first summer of Laidlaw research, I studied a series of editorials published by Mahadevi Varma on the condition of women in Hindu marriages during 1930s British India, seeking to compare Mahadevi's works with those of two groups: Western social reformers and feminists, and prominent men in the Indian independence movement who framed themselves as cultural reformers. Here, I discuss how Mahadevi's writings offer a means to reconceptualize the experiences of Hindu women in the marriage system and a critique of the more well-known views of her Western and Indian anti-colonial interlocutors, as well as what insights this might have to future historical research and to the field of leadership and human rights reform. I hope to continue engaging with Mahadevi's works in my second summer—spending the next year improving my Hindi proficiency so I can engage better with her original Hindi poetry and other literary works—and remain deeply interested in these intersections of gender and anti-colonialism in South Asia, and beyond.
I am an alumna of the 2021-22 Columbia Laidlaw Scholars cohort, and graduated from Columbia (CC'24) with majors in History and Mathematics. My Laidlaw research centered on the women's movement in early twentieth-century British India. My first summer focused on the Indian writer, educator, and activist Mahadevi Varma, and my second summer focused on networks of women from across the British empire attending the Oxford in the 1910s-30s at the Unstable Archives Project.
