On the Outside Looking In(dian) analyzes works over the past century translated into or written in English by feminist Indian women writers such as Krupabai Satthianadhan, Rokeya Sakhewat Hossein, Maitreyi Devi, Kamala Das, Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, and others. These writers condemn patriarchal customs and laws for depriving Indian women – of all castes and classes, as well as women of other cultures – of their basic human rights by sanctioning child marriage, sati, purdah, and the wearing of the burqa, while prohibiting widow remarriage, the expression of sexuality, and the pursuit of an education to promote self-sufficiency, and equal economic, political, and social status with men.
Phillipa Kafka
Phillipa Kafka, Professor Emerita and former Director of Women’s Studies at Kean University in Union, New Jersey, is the author of four books: The Great White Way: African American Women Writers and American Success Mythologies; (Un)Doing the Missionary Position: Gender Assymetry in Contemporary Asian American Women’s Writing; (Out)Classed Women: Contemporary Chicana Writers on Inequitable Gendered Power Relations; and «Saddling La Gringa»: Gatekeeping in Literature by Contemporary Latina Writers.
Editorial Reviews
 | “…an exciting new addition to this body of scholarship … [it] will be of great interest to not just students and scholars of Hindu traditions, but students and scholars of Sanskrit literature, students and scholars of mythology, and students and scholars of gender and religion as well.”
—Religious Studies Review
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| “The Literary Life of Yājñavalkya sets new standards in the examination of religious literary figures in South Asian textual traditions and is an exemplar of how philological and literary analysis should evolve to better accommodate the cultural investments of original literary communities. This study comes as a pertinent and much-needed reminder that even as historical facticity may not be a primary concern of literary characterizations, literary characterizations are indeed a historical fact in themselves.”
—Religions of South Asia
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| “…a valuable resource for readers of the Upaniṣads, post-Vedic Brahminical mythology, and Sanskrit literature more broadly … this title will no doubt become a benchmark work within Vedic studies, and will additionally inspire with its example a much wider audience of scholars engaging Hindu mythology.”
—Reading Religion
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| “Lindquist traces the textual references to Yājñavalkya from their pre-Buddhist beginnings to their classical and postclassical contexts, all while avoiding the pitfalls of mostly pointless inquiries into the 'historicity' of Yājñavalkya. As such, the book is unique within the field of Indology because it goes beyond the usual dismissive descriptions of such personalities as mere eponyms or arbitrary placeholders for sagely authority. In contrast, Lindquist shows how coherent features of thought and rhetorical style provided a solid core text-persona called Yājñavalkya, around whom a host of distinctive ideas and styles of debate and expression were carried through several genres of Vedic and classical Hindu sacred writing.”
—Donald R. Davis Jr., University of Texas at Austin
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