ABSTRACT
In both expected and unexpected ways, Krupabai Satthianadhan’s biography, her cultural milieu, and the reception of her work mirror those of Toru Dutt. Like Dutt, Satthianadhan was the daughter of Christian converts and received an extensive English-language education. Both families occupied a culturally intermediary position, like many of the English-educated and/or converted Indian elite, retaining deeply felt connections to Hindu culture, welcoming social reforms for women, and sensitive to the racism inherent in a colonized society. They both died young, and their writings were published posthumously to a wider audience, garnering very favorable reviews from both Indian and British critics of varied ideological leanings. Though religious conversion isolated both families socially from traditional Brahmin society, their texts reveal a desire to engage with that world imaginatively to correct distorted, inaccurate, and culturally-insensitive Western perspectives. The reformist cause of advancing Indian women’s education drew both of them to advocate for it in their literary works. Dutt reminds her readers that Vedic traditions encouraged women’s intellectual aspirations and validated learned women as models of feminine virtue. In Satthianadhan’s novels, Hindu women’s access to education as young wives proves integral to improving highcaste Indian women’s conjugal relations and family lives.
