Her Story, Our Story And On The Swing

In the short stories, Vibhavari Shirurkar (the pseudonym of Malatibai Bedekar), had bravely written on the complex yearnings of young girls, touching upon their sexuality and their tentative steps to an inchoate self-hood, and in the novella, of an abandoned wife’s courage in forming a new relationship. In the 1976 edition of Kalyanche Nishwas (Popular Prakashan), the author wrote a note on the public reaction to these two works when first published, which has also been included in this volume. These two fictional works, translated into English from the original Marathi for the first time, and accompanied by a critical note, written in 1933, by the sociologist and Marathi encyclopaedist S. V. Ketkar, are like a slice of social history. Together, Her Story, Our Story and On the Swing speak about women who loved and lost, despaired, doubted the choices they made, yet made them nevertheless.