Indira Bai: The Triumph of Truth and Virtue

Published in 1899, Gulvadi Venkata Rao’s Indira Bai is a text of social history that documents the wide-ranging transformation that took place in the ineluctable encounter between the Kannada social world and colonial modernity. Indira Bai, acknowledged as the first, independent, social novel in Kannada, chronicles the changes that rocked the Saraswat brahman community in the erstwhile South Canara region of Karnataka, at the turn of the nineteenth century. Indira Bai reflects the pan-Indian churning provoked by the social reform movement which had focused on the women’s question in a major way. This narrative of the nation tells you the moving tale of Indira, a child widow who stands up to a corrupt religious orthodoxy and remarries an upright, educated man. It actively participates, as do many other first novels in Indian languages such as Indulekha, in the fashioning of a new, secular self in an emerging modern, national culture. Reading this text in a new translation has a renewed significance now when local cultures of India have had to recast their identities again in the face of a globalizing world.