This episode of The Unofficial Seminar brings together Professor Malashri Lal with Arup K. Chatterjee for a wide ranging discussion on poetry, feminism, literary history, and interpretation. Lal is introduced as a long serving professor at the University of Delhi, a writer, poet, and scholar, and the conversation also notes her recent books, including The Mandalas of Time, Treasures of Lakshmi, and a play on Michael Madhusudan Dutt written with Namita Gokhale.
The first major theme is poetry as a deeply personal form of writing. Lal explains that she began publishing poetry relatively late because poetry, in her view, draws directly from emotion and private experience, including sorrow, ecstasy, painful memories, and unrealised hopes. She also notes that her work as a university academic made her cautious about revealing too much of the personal self in public. In the transcript she further observes that poetry often carries not only private feeling but also myth, history, and cultural memory, which allows the personal to open into a wider social and historical field.
From there the discussion moves to the development of Lal’s feminist thought. She traces this to her doctoral years and her fellowship at Harvard, where women’s studies and feminist criticism led her to ask why Indian women writers were not receiving comparable attention. That question became the basis for her first major book, The Law of the Threshold, which she presents as a study of Indian women writers in English built around the symbolic divide between domestic and public space. The transcript shows that for Lal, the threshold is both an architectural and metaphorical boundary, and the problem of crossing it lies at the heart of women’s experience in literature and society.
A substantial portion of the conversation concerns the difference she draws between feminism in general and Indian feminism in particular. Lal argues that feminism is often misunderstood when it is reduced to spectacle, fashion, or an aggressive style of public display. Her own understanding is more contextual and literary. She describes feminism as the assertion of women’s intellectual capacity and freedom of choice, while also remaining connected to family and society rather than rejecting them. She says explicitly that she is a feminist, but not a flag waving feminist, and that the woman’s perspective should be brought into whatever subject one is teaching or reading.
The conversation then turns to older Indian texts and to the figure of Ardhanarishvara, which Lal identifies as an emblem of equality and interdependence. She links this idea to her poetic and critical work, arguing that the composite vision of man and woman in Indian thought differs from a more confrontational model often associated with Western feminism. Her book The Mandalas of Time is presented as part of this line of thought, with the first poem in the collection written on Ardhanarishvara to stress that such ideas are not confined to antiquity but remain relevant in the present. She also discusses her work with Namita Gokhale on goddess figures such as Sita, Radha, and Lakshmi, placing them within a longer argument about Indian cultural understandings of the feminine.
Sarojini Naidu becomes an important example in this part of the dialogue. Lal describes her as a poet, prose writer, politician, and public figure whose life embodied what she calls a composite feminism. Naidu’s ability to combine family, literary work, and political activity is held up as evidence that women’s agency need not be defined by rupture or opposition alone. The transcript also mentions the story of Naidu’s speeches in public life and her wit, which Chatterjee connects to the relatively small number of women in the Constituent Assembly and to the way Naidu could ease patriarchal atmospheres without direct confrontation.
Another important subject is the play Betrayed by Hope, written with Namita Gokhale on the life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Lal explains that the play was built from his correspondence in English, transformed into dramatic form, and given a modern counterpoint through a PhD student in Bangladesh who studies him from a contemporary feminist perspective. The discussion does not excuse Dutt’s personal conduct, which Lal and Chatterjee both describe as deeply troubled, but it does insist on the separation between literary achievement and moral judgement. The writer may be flawed as a person and still remain significant as a literary figure. That distinction, in Lal’s account, is essential to literary empathy.
The final section of the conversation looks to the future of reading. Lal expresses confidence that younger readers are returning to classical literature, aided by better translations of texts such as the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the epics. She also notes the vitality of contemporary writing from the Northeast and the renewed interest in folklore, tribal memory, and ecological storytelling. Her view is that the present generation does not merely inherit the past as dead matter, but reads it as lineage and heritage, while also experimenting with new forms such as science fiction and fantasy. The overall tone of the episode is therefore reflective rather than polemical, and grounded in a belief that literature still has the capacity to connect memory, ethics, and interpretation.
Arup K. Chatterjee 