The Song of Life and other stories: Short stories

Vijaya Rajadhyaksha is one of the most celebrated women writers in Marathi. She has been writing for over fifty years. The twelve stories in this collection, originally written in Marathi between 1956 and 1998, explore a woman’s relationship with society, with men, and most importantly with herself, and her search for her own identity as opposed to what the world invests her with. The questions that arise from the roles assigned to her, the possibilities that these roles throw up for her, the way in which her experience of all these undergoes a change in the flow of time, form the crux of her fiction.

Delicately and sensitively the author describes the physical and mental world of a woman and how she balances the demands of one with the needs of the other. How the apparent conflict between the two is resolved, through a deep and profound understanding of the female body and a woman’s mind, is a hallmark of Vijayabai’s writing.