Chamba Achamba - Women's Oral Culture

The mention of ‘ Chamba’ opens up a vista in the imagination, taking one to pristine mountain landscapes, miniature paintings, ‘rumal’ embroidery, and rich folklore, This book uncovers the reality beneath a romanitieised surface and entes the lives of the women of Chamba and the rural area of Bharmour. With an understading that women and culture studies are entering previously unrecorded sites of knowledge, mainly the oral repertoire, the anthology seeks to construct a cultural map which is based on traditional tales, poems, legends, songs, mythologies and domestic and community practices. The dynamism embedded in these ‘histories’ has remained outside the pale of traditional scholarship and therefore been neglected in institutionalized forms of learning Here the minutiae of everyday practices in women-centric communities gathers into a fresh picture of Chamba.

Mulashri Lal Professor in the Department of English, was the Joint Director of the University of Delhi, South Campus, and also served as the Director of the Women’s Studies & Development centre of the same university. She has written and lectured extensively on women’s socio-cultural positioning and women’s writing. Her most recent works are the eo-edited bolumes, Speaking for myself: Anthology of Asian women’s writing and In search of Sita; Revisiting Mythology, both published by Penguin Indian (2009). She has served as a member of the international jury for the commonwealth writers’ Prize, London.

Sukrita Paul Kumar born and brought up in Kenya, is a poet and critic, teaching literature in Zakir Husain College, Delhi University, Formerly, a Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, she is and Honorary Fellow of the International Writing Programme, University of Lowa (USA), as also of Hong kong Baptist University and Cambridge Seminars. She is honorar faculty at the Durrell Centre t Corfu (Greece). She has published several collections of poems and many critical books including Without Margins, Folds of Silence, Narrating Partition, The New Story, Man, Woman and Androgyny and Ismat, Her Life, Her Times.