ताराबाई शिंदे यांची पुस्तके
Author
Tarabai Shinde
ताराबाई शिंदे
Tarabai Shinde (1850–1910) was a Marathi writer and social critic from Buldhana, whose single short book, Stree-Purush Tulna, is among the earliest arguments in an Indian language against the double standard by which men and women were judged. She was born in 1850 in Buldhana, the daughter of Bapuji Hari Shinde, a head clerk in the office of the Deputy Commissioner and a radical thinker who wrote Hint to the Educated Natives. At a time when her town had no school for girls, he taught her at home in Marathi, Sanskrit and English.
Stree-Purush Tulna, a comparison between women and men, answered the case of a Pune widow, Vijayalakshmi, condemned in the press and in court over the death of her newborn child, which showed how women bore the whole blame for conduct that men practised freely. Setting scripture and custom side by side, she argued that both exalted men and condemned women, and called for equal treatment regardless of sex. She published it herself in 1882, in an edition of 500 copies.
She was associated with the Satyashodhak Samaj of Jyotirao Phule, whose Satsaar of 1885 defended her book against orthodox attack, and she spoke against enforced widowhood and polygamy until her death in 1910. Shabdalaya Prakashan published its edition of Stree-Purush Tulna in 2020.
