Ageing in Indian higher education: analysing narratives of post-Independence women writers, educators, and academics

This article analyses experiences of old age and ageism in the trajectories of Indian women academics in post-Independencehigher education, drawing on narrative sources such as life-writing and fiction. It focuses primarily on writing by the late JasodharaBagchi, 1937–2015, and Nabaneeta Dev Sen, 1938–2019, who worked within public funded higher education in India, played major roles in feminist scholarship, writing, and creativity, and intersectionally raised issues around matters such as gender, class, generations, and religion. Sources discussed in this article are thenovel Sheet Sahasik Hemantalok: Defying Winter (1988; English translation 2013), a pioneering discussion in Indian literature ofageing, set in an old-age home for women, written by Dev Sen, a long-time Professor of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University and well-known creative writer; another set of sources analysed is writing by Bagchi, Dev Sen, Sushil Narulla, and Mary Roy, from A Space of Her Own: Personal Narratives of Twelve Women,edited by Leela Gulati and Jasodhara Bagchi, 2005, a collection edited by pioneering academics in women’s studies in India, telling the life-stories of a majority of women working in post-Independence Indian higher education as professionals, from an intergenerational perspective. The article asks, intersectionally, where and how we find traces in this writing of understanding of ageing and older age, of dynamics between the generations aboveand below these women, how the journey from middle age to old age is understood and negotiated, and how the intersections between formal education and informal education are imaginatively represented.