In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore made history as the first Asian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature for Gitanjali, a collection of his Bengali poems that he himself translated into English. Yet, despite this groundbreaking achievement, Indian literature has remained absent from the Nobel constellation for more than a hundred years—a silence that feels all the more striking given the country’s vast and diverse literary traditions.

Yet, even as the Nobel Prize continues to elude Indian literature, women authors from India have forged their own path to global acclaim, claiming other prestigious honours—most notably since 1997, when Arundhati Roy burst onto the world stage with her Booker Prize–winning novel ‘The God of Small Things’. In 2006, Kiran Desai followed with her Booker-winning ‘The Inheritance of Loss’, and this year she has been shortlisted again for ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’.

Other renowned women authors such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Bharati Mukherjee (1940-2017), though long settled abroad, reflect their Indian roots in their writings, even as they explore themes of migration, displacement, and identity in a wider global context. Jhumpa’s collections like ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ and ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ and novels like ‘The Namesake’........

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