Victorian Feminist Periodicals and the ‘New Indian Woman’: Indian Women’s Interviews in Women’s Penny Paper and The Woman’s Signal

This article traces the Women’s Penny Paper and Woman’s Signal’s reporting of an emerging Indian feminism. These feminist periodicals published groundbreaking interviews with two Indian women reformers: the social reformer Pandita Ramabai Saraswati in 1889 and the women’s rights advocate Shevantibai Nikambe in 1896. These were the only two Indian women, and the only racial minority, given full-length features on their front pages. By analyzing these interviews in the context of the New Woman in both colony and metropole, this article considers how Ramabai and Shevantibai used this journalistic opportunity to fashion modern, cosmopolitan identities for themselves while also subtly interrogating Anglocentric perceptions and stereotypes.