Contemporary girlhoods in South Asian nations are caught in the crosshairs between tradition and modernity. This assertion is backed by literature written by women in many of the languages in which songs, poems, stories and life narratives have been written and told in these countries. In India the two volumes of writing by women from times immemorial to contemporary times, compiled by Tharu and Lalita, opened up the possibility of a literary historiography of women's experiences of living through largely patriarchal societies. Other anthologies, like the one compiled by Eunice D'Souza, present the changes that colonialism brought about in women's lives through a critical selection of life-narratives and literary work by some of the first beneficiaries of modernism. From the 1980s to contemporary times, many women writers in academics in India have been representing or reflecting on womanhood in India. The most recent instances of these articulations from India that acquired global recognition are Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand and Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp and Other Stories. 

This seminar proposes to reflect on the emergence of the idea of girlhood as distinct from miniature womanhood in South Asian literary traditions to examine the possibility of a literary historiography of girlhood. The underlying assumption for proposing such a seminar is that such a historiography will unearth the heterogeneity of girlhood as a counter to the assumption of the universal ideal of girlhood that had been disseminated through colonial educational and cultural frameworks in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.