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A collection lost to Madras
IN QUEST for information about Krupabai Satthianadhan, I remembered someone telling me that one of the first magazines for women to be published in India had been published in Madras. I had heard that several issues of this magazine were with a collector of rare books in the city. And so I went in search of him. Only to find that the journal was first published long after Krupabai Satthianadhan's day. And that the collection was no longer in Madras.
The first woman's magazine in the South, Our Lady's Magazine, appeared in 1901, he stated confidently. It had looked at women's rights and issues at a time when women had still not moved beyond the domestic threshold and even there enjoyed few rights. Yet it successfully reached a large audience not only in India but also in South and Southeast Asia, from where it received a regular stream of contributions from leaders of the women's rights movements.
Bound volumes of all the published issues of Our Lady's Magazine, from 1901 to 1910, were with this collector in Madras for years. When he began disposing parts of his collection, he offered the volumes to a couple of official and quasi-official institutions in Tamil Nadu who thought Rs. 35,000 was too much for the lot. A Delhi book dealer visiting Madras grabbed what he thought was a bargain. And I have no doubt the collection is now nestling in some American library.
The pity of this loss is that I was not able to find out who had published and edited it. The collector could not remember, but he felt certain that he'd seen the name `Sathianathan' somewhere in those pages. I wonder whether anyone remembers anything about this pioneering journal, which appears to have followed the trail blazed by Krupabai Satthianadhan.
S.MUTHAIH
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