As a literary genre, autobiography has its origin in the West. To be precise, St. Augustine’s Confessions, is considered to be the first autobiography. However, the tradition of writing autobiography started in India quite late. Several factors are responsible for its late arrival. Out of many, one important factor is that Indian caste society is basically “communal” and hence it is very difficult to have an “enlightened self” which is a pre-requisite condition to write one’s autobiography. Banarasi Das’s Ardhakathanaka (1671) is considered to be the first full-fledged Indian autobiography.
Indian autobiographies are innumerable now even though there is hardly any critical tradition to evaluate them. It is therefore important, that we closely look into several issues relating to autobiography in general and Indian autobiographies. Like the caste society autobiographies are also complex in their forms and structures. In order to critically study them one has to closely look into several concerns such as caste, class, ethnicity, language, region, religion and above all gender. Thus, we propose to invite articles from scholars on the following broad areas:

1. Theoretical / Philosophical / historical issues relating to autobiographies.
2. Indian upper caste Men’s/Women’s autobiographies.
3. Dalit Men’s / Women autobiographies.
4. Forms, structures, styles and language of autobiographies
5. Narrated/mediated autobiographies etc

The papers pertaining to the areas mentioned above should be submitted in MS-Word format to the Guest Editor/Editors, at their contact addresses given below not later than 1st June 2009.

All papers submitted to Creative Forum - CF should be original, neither having been previously published nor being considered elsewhere at the time of submission.

Manuscripts should be in conformity with the MLA format.


Guest Editor:
Dr. Raj Kumar
Associate Professor, Department of English
SGTB Khalsa College
University of Delhi
E-mail: bedamatiraj@yahoo.co.in

Editors:
Harpreet Kaur Bahri
Deepinder Singh Bahri
C/o BAHRI PUBLICATIONS
1749A/5, Govindpuri Extension
Kalkaji, New Delhi 110019
E-mail: bahrius@vsnl.com