The "Santānagopāla" as a narrative opening up intimate spaces : Lakṣmī Tampurāṭṭi and her poem

During my fieldwork in Kerala in 2014 and 2015, made possible by the financial support of the National Science Centre in Poland, I was able to collect several manuscripts by women authors as well as some very rare printed editions of their works. From the collected sources I have decided to choose a poem based on the Santānagopāla theme, a story about a pious Brahmin and his wife losing one child after another. It recurs in the oeuvre of at least three women writers living at the turn of 19th and 20th centuries. We know very little about the lives of the authoresses but the selection of such a theme perhaps was not fortuitous and we will be able to notice their womanly sensitivity in its treatment or scenes from their own lives and gather more information about the authors themselves. In the present paper I will concentrate on the Santānagopāla poem written by Lakṣmī Tampurāṭṭi (1845-1909).