These two books from the independent Australian feminist press, Spinifex, are by Indian writers. The first, by Bulbul Sharma, was originally published two years earlier by the Indian feminist press, Kali. The cover image of a gorgeous plump aubergine lying on a piece of gold embroidered red silk is richly sensual and immediately desirable; it evokes a material and gourmet India instantly recognisable to Westerners through the fabric of women's traditional saris and their food. Women and their food are at the centre of this series of short stories, and Indian recipes are included at the end of every story. The book is a fabulous idea, and splendidly marketed to attract English readers. The back cover is suggestive about its concerns: 'Food as passion, a gift, a means of revenge, even source of power. … Women weigh up the loss of a lover or the loss of weight; they consider whether hunger and the thought of higher things are inextricably linked; they feast and crave and die for their insatiable appetites.' And the stories are suggestive of all these things, and replete with the waft of ginger, the hiss of cardamon seeds thrown into hot oil, and the zing of lemon zest mixed with freshly crushed coriander. Despite all these ingredients, however, the stories seem never-endingly depressing and oppressive. In them, the women compete with each other to cook meals for males; women wait to be married or wait to be told they are separated (and continue to cook for the husband); women are plumped up 'like a pregnant cow' or are made to fast to mourn the loss of a husband. Men are central while women wait around/for/on them, and mothers are the worst women of all and won't let go of their sons. It seems familiar ground for Indian writing, even with the evocatively sizzling spices. Perhaps this is Sharma's paradoxical critique of Indian patriarchy wrapped in the aroma of its exoticised food. While readers are being sensuously seduced, the relationships for women are sickening. Perhaps this is a deliberate undermining of traditionally Western associations of India as the spice culture, as the exotic other, while its politics and social relations remain unstintingly repressive. Ultimately, however, any desire for the delights of this book were overridden by its oppressive preparation and serving for me.

Entering Suniti Namjoshi's Goja is like falling down a rabbit hole into completely unfamiliar territory. Subtitled An Autobiographical Myth, it reflects on the life of privilege of an Indian noble who goes to the West, becomes a poet, a lesbian, an academic. Goja is the servant who cared for the baby/child subject, and who forms a nexus around which the narrator's guilt/questioning of Indian class relations revolves. Goja becomes a fantastical creature of myth, continually questioning and challenging the author in her own terms: 'You want to de-glamorise power, Sweetie, you'll first have to deconstruct it within yourself.' The other dominant figures are Goldie, the narrator's aristocratic Indian grandmother, and Charity, a confused and hybridised result of Indian Catholic boarding school. Namjoshi writes: 'My mind is a hodgepodge of Greek myth, Hindu experience and Christian words; but I have understood that Charity is neither the daughter of suffering, nor of joy. She has a human face. Blake understood it all along.' Blake understands quite a lot in this book, as the narrator constructs herself as erudite and learned through this mish-mash of canonical references. It is mainly to the characters of Goja, Goldie and Charity, however, that the narrator talks, as we all do to the voices inside our head, accusing them of sorrow, hurt and unfairness. In one insightful moment the narrator is asked: '”Who are you shouting at?” At myself? At the pain? At the whole of India?'

Namjoshi's analysis of sexism, class privilege and homophobia in the East and racism in the West is lucid, but drawn out and at times self-torturing. Post-colonial politics are engaged when the English language is referred to as a coloniser of the mind but also as the key to another life of poetry and writing. One of the most provocative aspects of this book is its experiments in form, which include a chapter on language as a forest, a fable about the black piglet and the queen of spades (mirroring a thread from Namjoshi's Building Babel), self-reflexive narration, poetry, fairytale, straight autobiography, and an almost continuous dialogue with various interrogators of conscience. While these variations could arguably be said to reflect the search for an appropriate form in which to write such an autobiographical myth, it is the 'straight' storytelling which is the most readable and engaging. If I were giving a lecture on this, I'd say that this is what I've been trained to read; that the confusion of hybrid textual forms proves just how fixed we've become in anticipating storylines. On another level, however, the tortured textual position of being Indian, aristocratic, and lesbian becomes repetitively self-flagellating (I've never understood Catholic culture) and comparable to that of the seventies Toronto academics in the book who 'complain' that it's not their fault they are white, male, or heterosexual. Perhaps the confusion of the title is telling: this autobiographical myth is not about Goja. Goja is one of many characters whose voice is important, dominant and female in the narrator's imagination. Goja is a fantasy of a servant speaking, a personal reconciliation, an elegy.

Alison Bartlett teaches literature at the University of Southern Queensland. Her most recent book was Postgraduate Research Supervision: Transforming (R)elations, edited with Gina Mercer.