Hailing from the Marwari community in Kolkata, late Prabha Khaitan (1/11/1942 – 20/9/2008) is renown as a writer, entrepreneur and feminist. Her writings reveal not only her private life and working experiences, but also her thought, that combines Indian and European philosophy.

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The conference focuses on the philosophical aspect of Prabha Khaitan’s literary production. She is the Hindi translator of Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’, published in 1991 with the title ‘Strī upekṣitā.’ She introduced Jean Paul Sartre’s Existentialism to the Hindi readers (Sārtr kā astitvavād, 1984; Sārtr: śabdoṃ kā masīhā, 1985) and published an essay on Albert Camus (Albeyar kāmū: vah pahlā ādmī, 1993).

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The conference has been organized under the auspices of the Prabha Khaitan Foundation, Kolkata, the Department of Humanities – StudiUm, UniTo, the Institute for Asian Studies – ISA, UniTO, and the Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Women and Gender – CIRSDe, Turin. It disseminates the results of a three-year long research led by Prof. Alessandra Consolaro, Associate Professor of Hindi Language and Literature at the University of Turin.

Starting from Prabha Khaitan’s writing, the sessions deal with the contact between Existentialist and Indian philosophy, and reflect on the translations into South Asian languages of Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex.’