Concluding Note

The conclusion focuses upon reception-based approach to understand the significance of women authors in the social map of reading community in nineteenth-century Bengal. It demonstrates how, even after the emergence of a sizeable reading community catering to books authored by women, due to the spatial ‘respectability’ of the presses from which their books got published the reception of prohibited penmanship by women by the bhadralok society in ‘renascent’ Bengal was disappointing. Since some women flouted the norms of literary aesthetics and tutored tastes, the bhadralok critics, in their reviews of book by women, often censured the authors if their autonomous selfhood in print became threatening and praised them for imparting ‘feminine’ ideals alone. However, such sarcastic comments and caustic critique could not strip women authors of their creative foray in the literary world. By the turn of the century, they had begun creating a literary tradition of their own in Bengali.

Introduction

The ‘Introduction’ helps the readers situate Hindu and Brahmo women’s literary outpourings within the wider sociopolitical context of nineteenth-century Bengal. It locates the eager penmanship of Bengali women within the larger and growing milieu of print literature; the tension between formal and informal forms of Bengali language; and the statistical analysis of ‘books in print’. The startling fact of the price of woman-authored books being on par with male-authored ones is a revelation about the market for women-authored texts. Extant literature on women authors in the nineteenth century considers the major scholarly epitomes that have appeared in the last 50 years in Bangla and English on women’s writings in Bengal. The ‘Chapters’ Overview’ deals with autobiographies, diaries, didactic tracts, novels, and travelogues written by women writers to examine how their literary production varied in style, content, and language form within and across genres. It demonstates both divergences and convergences in literary creations amongst male and female writers.

Domesticity

Critical questioning of broad framework of normative assumptions regarding womanly duties is studied in this chapter through close reading of Kailashbashini Debi’s polemical piece Hindu Mahilaganer Heenabastha and Swarnakumari Gupta’s didactic tract Usha Chinta Arthat Adhunik Arya Mahilaganer Abasthya Sambandhe Kayekti Katha. Beginning as an expression of femininity rather than a rebellion against it, they conceded that women bear innate potency and dedication to deliver these socially sanctioned duties. However, they chose domesticity as a vocal and publicly confessed pledge for gaining access to freedom, location, and power from which they entrust men with equal responsibility to make an orderly home. As agential voices with an enhanced moral role, they made an effort to transcend the prescribed ideal of domesticated, self-denying, self-regulating, self-effacing, and self-cancelling subjectivities. While Kailashbashini adopts the civilising-cum-nationalist critique of societal mores with a linear trajectory of progress in keeping with the project of creation of modern patriotic citizens/subjects, Swarnakumari, with her liberal-nationalist consciousness, seeks progress in re-establishment of Aryan/shastric societal order as a remedy to women’s fallen condition. Maintaining an exquisite balance and adroitly negotiating power equations, both the authors subverted certain indigenous patriarchal ideals of domesticity/conjugality (through contestation of non-consensual child marriage, kulin polygamy, non-allowance of widow remarriage) and colonial projection of ideal femininity (through debunking of the bibi or memsahib). Their complex contestations from within made them non-compliant within the discourse of domesticity.

Women in the Archives

In order to contextualise texts produced by upper-caste, middle-class bhadramahila, and to get an overview of the condition of women in general in the Bengal Presidency, this chapter uses the conventional archive—official records, censuses, contemporary newspaper reportage, and excerpts from journals. Dealing with the social and cultural base and materialist background that gave impetus to women to write, this chapter will try to provide a holistic picture of similarity and difference between the sensibilities, cultural idioms, lifestyle, and living conditions of women of various strata. In general, though the bhadramahila’s social location and individual positioning in the household differed from that of the lower-caste/class women, they shared cultural experiences and social and domestic conditions that find reflection in literary productions. The trajectories of colonial modernity, conjugal conditions, caste system, female education, and the emerging public sphere are negotiated to highlight the complex manner in which the bhadramahila began to assert her self-identity in print.

Travel Writings

Travelling women had to negotiate with liberating paradigms of travel and codes regulating the ‘masculinist’ discourse of travel writing. This chapter explicates how this double-bind situation forces ambiguity in the heart of the travelogues of women. The account of the inland travels of Prasannamayee Debi, Aryavarta: Janaika Banga-Mahilar Bhraman Brittanta, is balanced by the narrative of international travels of Krishnabhabhini Das in Englande Banga Mahila. They wrote against the grain and turned travelogues into scripts of dissent by overturning the masculinist genre into one that expressed their ‘selves’ and their agendas. Pictures of domesticity, grandeur of landscape, and romance in architecture are bypassed for fashioning critiques of colonized men and India. If Kailashbashini tries to understand what made the Britons a ruling race, her counterpart Prasannamayee tries to understand what led to the downfall of India from the glorious Aryan past. While Kailashbashini’s narrative was based on critical rationality, Prasannamayee’s account, at times, obliquely touches upon her emotions and sentiments. Together they situate the ‘condition of woman’ as an index of civilizational zenith and assert that the liberation of the Indian woman was imperative for the emancipation of India.

Novels

Women were taught to be discreet and reserved, to excel in domestic accomplishments and to influence only through familial affections. To gain ‘legitimate’ entry into the ‘male preserve’ of creative writing, women took to writing novels. This chapter examines how Kusumkumari Roychoudhurani’s Snehalata and Swarnakumari Debi’s Kahake? were adaptations of the western genre of novel writing to deal with indigenous societal injunctions on pativrata, dutiful daughter, and sisterhood. The protagonists, apparently docile Snehalata and feisty Mrinalini, are juxtaposed to explore the western ideal of romantic love. Snehalata’s unrequited love and unconsummated wifehood finds fulfilment in death, which bestows her with agency. The spirited Mrinalini presents multifaceted dilemmas to herself, moving from several loves in her lifetime before marrying a man of her choice. Both authors transcend their disadvantageous social location and physical reality in a patriarchal set-up to unleash an unbridled social imagination in the creative arena to depict transgressive women’s subjectivities who could re-draw a new social/moral order.

Personal Narratives

By choosing two dissimilar genres in the form of Kailashbashini Debi’s diary Janaika Grihabadhur Diary and Saradasundari Debi’s dictated autobiography Atmakatha, the chapter shows how the unmediated (diary) and the highly mediated (autobiography) are still ‘relational’ outputs. These fulsomely reveal fragmented subjectivities, dismembered recollections, slippages, and gaps that are as much a product of their interactions with ‘men’ as they are of their own creation. While Saradasundari surpassed the ideological constriction of Hindu wifehood and sculpted a defiant identity only after the death of her husband, Kailashbashini invented herself through marital love and the ensuing freedom, position, and authority that empowered her to speak. Embedded in the history of nineteenth-century Bengal, these personal narratives are candid enough to critically appraise the times, critique social relations, assess the efficacy of social reforms, and appeal for sociocultural changes. Though their life witnessed ‘big events’ and ‘illustrious men’, these are made insignificant in both personal narratives. The chapter provides vignettes of women’s experiences—negotiations, resistances, rebellions—and a range of emotions—resentment, anger, joy, sadness, rage, melancholy and resignation—which weave a masterpiece of history of emotions in colonial India.