ZAA 2018; 66(1): 19–34

Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty* and Dhritiman Chakraborty*

Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial
Period: Critique of Nation, Narration, and
Patriarchy
https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2018-0004

Abstract: Critical engagements like the first autobiography written by a Bengali

woman, Rasasundari Devi, and the non-fictions by Kailashbasini Devi, Krishnab-
habini Das, and other women writers in the second half of the nineteenth century
contested the imagined idealization of the Hindu domesticity and conjugality
as spaces of loveableness and spiritual commitment. They criticized coercion
in child-marriages and the forceful injunctions of the Hindu scriptures on both
married and widowed women. Such rhetoric of quasi empowerment needs to be
disaggregated to perpetuate issues of ‘double colonization,’ ‘dual-hold’ in fem-
inism in India. The question is whether there can be any grounds of women’s
agency in the Indian tradition. Eurocentric critiques are ill-equipped to politicize
all modalities of a culture of social exclusion in Hindu imaginaries. Henceforth,
as questions of equality, emancipation, and empowerment are fiercely debated
in the public domain in contemporary India, we need to argue how immanent
dissenting woman subjectivity can originate to counteract multiple patriarchies
formed in Indian immediacies.

1 Introduction
No feminist works emerged from behind the Hindu purdah or out of the Moslem harems;
centuries of slavery do not provide a fertile soil for intellectual development or expression.
(Schneir qtd. in Forbes 2005, 11)

I wrote this [essay on Rasasundari Devi’s autobiography], out of dissatisfaction with the
parameters of feminist cultural studies which seemed to me to reiterate the recast presence
of patriarchy within male discourse in the form of very similar images of women across
history and geography. (Sarkar 2001, 6)

*Corresponding authors: Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty, Ph.D. Research Scholar, Department

of English, Bankura University, Bankura, India, e-mail: sanchayita.dhritiman@gmail.com; and
Dhritiman Chakraborty, M.A., Department of English, Raiganj ­Surendranath College, University
of Gour Banga, Raiganj, India, e-mail: sanchayita.dhritiman@gmail.com
20      Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty and Dhritiman Chakraborty

Geraldine Forbes begins her book Women in Colonial India (2005) with the rebut-
tal of Miriam Schneir’s stand that feminism in India is inherently constrained
by the fundamental constitutive limitation of social and religious structures as
furnished in the Hindu scriptures and meticulously followed in Hindu society of
the early nineteenth century. On the contrary, Women in Colonial India bears tes-
timony to the fact that the metaphoric ‘purdah,’ which symbolizes both a forceful
social exclusion and patriarchal imposition, could not hold back women from
voicing their collective anger while simultaneously demanding their rights for
education, property, and equality since as early as the 1870s. The problem with
Schneir’s polemics is not that she is placed in an imperialist ideological discourse
that aggressively propounded Indian women being victims of a retrogressive
Hindu culture of coercion and ruthless torture. Rather, Schneir is fundamentally
mistaken in assuming female subjectivity in terms that do not fit with the kind of
double bind within which the issue of women’s agency was configured, negoti-
ated, and arguably resolved in colonial India. In fact, the second quotation by
Tanika Sarkar clearly critiques this western fetish for women’s agency, essentially
secured and thus stereotyped within certain frames of women’s empowerment
that really exhaust all available critical vocabulary of women emancipation. The
contention is whether there can be an alternative language of resistance and
subversion that can break away from such generalized and universalized ste-
reotypes of women’s agency. Therefore, we ask, was there any other imaginary
of feminist politics in colonial India which was subdued and gradually filtered
out from the annals of nationalist history of anti-colonial movement? Sarkar
attempts to retrieve one such alternative critical lineage in the self-representation
of a woman’s world in Rasasundari Devi’s autobiographical work, Amar Jiban,
a work published in 1876. She argues that the ‘women’s question’ was framed
and reproduced within the political ferment of nationalism and modernizing
debates. Rasasundari’s work is a template of how that emerging new patriar-
chy was contested and negotiated to reassert the differential voice of the Indian
woman as straddling both worlds of transcendental Hindu tradition: of Bhakti-
vad and female piety. Therefore, the autobiography is seen as that new possibil-
ity of selfhood in distinction from the Western understanding/generalization of
female subjectivity. This paper does not just share this critical hunch towards
constituting an alternative imaginary of feminist politics; it also, for the sake of
pushing the argument further, contends that alternative critical engagement by
the likes of Rasasundari Devi and Kailashbasini Devi was gradually side-lined in
the wake of the revival of cultural nationalism in the late colonial period and the
subsequent emphasis on liberal call for rights and equality in the post-independ-
ence era. This paper will show how the complex class–caste–religion–gender–­
sexuality intersections configured the question of women’s agency in their works,
 Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial Period      21

something that was missing in later works on women’s rights in the post-colonial
milieu. Susie Tharu and Tejaswani Nirajana are right in saying that

[i]dentities that had taken shape in major pre-independence class, caste, and gender strug-
gles, and which might have provided the basis for another social imaginary of the nation,
were fractured and disorganized as they were rewritten into narratives of humanity and
citizenship. (Tharu and Niranjana 2010, 251)

Eventually, those momentous efforts to resist and remold the Indian societal
taboos and hostile religious customs remain side-tracked in the nationalist
discourse of representing the woman’s dignity and the sanctity of home. Con-
sequently, that critical project of these individual Bengali women’s voices, as a
result of that shift in the popular attention towards self-preservation of a mythical
golden past, was debunked. The trajectories that emerged in their critical works
were not just a few eclectic attempts to raise the women’s voices – rather, the
project was far more grave, coherent, and substantial as they attempted to correct
and redress some of the fundamental paradoxes of Indian tradition in conflict
with the modernity discourses that arrived as a “derivative discourse” (Chatterjee
2007, v) in India.
The contribution of these essays can only be measured against the back-
drop that gave rise to conflicting discourses of cultural revivalism, imperialist
appropriation of the ‘women’s question,’ and the slow and distinct evolvement
of a nationalist discourse that tried to balance the reformist dispositions with the
reassertion of a ‘genuine’ nationalist space. These essays reformulate some of the
flashpoints between these opposing pulls of different discourses to essentially
create a new framework for self-realization and self-representation of women
as interlarded in the mutual functioning of several intersections between reli-
gion, culture, identity, and sexuality. Therefore, they constructed for themselves
a critical space, a vantage to look over all these calls from a position of one’s
own immediate experience of subversion and domination, not necessarily in the
hands of patriarchs or the male authority. Even though they succeeded in uphold-
ing a critique, the general argument is that this rupture was constrained by the
parallel emergence of nationalist ideology and the associated culturalist turn
that overlapped with the nationalist image. The nationalist project along with
the bourgeois modernizing discourses projected a particular image of the Indian
woman: one who is the sovereign at the domain of ‘home,’ educated enough to
serve and preserve the values and superiority of the Indian tradition and repre-
sent a mobile upper class that can compete with the colonizer’s self-presentation
of the masculine image of a savior committed to rescuing the oppressed women of
India. This is what Partha Chatterjee describes as the ‘New Woman’:
22      Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty and Dhritiman Chakraborty

The ‘new’ woman defined in this way was subjected to a new patriarchy. In fact, the social
order connecting the home and the world in which nationalism placed the new woman was
contrasted not only with that of the modern Western society; it was explicitly distinguished
from the patriarchy of the indigenous tradition. Sure enough, nationalism adopted several
elements from tradition as marks of its native cultural identity, but this was a deliberately
classicized tradition – reformed, reconstructed. (Chatterjee 2010, 127)

However, we contend that this ‘New Woman’ identity was challenged from within
that same discourse that congealed the space of home and pitted it against the
adulterated and corrupt image of the Western family. The women writers that we
are discussing were writing from that space of the antopur (the inside), the ‘home,’
to write back against that stereotype underpinned by the new patriarchy. There-
fore, these writers provide a critique from within which deliberately suspended
the nationalist emphasis on a pure, chaste image of a versatile woman; simulta­
neously, it did not buy into the reformist call for a liberated, right-centric woman
who can flaunt her mobility in templates of dress and intellect. Theirs was a bal-
anced stand that kept the tension between nationalist identities with the reform-
ist ideals to an excess of creative outpouring. Their works are smeared with that
tension of negotiation and the constant effort for an alternative third space to
unsettle any a-historical claim of an ideal womanhood. They therefore coined a
separate term: ‘Sansar,’ a notional escape from the exhausted rhetoric of ‘home,’
to radicalize the limit of such a conceptual tool to reproduce female subjectivity.

2 The ‘New Woman’ and the Home/World Dialectic

Partha Chatterjee in his essay “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Ques-
tion” (1989) tried to answer how the ‘women’s question,’ which occupied an
important position during the reformist period in the early nineteenth century,
suddenly disappeared by the end of that century into the first three decades of the
twentieth century. He rebuts the position of Gulam Murshid, noted historian, that
modernization of the ‘women’s question’ begun with the penetration of liberal
ideas from the colonial centers received a hostile backlash among the native
intellectuals; therefore, “[t]he movement towards modernization was stalled by
nationalist politics” (Chatterjee 2010, 117). According to Chatterjee,

[t]his critique of the social implications of nationalism follows from rather simple and linear
historical assumptions […] It would be the same sort of critique as that of the so-called ‘neo-
imperialist’ historians who argue that Indian nationalism was nothing but a scramble for
sharing the political power with the colonial rulers […] the squabble of parochial factions,
its ideology a garb of xenophobia and racial exclusiveness. (Chatterjee 2010, 117)
 Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial Period      23

Therefore, Chatterjee in another essay adequately sums up his position by saying

that nationalism succeeds

in situating the ‘women’s question’ in an inner domain of sovereignty, far removed from the
arena of political contest with the colonial state. The inner domain of national culture was
constituted in the light of the discovery of ‘tradition.’ (Chatterjee 2007, 117)

Thus, Chatterjee is of the opinion that the nationalist discourse resolved the
‘women’s question’ by placing it within the confines of ‘home,’ a cultural domain
of self-assertion where the woman, as we have already argued, was allowed edu-
cation and knowledge only to enrich this domain. In works of Bengali so-called
progressive thinkers like Bhudev Mukhopadhay, Tarasankar Sharma, Sibchandra
Jana, Pratapchandra Majumdar, and Rajendralal Mitra, this typified and sancti-
fied image of a woman is amply rendered. In fact, in nationalist women’s voices
of Sarojoni Naidu, Cornelia Sorabji, Uma Nehru, and Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, this
spectral mystique of ‘home’ is evident which haunts them to negate any outside
intervention in the female rights discourses. One can recollect how a fierce debate
followed the publication of Mother India by Katherine Mayo in 1927. Chatterjee
also shows how in all these disparate efforts from diverse corners, an image of
bhadramahila (respectable woman) was laboriously calibrated to reinforce the
stratified structure of Hindu society. We would like to return to this discussion
later in the course of this essay. But what emerged from this position and counter-
position is how the ‘women’s question’ was made conterminous with the nation-
alism drive and the bourgeois hegemony project. This image of the New Woman
was in conjunction with the class-caste domination in Indian society. Tanika
Sarkar demonstrates how the ‘Hindu wife – Hindu nation’ dialectic reached a
crescendo at the turn of the century. Now all these critical literatures attest to
following conclusions which can be enumerated as: (a) the inside domain based
on a reformed and modernized tradition of the Hindu culture appropriated the
women’s question; (b) women had to struggle and balance between the nation
and the agency question; and (c) the caste-class hierarchy was at loggerheads
with the gender question.
All these discrete stands of the ‘women’s question’ against that colonial
background are addressed in works of Rasasundari Devi, Kailashbasini Devi, and
Krishnabhabini Das. Their works present a reaction to these subterranean work-
ings of patriarchal-national-cultural forces. These peripheral voices protested
against that hegemony of ‘home’ as deliberated in the language of modernity and
an imaginary of peripheral modernity emanates from their works. These essays
of women writers not only problematize those grand narratives of nation and tra-
dition, they in fact break away from that domain division of inside and outside
24      Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty and Dhritiman Chakraborty

and challenge the Brahminical hold over religion and deliberately engage with
questions of conjugality and man-woman relationships in terms that radicalize
the conservative hold on Hindu society.

3 T
 he Emergence of ‘Lekhika’: Writing Women’s
Lives
An identity of ‘lekhika’, one who is writing in her own voice, conflating her
‘inside,’ experiential world with the creative expression to communicate with
the ‘outside,’ emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. The works of Kailashbasini
Devi, Krishnabhabini Das, and Rasasundari Devi were a product of that phenom-
enon which challenged the age-old Hindu presumption that women are meant for
domestic chores. They subsequently challenged the Hindu caste-religious system
in Kaulinya custom, while others revived some of the marginalized forms of
religiosity in Vaishnavism to contest Smarta orthodoxy. Some talked about equal
status between man and woman to sustain the family edifice, thereby meting
out a far more dynamic responsibility. Therefore, their writing was a political
act which anticipated long back the ‘personal is political’ ideology. All of these
women were housewives and started reading late in their life, predominantly
after marriage. Rasasundari only started writing at the age of 59 when she was
widowed. The secrecy of the process of learning for women writers like Kailash-
basini Devi and Rasasundari Devi indicates the kind of patriarchal hegemony we
have talked about. They transcended the domestic tension and family strictures
against women’s education and women’s writing, significantly with the help of
their radical husbands and progressive fathers. Therefore, their understanding
of women’s agency was not predisposed to anti-male ideals that undergirded the
Western ideas about radical feminism.
This paper will concentrate on selected essays by three women writers of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – Rasasundari Devi (1809–1899),
Kailashbasini Devi (1837–unknown), and Krishnabhabini Das (1864–1919).
Rasasundari initiated the rich genre of Bengali women’s autobiography by
writing Amar Jibon, her only work, published in 1876. Kailashbasini was a pio-
neering lady who was the first full-fledged female writer of a book of essays,
Hindu Mahilaganer Hinabastha (The Woeful Plight of Hindu Women), published
in 1863, which was followed by the publication of her other two books of essays,
Hindu Abalakuler Vidyabhyas o Tahar Somunnati (Hindu Female Education and
Its Progress) in 1865 and the last one, Viswasova in 1869. Krishnabhabini Das is
termed as “the first progressive woman” by Ghulam Murshid (2013, 97). She is
 Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial Period      25

well known for her famous travelogue-cum-memoir, Englande Bangamahila (A

Bengali Woman in England), recently translated and published by Cambridge
University Press. This is also the first female travelogue, published in 1885 and
written as a complete book. This paper will engage with those essays of Krishn-
bhabini’s oeuvre which probe the various strands of female subjugation like
“Strilok o Purush” (“Women and Men”), her first essay published in the Falgun
volume of the magazine, Bharati o Balak in 1890, “Sikkhita Nari,” published in
the Ashwin volume of the magazine, Sahitya, which triggered a major contention
with Rabindranath Tagore in noted journals like Sadhana and Sahitya. Another
of her essays which is discussed here is “Swadhin o Paradhin Narijibon” (“Inde-
pendence and Subjugation in Women’s Lives”), published in the Falgun volume
of the magazine, Pradip, in 1897.

4 R
 asasundari Devi: Voicing the Lived Realities
(After marriage) My day would begin at dawn and I worked till two at night […] I was four-
teen years old […] I longed to read books […] but I was unlucky, those days women were not
allowed to read. (Sarkar 1993, 1)

Tanika Sarakar begun discussing Amar Jibon with several such quotations to
show the change in Rasasundari’s consciousness, and the fluctuations of stands
that express her inner tension. Nineteenth-century Bengal was not accustomed
to the self-exposition of writers. Even the Bengali social reformists and the
prominent writers of the period shied away from any attempt at self-expression
through autobiography. The Nababidhan Brahmosamaj led by Keshabchandra
Sen initiated such modes of writings. However, it was not the religious reform-
ism; rather a simple devoted Vaishnavite fold gave birth to the first autobiogra-
phy by a Bengali woman of Potajiya village who first took the plunge to narrate
her life. So Rasasundari’s autobiography was a revolutionary one in 1876 when it
first pioneered the genre of autobiography in standard Bengali written language.
Rasasundari’s work also got noticed and it has even been more popular than
Kailashbasini’s books of essays which came earlier, because of the documenta-
tion of women’s living experience in a traditional orthodox Hindu family. It is
important to note that Rasasundari did not belong to the urban Hindu women,
mostly of Calcutta, who enjoyed the fruits of social reformism. She was an unedu-
cated woman married into a traditional Hindu patriarchal family from Ramdiya
village who, having undergone tremendous hardships and secrecy, learnt to read
and write on her own, without any helpful intervention from her husband. Such
spousal intervention was enjoyed by the other two women writers discussed
26      Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty and Dhritiman Chakraborty

in this paper, Kailashbasini and Krishnabhabini. Though the apparent reading

of the social and cultural documentation which her autobiography provides,
discloses to us a claustrophobic picture of Hindu women cloistered within the
antapur world of the ‘inside,’ Rasasundari on a deeper plane was trying to break
away from this cloister. She took the refuge of alternative religious modes which
stressed devotion and self-fulfillment through the communion with God. The
kind of immediacy and participation this sect of the esoteric religious acts per-
mitted was even unthinkable within the much more hierarchized, institution-
alized space of the Brahminic religious preaching. She turned the condition of
widowhood into a political position of getting off of the tenterhook of religious
taboos and regimentation. Hence, she was reinventing the space of the ‘home’
even though she remained resigned to her fate of being a housewife. Rasasund-
ari writes: “At the behest of parameshwar (the almighty god), I perform all my
domestic chores as my duty. I never felt irritated” (Rasasundari anthologized in
Devi, 2014; trans. by the authors; emphasis added). She would again and again
mention that Karmic philosophy that can liberate the soul and ensure complete
assimilation with the Brahman, the oversoul. There are several mystical strains
that were evident in her writings and importantly she was finding such liberating
moments in texts that were outside the fold of mainstream Hinduism. Therefore,
it would be wrong to say that these words were endorsing any Hindu scripture;
rather, these expressions are ingrained with a conscious political choice.
However, in complete contradiction, Rasasundari’s work immediately turned
into an exemplar of how an ideal Hindu woman can live and become responsible.
Both Jyotirindranath Thakur and Dinesh Chandra Sen appreciated this aspect of
Rasasundari’s Amar Jiban. Jyotirindranath believes: “After reading her autobiog-
raphy I think that she was an ideal woman, she was efficient in household works
as well as she was pious and devoted to Bhagbad” (quoted in Devi 2014, 12; trans.
by the authors; emphasis added). Dinesh Chandra is much more overtly patriar-
chal in his comments in the preface to Amar Jiban in the 1957 edition:

The way in which the Hindu women with all the pros and cons of the ancient tradition
maintain the home with the goodness of affection and sacrifice – if this sanctity would be
obliterated, the real beauty of the Hindu home will be destroyed. In the public domain, we
are insulted, deprived, dependent – where should we stand other than our home? (Devi
2014, 13; trans. by the authors)

His critique points towards a kind of compensatory politics where the Bengali
male’s inferiority complex in attaining power in the public world leads to a
flexing of the power-muscles in the domestic space. Rasasundari did address her
husband as ‘Karta,’ a king of the household. This portrayal definitely carried the
perception that her ‘Karta’ is like a king, a controller, a lawgiver in the Hindu
 Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial Period      27

family. Thus, the husband’s successful governance of the family becomes a marker
of his capacity to administer as deftly as a British subject. These instances can be
read as a creative tension, moments of self-contradiction that do not foreclose
but rather open up possibilities for woman’s agency within an unexplored rubric.
The question is: how should we approach Rasasundari – as an epitome of that
self-image of the nation or as someone who kept that image only to deconstruct
its bindings? She was writing that book to express her inner self, her desire to get
liberated and beatified in a divine assimilation with God. Therefore, this under-
standing of religion has to be separated from the nationalist Hindu-Brahminic
propaganda. In fact, there is also a caste angle to it as Vaishnavism was avowedly
against the caste system and its promise of redemption was all-inclusive, irre-
spective of any social implications of hierarchy.
Rasasundari suffered constraints on mobility. But she expressed this situa-
tion throughout the text with the metaphor of the “caged bird.” As Tanika Sarkar
comments, “[s]he powerfully conveyed how a little girl was brutally uprooted
from her home and grafted abruptly on an unknown family. It seemed to her that
God had given her a life-sentence” (Sarkar 1993, 46). Her domestic duties did not
release her from her sansar. Rasasundari was quite vocal in expressing this: “I
have been incarcerated within the prison-house of this sansar. There will be no
release for me till the end of my days” (Sarkar 1993, 46; original emphasis). Even
if she got a rare chance to visit her maternal home for a few days, it was like
being a prisoner set out on parole, with servants and other attendants surround-
ing and protecting her like prison-guards. These constraints only invoked distur-
bances when she was also denied visiting her mother on her deathbed. She was
not allowed to pay the last visit in spite of her mother’s earnest wish to have her
beside her deathbed, just on the account of her presumed domestic negligence.
She cries in despair: “Dear God, why did you ever make me a part of humanity!”
(Sarkar 1993, 47).

5 K
 ailashbasini and the Critique of Hindu
Brahminism
Kailashbasini Devi, one of the first female prose-writers, along with Bamasundari
Devi, also politicizes the domain of the home, the inner space, by addressing
certain registers which determine the condition of the Hindu women in Bengal.
For both of these path-breaking writers, the Hindu domestic system was “unam-
biguously represented as a site of female suffering, discrimination and subordina-
tion” (Sarkar 2003, xi). These registers are broadly categorized at the intersection
28      Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty and Dhritiman Chakraborty

of caste, gender, and religion within the dominant Hindu discourse. The Hindu
caste system and the various Hindu rituals are marked as the repository of subju-
gation of the Hindu women in Kailashbasini’s book, Hindu Mahilaganer Hinabas-
tha (The Woeful Plight of Hindu Women). This book documents the various strands
of social, cultural, and religious discrimination against women. Her second book,
Hindu Abalakuler Vidyabhyas o Tahar Somunnoti (Hindu Woman’s Education and
Its Progress) represents her argument on women’s education. Viswasobha, her
third book, contains poems along with her essays.
Kailashbasini, in the book Hindu Mahilaganer Hinabastha, points towards
the superstitions of the Hindu tradition and how women were afflicted by these
patriarchal customs. Her main critique is targeted towards the Brahminism and
the Koulinya customs as practiced by Brahmins and Kayasthas, two upper rungs
in the Hindu Barna system, its resultant polygamy among men, child-marriage,
and problems of widowhood. She is also vocal against the lack of education
among Hindu women which she analyzed in detail in her next book, Hindu
Abalakuler Vidyabhyas o Tahar Somunnoti. She also contemplates the conjugal-
ity in the Hindu family and the notion of women’s freedom. She is radical in her
stringent critique of the patriarchal customs, rituals, and social mores as well as
her detailed commentary on the various aspects of conjugal relationships. She
begins The Woeful Plight of Hindu Women with her critique of the age-old preju-
dice of the supremacy of the boy child over the girl child which is underlined as
the root cause behind the logic of subversion and marginalization of the girl child
within the domestic sphere. The girl child is trained to be the ‘angel in the house’
and this training invalidates the necessity of formal education. The woman as the
domestic angel phenomenon ultimately led to the deprivation of the education
for the women, as education is supposed to be the means to earn money, and
women are not the bread-earners; rather, they are the homemakers. Khailash-
basini questioned this logic by showing, in the way of Mary Wollstonecraft as
presented in her essay A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1976), that the depri-
vation of the education would also deprive women of virtue and the power of rea-
soning and thus the girl child would indulge in “illusory pleasures and pointless
games” (Devi 2003, 26). It is significant to note that Kailashbasini’s standpoint
on women’s education is also shared by both Rasasundari and Krishnabhabini.
All three of these writers critique this popular notion of education for mere eco-
nomic empowerment and nothing else; so women, being the domestic worker,
do not need any education. Kailashbasini analytically shows that the girl child is
the future wife and the mother and consequently, the illiterate condition would
render the wife an irrational object of attraction and subsequently, the untrained
mother for the future progeny. Women’s education was not only a kind of prohib-
ited act; rather, it was considered as an act of crime. Kailashbasini writes:
 Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial Period      29

The woman who takes up education becomes an eyesore of the entire family and thereby
suffers great anguish. The elders constantly fret and fume in an effort to restrain her from
this activity; female neighbours target her with a variety of taunts and forbid their daughters
from speaking with her. For such reasons as these, no woman can readily set about educat-
ing herself. (Devi 2003, 46)

There are couple of important aspects to this quite vocal critique of patriarchy.
Even though Kailashbasini is arguing for education, her main target or the point
of critique is the custom. Therefore, she in a way amalgamated the liberal ques-
tion of education with a vehement critique of the Hindu rites and strictures that
prevent women to pursue such aims. In forming that critique, she has succinctly
provided a wider definition of patriarchy. Her protest is against both the retro-
gressive Brahminical culture as represented in the camouflage of nationalism
and that assumption which incarcerate women deliberately within the fetters of
home. Like Rasasundari, these politics too have that overreaching tendency to
overlap the inside/outside binary to essentially perpetuate the ‘women’s ques-
tion’ in conjunction with several other resistive discourses.
A glimpse of that multidimensional critique can be found in the way she
explores the different facets of the Hindu marriage, considering the different
strands of Kulin discourse in detail. The Kulin discourse was based on the caste
hierarchy where the Baidya Brahmin attained a higher rank and was consid-
ered to be the most eligible man to whom a Hindu woman should be married to
achieve social status. Consequently, it leads to the patriarchal subjugation of the
Hindu women within it with reference to the Hindu rituals like child-marriage,
widowhood, and the concepts of the “shrotriya wife,” “tri-kulin daughters,”
“broken kulins,” and “kulin descendants” (Devi 2003, 27–37). She strongly chas-
tises the parents’ hasty actions to marry their daughters off to the Kulin husbands
in order to attain the higher status in the caste hierarchy without considering the
notion of propriety and the unsettled future of the daughters. The Hindu sastric
doctrine of marriage as an essential end in a woman’s life provokes these deci-
sions. She shows how this irrational insistence on marrying the daughter with a
Kulin husband or a Kayastha son to a Kulin daughter ends up in heavy dowry or
bride price respectively. She focuses on the problems the Kulin daughters face,
the drastic age difference between husband and wife, the polygamy of the broken
Kulin, the Kulin descendant’s desire to climb/advance upward in the social hier-
archy and the selling of the bride to attain this, shrotriya brahmin’s demand
for the bride price, and the Baidik Brahmans’ child-marriages. She thus politi-
cizes the Hindu religious discourse of marriage through a stringent critique of
Brahminism.
Kailashbasini is revolutionary in her scathing critique of marriage based on
the reciprocation of money, mobilization of the caste hierarchy, and continuation
30      Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty and Dhritiman Chakraborty

of the heinous practices like child-marriages and subsequent early widowhood,

without any consideration for the necessary mutual competence and equality
between husband and wife, and the presence of marital commitment. She marks
child-marriage as “one of the prime reasons for our wretched condition, the step-
ping-stone to our misfortune” (Devi 2003, 37). She devotes a significant portion
of her work to this issue and the detailing of the domestic violence enacted on
the child-wife and the physical and mental pressure she has to undergo in this
process of forceful uprooting. In this context, Kailashbasini shares her stand with
Rasasundari as both of them consider the status of women in the in-law’s home
as paradhin, as in bondage. Both of these women brilliantly use the metaphor of
the “caged bird” or “caged animal” to annotate the alienated situation and the
process of domestication. Kailashbasini shows:

Just as animals are trapped from the jungle by guile and force and brought to a human
neighbourhood, where they are tamed through various ploys, similar wiles are used to bring
the girl to submission. Like an animal, the girl is not subdued easily and behaves in the
same way as a caged creature, which foregoing food and sleep, continues to brood over its
old habitat and keeps looking around the cage for a way of escape. Head draped in a veil,
she keeps scanning the cagelike house and goes without food or sleep, pining constantly
for her parental home and counting her days to be back there. (Kailashbasini Devi 2003, 42)

The same situation is described by Rasasundari in Amar Jiban where she broods
over her caged situation and again and again portrays marriage as bondage
and the in-law’s home as a kind of prison. Tanika Sarkar theorizes the status of
women in marriage as “ousted from the paternal lineage and implanted in the
husband’s lineage” (Sarkar 2001, 19). It results in a “permanent refugee” (Sarkar
2001, 19) status for women in both the homes. Therefore, although nationalist
discourse resolved the ‘women’s question’ by dividing the domain of home and
a culture within from the material outside, there were virulent resistances from
within that limited space of home. This discussion clearly unfolds how differ-
ent fault lines led to frictions and confrontation within that space of home. The
women writers did not allow the ‘women’s question’ to be either hijacked by the
nationalist ideals, nor did they completely leave the cultural difference ques-
tion unaddressed. The most striking point of their critique is how they negotiate
between the female rights question and cultural difference question of a Hindu
woman. For example, Kailashbasini advocates the need of education for women,
but she does not intend to distress the domestic duties of the Hindu women. She
thinks that women’s subordination is between the public life of the Hindu woman
and the private sphere where she would not “bring disgrace to the marital casket
of vermilion” (Devi 2003, 45).
 Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial Period      31

6 The Feminist Discourse of Krishnabhabini

Krishnabhabini Das voiced perhaps the first feminist discourse in her essays
“Strilok o Purush” (“Women and Men”), “Sikkhita Nari” (“Educated Woman”),
and “Independence and Subjugation in Women’s Lives” when she claimed that
there are no basic differences between woman and man in consideration of their
nature, rationality, and intelligence. What is significant in her argument is her
confident assertion that the woman has her own identity and purpose in life irre-
spective of her position in relation to the man and the family. Krishnabhabini’s
strength lies in her strong desire to go out of the ‘cage’ of domesticity – unlike
Rasasundari and Kailashbasini, who apparently did not have that overt urge to
go outside the homeland because of the patriarchal constraints. Arguably the
first travelogue by a Bengali woman, Englande Bangamahila (A Bengali Lady in
England) was the outcome of her long stay in England with her husband during
the period of 1882–1890. The text presents her detailed observations of the socio-
cultural, political conditions in England, specifically women’s status in England
in comparison with the ‘caged’ condition of the Bengali women. Two radical nar-
ratives on women’s education and conjugality inform the text. She upholds the
socio-cultural equality women shared with men in England which was denied
to her compatriots in colonial Bengal. Like Kailashbasini, she ponders on the
necessity of mutuality in conjugal relationships which was completely absent in
her native land. She offers an alternative narrative of sati. Sati means a woman
with chastity and purity. Another important dimension of sati points to the
widow woman who sacrificed her life in her dead husband’s funeral pyre during
the colonial period. Here Krishnabhabini referred to Sati to define her notion of
woman’s chastity. She says:

The women who are sati in this country are the real sati; because one can be proud of being
sati by abstaining from mingling with men completely, but the women who can keep their
valuable status of chastity, their dharma even if mingling with the men and being with
men, they really deserve praise [...] they do not madly love their husbands as divine god.
(Das 1885, 152)

In her essay “Strilok o Purush” (“Women and Men”), Krishnabhabini calls for
activism to attain freedom which was quite radical at that time. She believes that
women need to do equal work if they want to get the same social and cultural
status like men. Like Kailashbasini, Krishnabhabini also promotes consensual
marriage for a better conjugal relationship between husband and wife. Her radical
ideas of women’s education were published in essays such as “Sikkhita Nari”
(“Educated Woman”), “Sikkhita Nari Protibader Uttor” (“Reply to the C ­ ritique of
32      Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty and Dhritiman Chakraborty

Educated Woman”), “Strilok o Purush” (“Women and Men”), or “Independence

and Subjugation of Woman” in different journals of her time.

7 Conclusion
The years from 1880 to 1940 have been referred to as the First Wave of Feminism
in India (Forbes 2005, 11). This first wave was characterized by two kinds of
dilemmas of whether to carry the reformist agenda of the colonial regime that
gave some of the rights to women, or to give in to the demand of a national-
ist ideology that placed the ‘women’s question’ as a corollary to the overarch-
ing nationalist-patriarchal project. In works of Sumit Sarkar, Geraldine Forbes,
Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, these dilemmas have been adequately
addressed, examined, and politicized. They unanimously put to rest the argu-
ment that the ‘women’s question’ at the end of this First Wave was co-opted
by the bourgeoisie modernization project and the anti-colonial national strug-
gle. This paper, by reflecting on these three particular women’s works as meto-
nyms of a very significant undercurrent in that First Wave, showed how the
issue of women’s agency was addressed in a much more nuanced and multi-
pronged manner alongside the larger discursive formations of nationalism.
Nation and its narrations of the ‘ideal woman,’ the Sati-Savitri incarnation was
vehemently critiqued, and thus reconfigured in their writings. Chandra Talpade
Mohanty argues: “no one ‘becomes’ a woman (in Simone de Beauvoir’s sense)
purely because she is a woman […] It is the intersections of various systemic
networks of class, race, (hetero)sexuality and nation […] that positions us as
‘Women’” (Mohanty et al. 1991, 12–13). This gendered, self-formed conception
in the intersections of these systemic networks is visible in these essays and
autobiographies. In fact, even, Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid also make
the observation that different axes of caste, class, religion, gender, race, nation-
ality, and sexuality configured women’s subjectivity during the colonial period
(Sangari and Vaid, 1989, 1–33). The important point is that these series of inter-
sections were contested by these women writers in their collective anger against
custom, the congealed space of home, the cultural revivalism, and the patriar-
chal legitimization of an ‘Indian’ woman. But the point is: this rupture gradually
foreclosed and after independence, the citizenship question predominated over
such cultural narratives of patriarchal domination. Geraldine Forbes describes
these women of this First Wave of feminism in India as “caged tigers” (Forbes
2005, 11). Undoubtedly, this journey from an identity of the “caged bird,” which
many of the women writers identified themselves with, to “caged tigers,” proves
 Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial Period      33

this remarkable transformation. They were “caged” because they could not
completely dismantle the boundary of ‘home,’ which perhaps was not expected
from them either, given their position in the socio-religious context. However,
they were not completely predetermined by any discursive regime or ideologi-
cal blindness. They wrote of their own, thus represented their own voices. This
paper is an attempt to re-historicize/resurrect these forgotten trajectories of
feminist politics to carve out an alternative space of women’s emancipation at
a time when India is poised for another round of Hindu cultural revivalism and
the feminists in India are in quandary to frame the ‘women’s question’ in the
face of these new challenges and paradoxes. Hence the question is: can there
be an alternative radical imaginary in these works of different Bengali women
writers? If so, what is the structure of that dissent, what other structures of
epistemology can emanate from an engagement with these works? Can there
be a new radical script for feminist politics that can galvanize the question
of women’s agency in the complex working of the intersectional categories of
caste, religion, class, and gender at the present juncture? These texts, therefore,
offer a different possibility of women’s agency in contemporary India.

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