A Book of Her Own.

A Life of Her Own:

Autobiography of a
Nineteenth-Century Woman
by Tanika Sarkar

(On getting married) 'I went straight into my mother's arms, crying,

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

"Mother, why did you give me away to a stranger?"'

(After marriage) 'My day would begin at dawn and I worked till two at night
. . . I was fourteen years old . . . I longed to read books . . . But I was
unlucky, those days women were not allowed to read.'

(Learning to read at twenty-five) 'It was as if the Great Lord himself taught
me how to read. If I didn't know even that much, I would have had to depend
on others . . .'

(Looking back on her youth) 'In the meantime the Great Lord had decked
my body out just the way a boat is fitted out. . . How strange it was: So many
things came out of my body, yet I knew nothing of their causes.'1

These are some important words and themes from Amar Jiban, the first
autobiography written by a Bengali woman, and very probably, the first
full-scale autobiography in the Bengali language itself. Her writing and her
life stand in a peculiarly significant relationship to each other, since the
author, Rashsundari Debi, a housewife from an upper-caste landed family
in East Bengal, seemed to possess none of the criteria that presumably make
a woman's life noteworthy.
It was an uneventful, unremarkable life. Rashsundari was born around
1809 in Potajiya village in Pabna district, in a landowning family. When she
was twelve, she was married off to Sitanath Sikdar, a prosperous landlord
from Ramdiya village at Faridpur. From the age of fourteen, she looked
after the entire household and brought up twelve children. When she was
twenty-five, however, Rashsundari made a daring departure. She secretly
taught herself to read and studied all the religious texts that her home
possessed. Later, she also learnt to write. Atfifty-nineshe became a widow,
and her autobiography came out in the same year, in 1868. She revised and
enlarged it when she was eighty-eight.
Only one event of an exceptional kind had interrupted the even, quiet

History Workshop Journal Issue 36 ©History Workshop Journal 1993

36 History Workshop Journal

rhythms of a pious housewife existence. Orthodox Hindus of those times

believed that a literate woman was destined to be a widow. In Rashsundari's
own family there was so much talk against women's education that she
would not even look at a piece of paper lest she was suspected of reading. 2
The first tentative experiments among liberal Indian reformers and Chris-
tian missionaries to educate women from reform-minded families had
produced a sort of an orthodox backlash and had hardened Hindu opinion
against it. The meek and submissive housewife had no doubt at all that she
was going against the grain of familial and social expectations. This one act
of disobedience, then, partially deconstructs the good wife role she played
all her life.

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

Why did she, on her own, and in great trepidation, make this deeply
transgressive departure? And what bearing does this desire and this
achievement have on the fact that Rashsundari was the first Bengali person
to write out her own life, to recreate, even invent it through the
autobiographical act, and thereby gather it closer to herself and possess it
more fully? What were the resources available to her that could have
produced this desire and what are the new possibilities that we can read into
women's lives and women's writing from the presence of this desire?
In the book Rashsundari explains that it was an irrepressible urge to read
a particular sacred text that made her struggle to read. 3 The book was
Chaitanya Bhagavat, the first Bengali biography of Chaitanya, the Krishna-
maddened saint of medieval Bengal, who had promised salvation to the
poor, the low-caste, the woman - categories excluded by the Brahmanical
orthodoxy from higher spiritual learning.4 She went on to read other lives of
Chaitanya and of Krishna.5 Her reading, then, had a lot to do with lives
divine and saintly. With a covert design that hid behind a seeming
unintentionality, Rashsundari was audaciously structuring her mundane life
story on that sacred pattern. Each detail of a thoroughly commonplace and
homebound life was arranged to exemplify a Godly intervention, the
crowning proof of which was her apparently miraculous access to the written
word. Her life was meant to be read as if it was enclosed within a divine
purpose, as almost an extension of God's own life. It was as if the two lives -
God's and the devotee's - were intertwined within a single narrative frame,
interanimating each other. In fact, the last sections of the autobiography
describe, without any apparent sense of incongruity, not events from her
own life, but from the various lives (incarnations) of Vishnu himself.h
Rashsundari read from a fairly wide spectrum of late medieval devotional
(bhakli) texts and her reflections drew largely upon terms that have long and
multiple lineages within Hindu religious discourses. Unless we refer often
and in some detail to this thick web of intertextuality, Amur Jiban will make
only a limited and emasculated sense - as a mere string of random effusion
and exhortation, held together by a few sparse facts from a commonplace
life.
Again, even though the history of her own times and place seems
 A Book of Her Own 37

remarkably absent within the text itself, the book, as a material product
created by a woman and printed for a nineteenth-century readership with an
assured interest in a woman's writing, belonged crucially to her century. We
need to explore the insertion of historical processes into the life as well as
into the text, even though Rashsundari herself showed no overt preoccu-
pation with them.

II
Vaishnav bhakti in Bengal (devotional discourses and practices that
established a direct emotional connection between Vishnu in his incarnation

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

as Krishna, 7 and the devotee), seemed to grant an unprecedentedly large
and free space to the woman. The great body of bhakti lyrics glorified the
illicit love between Krishna and the cowherd maidens (gopinis) of Vrinda-
ban, of whom Radha was of paramount importance. A popular trope within
devotional expression was to borrow the woman's voice and emotions.
Esoteric cults which were loosely affiliated to Vaishnavism, placed a
powerful emphasis on the practice of sexual rites between a man and a
woman who were not married to each other. Though all these traditions
seemed to privilege the woman's experience and emotions in multiple and
prominent ways, they delineated, at the same time, a fundamentally
problematic space for her by largely containing the libertarian impulses and
possibilities within devotional meditation and sexo-yogic practices. Ulti-
mately, their combined effect was to heighten the sheer instrumentality of
the woman's body and emotions within devotion itself. Again, even though
post-Chaitanya bhakti had generated an immense body of religious writing
in Bengali, and had stimulated reading habits among sections of Vaishnav
women and low caste rural households, Vaishnavism had tense and
paradoxical perspectives on the matter of scriptural and textual knowledge.
Rashsundari's devotion and writing as a woman, therefore, related in
complex ways to traditions which were partly enabling but partly so
constricting that she needed to make crucial departures and breaks of her
own within bhakti.
Rashsundari made a major innovation in religious as well as in literary
conventions by articulating a devotional statement through the autobio-
graphical mode. There were at least two distinct Bengali language resources
available to her for writing about divine intervention in human lives,
although none was autobiographical. One was the genre of medieval and
late medieval mangalkavyas or verse narratives about the exploits of a deity
who establishes his/her worship on earth by working through a human
agency. 8 These would generally be sung or recited by professional expoun-
ders of sacred texts (kathaks) with explanations and commentaries. Shorter
versions would be orally transmitted by women during women's rites.
Initially these cults had low-caste, folk origins and were shunned by the
Brahmanical orthodoxy. Several centuries of rule by Muslim dynasties in
38 History Workshop Journal

Bengal, however, saw a decline in the socio-political hegemony of Brah-

mins. They sought to retrieve it by appropriating some of these deities within
the mainstream Hindu pantheon. A number of upper-caste poets composed
kavyas or long sacred ballads about them and Brahmin kathaks read them
out to village gatherings. This partially - though only very partially - closed
the cultural gap between upper and lower castes and gave Brahmins a larger
entry and control within what used to be autonomous subaltern beliefs and
practices.
As an upper-caste Vaishnav woman in an orthodox family, Rashsundari
would have listened to readings and practised rites connected with these
cults and texts. She, however, never mentioned them. It seems that in her

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

remembered and self-constructed life, Rashsundari chose to opt out of the
world of women's culture, piety and collective rites with their songs, ritual,
colour and bustle. The choice has wider connotations which we shall explore
later.
The other tradition available to her and one which did inspire her
devotion, was that of Vaishnav hagiography. She herself had read at least
two of them - Chaitanya Bhagavat (henceforward CB), and Chaitanya
Charitamrita (henceforward CC). CB, written by a disciple of a close acolyte
of Chaitanya, and within fifteen years of Chaitanya's death, has a captivating
narrative flow and combines quotidian, intimate details with an effusive,
hyperbolic mode of devotional expression.y CC was composed later by
Krishnadas Kaviraj under the inspiration of a theologian who belonged to a
group of scholars whom Chaitanya had sent to Vrindaban to prepare a
Vaishnavite canon for Bengal. These theologians (Goswamis), had worked
out a consensus in the mid sixteenth century with the various Vaishnav sects
in Bengal which gave their texts canonical status among Bengali Vaishnavs.
The CC, unlike the Sanskrit Goswami texts, was written in Bengali.'" It
could, therefore, have a far wider reach and popularise the theological
concepts of the Goswamis among non-learned bhakts. It also provided a
model for theological discussion in the vernacular, that was built around the
unfolding of a life-story.
Rashsundari drew much from both texts. She divided her writing into
small sections, dealing with specific themes, and organised the sections into
broad parts, covering whole phases of her life. She also had access to a
chaste, literary vocabulary, a fast-flowing, vivid style. Yet these hagiogra-
phies would not adequately serve her purposes. She needed a sustained,
autobiographical mode to deal with the life events of an ordinary woman
devotee, not the holy chronicles about the wives and mothers of saints. She,
therefore, needed to improvise.
There was yet a third alternative available to her, an oral model for
recording the popular miracle lore connected with the lives and activities of
ascetics and holy men and women. Their sacred status was confirmed
through tales of ecstatic trances and of miraculous manifestations. Rashsun-
dari. however, was secure in her status as a successful housewife. She had
 A Book of Her Own 39

neither renounced her mundane life nor aspired for extraordinary powers
and competences. Her closeness to God could only be proved by her own
writing. It was at once a miracle in its scope of achievement as well as a
record of God's intervention in her life. Yet, it was a miracle that she alone
had witnessed and her self-written life alone could testify to it. Unlike all
these other modes of recording divine intervention in human lives, the
autobiographical mode was indispensible for her. Her religion, her life, and
her writing thus connected with one another to form an unbroken circuit.

Ill

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

By making her autobiography and her piety dependent on each other,
Rashsundari tried to make two statements. The very act of writing
established that her relations with God were more nuanced and more
intimate than those that exist between most human beings and divinity. She
also needed to problematise her own relationship to her household or
sansar, since, on the surface, this sansar seemed to exhaust the entirety of
her lived experiences. We need to explore the different meanings of this
term in Hindu discourses and locate the forms of excesses beyond it that had
been worked out in devotional and philosophical traditions. We would then
find the ways in which AmarJiban drew upon as well as departed from them.
Sansar is the domain of the householder, the stage of Garhasthya, a vital
phase within the prescribed four-stage life-cycle of a pious Hindu. Only an
ascetic may renounce this realm of worldly responsibilities. The observance
of prescribed ritual, caste and gender norms that had been spelt out by the
Vedas and subsequent sacred law-codes, would constitute the essence of a
pious life or dharma. The woman enters sansar through the sacrament of
marriage, the only sacrament that is available to her. For her, sansar is the
unending flow of domestic work and responsibilities, primarily connected
with cooking, serving, and child-rearing. Ideally, the woman should have no
other religious activity, except for some prescribed ritual observances.
In a broader, theological sense, sansar, as governed by the scriptural
prescriptions and injunctions (Vidhi nishedha), is sustained by the rule of
Karma. This is the conviction that actions performed in one life bear results
through successive rebirths and that only a strict obedience to the prescribed
rules of sansar would eventually wear out the fruits of past action and deliver
a human being from the Karmic order of rebirth which is fundamentally
painful. Sansar is thus the site of dharma as well as a site of trials. Some of the
later philosophical schools sought to mark out a domain which would
confirm yet also transcend the rule of Sansar. For our purposes, we may,
perhaps, rather schematically identify three such sites.
Parts of the Upanishads had postulated an ultimate and fundamental
identity between Brahman or Absolute Reality and Atman or the individual
self and also among individual selves.12 According to Shankaracharyya, a
'beginningless ignorance', stemming from Brahman's illusion-bearing
40 History Workshop Journal

power of Maya, makes the individual self erroneously identify itself with a
particular and finite body-mind, in a state of separation from and opposition
to other selves. Only a few seers can, in this life, realise the deeper reality
and achieve liberation from the bonds of Karma. The rest are trapped within
Maya and are condemned to a strict observance of Vidhi nishedha or
prescriptions-injunctions.13 It is interesting that while the source of human
sorrow is located indirectly in a stratified and self-divided human order, a
transcendence is sought within metaphysical knowledge alone. At the same
time, the more the order of the empirical world is left intact, the more
intense is the emphasis on the essential oneness of all selves. While
Shankar's monistic philosophy belongs to the realm of erudite speculation,

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

the dichotomy between an apparent reality and a deeper truth obscured by
Maya, became a part of universally accessible religious common-sense. We
shall find resonances of this in Arnar Jiban.
A second form of excess was constituted by body-centered philosophies.
Certain lower-caste, esoteric, popular religious sects, some of which were
loosely affiliated to Vaishnavism, aspired to trap divine energies, even
divinity itself, within the human body through ritualised violations of
purity-pollution taboos and secret sexual rites. They proclaimed a body-
centred philosophy, stressing the primacy of bodily sense-perceptions over
scriptural knowledge. Propagated largely through songs that encoded their
rites and theories, their philosophy of dehavad had become familiar to
nineteenth-century villagers, even though upper-castes, on the whole,
considered them deviant and contemptible. Amar Jiban uses fragments
from dehavad but the influence is limited. Even though the body-centred
philosophy with its defiance of caste and pollution taboos seems an attractive
and liberating form of excess over sansar, a lot of the texts reveal that the
female body and emotions were supposed to be used in an instrumental
capacity, for filling the male body with extraordinary powers which would
eventually liberate it from all desire for the woman. Nor were they
unmarked by the deep seated conviction in the innate depravity of the
woman which characterised upper-caste codes.14
For Rashsundari herself, it was the tradition of Krishna-centred devotion
(which, in Bengal, also included Chaitanya as an object of adoration), that
was of paramount importance. From the thirteenth century onwards,
Bengali Vaishnavism had developed a rich stream of devotional literature,
both in Sanskrit and in the vernacular. 15 The core of it dwelt on Krishna's
early sport (leela) in the holy land of Vrindavan. An aesthetic code, derived
originally from classical literature, provided the pattern for devotion. The
devotee vicariously entered the leela by identifying himself/herself with one
or other of Krishna's associates at Vrindavan. While most devotees were
supposed to internalise the mood of the lesser companions, the love between
Krishna and his most cherished lover Radha was the supreme object of
contemplation for all Bengali Vaishnavs.
The Bhagavat Puran, a medieval devotional text on Krishna's erotic leela,
 A Book of Her Own 41

was acknowledged as the primary source of religious knowledge within

Bengali Vaishnavism. The leela acquires a distinctive configuration here.
Krishna sports with thousands of cowherd boys and girls [gopas and gopinis)
of humble caste who are dearer to him than the arrogant higher castes.16 He
asks married gopinis to seek pleasure with him and fills all of them with
infinite bliss. It is a pastoral idyll of endless love and ecstatic pleasure, of
eternal music and fragrant flowers, where sansar and its unbending
vidhi-nishedhas stand suspended. The devotee, through mere contem-
plation of such bliss,findsaccess to an image of surfeit. Yet the laws of sansar
are not entirely inverted or cancelled out. What the image of surfeit
promises is, rather, a dream of the values of sansar, taken to the limits of

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

their possibilities.
The Krishna of BP is a male figure who fills thousands of gopinis with
equal bliss. Radha, as a separate figure, has not yet made an appearance in
this text. We have a god who brings nothing but pleasure to his many
devotees in equal measure, a king who plays with shepherds. Here power
dreams of an absolute condition of hegemony where it may translate itself as
love and fulfilment for the powerless - the human devotee, the low-caste,
the woman.
Religious imagination, however, could not indefinitely sustain this state
of infinite bliss. Inexorable existential and social problems of pain and
inequality re-enter the narrative and fracture it at different points. A
polygamous patriarchy had imagined itself as capable of satisfying endless
women equally. Later devotional texts introduced the figure of Radha who
breaks up the undifferentiated mass of loving womanhood. She loves
Krishna with an angry, resentful love, straining against the basic asymmetry
within the relationship, since Krishna must love others and must eventually
leave her to eternal viraha (pain of separation). Her resentment forms a
language through which the devotee articulates the arbitrariness of God's
power over the world and a human condition marked by inequality. A
Sanskrit couplet, ascribed to Chaitanya, expresses a passionate yet resentful
longing for Krishna in a language of unusual violence: 'Let that immoral
faithless one come and ravish me.'17
The Vrindavan of BP had been a condition of uninhibited, unbounded
fulfilment. In other Vaishnav works, problems of a patriarchal order clash
with the articulation of devotion in an erotic mode. If an endless love-play
becomes the ideal repository for the most perfect relationship with the most
desired being - that is, with God - then to be adequately demanding and
challenging, to be worthy of a lifetime of yearning, that desire cannot be
confined to conjugal boundaries where the love object is already attained.
Most of post-Chaitanya devotion agreed on the illicit nature (parakiya) of
Radha-Krishna love.
Here sansar acquires yet another meaning. It is the ensemble of licit
relationships that bars Radha's way to Krishna. A paradox is set up: the
world of patriarchal injunctions, insisting on the woman's unconditional
42 History Workshop Journal

monogamy, is her dharma, yet desire for Krishna is a call coming from God
himself. The erotic situation corresponds to a spiritual problem. Karma
enjoins submission to the rules of sansar, yet sansar, with its unending
demands and rigid prescriptions, is an obstacle that thwarts a complete
surrender to God. God calls out to the devotee and goes back empty-
handed. Sansar is divinely-ordained and also an impediment. The paradox
makes both God and the devotee weep.
There was, then, within bhakti, a problem of reconciling faith with a
painful world order. When they reflected on Hinduism, Christian mission-
aries were traumatised over the absence in it of a Manichaean division of the
world between God and the Devil, by the ascription of an obviously skewed

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

earthly scheme to a divine and not a diabolical agency.IK For the Vaishnav,
faith begins with an acceptance of God's work while arguing about its
disorders. This was often conveyed through yet another devotional trope
that shocked missionaries: abuse of God.19 Since submission to divine will is
founded on an already-given (and, hence, already-transcended) critique of
the world order, faith involves a critique of the way faith must be.
To these ways of negotiating with God and sansar, Chaitanya had added
another possibility - a congregation of devotees who could be assured of
equal access to salvation by the existence of a new scheme of devotional
activity that was available to all: not caste status or scriptural learning but
simple faith expressed through ecstatic singing and chanting of God's name.
Salvation was to be easier for the socially dispossessed since their hearts had
not been hardened by pride. The promise of spiritual equality empowered
Chaitanya (himself a Brahmin) and his largely upper-caste acolytes to
undertake a massive proselytisation campaign among low-caste yet socially
and politically significant groups - artisans, traders, manufacturers, tribal
chieftains.20 Possibly, the success of the Islamic proselytisation was judged
to lie in its congregational practice and its conviction in an unstratified
spiritual order. Even though some post-Chaitanya sects and groups did
violate Brahmanical injunctions about caste and gender, on the whole,
Chaitanya's bhakti was not meant to transform broader social relations.
Rashsundari's Brahmin family was devoutly Vaishnav, but deeply
orthodox.

TV
These, then, very crudely, are the shapes of sansar, and the ways in which an
excess is created beyond them. How much of this would have been available
to an unlearned housewife like Rashsundari? Although Vaishnavism had
generated reading habits and sacred vernacular texts in abundance for
subordinate groups, and although women in the mendicant orders were
often literate,21 all the women in Rashsundari's family were insulated from
literacy.22 Even in the freer atmosphere of her mother's home, where the
village school was taught, and where Rashsundari as a child was told to
 A Book of Her Own 43

spend her days since her friends were unkind to her, she was not expected to
learn anything. She did pick up the letters from the work that the boys were
doing, but she told nobody about it.23 Not only did Brahmanical custom
continue to reign in upper-caste homes, Vaishnavism itself was ambiguous
on the matter of scriptural learning, counterposing simple faith to the path of
knowledge. Since the unlearned was privileged over the arrogant Brahmin
scholar, by the same token, learning would remain restricted.24
Yet much of Vaishnav doctrines could be orally transmitted at a fairly
high level of conceptualisation. Ritual occasions within households or local
congregations organised recitations and commentaries (katha and path) as
well as devotional music (kirtan) which was interspersed with an expounding

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

of texts. Texts were, therefore, quite ubiquitous, penetrating into even oral
performances. The BP, for instance, would be read out over a month at a
time. Morning sessions would be devoted to recitations from the Sanskrit
original and, in the evening sessions, their meaning would be expounded in
Bengali.25 This way, an unlearned listener gained what has been termed
'phonetic competence' - that is, an overall understanding over whole blocs
of Sanskrit terms. At the same time, she would also acquire 'linguistic
competence' over each word that was read out and explained from the
Bengali texts.261 would suggest that this notion of dual competence may be
extended from the realm of words to that of concepts. The simultaneous
exposure to recitations from the erudite Sanskrit as well as from the more
accessible Bengali texts, created a 'phonetic' grasp over complex conceptual
problems in Sanskrit works and a literal, 'linguistic' competence over each
idea in vernacular theological expositions. Popular religious songs and
literature move with effortless ease into knotted theological problems.
Yet the notion of a shared culture cannot be pressed too far. Ordinary
labouring people and women were excluded from a systematic cultivation of
interest and understanding by a lack of leisure and by rules of seclusion.
Women's religious life was confined to routinised and elaborate worship of
the family idol and a range of women's rites. Rashsundari wrote that she and
her kinswomen were excluded from these recitations which were held in the
outer male quarters.27
There was, then, a ubiquity of sacred texts which established a visible,
powerful bond between reading and piety. Snatches of recitations would
penetrate into women's quarters. At the same time, women interested in a
more complete and autonomous understanding, were simultaneously
stimulated and frustrated by imperfect access. The fact that Vaishnav
mendicant women read fluently, would aggravate their sense of deprivation.
The nineteenth-century premium on women's education and orthodoxy's
criticism of reformism added a new twist to the situation. Vociferous abuse
of women's education would frighten the woman aching to read. It would
also make her realise that very close to her women like herself were being
helped to read.
Excited by such fears and such desires, Rashsundari worked out a
44 History Workshop Journal

double-edged position vis-a-vis her sansar. She underlined her obedient

surrender and unqualified success here. At the same time she took care to
indicate that a deeper truth lay veiled behind this apparent reality, this
partial truth, this Maya that was her sansar.
By evoking this contrast, Rashsundari reserved an interior space for
herself which was her faith. She prised open both sansar and faith to
accommodate a new figure: the serious yet domesticated woman bhakt who
has created her own autonomous and individual life of devotion within the
household. The striking thing about her faith was the way she insulated it
from all that sansar had to offer to her piety: temples, religious festivals,
domestic rites and rituals, the family idol, initiation by the family guru or

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

religious preceptor. Even though she would have participated in all of this,
she simply did not write about it. Her autobiography, therefore, resisted her
lived life more than it reflected it.
Rashsundari chose to ground her faith in something that her sansar
withheld from her - reading and writing about sacred matters. By refusing
the resources that prescribed religion gave her as a woman, Rashsundari, in
effect, laid claim to an ungendered religious activity, to spiritual equality
with men. Within her writing, she chose to withdraw from all collective and
shared acts of devotion into an entirely interior activity. In pre-print days,
reading, especially of sacred texts, used to be loud or at least mumbled.
Since her reading, for a long time, was a deep secret, Rashsundari had to
engage in the unusual mode of silent reading. The enforced silence
underlined the privacy of the act. This was a space, a room of her own in a
household where she had brought nothing of her own, not even her own
name: 'The name that I had brought from my father's home has been lost.
Here I am just the mother.' 28
The claim to a non-feminine, individualistic religious practice went
against the grain of orthodox prescriptions. It also went beyond nineteenth-
century reformism. Reformers did not see women's education as a self-
absorbed, self-centred activity. It was meant to be the basis of a com-
panionate marriage, it was to train the woman into a family-oriented piety.29
Yet the boldness of Rashsundari's claim went largely unnoticed, in her
own world, as well as among later readers. Jyotirindranath Tagore, a leading
avant-garde literary figure, wrote an admiring preface to her book. He
found her sound housewifely qualities wholly admirable and a fitting
rebuttal of orthodox fears about educating the woman.'" Later on, the
nationalist scholar, Dinesh Chandra Sen, saw in her the self-effacing image
of feminine nurture, an icon cast in the image of the Motherland herself.11 A
contemporary scholar of our times, Partha Chatterji, uses her writing as an
example of the appropriation of a woman by a male rationalist enterprise,
shaped, in its turn, by western power-knowledge.' 2 Each of these readings
unproblematically annexed a complex, highly individual endeavour by a
woman to a different agenda and narrative and considered her story as
concluded, exhausted of any other possibility after that. I would suggest that
 A Book of Her Own 45

these linear readings could only be enabled by missing out on the various
writing devices with which Rashsundari complicated her agenda.

There are difficulties in reading the text since Rashsundari simultaneously

occupied two very different sites: that of a conformist housewife in an
orthodox family and of an early woman author, engaged in the highly public,
audacious act of writing about her life. The two compulsions could be fitted
together only by devising a novel mix of rhetorical modes that would mask a
public unveiling of her life and recast it as an expression of prescribed

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

Vaishnavite self-abnegation and humility as well as of proper womanly
modesty and obedience. What emerged out of such constraints was a
sustained, skilful and delicate double-speak, enabling her to announce her
problems and her triumphs without letting go of her Vaishnav humility or
her feminine modesty. It also insidiously portrayed her own gender-marked
experiences as highly problematic ones, without using the mode of overt
critique.
A multi-intentioned, polysemic content lay blandly enfolded within
seemingly innocent statements. In the very first colophon, she described
herself as 'lowly, ignorant that I am, and a woman, moreover.' 33 While
colophons are conventionally self-deprecating, Rashsundari stretched hers
to evoke other possibilities. She bracketed herself within the same
categories that Chaitanya had promised to save - the low-caste, the
ignorant, the woman. By using near-identical terms she obliquely invoked
the promised inversion of status, the assurance that lowliness is a condition
of salvation. In the same sentence she also subtly reminded us about the
remarkable feat that a person as deprived as herself has accomplished by
writing the book. And she did all of that without recourse to open self-praise
or self-aggrandisement.
She let us know how pretty she was by simply repeating what others had
said about her. In fact, she even composed a little verse about her looks:
'Everyone called me a little golden doll.' Her neighbours used to comment
on her attractiveness: 'Whoever marries her will be truly blessed.' She would
not say that she was a domestic success. She simply said that all her in-laws
were extremely kind and no one ever had a word of criticism about her all
these years. 34 Indirect statements or reported speech could convey what she
could not directly say about herself.
Rashsundari attained a level of sheer mastery in signifying something
very different from what she was saying overtly. She did it by a careful
framing of her direct statements. She would conclude an episode with pious
sentiments, resigning herself to divine will. At the same time, she
surrounded it with vivid details that described very painful consequences
flowing from her obedience. As a result, the surface message got scrambled
and confused so that she appeared compliant, and, also, a victim-figure
46 History Workshop Journal

precisely as a result of that compliance. She had been extremely eager to

please others as a child. She began to help out an old and infirm relative with
domestic chores without letting others know about it. When her family
learnt about it, they praised her so much that she volunteered to do all the
housework. All good, womanly instincts, that pleased her family and, later,
her readers. She, however, concluded the episode with a surprise sequel that
can wrench our thinking on to very different tracks. 'That was the end of my
days of playing. Now I worked all the time.' 35 She made only a factual
statement about herself, but the words are packed with resonances. Popular
folk verses have often repeated the same problem: 'Let us have a last quick
game together, for the son of a stranger (i.e. the husband) is coming to take

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

me away and I shall never play again.' 36
The strategy was deployed with meticulous long-term planning, spread
over three chapters, in the course of which she gradually introduced the
theme of her secret reading. She prefaced the event with long, vivid and
richly-detailed accounts of the gruelling household labour that she regularly
performed. There is a moving description of how she had found no time fora
single meal for two whole days. She saved the narration from the taint of
self-pity or resentment by frequently inserting phrases like: 'Why should I
talk of such matters? . . . It is shameful to even think of these things.' She
finished up with: 'Thinking over the ways of the Lord, I began to laugh. I
never mentioned it to anyone.' 37 She, then, had it both ways. She
proclaimed her predicament to the whole world through the print-medium
and she reserved the image of the self-effacing Hindu wife who suffers her
deprivations with smiling forbearance.
She 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. 'I have been incarcerated within the
prison-house of this sansar. There will be no release for me till the end of my
days.' She immediately followed it up with a song of praise. 'The mind is
overwhelmed when I ponder over your mercy. You have been kind to your
subjected daughter.' 3 " Mercy here referred to the fact that her healthy body
stood up to this strain. Yet, obviously, it was the strength of a slave that God
had blessed her with. Again, her use of the somewhat strange word
'subjected' robs God's mercy of some of its content even though her
intention had been to indicate that the painful experience bore happy
results. Words, intentions, and effects are conjoined in a curious syntax to
produce multiple meanings, all at odds with one another. The long-range
effect was to build a strong sympathy-base for her act of disobedience, her
reading. The final impression is one of insidious, delicate, masked ex-
pressions of pain that complicate gestures of compliance but that also always
stop short of criticism.
At one place alone, does the dialectic between the submissive devotee
and the self-aware victim figure break down, or, rather, Rashsundari chose
to snap out of the endless transaction between the two. Towards the end of
 A Book of Her Own 47

the third chapter, she expanded the prison-house metaphor with meticulous
thoroughness. Her new home would not relieve her from work to visit her
natal home. The few occasions that she did get permission, she was let out
for a few days like a prisoner out on parole. Servants would surround her like
so many prison-guards. Even when her mother was dying, she was not
allowed to pay her a last visit. She ended her chapter with a reproach, a cry:
'Dear God, why did you ever make me a part of humanity!' This is one
chapter, one statement that ends without a single recuperating word of
praise.
Wherever she referred to the social order, she described it as a part of
God's design . 40 God, thereby, is held responsible for patriarchal oppression,

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

for her own searing experiences. She had an alternative which she chose not
to use - that of describing her oppression as a violation of God's will. Her
choice indicates something about her relationship with her God. The more
smilingly and patiently she offered her devotion the more she underlined the
tyranny of his rule. The devotee's surrender accentuates divine despotism
rather than absolve it.
Rashsundari's devotion, then, had a more complex design than either
willed surrender or critique. That ambiguity and tension inform her
manipulation of the yatra or folk-theatre metaphor. These theatres, with
their travelling companies, their elaborate stage props and musical ac-
companiment, had acquired tremendous spread and popularity in nine-
teenth-century villages.41 The director-cum-manager was called adhikari.
Rashsundari described God as the adhikari of a play that is unrolled before
her eyes. The play is presumably about her own life, but she is alternately an
actor and a spectator while God has scripted and directed it and he is
watching it too, since the whole purpose of the play is to amuse him. The
subject of the play has no clue at all to the direction of the script nor does she
have any control over it. She allows herself to be blindly manipulated. 42
Interestingly, the only role that she seems to be playing is as the mother of
a son.43 Probably this was so since this is the only empowering one for a
woman. At the end of the act God comes and takes the son away. She copes
with the pain by telling herself that it had been only a play, his leela.
God also enacts his many lives (incarnations) before her eyes. There is a
crucial difference between her life as theatre and God's lives as yatra. She is
helpless before her own life while God scripts his own. He changes roles - as
Ram, as Krishna, as Chaitanya - and begins a new play the moment the old
one begins to weary him.44 The metaphor ties up with philosophical
speculations on the origins of creation: that creation itself is maya, an
illusion conjured up by God to amuse himself with. It has personal
resonances as well. It expresses not just the spiritual helplessness of the
devotee but also the specific social helplessness of the woman whose
passivity and fatalism are deeply scored over with gender inequalities. A
woman's life is lived out in a permanent condition of homelessness in a literal
sense.
48 History Workshop Journal

A sense of marginalisation had probably accompanied the spread of this

immensely popular art form in the nineteenth century, marking out within
the spectacle, the boundaries between the director/author and the actors:
between the play on stage and the passive spectators. A mid-twentieth-
century novel tried to describe the first destructive impact of this new art
form upon a local community. It completely disrupted the older, more
collective performances of devotional music where everybody sang about
their own bhakti. This gave way to a spectacle, alienated and distant, which
could only be passively consumed.45
Rashsundari's self-alienated life was a thing of endless surprise, wonder
and marvel. The devotee gains a purchase on the divine spectacle of leela at

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

the cost of learning not to identify with her own life.

VI
A possibly exaggerated account of childhood fears creates the space to let
God into the narrative. The problems could have been overemphasised
since, in a number of ways, Rashsundari was luckier than most girls of her
times. Even though she was a fatherless girl, her relatives loved her, and she
was brought up by a wise, serene and adoring mother. Since the family was
affluent, and the girl pretty, fixing a match was not a pressing problem. In
fact, she was kept at home well beyond the usual age of marriage since her
mother could not let her go. Even in her new home, the in-laws loved the
bride. Her first experiences contrast sharply with the more typical feelings of
another girl-bride: 'Every time my mother-in-law looked at me a pint of
blood would dry up in my body.' 46
These facts emerged only incidentally while Rashsundari dwelt on her
many fears and anxieties. More childish and sheltered than her companions,
she was a butt of their teasing. She also had a morbid fear of kidnappers. In a
world filled with troubled apprehensions, the first words about God came
from her mother who tried to remove her fears. This, incidentally, was also
the first appearance of the mother in the narrative, bearing the words of
God. It was the only purpose she serves in the autobiography. She told
Rashsundari: 'Why should you fear anything, we have Dayamadhav (name
of the family idol) at home."47 It was as if the mother gave birth to the idea of
God.
She continued to nurture and develop the idea to remove other fears.
Rashsundari had another bout of terror when she first discovered that she
was the daughterof a dead man. 'All these years I had thought that I was just
my mother's child.' She wept at the new discovery because the notion of a
dead father aroused the dread of ghosts. Her mother consoled her again with
the name of Dayamadhav. 48
The third time that God's name was invoked, and developed at some
length, was when a fire had broken out at home and the frightened children
had run away and lost their way. Their cries of distress had brought some
 A Book of Her Own 49

villagers out who took them home. Rashsundari thought that Dayamadhav
had heard her cries and come to rescue her. The mother then explained
about different grades within divinity which were interconnected as
sedimented layers within one single truth. Human agency had been used by
Dayamadhav to rescue the children who had appealed to him. Yet, while
Dayamadhav was the specific name and shape in which God was contained
within their particular family, the Great Lord who rules over the whole
world was Parameshwara. 'He belongs to everybody. He has created
everything in this world, he loves everyone, he is the Lord God of us all. '49
Although the first mention of God was as a family idol which seemed to
affirm a polytheistic divinity, eventually a monotheistic God is established.

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

From the third section till nearly the end of the book God is called
Parameshwara. The designation is curious since this is a rare appellation to
be attached to Krishna. On the other hand, Christian missionaries and
monotheistic religious reformers like the Brahmos called their God by this
name. Rashsundari seems to have extrapolated a non-Vaishnav designation
to her God. He is also, for much of the book, a curiously faceless, abstract
figure without any of the lush and vivid mythological attributes of Krishna.
The family idol, a central figure within a devout Vaishnav household, is
never even described once in the book.
Once Rashsundari came to know about God, 'on that very day my mind
sprouted the first seeds of intelligence.'50 Her way to God was thus through
acts of thinking. It was the cerebral way, not the pietistic, emotive, ecstatic
or ritualistic ways that are commonly associated with women's devotion.
This way would follow the intellectual trajectory of reading and writing.
God came to Rashsundari not as an icon or as myth and ritual, but as
words spoken by the mother. The mother came into the text only to bear the
words of God. The two were linked together within a single structure to
remove a nervous child's constant fears. The structure broke down when, at
twelve, Rashsundari heard that she was about to be married off. Terrified,
she rushed to her mother to ask: 'Mother, will you give me away to a
stranger?' Her mother tried to rise to the occasion with a denial. But this
time her words rang false and she was crying.51
Rashsundari's world - held together by her mother's reassurances -
crashed around her as she realised that her mother was lying and that her
mother was, after all, as helpless and vulnerable as Rashsundari herself. She
was a woman. In utter terror, her words choking her, Rashsundari tried to
retrieve something of the early structure of reassurance. 'Would Paramesh-
wara come with me?' Her mother replied that he would go with her
wherever she went. Bereft of the precious,-living, human mediation of the
mother, a male God was left to Rashsundari as the memory of her mother's
speech, as the promise of reassurance. He was, therefore, both a residue and
an extension of the mother. A male divinity had to be imagined who was free
from the limitedness and vulnerabilities of the mother. At the same time he
was entirely a creation of the mother.
50 History Workshop Journal

When the terrible, unbelievable ordeal of parting arrived, and the little
girl lost her home, her birthplace, her mother and every face she had known
all her life, Parameshwara was the only bit of her old identity that she carried
with her from her old life. In a new place, filled with total strangers, where
even the spoken dialect would be different, she went over his name again
and again within her terrified heart: 'I admit it was only out of fear that I
called out to you'.52 She made it clear what location and function she had
allotted to God in her life-deliverance from fear and pain. What she is silent
about, yet what comes through from her subsequent experiences, is how
inadequate God was to the task. By the end of the book the early
expectation was gone. God was now a powerful, whimsical figure who

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

played with her life. She could only hope that he would show pity for her.
'Even if you are cruel to me, I shall call you the Merciful One.' 53
Her mother had been, above all, her teacher, htr guru. Rashsundari took
great care to establish that she had none other. Even though in Vaishnav
households the family guru is a powerful figure who ritually purifies the body
and the mind, Rashsundari did not mention hers. Nor did she refer to her
other prescribed religious activities. She made the narrative bare of all
influences that would have gone into the making of her religious life. Both
Pabna and Faridpur had old and strong Vaishnav associations,54 but Amar
Jiban is silent about them. What is most striking is that she did not discuss
what the sacred texts that she had mastered against such odds, had to teach
her.
By making her mother bear the entire weight of a complete religious
instruction that must have actually been acquired piecemeal through her
entire life, Rashsundari endowed the mother with a specifically 19th century
role. In Vaishnav hagiographies, the mother is a source of nurture but not of
instruction. For the nineteenth-century Hindu revivalist-nationalist on the
other hand, the Hindu woman, being untainted by western pedagogy and
values, being ruled entirely by Hindu scriptures alone, had escaped colonis-
ation in contrast to the Hindu man. As the sole bearer of a lost freedom and
as the site of a new nation, she was the purest influence and source of
instruction within the Hindu home. 55 Liberal reformers, on the other hand,
believed in the modern pedagogical principle that an enlightened mother
was the best early guide for education as well as for morals. In fact, they
based their arguments for educating women on this conviction.56
Obliquely, this move of Rashsundari made a larger point. The mother's
teaching, however potent, had ceased in her life from the age of twelve.
From a very early age, then, Rashsundari's spiritual growth would have
been self-made. As we shall see, Amar Jiban is a jealously individualistic
narrative, shaping the material of her life around the lonely efforts of a
heroic individual. In this sense, too, it is a typically nineteenth-century
product, with something of the bildungsroman about it. Debendranath
Tagore's Atmacharit was an autobiography similarly patterned on a lonely
spiritual quest where he gathered the ingredients of his religion all by
 A Book of Her Own 51

himself. The difference lies in the organisational, mobilisational, insti-

tutionalising imperatives that structure the later part of his book.57
Rashsundari's gender-constrained religious activism, in contrast, had to be
confined to reading and writing.

VII
Rashsundari wrote out her life as a series of trials that she survived with
God's grace. We have referred to her childhood fears. The real ordeal,
however, was married life. Marriage began with a forced parting with
everything she loved. The event was synonymous with great grief, with

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

copious weeping. Bengali girls were generally married off very early, for
ritual compulsions demanded that they should be in their husband's home
when puberty sets in. The loss of the natal home at childhood has been
described in all nineteenth-century women's writings as a traumatic
experience, uprooting a child from the security of her own home and exiling
her forever to the mercy and control of total strangers.58 Other women
recorded excruciating memories - how a mother went blind with continuous
tears after losing her daughter this way.59 A genre of devotional songs
described the annual three-day visit of the goddess Durga to her parent's
home. They were immensely popular all over Bengal in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries - at a time of growing affluence among some upwardly
mobile agricultural and commercial castes and the spread of Brahmanical
patriarchal customs among them.60 Already, sixteenth century law codes
had hardened Brahmanical gender injunctions - including the propagation
of infant marriage for girls - to shore up the declining socio-political
hegemony of Brahmins after a few centuries of Muslim rule in Bengal,
large-scale conversions to Islam and the spread of syncretic practices.61 The
powerful estate of Krishnagore in the eighteenth century had reinforced
Brahmanical orthodoxy.62 The agamani songs about Durga's mother and
her searing pain as the time of parting draws near, would, then, have a
double resonance for Bengali women. Women, by their late-twenties, could
well be daughters aching for their mothers as well as young mothers pining
for their married daughters.63
Rashsundari described the ways that regulated her movements as a new
bride as the rules of old times or sekal. Hers was a pious, deeply orthodox
Hindu family, governed by Brahmanical injunctions and untouched by any
westernised, reformist values. This was precisely the authentic Hindu space
that militant Hindu revivalist-nationalists of the nineteenth century valor-
ised as the domain of residual freedom, an abode of happiness, that
contrasted with the deprivations and humiliations of colonial rule. An icon
was constructed of the true patriotic subject, the good Hindu woman with
her simple dress, her ritually pure conchshell bangles and red vermilion
mark, her happy surrender and self-immersion in the sansar, and her endless
bounty and nurture expressed in cooking and feeding. She was charged with
52 History Workshop Journal

an immense aesthetic, cultural and religious load in nationalist writings, as

Annapurna, the goddess of food, as the bounteous Motherland.
Apart from reformist contestations of this image of Hindu female virtue,
women's own writings from the 1860s seriously interrogated its foun-
dations. 64 They shared two major planks of criticism - the withholding of
education from women, and the trauma of early patrilocality and forced
planting of little girls in new families. Rashsundari, who was a pious Hindu
housewife herself, occupying the concrete social space marked out by the
icon, and who otherwise was careful to surround her statements with
sentiments of obedience, was, nevertheless, quite outspoken in her negative
assessment of the system. 'I am filled with loathing when I look back on all

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

that . . . the coarse clothes, the heavy cumbrous jewellery, the conchshell
bangles, the vermilion mark . . .' She used images of blindness, of dumbness
and of paralysis, of the blindfolded bullock moving mindlessly round the
oil-press, to describe the gamut of injunctions that governed the bride. 65 She
was condemned to strict silence, to limited, awkward movements, to an
absence of any contact with most older and male relatives. Since the
boundaries of permitted movements varied in each family, no bride was
quite sure of the exact scope of restrictions. As a much older wife with
several children of her own, Rashsundari had thought it might be forbidden
for her to appear before her husband's horse. Throughout her text she
enviously compared her fate with that of the 'modern' girls who were blessed
with education 'these days'. In her days, everyone believed that 'women
were fit for nothing else except domestic drudgery.' 66
She herself was obedient and her in-laws were affectionate. Yet, grafting
remained a pain-filled process. Incarceration was the recurrent image for
this stage. 'I was caged for life, in this life there will be no escape forme . . . I
was snatched away from my own people . . . and was given a life sentence
. . . I would shed tears in secret but since I had to spend my life with these
people, I eventually became a tamed bird . . ,'67 The love she gave her
in-laws was no spontaneous affection but the result of training and necessity,
the habit of the caged bird.
At fourteen, Rashsundari was looking after the entire household without
any help. Her world was the kitchen, and her 'cage' had distinct spatial
connotations. She was in charge of the many ritual requirements of the
family idol, she nursed her mother-in-law, looked after a stream of
unexpected guests and cooked two meals every day for at least twenty-five
people. 68 Her account of her daily work deconstructed the iconic figure of
the contented female nurturer in two very crucial ways: she listed her service
to the family idol as work and not as the emotional release and aesthetic
gratification that it is meant to be for women. She also went into a very full
account of the gruelling work-schedule, although all the time thanking God
for her strong body which could take the strain. She thus evacuated the
image of nurture of the sense of emotional fulfilment and remade it in the
image of a slave. She made a similar move with the image of mothering. The
 A Book of Her Own 53

hard, unassisted, continuous work involved in nursing a series of twelve

babies in quick succession, was conventionally read as the cherished
devotional or patriotic icon of happy, self-effacing motherhood. Rashsun-
dari restored the feel of slog to the image. All night a stream of children
would keep her up. 'One would say, Mother, I want to piddle, another
would say, Mother, I am hungry, the other one would say, Mother, take me
in your arms.' 69
She extended the same move with brilliant success to the theme of food -
on cooking, feeding, eating and non-eating. She literally spent her entire
youth in cooking and feeding others. In the prosperous East Bengal
countryside, among affluent families, the preparation of excellent meals of

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

immense variety and skill was a constant preoccupation. Women were
graded, and family memory organised, according to the meals that had been
brilliantly prepared and lovingly served by women. On the other hand, ritual
fasting and even non-eating as a matter of preference among women was
valorised in a whole range of prescriptive texts and literature. 70 Her eating
was a peculiarly non-structured, uncertain activity. Nineteenth-century
behavioral manuals that taught women proper deportment in their new
homes, confessed their helplessness on the matter. 'My child, I can give you
no good advice on this. If you serve yourself, you will be called shameless. If
you wait for others to serve you, you may have to go without food.'71 Even in
far more 'modern' families, women faced the same problem. 72 In fact,
femininity was crucially tied up with professed indifference to food, to
habitual neglect of eating. Interestingly, the same prescriptive authorities
that had relegated women to a lifetime of non-eating in the middle of endless
feeding, and had fixed this role in the image of Annapurna, the Goddess of
food, had also imagined the terrifying counter-image of Kali, the primal
female force that devours Creation itself. Female saints would often exercise
their saintly privilege with bouts of voracious eating and with demands of
being physically fed.73
Rashsundari described her acts of cooking and feeding as hard work. She
made no reference to the possibility of excitement in cooking, the
gratification of feeding the loved ones, the aroma and taste of the
memorable dishes she would have prepared as a successful housewife. She
frankly and humourously talked about her senile greed for good food in old
age, as if age had somehow defeminised her and released her from
prescribed inhibitions.74 She emptied out the act of cooking from associ-
ations of creativity and filled it with hard labour, with deprivation. She
refused the iconic privilege of Annapurna.
She was quite clear about the deprivational aspect. 'Forget about being
cared for in other ways, most days I did not even get to eat two proper
meals.' 75 She went without a single meal for two days since guests arrived
without notice and the high standards of family hospitality had to be
maintained by the wife who offered up her own meals. At night, children
would get up and interrupt her meals and she had to stop eating to tend them
54 History Workshop Journal

since their bawling disturbed the husband's sleep.76 It was not possible to
share the problem with him. Rashsundari chose to refer to Krishna as a
father, although in sacred myths Krishna played a number of familial roles,
but never that of the father. She refused the more conventional feminine
approaches to him as his mother or his lover. As a Bengali woman, both the
roles would have involved her in the act of providing nurture. She was tired
of being the source of nurture. In the realm of religious imagination, she
needed to create a source of stable nurture for herself.
If the kitchen was a cage, so was the sexual body of the young woman.
Rashsundari's first child was born when she was eighteen. Till the age of
forty-one, she gave birth, at roughly two-yearly intervals, to eleven more

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

children. Lying-in rooms were notoriously insanitary and childbirth was
surrounded with a range of extremely exacting rituals.77 Vaishnav house-
holds had somewhat more lenient ritual expectations, and that, along with
the mild and healthy climate of her birthplace, probably accounts for her
unimpaired good health. 78 Childbirth would still have been a dangerous
moment in her life. Census figures show that in the nineteenth century, the
highest incidence of mortality among Bengali women occurred in their most
fertile years.
Rashsundari summed up these years in her life in a few terse words: 'The
Lord only knows what I went through all these years.' 79 We find little about
her husband in Amar Jiban. We are told that he would be impatient when
babies cried at night, that, bound as he was by strong ties of custom, he was
of no help to her in her desire to read. He cried when she was seriously ill and
given up for dead, but he also said stoically: 'Is she gone? So let it be then.' 80
There are no memories in the book about the time when they were young
together. His own death was described as a social catastrophe, making her a
ritually inauspicious person. She said that she had lost her 'crown of gold',
not that she had lost a limb which would have signified the loss of something
far closer than social status. She followed it up with an extraordinarily
strange statement: 'I do not regret what God had willed.'81 If convention
demanded that she did not speak openly about her sexual relations with him,
it certainly would not recommend such fatalistic stoicism in reporting her
husband's death. Other widows had left long, loving accounts of their
husbands' last moments. 82 She also departed from the norms of a widow's
speech in a small but significant way: whereas widows are expected to see
their prolonged life as a curse, Rashsundari thanked God for her long life.83
There was no effort at preserving the memory of her sexually active years,
except as a bind. The husband, as a partner in that life, is equally absent.
Was that entirely an effect of inhibition?
The Hindu marriage system, which revivalist-nationalists valorised as a
domain of affect, compensating for a miserable colonised existence in the
public sphere, a domain which they were committed to save from all colonial
intervention, initiated the conjugal relationship with a traumatic separation
from the childhood home and an abrupt termination of childhood.
 A Book of Her Own 55

Co-habitation was ritually obligatory from the onset of puberty, often when
the girl's body was not mature enough to sustain sexual penetration. 84 There
was no question of choice, of consent, of cancelling the tie and shifting to
another partner, however incompatible the marriage or whatever the
problems with the husband. The husband's polygamy or even his death
would not dissolve the marriage bond. The sexually most active years in a
woman's life would coincide with the years of most exacting labour. It would
also lead to dangerous and draining childbirths. In this situation it is,
perhaps, necessary to read her silence about her sexual experiences not as
inhibition, as repressed speech, but as a turning away from her own sexuality
which would appear as little more than a trap for her.

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

Rashsundari was 40 when her first son was married. She did not conceive
after that. 85 It was customary for parents to terminate regular sexual
relations at that point, and we may assume that this was what had happened
to her, since 41 was too early for the onset of the infertile phase. Rashsundari
described her middle age, that was presumably free from sexual activity,
with affection and nostalgia. It was a time of relative power and privilege, a
point where she emerged as a figure of considerable authority, within the
household. She was the mother of grown-up sons, a mother-in-law. For the
first time, she used the words, 'My sansar'.86 It was a time of integration.
The new experiences of her life coincided with a new view of religion. At
the very end of the book, she gave conventional and familiar names, forms
and myths to God. For the first time, too, she addressed him by the name of
the family idol. A self-created God, wrested and saved from her mother's
home, was merged into a shared, collective devotional knowledge. She
ascribed to herself the usual range of religious practices permitted to a
Vaishnav woman of means: endowing the family idol, providing for an
annual congregational feast. Her religion now expressed a family of
property and status, and no longer the lonely struggles of the bhakt. Yet
something new remained in her endeavour. The money she endowed came
not out of family inheritance but from the proceeds of her own publication ,87

VIII
In Vaishnavite hagiographies, closeness to divinity is established through
trances or through miracle-making abilities. Rashsundari had no claims to
extraordinary powers since they were incompatible with her secure house-
wife status. Yet, her own signs had to be in some ways within the realm of the
marvellous, the unusual, to establish the seriousness of her bhakti. She
formulated a series of what we may call tamed, domesticated, everyday
miracles, non-supernatural in manifestation, yet sufficiently wondrous to be
ascribed to divine inspiration. They were located in changes within her own
body, in her ability to dream strange dreams, and, finally, in her ability to
read.
Certain normal, expected bodily changes were interpreted as signs of a
56 History Workshop Journal

wonderful and persistent care with which God had altered her body for the
different stages of life. Her youthful body had been healthy, pretty and
fertile. In middle age the strength remained but fecundity dried up, as
befitted the respected seniormost woman in a large household. As the house
filled up with a younger generation, and her responsibilities dwindled, her
strong body began to age and decay, shedding its old capabilities. She now
awaited her last journey across life with a lightened load. With this account
Rashsundari defamiliarised a normal female life-cycle by imparting a sense
of wonder at the perfect fit between the body and its changing functions. The
familiar body was made strange, exotic and holy, the sign and site of God's
handiwork. 'Plain eyes can see it quite clearly.'xx

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

The supremacy of sense-perceptions as the primary source of religious
knowledge, and of the human body as the object of this knowledge, tie up
with strands within body-centered popular esoteric cults. Yet, unlike them,
Rashsundari did not seek to manipulate and stretch the limits of the ordinary
body. To her, the normal changes themselves were infinitely wondrous. The
cultic practices involved a relationship with a male body and the object was
to impart great powers to that. In a way, then, it was a replication of the
patriarchal order on a different register. Rashsundari's religious project,
however, was autonomous and self-centered.
Her dreams were occasionally anticipations of events that were about to
happen. She dreamed, for instance, that she was reading the CB before she
had learned to read. The next day, accidentally, she managed to identify the
book. It had, therefore, been a message from God. Similarly, she had a
vision of a shower of golden flowers, symbolising the birth of a male
grandchild. She also dreamt of things that had happened without her
conscious knowledge -for instance, the death of a son. She even saw a ghost
once."4 These experiences were close to abilities that a whole range of
otherwise ordinary women might possess, powers of a rather low grade that
singled them out as curiosities rather than as people touched by the divine.
Rashsundari, however, linked them up with a superior spiritual competence
by pointing out the parallels with dreams seen by fathers of Ram or
Chaitanya."" Dreams, therefore, became a privileged access to a superior
reality.
The unexpected retrieval of a long-lost object in an unchanged, un-
blemished condition, was interpreted as yet another sign from God.1" Some
essence of herself had remained in his safe custody, retaining its old lustre
even though her mortal body had gone into decay. The retrieval of lost
objects, we must remember, was also an essential part of miracle tales.
Her reading was the fourth and the most important miracle in Rashsun-
dari's life. She first read a sacred book in manuscript form.
Vaishnav manuscripts were profusely produced from the seventeenth
century onwards, and manuscripts remained much in use till the mid-
nineteenth century. These were, however, awkward to handle since the
stained paper was too fragile to be sewn together. Loose pages were pressed
 A Book of Her Own 57

between illumined wooden covers. Each page had to be detached while

being read. 92 Reading was, therefore, a delicate, time-consuming process,
involving careful movements. It acquired the aura of an act of worship.
Books were also extremely expensive. Rashsundari's family possessed quite
a few of them, indicating an unusual degree of investment in reading.
Rashsundari had longed to read since she was fourteen. When she was
twenty-five, she dreamt that she was reading the CB. The very next day, her
husband told a son in her presence to replace it among other manuscripts.
She identified the manuscript by its illumination, and later she detached a
page and hid it. She also surreptitiously acquired a palm-leaf on which her
son was practising letters. Then, over a very long time, and in deepest

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

secrecy, she matched the letters on the leaf with those on the page. With
great efforts of memory she also recalled the letters that she had learnt as a
little girl and identified them. Eventually, she became jitakshara, master of
the word, a magnificent term that she had coined herself.93 Much later, she
learned to write and to read printed books with support from her grown-up
sons who had received the new education. 'I discovered that printed letters
are the best.' 94
For a long time, her reading remained unsuspected. Only a few
maidservants were later trusted with the secret. Much later, her widowed
sisters-in-law were told, and, contrary to her apprehensions, they were
delighted and eager to learn from her. 95 But, for quite some time, reading
was a forbidden pleasure. It was not an act of rebellion since it was a secret
and she did not let it interfere with her other duties and obligations. On the
surface, nothing had changed. In reality, a miracle had taken place.
It was, however, a transgression of the deepest kind. She was now a
woman with a double-life. As a Vaishnav, Rashsundari used the pattern of
transgression that was most familiar to her to describe her condition. She
structured it on the mode of the illicit love of Radha for Krishna, the conflict
between the woman's religion within sansar, and a higher religious urge
turning her against it. She used expressions very familiar to the literature of
divine illicit love. Her household was against her desire, there was no one to
help her, she had no time for it. It split up her very self, yet she
acknowledged its divine inspiration. It had taken hold of her entire being. 'I
was forever yearning' 96 It is interesting that orthodox critics of women's
education were convinced of an equation between the woman's intellectual
desires and her sexual immorality. One kind of transgression was conflated
with another kind. When girls' schools were first started in Calcutta, the
editor of a Bengali newspaper sarcastically offered his services to teach girls
at night.97 The reformist leader Sibnath Shastri's mother was an educated
woman. When his schoolteacher discovered it, he immediately sent her a
letter through the little boy, asking her for a secret assignation. If a woman
was educated, she must be an immoral woman. 98
If this was the kind of attitude that Rashsundari expected from her milieu,
what were the resources that could have given her hope? Rashsundari said
58 History Workshop Journal

that in her youth she would hear her elders fret about the new-fangled
interest in women's education. 'Now, of course, we are ruled by a female
sovereign. . . . This is the age of Kali.'99 Victoria's rule was coupled with
Kali age, the last and most degenerate of times within the Hindu time-cycle
of four-ages. For Rashsundari, the terms would carry very different
resonances. If Victoria's rule heralded a modernity that promised education
for women, then it would be a resource and not a burden for her. Possibly, a
Vaishnav notion of time reinforced her choice. Post-Chaitanya bhakti had
welcomed Kali age, when the saviour Chaitanya had been born. In this age,
women, low-castes, and the ignorant were blessed with a larger possibility
for salvation. If this was an age of decline, it was also a time for more

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

generous hopes. Interestingly, this trope within Vaishnav piety found a
resonance among the liberal rationalists of the nineteenth century who
hoped for a deliverance from social malaise through reform and education.
Rashsundari knitted up the two kinds of hope together: Kali age was a time
of love and salvation for all, it was a time when girls were taught to read.
'Blessed, blessed be this Kali age.' 100 A Vaishnavite and a gendered
construction of time met to contest a dark perspective on modernity that was
shared by a traditional Brahmanical orthodoxy and the Hindu revivalist/
nationalist alike.101
By claiming that God had taught her to read, Rashsundari took her place
within the new domain of the great, secular miracle-tales of nineteenth-
century Bengal. For colonised Bengalis, excluded from most of the exalted
public stations of life where their transformative abilities would have
registered themselves, a mastery over the new education was the only way of
proving individual greatness. A new realm of secular miracle literature had
shaped itself around marvellous accounts of such mastery. Rashsundari's
book was read as a sign of traditional womanly virtues. Yet its very
production places it within the new genre. The appropriation of a radical
departure as a traditional virtue was something more than a misreading. It
was a process that enabled an absorption of the new into commonsense.

X
I was interested in Amar Jiban not only because it initiates the autobio-
graphical genre in Bengali or because it is one of the earliest examples of
women's writing in the language. It was also not entirely because Amar
Jiban is a very rare and early example of a concrete, individual woman's
devotional quest, articulated in her own words. My interest was sharpened
as I came to realise how different the text had turned out to be from what I
had expected from a woman's autobiography, a woman's writing, a woman's
bhakti.
The erotic mode had been singularly privileged within Vaishnavism and
among popular, esoteric cults. For a lot of women, bounded by an
unbending patriarchy, it carried access to an imagined erotic relationship of
 A Book of Her Own 59

immense richness. Krishna could also be appropriated as one's child,

framing the absorbing female experience of mothering within a more perfect
world of meanings. Rashsundari's Parameshwara, however, was a very
different God. He had an ambiguous and problematic role in her life.
There were other departures as well. It would be simple-minded to posit a
straight connection between female subjectivity and female writing, to
assume that the latter reflects the former in a direct, unmediated way. In
fact, for the writing woman, the act of writing itself reconstitutes her
subjectivity in radically new ways. Yet, a woman's writing is far too easily
related to the cultural world it came out of. In Amar Jiban, on the other
hand, there is very little by way of direct speech of women, or speech-effects

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

specifically associated with the women's world - no proverbs, riddles, tales,
pungent and earthy idioms. Her prose is far removed from everyday,
colloquial forms. The language is definitely not gender-marked.
In sharp contrast to expectations from women's writings, the book is
astonishingly bare of visual or sensuous content. There are no descriptions
of exterior landscapes, nor of domestic scenes. There is no impression of
taste, sound or smell. The objects she handled, the spaces she passed
through, the faces she saw bear no features in her narrative. The great rivers
and waterways of Pabna and Faridpur - Padma, Brahmaputra, Ariyal Khan
- are condensed into the single image of a boat-journey through the rivers of
life. They also shape a dream-sequence where her dead son comes to meet
her on a tiny boat, across the great, melancholy expanses of a river. Events
that took place around her are similarly condensed. There is a brief poem on
an epidemic fever at her Faridpur village.102 But there is very little about
anything else. At the time the book was being revised, her birthplace Pabna
had become the seat of a highly-organised peasant agitation against the
arbitrary cesses and rent-enhancements that a group of landlords had
imposed on tenants. Around the same time, untouchable cultivator castes of
Faridpur had gone on 'strike' to improve their low ritual status, and had
refused to work for the upper-caste gentry.103 Rashsundari was a landlord's
daughter and a landlord's wife. She, however, made no mention of these
events even though they must have made a considerable stir in her milieu.
Amar Jiban is a curiously self-absorbed narrative. Other people appear
simply to make a very specific point about her and then they disappear. They
do not have an independent life of their own within her text, nor do they live
out relationships with one another. It is uncompromisingly non-dialogic.
The husband, who had been given a few perfunctory references in the main
body of the text, was granted a separate, brief section towards the end of the
first part of the book because, she felt, people would want to know about
him. A curiously impersonal obituary was therefore appended, for narrative
requirements, not because she wanted to talk about him.104
She turned the narrative focus intensely and exclusively upon herself, first
of all, by abstracting herself from her concrete world. 'I came to Bharat-
varsha (India), and spent a long time here. This body of mine, this mind, this
60 History Workshop Journal

life itself have taken different forms'.105 She lived out her life in two villages.
They are, however, absent, except as mere names. Nor are there more
intimate, familiar locales - the sub-division, the district or even the
province. Her time-scale is oddly precise, very different from CB or CC. She
departed from popular, rural ways of patterning time and memory: pinning
down a human event by referring to a natural one like a flood or a famine, or
by referring to an event of local importance. There is no local time, village
time, family time. She gives herself nothing less than a whole sub-continent
and almost an entire century to live in.
In their larger historical-geographical dimensions these landmarks were
remote to her lived life. Yet, evidently, they were meaningful to the design

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

of her self-created, narrated life. At the time she was writing, a united Indian
empire had emerged, renewed and revamped after a sub-continental upris-
ing. ""'Bharatvarsha, then, was an effect of a new political reality. The name
also occurs in the Cfi." l7 The Vaishnavite pilgrimage circuit, spreading from
Nabadwip in Bengal, to the Puri temple in Orissa (which was a gateway to
South Indian temples), to Mathura-Vrindavan in North India and Dwarka
in Western India, gave Vaishnavs a vivid sense of a large, sacred geography.
Again, when the book was being written, the nineteenth century had already
self-consciously separated itself out from an undifferentiated mass of time, a
recurrent replay of identical historical cycles. It had come to see itself as the
site of a new and unique history, which gave time a direction, a teleology.108
Rashsundari needed this large context to abstract herself from her actual
lived life. She transcended its narrow limits and its inability to intersect with
grand historical narratives by giving herself the largest possible temporal
and spatial frames that she could relate to. Her life could now become an
adequate site for the play of a grand divine purpose.
Autobiography, as a genre, most obviously confuses the boundaries
between the word and the world, deluding us that it is a life we are reading
and not a text. I found that AmarJiban thwarted these expectations persist-
ently. In very many ways, its textuality is underlined by the distance it sets up
between Rashsundari's lived experiences and her narrative preoccupations.
It was through writing a book that the life she wanted to express could live.

XI
In its textuality and conditions of being, Amur Jiban was a nineteenth-
century production, although Rashsundari seldom reflected upon her
times."19 They gave her a publisher, a printer, a market for her writing. They
created a modern readership that would want to read about an ordinary
woman. They also gave her a language that she could write in - a vernacular
prose which was accessible to a neo-literate person with no training in the
classical languages or in English. It was a prose that could express the
life-events of a housewife as well as the devotional exhortations of a
devotee.' 10
 A Book of Her Own 61

If nineteenth-century processes had enabled the writing of AmarJiban,

they remained incomplete, even botched-up. And here I have a personal
debt to enter. A hundred years after Rashsundari, in the early decades of
this century, a grand-aunt of mine was seized with a desire to read. Her
affluent, educated, upper-caste family was non-co-operative, and she had to
keep her desire a secret. The only reading matter that would come her way
were paper packets carrying groceries from shops into her kitchen. The
paper came out of torn pages from schoolboys' exercise books, scored over
with sums and spelling lessons. While cooking the evening meal, she would
pore over them in theflickeringlight from her hearth-fire.
Rashsundari's life and writing stood at the confluence of two orders of

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

patriarchy, and of women's desires. On the one hand, there was her
relationship with the bhakti tradition. It allowed the woman, seeking an
excess beyond a homebound existence, a certain ambiguous space. On the
other hand, there were her own times, when a new system of liberal
pedagogy came to include women as its target. It, however, was riven with
doubts about its own agenda. If a liberal pedagogy was a weapon of the
coloniser, it asked itself, would the education of the woman not indicate a
possible surrender to colonisation? In any case, liberal reformism operated
within severely narrow margins, even inside its middle-class boundaries.111
For other women, seized with the hunger for the written word, it had little to
offer beyond stray pages torn out of school exercise books.

Post-script
Most recent works on cultural developments in the colonial period tend to
assume the operations of a single, monolithic colonial discourse with fully
hegemonistic capabilities. All that Indians could possibly do was to either
form a secondary, derivative discourse that simply extended the message of
the master-text, or refuse and resist its positions and language. I was
particularly keen to avoid this perspective. It necessarily robs colonised
Indians of effective agency and evacuates an especially complicated
historical problem of all complexities. It is striking that it is only Third-
World histories that are made so monochromatic and flat, capable of being
read off from a single and simple perspective. I think the acceptability of
these readings in the First World owes a lot to an unstated conviction there
that historical processes in the Third World had been without much depth or
thickness and an understanding can easily be managed by positing a single
binary opposition as the only axis around which they revolve. This particular
axis - the totalising power of colonial discourse - also has the further
advantage of reaffirming the ubiquity of Western presence and the
everlasting mastery of its knowledge-systems in Indian history since both
complicity and resistance of Indians would equally and exclusively shape
themselves around a colonial agenda and be eternally parasitic upon it. In
62 History Workshop Journal

the largely decolonised world after the mid century such an acknow-
ledgement of its ineffable mastery would have been particularly welcome in
the First World. Since I do not believe that colonial discourse (itself an
undifferentiated, unhistoricised stereotyped construct) ever operated as a
fully hegemonistic power, eradicating and completely overhauling all other
histories, I chose to abandon what seemed to me a sterile and stale
organisational principle and focus for exploring social and cultural problems
in the nineteenth century. I did not use this text just to probe its precise
relationship with systems of colonial power-knowledge. I saw it as being
shaped by many histories that interanimate and transact with one another. I
also saw it as an autononomous endeavour that creates its own world of

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

meaning out of a whole range of given meanings.
I am grateful to Rimli Bhattacharyya, Shibaji Bandopadhyya, Jasodhara
Bagchi, Pradip Datta, Aditya Sarkar and Sumit Sarkar for their comments
and suggestions.

NOTES

1 Rashsundari Debi, Amur Jiban, pp. 18, 22, 31, 44. Reprint of 1897 edition in
Atmakatha, Ananya publications, Calcutta, 1981. A] was first published in 1868. A second,
enlarged version came out in 1897. a third one in 1906 and a fourth edition appeared in 1956.
2 AJ, p. 23.
3 Ibid, p. 21.
4 Vrindaban Das, Sri Chaitanyacharitamrita, ed. Kanchan Basu, Calcutta, 1986, p. 143.
Vishnu is the preserver of Creation who has taken on different incarnations in different ages to
save and protect the world. From early medieval times, major devotional traditions developed
around the incarnation of Krishna who spent his youth among the low-caste cowherds of
Vrindaban, which devotees associate with the important pilgrimage centre located at modern
Uttar Pradesh. Later, he became the king of Dwarka and played a major role in the battles
which the epic Mahabharaia narrates. Chaitanya, who founded a massive, popular devotional
movement in Bengal, was born in 1486 in a Brahmin Vaishnav family at Nabadwip, the major
centre of Brahmanical scholarship in medieval Bengal. A noted scholar himself, he later
became an ascetic, and preached an extremely emotional form of bhakli that was accessible to
all castes and which required public congregational singing and dancing in Krishna's name. His
acolytes started a vast proselytisation campaign in all parts of Bengal. A group of disciples went
to Vrindaban and prepared a body of theological canon for Bengali Vaishnavs. Chaitanya was
deified in his lifetime and became a central figure of adoration. He died around 1533. CB was
composed about fifteen years after his death. Interestingly, the Chaitanya movement generated
the first (and a very rich) corpus of biographical literature in the Bengali language. Studies of
the Vaishnav movement in Bengal are vast and highly interesting. I have particularly used S. K.
De, Early History of the Vaisnava Faith and Movement in Bengal. Calcutta, 1961; Ramakanta
Chakrabarti. Vaisnavism in Bengal, 1486-1900, Calcutta. 1985; Hitesh Ranjan Sanyal, Rangla
Kirtaner Itihas. Calcutta. 1989.
5 AJ. p. 41.
6 Ibid, part II.
7 Ramakanta Chakrabarti. chapters 4 and 5.
8 SukumarSen, Bangla Sahityer Itihas. Calcutta. 1965.
9 It was particularly detailed about Chaitanya's early years. Although its accessibility
made it immensely popular, its scholarship was not very highly thought of.
10 Sukumar Sen, Introduction to Krishnadas Kaviraj. Chaitanyacharitamrita, New Delhi.
1963.
11 Accounts of holy women in June McDanicl. Madness of the Saints: Ecstatic Religion in
Bengal. Chicago. 1989. Swami Gambhiranand. Shri Ramkrishna Bhaktamalika. Calcutta.
1952.
 A Book of Her Own 63

12 R. C. Zaehner, Hindu Scriptures, Calcutta, 1992.

13 Satish Chandra Chatterjee, 'Hindu Religious Thought', in K. W. Morgan, ed, The
Religion of the Hindus, Delhi, 1987; U. Bhattacharyya, Bharatdarshanshar, Calcutta, 1949.
14 S. K. De, Early History.
15 Sudhir Chakrabarti, SahebdhaniSampradaya O Tader Gan, Calcutta, 1985; Manindra
Mohan Bose, The Post Chaitanya Sahajiya Cults of Bengal, nd, Calcutta reprint, 1986.
16 Thomas J. Hopkins, The Social Teaching of Bhagavat Purana; J. A. B. van Buitenen,
'On The Archaism Of The Bhagavat Purana', in Milton Singer (ed), Krishna: Myths, Rites And
Attitudes, University of Hawaii, 1966.
17 Kaviraj, Chaitanyacharitamrita, op. cit.,p. 616.
18 W. Ward, A View Of The History, Literature And Religion Of The Hindoos, Vol 2,
Serampore, 1815.
19 Ibid.
20 Ramakanta Chakravarti, Vaisnavism In Bengal. Also Hiteshranjan Sanyal, Bangla

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

Kirtaner Itihas, Calcutta, 1989.
21 Hitesh Ranjan Sanyal, Bangla Kirtaner Itihas, ibid. Asit Kumar Bandopadhyaya,
Bangla sahityer Itibritta, Vol 5, Calcutta, 1985.
22 AmarJiban.
23 Ibid, p. 8.
24 See Vrindabandass, Chaitanya Bhagavat, for a forceful attack on the empty arrogance
of Brahmin scholars.
25 W. J. Wilkins, Modern Hinduism: Being An Account Of The Religion And Life Of The
Hindoos In North India [1887], New Delhi, 1987.
26 Paul Singer, 'Book Of The Hours And The Reading Habits Of The Later Middle
Ages', in Roger Chartier, (ed), The Culture Of Print - Power And The Uses of Print In Early
Modern Europe, Cambridge 1989.
27 AmarJiban, p. 37.
28 Ibid, p. 56.
29 Ghulam Murshid, Reluctant Debutante: Responses Of Bengali Women To Modernis-
ation, Rajshahi, 1983. Also BamabodhiniPatrika, Calcutta, 1863.
30 Preface to AmarJiban, 1897 edition.
31 Preface to AmarJiban, 1957 edition.
32 Partha Chatterji, Their Own Words? Women's Autobiographies From Nineteenth-
Century Bengal, forthcoming.
33 AmarJiban, p. 2.
34 Ibid, p. 19, p. 7.
35 Ibid, p. 14.
36 Bhabataran Datta, Bangladesher Chhara, Calcutta n.d.
37 AmarJiban, p. 26.
38 Ibid, p. 17.
39 Ibid, p. 27.
40 Ibid, p. 26.
41 Subir Raychoudhury (ed), Bilati Yatra Theke Swadeshi Theatre, Jadavpur University,
1971.
42 AmarJiban, p. 70.
43 Ibid, p. 71.
44 Ibid, pp. 73-5.
45 AdvaitaMallabarman, Titash Ekti Nadir Nam, Calcutta, 1956.
46 SaradasundariDebi,>U/naA:atfia, first published Dacca, 1913. Reprinted in Atmakatha,
Calcutta, 1981, op. cit, p. 7.
47 AmarJiban, p. 8.
48 Ibid, p. 9.
49 Ibid, p. 12.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid, p. 14.
52 Ibid, p. 18.
53 Ibid, p. 72.
54 Ramakanta Chakravarti, Vaisnavism In Bengal, op. cit.
55 Tanika Sarkar, 'The Hindu Wife And The Hindu Nation: Domesticity And National-
ism In Nineteenth-Century Bengal', Studies In History, 8:2, n.s., 1992.
64 History Workshop Journal

56 Ghulam Murshid, Reluctant Debutante.

57 Debendranath Tagore, Atmacharit, Calcutta, 1898. Reprinted in Atmakatha, op.cit.
58 Kailashbashini Debi, Hindu Mahilaganer Durabastha, Calcutta, 1863, would be a
particularly good example.
59 Gnanadanandini Debi, 'Smritikatha'', in Indira Debi (ed), Puratani, Calcutta, 1957.
60 Tanika Sarkar, 'The Hindu Wife And The Hindu Nation', op. cit.
61 S. K. De, Vaisnava Faith And Movement In Bengal.
62 Diwan Kartikeyachandra Rayer Atmajibancharit, Calcutta reprint, 1956.
63 Tanika Sarkar, 'The Hindu Wife And The Hindu Nation'.
64 Kailashbashini Debi, Narishiksha, Calcutta, 1884.
65 Amar Jiban, p. 30; Ibid, p. 21.
66 Ibid, p. 33.
67 Ibid, p. 19.
68 Ibid, p. 24.

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

69 Ibid, p. 29.
70 Nandalal Seal, Vralakatha, Calcutta reprint, 1930. A whole host of behavioural
manuals for women, written in the late 19th century, advised on a cultivated disregard for food.
71 Saudamini Gupta, Kanyar Prati Upadesh, Dacca, third edition, 1918.
72 Even in the highly enlightened Tagore family, married women faced a disconcerting
uncertainty about regular flow of meals. See Gnanadanandini Debi, 'Smritikatha1.
73 See lives of Lakshmididi and Gopaler ma in Swami Gambhirananda, Shri Ramkrishna
Bhaktamulika, Calcutta, 1952. Also June McDaniel, Madness Of The Saints.
74 Amar Jiban, p. 70.
75 Ibid, p. 24.
76 Ibid, p. 25.
77 W. J. Wilkins, Modern Hinduism, p. 9.
78 Ibid, p. 10.
79 Amar Jiban, p. 24.
80 Ibid, p. 55.
81 Ibid, p. 45.
82 See Saradasundari Debi, Atmakatha. Also Kailashbashini Debi, 'Atmakatha', in
Atmakatha, Vol 2, Calcutta, 1982.
83 Amar Jiban, p. 78.
84 There was a detailed discussion of the bruta(, even fatal effects of sexual penetration
into immature female organs during the Age of Consent debates in 1890-91. Prior to 1891,
there was no legal bar to cohabiting with wives above the age of ten. See Bengal Government
Judicial, FN J C/17.1, Proceedings 104-117. June 1893.
85 Amar Jiban, p. 36.
86 Ibid, p. 32.
87 Ibid, p. 80.
88 Ibid, p. 44.
89 Ibid, pp. 50-51. p. 56, p. 60.
90 Ibid, p. 50.
91 Ibid, pp. 63-64.
92 J. C. Ghosh, Bengali Literature. 1948. p. 20.
93 Amar Jiban. p. 21.
94 Ibid, p. 42.
95 Ibid, p. 38.
96 Ibid. p. 23. p. 28.
97 Samachar Chandrika, 1831. in Brajendra Nath Bandopadhyaya (ed). Sambadpatre
Sekaler Katha, Vol 2. Calcutta. 1941.
98 Shibnath Shastri. Atmacharit. Calcutta, 1952. p. 22.
99 Amar Jiban. p. 28.
100 Ibid.p. 77.
101 On the representation of Kaliyug in the 19th century, see Sumit Sarkar, 'Kaliyuga.
Chakri And Bhakti: Ramakrishna And His Times', in Economic And Political Weekly, July 18,
1992.
102 Amar Jiban, p. 60. On Pabna and Faridpur. sec W. W. Hunter, The Imperial Gazetteer
Of India. Vol 7. 1883.
103 Ibid.
 A Book of Her Own 65

104 AmarJiban, p. 57.

105 Ibid, p. 2.
106 An earlier reference to meyerajar rajatwa (rule of a female monarch) by the village
people shows that Victoria's rule was a widely-known political fact. AmarJiban, p..23.
107 Vrindabandass, Chaitanya Bhagavat.
108 See Sumit Sarkar, 'Kaliyuga'.
109 Apart from a reference to Victoria's rule, there is no other mention of any political
event of her times. About social developments, she approvingly referred to the growth of
women's education and to the spread of print culture.
110 Bengali prose had existed from at least the 16th century, but a prose literature came
into its own from the early 19th century, along with the spread of print.
111 Schools for girls remained largely restricted to Calcutta in the 19th century and their
numbers were extremely limited. Despite Rashsundari's enthusiastic anticipations, only
women from families influenced by liberal reform would enjoy access to education. See Usha

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Indiana University Library on July 24, 2015

Chakrabarti, Condition Of Bengali Women Around The Second Half Of The Nineteenth
Century, Calcutta, 1963. The tradition of employing Vaishnav mendicant women to educate
upper caste Hindu women remained largely restricted to families with considerable property
rights, possibly because of the necessity to train them in property management, if the need
arose. See B. C. Pal, Memories Of My Life And Times, Vol 1, Calcutta, 1932.