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Women Performers in Bengal and
Bangladesh
 Women Performers
in Bengal and
Bangladesh
Caught up in the Culture of South Asia
(1795–​2010s)
Edited by
M A N U J E N D R A K U N DU

Foreword by
L ATA SI N G H A N D SE L I NA HO S S A I N
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Oxford University Press 2023
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023933581
ISBN 978–​0–​19–​287151–​0
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780192871510.001.0001
Printed and bound in India by
Replika Press Pvt. Ltd.
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 To
my wife, Sukanya Ray,
who is also my first teacher of  unbelief,
and my mother, Manju Kundu.
 Contents

Foreword  ix
Lata Singh
Foreword  xiii
Selina Hossain
Preface  xvii
Manujendra Kundu
Acknowledgements  xxix

Introduction: ‘Home’: The Repository of Polar Play-​acting

and Challenges of Circularity to Women’s Acting Out  1
Manujendra Kundu
1. Footprints of the ‘Outliers’: Female Performers in Colonial
Eastern Bengal  61
Syed Jamil Ahmed
2. The ‘Fallen Women’ of Culture: An Overview of Performers
from the Dark Chambers of Bengal (1795–​1930s)  84
Devajit Bandyopadhyay
3. Feminine Experiences in the Bengali Stage: From ‘Patita’
to Bhadramahila, and to Today’s New ‘Patita’  101
Sumanta Banerjee
4. Actresses in a Period of Transition (1947–​1952):
Connecting Actress Stories with Their Histories  116
Bishnupriya Dutt
5. Women in Search of a Play: Theatricality and Gender,
from the IPTA to the Naxalbari Movement  132
Mallarika Sinha Roy
6. Entangled in Performance: Women in Group and
Commercial/​Professional Theatre in Kolkata
(1940s–​2010s)  151
Kuntal Mukhopadhyay and Manujendra Kundu
viii Contents
7. Labour, Infrastructure, Division of Labour, and the Position
of the New Generation Women Performers in Kolkata  169
Arijita Mukhopadhyay
8. Survival, Agency, and the Politics of Compromise:
Contemporary Stage and Screen Actresses in Kolkata  180
Madhubanti De
9. Can Female Performers Be Heard? Her Stories in
Theatre of Bangladesh (1950s–​2010s)  196
Samina Luthfa
10. Desire, Decadence, and a ‘Dirty’ Dancer:
In Conversation with Miss Shefali  219
Aishika Chakraborty
11. ‘Extending’ Uday Shankar’s Dance Pedagogy?
Articulation of Agency in Amala Shankar’s Work  231
Urmimala Sarkar Munsi
12. Life of Jatra Actresses: Stories of Unending Struggle
(1950s–​2010s)  243
Prabhatkumar Das
13. The Enigmatic World of Sadhansanginis  260
Sudhir Chakravarti
14. Bonds of Labour: Nachni Women as the Dancers in
the Margin  277
Urmimala Sarkar Munsi
15. Poverty to Sustenance: The Respectable–​Shameful
Journey of Women Performers of Sundarban  289
Poulomi Das

Notes on Contributors  305

Index  313
 Foreword

Performance history offers a vantage point from which the relationship

between cultural practices and gender roles can be explored. In fact,
women have shared a problematic and tenuous relationship with per-
formance in colonial and postcolonial India. Conventions of perform-
ance and representation had remained blatantly patriarchal. Moreover,
the invocation of the most natural art-​historical criteria, those of ‘excel-
lence’ and ‘talent’, has operated in history as one of the chief means of de-
motion and marginalization of women’s artistic careers. But women have
an unexpected treasure trove of artistic expressions and increasingly and
more joyously express their solidarity and intimacy through non-​verbal
forms, especially theatre, music, and dance, than through words. Feminist
cultural activists have been underscoring how the language that the male
world has built, controlled, and given recognition to has divided them.
They talk of a different language—​a language that lies in their bodies,
feelings, gestures, and movements—​a language that speaks through the
work of their hands and their bodies. Chandralekha, the dancer and
choreographer, considers creativity, not the monopoly of a select band of
people but a common possession that humanizes the very content of pol-
itics. She considers women as the centre of all creation and creativity. In
fact, cultural production is a significant site for subaltern voices. But the
entire thrust of cultural discourse at the national level remains steeped in
elitism. Subaltern voices remain largely invisibilized in printed, written,
and official narratives. Women performers have remained on the margin
in mainstream historiography and on the fringe in subaltern and feminist
historiography. Not much work has been done to explore the imbrication
of gender in the history of performance in India. Hence, this book be-
comes very significant. The chapters in this volume emphasize the multi-
faceted relationship between gender and performance.
This volume by foregrounding women in performance further prob-
lematizes the category of gender along the axis of caste, class, ethnicity,
and sexuality. Women performers are the most unsettling category in a
x Foreword
patriarchal society, transgressing gendered boundaries at many levels—​
social/​physical/​normative. The whole respectability and morality dis-
course on performance remained mired with the notion of prostitution
during colonial India. The politics of social class, gendered ideologies,
and nationalism permeating the performance space excluded women
performers from the new nation-​state. Women performers’ question in
the volume can become a vantage point to chart the historical fissures
that lie beneath colonial cultural modernity, which had redefined the cre-
ative, social, and legal status of the performing communities. This would
also unpack the construction/​creation of fuzzy boundaries between the
women performers and ‘prostitutes’ in colonial modernity. Several layers
in the history of modern India—​genealogies of sexuality, the aesthetic,
the public sphere, as well as class, caste, and gender—​bring the category of
women performers under the umbrella of ‘loose’ and ‘deceptive’ women.
However, one also needs to map the complex checkered narrative of their
journey from being ‘loose’, ‘stigmatized’ women to the appropriation of
their cultural forms to the retrieval and cultural assertion by the so-​called
fallen women. Scripting the cultural heritage in the development of the
nation has not only invisibilized but also silenced the narrative of dis-
placement of the subaltern community from their arts and its appropri-
ation by the elites. The book critically engages with some of these issues.
Generally, the writings on women performers underscore the high
points of their careers and accomplishments. The parallel histories of
their everyday travail, agency, struggle, pain, and agony not only get
invisibilized but are also obliterated. The multiple identities of women
performers also remain eclipsed in most writings. Foregrounding the
lives of the women performers in this book would help one to critically
engage with the question of respectability discourse and patriarchal in-
stitutions, like marriage, family, and domesticity, and what they entail for
women. It would also problematize the model of man as the breadwinner
and woman as the housekeeper. Sova Sen, a Bengali theatre personality,
has drawn attention to the fact how domesticity and respectability had
their own burdens for women. She says how older actresses saw the per-
formance as their major job and devoted a vast amount of time to the
theatre, but the new actresses, when awarded the honour of wifehood
and motherhood, have less legitimate time for acting since family con-
tinues to be their priorities. In an interview, one of the women tamasha
artists said that tamasha was what she wanted to do and enjoyed doing,
 Foreword xi
as she was not interested in living a restricted and caged marriage life.
However, the hegemonic middle-​class respectable discourse invisibilizes
such voices.
The book also highlights performance as a sight of labour and work,
which remains invisible in mainstream labour historiography. Such cul-
tural labour remains invisibilized and devalued in mainstream society
due to caste, class, gender, sexuality, and cultural politics. Caste, gender,
and cultural politics continue to marginalize local and regional arts. This
is linked up with the question of patronage. However, the identity of the
performer as an artist and worker is deeply enmeshed and cannot be
separated. This comes across very strongly in Nati Binodini’s autobiog-
raphy for whom acting was the chief treasure and the mainstay of her
life. Binodini says that she never felt that she was acting in order to dazzle
others or simply because she was a salaried actress. She forgot her own
self—​the joys and sorrows of the character she played were hers. But the
evocation of performance as a temple of art creates the paradigm of art
and work as a binary. Such a binary masks art as a site of work, foreclosing
the struggle and contestations of artists and their economic concerns as
working professionals. However, one needs to chart the gendered div-
ision of labour in the cultural domain too. Women’s ‘caring labour’ and
‘labour of love’ have long been put to service in the performance domain
too. The cultural organization took on the form of family, reinforcing
structures of household labour and mystifying its intellectual and organ-
izational aspects. The family’s ‘normal’ expectations of a female member
continued unabated in the progressive left cultural organization too.
Women performers’ questions cannot be discussed without addressing
the question of caste. To date, class, caste, and patriarchal prejudices mark
the women performers of popular performances as vulgar and veiled
‘prostitutes’ or ‘loose’ women. The complexity of patriarchy determines
women’s lives in a context that are caste-​specific in the world of perform-
ance. The ban on women in dance bars highlights the contested debate
amongst the feminist groups on the question of the troubled relationship
between caste, sexuality, and labour. This problematizes the question
of sexuality, taking it beyond the sexual choice, agency, and autonomy
debate, and highlighting how patriarchy operates in complex and mul-
tiple ways. But one also needs to discuss subaltern women performers’
question not only within the framework of the Brahmanical caste order,
which is significant, though. Many of them also came from the most
xii Foreword
economically deprived sections, not all belonging to Dalit communities.
Foregrounding both caste and class in the context of women performers
would be problematizing the readings of artistic agency and power along-
side the narratives of submission, coercion, force, and violence. This book
critically engages with some of these questions.
Gender still remains a profoundly neglected analytical framework in
the study of political theatre. In fact, the conjunction of political and cul-
tural activism also had the potential to highlight women’s role in culture.
It facilitated a radical change in women’s perception of culture and their
own role in it. There is a relationship between political resistance, cul-
tural productions, and gender question. This volume also makes an at-
tempt to chart how the gender question was being addressed within the
political-​cultural organization at the theoretical level or the level of per-
formative practice. The book also treads new ground by foregrounding
religious space as a site of performance and critically engages with the
gender question. In fact, religious space is formed by and significantly
formative of performance. But there have been very few studies from this
aspect, and those too have remained centred around men. How does one
read the presence of women in such performative spaces? Can gendered
enactments of the women in religious practice be read as subversive or
transgressive, and how do they negotiate their identity, position, or life
choices in light of contradictory views on and expectations of appropriate
behaviour for women?
Hence this book, by retrieving and relocating the marginalized voices
of women in performance, would provide a vantage point from which
history may be read and rewritten and the contours of the contests over
the nation redrawn. The intersectional analytical framework of gender,
performance, history, and nation in this volume would unsettle the pre-
determined ideological framework of gendered politics and theory.

Lata Singh
Associate Professor
Centre for Women’s Studies
Jawaharlal Nehru University
New Delhi
12 February 2022
 Foreword

Women Performers in Bengal and Bangladesh: Caught up in the Culture

of South Asia (1795–​2010s) is an extraordinary publication. The chap-
ters in this book have been selected against a historically large significant
backdrop. The chapters highlight the ways in which women were subju-
gated in cultural spheres in a patriarchal society. In today’s world, there is
a space for gender equality. Women have earned the right to build their
own worlds, both inside the home and outside of it. But this is not the
case in every sphere, and certainly not for everyone. This book highlights
the ways in which Bengali women have been oppressed for over two cen-
turies and their valiant struggles against it. Hence, this book is essential
reading for everyone, particularly for the young reader.
In the book Sanskritik Itihas published by the Bangladesh Asiatic
Society, Shahanara Hossain writes in an essay: ‘Due to child marriage and
religious control, it was not possible for Bengali women to get an educa-
tion in the ancient times. Manu and Kulluk forbade women from reading
the Vedas and Smriti texts. Manu dictates that for women the act of mar-
riage is Vedic religious practice, serving their husbands is comparable to
learning from the teacher and day to day domestic work is equivalent to
the worship of Agni’ (Hossain 2007: 91; translated by the translator). The
traces of this originary discourse of domination over women still remain.
An example of the kind of violence faced by women from ancient times
can be seen clearly in a recent news item published in the daily Prothom
Alo (31 January 2021). A young woman named Mitu Khatun has been
married for a mere two months. Mitu has been living in intense agony in
a hospital. Mitu’s family alleges that due to their inability to meet the de-
mands of dowry, her face has been scarred with acid by her husband, Arif
Hossain. He had previously cut off her hair and eyebrows. The FIR for the
incident that took place on 25 January in Pabna’s Ishwardi was registered
on 29 January. On the same night Arif was arrested by the police.
xiv Foreword
Mitu was immediately admitted in Upazila Health Complex, Ishwardi.
After primary treatment she was sent to the Rajshahi Medical College
Hospital. Shafiqul Islam, the resident head of medicine at the Ishwardi
Upazila Health Complex, stated that the acid had scorched some parts
of Mitu’s face. According to the FIR and locals, Mitu’s father is a resident
of Arambaria village in the Sara union of the Upazila. She got married to
Arif Hossain of Babupara two months ago. Soon after, Arif demanded six
lakh rupees as dowry from Mitu’s family with the pretext of a trip abroad.
When Mitu’s family expressed their inability to provide the amount, he
was displeased. As a result, when Mitu went to sleep on 25 January 2021,
he shaved off her eyebrows and hair and scorched her face with acid.
In early 2022, in Bamna Upazila of Barguna district, an incident of a
school student’s rape has come to light. Moreover, college and university
students have also suffered rape, physical and mental harassment in many
instances. The Covid-​19 pandemic has deepened the crisis of child mar-
riage. Bangladesh abounds in such incidents of psychosexual-​physical
violence against women. These are not mere isolated incidents. They rep-
resent a major aspect of the social alienation of women. It is therefore
necessary to understand these types of alienation in order to compre-
hend women’s representation in performative texts and their presence as
performers.
At one time, Muslim women were prevented from acting onstage
under the pretence of religion in East Pakistan. But theatre artistes did
not always abide by this restriction. We are also aware that in the 19th
century, on Michael Madhusudan Dutta’s advice, women were incorp-
orated into the ensemble of Bengal Theatre for his play Sharmistha. He
realized that if the characters he created were not essayed by women,
it would diminish the value of his text (Basu in Bandyopadhyay 1421
BCY: 148). We are aware of the historical events that followed, changing
the Bengali sociocultural gamut altogether. In Bangladesh, theatre flour-
ished only after independence. But men and women acted together in
some plays in East Pakistan as well. At present, there is no alternative to
this tradition.
I congratulate Manujendra on putting this volume together. He has
brought to the fore the struggle of cultural workers for progress. Each
of the fifteen essayists in this book has brilliantly illuminated their re-
spective areas. I congratulate everyone on their efforts.
 Foreword xv
I hope this book reaches readers all over the world.
Selina Hossain
President, Bangla Academy
Dhaka, Bangladesh
14 February 2022

Works Cited
Excerpt from Amritalal Basu’s autobiography in Brajendranath Bandyopadhyay. 1421
BCY. Bangiya Natyashalar Itihas 1795–​1876. Kolkata: Bangiya Sahitya Parishat;
2nd reprint; 7th ed.
Hossain, Shahanara. 2007. ‘Sanskritik Jibane Bibartan’. In K. M. Mohasin and
Sharifuddin Ahmed (eds.). Sanskritik Itihas (Bangladesh Sanskritik Samikshamala-​
4). Dhaka: Bangladesh Asiatic Society. 65–​107.

Translated by Nildeep Paul

 Preface

Manujendra Kundu

An Editorial Note

Covering a period of nearly 225 years, this volume would try to capture
a broad spectrum of the situation of women performers from Gerasim
Lebedeff ’s time (1795), who are considered to be the first performers in
modern Bengali theatre, to our time. The moot question is whether women’s
roles as performers have evolved down the centuries. Whether this question
will lead us to their subjugation to their male counterparts, producers, and
directors has been explored here to give readers an understanding of when,
where, and by whom the politics began, and, by tracing the footprints, we
have tried to understand if the politics have changed, remained unchanged,
or metamorphosed with regard to the woman’s question in the performance
discourse. We have explored, in this regard, how her body, mind, and sexu-
ality interacted with and negotiated the phallocentric hierarchy.
We have also tried to examine the transformation of male dominance that
has forced their women counterparts to undergo repression in ever-​changing
garb. What we can say is that with changing times the pattern of exploitation
has become ‘artistic’, ‘humane’, ‘tolerable’, and essentially ‘intellectual’. Amid
such a treacherous terrain, it is indeed a challenging task for women to assert
their agency and rights as cultural purveyors and workers/​experts.

Curtain-​up: Situating the Text in the

Scholarly Context

Although the chapters have been arranged to provide the readers with a
somewhat chronological understanding of the development of women’s
xviii Preface
position as performer-​workers, strictly speaking, we wanted to study the
internal-​external factors that engaged or disengaged women’s gendered
position. Although there is no single book on women performers of West
Bengal (henceforth, Bengal) and Bangladesh entailing more than two
centuries, there are some important works that have taken gender pol-
itics in Indian and Bangladeshi performative schemes (from aesthetics to
functionality) into consideration.
In Public Women in British India, Rimli Bhattacharya elaborates
on the actresses’ functioning ‘as a unit of representation and as ma-
terial for display in the translation of traditional repertoire from a wide
range of extant and emergent forms for the proscenium stage’; whether
‘impersonating’ certain ideals and icons was within their rights; and how
the enactment of those ideals incepted ‘an entirely new component to the
identity and status of the female performer in a metropolitan space such
as Calcutta’ (Bhattacharya 2018: 5). Sumanta Banerjee has traced Bengali
women performers’ marginalization and their strategies of negotiation
with the 19th-​century bhadralok patriarchal structure (Banerjee 1998,
2000). Sarvani Gooptu studied the ‘participation’ of women performers
in the theatre of Bengal, their agency as performers, and their contri-
bution to their work/​job, society, and art (Gooptu 2015: xii). Theatre
Beyond the Threshold discusses the influence of political discourse on
performance gamut and the latter’s response to/​impact on the former
amid a nationalist framework between 1905 and 1947 (Chatterjee 2004).
While studying the histories of dancers and actresses, Bishnupriya Dutt
and Urmimala Sarkar Munsi have explored ‘the crucial theme of iden-
tity and body politics’ and women performers’ capacity for determining
colonial and postcolonial Indian cultural discourse (2010: xiv). Meghna
Guhathakurta argues that women’s representations in visual media ‘are
fabricated by men and projected onto an entirely androcentric world’.
Mainstream Bengali theatre in Bangladesh is no different (Guhathakurta
1997: 239). Ali Riaz and Md. Abu Naser have analysed ‘both the ways in
which Islamists have sought to mobilize Bangladesh’s popular culture as
well as how its various forms have facilitated the rise of Islamists’. In doing
so, they have touched upon women’s regulated/​impeded ‘public partici-
pation’ due to ‘tradition and an interpretation that is devoid of equality
among men and women’ (Riaz and Naser 2011: 136, 143).
 Preface xix
Lata Singh has attempted to ‘foreground women performers in
feminist historiography’ and ‘problematise gender and patriarchy’.
Felicitously does she assert that women performers have been relegated
to the darkness in feminist writings/​historiography, which ‘negates’ the
importance of women’s participation in theatre. Singh, therefore, empha-
sizes the need for positing performance discourse ‘in larger political and
social contexts’, which also has bearing on the producers/​creators of art/​
performance (Singh 2017: xiii, x, ix). By emphasizing women performers
as artistes, especially as cultural workers, Theatre in Colonial India: Play-​
House of Power discusses the politics of constructing women performers
as the ‘other’ as opposed to the idea of the gentlewoman (2009: 16).
Sheetala Bhat explored ‘the discourse of the female body’ that refashions
the delineations of the body of individual performers that ‘succumbs, ac-
commodates, and subverts these discourses’ to invest the relationship
between performance and gender with multifaceted character (Bhat
2017: 24). In a brief article, Neera Adarkar has narrated eloquently the
history and politics around women’s coming to Marathi theatre and the
challenges they had faced from the native patriarchal structure during
the colonial period (Adarkar 1991). Kathryn Hansen has explored how
female impersonators and actresses transformed the visual construct of
womanhood in Parsi theatre (Hansen 1999). While Anuradha Kapur
wants to emphasize how women theatre practitioners have been ‘upset-
ting sexual and gender hierarchies’ by ‘bringing the question of gender
on the stage’ (Kapur 2011: 49, 53), Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker asserts
Indian women directors’ success in building ‘new modes of performance’
that appealed to the audience, expanding ‘a hitherto male-​dominated
field’ and foregrounding the ‘female experience by women practitioners’,
instead of the representation of femininity by ‘the almost monopolistic
control that male playwrights and directors have exercised’ (Dharwadker
2005: 119). Nandi Bhatia deals with ‘the work of women who performed
on the borderlines of dominant theatrical activity and engaged in dra-
matic enactments that contested middle-​class codes of female propriety,
which became normalized in the national popular consciousness’. She
further examines the works by individual playwrights to study their con-
tribution to fashioning ‘modern womanhood’ (Bhatia 2010: xix). Tutun
Mukherjee lays emphasis on ‘the creation of identities and a sense of
self worth [sic]’ vis-​à-​vis women’s disempowerment and negation ‘at a
xx Preface
profound level of their personal sense of being’ (Mukherjee 2005: 16).
Gender Space and Resistance: Women and Theatre in India explores the
relational positioning of gender in theatre history through the theoret-
ical and practical study of women in theatre and its relationship to public
and private spaces to investigate if performance spaces could discompose
the questions of gender binaries vis-​à-​vis women’s presence (2012). Anita
Singh further brings out the expressions of five performers, who ‘share
a concern for identifying the status of women in India at the beginning
of the 21st century’ (Singh 2022). Muffled Voices takes into consider-
ation ‘the image of women in the written and performance text in post
Independence Indian theatre’, and also incorporates ‘the diverse voices
of the female practitioners’ (Subramanyam 2002: 13). In The Progressive
Cultural Movement: A Critical History, Anuradha Roy, Lata Singh, and
Rakhshanda Jalil have etched the creative roles and denied agency of
women performers in the left cultural movement (Sahmat 2017). While
Female Characters in Modern Assamese Drama traces women charac-
ters and assesses women’s position through their depiction in Assamese
drama (Sharma Goswami 2004), Pankaj K. Singh discusses the legends
and their influence vis-​à-​vis structural formation, and women’s repre-
sentation in pre-​and post-​independence Punjabi drama (Singh 2000).
Drama Queens is a collection of biographical sketches, which ‘came with
political legacies’, of ten women performers across India (Sai 2017: 17).
Eulogizing Tagore as the ‘Dancing Poet’, Rimli Bhattacharya concen-
trates on the dancing bodies of women as the progeny of a new cultural
paradigm. She argues that while attempts were made to experiment with
new scopes and elements to explore the body, physicality was also ne-
gotiated, not disregarding manhood, quite paradoxically (Bhattacharya
2019). Women’s subjectivity, utterance, and kinetic existence/​energy
through various media and places have been dealt with in The Moving
Space for an understanding of their personal experiences and gendered
and cultural formation in the field of Indian dance (Sarkar Munsi and
Chakraborty 2017). Traversing Tradition endeavours to bring together
‘practice and research’ of dance in India. Here, ‘scholars, critics and
performers address the personal, local or global concerns born within
and outside tradition—​ in the changing world’ (Sarkar Munsi and
Burridge 2011). In her book on Ranjabati Sircar, Aishika Chakraborty
 Preface xxi
argued: ‘Negotiating constantly with cultural borders, social identities
and their embodied realities, Ranjabati worked in a liminal or in-​between
“third space” and rose above essentialist cultural specificity’ (Chakraborty
2008: 3). Prarthana Purkayastha has noticed ‘the early signs of rebel-
lion against the idea of borders, at both formal and conceptual levels’
in the cultural practices of Rabindranath Tagore, Uday Shankar, Shanti
Bardhan, Manjusri [Manjushree] Chaki Sircar, and Ranjabati Sircar. She
claims that it was not merely responses to the ‘modernity of bodies in
motion’, but a multifarious and multifunctional ‘modernity that are [is]
offered by Indian dancing bodies’ (Purkayastha 2014: 18).

The Positioning of the Volume

Although the reader may find many of these elements in this book, I think
it would be judicious to discuss, by way of explanation, some aspects that
have/​have not been undertaken here. This volume covers the role of the
women playwright/​director/​worker, though particular (examples of)
play/​performance texts, with only a couple of exceptions, or the works
by individual female playwrights in shaping ‘new modes of performance’,
‘dramatic enactments’, etc., have not been studied. This work rather en-
gages in a dialogue, being in the liminal state of the actual performance
space/​discourse and ‘non’-​performing space/​trajectories: the overlapping
of the public and private space (public is private and private is public),
which blurs the performing and ‘non’-​performing dichotomic margin-
alization scheme. Therefore, quite obviously, prioritizing the concept of
‘home’ with its multifaceted connotations, the introductory chapter en-
deavours to contextualize the articles in this volume traversing more than
two centuries’ socio-​politico-​cultural scape vis-​à-​vis women’s position/​
challenges/​negotiations as performers/​cultural workers in Bengal and
Bangladesh.
In order to come to the conclusion that women performers, though
caught up in patriarchal machinations, succeeded in exercising their
agency through the deployment of cunning and beguiling subterfuges,
Syed Jamil Ahmed’s article studies the traditional female performers,
xxii Preface
baijis, modern female performers, and the beshya abhinetris (‘sex-​
worker’-​actresses) of colonial eastern Bengal.
Devajit Bandyopadhyay’s article is an overview of women dancers-​
singers of ‘Dark Chambers of Bengal’ (1795–​1930s). With brief intro-
ductions of their traumatic experiences in public and personal lives, the
article strives to engage with the denial of their agency both as performers
and cultural workers.
Sumanta Banerjee portrays the journey of ‘patita’ (‘fallen’) women per-
formers who were replaced by bhadramahila performers only to share,
with the passage of time, the performance space with the formers in
Kolkata performancescape, although/​ albeit knowingly/​ unknowingly
and willingly/​unwillingly.
Bishnupriya Dutt highlights the postcolonial cosmopolitanism in-
herent in the practice distinct from envisaging the nation along the
lines of ethnic-​Indian identities. The amateur theatre scene in the pur-
view refers to activities affiliated to St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta, and The
Amateur Shakespeareans that performed Shakespeare in English with ac-
tresses who came from various communities residing in Calcutta at that
time: English, Anglo-​Indians, and Jews.
Mallarika Sinha Roy intends to unpack the complex connection be-
tween political activism and the politics of theatricality in the context of
the Naxalbari movement. The analytical angle for such an analysis re-
mains gender, as the interplay between ideals of masculinities and femin-
inities has the potential to unpick through the intricate seams of ideology,
revolutionary romanticism, and activism within the larger context of
women’s participation in cultures of the left, beginning with the Indian
People’s Theatre Association in the 1940s.
In a comparative study of women performers in group and commer-
cial/​professional theatre of Kolkata, Kuntal Mukhopadhyay and I have
traced the performers’ travails and negotiations amid a male-​dominated
‘kinship’ and ‘cartel’ culture. Here, it has been argued that the nature of
‘denial’ in both spaces, though it might seem different/​incongruous at the
outset, has remained fundamentally the same. Over time, women have
started becoming conscious of their situation and have begun negotiating
with the unfavourable conditions.
Arijita Mukhopadhyay’s essay positioned theatre groups as institution-
alized ‘collectives’ and explored the situation of women workers. Through
 Preface xxiii
interviews with contemporary women theatre workers from different
social, economic, political, and even religious backgrounds, the chapter
tries to understand the gendered identities of theatre groups of present-​
day Kolkata and attempts to comprehend if and how the feminine iden-
tity plays a role in deciding the nature of work and wages due to women
theatre performers.
Madhubanti De examines the place held by women in their public lives
as performers in Kolkata through recollections, correspondence, and
essays by and interviews with veteran and contemporary actresses, dir-
ectors, playwrights, and technicians working full-​time as well as freelan-
cers on individual projects, film/​television, and web serials to trace the
emergence of a new intermedial (situated at the intersection of different
media) field rife with structural and interpersonal inequalities, within
which these performers negotiate their survival through a unique politics
of agency and compromise.
Samina Luthfa presents archival data and the life stories of eight fe-
male performers from Bangladesh who worked on the stages of Dhaka
from the 1950s till the 2010s. Using a participatory reflexive research
method, she observes that historically women’s gender roles inside the
theatre troupes had changed, so had the nature of dignity they held in the
eyes of the general people, the theatre community, and their co-​workers
in their own troupe. She reveals that the amount of abuse or harassment
has increased, though the nature and type of perpetrators have changed.
Their accounts reveal that family remains as important in the 2010s as it
was in the 1950s in determining how one will survive in theatre, and the
same goes with gendered roles, body image, or gendered construction of
feminine beauty.
Aishika Chakraborty’s interview with Miss Shefali, formerly known as
the cabaret queen of Calcutta, reveals the dancer-​entertainer’s stages of
discord and settlement when the refugee girl/​woman had to construct
new ideas of history and subjectivity through her artistic labour as a sur-
vival strategy against a phallocentric socio-​politico-​cultural discourse.
Amala Shankar’s book Sat Sagarer Pare about her first tour with Uday
Shankar, the innumerable anecdotes she often shared with her students,
including Urmimala Sarkar Munsi, and her national and global tours with
them as the Director of Uday Shankar India Culture Centre, motivated
Sarkar Munsi to bring to the fore Amala’s deep love for dance—​trying
xxiv Preface
to create a nuanced understanding of her agency and contribution as a
modern dancer, choreographer, and teacher in her own right.
With the help of printed memoirs and interviews with jatra person-
alities past and present, and decades-​long research, Prabhatkumar Das’s
article attempts to present an objective picture of the complex struggles
of jatra actresses’ lives, cutting through the salacious networks of gossip
and rumours.
Through a sociological study of baul practices, from experiences
gathered over many years of encounters with sadhansanginis, Sudhir
Chakravarti’s article aims to examine the complexities of this tradition.
Locating baul culture within intersections of gender and caste-​based
hierarchies, Chakravarti attempts to shed much-needed light on the
agency (or lack of it) of the sadhansangini within baul culture.
In ‘Bonds of Labour’, Urmimala seeks to draw the historiography of
a defiant presence on a public proscenium where the nachni performer
devises her subversions to claim liveness, pleasure, and spatial presence
in order to resist social deletions by the Establishment. Urmimala fur-
ther proposes to categorize this form of labour as an open case of bonded
labour—​perpetuated in the open with the consent of society.
Poulomi Das’s chapter unpacks the notions of dignity and agency that
women ‘folk’ performers of Sundarban interrogate, embrace, and flout to
mitigate and often transcend their class and gender-​oppressed realities.
Using the lens of gender studies and the tool of ethnographic narrative
enquiry, this chapter interpolates their tales of journeying from poverty
to sustenance.
In almost every article, the contested locale called ‘home’ has emerged,
overtly or tacitly, as the leitmotif. Critics may find it somewhat unusual,
but the editor of this volume thinks that the questions of varna/​caste/​
class, bigotry, fundamentalism, agency, affected-​ness, etc. are related to
the larger concept of ‘home’ vis-​à-​vis women’s position at large, and the
gendered performance discourse, especially in this part of South Asia.
Although most of the contributions prioritize Bengali women, this
book is not about them only. This volume also talks about non-​Bengali
baijis, tawaifs, Anglo-​Indian, English, and Jew performers who were
active in this region. Nachni performers, though popularly known as
Bengalis, would wrongly be considered/​defined as such vis-​à-​vis/​with
an urban/​urbane-​centric concept of ‘Bengaliness’. Their ‘Bengaliness’ is
 Preface xxv
unique to their place and their selves. Here, it is beyond the scope and
purview to define ‘Bengaliness’, which would require another sociolin-
guistic study. Those who are familiar with the inclusion/​exclusion of
dialects (i.e. numbers and types) on the syllabus of institutionalized/​aca-
demic Bengali linguistics and the politics associated with it would under-
stand what I am trying to say. However, the book is not limited to the
understanding of ‘Bengali women’ only.

Nitty-​gritty

Critics may object to using ‘Devi’ or ‘Dasi’ as surnames. But in the intro-
ductory chapter, it has been shown that Jnanadanandini Devi had argued
for ‘Srimati’ as a title and ‘Devi’ as a surname or suffix for both married
and unmarried women to retain their ‘individuality’. On the other hand,
Kamini Roy observed from a different perspective that the social con-
struction of Man as a human being and Woman as a ‘Devi’ put the latter
in all sorts of regressive practices, while men piled up social filth by their
depravity, and forced women into treading the path of the unchaste and
dissolute life as ‘patita’ (‘fallen woman’). Therefore, using ‘Devi’ and ‘Dasi’
as surnames was not only a social practice, but also assumed, thus, a
­political character (see the introductory note for references).
It can be observed that the chapters are not arranged thematically, nor
regionally and doctrinally in the list of contents, because the reader may
realize that the issues that have been talked about cannot be confined
within these tropes. Despite the importance of themes, geopolitical inter-
relationship, and religion, women’s position on both sides of the border
(Bengal and Bangladesh) creates a complex situation for them that is
different yet similar, elusive yet ostensible—​the psycho-​socio-​politico-​
religious matrix of which brings them closer, where describing/​segre-
gating/​separating them under any normative structure/​rubric might be
problematic. That is not to say that there is no inherent structure: the la-
tent organization, of course, constitutes the fabric of this volume and the
logic of arrangement of the articles.
Although this volume covers more than two centuries, like any schol-
arly undertaking, it is by no means a complete account of all the aspects
and areas vis-​à-​vis performance politics. I am aware that a few more
xxvi Preface
articles would have enhanced the worth of this volume, like the pi-
oneering role of Rabindranath Tagore in encouraging young women
to go onstage; Kazi Nazrul Islam’s influence on women performers;
Bulbul Chowdhury and his wife Afroza Bulbul’s contribution towards
influencing women to come forward in the field of dance in Bangladesh;
and dancer Manjushree Chaki Sircar and her daughter Ranjabati’s sig-
nificant experiments. They could not be included because we had to keep
the length of the complete volume in mind for practical reasons. However,
I would like to mention that although separate chapters on these areas
have not been incorporated, some of the issues have been touched upon
in the introductory chapter. The reader may also notice the absence of
articles on women’s positions in bhadu, tusu, gambhira, alkap, chhau,
jari and sari (gan/​nach), ghatu nach, fakir nach, pir traditions, rural wed-
ding customs, and so on. Here, we have incorporated only three (loosely)
representative articles on baul, nachni, and performers at Sundarban for
similar reasons as stated above. There is also a disparity in the number of
articles on/​from Bengal and Bangladesh. The responsibility is solely mine
because establishing communication with other potential contributors
from Bangladesh was a tricky affair. I extend my sincere regrets for such
shortcomings. Through this book, we have tried to initiate a dialogue on
an area that, we think, was long overdue. We intend to address the un-
touched footprints in a future undertaking. Because, after all, academic
scholarship exists in continuity, not in finality and closure.
In this book, ‘Bengal’ betokens both undivided Bengal and West
Bengal without any socio-​politico-​cultural agenda. Similarly, Kolkata
and Calcutta have been used interchangeably. Bengali years have been
suffixed with BCY (Bengali Calendar Year). Many English meanings
of Bengali words have been culled from the Samsad Bengali to English
Dictionary (https://​dsal.uchic​ago.edu/​dicti​onar​ies/​bis​was-​beng​ali/​),
which have not been mentioned separately in the chapters. Diacritical
marks have been used in one article, and in the rest, the popular style has
been maintained.
While I did not interfere with the italicizations/​emphases of non-​
English words by the contributors (except names of different perform-
ances and people’s caste and religious identities, italicization of the
words, which are not included in the English lexicon, has been retained
in their articles; since no words were italicized in Sudhir Chakravarti’s
 Preface xxvii
originally published article, the translated version of it also maintains
that), I deliberately chose not to italicize/​emphasize similar words in my
chapters. I disagree with the standard academic practice of italicizing or
emphasising non-​English words, even if they are sufficiently explained
in English, because I think there is a top-​down approach of the Western
world that thinks that non-​emphasis is permissible only if a word is in-
corporated into the English lexicon. I think the readers are intelligent
enough to distinguish between English and non-​English words without
emphases and understand them.
Finally, as an editor, especially a male, of such an enterprise, I take full
responsibility for all sorts of limitations and errata, being at the mercy of
my kind readers.

Works Cited
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1933’. Economic and Political Weekly. Vol. 26. No. 43, 26 October. WS87–​WS90.
Banerjee, Sumanta. 2000. Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century
Bengal. Calcutta: Seagull Books.
Banerjee, Sumanta. 1998. The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in
Nineteenth Century Calcutta. Calcutta: Seagull Books.
Bhat, Sheetala. 2017. Performing Self, Performing Gender: Reading the Lives of Women
Performers in Colonial India. Manipal: Manipal University Press. Google Books:
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Rea​din/​V8kHE​AAAQ​BAJ?hl=​en&gbpv=​0. Accessed on 29 January 2021.
Bhatia, Nandi. 2010. Performing Women/​Performing Womanhood: Theatre, Politics,
and Dissent in North India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Bhattacharya, Rimli. 2019. The Dancing Poet: Rabindranath Tagore and Choreographies
of Participation. Delhi: Tulika Books.
Bhattacharya, Rimli. 2018. Public Women in British India: Icons and the Urban Stage.
London, New York: Routledge (South Asia edition).
Chakraborty, Aishika (ed.). 2008. Ranjabati: A Dancer and Her World. Kolkata: Thema.
Chatterjee, Minoti. 2004. Theatre beyond the Threshold: Colonialism, Nationalism and
the Bengali Stage 1905–​1947. New Delhi: Indialog Publications Pvt. Ltd.
Dharwadker, Aparna Bhargava. 2005. Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and
Urban Performance in India since 1947. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Dutt, Bishnupriya, and Urmimala Sarkar Munsi. 2010. Engendering
Performance: Indian Women Performers in Search of an Identity. New Delhi: Sage.
Gooptu, Sarvani. 2015. The Actress in the Public Theatres of Calcutta. Delhi:
Primus Books.
Guhathakurta, Meghna. 1997. ‘Gender Politics in Theatre’. India International Centre
Quarterly. Vol. 24. No. 2/​3, Crossing Boundaries (MONSOON). 239–​249.
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Hansen, Kathryn. 1999. ‘Making Women Visible: Gender and Race Cross-​Dressing
in the Parsi Theatre’. Theatre Journal. Vol. 51. No. 2, May. 127–​147.
Kapur, Anuradha. 2011. ‘Reassembling the Modern: An Indian Theatre Map since
Independence’. In Nandi Bhatia (ed.). Modern Indian Theatre: A Reader. New
Delhi: Oxford University Press. 41–​55.
Mukherjee, Tutun (ed.). 2005. Staging Resistance: Plays by Women in Translation. New
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Purkayastha, Prarthana. 2014. Indian Modern Dance, Feminism and Transnationalism.
Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Riaz, Ali, and Md. Abu Naser. 2011. ‘Islamist Politics and Popular Culture’. In Ali Riaz
and C. Christine Fair (eds.). Political Islam and Governance in Bangladesh. London,
New York: Routledge. 136–​152.
Sahmat (ed.). 2017. The Progressive Cultural Movement: A Critical History. New
Delhi: Sahmat.
Sai, Veejay. 2017. Drama Queens: Women Who Created History on Stage. New
Delhi: Roli Books.
Sarkar Munsi, Urmimala, and Aishika Chakraborty (eds.). 2017. The Moving
Space: Women in Dance. Delhi: Primus Books.
Sarkar Munsi, Urmimala, and Stephanie Burridge (eds.). 2011. Traversing
Tradition: Celebrating Dance in India. New Delhi: Routledge.
Sharma Goswami, Pranati. 2004. Female Characters in Modern Assamese Drama
(1857–​1977). Delhi: B. R. Publishing Corporation.
Singh, Anita. 2022. Staging Feminisms: Gender, Violence and Performance in
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https:// ​ w ww.goo ​ g le.co.in/ ​ b ooks/ ​ e dit ​ i on/ ​ Stagin​ g _ ​ Fe​ m ini​ s ms/​ y KYvE​ A AAQ​
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 Acknowledgements

I owe a debt of gratitude to all the contributors. It has been a great

learning experience from them. There are other scholars who appreci-
ated this project and wanted to contribute but could not due to their prior
commitments.
Thanks are due to Anupam Basu, the library members of Bangiya
Sahitya Parishat, Kolkata, and Shakti Roy, the chief librarian of the ABP
Pvt. Ltd. Thanks to Ananda Publishers, Kolkata, Sudhir Chakravarti, and
Shreya Gangopadhyay for giving permission to translate Chakravarti’s
Bengali article titled ‘Sadhansanginir Rahasyalok’ in his book titled Baul
Fakir Katha (Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, [2009] 2012). Chakravarti
passed away in 2020. It is a matter of great sadness that the published
volume would not reach him.
It upsets me that this volume will also not reach Prabhatkumar Das
who passed away in 2022. He told me about developing the article in this
volume into a full-​length book. His death will prove an immense loss to
the jatra enthusiasts and scholars.
I could not have completed this project without the support of my
wife, Sukanya Ray, and my mother, Manju Kundu. Sukanya’s avid interest
in this volume and acceptance of the introductory premise helped me
muster confidence as a male editor of the book. It is satisfying when one
gets support and appreciation from one’s harshest critic!
The book cover of this volume was initially conceptualized by Sukanya
(colour scheme and symbolic arrangement), graphically presented
by Kamal Kant Koner, and later developed and edited by the Oxford
University Press designer. I can’t thank them enough.
 Introduction
‘Home’: The Repository of Polar Play-​acting and
Challenges of Circularity to Women’s Acting Out

Manujendra Kundu

The objective of this introductory chapter is to give a perspective on

the contributions by the scholars in this volume. It is beyond the scope
and the space to draw up a comprehensive socio-​politico-​historical
background to the making and the understanding of women thinkers-​
performers in Bengal and Bangladesh. There is a voluminous literature
on these areas. Excepting only a very few examples, I have discussed here,
within the constraints of space, the writings by women from these two pol-
ities to prioritize and emphasize their cognitive processes of assimilation,
rejection, and negotiations. The following sections are primarily based
on autobiographies and essays written in Bengali by women intellectuals
and performers/​reformers. I have not taken other literary genres into
consideration to set a limit on the discussion. What I have attempted here
is to conflate the intellectual exercises of bhadramahila (gentlewoman)
writers-​thinkers-​activists and women performers-​thinkers (both bhadra,
i.e. gentle and ‘fallen’) in concatenation.1 At the outset, the idea may seem
implausible, but a deeper look into the issues that the performers (here,
one who labours for an audience as an entertainer and/​or artistic pre-
ceptor) and non-​performers (here, those who belong(ed) to other types
of social and political agencies, and also influence(d) cultural/​artistic
performances through various industrious performances/​processes) had/​

1 Please see the penultimate paragraph in the ‘Preface’ for the explanation for not italicizing/​

emphasizing non-​English words in my chapters in this volume.

Manujendra Kundu, Introduction In: Women Performers in Bengal and Bangladesh. Edited by: Manujendra Kundu,
Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780192871510.003.0001
2 Introduction
have been dealing with will reveal that home or domesticity was/​is the real
challenging space that had/​has been the reason for their angst, anguish,
and also the point of departure to question patriarchy. Home/​domesti-
city, which is traditionally considered to be a place of refuge, sanctity, and
security and yet is the epicentre of unsettling tremors and the central ner-
vous system that controls most of the constructive-​precarious functions
of body and mind, is not limited to the place of abode only but extended
beyond to the workplace as ‘home’ away from home where colleagues are
(to be treated as extended) family members, yet neither the workplace is a
home nor the colleagues are family members (with rare exceptions). This
sanctimonious inconsistency of ‘domesticity’, which is the sinew of public
and private spaces, discomposed women in this part of the world. The
trials and tribulations of women performers, therefore, I argue, have to
be read together with the challenges of writer/​activist/​reformer and per-
former, and not in isolation.
In an article titled ‘Griha’, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain discussed
the wretchedness of women in Muslim and Hindu families to draw the
inference that most Indian women were deprived of happiness at home.
‘Everyone has a home—​except us’ (Hossain 2006: 46–​54; translation
mine). Having accepted religious prescription, Khayrannesa Khatun ac-
quiesced thus: ‘we do not have unmediated access to other villages like
Hindu women. To visit others’ houses without maintaining abarodh
[blockade; obstruction; a covering] system after coming of age is strictly
prohibited’ (Khatun 1998: 40; translation mine). In her lamentations,
Rasasundari wrote: ‘Such a state of misery for being a woman! I am as
if incarcerated like a thief, but, for that, is even learning an offence?’ She
compared her domesticated life with jatra/​pala and herself with an ac-
tress in different roles and characters which had been assigned to her by
her god for that jatra/​pala (Rasasundari 1363 BCY: 44, 109–​121; trans-
lation mine). We must remember that here is a woman who was not at
all acquainted with Western writings, yet the quotidian experiences
could turn (a writer/​activist/​reformer and even) a housewife into a ‘per-
former’—​ Rasasundari’s autobiography pointed our attention to that
highly advanced and sophisticated concept way back in the 19th cen-
tury with her ‘thief-​like’ presence at home. Mahmuda Khatun Siddiqua,
an educated bhadramahila, reminisced about her experience behind
purdah thus: ‘...I was put in purdah at the age of twelve and taken out of
 Introduction 3
school. But the world outside was so irresistible that I would ramble in
the garden whenever I could’ (quoted in Amin 1996: 231). Her words are
almost identical with those of the ‘patita’ (‘fallen woman’) performer Nati
Binodini: ‘my nature had become such that if we were visiting a garden,
I did not care for the house, but went looking for a lonely spot surrounded
by wild plants and flowers. . . . I often slipped out of the house and went off
far away to spend my time in solitude’ (Dasi 1998: 80–​81).
The title of Manada Devi’s autobiography is itself an interesting
one: Shikshita Patitar Atmacharita (Autobiography of an Educated
Fallen Woman), where she blamed her forsaken childhood for her de-
bauchery and dissolute life choices (Devi 1991: 35, 40). In fact, the car-
eers of most of the women performers, who would also be stigmatized
as ‘fallen women’, would not have started at all had they not gone out of
their homes for livelihood. It was home that forced them out of domesti-
city and compelled them to take refuge in a precarious professional home
of greater uncertainty, where there was money, but no respect. Similarly,
on the other hand, in the attempts of P. C. Joshi, the General Secretary
of the Communist Party of India (CPI), at straightjacketing the pol-
itical will (to engage in political activities other than the cultural activ-
ities at the IPTA) of Reba Roychowdhury or Preeti Bandyopadhyay and
the like—​many of whom did not feel like rehearsing long hours all the
time sitting at home—​and pigeonholing them as only cultural activists
(Roychowdhury 1999: 19), we sense that Reba or Preeti idealized their
workplace as ‘home’, but their employer/​leader did not reciprocate like
a family member. In recent times, the words of Tulika Das, the founding
member of the Bahuswar theatre group, echo Reba’s feeling and the prop-
osition here. On the rift with the theatre group Bohurupee and their de-
parture therefrom, Das says: ‘We left our house, actually. Our house, our
temple . . . our life’ (Tulika Das, interview; translation by Madhubanti De;
emphases mine. Also, see c­ hapter 6 for more citations of similar nature).
We must remember here that the ‘fallen women’ in socially accept-
able popular cultural practices like theatre not only came to explore
these areas for monetary purposes and reap the benefit of this space for
attracting rich and influential clientele elsewhere (because their fame
helped them attract rich patrons to sustain as prostitutes), but with time
these practices and spaces also defined ‘civility’, ‘respectability’, and ‘so-
cial prestige’ to them. It was difficult for them to ignore the ideological
4 Introduction
baggage of bhadrata (civility) of high-​class/​caste/​varna women, whereas
the ‘fallen women’ of ‘unacceptable’ popular culture did not perhaps care
much about the bhadra–​abhadra (civil–​uncivil) polarity.
Even in their performative parlance, sometimes ‘home’ appeared as
the innuendo about oppression and societal critique: ‘Amar bhalobasa
abar kothay basha bendhechhe/​. . . Mashe mashe barchhe bhara/​Bariulee
dicchhe tara/​. . . ’ (My love has nested in another home/​. . . [Room] Rent
has been increasing every month/​The rentier lady has been pushing for
the hike); ‘Bhat debar nam nei, kil marar gosai’ (No signs of providing me
with rice, only beatings are in store); ‘Darbare na mukh peye ghare ese
mag thengay’ (Losing prestige at the durbar, [he] beats up wife at home);
‘Ghar porle chhagole maray/​Ranr hole sabai ese sanga korte chay’ (Goat
treads on the fallen home/​But wants to marry a woman when she is a pros-
titute).2 In these examples, the words ‘basha’ (home/​house), ‘Bhat’ (rice),
‘ghare’, ‘ghar’ (at home/​house; home/​house) are signs of the speakers’ be-
lief in domestic peace and protection, aspersions in the absence of it, and
the state of consternation. As the receptacles of phallocratic squalidness,
these conflicting ideas of ‘home’ could not escape the attention of those
ostracized women performers whose existence and expression became
the targets of disparagement by the bhadralok culture (Banerjee 1999).
In the writings of Bengali women, ‘home’ comes with a conflicting
rendition: a cover, security, peace, piety, freedom as well as bondage,
insecurity, misgiving, profanity, and unfreedom. More so because to
most of the bhadramahila housewives, ‘home’ was/​is a place of resi-
dence, a workplace, and a house of correction (not just in the sense of
prison, but as an address for changes that made/​makes someone more ac-
curate than one was before). This constant tension of the opposite made/​
makes ‘home’ a challenging and contentious space, a vortex of polarity
for both bhadramahila and public/​‘fallen woman’—​performer and non-​
performer alike—​often blurring the personal and professional spatialities
by infringing upon one another.
We also have to remember that the ‘home’ did not necessarily consti-
tute a similar concept for the bhadramahila and the public woman be-
cause the latter’s intellectual exercises not only did not gain currency

2 I have quoted these lines from Banerjee 1999 but dispensed with diacritical marks and

changed spellings; translations within the brackets are mine.

 Introduction 5
among the bhadralok but also failed to garner support from the edu-
cated bhadramahila who had ‘internalized the male concepts of the new
womanhood’ (Banerjee 1999: 165). Therefore, ‘home’ also became/​be-
comes a contested site of convergence and divergence vis-​à-​vis their re-
spective class positions.
Bhadrata was another aspect that complicated and continues to en-
mesh and entangle women’s position. A queer combination of scriptural
tenets and colonial learning process brought about a crossbreed concep-
tion of the bhadrata of women entailing satitva/​patibratya (devotion/​
faithfulness of a wife to her husband; chastity), brahmacharya (celibacy,
especially for widows) and education, exploration of the public domain,
social activities, etc., the trope of which the ‘fallen women’ of the per-
formance/​entertainment world could not even escape. While education,
social activities, etc. of women were (and still are) expendable, satitva/​
patibratya and brahmacharya were non-​negotiable. We might remember
that the upper-​class/​caste/​varna bhadramahila’s education and their free
mixing with the opposite sex in public places were not at all welcomed by
society, not to talk about the (bhadra and public) women performers. It
was not easy for them to enter these spheres. Women’s learning was con-
sidered ominous; therefore, non-​learning was homely, chaste, pious, and
devotional. From the second half of the 19th century mostly, the attitude
would change among a section of bhadra, progressive families, where
non-​learning would mean backwardness, unconjugal, and unhomely.
Even now Bengali women performers’ labour/​engagement is seen as
secondary, inconsequential, unnecessary, and dispensable in many in-
stances. A proper 10 to 5 desk job is a rather appreciable act of bhadra-​
sabhya (here, sabhya is polite, mannerly, elegant, civilized, courteous,
etc.) engagement in middle-​class Bengali families. Therefore, the ques-
tions about the difference between bhadrata and abhadrata (opposite of
bhadrata), demure and decadence, modesty and depravity, upper-​and
lower-​class/​varna/​caste (though varna and caste systems are older than
colonial discourses) were and have been the colonial baggage that con-
tinues to settle and unsettle women’s psyche and social position. The most
advanced, progressive representatives of society could/​can not avoid
these uneasy issues even after critiquing them. Of course, the mores of
bhadrata have evolved with time, but, with only some exceptions, the ba-
sics remain the same vis-​à-​vis women’s approach to the self and men’s
6 Introduction
‘construction’ of women—​which can be understood through office cul-
ture, television soaps, matrimonial and other advertisements, hard and
entertainment news by and about women, cliched films, religious festi-
vals, political rhetoric, etc. A circularity of double helix of religious cus-
toms and Westernized liberty has been at play constantly in determining
the place of women. In recent times, with the rise of aggressive and acute
fundamentalism, a spate of retrogressive religious ideas has gained strong
ground at every social level.
‘Home’, civility, spirituality, etc. have a direct bearing on Bengali
women’s sexuality (even now). The 19th-​century male unrest over the
position of widows and wives was an aperture/​opportunity to restrict
woman’s sexuality by making every home a house of correction, because
widowhood and polygamy opened the possibility for women to explore
their sexuality, albeit surreptitiously, often leading to the termination of
their stay at parental or spousal homes and the inception of a life at the re-
ligious homes (akhara), or red-​light districts’ houses, or at other people’s
houses as maidservants, being relegated to the position of ‘fallen woman’.
Some of these women would insinuate again into the private parts of the
bhadra family in the garb of performers transgressing the homily on fem-
inine correctness of kulabadhu (housewife), and some would infiltrate
into the sacred conjugal relationship of bhadra-​bari (civil, respectable
house) by attracting colonial men through their regulated, sophisticated,
sobered, arty sexuality. The latter’s physical grace and/​or oeuvre attracted
the bhadramahila to the performance space for the educative nature of
the body of entertainment, transmuting the performers into purveyors of
certain ideas and qualities of a respectable woman, though through their
male preceptors and impresarios.
However, the uncertainty of the ‘fallen’/​public women’s career, the
transience of their physical beauty on the one hand, yet the educative
qualities of their work/​labour (in some cases), the sexual rivalry between
bhadramahilas and these women, and the inability to get rid of them for
bhadramahilas’ husbands’ intransigent promiscuity, on the other, would
place both the ‘fallen’/​public women/​performers and the kulabadhus in
a precarious situation. Often it would turn out to be a rivalry between
the unrestricted, unprotected, unbridled, revolting celebration of sexu-
ality and the suppressed, regulated, objectified, purposeful, joyless,
run-​of-​the-​mill, coital experience. Yet, both had a profound sense of
 Introduction 7
consternation and existential crises in the presence of the same man. For
bhadramahila, the crises deepened with the absence of choice in selecting
or jettisoning their partners and the existence of cowives/​trysts; for the
others, the choice of their sexual partner was entirely their own. While
the public/​‘fallen’ women were the visible results of libertine men, the
precarity of housewives was also evinced by the depravity and wilfulness
of their husbands. Hence, women of both categories had to live between
the extremities of home: chastity, celibacy, or fallen state; cognition, so-
briety, sophistication, or unsavoriness, therefore degeneration.
Although deprivation brought them closer, the bhadramahila would
either nurture hostility against their cowives and the ‘fallen women’/​
performers or acquiesce in the situation by following customs or try to
compete with them by concentrating on fashion, coiffure, fineries, edu-
cation, lessons in handcraft, etc. for acceptance and getting closer to their
men. Similarly, the ‘fallen woman’/​performer had to train themselves to
look attractive or make themselves marketable to their preceptors and
their male clientele. Kailashbasini Devi (Koylasbasiney Davi) rightly ob-
served: ‘Beauty is the only weapon of women. . . . ugly men can achieve
success by virtue of education and knowledge, but women do not have
such a possibility’ (Devi 1863: 41; translation mine). Here we may recall
the words of K. N. Kabraji, who ‘inveighed against the low-​class prosti-
tutes who had co-​opted music and urged middle-​class married women to
learn music so their husbands did not have to leave their homes at night
in search of musical entertainment’ (Bakhle 2005: 4). Both, therefore, had
to ‘sell’ something to their men: refined, learned, exercised, and prac-
tised sexuality. No wonder that when a marital relationship is terminated
or convoluted beyond recovery, the Bengali saying is ‘ghar bhanga’ (the
breakage of home). Here, ‘ghar’ denotes the relationship.
As in Indian religious matrices, the spate of 19th-​century political/​so-
cial diatribes in Bengal centred around the idea of controlling the ‘body’,
which was publicly translated into the regulation of the body politic and,
at the personal/​private level, the manipulation and occupation of the
‘body’ of an individual, especially women, by playing around with (i.e.
imposing and abolishing several) social/​religious mores. The Indian con-
cept of dharma is the political entity that was underpinned chiefly and
almost solely by the idea of the subjection and appropriation of the body,
therefore sexuality, hence the mind. This political discourse from the
8 Introduction
19th century (considering it as the starting point in modern times) until
our times has not changed much, or the changes are only superficial.
But the bhadramahila would not always remain silent on her sexual
choices. Nawab Faizunnessa Chowdhurani, who oversaw her own za-
mindari, set up a girls’ school (and not a madrasa), ‘contributed to the
fund for a women’s hospital at Comilla’, left her husband for polygamy,
‘refused the title of Begum for the non-​gendered one of Nawab’, did not
hesitate to draw a frank ‘sexual imagery and allusions’ with a ‘flavour
of the Islamic-​Hindu syncretistic ethos of (rural) Bengal’ in her 19th-​
century literary work, Rupjalal, which is credited as ‘the first full-​length
book in modern times’ by a Muslim woman (Amin 1996: 215–​217). In
the writings of Anindita Devi, Taslima Nasrin, and others, we sense an
urge to emancipate women’s sexuality. In her novels, Sabitri Roy did not
bother to experiment with the demure desires of women. Bhadrata might
have restrained women writers from being over-​expressive of their sexu-
ality, but their gradual frankness was still not received well by the Bengali
society.
The spillover of homey relationships into public spaces and formal/​
semi-​ formal relationships, thereby extending the home beyond the
home, complicated human relationships beyond recovery. Dragging fa-
milial obligations/​relationships into the outer spaces where there are no
actual familial ties deepens (psychological) problems and often imbues
with incestuous relationships. Thus, the Bengali (and subcontinental)
‘home’ was/​is prevalently pervert(-ed) in nature, where women paid/​pay
the highest price.
I must clarify that here the exposition of ‘home’ is different from Partha
Chatterjee’s arguments on ‘ghar’ and ‘bahir’ (‘the home and the world’)
vis-​à-​vis women’s position. Notwithstanding the significance and impli-
cations of ‘inner/​outer distinction’, and ‘material/​spiritual dichotomy’
largely influenced by the discourse of nationalism (Chatterjee 1999),
I would like to emphasize ‘home’ as the ‘treacherous terrain’ beyond the
nationalistic framework.
In all the above senses, I argue, it was/​is the Bengali man who was/​is
the actual homemaker, that is, the maker of the home; the woman was/​
is nothing more than a caretaker, who had/​has been following the guide-
lines, or a model code of conduct drawn up by the man to protect his
home—​a home that is the repository of firm yet fluid relationships, a stable
 Introduction 9
institution of a deep-​rooted yet uncertain establishment called family, a
palpable container of concrete yet impalpable human-​to-​human norms.
The terms and conditions of this home vary from place to place, agent
to agent, and purpose to purpose. It is the political economy of familial
structure—​ interpersonal management, budgeting and accounting,
the territory of defence, the site of planning and conspiracy. Yet, it is
also a story of women’s struggle and negotiating strategies through ups
and downs.
This chapter, which does a walkthrough of performance politics/​pol-
itics in performance from a ‘queer’, ‘off the beaten path’, must be seen as a
prototype of the developing scholarship in this area. The reader will only
be able to relate to the issues discussed here after going through the chap-
ters in this volume. But before that, suffice it to say, perhaps, that without
a comprehension of the convoluting paradigm called ‘home’, entailing a
religio-​socio-​politico-​psycho-​sexual-​cultural-​economic trajectory, the
understanding of women as performers may elude us. Since, after all,
the making of performers, as that of other social beings, is contingent on
these factors, I think, we have to realize and penetrate the performance
politics by cleaving through this elongated trajectory as much as possible.
Otherwise, it may defeat the purpose of studying performers without
educating ourselves on social constructs.
Moreover, if we can strive to think beyond the privileged urbanity of a
few, and care to peer inside the lives of countless people in the mofussil,
we may, perhaps, realize the limitedness and patchiness of our privileged
and ‘progressive’ performativity.

II

When 19th-​century men had been constructing women with their pre-
cepts and postulates, women thinkers had also started questioning patri-
archal norms. Most of them, who found a comparatively better liberal
familial structure to exercise their critical faculty out in the open, would
concentrate predominantly on those problems (such as the introduc-
tion of female education, widow remarriage, the abolition of kulinism,
child marriage, widow immolation and polygamy, etc.) that were already
being dealt with by the like-​minded male thinkers/​activists. Therefore,
10 Introduction
the women writers’ observations on these areas were not perceived as
completely unsocial or profane or transgressive by the ‘progressive’
upper-​class/​caste phallocentric society. (Here, it would perhaps not be
inappropriate to say that the usage of the words ‘progressive’ and ‘radical’
in South Asian political, social, and cultural idioms has been very prob-
lematic and misleading because of its arbitrary application to contra-
dictory, inconsistent, and often hypocritical spaces and areas of activity.)
However, although women toed the line that was drawn by the male
thinkers, the female writers viewed most of those problems from their
own social perspectives leading to the foundation of a train of critiques
of gender inequality, whereas most of their male counterparts were pri-
marily concerned about social degeneration for fear of the destruction of
centuries-​old patriarchal social structure and loss of face to the foreign
rulers. That was why they needed to challenge one system of power with
the other system, and women observers/​intellectuals did not normally
violate that line of thought, which helped keep the fundamentals (con-
cepts/​essence of religion, class, caste, varna) intact.
In the following sections, I would like to discuss some of the prom-
inent women thinkers-​performers whose razor-​sharp, trenchant, and
sometimes gloriously ‘devastating’ intellectual contributions, which were
either contained or avoided or appreciated nominally by the ‘urbane’, ‘in-
tellectual’ Bengali masculine bhadralok society in academia or elsewhere,
called the male-​dominated society into question. The self-​content social
structure never felt threatened by the feminine discourse.

‘Apana Mangshe Harina Bairi’3: When the Body Is One’s

Own Enemy

Rasasundari’s life stands out among her peers because of her robust de-
termination and unremitting zeal for reading and writing, eventually to
be considered the first woman autobiographer in Bengali. We are awe-
struck by her accounts of humongous efforts that went into achieving the

3 Shastri 1413 BCY: 12. The line is from an esoteric poem by Bhusukupad, the literal meaning

of which is that the flesh of a deer is its own enemy, implying that the mind-​deer is an impedi-
ment to the attainment of higher goals.
 Introduction 11
monumental accomplishment in a throttling patriarchal domestic routine
where female education was a blasphemy. ‘This one act of disobedience,
then, partially deconstructs the good wife’ (as if) with her declaration
of ‘emancipation’ (Sarkar 1999: 3, 5). Rasasundari laments the inaccess-
ibility to education in her youth; in fact, she lambasted thus: ‘Everyone
deprived women of education. They were quite unfortunate; must be
counted among animals’ (Rasasundari 1363 BCY: 33, 44, 106–​107, 40;
translation mine). Rasasundari, although seems very content with other
social customs of her time (Rasasundari 1363 BCY: 32–​33), did not hide
her disgust at her state of imprisonment, outfits, and the forbiddance
of women’s education (Rasasundari 1363 BCY: 38–​39, 42, 44). Here, we
may remember Jnanadanandini Devi’s similar recollection of her mother
Nistarini Devi’s clandestine self-​learning (Devi, J. 2011: 27).
No wonder Rasasundari’s compliance with social/​familial mores in-
duced Jyotirindranath Tagore and Dineshchandra Sen to laud her auto-
biography as the ‘pure sketch’ by an ‘ideal’ ‘Hindu’, ‘religious and godly’
woman for her skills in ‘grihasthali’ (household chores). They celebrated
all the Hindu women of that period, who were ‘a silent picture of toler-
ance and relinquishment’. Sen also rued the absence of it in his contem-
porary milieu and suggested that women of his time should revere the
household Annapurna. He concludes thus: ‘We are humiliated, plun-
dered, harassed and dependent in the outside world—​what other place
do we have for footing than our home?’4 The timid, submissive, domes-
ticated, self-​giving ‘grihini’ (one who manages home) becomes the re-
ceptacle for exercising the lost Hindu masculine pride, which was to be
showcased to the world with pride. Vivekananda also advanced some-
what similar ‘ideal features’ of women to the American audience at the
Shakespeare Club House in Pasadena, California, on 18 January 1900
(Vivekananda 1963).
Kailashbasini Devi expressed great disappointment at the Hindu
Mahilaganer Heenabastha—​the misery of Hindu women. She says a
girl is wretched right from the time of her birth, as she is unwanted by
her parents. A boy gets an education, but the girl does not. On the con-
trary, she remains preoccupied with girly bratas (a vows or practices of

4 Jyotirindranath Tagore, ‘Bhumika’; Dineshchandra Sen, ‘Granthaparichay’, in Rasasundari

1363 BCY: i–​ii; ka-​jha respectively; translation mine.

12 Introduction
ascetical austerities) in order to get a good husband, or to propitiate the
future in-​laws, or to ward off widowhood and the like. She summarized
the torments of different sects/​strands of kulinism (polygamy of upper-​
caste Hindu men) that women had to undergo. Only education could
have eradicated the vice of kulinism and rescued men from the state of
ignorance, she believed. Even so, being aware of the shastriya (related to
shastra) reasons for the inception of the caste system, Kailashbasini did
not find it necessary to engage in its eradication.
Women’s traumatic experience in the family structure caused by the
excruciating behaviour of mothers-​and sisters-​ in-​
law, some wives’
cruelty against their mothers-​in-​law, and infighting between the two
wives of two siblings did not escape her notice either. She held that only
education could improve the understanding of relationships between
them. But their education was thwarted by the social pundits with the ap-
prehension about early widowhood, moral degeneration, and neglect of
family duties—​none of which was accepted by Kailashbasini (Devi 1863).
Anindita Devi, on the other hand, accepted the importance of religious
customs in women’s life cycle. She assessed the regressive traditions like
bratas and upavas (fasting) as apertures to make the oppressive system
endurable, pleasing, and emancipatory to them. But social reform and
quality education could replace these areas of endurance and pleasure to
extirpate religious confinement and its misuse. Society and religion were
so intermingled that religion must be attacked in/​through the process
of social reform. The formation could only start from destruction (Devi
1997: 104).
Kailashbasini was perhaps among the first women writers who touched
upon the defamatory lexical construction of the word ‘nari’ (woman) that
described women as ‘abala’ (deprived of strength) and ‘bama’ (who[se]
[level of intelligence] is negative or not favourable). She lamented the ab-
sence of love between the husband and the wife and prayed, like some
contemporary male social thinkers, that women be devoted and obedient
to their husbands and cast off deceit from their hearts (Devi 1863: 61–​63).
Like her contemporary Bengali male cognoscenti, she also considered
the British dominion in India productive and propitious. She praised
their contribution to the betterment of native society, especially female
education after a prolonged period of darkness of Muslim occupation.
 Introduction 13
Quite normally, she could not avoid the precepts and postulates of
Islamophobia as the reason for the discontinuity of female education.
Having considered all objections by the social dignitaries, Kailashbasini
suggested that didactic texts be written for women and schools be
founded exclusively for them, so that they could be taught family values
alongside literature, etc. (Devi, K. 2011: 82, 84–​86, 88, 90–​92).
Another Kailashbasini Devi’s autobiography, Atmakatha, which
was serialized later as ‘Gata Juger Janaika Grihabadhur Diary’ in Masik
Basumati in 1359 BCY, is a narrative of a housewife who had a pleasant
conjugal life of fun, happiness, and jaunts. On her daughter’s birth, her
mother-​in-​law was, as usual, unhappy, though her husband Kishorichand
Mitra expressed contentment. But some of his later actions proved to her
that her husband was desirous of a son, but never discussed that with
her lest she be unhappy. A writer, magistrate, editor, and social reformer,
Kishorichand seems to be a non-​believer in Hinduism from her accounts.
Kailashbasini also unhesitatingly declared her disbelief in Hinduism but
admitted to practising all its rituals and customs lest their relatives for-
sake them and her husband become a complete apostate (Devi, K. 1982).
In her autobiography, Devi Saradasundari, mother of Keshabchandra
Sen, portrays the life of a Hindu woman in a Vaishnava family. She re-
counted her mother-​in-​law’s intemperate behaviour towards her from
her tender age of ten, but her father-​in-​law’s compassionate attitude. She
had a moderately happy life with her pious husband. But after his death,
her brothers-​in-​law’s sinister motive to appropriate her husband’s be-
longings and property caused severe pain to the malleable Saradasundari.
She refrained from detailing her trials and tribulations, but her anguish in
the scanty narrative is ineluctable (Devi 1981).
In a remarkable narrative titled Sekele Katha, Nistarini Devi, the
daughter of a kulin brahman family (also, the elder sister of Rev.
Kalicharan Bandyopadhyay and the paternal aunt of Brahmabandhab
Upadhyay), recounted her ordeals with sharp criticism of kulinism, her
husband and forefathers’ expediency in taking advantage of their upper-​
caste social status, although an artifice to evade poverty, and the tribu-
lations of women in kulin families. Nistarini Devi’s poignantly classic
narrative takes us through the farcical social structure, empty pride of
brahmanism, and vanity of the marriage system which left a childless
widow redundant at home (Devi, N. 1982).
14 Introduction
Questioning Traditionality: A State of Flux

Concerning female education, Jnanadanandini Devi could not over-

come the prevalent ideas to only propose better education for women
for household activities and child-​rearing, alongside academic studies
(Devi, J. 2011: 63–​72). While displaying a firm belief in traditionality,
Swarnakumari Devi displayed a unique scientific approach to studying
women’s problems. For instance, besides writing some brilliant (com-
pared to the contemporary standard of writings) science articles in
Bengali, Swarnakumari discussed the situation of female school edu-
cation in her time with statistical data to show a lack of quality (Devi
1998: 98–​104). Following the leads of men’s clubs and several types of
associations, she founded Sakhisamiti (women’s association) for getting
together with noble ladies to develop amity among them, for fundraising
for charity, supporting poor widows and girls financially, and educating
them, employing them as salaried private teachers for women (mostly
of the nobility) to spread female education (Devi 1998: 112–​121). Her
insight into perceiving factionalism between educated and uneducated
women is also noteworthy. In order to eradicate this impregnable con-
dition and to make women who accompanied their husbands to social
gatherings more presentable, along with other objectives, she would
suggest a regular get-​together of both the classes at Sakhisamiti (Devi
2000: 263–​269).
Kamini Roy condemned the dowry system as the menace of trading
for a ‘master’ for the bride at a high price. She said that this practice was
ignominious when people demanded Swaraj and independence and
claimed preeminence in spirituality in the world. She believed the dowry
system was also linked to child marriage and the joint family struc-
ture. Only education could emancipate women from letting themselves
change hands like speechless, inanimate objects, and earn their live-
lihood without being mortified. And those men who refused to budge
should be ostracized, was her strongest recommendation (Roy 2005: 37–​
39). Jyotirmayee Devi not only berated the dowry system but also remon-
strated about the practice of scrutinizing the prospective daughter-​in-​law
(‘kane dekha’) as the custom of arranged marriage (Devi 1994: 179–​183).
Anindita Devi, on the other hand, thought that independent spousal se-
lection would exterminate the dowry system (Devi 1997: 67).
 Introduction 15
‘Devi’ or/​vs ‘Manavi’

The custom of addressing woman of higher caste as ‘Devi’ (goddess) and

of humble origin as ‘Dasi’ (a female servant, attendant, humble woman,
or a dependent) gained currency in the colonial period. Jnanadanandini
Devi, in her sarcastic criticisms of imitating several English practices and
introducing them to the Bengali society, would argue for emulating trad-
itional native practices, extant for thousands of years. In this connection,
she questioned the practice of mutating women’s surnames and titles after
the wedding, following the English tradition. Instead, she recommended
‘Srimati’ as a title, and ‘Devi’ as a surname or suffix for both married and
unmarried women to retain their ‘individuality’ (Devi, J. 2011: 82–​89).
Kamini Roy demanded that women should be regarded as ‘Manavi’
or human beings. She was certainly not discussing surnames or in lex-
ical terms but was concerned about women’s welfare on an equal footing
with men. She observed that the social construction of Man as human
beings and Woman as ‘Devi’ had put the latter in all sorts of regressive
practices, while men piled up social filth by their depravity and forced
women into treading the path of an unchaste and dissolute path as ‘patita’
(‘fallen woman’).

You forget that a goddess daughter cannot be had without the father
being a god. . . . You do not understand the goddess cannot exist in your
houses as long as the demon dwells in you. You be human beings and
give us human rights considering us humans. . . . You claim to worship
us. But we do not want such worship. . . . You have been worshipping us
eons like this. You have made us inactive, sloth, worthless, and turned
our bodies into the publicity campaign of your fortune. (Roy 2005:
26–​27; translation mine)

Women Do Not Have a History

Jyotirmayee Devi, in one of her trenchant criticisms of patriarchy, as-

serted that ‘there is no history of women’ because the history of their pain,
happiness, social benefits, or disadvantages was never told or written by
them. Women had been eternally silent in their own history, and men
16 Introduction
constructed women at will. Women neither protested against it nor
approved, which was construed by men as the right action; the
mahakavyas and puranas reflected the same proclivity. Similarly, it was
men who depicted women’s body in the visual arts, whereas women never
attempted such a feat, neither with men’s body nor with their own body
(Devi 1994: 218, 220–​221). Later, Taslima Nasrin would talk about these
issues in similar strain and disapprove of Rodin’s exploitation of his fe-
male models (Nasrin 2008: 199–​201). Jyotirmayee came down heavily on
Schopenhauer, Weininger, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and others for stereotyping
woman and denying her agency (Devi 1994: 139–​145). Hindu god-​men
like Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Ramprasad, Tulsidas, and the writers of
almanacks were taken to task for drawing analogies between the woman
and food items or subhuman creatures or gold, which denied her human
characteristics and/​or accepted her human existence that was beneath
one’s dignity (Devi 1994: 123–​124, 130, 132).
Anindita Devi pointed out the practice of stereotyping women as
‘premamayee’ (loving), ‘pashani’ (heartless), ‘devi’ (goddess), ‘danabi’
(she-​devil), ‘sulakshana’ (good-​ natured), ‘kulakshana’ (ill-​natured),
and compartmentalizing them with such taxonomies in perpetuity,
but men, being carriers of these characteristics, escaped such classifi-
cations. Contrarily, any attempt at curbing ‘womanliness’ would result
in a stark ‘manliness’ of the world, which might become ‘womanlier’ as
many women would spread and establish themselves as possible (Devi
1997: 24, 31).
Rokeya said men’s overprotective love for women had uprooted them
from the natural, social environment by immersing them in the world
of ignorance and illiteracy and defined them in literary texts as petite,
dainty, and delicate. She prayed that men should refrain from showing
sympathy and compassion that weakened women over the centuries, so
much so that an unemployed husband would rule over the poor female
breadwinner or a wealthy wife. She advised women, especially Muslim
women, to overcome the situation, in spite of the monumental opposition
from both Hindu and Muslim male society, to achieve equal status with
men by earning a livelihood as top officials or through farming. Rokeya
invoked their dormant courage to set them in motion. In this connec-
tion, she cited the example of Parsi women who were liberated by their
 Introduction 17
men following the Western custom but were not emancipated mentally
(Hossain 2006: 15–​16, 20–​21, 25–​26).
Jyotirmayee Devi argued that a co-​education system could not only
provide education to girls (and boys) easily and economically, but also
ameliorate the relationship between the two sexes and ease up their at-
titude towards each other from childhood. She refuted the apprehen-
sion about degeneration by giving the example of Visva-​Bharati and
other educational institutions elsewhere where co-​education was al-
ready in practice. That was why she criticized renowned academic/​
scholar Sunitikumar Chattopadhyay for his opposition to co-​education
on account of inexorable moral degeneration (Devi 1994: 165–​170).
Anindita Devi has an answer to such a phallocentric mindset: ‘Man
despite being erudite cannot see women as normal humans that brings
about problems to do anything for them.’ While she observed that edu-
cation turned women into men, a group of men, on the other hand, were
opposed to women’s education. She mocked erudite men’s mental dex-
terity in lecturing on socialism, Bolshevism, etc., which they dissem-
inated to their wives who, lamentably, did not have any direct access to
those critical ideas. She asks, ‘Isn’t it a profound loss and deprivation?’
Like Jyotirmayee, Anindita also prescribed co-​education to keep the
hostility between the two sexes under control at a minimal cost, but fe-
male education needed to be thoroughly modern if women were to be
made ‘useful members of the society’. She maintained the necessity of
women’s becoming good mothers and wives, but questioned the reality
of not letting her become a ‘graduate’ and enter the ‘learned profession’
(Devi 1997: 292–​293, 290, 138–​139; translation mine). Jyotirmayee, on
the other hand, had been upfront about the peaceful settlement of aban-
doned wives, and forthrightly discussed women’s right to the property of
her husband and father (Devi 1994: 146–​150, 184–​199). Krishnabhabini
Das argued that repeated neglect and detestation would drain out from
Hindu women the qualities like self-​sacrifice, devotion to husband, re-
ligiosity, kindness, modesty, and meekness—​most of which were already
lacking in them and Bengali men should only be held responsible for that
(Das 2004: 45). Anindita Devi upped the ante by demanding women’s
right to divorce for which their education from childhood was necessary
(Devi 1997: 67–​68).
18 Introduction
Muslim society, according to Rokeya, was no different in denying
the daughter the right to property, disregarding the Islamic law. Rokeya
lashed out at the Muslim society for women’s repression, walling them
off, and depriving them of education. However, despite her bold stance
on many a social cause, Rokeya could not cast aside the traditional line of
delineating the woman as a perfect housewife and homemaker, nor did
she support the abolition of the burqa/​purdah/​abarodh. She prescribed
that girls should be taught Koran along with general subjects because the
Koran was essential to preserve the society and religion intact, and all
the elements of elementary education could be found in the holy book,
she believed (Hossain 2006: 29, 32–​46, 225–​231). Khayrannesa Khatun
also warned against disrespecting the purdah/​abarodh system while
pursuing the school education that she had proposed (Khatun 1998: 41).
Razia Khatun Chowdhurani also wanted Muslim women’s freedom by
retaining purdah as prescribed in the Sharia law (Khatun Chowdhurani
1998: 188). Contrarily, Faziltun Nesa and Mahmuda Khatun Siddiqua
assessed purdah and androcentric indifference as the major reasons
for Muslim women’s illiteracy and misfortune (Nesa 1998: 163; Khatun
Siddiqua 1998: 179). Referring to Mrs. M. Rahman, Sonia Nishat Amin
observed that ‘purdah (modesty in dress and behaviour) and abarodh
(a patriarchal distortion of the former) which banished women behind
the andarmahal’ were leitmotifs ‘in the writings of the first half of the
twentieth century and recurred often enough to suggest that the purdah/​
abarodh formulation was an intrinsic part of the mental makeup of the
typical bhadramahilā’ (Amin 1996: 227). Many Muslim women writers of
the colonial period imagined ‘a golden age of Islam in the past’ when, they
believed, greater freedom had been conferred on women. In the process
of glorifying the past vis-​à-​vis women’s rights and freedom, Razia Khatun
put Islam above Christianity and Hinduism. ‘Rokeya did not go into any
specification, and thereby avoided the pitfall of ethnocentricism’ (Amin
1996: 227).
However, Mrs. M. Rahman lashed out at these religious diktats that
wanted to see ‘woman cook, bear children every year like a bitch, yield
to egocentric-​squalid social norms’. She took those women to task who,
being mothers, had forsaken self-​respect and were enticed by jewellery
and money. Those who forgot their duties would not be able to invoke
motherhood in themselves. She would therefore recommend that women
 Introduction 19
should ‘snatch at’, and struggle to get hold of good things because nobody
would give them for nothing. ‘We can do what human beings are capable
of.’ The evil society (samaj), which was constituted by ‘our kinsman’, must
be tamed (i.e. its shackles must be broken); women could not be objects
of men’s lust; they should renounce motherly compassion and tenderness
because women did not get practically anything from their fathers and
husbands. There are thousands of other ways to fulfil womanhood than
marriage. The abominable womanhood should be ended by ‘committing
suicide’. ‘Religious identity for women is not important, but to consider
everyone as children of one creator is.’ Economic subordination was a de-
terrent to women’s liberty, but men did not have the power to give any-
thing to women. They diminished their ideals by surrendering souls to
subservience [to the Raj]. They would give their women what they had
received from their masters (Rahman 1998: 52–​53, 55, 57–​60, 63; trans-
lations mine).
Like Mrs. M. Rahman, Mahmuda also identified the anomalous
marital system for Muslim women’s wretchedness (Khatun Siddiqua
1998: 182–​183). And Faziltun’s words on snatching at Muslim women’s
own rights and unshackling societal norms unlike, begging entities,
are identical to those of Rahman’s. She further said, ‘women will not
tolerate her status of enjoyable products forgetting her self, woman-
hood and self-​identity’. Faziltun aspired that Muslim women’s rebel-
lious mind and the sense of disgrace would ultimately make them
human beings. While religion might be important in one’s own life, it
was not desirable for the greater good of the country. Religious toler-
ance, which might be had through a liberal education, was of utmost
importance. The opposite condition, which was being the catalyst for
women’s captivity and illiteracy, might be imposed on men, she sug-
gested in vengeance (Nesa 1998: 165, 168–​169; translation mine). As
we have discussed earlier, Razia Khatun observed women’s worth to
men for their physical grace, cooking skills, and the ability to render
other services, and in many cases, physical attraction overrode other
‘qualities’. Instead of mutuality between the husband and the wife,
gratification was one-​sided (phallocentric), where women’s obeisance
was absolute—​which was akin to domestic prostitution. She says, ‘We
hate prostitutes, but are oblivious to domestic prostitution’ (Khatun
Chowdhurani 1998: 188–​190).
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 CHAPTER VII
NINE HUNDRED POUNDS

Bobby Ravenshaw did not spend the day at the Charing Cross Hotel
waiting for Simon; he amused himself otherwise, leaving Mudd to do
the waiting.
At eleven o'clock he called at the hotel. Mr. Mudd was upstairs in Mr.
Pettigrew's room, and he would be called down.
Bobby thought that he could trace a lot of things in the porter's tone
and manner, a respect and commiseration for Mr. Mudd and perhaps
not quite such a high respect for himself and Simon. He fancied that
the hotel was beginning to have its eye upon him and Simon as
questionable parties of the bon vivant type—a fancy that may have
been baseless, but was still there.
Then Mudd appeared.
"Well, Mudd," said Bobby, "hasn't he turned up yet?"
"No, Mr. Robert."
"Where on earth can he be?"
"I'm givin' him till half-past eleven," said Mudd, "and then I'm off to
Vine Street."
"What on earth for?"
"To have the hospitals circulated to ask about him."
"Oh, nonsense!"
"It's on my mind he's had an accident," said Mudd. "Robbed and
stunned, or drugged with opium and left in the street. I know
London—and him as he is! He'll be found with his pockets inside out
—I know London. You should have got him down to the country to-
day, Mr. Robert, somewhere quiet; now, maybe, it's too late."
"It's very easy to say that. I tried to, and he wouldn't go, not even to
Richmond. London seems to hold him like a charm; he's like a bee in
a bottle—can't escape."
At this moment a horrid little girl in a big hat and feathers, boots too
large for her, and a shawl, made her appearance at the entrance
door, saw the hall porter and came towards him. She had a letter in
her hand.
The hall porter took the letter, looked at it, and brought it to Mudd.
Mudd glanced at the envelope and tore it open.

"10, Duke Street,

"Leicester Square
"Mr. Modd,
"Come at once.
"Celestine Rossignol."

That was all, written in an angular, old-fashioned hand and in purple

ink.
"Where's my hat?" cried Mudd, running about like a decapitated
fowl. "Where's my hat? Oh ay, it's upstairs!" He vanished, and in a
minute reappeared with his hat; then, with Bobby, and followed by
the dirty little girl trotting behind them, off they started.
They tried to question the little girl on the way, but she knew
nothing definite.
The gentleman had been brought 'ome—didn't know what was
wrong with him; the lady had given her the letter to take; that was
all she knew.
"He's alive, anyway," said Bobby.
"The Lord knows!" said Mudd.
The little girl let them in with a key and, Mudd leading the way, up
the stairs they went.
Mudd knocked at the door of the sitting-room.
Madame and Cerise were there, quite calm, and evidently waiting; of
Simon there was not a trace.
"Oh, Mr. Modd," cried the old lady, "how fortunate you have received
my letter! Poor Monsieur Pattigrew——"
"He ain't dead?" cried Mudd.
No, Simon was not dead. She told. Poor Monsieur Pattigrew and a
very big gentleman had arrived over an hour ago. Mr. Pattigrew
could not stand; he had been taken ill, the big gentleman had
declared. Such a nice gentleman, who had sat down and cried whilst
Mr. Pattigrew had been placed on the sofa—taken ill in the street.
The big gentleman had gone for a doctor, but had not yet returned.
Mr. Pattigrew had been put to bed. She and the big gentleman had
seen to that.
Mr. Pattigrew had recovered consciousness for a moment during this
operation and had produced a number of bank-notes—such a
number! She had placed them safely in her desk; that was one of
the reasons she had sent so urgently for Mr. Modd.
She produced the notes—a huge sheaf.
Mudd took them and examined them dazedly, hundreds and
hundreds of pounds' worth of notes; and he had only started with
two hundred pounds!
"Why, there's nearly a thousand pounds' worth here," said Mudd.
Bobby's astonishment might have been greater had not his eyes
rested, from the first moment of their coming in, on Cerise. Cerise
with parted lips, a heightened colour, and the air of a little child at a
play she did not quite understand.
She was lovely. French, innocent, lovely as a flower—a new thing in
London, he had never seen anything quite like her before. The
poverty of the room, Uncle Simon, his worries and troubles, all were
banished or eased. She was music, and if Saul could have seen her
he would have had no need for David.
Had Uncle Simon added burglary to knocker-snatching, broken into a
jeweller's and disposed of his takings to a "fence," committed
robbery? All these thoughts strayed over his mind, harmless because
of Cerise.
The unfortunate young man, who had fooled so long with girls, had
met the girl who had been waiting for him since the beginning of the
world. There is always that; she may be blowsy, she may be plain, or
lovely like Cerise—she is Fate.
"And here is the big gentleman's card," said Madame, taking a
visiting card from her desk, then another and another.
"He gave me three."
Mudd handed the card to Bobby, who read:
"The Hon. Richard Pugeot,
"Pall Mall Place, St. James.
"Guards' Club."
"I know him," said Bobby. "That's all right, and Uncle Simon couldn't
have fallen into better hands."
"Is, then, Monsieur Pattigrew your oncle?" asked the old lady.
"He is, Madame."
"Then you are thrice welcome here, monsieur," said she.
Cerise looked the words, and Bobby's eyes as they met hers
returned thanks.
"Come," said Madame, "you shall see him and that he is safe."
She gently opened the door leading to the bedroom, and there, in a
little bed, dainty and white—Cerise's little bed—lay Uncle Simon,
flushed and smiling and snoring.
"Poor Monsieur Pattigrew!" murmured the old lady.
Then they withdrew.
It seemed that there was another bed to be got in the house for
Cerise, and Mudd, taking charge of the patient, the ladies withdrew.
It was agreed that no doctor was wanted. It was also agreed
between Bobby and Mudd that the hotel was impossible after this.
"We must get him away to the country tomorrow," said Mudd, "if
he'll go."
"He'll go, if I have to take him tied up and bound," said Bobby. "My
nerves won't stand another day of this. Take care of those notes,
Mudd, and don't let him see them. They'll be useful getting him
away. I'll be round as early as I can. I'll see Pugeot and get the
rights of the matter from him. Good night."
Off he went.
In the street he paused for a moment, then he took a passing taxi
for the Albany.
Tozer was in, playing patience and smoking. He did not interrupt his
game for the other.
"Well, how's Uncle Simon?" asked Tozer.
"He's asleep at last after a most rampageous day."
"You look pretty sober."
"Don't mention it," said Bobby, going to a tantalus case and helping
himself to some whisky. "My nerves are all unstrung."
"Trailing after him?"
"Thank God, no!" said Bobby. "Waiting for him to turn up dead,
bruised, battered, or simply intoxicated and stripped of his money.
He gave me the slip in Piccadilly with two hundred-pound notes in
his pocket. The next place I find him was half an hour ago in a
young lady's bed, dead to the world, smiling, and with nearly a
thousand pounds in bank-notes he'd hived somehow during the
day."
"A thousand pounds!"
"Yes, and he'd only started with two hundred."
"I say," said Tozer, forgetting his cards, "what a chap he must have
been when he was young!"
"When he was young! Lord, I don't want to see him any younger
than he is; if this is youth, give me old age."
"You'll get it fast enough," said Tozer, "don't you worry; and this will
be a reminder to you to keep old. There's an Arab proverb that says,
'There are two things colder than ice, an old young man and a
young old man.'"
"Colder than ice!" said Bobby. "I wish you had five minutes with
Uncle Simon."
"But who was this lady—this young——"
"Two of the nicest people on earth," said Bobby, "an old lady and her
daughter—French. He saved the girl in an omnibus accident or
something in one of his escapades, and took her home to her
mother. Then to-night he must have remembered them, and got a
friend to take him there. Fancy, the cheek! What made him, in his
state, able to remember them?"
"What is the young lady like?"
"She's beautiful," said Bobby; then he took a sip of whisky-and-soda
and failed to meet Tozer's eye as he put down the glass.
"That's what made him remember her," said Tozer.
Bobby laughed.
"It's no laughing matter," said the other, "at his age—when the heart
is young."
Bobby laughed again.
"Bobby," said Tozer, "beware of that girl."
"I'm not thinking of the girl," said Bobby; "I'm thinking how on earth
the old man——"
"The youth, you mean."
"Got all that money."
"You're a liar," said Tozer; "you are thinking of the girl."
 CHAPTER VIII
PALL MALL PLACE

"Higgs!" cried the Hon. Richard Pugeot.

"Sir?" answered a voice from behind the silk curtains cutting off the
dressing and bathroom from the bedroom.
"What o'clock is it?"
"Just gone eight, sir."
"Get me some soda-water."
"Yes, sir."
The Hon. Richard lay still.
Higgs, a clean-shaven and smart-looking young man, appeared with
a bottle of Schweppes and a tumbler on a salver.
The cork popped and the sufferer drank.
"What o'clock did I come home?"
"After twelve, sir—pretty nigh one."
"Was there anyone with me?"
"No, sir."
"No old gentleman?"
"No, sir."
"Was Randall there?"
"Yes, sir."
"And the car?"
"Yes, sir."
"There was no old gentleman in the car?"
"No, sir."
"Good heavens!" said Pugeot. "What can I have done with him?"
Higgs, not knowing, said nothing, moving about putting things in
order and getting his master's bath ready.
"I've lost an old gentleman, Higgs," said Pugeot, for Higgs was a
confidential servant as well as a valet.
"Indeed, sir," said Higgs, as though losing old gentlemen was as
common as losing umbrellas.
"And the whole business is so funny I can scarcely believe it's true. I
haven't a touch of the jim-jams, have I, Higgs?"
"Lord, sir, no! You're all right."
"Am I? See here, Higgs. Yesterday morning I met old Mr. Simon
Pettigrew, the lawyer; mind, you are to say nothing about this to
anyone—but stay a moment, go into the sitting-room and fetch me
Who's Who."
Higgs fetched the book.
"'Pettigrew, Simon,'" read out Pugeot, with the book resting on his
knees, "'Justice of the Peace for Herts—President of the United Law
Society—Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries'—h'm, h'm—'Club,
Athenæum.' Well, I met the old gentleman in Piccadilly. We went for
a spin together, and the last thing I remember was seeing him
chasing a stableman round some inn yard, where we had stopped
for petrol or whisky or something; chasing him round with a bucket.
He was trying to put the bucket over the stableman's head."
"Fresh," said Higgs.
"As you say, fresh—but I want to know, was that an optical illusion?
There were other things, too. If it wasn't an optical illusion I want to
know what has become of the old gentleman? I'm nervous—for he
did me a good turn once, and I hope to heaven I haven't let him in
for any bother."
"Well, sir," said Higgs, "I wouldn't worry, not if I were you. It was
only his little lark, and most likely he's home safe by this."
"I have also a recollection of two ladies that got mixed up in the
affair," went on the other, "but who they were I can't say. Little lark!
The bother of it is, Higgs, one can't play little larks like that, safely, if
one is a highly respectable person and a J.P. and a member of the
what's-its-name society."
He got up and tubbed and dressed, greatly troubled in his mind.
People sucked into the Simon-whirl were generally troubled in their
minds, so great is the Power of High Respectability when linked to
the follies of youth.
At breakfast Mr. Robert Ravenshaw's card was presented by Higgs.
"Show him in," said Pugeot.
"Hullo, Ravenshaw!" said Pugeot. "Glad to see you. Have you had
breakfast?"
"Yes, thanks. I only called for a moment to see you about my uncle."
"Which uncle?"
"Pettigrew——"
"Good heavens! You don't say he's——"
Bobby explained.
It was like a millstone removed from Pugeot's neck.
Then he, in his turn, explained.
Then Bobby went into details.
Then they consulted.
"You can't get him out of London without telling him where you are
taking him to," said Pugeot. "He'll kick the car over on the road if
he's anything like what he was last night. Leave it to me and I'll do
the trick. But the question is, where shall we take him? There's no
use going to a place like Brighton; too many attractions for him. A
moated grange is what he wants, and even then he'll be tumbling
into the moat."
"I know of a place," said Bobby, "down at Upton-on-Hill. A girl told
me of it; it's the Rose Hotel."
"I know it," said Pugeot; "couldn't be better. I have a cousin there
living at a place called The Nook. There's a bowling-green at the
hotel and a golf-course near. Can't hurt himself. Leave it all to me."
He told Higgs to telephone for the car, and then they sat and
smoked whilst Pugeot showed Bobby just the way to deal with
people of Uncle Simon's description.
"It's all nonsense, that doctor man's talk," said Pugeot. "The poor
old chap has shed a nut or two. I ought to know something about it
for I've had the same bother in my family. Got his youth back—pish!
Cracked, that's the real name for it. I've seen it. I've seen my own
uncle, when he was seventy, get his youth back—and the last time I
saw him he was pulling a toy elephant along with a string. He'd got
a taste also for playing with matches. Is that the car, Higgs? Well,
come along, and let's try the power of a little gentle persuasion."
Simon was finishing breakfast when they arrived, assisted by
Madame and Cerise. Poor Monsieur Pattigrew did not seem in the
least in the need of pity either, though the women hung about him
as women hang about an invalid. He was talking and laughing, and
he greeted the newcomers as good companions who had just turned
up. His geniality was not to be denied, and it struck Bobby, in a
weird sort of manner, that Uncle Simon like this was a much
pleasanter person than the old original article. Like this: that is to
say, for a moment out of danger from the vicious grinding wheels of
a city that destroys butterflies and a society that requests
respectable old solicitors to remain respectable old solicitors.
Then, the women having discreetly retired for a while, Pugeot began
his gentle persuasion.
Uncle Simon, with visions of yesterday's rural pleasures in his mind,
required no persuasion, and he would come for a run into the
country with pleasure; but Pugeot was not taking that sort of thing
on any more. He was gay, but a very little of that sort of gaiety
sufficed him for a long time.
"I don't mean that," said he; "I mean let's go down and stay for a
while quietly at some nice place—I mean you and Ravenshaw here—
for business will oblige me to come back to town."
"No, thanks," said Simon; "I'm quite happy in London."
"But think how nice it will be in the country this weather," said
Bobby. "London's so hot."
"I like it hot," said Simon; "weather can't be too hot for me."
Then the gentle persuaders alternately began offering inducements
—bowls, golf, a jolly bar at an hotel they knew, even girls.
They might just as well have been offering buns to the lions of
Trafalgar Square.
Then Bobby had an idea, and, leaving the room, he had a
conference on the stairs with Madame Rossignol; with Cerise also.
Then leaving Simon to the women for a while, they went for a walk,
and returned to find the marble wax.
Simon did not mind a few days in the country if the ladies would
come as his guests; he was enthusiastic on the subject now. They
would all go and have a jolly time in the country. The old poetical
instinct that had not shown itself up to this, restrained, no doubt, by
the mesmerism of London, seemed to be awakening and promising
new developments.
Bobby did not care; poetry or a Pickford's van were all the same to
him as long as they got Simon out of London.
He had promised Julia Delyse, if you remember, to see her that day,
but he had quite forgotten her for the moment.
 CHAPTER IX
JULIA

She hadn't forgotten him.

Julia, with her hair down, in an eau-de-Nil morning wrapper, and
frying bacon over a Duplex oilstove, was not lovely—though, indeed,
few of us are lovely in the early morning. She had started the flat
before she was famous. It was a bachelor girl's flat, where the
bachelor girl was supposed to do her own cooking as far as
breakfast and tea were concerned. Money coming in, Julia had
refurnished the flat and requisitioned the part-time service of a
maid.
Like the doctors of Harley Street who share houses, she shared the
services of the maid with another flat-dweller, the maid coming to
Julia after three o'clock to tidy up and to bring in afternoon tea and
admit callers. She was quite well enough off to have employed a
whole maid, but she was careful—her publishers could have told you
that.
The bacon fried and breakfast over and cleared away, Julia, with her
hair still down, set to work at the cleared table before a pile of
papers and account-books.
Never could you have imagined her the Julia of the other evening
discoursing "literature" with Bobby.
She employed no literary agent, being that rare thing, a writer with
an instinct for business. When you see vast publishing houses and
opulent publishers rolling in their motor-cars you behold an optical
illusion. What you see, or, rather, what you ought to see, is a host of
writers without the instinct for business.
Julia, seated before her papers and turning them over in search of a
letter, came just now upon the first letter she had ever received from
a publisher, a very curt, business-like communication saying that the
publisher thought he saw his way to the publishing of her MS.
entitled "The World at the Gate," and requesting an interview. With
it was tied, as a sort of curiosity, the agreement that had been put
before her to sign and which she had not signed.
It gave—or would have given—the publisher the copyright and half
the American, serial, dramatic and other rights. It offered ten per
cent, on the published price of all copies sold after the first five
hundred copies; it stipulated that she should give him the next four
novels on the same terms as an inducement to advertise the book
properly—and it had drawn from Julia the prompt reply, "Send the
typescript of my novel back at once."
So ended the first lesson.
Then, heartened by this evidently good opinion of her work, she had
gone to another publisher? Not a bit—or at least, not at first. She
had joined the Society of Authors—an act as necessary to the
making of a successful author as baptism to the making of a
Christian. She had studied the publishing tribe, its ways and its
works, discovered that they had no more love for books than
greengrocers for potatoes, and that such a love, should it exist,
would be unhealthy. For no seller of commodities ought to love the
commodities he sells.
Then she had gone to a great impudently-advertising roaring
trading-firm that dealt with books as men deal with goods in bulk,
and, interviewing the manager as man to man, had driven her
bargain, and a good one, too.
These people published poets and men of letters—but they
respected Julia.
Free of creative work this morning, she could give her full attention
to accounts and so forth.
Then she turned to a little book which she sometimes scribbled in,
and the contents of which she had a vague idea of some time
publishing under a pseudonym. It was entitled "Never," and it was
not poetry. It was a thumb-book for authors, made up of
paragraphs, some long, some short.
"Never dine with a publisher—luncheon is even worse."
"Never give free copies of books to friends, or lend them. The given
book is not valued, the lent book is always lost—besides, the
booksellers and lending libraries are your real friends."
"Never lower your price."
"Never attempt to raise your public."
"Never argue with a critic."
"Never be elated with good reviews, or depressed by bad reviews, or
enraged by base reviews. The Public is your reviewer—It knows,"
and so on.
She shut up "Never," having included:
"Never give a plot away." Then she did her hair and thought of
Bobby.
He had not fixed what hour he would call; that was a clause in the
agreement she had forgotten—she, who was so careful about
agreements, too.
Then she dressed and sat down to read "De Maupassant" and
smoked a cigarette.
She had luncheon in the restaurant below stairs and then returned
to the flat. Tea-time came and no Bobby.
She felt piqued, put on her hat, and as the mountain would not
come to Mohammed, Mohammed determined to go to the mountain.
Her memory held his address, "care of Tozer, B12, the Albany."
She walked to the Albany, arriving there a little after five o'clock,
found B12, and climbed the stairs.
Tozer was in, and he opened the door himself.
"Is Mr. Ravenshaw at home?" asked Julia.
"No," said Tozer; "he's away, gone to the country."
"Gone to the country?"
"Yes; he went to-day."
Tozer had at once spotted Julia as the Lady of the Plot. He was as
unconventional as she, and he wanted further acquaintance with this
fascinator of his protégé.
"I think we are almost mutual acquaintances," said he; "won't you
come in? My name is Tozer and Ravenshaw is my best friend. I'd like
to talk to you about him. Won't you come in?"
"Certainly," said the other. "My name is Delyse—I daresay you know
it."
"I know it well," said Tozer.
"I don't mean by my books," said Julia, taking her seat in the
comfortable sitting-room, "but from Mr. Ravenshaw."
"From both," said Tozer, "and what I want to see is Ravenshaw's
name as well known as yours some day. Bobby has been a
spendthrift with his time, and he has lots of cleverness."
"Lots," said Julia.
Tozer, who had a keen eye for character, had passed Julia as a
sensible person—he had never seen her in one of her love-fits—and
she was a lady. Just the person to look after Bobby.
"He has gone down to the country to-day with an old gentleman, his
uncle."
"I know all about him," said Julia.
"Bobby has told you, then?"
"Yes."
"About the attack of youth?"
"Yes."
"Well, a whole family party of them went off in a motor-car to-day.
Bobby called here for his luggage and I went into Vigo Street and
saw them off."
"How do you mean—a family party?"
"The youthful old gentleman and a big blonde man, and Bobby, and
an old lady and a pretty girl."
Julia swallowed slightly.
"Relations?"
"No, French, I think, the ladies were. Quite nice people, I believe,
though poor. The old gentleman had picked them up in some of his
wanderings."
"Bob—Mr. Ravenshaw promised to see me to-day," said Julia. "We
are engaged—I speak quite frankly—at least, as good as engaged,
you can understand."
"Quite."
"He ought to have let me know," said she broodingly.
"He ought."
"Have they gone to Upton-on-Hill, do you know?"
"They have. The Rose Hotel."
Julia thought for awhile. Then she got up to go.
"If you want my opinion," said Tozer, "I think the whole lot want
looking after. They seemed quite a pleasant party, but responsibility
seemed somewhat absent; the old lady, charming though she was,
seemed to me scarcely enough ballast for so much youth."
"I understand," said Julia. Then she went off and Tozer lit a pipe.
The pretty young French girl was troubling him. She had charmed
even him—and he knew Bobby, and his wisdom indicated that a
penniless beauty was not the first rung of the ladder to success in
life.
Julia, on the other hand, was solid. So he thought.
PART IV
 CHAPTER I
THE GARDEN-PARTY

Upton-On-Hill stands on a hogback of land running north and south,

timbered with pines mostly, and commanding a view of half Wessex,
not the Wessex of Thomas Hardy, however. You can see seven
church spires from Upton, and the Roman road takes it in its sweep,
becomes the Upton High Street for a moment, and passes on to be
the Roman road again leading to the Downs and the distant sea.
It is a restful place, and in spring the shouting of the birds and the
measured call of the cuckoo fills the village, mixing with the voice of
the ever-talking pine-trees. In summer Upton sleeps amongst roses
in an atmosphere of sunlight and drowsiness, sung to by the bees
and the birds. The Rose Hotel stands, set back from the High Street,
in its own grounds, and beside the Rose there are two other houses
for refreshment, the Bricklayer's Arms and the Saracen's Head, of
which more hereafter.
It is a pleasant place as well as a restful. Passing through it, people
say, "Oh, what a dream!" living in it one is driven at last to admit
there are dreams and dreams. It is not the place that forces this
conviction but the people.
Just as the Roman road narrows at the beginning of the High Street,
so the life of a stranger coming, say, from London, narrows at the
beginning of his or her residence in Upton. If you are a villager you
find yourself under a microscope with three hundred eyes at the
eyepiece; if you are a genteel person, but without introductions, you
find yourself the target of half a score of telescopes levelled at you
by the residents.
Colonel Salmon—who owned the fishing rights of the trout-stream
below hill—the Talbot-Tomsons, the Griffith-Smiths, the Grosvenor-
Jones and the rest, all these, failing introductions, you will find to be
passive resisters to your presence.
Now, caution towards strangers and snobbishness are two different
things. The Uptonians are snobbish because, though you may be as
beautiful as a dream or as innocent as a saint, you will be sniffed at
and turned over; but if you are wealthy it is another matter, as in the
case of the Smyth-Smyths, who were neither beautiful nor innocent
—but that is another story.

"The village is a mile further on," said Pugeot; "let's turn down here
before we go to the hotel and have afternoon tea with my cousin.
Randall, steer for The Nook."
The car was not the Dragon-Fly, but a huge closed limousine, with
Mudd seated beside Randall, and inside, the rest of that social
menagerie about to be landed on the residents of Upton upon the
landing-stage of the social position of Dick Pugeot's cousin, Sir
Squire Simpson.
All the introductions in the world could not be better than the
personal introduction to the Resident of Upton by the Hon. Richard
Pugeot.
They passed lodge gates and then up a pleasant drive to a big
house-front, before which a small garden-party seemed to be going
on; a big afternoon tea it was, and there were men in flannels, and
girls in summer frocks, and discarded tennis racquets lying about,
and the sight of all this gave Bobby a horrible turn.
Uncle Simon had been very quiet during the journey—happy but
quiet—squeezed between the two women, but this was not the sort
of place he wanted to land Uncle Simon in despite his quietude and
happiness. Mudd evidently also had qualms, for he kept looking back
through the glass front of the car and seemed trying to catch
Bobby's eye.
But there was no turning back.
The car swept along the drive, past the party on the lawn, and drew
up at the front door. Then, as they bundled out, a tall old man,
without a hat and dressed in grey tweed, detached himself from the
lawn crowd and came towards them.
This was Sir Squire Simpson, Bart. His head was dome-shaped, and
he had heavy eyelids that reminded one of half-closed shutters, and
a face that seemed carved from old ivory—an extremely serious-
looking person and a stately; but he was glad to see Pugeot, and he
advanced with a hand outstretched and the ghost of an old-
fashioned sort of smile.
"I've brought some friends down to stay at the hotel," said Pugeot,
"and I thought we would drop in here for tea first. Didn't expect to
find a party going on."
"Delighted," said the Squire.
He was introduced to "My friend, Mr. Pettigrew, Madame—er—de
Rossignol, Mademoiselle de Rossignol, Mr. Ravenshaw."
Then the party moving towards the lawn, they were all introduced to
Lady Simpson, a harmless-looking individual who welcomed them
and broke them up amongst her guests and gave them tea.
Bobby, detaching himself for a moment from the charms of Miss
Squire Simpson, managed to get hold of Pugeot.
"I say," said he, "don't you think this may be a bit too much for
uncle?"
"Oh, he's all right," said Pugeot; "can't come to any harm here. Look
at him, he's quite happy."
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