Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial Period: Critique of Nation, Narration, and Patriarchy
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Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty
and
Dhritiman Chakraborty
Abstract
Critical engagements like the first autobiography written by a Bengali woman, Rasasundari Devi, and the non-fictions by Kailashbasini Devi, Krishnabhabini Das, and other women writers in the second half of the nineteenth century contested the imagined idealization of the Hindu domesticity and conjugality as spaces of loveableness and spiritual commitment. They criticized coercion in child-marriages and the forceful injunctions of the Hindu scriptures on both married and widowed women. Such rhetoric of quasi empowerment needs to be disaggregated to perpetuate issues of ‘double colonization,’ ‘dual-hold’ in feminism in India. The question is whether there can be any grounds of women’s agency in the Indian tradition. Eurocentric critiques are ill-equipped to politicize all modalities of a culture of social exclusion in Hindu imaginaries. Henceforth, as questions of equality, emancipation, and empowerment are fiercely debated in the public domain in contemporary India, we need to argue how immanent dissenting woman subjectivity can originate to counteract multiple patriarchies formed in Indian immediacies.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Introduction – Voices of Their Own: South Asian Women’s Writing
- Voices of Resolution and Resistance in Indian Women’s Poetry
- Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial Period: Critique of Nation, Narration, and Patriarchy
- Alternative Literary Modernities: A Voice from Colonial Punjab
- “What an inauspicious moment it turned out to be when she began to write!”: The Presentation and Position of the South Asian Woman Writer in Colonial Bengal
- Voices from the Threshold in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column
- Negotiating Gender, Memory, and History in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day
- Splitting/Violating the “New Indian Woman” in Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980)
- Challenging Gender and Genre: Women in Contemporary Indian Crime Fiction in English
- Book Reviews
- “I Am Because You Are:” Relationality in the Works of Siri Hustvedt
- Counternarrative Possibilities: Virgin Land, Homeland, and Cormac McCarthy’s Westerns
- Shakespeare, Court Dramatist
- Subjectivity across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives
- Books Received
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Introduction – Voices of Their Own: South Asian Women’s Writing
- Voices of Resolution and Resistance in Indian Women’s Poetry
- Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial Period: Critique of Nation, Narration, and Patriarchy
- Alternative Literary Modernities: A Voice from Colonial Punjab
- “What an inauspicious moment it turned out to be when she began to write!”: The Presentation and Position of the South Asian Woman Writer in Colonial Bengal
- Voices from the Threshold in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column
- Negotiating Gender, Memory, and History in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day
- Splitting/Violating the “New Indian Woman” in Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980)
- Challenging Gender and Genre: Women in Contemporary Indian Crime Fiction in English
- Book Reviews
- “I Am Because You Are:” Relationality in the Works of Siri Hustvedt
- Counternarrative Possibilities: Virgin Land, Homeland, and Cormac McCarthy’s Westerns
- Shakespeare, Court Dramatist
- Subjectivity across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives
- Books Received
