151

Preprint. Not for Citation

WOMEN, REBIRTH AND REFORM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BENGAL
Supriya Chaudhuri

In his book Provincializing Europe, the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty speaks of the birth
of the modern subject in colonial India as in some way tied to the perception of the lives
of women, particularly widows. A centrally placed chapter of the work, titled ‘Domestic
Cruelty and the Birth of the Subject’, undertakes to examine the constitution of a
nineteenth-century archive of suffering that might enable its witnesses, early modern
male reformers, to lay claim to a new kind of interiority.1 Analysing instances from the
Bengali reformers Rammohun Roy and Ishvar Chandra Vidyasagar, Chakrabarty traces
the discursive birth of pity or compassion and its employment as an instrument of social
amelioration. Valuable though his account is, it is founded on a curious anomaly. Though
he describes ‘the widow as the modern subject’, he focuses only on those male writers,
within the period of which he speaks, who viewed and were moved by the widow’s
suffering. References to the testimony of widows themselves are confined to a record
compiled in the 1960s. While the anomaly may point us to an actual absence, a lack that
may, at its most absolute, prevent us from assigning modern subjecthood to women in the
nineteenth century, I would argue that this conclusion is mistaken. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s
account simply ignores one aspect of a complex and difficult history, though he cannot
have been unaware of writings produced by women, several of them widows, in the
nineteenth century. His focus on male reformers and their self-constitution in terms of the
discourse of pity is not unrepresentative of the public means through which a new kind of
male subject, a new identity of the human, came to be formed in colonial India, but it
fails to address the question he had appeared to pose by describing women as subjects. It
is important to examine the extent to which women could share in this ‘birth’, and their
destiny when they did. The question is worth asking particularly because nineteenth-
century Bengal appears to claim not just a birth, but a rebirth: in short, a renaissance.

Much has already been said about the nature and possibility of rebirth as a model
for the cultural self-understanding of nineteenth-century Bengal, and about the relation

All translations from Bengali are my own unless otherwise indicated.

1
See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp.117-48.
 152

between modernity, textual culture, reform and awakening (or, to translate the Bengali
term nabajagaran more strictly, ‘new awakening’). It seems arguable that the model
itself, when used by nineteenth-century Bengalis, was a means of establishing the
dwijatwa of their own cultural self-understanding, a double gesture towards the
apprehension of their present as exception and their present as repetition. Inevitably, the
society of the twice-born, dwija,2 would exclude those whom destiny had not chosen, the
figures briefly but significantly brought together in Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s
subsequently withdrawn treatise Samya (Equality) published in 1879:3 the labouring
peasants Hashim Sheikh, Rama Kaibarta and Paran Mondal on the one hand, and an
unnamed assembly of women pressing their claims to education, property and personal
freedom in matters such as widow remarriage, on the other.

Samya was made up of some sections of the long essay on ‘Bangadesher krishak’
(The Peasants of Bengal) which had preceded the peasant uprising in Sirajgunj in 1873,
and three other articles that had appeared in Bangadarshan, the journal edited by Bankim
in 1873 and 1875. In later life, Bankim repudiated the Mill-influenced views of that
period (especially those derived from The Subjection of Women),4 and did not re-issue
Samya, though ‘Bangadesher krishak’ was included, with an explanatory note, in Part II
of Bibidha prabandha (Various Essays) in 1892. But the original plan of the treatise, and
its temporary alignment on the historical stage of persons such as peasants and women,
might well cast doubt on the idea of the Bengal Renaissance as a large-scale cultural
event, even prompting questions of the kind famously put by Joan Kelly in her classic
essay of 1977, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’5 Bankim, himself inclined to think
that Bengal had its renaissance in the fifteenth century and entered into decline thereafter,
imports a strange and not wholly explicable reference to the European revival of learning

All translations from Bengali are my own unless otherwise indicated.

2
The Sanskrit word dwija literally means ‘twice-born’ and is applied to brahmans, the highest caste of
Hindus.
3
Samya was separately published in 1879, but it contained essays that had appeared individually in
Bangadarshan, the journal edited by him, between 1872 and 1875. For the texts of these works, see
Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Bankim rachanabali, ed. Jogeshchandra Bagal, vol. 2 (Kolkata:
Sahitya Samsad, 1954 rpt. 2004), pp.249-72, 328-51.
4
John Stuart Mill’s essay, The Subjection of Women, is thought to have been written in 1861 (though
he asserted that he co-wrote it with his wife Harriet Taylor who died in 1858), and was published in
1869. See the edition by Susan Moller Okin (New York: Hackett Publishing, 1988).
5
Joan Kelly, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’, in Becoming Visible. Women in History, ed. Renate
Bridenthal & Claudia Koonz (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1977); rpt. in The Italian Renaissance, ed.
Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea Publishing House, 2004), pp.151-76.
 153

in his discussion of the conditions of the Bengal peasantry, where he argues that their
misery, produced to some extent by climatic and other factors, and tied to the
degeneration of the classes above them as well, is not an inevitable consequence:
These conditions of misery gradually came to affect all other segments of
society. Borne on the same current, the brahmans, the kshatriyas, the vaishyas,
and the shudras all went downhill. […] [But] the consequences we are
demonstrating are not universal. […] It cannot be doubted that, were it not for
the discovery of Greek literature and knowledge in Italy in the thirteenth
century or thereafter, the conditions in Europe would be different from what
they are now.6

The strangeness of this reference is precisely because Bankim refuses to see the
revival of learning as a restricted event involving only those humanist pedagogues who
were directly engaged in cultural reconstruction; yet at the same time, he acknowledges
that what happens in the cultural sphere can have profound consequences for all those
who are beneficiaries of that historical moment. Out by a century or so, he nevertheless
argues that something happened in Europe then which changed life for everyone
thereafter. In a set of essays marked by a fierce, polemical logic – which leads him later
to defend, against his own inclinations, women’s equal rights with men even in matters of
sexual choice – Bankim views cultural facts and social conditions as inextricably,
materially linked. For him, therefore, it would not be possible to accept the notion of a
renaissance and mark the parallels between the limited, pedagogic, elite and male
characteristics of these movements where they occur; it would be necessary to take into
account what happens around such a movement, to what extent it confirms or denies – in
Bengal – what he savagely describes in the first lines of ‘Bangadesher krishak’ as the
civilizing consequences of British rule. It may well be that we do not follow Bankim in
this conviction: that, persuaded of the validity of the renaissance as a cultural model, we
nevertheless see it as restricted to certain classes and pursuits, so that Joan Kelly’s
question makes just as much sense as her answer: ‘there was no renaissance for women –
at least, not during the Renaissance’7 (we should note the two uses of the word
renaissance here). But Bankim’s discomfort is an important reminder that we ignore
social and historical contexts at our peril. At the same time, if from our vantage-point of

6
Translated from ‘Bangadesher krishak’, ch.3, in Bankim rachanabali vol. 2, p.264.
7
Kelly, ed. cit. p.151.
 154

history, we pose the same kind of question that he does, we may find that something did
take place in nineteenth-century Bengal which changed life for everyone. If it was a
renaissance, women and peasants were indeed excluded from it; but they were not
unaffected by it.

Those familiar with Joan Kelly’s essay may recall that she set out a list of criteria
‘for gauging the relative contraction (or expansion) of the powers of Renaissance women
and for determining the quality of their historical experience’:8 the regulation of
sexualities, male and female; women’s economic and political roles, work, access to
property and political power, and their education and training for these; the cultural roles
of women in shaping social outlooks; and the ideology concerning women as displayed
or advocated in the symbolic products of society, its art, literature, and philosophy. She
emphasized particularly the ‘rich inferential value’9 of this ideological index, but noted
the difficulty of establishing the relation between the ideology of sex-roles and the social
realities she was seeking – an important reminder for the cultural historian of nineteenth-
century Bengal. Seminal though her work was in setting off new ways of thinking about
the European Renaissance, perhaps I am not the only reader to be disappointed by her
analysis, which seems to repose an unsubstantiated confidence in the freedoms of the
High Middle Ages and to view the Italian Renaissance through the lens of Castiglione’s Il
cortegiano.

Nevertheless, the question Kelly asked prompted several decades of intense

labour by feminist historians and philologists, so that we may now be better placed to see
what European women gained during this period. If they did not gain social freedom or
political agency (and in this her instincts as a historian appear to have been correct) they
did obtain – in very limited numbers, and often only through being members of humanist
households – some access to secular humanist education, to the world of print, and to the
sense of a textually produced and recorded personhood. The education, or educability, of
women formed an important part of the debate on women’s worth, the querelle des
femmes conducted by male humanist ideologues such as Juan Luis Vives, Thomas Elyot
and Henry Cornelius Agrippa, while learned women such as Louise Labé and Laura
Cereta argued eloquently for their intellectual equality with men. At the same time, as

8
Ibid. p.152.
9
Ibid.
 155

Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton asked in From Humanism to the Humanities, analysing
the cases of Isotta Nogarola and Cassandra Fedele, what were women humanists being
educated for?10 What could their extraordinary accomplishments and abilities, their
widely celebrated competence in Latin (or as in the case of Alessandra Scala, Greek) be
used for in a society where they could only be good daughters, wives, or mothers? Even
Vives, in his De institutione foeminae christianae (1523; translated into English by
Richard Hyrde as The Instruction of a Christen Woman, 1529),11 and Elyot in The
Defence of Good Women (1540) urge women to display their chastity and obedience, on
the lines of the spurious third book of Aristotle’s Economics. Marriage and the family are
upheld so as to replicate the patriarchal order of the state (or the other way around).12

Peter Iver Kaufman, analysing the case of the most beloved and most apt of
Thomas More’s learned daughters, Margaret Roper, believes on the evidence of her letter
to Alice Alington that she was capable of resisting patriarchy and entering into her own
humanist network of friendship.13 Even if this were so, it would prove little beyond the
truth of a particular instance. Like Katharina Wilson in her anthology of women writers,14
Jardine and Grafton reach a sober, qualified, but ultimately negative conclusion. In the
first place, education and its gifts of intellectual emancipation are restricted, in the
Renaissance, by class and family circumstance. Secondly, there is an unbridgeable gap
between accomplishment and profession, so that women humanists can only display their
learning like fine needlework. But – and this sting in the tail unexpectedly confirms
Kelly’s instinct in turning to Il cortegiano and Hans Baron’s thesis in The Crisis of the
Early Italian Renaissance15 – the impotence of female humanists is only an extreme

10
‘Women Humanists: Education for What?’ in Anthony Grafton & Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to
the Humanities. Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp.29-57. See also Margaret L. King, ‘Book-lined
Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance’, in Beyond their Sex. Learned Women
of the European Past, ed. Patricia H. Labalme (New York: New York University Press, 1980), pp.66-
90.
11
See Juan Luis Vives, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, ed. Virginia W. Beauchamp, Elizabeth
H. Hageman & Margaret Mikesell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977).
12
There is by now a very substantial body of literature on the place and status of women during the
Renaissance, as well as about ideas concerning them. For the possibility of a proto-feminism, see
Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism. Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1990).
13
Peter Iver Kaufman, ‘Absolute Margaret. Margaret More Roper and “Well Learned” Men’, Sixteenth
Century Journal 20 (1989), pp.443-56.
14
Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 1987): see Introduction, p.xxxi.
15
Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance. Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in
an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).
 156

version of the impotence of male humanists, deprived by Renaissance absolutism of

political agency and condemned to an empty rehearsal of learning.

There are evident attractions in transferring this paradigm of education, with its
success inscribed within failure, its gain circumscribed by loss, to the context of colonial
Bengal. But I regret to say that the parallel is not exact. Certainly there is a similar pattern
of claiming a renaissance, largely upper-class, Hindu and male, which is then challenged
by the entry of the subaltern on to the historical stage – an occasion for alarm and
despondency in some quarters, as reflected in David Kopf’s remarkably ill-tempered
review of Sangari and Vaid’s Recasting Women.16 And it is not necessary any longer to
prove that women were not conscious participants in a project of rebirth; that they did not
look to founding texts from the past on which to base a programme of cultural
repristination; that their social conditions did not improve dramatically in the first sixty
years of the nineteenth century, when the Bengal Renaissance is supposed to have
occurred; and that even education for women was extremely circumscribed and
instrumental, directed towards making them better wives and mothers, just as education
for men, as conceived by Macaulay’s 1835 Minute, might make them better clerks. There
are parallels we could reflect on here, but I think it is more interesting to look at what is
distinctive about the history of nineteenth-century Bengal and the place occupied in that
narrative by women.

What is most remarkable about this history, I would suggest, is the central
importance given to the male project of rescuing, reviving, or refashioning women: as the
Young Bengal spokesman Kailashchandra Basu put it in 1846, ‘she must be refined,
reorganized, recast, regenerated.’17 This project, which is also a project of male self-
fashioning in various stages of its development and practice, occupies at least as
important a place in nineteenth-century thought as the Orientalist rediscovery of Hindu
antiquity and its textual traditions, the entry into print and the dissemination of useful
knowledge, and the production of a Bengali literature. It has no real parallel in the
European Renaissance, and if we are to take the notion of a Bengal Renaissance rather

16
David Kopf, review of Recasting Women. Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari
& Sudesh Vaid, in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22 (1992), pp.563-5.
17
‘On the Education of Hindu Females’, speech by Koylaschunder Bose [Kailashchandra Basu] at the
Medical College Theatre, Calcutta, 14 August 1846, as in Nineteenth Century Studies, ed. Alok Ray
(Kolkata: Bibliographic Research Centre, 1975), p.198.
 157

narrowly, it appears to have nothing to do with that either. But, like the Bengal
Renaissance itself, it is a project narrowly defined by class and caste: feminist scholars
have correctly pointed out that the efforts of reformers are directed towards women of the
upper castes, among whom satidaha and restrictions placed on widows are more
prevalent.18 At a point around mid-century, it becomes a project in which some educated
women can participate, in a way that would naturally invite accusations of having
internalized male expectations and hierarchies. Sometimes this participation is accidental
or fortuitous. And by the end of the century, some women at least can claim to have
achieved some personal emancipation, a degree of mental and physical autonomy (though
the former will always be disputed). Is this a birth or a rebirth? Is it a process of
renovation or of reform? Or is it simply a gift of history, as arbitrary as an earlier theft of
history? For it is important not to idealize this project, as I have called it: since men were
in fact responsible for the ignorance, oppression, sufferings and murders of women (and
continued to be so), there is no point in treating this account of partial restitution as a tale
of simple benevolence. I will try to examine some of these problems.

I think that one of the main issues that we have to address in looking at this
history (and here I am indebted to Professor Alok Ray’s searching and thoughtful account
of the long nineteenth century’s engagement with jukti, reason, as with shastra, or
authority)19 is the operation of a form of public reason seeking to designate its object –
the common good – by identifying it within the insistent particulars of experience. The
British Orientalists were not per se interested in the question of women: as most scholars
have noted, Colebrooke sets out the textual position on satidaha more or less neutrally in
‘On the Duties of a Faithful Hindu Widow’,20 and only a couple of phrases (‘awful rite’
and ‘melancholy scene’)21 indicate anything other than a scholarly interest in the variety
of authorities and their stipulations for the observant widow. Rather, it is Mrityunjay
Vidyalankar, and after him Rammohan Ray, who create the moral climate for social
change.22 In order to do so, they make use of what Kelly might describe as an ideological

18
See Ghulam Murshid, Reluctant Debutante. Response of Bengali Women to Modernisation 1849-
1905 (Rajshahi: Rajshahi University Press, 1982), and S. Tharu & K. Lalita (ed.), Women Writing in
India, 600 BC to the Present, Vol. I (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp.150-51.
19
See Alok Ray, ‘Some Distinctive Features of the Bengal Renaissance’, in this volume.
20
H. T. Colebrooke, Miscellaneous Essays, vol. 1 (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1837), pp.114-22: ‘On
the Duties of a Faithful Hindu Widow’, from Asiatic Researches, vol. 4 (Kolkata, 1795), pp.209-19.
21
Ibid., p.121.
22
As pundit to the Sadar Diwani Adalat, Mrityunjay Vidyalankar produced in 1817 a legal note or
byabastha indicating the absence of scriptural prescriptions for satidaha, a year before the publication
 158

index which privileges the spiritual potential of women (especially in ancient times, thus
confirming an Orientalist idealization of the past) while they respond on the other hand to
missionary disapproval of native barbarism. But though it may be tempting to see their
positions as compromised by this double co-option within colonial frames of thought, this
is not the impression we receive from Rammohan’s writings, with their enfolding of pity
within the argument of reason.23 Rammohan’s whole endeavour appears to be directed
towards the creation of a public discourse of rationality capable of persuading those
whom habit or custom has made insensible to wrongdoing. This can only be done
through an awakening of conscience or compassion, as instrumental within the operation
of reason, and motivated by it. For Rammohan, this awakening of compassion is
profoundly linked to self-understanding. I will cite the close of Sahamaran bishay
prabarttak o nibarttaker sambad:
It is true that in other matters you are full of compassion. But because,
instructed by your elders and neighbours and fellow-villagers from early
childhood, you have repeatedly witnessed the burning of wives and hardened
your hearts against their lamentations as they are consumed by the flames, a
contrary habit has set in amongst you, and owing to this, you do not feel
compassion at the lamentations of the dying, whether they be men or women.
Thus because the Shaktas witness the sacrifice of goats and buffaloes from
early childhood, they feel no pity at the cries of the slaughtered animals, while
the Vaishnavas feel immense pity for them.24
What is remarkable about this passage is the effort of the imagined speaker to analyse
and explain his opponent’s insensibility, as if that were the first test of a sympathy he
seeks to arouse and educate. Rammohan’s taking up of the women’s question places it
centrally in the programme of reform from the beginning of the nineteenth century, and it
does so through a critical linking of legal and rational processes with moral duty and
personal sentiment. This conjunction of the personal and the political is a move that has
no parallel in Renaissance Europe, and it produces nearly a century of intense debate and
questioning with regard to the position of women.

of Rammohan Ray’s first tract on the subject, Sahamaran bishay prabarttak o nibarttaker sambad
(Kolkata, n.d.) and its English version, Translation of a Conference Between an Advocate for, and an
Opponent of, the Practice of Burning Widows Alive, from the Original Bungla (Kolkata: Rammohan
Ray, 1818). See Rammohan Ray, Rammohan rachanabali, ed. Ajit Kumar Ghosh et al. (Kolkata:
Haraph Prakashani, 1973), p.419.
23
On Rammohan, see Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, pp.120-27.
24
Translated from Rammohan rachanabali p.175.
 159

At the same time, we can scarcely be unaware that throughout the century,
satidaha also occupies an extremely privileged position in the ideological index, serving
to fill men with vicarious pride, and instilling in them a putative confidence in their own
courage. There are countless examples of this in drama, fiction, songs and tracts. We may
quote Rajkrishna Mukhopadhyay in ‘Striloker rup’ (The Beauty of Women), contributed
to the ‘Kamalakanta’ papers published in Bangadarshan between 1873 and 1875:
In my mind’s eye I see the pyre burning, and the saintly wife sitting upon it
clasping her husband’s feet lovingly to her breast. Slowly the fire spreads, it
burns one limb after another. As she is consumed by the flames, the wife
meditates upon her husband’s feet, chants or signifies the name of Hari. She
shows no trace of physical suffering. Her face is beatific. Gradually the flames
grow higher, life departs, the body turns to ashes. Praised be endurance!
Praised be love! Praised be reverence!
When I reflect that only a short while ago the women of our country,
despite their soft bodies, were capable of dying like this, then my mind is
filled with new hope, and I believe that the seeds of greatness dwell even in
us. Shall we not be able to display this greatness when the time comes?25

Rajkrishna is clearly appealing to the ideological index, glorifying the heroism of the
chaste wife by drawing upon the affective realm of religious sentiment and national pride.
But a later essay by Chandrashekhar Mukhopadhyay, which appeared in Bangadarshan
in1877, scrupulously adheres to the ‘rational’ structure of arguments for and against, even
citing Jeremy Bentham, Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill, though it reaches the same
conclusion: satidaha is a voluntary and admirable act, which the government is wrong in
prohibiting.26

It would seem, then, that reason can collude with the most repellent forms of
obscurantism. Ideologically satidaha has had a troubled history, even to this day. In 1623
the Italian traveller and poet Pietro della Valle met the Sati Giaccama at Ikkeri, in modern
Andhra Pradesh, was much impressed by her cheerful resolve to perish with her dead

25
Translated from the text given in Bankim rachanabali, vol.2, pp.65-6.
26
See Chandrashekhar Mukhopadhyay, ‘Satidaha’, in Bangadarshan: Nirbachita Rachanasangraha,
ed. Rabindra Gupta (Kolkata: Charuprakash, 1975), p.200.
 160

husband, and promised to commemorate her in verse. He wrote three sonnets to her,
surviving in manuscript (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS lat. 10,389), the first of
which concludes thus: ‘O love, worthy of fame, which will be celebrated here below
though the infidel spirit cannot ascend.’27 Some one hundred and fifty years earlier, the
merchant Niccolò Conti had also witnessed and described the practice of satidaha in
generally positive terms, though he noted that unwilling widows were forcibly thrown
into the fire.28 Satidaha is an extreme instance: other ways of configuring the psychic
value and spiritual potential of women, especially with relation to ancient sources and
models, and finally, of course, towards the end of the century, with reference to the
nation as mother-goddess, are deeply instrumental throughout in projecting a hidden or
lapsed male self-worth (as in Bankimchandra’s Anandamath).

If reason, then, is capable of such cunning, how precisely are we to view its
operation in the public sphere of social reform? Feminist historians have pointed out that
despite the debates about child marriage, kulin polygamy, widow remarriage and, later,
the Age of Consent Bill in the 1890s, about strishiksha or female education, and about
opportunities for women in the public domain, the atmosphere of male oppression,
illiberality, and abuse is so general that it would seem surprising to speak of women’s
education and their social empowerment as male projects. Moreover, even in reformist
tracts, there is a constant iteration of the pettiness, ignorance and superstition of women,
conditions from which they need to be rescued by enlightened male reason and prudence.
Conservative authors, on the other hand, assert that traditional womenfolk were properly
pious, devoted and possessed of all household accomplishments, while the modern,
‘reformed’ woman is shallow and incompetent.29 Again, the scope of this dispute is
confined to middle- and upper-class women: little attention, if any, is given to the actual
status of the large mass of labouring women in the lower strata of society, among whom
child marriage was certainly widespread, though widows might not have been as cruelly
treated.

27
‘O amor degno di fama, e che qua giù/ Sia celebrato almen, poi che non può/ Lo spirito, ch’è
infedile, andar là su.’ My translation. For the texts of the sonnets, see Joan-Pau Rubies, Travel and
Ethnology in the Renaissance. South India through European Eyes, 1250-1625 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp.399-400.
28
See Poggio Bracciolini’s account in De L’Inde. Les Voyages en Asie de Niccolò de Conti. De
varietate Fortunae, Livre IV, ed. & trans. M. Guéret-Laferté (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp.140-42.
29
See, for example, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Prachina o nabina’ (Woman, Traditional and
Modern’), published in Bangadarshan, April-May 1874: Bankim rachanabali, Vol.2, pp.217-23, and
especially the three fictional letters from women correspondents in response to the article.
 161

Yet there can be no doubt that women, as objects of reform, as instruments of

social reconstruction, as symbols of the nation and its male subjects, are at the centre of
the modernization project of the nineteenth century. Reformers have much to contend
with, and they are themselves all too often guilty of collusion with their colonial masters,
having learnt lessons of subjection which they will now use to elicit new kinds of
dependence, especially from the institutions of pedagogy and companionate marriage.
But those women who were the objects of such reform could not have combined to carry
out their emancipation by themselves alone, and most of the major steps towards a
positive change in their social conditions were indeed taken by men. Most importantly,
these steps are not the accidental product of general social reform: they are what serve to
define the nature and validity of reform in general, to justify the self-understanding of
male reformers. Repeatedly, whether in the early phase of reform initiated by
Rammohan, the somewhat different trajectory followed by Vidyasagar, or even in the
confused emergence of nationalism towards the end of the century (which, Partha
Chatterjee has argued, leads to an abandonment or ‘resolution’ of the women’s
question),30 there is a deep and personal engagement with the condition of women, as
directed by a postulated public reason on the one hand, and on the other by compassion,
which is a new form of self-understanding.

It is probably Vidyasagar who provides the most signal instance of these two
qualities. Rather than the separation of public and private, bahir and ghar, men’s public
space and women’s private sphere, law and religion, work and faith that Partha Chatterjee
posits as characteristic of the nationalist movement, there is in this earlier period (and
even, I would suggest, in the later) a conflation of public and private, reason and pity, the
‘masculine’ and the ‘feminine’. And it seems to me that it is this conflation or confusion
that is most characteristic of modernity, releasing men and women as subjects into a new
state of uncertainty about their places in the disciplinary order, under colonial law, in the
regulated spaces which are produced by this discursive regimen. It is this uncertainty that
is used by Sandip, afflicts Nikhilesh and confuses Bimala in Rabindranath Tagore’s novel
Ghare Baire (The Home and the World).

30
Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’, in Recasting Women
pp.233-53.
 162

But to say that women and their social conditions are objects upon which reason,
compassion and self-understanding (as exercised by men) can work, does not make
women subjects and participants in ordering their destiny. When do women, as subjects,
come to share in a renaissance? In the first half of the nineteenth century, when the
‘Bengal Renaissance’ is supposed to be taking place, there is little evidence of active
roles for women. With the advance of the century, some spaces earlier available to many
of them – the spaces of popular religion, of festivity, of ritual, of music, of conviviality,
as well as certain traditional professions and forms of labour – are in fact gradually
reduced through a process of gentrification, education and domestic seclusion. A new
industrialized economy offered less to women.31 And it was only much later, perhaps in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that new professional opportunities
opened up for women through education, training, and the technological transformation
of fields such as music, for example.32 In a fragment of autobiography, Rabindranath
Tagore’s highly literate elder sister Swarnakumari not only claims a tradition of educated
women in her own family, she speaks of a learned Vaishnavi who used to visit the
antahpur to teach and lecture to the women of their house, long before Swarnakumari’s
own childhood. Citing an aunt’s recollections, she describes the imaginative and affective
pull of the Vaishnavi’s stories, and the materials of an educational curriculum conceived
before Vidyasagar’s alphabet-book and primer Barnaparichay. Even if such education
was accessible only to privileged households, its character is fundamentally different
from that offered by bourgeois reformers:
That was before the time of Vidyasagar’s Barnaparichay. The lady Vaishnavi
used a booklet called Shishubodhak to teach the letters of the alphabet, which
I came across when I grew up. This single booklet taught everything from
letters and spellings to invocations of Gods and Goddesses, to descriptions of
various hours of the day and methods of writing. […] In my childhood
everyone in the antahpur betrayed a love for learning. My mother would
always have a book in her hand during her leisure hours. A special favourite
of hers was the Chanakyashloka – she would often take the book and repeat
the shlokas. One of my brothers would frequently be called to read out the

31
See Sumanta Banerjee, ‘Marginalization of Women’s Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century
Bengal’, and Nirmala Banerjee, ‘Working Women in Colonial Bengal: Modernization and
Marginalization’, in Recasting Women pp.127-79, 269-301.
32
On the last, see Amlan Das Gupta, ‘Women and Music: The Case of North India’, in Women of
India: Colonial and Post-Colonial Periods, ed. Bharati Ray (New Delhi: Sage, 2005).
 163

Sanskrit Ramayana and Mahabharata to her. My grandmother – mother’s

paternal aunt – was a real bookworm. Of course, there were the novels and the
poetic works; but she would not rest until she had tried the most complex texts
of Tantrapurana, Samkhya or other philosophic texts. If she did not find any
other book she would take the dictionary and sit down with it. There was no
one who understood my elder brother’s Tattvavidya as she did.33

The Tagore household must have been exceptional, and there is no reason to
suppose that even in the upper and middle classes, women were generally given access to
education in what is now called the ‘pre-modern’ era. It remains true, however, that
certain kinds of learning, amongst women as amongst men, disappear with the advent of
new educational programmes. But like Swarnakumari herself, many bourgeois
beneficiaries of the new forms of strishiksha become, from mid-century, active colluders
in the modernization project, writing and speaking of the necessity to take women
forward. Kailashbasini Debi, the wife of the Brahmo reformer Durgacharan Gupta, who
was illiterate at the time of her marriage but received a remarkable education thereafter,
published a book of essays in 1863, titled Hindu mahilaganer hinabastha (The Woeful
Plight of Hindu Women) in which she argued forcefully for reform. Here, as in the same
author’s later work Hindu abalakuler bidyabhash (The Education of Hindu Women,
1872) and Bamasundari Debi’s short treatise, Ki ki kusamskar tirahita haile ei desher
shribriddhi haite pare (What are the superstitions that must be removed for the
betterment of our country?, 1861),34 we find the first female articulations of a debate that
gathers momentum in the 1870s, though it had already been initiated earlier by male
reformers and their conservative opponents. While some women urged the need for wider
social and political roles for women and their exposure to public, i.e. school education,
others, like Krishnabhabini Das, were more concerned with what came later to be known
as zenana education, proper to the antahpur or inner, women’s quarters of Bengali
households. By the end of the century, however, Krishnabhabini was convinced that

33
Swarnakumari Debi, ‘Sekele katha’, published in Bharati, Chaitra 1322/ March-April 1916; as
translated by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta in Talking of Power: Early Writings of Bengali Women
from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, ed. Malini Bhattacharya
& Abhijit Sen (Kolkata: Stree, 2003), p.137.
34
The first and third of these treatises are translated in Talking of Power, cited above.
 164

women had lost more ground than they had gained, and that education had not brought
them freedom.35

By the 1890s, women like Rabindranath’s sister Swarnakumari Debi were deeply
involved with nationalist politics, causing much disquiet to Rabindranath himself, whose
attitude towards his accomplished elder sibling, an established writer by the 1870s, was
always troubled and critical, especially when her daughter Sarala became a nationalist
and political activist. If nationalism appears, as Partha Chatterjee suggests, to ignore the
women’s question, it cannot be denied that large numbers of women were able to break
the shackles of family and society by dedicating themselves to the cause of the nation. At
what point during the past half-century should we place their ‘renaissance’, in that case?
Or should we identify it, paradoxically, with the moment of crisis when nationalist
politics neglects or ignores their personal struggles? It does not help that at the same time,
a symbolic woman is born: a woman who consoles, inspires and replaces man at the
nation’s heart. To some extent, the presence of this figure inhibits the emergence of the
‘newly-born’ or ‘re-born’ woman in society.

Some of these paradoxes may be more clearly understood if we examine the lives
of two very different women, each a stranger to her time, but arguably more
representative of it than any of their contemporaries: the writer of the first Bengali
autobiography, Rassundari Debi, and the most learned female scholar of the period,
Pandita Ramabai. Rassundari (1810-?99), was born in a small village in East Bengal and
lived in domestic seclusion through almost the whole of the nineteenth century. Ramabai
(1858-1922), a Maharashtrian brahman woman at least a generation younger than
Rassundari, had an extraordinary and event-filled life, lived equally in the private and
public spheres. Taught Sanskrit and the shastras from early childhood by her mother
Lakshmibai, who had received an unusual education at the hands of her husband Anant
Shastri, she travelled all over India on pilgrimage, and astonished pandits in Calcutta

35
See Krishnabhabini Das, ‘Swadhin o paradhin narijiban’ (Free and Dependent Lives for Women),
Pradip, Phalgun 1304/ February-March 1897; translated by Sourin Bhattacharya in Talking of Power,
pp.77-83. Much of this material is exhaustively studied by Malavika Karlekar in Voices from Within.
Early Personal Narratives of Bengali Women (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991). See also
Murshid, Reluctant Debutante; Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 1849-
1985 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) and Tanika Sarkar, ‘Strishiksha and its Terrors: Re-
Reading Nineteenth Century Debates on Reform’ in Literature and Gender. Essays for Jasodhara
Bagchi, ed. Supriya Chaudhuri & Sajni Mukherji (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2003), pp.153-84.
 165

when she arrived there with her brother in 1878, to the extent that she was honoured with
the titles ‘Pandita’ and ‘Sarasvati’. In Bengal, she was inducted into enlightened Brahmo
society, where she served as a proponent of reform and women’s education, and she
married a Bengali Brahmo lawyer, breaking caste and religious taboos. Widowed within
two years, she returned to Maharashtra to be inducted into the reform movement there
(through M. G. Ranade’s Prarthana Samaj) and to set up the Arya Mahila Samaj in Pune
in 1882. With the intention of raising funds for the association, especially to set up a
‘destitute home’ for oppressed women, she travelled to England in the spring of 1883.
There, she converted to Christianity in circumstances that cannot be fully reconstructed
but which apparently included the suicide of her companion Anandibhai Bhagat, and a
degree of pressure that left her in a state of ‘nervous prostration’ when she visited Max
Müller in Oxford.36 Following this critical event, she found herself initially contesting the
authoritarianism (and implicit racism and gender-bias) of the Anglican Church; and later,
when she returned to India after nearly six years of study, teaching, writing, lecturing and
fund-raising in England and America, the hostility of orthodox and upper-caste Hindus to
her proselytizing. Though she had by this time become a celebrated public figure, and
had raised funds for a secular, non-sectarian widows’ home through the Ramabai
Association in America, her activities in this last period of her life led to a break with the
mainstream Hindu (and male) reform movement. Initially lauded by the press, she was
later attacked and vilified. Her widows’ homes expanded to take in lower-caste famine
victims, and while she worked unceasingly to train and equip poor or deserted women
with the skills that might give them independence, she became increasingly isolated. She
also underwent a revelation that strengthened her Christian faith and her belief in the
efficacy of conversion. Her last work was a translation of the Bible from the original
Hebrew and Greek into Marathi (accompanied by a Greek grammar in Marathi), which
was printed at her Kedgaon press by her own trained girls.

Ramabai’s own accounts of her life are brief and factual, though the late Christian
narrative, A Testimony of our Inexhaustible Treasure (1907) gives a sense of the
profound difference made in her life by her access to religious faith through revelation.
Autobiography is not her chosen genre, and though she remains to the end intellectually

36
See Freidrich Max Müller, Auld Lang Syne (2nd series), My Indian Friends (London: Longmans,
Green & Co., 1899), p.127, cited in Pandita Ramabai Through Her Own Words, ed. Meera Kosambi
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.14.
 166

confident, even arrogant, she wrote only to achieve specific social ends, not to display or
even apply her remarkable learning. The principal achievements of her extraordinary life
are two-fold: first, the example of the life itself, as iconic of an educated, active, public-
spirited Indian womanhood, deeply engaged with women’s issues; and second, her work
of rehabilitating widows and famine victims. For the wider social reform movements of
her day, and for feminist scholarship today, her conversion and her insistence on re-
interpreting the course of her whole life through her faith remain obstacles in the way of
an adequate understanding of that life.

In some ways Ramabai’s history is like that of the learned women humanists of
Renaissance Europe: trained in Sanskrit, logic and interpretation of the scriptures, she is
compelled to struggle against the tensions produced by this singularity. Importantly, she
does indeed find a vocation, even a mission, in her lifelong project of helping and
educating women, especially widows. Yet the clear trajectory of this mission is overlaid
by its cost in terms of alienation from the community of her birth as well as, to some
extent, the Christian church into which she was received. In early writings such as the
Stri dharma niti, written in Marathi, or in later Christian pieces, she shows herself willing
to moderate what must have been a fierce personal sense of women’s worth and
independence to the demands of conventional morality, custom, or religious prescription.
While her life and her work are exceptional by any standards, they cannot be described as
inaugurating a new birth for Marathi – or for Indian – women. In fact she is a lonely,
even uncomfortable presence in the social reform movements and the proto-feminism of
the nineteenth century.

In 1889, Rabindranath Tagore was present at a public lecture given by Pandita

Ramabai, an occasion marred by the jeers of some men in the crowd who cut the speaker
short. Rabindranath’s unease with Ramabai’s claim that women were in all respects the
equals of men is evident in a letter he wrote shortly after to Bharati o balak, a journal
edited by his elder sister Swarnakumari, in which he urged that women were designed by
nature to care for their families as housewives. Swarnakumari herself contested his views
strongly in the next issue, writing, ‘I cannot understand how the correspondent has
 167

determined that women have the power to receive and understand ideas, but lack the
power to create.’37

As Ramabai writes in The High Caste Hindu Woman (1887), orthodox Hindu
opinion forbade women of the nineteenth century to read and write on the grounds that
this would lead to their husbands’ deaths and their own widowhood:
Girls of nine and ten when recently out of school and given in marriage are
wholly cut off from reading and writing, because it is a shame for a young
woman or girl to hold a paper or book in her hand or to read in the presence of
others in her husband’s house. It is a popular belief among high caste women
that their husbands will die if they should read or should hold a pen in their
fingers. The fear of becoming a widow overcomes their hunger and thirst for
knowledge. Moreover the little wives can get but scanty time to devote to self-
culture; any one fortunate enough to possess the desire or able to command
the time is in constant fear of being seen by her husband’s relatives. Her
employment cannot long be kept secret where every one is on the lookout, and
when discovered she is ridiculed, laughed at, and even commanded by the
elders to leave this nonsense.38
It is precisely towards the creation of this space of writing that the earliest personal
narrative in Bengali prose, Rassundari Devi’s Amar jiban (My Life)39 is directed.
Rassundari’s modern editors claim that her work is the first Bengali autobiography,
whether by a man or a woman; with some qualifications; and excepting Bhakti literature,
this claim may very well be correct. According to her own careful account, Rassundari
was born in 1810; the first part of Amar jiban, consisting of sixteen compositions
(rachana) was, she claims, published in 1868, the year her husband died (she was
widowed at the age of 58). The second part, consisting of fifteen compositions, appears to
have been added to the first some thirty years later, when she was eighty-seven (in 1897:
Rassundari counts her age by the Bengali reckoning, describing her self as fifty-nine at
the time of her widowhood and eighty-eight at the time the entire work was published).

37
My translation of the passage as cited by Prasantakumar Pal, Rabijibani, vol. 3 (Kolkata: Ananda
Publishers, 1987), p.118.
38
The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887), in Pandita Ramabai Through Her Own Words, p.173.
39
See Rassundari Debi, Amar jiban, in. Atmakatha, ed. N. Jana et al., vol 1 (Calcutta: Ananya
Prakashan, 1981). Many other personal narratives of Bengali women have been recovered and printed
over the past two decades. On Rassundari, see also Tanika Sarkar, Words to Win. The Making of Amar
jiban, A Modern Autobiography (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999).
 168

No copy of the 1868 printing of the first part appears to have survived, but it is
important to note the author’s insistence on that date and the event it commemorates, her
entry into print. Each composition is preceded by a devotional poem expressive of her
intense Vaishnavite faith in a loving deity. The compositions in the first part are longer
and more directly autobiographical; in the second part, written when the author was
eighty-seven, religious devotion predominates. Many early personal narratives of Bengali
women are dictated reminiscences; Rassundari’s work is, so her editors claim, entirely
from her own hand. And its most important feature may be its entry into print,
shepherded by a preface written by Rabindranath’s elder brother Jyotirindranath Thakur
(Tagore), in which he expresses an admiration for the writer which is founded on her
being an ‘ideal woman: as skilled in housework as she is religious and devoted to God.’40

It is difficult to convey adequately the personal struggle that lay behind

Rassundari’s writing her own life: for she was by no means one of those ‘enlightened’
Hindu, Brahmo, or Christian women who join issue with their compatriots in the later
nineteenth century, encouraged to write by their husbands and families. She was born in a
small village in East Bengal and was not taught to read or write, though she sometimes
sat with the boys during their lessons in an outer room of her parents’ house that served
as the village school (pathshala). She was married at the relatively late age of twelve, the
delay largely owing to the anxious and protective love of her widowed mother. She had
not known her father and reports how, as a child hearing herself called her father’s
daughter, she did not recognize the name and was terrified that she was someone else, not
her mother’s daughter. She was not ill-treated by her in-laws, but had to take charge of
the household after her mother-in-law lost her eyesight when Rassundari was fourteen. A
considerable part of Amar jiban is about the immense burden of this housework,
beginning before dawn and continuing till late into the night. It involved cooking for the
entire extended family and all its dependants, and attending to the needs of her husband,
relatives and eleven children, the first born when Rassundari was eighteen and the last
when she was forty-one. Though, as a well-to-do landed family, they had many servants,
the servants belonged to the outer house and did not serve in the seclusion of the inner
quarters, where, as the custom was, the mistress of the house did all the work.

40
See Amar jiban, p.3.
 169

Rassundari’s life is entirely shaped by this antahpur, by the private domestic space of the
household: much of it is physically spent in the kitchen.

This constriction of space, mental as well as physical, exists in a complementary

relation with Rassundari’s extreme timidity and shyness, which constitute an important
and recurring feature of her narrativization of her own subjectivity. The word that
Rassundari repeatedly uses to describe her own feelings is ‘fear’. She is constantly afraid
– of other children, of other people, of social censure, of being looked at, of being talked
about, of being talked to.41 She is even afraid of being seen by her husband’s horse, and
retreats into the inner rooms when it comes into the courtyard to be fed.42 Looking back
at this earlier self, Rassundari as writer finds it difficult to explain: even her children, she
realizes, have little understanding of the prohibitory shrinkings that formed their mother’s
life. Almost uniquely, she is conscious of the confining space of the ‘ghar’ (room, house)
as being constituted both by external restriction and proscriptive fear or ‘shame’. From
the passage in which she describes her marriage, she calls herself a ‘caged bird, a fish
caught in the net’;43 but trapped as she is in the narrow sphere of the domestic, she is
confined too by the contours of her own sensibility. In this impulse always to withdraw,
retreat, endure privation, Rassundari describes herself as having internalized almost
completely the strict social restrictions placed upon married women in the antahpur,
making them part of a nature which male biographers found easy to approve as fitting the
virtuous Hindu wife.

Another strategy Rassundari forms for survival is her faith in God. It was her
mother, she tells us, who told her to pray to the almighty whenever she was afraid. This
lesson of childhood becomes for her like a magic charm which can protect her, and if
repeated often enough, give meaning to her privations. Rassundari’s faith, conveyed in
her addressing much of her self-history to God, is extraordinary and moving. For her it is
also the ultimately unconfined space, the perspective of infinitude, within which her
struggles and privations will assume their own value and proportion. Amar jiban is
constructed around these two poles of the self: the constricted, painfully burdened,
physically exhausting life of the kitchen and the household, and communion with a deity

41
Ibid., p.6.
42
Ibid., p.33.
43
Ibid., p.17.
 170

whose love is infinite and emancipatory. The poles are not spatially distinct: they exist
within the same domestic geography, the one always capable of being superimposed
upon the other.

The major endeavour of Rassundari’s life, the struggle that informs her
autobiographical self-representation, is learning to read and write. It is a struggle carried
on for a considerable part of her adult life like guerrilla warfare: occasional forays, retreat
and consolidation. The conservative prohibitions against women’s education, the fear of
censure, the fear of widowhood, the lack of access to books, the impossibility of voicing
her desire: all of these contribute to making silence and stealth Rassundari’s only
weapons. But in its own way her obsession is as intense and irrational as that of the little
girl named Uma in Rabindranath Tagore's short story written in the 1890s, ‘Khata’ (The
Exerecise-Book).44 Rassundari describes how she steals a page of her husband’s
Chaitanya-bhagavad when one day he leaves it outside the kitchen. She abstracts a
palmyra-leaf on which her son has been writing the alphabet. Hiding these in the kitchen,
she secretly compares the letters, trying to recall those ‘letters of the mind’45 which have
remained in her memory of the boys’ lessons she overheard as a child. It is a slow and
almost impossibly frustrating process. ‘Like a thief I am captive,’ she says, ‘just because
I am a woman. Is learning a crime?’46 She is twenty-five when she learns to read the
Chaitanya-Bhagavad, in moments snatched from housework, in the kitchen or in her
room where her sisters-in-law cannot see her. She is past forty before she learns to write,
since, as she explains, to write you need so many things: paper, a quill, an inkstand,
someone to instruct you. How could she get these things without someone coming to
know about it?

In fact Rassundari’s family, when they do come to know about it, offer no
opposition. She says little about her husband, absent though influential through most of
her narrative; but her widowed sisters-in-law are supportive in the inner quarters when
they realize that she can read. Much later it is one of her sons who gets her all the
material she needs to commence writing – paper, ink, quills. But in fact no one actually

44
See my English translation ‘Exercise Book’ in Selected Short Stories, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri
(Oxford Tagore Translations, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). For the original Bengali text, see
Rabindra-rachanabali, vol.18 (Kolkata: Visva-Bharati, BE 1351 / CE 1944), pp.317-23.
45
Amar jiban, p.30.
46
Ibid.
 171

helps her: her sons do not teach her to write, and it is only after complex adjustments of
social space, including moving to stay with one of her sons where it is not she who must
manage the household, that she can begin to teach herself.

How does Rassundari produce so complicated, detailed, personally moving and

metaphysically self-justifying an autobiography after so late and inadequate a beginning?
Even the Bengali prose she writes is an astonishing achievement, given the absence in her
time of a formal written style. There is little contemporary evidence to place beside
Rassundari’s own careful accounting of dates and times: her life is unrecorded except by
her. What she achieves by this singular record is an identity that comes across as formed
in and by the very act of writing: through the taking of an impossible risk, a gamble
unsuited to her ‘nature’. Against the grain of her housewifely self-sacrifice and religious
piety, so much part of the ideal image of Bengali womanhood, she expresses through
writing a personality resenting the burdens and privations of marriage and domesticity –
the forced seclusion, the pains of labour, the absence of solace – and, later, the injustice
of the rituals and attitudes that attend her widowhood. To write this self is not to right its
wrongs; but in a qualified and incomplete way, it is certainly a kind of triumph.

In important ways, Ramabai and Rassundari help to tie up the tangled,

complicated threads of reform on the one hand, and textuality on the other: the two
strands that produce what we call the Bengal Renaissance. Yet each constitutes an
exception. There is nothing in contemporary Bengali prose to match the singularity of
Rassundari’s life-record: all the more because it so fully, with such complexity,
articulates the process of acquiring the tools of self-representation, of the conversion of
life into mimetic capital. It is this conversion that allows women to access the textuality
that lies around them and that, so we are told, constitutes the nineteenth-century Bengal
Renaissance. To acquire the word, to become not simply sakshara (lettered) but
jitakshara (winner of letters),47 as Rassundari describes herself, is what opens up the
possibility of a renaissance for women. Perhaps, on evidence, this renaissance was not
here, not now, and not for them; but it was to come.

47
Ibid., p.29.