Contaminating the Binaries: The Rhetoric of Resistance in Women’s Autobiographical Narratives in the Bamabodhini Patrika (1863-1922)

Abstract

The nineteenth century Bhadralak attempted to recast women and model them into the Bhadramahila (“respectable woman”). This was done as an attempt to establish themselves as a class and propagate the ideologies of liberal nationalism. I look at this recasting project through the reading of the Bamabodhini Patrika, a periodical for the upper-middle-class Bengali women started by Umesh Chandra Gupta in 1863. The Bhadralak introduced the antahpur education, which featured extensively in the Bamabodhini, as a mean to emancipate the women from the clutches of Hindu patriarchy. This project, however, was circumscribed by its own limitations. In analysing the serialized publications in the Bamabodhini Patrika (‘Gayanada, Sarala and Abala’ and ‘Strir Prati Swamir Upadesh, ‘Kanyar Prati Matar Upadesh’, and ‘Swami Strir Paraspar Sambandha’) I bring out how the Bhadralak tried to curb curiosity and tame female self-subjectivity. Therefore, in construction of the Bhadramahila, the Bhadralak reorganised some of the tenets of the older order of patriarchy and placed her in a newer and reformed patriarchy dictated by a distorted concept of ‘emancipation’. However, viewing the patrika solely in terms of hegemony is, reductionist and one-dimensional; it provided one of the first platforms for the self-expression of the women. Although the patrika’s strict editorial policies did not align with radical self-expression, towards the end of the nineteenth century and the twilight years of the Patrika the editorial policies were relaxed. The task I have undertaken in this dissertation is to collect the scattered voices of resistance and unpack them as challenges to the new formed patriarchal discourse. Periodicals like the Bamabodhini Patrika contaminated the public sphere with personal narratives of the Bhadramahila, and problematised the nineteenth century nationalists’ attempt to resolve the woman’s question. My reading further complicates the conclusions drawn by critics such as Partha Chatterjee regarding the dichotomies of the inner and the outer domain of nationalist discourse. His contention that women’s autonomous struggles were tucked away in the private tracts of autobiographies shall also be disproved by my thesis. Finally, I propose that the Bamabodhini Patrika offered a space for women’s writings to leak into the public sphere, and stands as a mean of obfuscation of lines that tried to neatly compartmentalize women’s resistance in the private