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82 / JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND AESTHETICS

An Indomitable Urge to Penetrate the World of Words:

Reading Amar Jiban in South Asian Context

SRIJA SANYAL

Born into a society vehemently opposed to female education, Rassundari Devi (1810-

1899) was a woman of her own kind at the time. The proposed essay intends to

discuss Devi's autobiographical account, Amar Jiban (My Life, 1876), in the context of the

broader South Asian framework and how it stood not only as a testament of the women's

position at the time but also reflected on the struggles that women were to undertake in

the time that followed. Being the first ever full-length autobiography in the Bangla literary

space, Amar Jiban received praise and warm welcome, especially so as it was authored by

a woman with extremely restricted economic means in a time when female literacy was

not even a spared thought. Apart from this fact, what makes the autobiography a valuable

treasure is its commentary on the changing times of the then Bengal and the author's

own viewpoints on the same. The paper will primarily focus on this narrative that runs

through the text, which, at that point of time, echoed the voice of dissent in a

heteronormative environment characterized by imperialism and reigned by the upholders

of patriarchy. The paper further extends its cynosure to the realm of a fierce struggle of

creating an identity of her own, as undertaken by Devi herself in her lifetime, and her

enduring experiences as a reflection of the striving of women writers in the time to come.

The paper shall culminate the discussion by tracing the economic and social

vulnerabilities, and socio-religious-political constructs behind these vulnerabilities, which

restrict women's voices while situating Devi's struggle as a universal one rather than

individual in wider South Asian narrative of both women writers and their writings.

Introduction

The urge to write is a natural one, which, surprisingly and strangely, like many other

aspects, has always been restricted to the menfolk. This is perhaps the foremost challenge

that a "writer with the female gender" has to face while attempting to penetrate an area

which has predominantly been a male one. This becomes quintessentially explicit when

one notices the paucity of autobiographies of women in the literary canon, as transcribing

experiences of a woman's life has often been deemed as unnecessary as her existence itself.

Meenakshi Malhotra in her book Representing Self, Critiquing Society: Selected Lifewritings by

Women, wonders whether autobiographies are always gendered and argues that texts are

always gender-marked, i.e., the gender of the writer or subject is perceptible and can be

discerned through the writing. This is not to say that the act of writing is biologically

determined or to say that there is a distinct and discernible feminine style. But, as Virginia

Woolf (1882-1941) argues that the stress falls differently with a woman (Woolf, Orlando).

This essay intends to discuss Devi's autobiographical account, Amar Jiban (My Life,

1876), in the context of the broader South Asian framework to explore how it not only

stood as a testament of the women's position of the time but also how it reflected the

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 43.3 Autumn 2020 [Supplement 82-90]

© 2020 Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute, India

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struggles that women were to undertake at the time that followed. Being the first ever

full-length autobiography in the Bangla literary space, Amar Jiban received praise and

warm welcome, especially so as it was authored by a woman with extremely restricted

economic means at a time when female literacy was not even a spared thought. However,

what makes the autobiography a valuable treasure is its commentary on the changing

times of the then Bengal and the author's own viewpoints on the same. The narrative

that runs through the text, echoed the voice of dissent in a heteronormative environment

characterized by imperialism and reigned by the upholders of patriarchy. Devi's writing

expressive of the subdued female voice thereby depicts the fierce struggle of creating an

identity of her own, very much reminiscent of her personal experiences, and her enduring

journey as a reflection of the striving of women writers in the time to come.

Gender, Race, and Class: Bengal and India In South Asian Narratives

A recurring theme that South Asian women writers have consistently been exploring

is the doubly marginalization of women. The situation aptly reflects Spivak's attempts to

question the ability of the subaltern to speak as the women writer's from the region are

marginalized not only because of their gender but also of the class hierarchy established

by the first-world countries, which effectively dismisses any account of third-world

narratives. In line with this, there undoubtedly exists a significance of women's life

narratives for feminist theory. As there exists no universal sisterhood among women,

there remains no universal category of women when discussing women's life narratives.

Therefore, the cultural assumptions underlying the writings of a white middle-class

woman would be different from those underpinning the writings of working-class Jewish

women or the life narratives of newly educated Indian women (Malhotra). Furthermore,

as Amartya Sen have stressed (Sen), the bases of identity in the modern world is not

singular but multiple. The self, therefore, as it unfolds in women's life narratives is not

fixed but fluid and flexible (Arneil). As propounded by Lacan in his theory of the mirror

phase, the identity is never entire or whole but is always partial and process. Any sense

of wholeness or autonomy is a misrecognition. Moreover, the life narratives of many

women amply demonstrate the point made by Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) in The

Second Sex (1949) that gender is purely a social construction. The process of this

construction, as represented in both life narratives and autobiographical fiction, focuses

on the childhood of the autobiographical subject as crucial and formative.

In the South Asian context, there were many women in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth century India, especially in the Bengal province, who transcribed their

childhood days in the ink and paper. As Bengal, along with the Madras presidency, were

among the forerunners in receiving reformist tides toward women's education, they were

also witness to a proliferating print culture. Certain common elements, such as a sense

of the carefree nature of childhood, unencumbered by the bonds which were to tie women

down in their later life, run extensively through these narratives. In Rassundari Devi's

Amar Jiban, she relates her heart-wrenching separation from her mother, which, in a

way, also resonate (to a great extent) the several pages in the novel Subarnalata (1967),

where there is nothing but immense pain that stretches between Subarnalata and her

mother, Satyaboti. Written by Ashapurna Devi (1909-1995), a pivotal name in the Bengali

literary space for women writings, was a forerunner in presenting the domestic world of

the Bengali women through the might of her pen. Although not a transcriber of

autobiography, through Subarnalata, Devi somehow echoes what Rassundari Devi echoes

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several years earlier in her form of writing. Dominated by an acute sense of nostalgia

and loss, the narrative is heavily agonized with respect to outlining an all-women

experience. While childhood is narrated in many life writings by men, they are seldom

marked by this sense of loss or pain as they are in women's life writings (Malhotra). In

Amar Jiban, Devi further narrates her helplessness on not being able to visit her dying

mother, "I was like a bird in a cage, an oil-presser's bullock " (Tharu and Lalita). She, like

many other writers, bemoans her fate of being born a girl: "Why was I ever born a woman?

Shame on my life! A mother is the most affectionate person in the world, the representative of God

on earth – and I could not even be of any use to her. My grief knew no bounds. If I were a son I

would have flown directly to my mother's bedside. But I am helpless. I am a caged bird"

(Chatterjee). This trope of loss is manifested even in the writings of prominent and affluent

women belonging from the first-world. For instance, Beauvoir wrote of her mother's

death (and) said that in spite of the pain it was an easy one: an upper-class death. Outside,

for the poor, dying is a different matter (Steedman).

The life narratives of women can be witnessed as powerful social documents, as well

as a testimonial to the history of the 'fairer sex'. They thus hold great archival value as

they offer micro-histories by focusing on the individual narratives amidst the broader

framework, which, consequently, draws a wide variety of shades on the canvas as each

of the narratives stand out distinctively from the other despite being dominated by certain

common elements binding them together. According to Malhotra, narratives that emerge

from a historically deprivileged perspective have greater epistemological validity than

knowledge that emerges from a privileged position and perspective (Malhotra). This

resonate the fact that those in a position of privilege are unlikely or at least less likely to

experience caste, class or gender-based oppression as compared to those who have been

traditionally subjected to such discrimination, which often have a violent history

associated with them. Therefore, it becomes imperative that the writings chronicling

such experiences will bear the ramifications of agonized real-life accounts and hence

will offer new insights into the question of identity. For instance, in the Indian context,

authors like Bama and Baby Kamble think of identity in terms of the community and not

in an individual or autonomous way. Instead, their subjectivity is produced in terms of

their subjection and subjugation, wherein the basis of this identity is collective and social

(Malhotra). This, consequently, also partially rejects the statement of individuality as a

necessary prerequisite for autobiography, thus ushering a sense of community or

solidarity. In line with this, women's autobiographies have also offered a critique of

rationality as a ruse of patriarchy. French feminists and feminist psycho-linguists, most

notably, Irigaray, have even critiqued language as patriarchal.

Amar Jiban: Documenting Women's Condition

Rassundari Devi's Amar Jiban is a document of the women's condition in South Asia in

general and in Bengal, in particular. In the autobiography, she uses her hard-earned, and

hard-won (to a great extent), literacy as a remarkable tool for self-discovery. And therefore,

it can be rightfully said that perhaps no other autobiography dramatizes the question of

women's access to language the way Amar Jiban does. The entire narrative that runs

throughout the text echoes the daring step that a woman in the 19th century undertook

towards penetrating the world of words, at a time when women's literacy was not even

a spared thought. Rassundari secretly learnt to read in a near-impossible circumstance

of the 'andarmahal' (inner chambers) at the age of twenty-five – this is possibly the only

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'noteworthy' event in her life, which was a daring departure in an otherwise humdrum

conventional domestic existence (Malhotra).

When western education was introduced in India in the early nineteenth century, the

first recipients were the middle-class boys and the men as it was perceived as a necessary

prerequisite for availing the opportunities offered by the colonial administration.

However, along with the west wind of education, what also ushered in was the wave of

reformist ideologies that attempted to uproot the dilapidated didactic. As Karlekar puts

it, a wide cross-section of individuals became concerned with women's emancipation,

and questions related to the function of the new education and how it could adapt to

other predominant requirements such as feminine seclusion, division of labor within

the home were hotly debated (Karlekar). Consequently, by the late nineteenth century,

most notably Bengal, along with Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, witnessed the

establishments of schools for women. However, the primary goal of the offered education,

largely, geared itself with the construction of the woman as a companion within the

institution of the marriage. In line with this, the women's education or 'strishiksha' was

being constructed in a context that was driven by the needs and interests of upper class/

caste males. Such an argument gets it fair representation in various works of Bangla

literature, which satirizes a woman who misuses her newly acquired literate status and

forsakes her domesticity, thus becoming a 'bibi' . Along with this existed the societally

ingrained fear of being widowed – a woman who knows to read is fated to be widowed.

It is this fear that Jyotirindranath Tagore (1849-1925) attempts to refute in his introduction

to Rassundari Devi's autobiography. At the same time, Tanika Sarkar's argument that "we

need to seek the impulse for 'strishiksha' more in the social understanding of Indian reformers

and of women themselves rather than any modernizing impulse of the colonial government"

(Sarkar, On Re-reading the Text), becomes quite significant in the context. For instance, as

she further asserts, when faced with a financial or political crisis, women's education seems

to have been one of the first casualties. In a nutshell, the idea of woman was constructed,

quite cleverly, through education, to represent the pure spiritual inner self as opposed to

the colonized public domain. For one, this metaphoric and metonymic relationship

between women and the 'uncolonized' spiritual domain of pure 'Indian' culture tended

to fix many emancipated and educated women into an ideological straitjacket where

they tended to ventriloquise and replicate their male counterparts (Malhotra).

Rassundari Devi's Amar Jiban , however, situates in a period prior to social reform and

is her aspiration to literacy forms the cynosure of the manuscript. Her God, Dayamadhab,

and her mother, become the two pillars of her experiences, structuring her identity

extensively. Married to a family where reading for women was a forbidden thought, her

desire to be lettered could only be nurtured in utmost secrecy. In Sixth Composition, she

recounts her desire to read was actually catalyzed by a dream in which she saw herself

reading Chaitanya Bhagawat: "One day I dreamt that I was reading the Chaitanya Bhagavata.

When I woke up I felt enthralled. I closed my eyes to go over the scene. It seemed that I was already

in possession of something precious. My body and my mind swelled with satisfaction. It was so

strange! I had never seen the book yet I had been reading it in my dream. For an illiterate person

like me, it would have been absolutely impossible to read such a difficult book. Anyhow I was

pleased that I was able to perform this impossible feat at least in a dream. My life was blessed! God

had at last listened to my constant appeals and had given me the ability to read in my dream"

(Rachel Fell McDermott). However, the onus of domestic sphere and child rearing was

such that she once went without food for days, as she recollects in Fifth Composition:

"… on many occasions I was forced to go without food ." Sarkar, in her translation of the text,

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titled Words to Win (1999) comments on this custom in the section on "Food and Eating

in the Woman's Life": "Amar Jiban establishes a very peculiar relationship between the

woman and the food she cooked and served", wherein women's consumption pattern

and hours both are severely restricted and also ignored, so much so that it becomes an

unaccounted event amidst the hullaballoo of the household chores. Yet, her words

represented not an isolated instance as women's responsibilities were strenuously

demanding within the domestic walls. Noted reformist Anandibai Karve (1866-1950),

also known to all as Baya Karve, writes in her autobiography Maze Puran (My Saga,

1944) that the responsibilities of running a household befell on her eleven year old

shoulders, wherein her duties were not limited to just cleaning the house or cooking the

food but also demanded an active involvement in religious rituals and their meticulous

preparation, while also participating in outdoor activities, including tending livestock

and supervising workers in the fields. This, in turn, effectively ensured that womenfolk

of the household, trapped within the domestic walls, had hardly any time or the energy

to pursue their academic or any other interests. The constraints were set upon the women

by social concepts of what is 'proper' and what is not, all situated within the four-walls

of the household, wherein 'she' is quintessential to its functioning yet invisible and the

most neglected element.

Tanika Sarkar points out that Rassundari, simultaneously, occupied "two very different

sites: that, of a conformist housewife in an orthodox family and of an early woman author,

engaged in the highly public audacious act of writing about her life" (Sarkar, Words to

Win: The Making of a Modern Autobiography). The relation between the two sites – and

identities – is highly problematic since literate women were assumed to be faced by

imminent widowhood, as previously mentioned. The autobiographical act in Rassundari's

case entailed at least, therefore, three sets of actual and potential transgressions. One

was the breaking of the taboo on reading and writing; the second was the implicit

interrogation of the private/public dichotomy; and the third was the choice of an idiom

devotion – within the space offered by Vaishnav "bhakti" as a choice of religious affiliation

– which permits, and thus opens up a terrain for the articulation of self and agency

(Malhotra). Interestingly, initiatives taken by her are also viewed as instances of divine

intervention. As Tanika Sarkar points out, it was as if the two levels – God's and devotee's

– were intertwined within a single narrative frame, interanimating each other (Sarkar,

On Re-reading the Text). However, as further stated by Malhotra, Rassundari's devotion,

ultimately, is a very private and individual matter. Quite intelligently, the marker of the

devotional trajectory that she adopts is not a ritual penance but something more

intellectual. It should be noted in this context that the forms of female worship, both as a

devotee and a deity, is expressed, and extensively geared, to the maintenance of the

existing social system – which, unquestionably refers to the well-being of the husbands/

household and the avoidance of widowhood – the ultimate hated and most feared moment

in a Hindu woman's life. However, Rassundari seems to view this upholding of the

prevalent social system and the onus of maintaining the ritualistic purity befalling on

women, with enough suspicion, especially because the prescribed roles are deriving from

the traditional mapping of a woman's life-cycle. Although moved by her first-pregnancy,

she later regrets the subsumation of all other aspects of identity into the role of a mother

(Malhotra). Similarly, she deconstructs and demystifies both the "iconic figure of feminine

nurture" and the maternal image by characterizing her service to the family idol, her

endless cooking and feeding as physically laborious work (Sarkar, Words to Win: The

Making of a Modern Autobiography), thus creating the space of 'reproductive labor'

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that is enforced rather than embraced as a fulfilling experience. In the Fourth Composition,

she refers to the 'caged bird' repeatedly, echoing her inner self enforced to reside within

a restricted space: "Only God will understand the predicament I was in – nobody else can have

any idea. Even now I remember those days. The caged bird, the fish caught in the net." In another

instance, she recollects, "people put birds in cages for their own amusement. Well, I was like a

caged bird. And I would have to remain in this café for life. I would never be freed" (Chatterjee).

If the kitchen as a geographical space was a cage, so was her body, which was subjected

to bear children almost every year, as she chronicles in the Fifth Composition: " my first

child was born when I was eighteen and the last when I was forty-one. God only known what I

had to go through during those twenty-three years. Nobody else had any idea either" (Chatterjee).

It is only when she reaches middle age that Rassundari experiences a kind of relief

following the cessation of the reproductive cycle, which, she again attributes to the divine

intervention and expresses her gratitude toward the divinity. As Malhotra reflects upon

her this state, praising God for the perfect fit between the body and its changing functions,

she defamiliarized the female life cycle – the familiar body is made strange exotic and

holy, the sign and site of God's handiwork. In the version of herself Rassundari hence

creates the absences, silences and erasures, with an acute sense of 'lack of lamentation',

which becomes one of the highlights of the narrative. It seems that her life writing 'resists'

her lived life more than it reflects it (Sarkar, On Re-reading the Text). She herself, thus,

establishes her identity as a wife, mother, and a householder, as a less significant one

than Rassundari as a Vaishnava devotee and emergent neophyte (Malhotra). With such a

stance, it is her spiritual quest that she aligns with her desire to be familiarize with letters

that is posited as real, which ultimately offers, in her views, a possibility for articulating

self and agency: "How amazing! Who has made me fearless? Now I fear nothing" (Sarkar,

Words to Win: The Making of a Modern Autobiography). Also, the writing of spiritual

autobiography wrenches her out of her lonely bound context and puts her in the category

of devotes of a higher order. Hagiography and autobiography flow into each other so

that there is no sense of disjunction in the last sections of the autobiography that describe

events from the various incarnations of Vishnu (Sarkar, Words to Win: The Making of a

Modern Autobiography). Here, religion is therefore used as an idiom to offer a space for

the articulation of self, to offer a sense of stability and continuity to a self which is often

discontinuous and fragmented. The narrative has a modern quality of self-absorption

and reflexivity as it is her religion that offers and emotional anchor and a structural

frame for exploring selfhood (Malhotra).

Critique: Of and By the Text

Rassundari's initial illiteracy could not stop her from materializing a forbidden desire

that she longed harbored within herself, which she does by creating a 'Self' to objectify it

in her autobiography – a space of her own to narrate not only her own experiences as an

individual but also as a part of the bigger whole/community, i.e., the then society.

Structure-wise and stylistically, each entry of the autobiography is preceded by a verse

composition addressed to Dayamadhab – her supreme lord and underlines the distance

and the difference between the writing self and the written self (Sarkar, Words to Win:

The Making of a Modern Autobiography). Once she locates her-'self' within the narrative,

Rassundari employs the duality to pen down with both honesty and objectivity. For

instance, her transformation from being a docile housewife on the one hand, and at the

same time, unveiling the society that prefers to keep its women chained to the drudgery

of housework goes hand in hand to a great extent. Residing within this society that denied

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her literacy and glorified her role as a `devoted home maker' and that of a nurturer, she

ultimately achieves self-actualization in the midst of the various conflicts in her life

through her writing as she develops and experiences the power of words. There remain

various paragraphs where she details about her disapproval of the prevalent norms and

how they restrict not only her but the feminine plight from growing as an individual

being: "It would have been most shameful to refer to my eating in public " (Chatterjee). Asking

for food was highly disapproved and ascribed to shame in the nineteenth century Bengal

– something that women, right from a young age were diligently taught. This was so

ingrained in the psyche of women that they were regimented to ignore their nutrition

and love for food. She further goes on to reveal that the sheer lack of aid for sharing the

domestic responsibilities compelled her more often than not to go without food for days,

as she records that there used to be no one to help her with the chores in the inner

quarters except herself. As per the custom, she was ladened with not only the domestic

chores of the 'andarmahal' but also the child rearing, which was and still is to a great

extent, an exclusive periphery for the women in the sense that the responsibility majorly

befalls women. Her words, "… I had no time to think about my own health" as a consequence

of missed meals consecutively for days because of the pressure of the work is both simple

yet disturbing to read. The tenure of responsibilities was so strenuous that it used to be

next to impossible for a single person to execute all, that too with perfection. And yet, the

round-the-clock routine that Rassundari herself was subjected to reflected the greater

picture of what the life of the women in general was in the then Bengal: "I even started

cooking before they were up… Then I had to make offerings to the family deity and get ready to

prepare the meals for the rest of the family. I had to cook quite a lot – about twelve seers of rice for

each meal. The master of the house had to eat his meal of rice just after he had bathed in the

morning. He would not eat anything else. So I had to cook specially for him first. In the next

round I cooked for the entire family. So it used to be about four in the afternoon before the cooking

was done" (Chatterjee). Even in cases where a young woman was the head of a household

she often was deprived of proper food. She would be so laden with household chores

and the number of children to look after that there would be no time left for her to have

lunch or dinner (Banerjee).

The process of writing her autobiography helped Rassundari Devi to search for her-

"self" in the society and culture while offering a chance to critique the then society from

a feminist lens. The prevalent system's disapproval of women's education is something

that she reflects upon in the text, something that is perpetuated by fellow women who

acted as mouthpiece and active agents of the patriarchy: "People used to despise women of

learning. How unfortunate those women were, they said. They were no better than animals… In

fact, older women used to show a great deal of displeasure if they saw a piece of paper in the hands

of a woman." She further goes on to chronicle, " wasn't it a matter to be regretted, that I had to

go through all this humiliation just because I was a woman? Shut up like a thief, even trying to

learn was considered an offense. It is such a pleasure to see the women today enjoying so much

freedom. These days parents of a single girl child take so much care to educate her. But we had to

struggle so much just for that. That like that I have learned is only because God did me the

favor… In those days people considered the education of women to be wrong. Even now we come

across some who are enemies of education. The very word excites their displeasure" (Chatterjee).

Her efforts crossing great lengths just to educate herself calls for a special attention indeed

while reading the text, especially in the twenty first century where the situation has

drastically undergone transformation for women – for both better and the worse.

However, as Rassundari, in Sixth Composition points out, "one needs a lot of things if one

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is to write: paper, pen, ink, ink-pot and so on" and immediately sets the tone for the reader

for Virginia Woolf's (1882-1941) celebrated and significant essay A Room of One's Own

(1929), which also reflects on what exactly a woman needs if she wishes to write down

her thoughts – a room of her own! As Tanika Sarkar argues in her essay On Re-reading

the Text, Amar Jiban addresses the problems beyond those that male reformers and

orthodoxy were debating. Those latter related to education of women, the abolition of

sati, the legalization of widow remarriage, a higher age of consent and the possibility of

a higher age of marriage or the right to divorce. Rassundari does talk about education at

great lengths, but her other major concerns remain very different, one not frontally

addressed by reformers: patrilocality, housework, single-handed raising of infants, the

humiliations that surround widowhood (Sarkar, On Re-reading the Text) – things that

are innately intimate, thus forming the micro elements of the macro narrative of women's

life writings. At the same time, she is somewhat sounding both envious and approved of

what is happening to the new-age women, who are having it rather an easy access to the

basic that she had to struggle for so much. This duality might be because of the fact that

she must design her primary identity, above all, as that of the good wife, - an identity

without which her transgression will not be shown to have gone against the grain of her

very being – she cannot link herself up within open critiques and proposals for change

(Sarkar, On Re-reading the Text), and hence, the need for the divine intervention as a

trope that justifies the transgression. Delinked, her tone is what Virginia Woolf would

describe as "special pleading", a characteristic of much of women's writing. And which

Steedman elaborates: "To be resentful and angry in small ways is one form of

resistance…However, it is not often called resistance: its more common name is

complaint". Noted author, critic and professor Nandita Basu's work in this regard becomes

significant as she highlights the internalization of social pressure by Rassundari that acts

against her aspiration to literacy as Amar Jiban does not directly enter into the larger

debates on women's education which were circulating in the public arena by the mid-

nineteenth century, something that is resonated by Tanika Sarkar as well. Rassundari has

been very firm in her criticism of her time when women were not allowed to read and

write even if they had leisure. In those days, women were supposed to wait on the head

of the family with bowed heads. Rassunari's comments that women were not supposed

to do anything but housework. This was especially true of young brides who had to

wear very long veils while doing housework inside the house, and were strictly instructed

not to talk to adult makes even if they were member of the family. Only then would she

prove herself a good daughter-in-law. Men, and women too, in this would kept on

criticizing the idea of women's education (for the idea that had arrived), which they

lamented would unsettle the status quo in this matter which was perfectly acceptable to

them. They thought that once educated, women would start doing the work meant for

men and the traditional bhadralok would lose his caste. What would a woman do with

education they asked – go and earn money? The idea was horrifying. Even Rassundari,

when she refers to it, does not question the reason for this horror; on the contrary, she

argues that learning brings other blessings too, and is not be necessarily connected with

the earning of money (Basu) for the concept of women's economic liberation was an

alien one and hence the fear of the unknown directed the conscience of the masses as if

warning them of the doomsday. Basu's essay also explicates how Rassundari confers

legitimacy on her "transgressive" act by attributing the human drama and her desire to

read to divine intervention. Thus, she disconnects herself totally from the satirical figure of

the "Memsahib " or "bibi " ridiculed so often in the contemporary popular culture (Malhotra).

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Conclusion

Rassundari Devi's writing was not simply an attempt to express the female voice but

goes much beyond it. Much of her concerns about the situation of women, which

anticipated the concerns raised in modern European feminist movement, such as the

potential transgression entailed in speaking about the taboo of women's access to

education, interrogating the dichotomy existing private and the public space of women

and their socio-political marginalization marked her attempt to challenge and subvert

the patriarchal hegemony of the nineteenth century society.

Ronin Institute, USA

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Aurell, Jaume. Theoretical Perspectives on Historians' Autobiographies: From Documentation to

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• Jaume Aurell

E. H. Carr wrote, "study the historian before you begin to study the facts." This book approaches the life, work, ideas, debates, and the context of key 20th- and 21st-century historians through an analysis of their life writing projects viewed as historiographical sources. Merging literary studies on autobiography with theories of history, it provides a systematic and detailed analysis of the autobiographies of the most outstanding historians, from the classic texts by Giambattista Vico, Edward Gibbon and Henry Adams, to the Annales historians such as Fernand Braudel, Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, to Marxist historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and Annie Kriegel, to postmodern historians such as Carolyn Steedman, Robert A. Rosenstone, Carlos Eire, Luisa Passerini, Elisabeth Roudinesco, Gerda Lerner and Sheila Fitzpatrick, and to "interventional" historians such as Geoff Eley, Jill Ker Conway, Natalie Davis and Gabrielle Spiegel. Using a comparative approach to these texts, this book identifies six historical-autobiographical styles: humanistic, biographic, ego-historical, monographic, postmodern, and interventional. By privileging historians' autobiographies, this book proposes a renewed history of historiography, one that engages the theoretical evolution of the discipline, the way history has been interpreted by historians, and the currents of thought and ideologies that have dominated and influenced its writing in the 20th and 21st centuries.

New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1992

• Bama
• Karukku

Bama. Karukku. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1992. Print.

Gender in Food: Food Habits of Bengali Women

• Tupur Banerjee

Banerjee, Tupur. "Gender in Food: Food Habits of Bengali Women." Sahapedia.

Autobiography of Rashsundari Debi: Some Comments on the Text and its Translation

• Nandita Basu

Basu, Nandita. "Autobiography of Rashsundari Debi: Some Comments on the Text and its Translation." Malhotra, Meenakshi (Ed.). Representing Self, Critiquing Society: Selected Lifewritings by Women. Delhi: Worldview Publications, 2016. 176-188. Print.

A Very Easy Death. London: Penguin

• Simon Beauvoir
• De

Beauvoir, Simon De. A Very Easy Death. London: Penguin, 1966. Print. -. The Second Sex. London: Harmondsworth, 1949. Print.

From Amar Jiban (My Life)

• Enakshi Chatterjee

Chatterjee, Enakshi. "From Amar Jiban (My Life)." Devi, Rassundari. Amar Jiban. Kolkata: Writers Workshop, 1999. Print.

Print. Kamble, Baby. The Prisons We Broke

• Luce Irigaray

Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Cornell University Press, 1985. Print. Kamble, Baby. The Prisons We Broke. New Delhi: Zubaan, 1986. Print.

Maharshi Karve Stree Shiksha Sansthan

• Anandibai Maze Karve
• Puran

Karve, Anandibai. Maze Puran. Maharshi Karve Stree Shiksha Sansthan, 1944. Print.

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348919823_An_Indomitable_Urge_to_Penetrate_the_World_of_Words_Reading_Amar_Jiban_in_South_Asian_Context

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