Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular

Gender and Genre in Modern South Asia

Charu Gupta, Laura Brueck, Hans Harder, Shobna Nijhawan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000511185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This collection brings together nine essays, accompanied by nine short translations that expand the assumptions that have typically framed literary histories, and creatively re-draws their boundaries, both temporally and spatially. The essays, rooted in the humanities and informed by interdisciplinary area studies, explore multiple linkages between forms of print culture, linguistic identities, and diverse vernacular literary spaces in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. The accompanying translations—from Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and Urdu—not only round out these scholarly explorations and comparisons, but invite readers to recognise the assiduous, intimate, and critical labour of expanding access to the vernacular archive, while also engaging with the challenges—linguistic, cultural, and political—of rendering vernacular articulations of gendered experience and embodiment in English. Collectively, the essays and translations foreground complex and politicised expressions of gender and genre in fictional and non-fictional print materials and thus draw meaningful connections between the vernacular and literature, the everyday and the marginals, and gender and sentiment. They expand vernacular literary archives, canons and genealogies, and push us to theorise the nature of writing in South Asia.

Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular is a significant new contribution to South Asian literary history and gender studies, and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of History, Literature, Cultural Studies, Politics, and Sociology.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.

Female Mobility and Bengali Women's Travelogues in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Hans Harder

ABSTRACT

Pioneering women’s periodicals in Bengali in the second half of the nineteenth century eloquently deplore the social confinement of women. Contesting this paradigm of female immobility, travelogues written by Bengali women simultaneously start to appear in the pages of such journals as Bāmābodhinıī Patrikā, Bhāratıī, Antaḥpur, etc., from the 1860s onwards. Unlike the famous nineteenth-century Bengali travelogues by Krishnabhabini Das and Svarnakumari Debi, these other writings have only very recently drawn attention. After laying out the state of the art, I will first introduce two of the established travelogues. Thereafter I will look at these still largely unknown writings, measure their significance for a women’s public and the Bengali literary sphere, and evaluate their setting in terms of gender and class. Shorter and less spectacular, the accounts in these periodicals are nonetheless a significant body of literature. They furnish detailed insights into the travel conditions and social framework women in those days experienced, and amply bear witness to the literary sentiments travelling inspired.

Introduction

The following article traces travel narratives evolving from a social context that is openly denounced to be extremely hostile to travelling. This fundamental discrepancy is intriguing because it hints at the dynamics, the emotional investments and the practical burdens that encircled women’s travels in colonial Bengal. How do travelogues thrive in an environment that stereotypically perceived the situation of women in terms of confinement, restricted mobility and blocked vision? There is no better way to illustrate this ambience than to look at some randomly chosen quotations from a huge array of statements running through much of early Bengali women’s journalism. The anonymous author of the article, ‘Reforming Hindu Society’, in the pages of the periodical Baṅgamahilā in 1875 claims, for instance:

There are in our country great differences between men and women (baiṣamya) women don’t know what freedom is, whereas men do as they like; they have to live in dependence on men…. From their ninth or tenth year until advanced age, our women are confined in the inner chambers.¹

A few pages later in the same issue, a woman author called Mayasundari complains:

Women are not allowed to see anything. In Calcutta, a bridge over the Ganges has been constructed and the people have praised it so much. But hearing was all that was ordained for us…. If we can’t get education and see the wondrous scenery of the world, then there is little pleasure in our lives.²

This perception of female immobility still persisted a quarter of a century later. In a travelogue about Jharkhand in the pages of the journal Mahilā (1899), the anonymous male writer laments about Bengalis not travelling, particularly women:

No need to even talk about the [role of] women in that. They are secluded Indian women who don’t look at the sunlight, it is not their fault [that travelling is so rare]. What is their fault in how we are and how our society is?³

These quotes exemplify that mobility, or rather the lack of it, is one of the fundamental themes discussed in early Bengali women’s journalism, i.e. monthlies initially written mostly by men, and later also by women, for consumption by women. The confinement of Bengali women in the antaḥpur or andarˡmahal, the inner chambers, was equated with darkness and ignorance, stepping out of the house with enlightenment,⁴ and Western women with active roles in social life were set up in the periodicals as models to emulate from the very start.⁵

As the last-quoted anonymous writer suggests, travelling, regardless of gender, had not quite become a widespread social practice amongst Bengalis at the close of the nineteenth century. Despite what proponents of an outgoing, expansionist Greater Bengal of old such as Radha Kumud Mookerji (1884–1963) may have claimed,⁶ there is little evidence that the picture was different in earlier times—quite the reverse. Testimonies and narrations of journeys in the pre-colonial period are dispersed over genres like the Maṅgalˡkābyas, hagiographic literature and pilgrimage accounts, but they are very few and far between. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century did travelling gather pace and only then was travel literature popularised in Bengal.⁷ The incipient trend of travelling in the second half of the nineteenth century was in many ways an effect of the British colonial order and implied new kinds of vision and space-making. In Simonti Sen’s words, ‘colonialism marked the point of departure’ for a new kind of travelling that did nothing less than furnish the Bengalis with an ‘experience of modern subjectivity’.⁸ Sandeep Banerjee and Subho Basu, in their analysis of Himalaya travelogues by three prominent mid to end nineteenth-century (male) Bengali writers, also describe a transition in attitudes from a traditional sacred topography towards a secularised nationalist territorialisation.⁹

However, looking back from the late nineteenth century through the lens of our anonymous male author, this rather short recorded history of Bengali travelling appeared to be an overwhelmingly male affair. Roughly speaking, we would seem to be confronted with a scenario in which British men move between imperial centre, colonial centre and periphery, while colonised males (except for a few illustrious cases) stay in the colonial centre or periphery or move from the latter to the former. British women, on the other hand, start moving from imperial centre to colonial centre or periphery on a noticeable scale with the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), while colonised females remain mostly immobile.¹⁰ Such a situation would be neatly in sync with the discourse on (im)mobility encountered in the periodicals being investigated, and seems to have dominated the common imagination up until today.

On closer perusal, however, it becomes clear that this picture is only partial and needs a good deal of differentiation along both class lines and according to region. Mobility in a larger sense is not only about travelling but includes various forms of migration, amongst them regulated and coercive ones. Indentured labour, for instance, already going on in the 1830s, was a work regime that brought with it a coercive type of mobility that was often experienced as displacement. In the main, it was Indian men who were sent on work contracts to Mauritius, South Africa or the Caribbean, but women were also part of the indentured labour system as spouses, ayahs or workers.¹¹

As for more voluntary kinds of female mobility on the Indian subcontinent, those were still quite isolated events, all the more so when it came to journeys to overseas destinations. The 1880s in western India saw the spectacular travels of Anandibai Joshi (1865–87) and Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922), two Marathi women who travelled abroad on their own. Anandibai Joshi is famous for having been the first Indian woman to earn a degree in medicine from the United States of America. Pandita Ramabai, after itinerant years in rural India with her brother, became a writer and activist in her early twenties, converted to Christianity and spent years in Britain and America in Christian and socially-progressive circles. While in the USA (1886–88), she became a well-known public persona and speaker, and started writing her extensive Marathi-language book about America which appeared in 1889.¹² Turning to Bengal, the first woman who set foot on European ground was apparently Kamalmani, the daughter of Krishnamohan Bandyopadhyay, who accompanied her husband on a journey to England in 1859. A decade later, the Dutt family, with daughters Aru and young writer Toru, went to France and England, followed by others. In 1877, Jnanadanandini Debi with her three children was the first Bengali female to travel to England without a male companion. And in 1893, Kadambini Gangopadhyay was the first female medical practitioner (gynaecologist) from Bengal to go to England for training.¹³ None of these women, however, authored travelogues.

But others did, as travelling became more frequent and educated Bengali women started to travel both out...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Female Mobility and Bengali Women’s Travelogues in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
• 2 Masculine Vernacular Histories of Travel in Colonial India: The Writings of Satyadev ‘Parivrajak’
• 3 Malika Begum’s Mehfil: The Lost Legacy of Women’s Travel Writing in Urdu
• 4 Nationality and Fashionality: Hats, Lawyers and Other Important Things to Remember
• 5 Adoption in Hindi Fiction: Contesting Normative Understandings of Parenting and Parenthood in Late Colonial India
• 6 An Aesthetics of Isolation: How Pudumaippittan Gave Pre-Eminence to the Tamil Short Story
• 7 The LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) of Language: The Materialist Poetry of Arun Kolatkar and R.K. Joshi
• 8 ‘Justice’ in Translation
• 9 Mother Tongues—the Disruptive Possibilities of Feminist Vernaculars
• Appendix
• Index