Gendered Journeys: Hariprabha Takeda’s Travelogue A Bengali Woman’s Voyage to Japan (1915) and Other Writings

Abstract

Hariprabha Takeda’s intimate first person account of her voyage to Japan was first published in 1915 from Dhaka, titled Bongomohilar Japan Jatra (A Bengali Woman’s Voyage to Japan). She was married to a Japanese entrepreneur in Dhaka and the journey was undertaken to meet her husband’s family. Without knowing a word of Japanese and against the misgivings of her family and friends, Hariprabha Takeda embarks on this travel that is both a discovery of a new land and of herself. On board the ship that takes her on an arduous journey across the oceans, Takeda keeps a journal about what she sees and the places that she visits. Subsequently, she visits Japan again during the World War II that results in another memoir called Juddho Jorjorito Japane (In War-ravaged Japan) that vividly describes her experiences of living in Tokyo during the American bombardment. The paper looks at the ways Hariprabha Takeda’s travels enable her to assess national and cultural formulations that govern gendered experiences as she seeks to understand and compare Japanese and Indian society at the turn of the twentieth century. Belonging to the Brahmo Samaj, Hariprabha Takeda is greatly curious about Japanese life and culture. Her first memoir, especially, is replete with the domestic and social dynamics of women’s lives both in Japan and in India as she looks at the cultural spheres that women occupy. Her remembrances are fraught with the ways in which she herself negotiates issues of language, identity and race to problematize her own gendered experiences of crossing the kala-pani.