Negotiating the Stage and the World: The Life Writings of BinodiniDasi.

Abstract

At a time when it was not ‘respectable’ for women to act on a public stage, BinodiniDasi’s performances created quite a stir. Not only was she of the first actors on the Bengali stage, she was also one of the finest. Her autobiographies, Amar Katha (My Story) and Amar AbhinetriJibon (My Life as an Actress) were published in 1910 and 1924/25 respectively. The necessity for her chronicle her life, arose out of her need for acceptance, wherein she constantly judged herself against a prevalent societal value system. Dasi was born into a house of prostitutes and her identity had always haunted her, even in the public sphere, in spite of her success. Her autobiographies have an overarching tone of self-pity. Her desire to fit in, into a society that had set norms of “propriety”, in fact, pushes her to look for redemption, which comes through, with the intervention of an almost saint like figure, Ramakrishna Paramhansa, who redeems her of all her sins. She ceases to be a ‘patita’, or the fallen one. However, one cannot ignore the fact that, Binodini writes her autobiographies because she is famous. The foreknowledge of the fact that her autobiographies will be accepted went hand in hand with her popularity, and she negotiates the power of this popularity alongside, the society’s strict value system, to write an account of her life, located amidst the politics of class, gender, identity, the public and the private, purity/propriety and the ‘home’ and the ‘world’. This paper will attempt to read/analyse these negotiations, within the larger context of writing an autobiography.