Two Lives: voices, resources, and networks in the history of female education in Bengal and South Asia

Abstract

This article focuses on the lives of two women active in furthering female education in Bengal in colonial India, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Priyabala Gupta. It analyses the life‐histories of oppressed women in Rokeya’s novella, Padmarag (1924), as well as biographical material in Bengali on Rokeya by two younger friends and activists. Priyabala’s autobiography, published posthumously from the manuscript by feminist academics, is also analysed. Women’s associationalism and educational‐welfarist work are constructed in sophisticated ways in these writings, which are, however, also narratives of dreams deferred or destroyed. The lives of these women unfolded in a region undergoing successive partitions, first in 1947, then in 1971, leading to loss of lives and displacement. It is suggested that instead of according exaggerated importance to ‘the nation’ in analysing such women’s lives, we recognize instead that these life‐histories offer avenues into histories of women’s education in South Asia that cut across national boundaries.