Woman-Speak: Ventriloquizing Femininity in the Poetry of Radharani Devi

Abstract

Challenging critic Pramatha Chaudhuri’s claim that Bengali women authors lacked a genuinely feminine voice, the writer Radharani Devi embarked on a literary experiment – adopting a nom de plume, “Aparajita Devi,” she started writing poetry in a markedly “feminine” style about women’s experience of everyday domestic life. Aparajita’s language, buoyancy, and humor introduced a new esthetic into Bengali poetry. And her poems were wildly popular. This paper makes a two-fold examination: First, it demonstrates Aparajita Devi’s originality by addressing how her narrators’ vocalization of everyday worlds, delivered in ordinary language voicing common people and circumstances, blew a gust of fresh air over the serene, decorous landscape of Bengali women’s literature. And second, it asks what makes her poems so compellingly feminine. While Aparajita was applauded for restoring the feminine to women’s writing, did it come instinctively to women writers or was it a persona that any writer could adopt? Radharani Devi’s artistic concerns frame the question of the authentic feminine voice against the wider issue of the sources of the poetic impulse in the modern writer.