Words of Her Own: Women Authors in Nineteenth-Century Bengal by Maroona Murmu

Abstract

Reviewed by: Words of Her Own: Women Authors in Nineteenth-Century Bengal by Maroona Murmu Tara Puri WORDS OF HER OWN: WOMEN AUTHORS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BENGAL, by Maroona Murmu. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021. 456 pp. $35.00 hardback. Maroona Murmu's Words of Her Own: Women Authors in Nineteenth-Century Bengal is a detailed and wide-ranging study of female authorship that combines a historiographic approach with meticulous archival and bibliographic work. The book brings to life the nineteenth-century cultural milieu that witnessed the emergence of Bengali women's writing in a variety of genres. Focusing particularly on middle- and upper-class Hindu and Bhramo women, Murmu argues that these writers fashioned themselves in relation to contemporary male writers as well as the reformist current that had brought new attention to women's private and public roles, thus creating a tradition of their own that documented women's experiences as well as the figure of the woman author in Bengali. Historians and literary critics like Tanika Sarkar, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Antoinette Burton, and Anindita Ghosh have shown us how women's writing in the late colonial period in India, and especially in Bengal, is central to understanding the history of printing, the publishing industry, and the construction of the bhadralok identity. Recovering forgotten writers, marginalized literary works, autobiographical writings, and networks of production and circulation, these scholars have provided correction to nationalist and literary histories that focused primarily on male figures. Murmu places herself in this critical trajectory, noting how histories that locate women's writings solely in the context of social reform and nationalist ideology "deny women writers the credit of being decisive agents of history-making" (p. 17). Her aim then is to analyze her chosen writers and their texts not just as reflective of their particular historical moment but as figures birthing themselves into authorship through their literary experiments. Beginning with the colonial archive as an institutionalized repository of evidence—based on the imperfect and problematic but still insightful statistics collected by colonial administrators—the first chapter, "Women in the Archives: Situating Women's Writings," sets the stage for the writers Murmu will go on to examine in detail. These official archives have been a valuable resource for scholars, but as Murmu recognizes, they [End Page 401] leave unmentioned everything about the ordinary experience of women's lives. The nuanced literary readings that follow fill up this absence, but this introductory chapter remains rather dry—exhaustive but also exhausting in its detail—and not entirely necessary for the overall argument. The subsequent chapters are organized by genre and focus on a particular issue through coupled case studies: discursive essays by Kailashbashini Debi and Swarnamayee Gupta that challenge and transgress conventional notions of domesticity; a diary by Kailashbashini Debi and an autobiography by Saradasundari Debi whose intimate, confessionary modes display an "I" that is "decentred and relational" (p. 132); two realist novels written at the end of the nineteenth century by Kusumkumari Roychoudhurani and Swarnakumari Debi that are cautiously conformist yet manage to smuggle in subversion by fusing romantic love with a higher religious ideal; and two very different travel narratives by Krishnabhabini Das and Prasannamayee Debi, who created a modern, colonial subjectivity by stepping out of the feminine space of the antahpur and becoming critical observers of a larger world. While Murmu situates these writers at a particular historical juncture in which Bengali Hindu social mores were being questioned by religious reformers who themselves were part of the larger project of nation-making, the last chapter, "Travel Writings: Her Travails and Negotiations" is where these ideas come together most productively. As Murmu acknowledges, the female travelers she discusses are the most singular of all the authors examined in the book since they wrote at a time when the genre of travel writing did not exist in Bengal and religious doctrine forbade travel overseas for fear of losing caste purity. Therefore, "acts of travel and their textualization constituted a new form of gender power for women in nineteenth-century Bengal" (p. 246). These travelogues not only offered their writers a new medium and new vantage point for considering their own selfhood in opposition to the...