Words of Her Own

Abstract

Drawing on a spectrum of genres, such as autobiographies, diaries, didactic tracts, novels and travelogues, this book examines the sociocultural incentives that enabled the emergence of middle-class Hindu and Brahmo women authors as an ever-growing distinct category in nineteenth-century Bengal and the factors facilitating production and circulation of their creations. By exploring the intersections of class, caste, gender, language, religion, and culture in women-authored texts and by reading these within a specific milieu, the study opens up the possibility of re-configuring mainstream history-writing that often ignores women. Questioning essentialist conceptions of women’s writings, it contends that there exists no monolithic body of ‘women’s writings’ with a firmly gendered language, form, style, and content. It shows that there was nothing in the women’s writings that was based on a fundamentally feminine perspective of experiences with an inherent feminine voice. While describing the specifically female life world of domestic experiences, women authors might have made conscious divergences from male-projected stereotypes, but it is equally true that there are a number of issues on which men and women authors spoke in unison. The book argues for distinctions within each genre and across genres in language, content, and style amongst women authors. Even after women authors emerged as a writing community, the bhadralok critics often censured them for fear of their autonomous selfhood in print and praised them for imparting ‘feminine’ ideals alone. Nevertheless, there were women authors who flouted the norms of literary aesthetics and tutored tastes, thus creating a literary tradition of their own in Bangla and becoming agents of history at the turn of the century.