Words of her Own: Women Authors in Nineteenth-Century Bengal by Maroona Murmu (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Words of her Own: Women Authors in Nineteenth-Century Bengal by Maroona Murmu Máire ní Fhlathúin Words of her Own: Women Authors in Nineteenth-Century Bengal. By Maroona Murmu. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2020. xvi+ 439 pp. ₹1395; £26.99. ISBN 978–0–19–949800–0. The tradition of women's writing in colonial Bengal has been historically undervalued, only recently becoming the topic of literary and historical scholarship. Maroona Murmu's book, an impressive project of retrieval and contextualization, focuses primarily on the second half of the nineteenth century, a period when women writers published, by her estimate, over three hundred books. Murmu's subjects are educated, Westernized, Hindu and Brahmo women; she excludes those she terms 'their religious others—Muslim and Christian women authors—as well as regional others—Oriya and Marathi women writers' (p. 20). The first chapter uses archival research to locate these elite women among and against those of 'lower caste and class' who nevertheless shared some of their experiences of family life and culture. Later chapters aim to supply through genre-based case studies 'all that the official archive left unmentioned' (p. 66). In Chapter 2, essays by Kailashbashini Debi and Swarnamayee Gupta both take issue with the ideology of domestic femininity; Kailashbashini's work is subtitled 'Hindu Female: Miseries of Hindu Women', although she credits her husband Durgacharan Gupta for its publication. Other chapters focus on life-writing by Kailashbashini Debi (not to be confused with her namesake) and Saradasundari Debi, novels by Kusumkumari Roychoudhurani and Swarnakumari Debi, and travel narratives by Krishnabhabini Das and Prasannamayee Debi. A final note examines the reception of women's writing by a predominantly male reading public (excluding most women by virtue of their low levels of literacy), whose normative gaze exerted its own pressure on the form, substance, and conditions of production of these works. One of the strengths of Murmu's detailed, thoughtful research is her delineation of these writers' social and political milieu. The cultural impact of colonialism is pervasive, as are the ways in which both colonial and indigenous norms prescribed women's roles. Krishnabhabini Das's narrative of her encounter with Britain, Englande Bangamahila (1885), reverses the colonial gaze, but as Murmu points out, print technologies had long before her journey brought British culture to Bengal. In the pedagogy of domesticity, exemplary figures include 'the daughters of the Empress Victoria' as well as the Hindu deities Draupadi and Sita—all reminding 'modern women' of the importance of cooking (p. 124). Both these cultural forces are evident in the figure of Swarnakumari Debi, whose literary work spanned the fields of fiction, poetry, drama, and journalism, among others. Her writing bears the traces of her wide reading in English—Gray, Shelley, Shakespeare, Byron—and 'Mary Evans who masqueraded as George Eliot', her inclusion evidence [End Page 618] of Swarnakumari's refusal 'to project feminine selves as carriers of culturally prescribed womanly values' (p. 239). Swarnakumari's independent self-assertion is central to Murmu's concept of these Bengali women writers' projects, but her story also demonstrates the extent of their marginality. It seeps through the patronizing voice of her younger brother Rabindranath Tagore, who judges that his sister has 'more ambition than ability', and had earlier posited that the 'female brain is incapable of performing' the 'profound task' of attaining a stature comparable to his own (pp. 241, 242). Murmu concludes that such an attitude in 'one of the most progressive and cultured households in nineteenth-century Bengal' must indicate the (implicitly greater) 'difficulty faced by women writers belonging to ordinary homes' (p. 243). The suggestion that a progressive and cultured man is necessarily an ally to women is indicative of the ways in which Murmu's approach is sometimes lacking in nuance, her broad, fluent summaries occasionally reifying and entrenching conventional social divisions. Nonetheless, this book is a notable achievement, the more valuable for the inclusion of Appendix 1, 'Hindu and Brahmo Women Authors (1850–1900)', drawing on multiple sources to compile a chronological list of works in a variety of genres. This and the book as a whole constitute a valuable historical and literary resource...