Expressing the Self in Bengali Women’s Autobiographies in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This article discusses evidence from the autobiographical writings of three Bengali women to explore expressions of the self in such literature. Sarala Devi Chaudhurani, Santisudha Ghosh and Manikuntala Sen were contemporaries, all three active in different capacities in the various political formations that shaped the outcome of the struggle against colonial occupation. Their autobiographies lay bare the prescriptions they encountered as daughters and women and the choices they made, all the time straddling multiple worlds, occupying multiple subject positions.

The article contends that these autobiographies, along with other personal and public documents, reflect the construction of tortured, fractured female subjectivities that must continually negotiate with ‘modernity’ in early twentieth century Bengal. Consequently, the ‘female self’ in these autobiographies is not a securely rooted and stable entity but is constantly ‘becoming’, as the various fragments try to cohere around an elusive centre, ‘modernity’, which is itself a nebulous, unstable product of multiple discourses.