Saogat and the Reformed Bengali Muslim Woman

Abstract

This article explores the interface of politics and women’s writing in late colonial Bengal and traces the trajectory of identity formation of middle-class Bengali Muslim women through a reading of the history of Saogat—founded in 1918, the liberal reformist periodical acclaimed to have mentored some of the best-known women writers of Muslim Bengal. Taking into account some of the changes in the political climate of Bengal from the 1920s to the 1940s, the paper researches the influence of politics on the changing course of Saogat and the moving of women’s voices to a separate domain—the women’s weekly, Begum, established a few weeks before the partition of India in 1947. In doing so, it recognises the plurality in elite women’s writing in Bengal in this period and shows how the shifting grounds of a periodical in relation to categories of identity like religion and state politics, shapes women’s writing produced therein.