Krishnabhabini Das: The emergence of woman as cultural signifier in 19^th century Bengal

What do we understand by the term contemporaneity? Very simply, the historical context. My job in this paper is to link today’s contemporaneity with yesterday’s—to trace if possible the emergence of woman today in all the significations she has as political, cultural, economic, professional subject/agent with the first manifestations of change in which people understood the sign woman. To consolidate my notions of feminine/female/feminist contemporaneity in the 19^th century, I will highlight the role of Krishnabhamini Das as international traveler in an age when seclusion for women was still considered mandatory, and crossing of the Kalapani or sea, considered strongly anti-religious. Many women of the nineteenth century had to define themselves against traditional taboos, strong patriarchal and familial pressures, and also contend with personal loss. Let me first take you through the steps that eventually led to the radical alterations of how the sign woman functioned within the cultural economy of colonial/colonized/ Bengal.

            In the beginning of the 19^th century, woman meant zenana, exclusion, illiteracy,

dependence—in other words it was a sign that was completely determined by the forces of patriarchy, which was synonymous with tradition. The forces that altered the signification of this sign were  many. One of the principal factors leading to change was the growth and development of English education, contact with the ideas of democracy and liberalism that were radically altering the political and social institutions of Europe. Rammohun Roy who knew English amongst the many other languages that he spoke and wrote was associated with Bentham and Owen, both of whom were both  votaries for a better social status for women. Besides, Rammohun also read James Mill’s History of India(1818) in which Mill indicated that the index of any culture’s greatness was the state of its women. Rammohun is known for his pamphlets against Sati which came out between the years 1818-1829. Rammohun also had friends like Dwaraknanath Thakur and Prasanna Kumar Tagore who too believed in the upliftment of women. Advocacy of the upliftment of women was not only confined to the Brahmos and Christians,  Radhakanto Dev who belonged to the conservative faction of Hindus, and expressed his conservatism in various ways, however, encouraged Gourmohan Vidyalankar to compile a book StreeSikshya Vidhayak (1822) which is considered to be one of the first books on the subject of female education and was  one that was influenced by Rammohun’s emanicpatory ideas.

As Gulam Murshed informs us in his highly interesting and densely packed, detailed account of the emergence of the “reluctant debutante” of Bengali culture, radical forces of change were also supplied by the Young Bengal movement of the late 1820’s  who influenced by Tom Paine, Richard Carlyle and WilliamThompson also advocated a better and socially uplifted life for women. Among the western thinkers just mentioned, Richard Carlyle advocated birth control for women and William Thompson’s feminist sympathies are apparent from the n ame of the book Appeal of One Half of the Human Race Women against the Pretensions of the other Half Men (1825).

Missionary institutions too  put in a lot of effort to institutionalize female education. However, in spite of the efforts of the London Missionary Society (1818), the Calcutta Baptists(1819) and the Church Missionary Society which enlisted the active help of Miss Ann Cook, it was not until 1849, that  the Victoria Girl’ School later known as the Bethune School was founded by J.E. D. Bethune. The school started with 11 students, which soon dropped to 7, and ultimately dwindled to three. Hardev Chattopadhyay(father of Sarojini Naidu) and Madanmahon Tarkalankar who allowed their daughters to go to this school were stigmatized by society for doing so.  Iswar Gupta who had been strongly supportive of the cause of Bethune school funnily  became strongly anti after the establishment of the school and wrote a poem Bibhisikha on how women within the new educational system were rapidly losing their morals.

Let me mention a few firsts in this context. Kailashbasini Devi, married to Durgacharan Das in 1849, not only did not know how to read and write when she got married, but also despised the idea of education. She eventually, taught at home by her husgband, became the first author of a book of essays entitled Hindu Mahilar Hinabastha in 1863. Other women who wrote during this period of the 1860’s acquiring the title granthakartri were Saudamini Devi, Madhumati Ganguly and Krishnkamini. We must not fortet in this context the achievement of one of the first women autobiographer s of this period—Rasundari Devi’s Aamar Jeebon (1876) and Binodini’s Amar Katha published in 1912. Rasasundari is singular because she achieved what she did without the advantage of an urban location, and Binodini who was a courtesan cum actress certainly belonged to the edges of Bengali society. Journals that focused on women’s issues at this time were Masik Patrika(1854), Bamabohini Patrika,(1869) and Abalar Bandhav. As Murshed informs us the ideal of the attractive woman was  changing fast in 1860’s and 1870’s in favor of educated women and the heroines of Dinabandhu Mitra, Jyotrindranath Tagore ad Upendranath Das, were all educated. Even Bankim who belonbed tro the conservative faction, portrayed educated heroines.

Around this time the Hindu Mahila Bidyalay was established to impart higher education to women(lot of controversy) and later merged with Bethune school as its college section(1876) started imparting secondary education under the direction of Annette Ackroyd. Center of debate on whether women would be allowed to take university examinations. It was first from this school that a woman named Kadambini Basu was officially allowed by Calcutta University to appear for a public examinations. Chandramukhi and Kdambini passed the B.A. examination in early 1883. Kadambini Ganguly became the first woman to get a medical degree, followed by medical doctor to Bidhumukhi Bose. By 1901 female education had considerably spread among upper caste  Hindus too. Literacy  among Brahmos being 55.6, Brahmins, 5.6, baidya  25.9 and  kayasthya 8.0.

In keeping with what constituted the ideal of the attractive woman in the 1860,70’s and 80’s I will now introduce to you the figure of Krishnabhamini Das who went to England in the 1870’s and 1880’s. In terms of genre Krishnabhamini’s Englande Bangamahila(1885) was/I syet another travel narrative of   19^th century Bengal, like Rameshchandra Dutta’s Three Years in Europe or Keshab Sen’s Diary in England. The book not only foregrounds the centrality of gender in contemporary discourses of culture, it also offers the image of the colonized woman as traveler, who not only breaks indigenous taboos regarding traveling within her own social and cultural context, but also breaks into the world of discourse, long the exclusive prerogative of men, and legitimizes  to herself at least, her right to view, observe, analyse and record. As much as the text represents England, and India by oblique extension, it also becomes an instance of self representation by a woman at a time when few Indian women broke the gendered social code of silence. Of course, Krishnabhamini’s elite positioning in Indian/Bengali society is partially responsible for this, but it also becomes an instance of a woman seeking self definition through writing

             A few facts about Krishnabhamini first. Born in 1864 in Nadia, Krishnabhamini received an early education from her father. This education became a truly refined one after marriage to Debendranath, son of Srinath Das, a lawyer who practiced in the High Court, and was a close associate of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar. When her husband first departed to England in order to become a barrister (  ), Krishnabhamini did not accompany him. When he came back after several years, Krishnabhamini had already lost her eldest daughter and her husband was excommunicated by his father because of his long stay abroad. When Debendranath decided to go back to England, Krishnabhamini accompanied him, even though it meant the loss of her daughter Tilottama, who was forcibly kept back by her grandfather. Tilottama grew up resenting her parents deeply and learnt to think as an arch conservative. She was married off at the age of ten, when her mother was till abroad, and on Krishnabhamini’s return, was never really reconciled with her. A poem by Tilottama, which while not carrying any overt references to her childhood deprivation from maternal affection, but bearing traces of deep individual suffering, provides an addendum to Krishnabhamini’s text, and qualifies the overtly “political” of Krishnabhamini’s life with the intensely “personal.” Tilottama’s poem, side by side with her mother’s analytical and descriptive work, becomes a testament to the many India’s and the many sites of Indian feminine subjectivity, that coexisted simultaneously at the time of the writing of the text, and does even today. 

In a narrative shot through and through with nostalgia for India, Krishnabhamini who lived in England for eight years, packs her writing with analysis and description,  rarely weaving in the  personal detail. Written in language that would be accessible to the general reader, her book has twenty chapters in all, and a quick survey of the different chapter headings will reveal her sensitivity to the various aspects of what constitutes social life or the life of a nation. Some of these chapter headings (translations mine) are “Some Reflections” (Ch. 5), “The English Nation and Its Characteristics” (Ch. 7), “The Queen and Her Affairs” ( Ch. 8) “English Women” ( Ch.10), “ The Landowner and Farmer in English Agriculture” (Ch. 14) “English Education” (Ch. 15)  and “Parliamentary Elections” (Ch. 17).

Though,  the book is a social and historical commentary on the state of affairs and society in Victorian England, Krishnabhamini has a few definite agendas. One is the unquestionable superiority or advancement of European or English culture (36-37). One of the main dimensions of this excellence of culture and civilisation, is predicated on the fact of the political freedom of these nations. By extension, the freedom of India becomes a very vital issue with her, and correlated to it or independent of it, the issue of women’s freedom, enhancement and empowerment in India.

As she celebrates several facets of English life, which seem to have paved the way for her economic, political and cultural ascendancy in the world, she analyses what could make her own country, similarly empowered. Krishnabhamini’s firm location in the indigenous soil of India, is nowhere disguised, and becomes one of the earliest written documents of exploring the concept of the Indian nation, from the gendered point of view.

In the chapter “Some Reflections,” she points to the suffocating implications of intellectual inertia and superstition in India. The opposition of the West’s (Europe, England) adaptability to change and the Indian resistance to it  is an incontrovertible  opposition in her text. She asserts ,”Unfortunately we [Indians] are trapped within the spell of ignorance and superstition, which makes us erupt into anger anytime that we see indications of Westernisation/change in anyone.” (36-37) England’s imbibing of what is excellent in other cultures, is posited as a site of its power and our obsessive desire for a mirror that reflects an unchanging face of reality, the source of our degeneration.

In the chapter “English Education,” she clearly asserts the link between education, and empowerment. At the beginning of this chapter she asserts, that it is only when we assess how far education has penetrated into the heart of a nation, that we can assess its degree of civilization and advancement. Tied to her general approbation of the far reaching social implications of the English structure of education, is her joy in discovering women’s participation in it. In the chapter “English Women,” she celebrates the fact that girls of even middle class families are allowed to study till they are eighteen or nineteen. (75). She notes the emphasis on physical education as an integral part of this education. Regarding the question of women’s intellectual powers she says that  the competence that some British women have demonstrated in qualifying examinations that were traditionally viewed “difficult,” (74)proves the equality of women with men on the question of intelligence and capability. In contrast to this textual position, it would be apposite in this context to cite Virginia Woolf’s book written a few decades later (1929),  Room With A View about the difficulty women in England to work and to have equal education.

I hope that I have been in the scope of this paper been able to give you a sense of the gendered protagonist of culture in the 19^th century, particularly its latter half. Through education, writing, nationalist politics, traveling and performance (and all this is also performance), the Bengali woman (with analogues like Ramabai in Maharashtra), inscribed herself and thereby also altered the significations of 19^th century Bengali culture.