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Lessons in Self-Fashioning: "Bamabodhini Patrika" and the Education of Women in Colonial
BengalAuthor(s): Krishna SenSource: Victorian Periodicals Review , Vol. 37, No. 2, The Nineteenth-Century Press in India
(Summer, 2004), pp. 176-191Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Research Society forVictorian PeriodicalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20084005Accessed: 24-04-2016 08:06 UTC
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Lessons in Self-Fashioning:
Bamabodhini Patrika and the Education
of Women in Colonial Bengal
KRISHNA SEN
In The History of Sexuality Foucault speaks of the intellectual obligation
to locate theoretical speculation within specific material conditions, of the
need to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints
from which they speak, the institutions which prompt them to speak
about it [sexuality under various names] and which store and distribute
the things that are said ... (Foucault I: n). The nineteenth-century
project of constructing the New Indian Woman (an enterprise primarily
associated with Bengal, a hub of liberal thought) had its share of illustri
ous male catalysts, such as Raja Rammohan Roy and Iswarchandra Vid
yasagar. But to uncover variegated inflections of this radically-gendered
discourse one can to turn to Bengali women's magazines for the new dis
cursive social icon of the bhadramahila, or genteel woman. Meredith
Borthwick lists nineteenth-century Bengali journals devoted to creating a
reformed female subjectivity as part of the nationalist agenda for a resur
gent India and describes their extensive readership, both male and female,
in the metropolitan centers of Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Dhaka, in sub
urban communities, in small district towns, and even in the villages of
undivided Bengal (Borthwick 15 sff). Contributors were men as well as
women. These publications collectively provided a discursive forum in
which to probe the parameters, as well as the desirability (or otherwise),
of a reinscribed female sensibility. From their pages we can identify not
only who does the speaking but, more importantly, the positions and
viewpoints from which they speak.
Bamabodhini Patrika (Journal for the Enlightenment of Women), a
periodical for women published from Calcutta in Bengali continuously
between 1863 and 1922, was not only the longest running but one of the
earliest of such journals that included Bharati, Sahitya, Pradip, Mukul,
Sakha, and others. It was preceded only by the short-lived Tattwabodhini
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KRISHN SEN
177
Patrika (Journal for Inculcating Knowledge, 1843) and Masik Patrika
(Monthly Magazine, 1854-55). The steps leading to the creation o? Bama
bodhini Patrika constitute an historical capsule of the reformist agenda
for women in Bengal. The main dilemma confronting the reformists was
that of accommodating the claims of the antahpur (the inner space of
home, synonymous with the woman's arena) with the call of the bahir
(the space outside the home, or the male domain): the conundrum of how
to be both in line with Western-oriented modernization in which women
were to know of the outside world and in line with indigenous tradition in
which they were not to be a part of it. Bamabodhinini functioned as an
integral component of the novel solution worked out to resolve this
thorny problem.
In 1862, The Brahmo1 intellectual Keshub Chunder Sen inaugurated
the Brahmobondhu Sabha (Association inspired by Brahmo Ideals), with
the uplift of women as one of its primary objectives. In an era when
women were not exposed to the non-kindred male gaze, when just a few
aristocratic ladies were learning their letters at home, and lady tutors and
schools for girls were few and far between, Brahmobondhu championed
the then-pioneering concept of antahpur schools, that is, schooling in the
andarmahal or women's inner living quarters within the family home.
The students could be all the women in the family from young girls to
older matriarchs, and the teachers would be their fathers, brothers, and
husbands, instructing them according to a prescribed syllabus and con
ducting examinations at fixed intervals. Several such schools were set up
during the century at well-to-do homes in Calcutta and Dhaka. As the
Brahmobondhu Sabha gradually shifted its focus to other social issues, it
passed on this mantle to the Bamabodhini Sabha (Society for the Enlight
enment of Women), founded 1863 and kd by tne Young Turks of the
Brahmo Samaj, Umesh Chandra Datta (b. 1840) and Bejoy Krishna Gos
wami (b. 1841). Bamabodhini Patrika, the mouthpiece of this new Soci
ety, was Datta's brainchild and the main purveyor of antahpur schooling,
as well as of the many debates and diatribes which this movement
provoked.
Bamabodhini was a monthly publication with a print run of a hundred
copies a month priced at one anna each. For decades, until competitors
appeared at the turn of the century, every issue sold out. The first issue
(August 1863/B.S. Bhadra 1270) carried Datta's manifesto dedicating the
journal to the service of the woman ( bama, the old Sanskritised Bengali
term):
By the grace of God many people in this country have turned their attention
towards bettering the lot of our women. That they need to be educated just as
much as men, that without this there is no advancement either for women or for
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178 Victorian Periodicals Review 37:2 Summer 2004
this country, is now an accepted fact. We find public-spirited gentlemen setting up
schools for girls here and there, an activity encouraged also by the benevolent
Government. But very few girls avail of this opportunity and that, too, for a lim
ited period [i.e., only as long as they are unmarried]. Unless the school can enter
the antahpur there is very little chance of benefiting the majority of our women ...
. This journal will cover all topics which are relevant to its readers. We will
attempt to eradicate error and superstition through the radiance of true learning
so as to nurture the finer qualities of their minds, and we will pay utmost attention
to the basic kinds of knowledge which they require.... To make our articles easily
accessible to women, we shall endeavor to keep our subject matter chaste and our
language simple ... . If by the will of God this effort of ours is accepted by our
cultured society and found to be of use to its women, then it will have served its
purpose. (Ray 1-2)2
The second editorial (September 1863) declared that the periodical
would be as far as possible of, by, and for women, instead of being (as was
more usual at that time) composed solely by men for the edification of
women: Contributions by women will be very welcome and will be
published if considered suitable. Ladies are requested to send in their con
tributions to the Editor along with their names and addresses (Ray xvi).
To encourage women to write, the January 1864 issue announced an essay
competition for women on any one of these topics - (a) The benefits that
can be expected from women's education, and the evil effects of not edu
cating them, or (b) The harmful customs and superstitions that need to
be eradicated before the women of our country can improve their status ;
the three judges, Dwarkanath Vidyabhushan, Peary Churn Mitter, and
Keshub Chunder Sen, were leading liberal intellectuals of Calcutta, and
prizes were to be awarded (Ray 24-25). The best essay on the first topic
by Madhumati Mukhopadhyay of Shaligram (a non-metropolitan loca
tion) was published in September 1865 (Ray 31-32). Bamabodhini was
thus from its inception a platform for women's self-expression. During
the second half of the nineteenth century, there were many private publi
cations of volumes in Bengali (and infrequently in English) by upper/
middle- and middle-class antabpur-educzted ladies, so the editor's solici
tations fell on fertile ground. A later editorial expressed astonishment at
the quantity and quality of women's submission, most as articulate and
thought-provoking as if written by men, perhaps provoking the injunc
tion: Those ladies who are desirous of publishing their writings in Bam
abodhini ... should immediately by any means possible send us such proof
that we may be absolutely convinced that their compositions are indeed
their own (Ray xl).
The preparation of a blueprint for antahpur schooling was taken very
seriously: recently Bamabodhini Sabha [Society for the Enlightenment
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KRISHN SEN
U9
of Women] has taken up the responsibility of propagating women's edu
cation in the antahpur.... To facilitate educational opportunities for older
women within the home is the goal of this Society (December 1865; see
Ray 33). The April 1866 issue outlined a five-year syllabus for home
study, covering a variety of subjects, with recommended textbooks and
topics for examination for every year. Moral Science, embroidery, and
handicrafts would be taught, and the academic curriculum would be
graded: reading and writing Bengali the first year; Bengali grammar, geog
raphy, and arithmetic the second year; advanced Bengali grammar and lit
erature, geography, history, and algebra the third year; the same subjects
and hygiene the fourth year; the same subjects and botany and biology
the fifth year (Ray 34-36). This syllabus, reprinted with minor alterations
and the addition of an optional sixth year course covering more advanced
topics in the earlier disciplines together with geometry and basic physics,
was given in September 1870 (Ray 93-95). Ambitious as this was, and
despite an editorial in July 1867 lamenting that most Hindus were less
enthusiastic about educating their women than Brahmos and Christians
(Ray 42), there were concrete results. The May 1870 issue printed two
prize-winning answer scripts3 from the fourth year examinations by
Deentarini Mukhopadhyay and Dakshayani Ghosh (Ray 87-90). The
award-winning scripts were published by Bamabodhini in 1870 in a sepa
rate volume entitled Narishiksha, or Women's Education (Ray 90).
The editors of Bamabodhini were equally alert to the necessity for for
mal schooling. The Editorial for July 1867 regretted the existence of a
mere three schools for [local] girls in Calcutta, of which only one had
been established by a native gentleman (Ray 46). Bamabodhini described
the progress and the annual prize-giving ceremonies of the Bethune Col
legiate School for Girls (established in central Calcutta in the late 1840s
by John Drinkwater Bethune). An editorial in December 1866 champi
oned setting up a Teacher Training College for Women as proposed by
Mary Carpenter (Ray 37-38; 47-52 for the October 1866 editorial on this
topic). The August 1867 editorial lists four obstacles to women's educa
tion: misconceptions about its aims among the local populace, child mar
riage, lack of qualified women teachers, and lack of dedication among
students and teachers alike. The demand for teacher training institutions
was raised again in December 1870, bolstered by a letter to the editor
from H. Woodrow, Inspector of the Middle Schools Division. The edito
rial also advocated a Training College for Nurses (Ray 102-05).
Bamabodhini is also a prime source of documentation regarding the dis
trict-wide increase in girls' schools, including antahpur schools, in undi
vided Bengal, with statistics relating to the number of entrants and the
number of successful examinees in both formal and home-based schools
and data on the number of young girls studying in primary schools for
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18o Victorian Periodicals Review 37:2 Summer 2004
boys (Ray 28-30, ^6-6y, i6y, 181-86, 220-22, 257, 324-26). Eurasian, con
verted Christian, and Brahmo girls outnumber Hindus and Muslims in
regular schools. The enterprise of women's education reaches a kind of cli
max in the celebratory Editorial of May 1877, commending the University
of Calcutta (established 1857) for allowing women candidates, including
privately educated applicants, to sit for its degree examinations and for
providing specially secluded examination halls with women invigilators
(Ray 161-62). The Annual Education Survey, dated April 1889, lists one
M.A. student studying at Bethune College for Girls (set up in 1878) and
one woman doctor, Kadambini Ganguly, graduating from Calcutta Med
ical College (Ray 221). In January 1887, Bamabodhini chronicles the
admission of women into Medical Colleges in Madras, Bombay, and Cal
cutta. Two women had entered Calcutta Medical College, while the
Campbell Medical Training School at Calcutta opened its doors to women
who were exempt from tuition fees, offered secluded seating areas in class
rooms and laboratories and access to dormitory facilities and a special
omnibus with shaded windows to transport them to and from class
(Ray 211-16) to encourage their enrollment: If native women do not
study medicine, foreign women will arrive here to fill the void, and then
we shall not have any grounds to protest (Ray 212).
These editorials represent the official voice of the Bamabodhini
Patrika. The real drama surrounding the Woman Question is played
out through voluntary submissions. Many ordinary women, not belong
ing to aristocratic families of Calcutta and Dhaka but hailing rather from
non-metropolitan and rural areas, took an active interest in, and offered
creative suggestions for, the syllabus and pedagogy of antahpur educa
tion. Susamasundari Dasi from Ghoshpara, Krishnanagar, writes of many
practical obstacles to in-house study: older unlettered women of the
household burn with jealousy toward literate younger women and
obstruct them; women living in crowded joint families with their tradi
tional ambience are at a disadvantage as compared to those who can go
away with their husbands to their distant places of work; men, too, often
shy away from the extra load of tutoring their women. The writer's pana
cea for these ills (she invites debate on her proposal) is the creation of a
cadre of peripatetic schoolmistresses to be paid out of public funds -
every household must allow a teacher to hold classes indoors on specific
days of the week or pay the Government a monthly penalty of five
rupees, a princely sum in those days (Ray 221-22). Another correspon
dent, identified by the initial S, suggests that educated women of the
family might make better antahpur teachers than men because of their
womanly qualities of patience and gentleness and recounts the story of
one such school in a village outside Dhaka (Ray 215).
Despite these encouraging portents, the major controversy raging in
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KRISHN SEN
l8l
Bamabodhini concerns the rationale and usefulness of women's education
itself. In impartially projecting all three current viewpoints on this con
tentious issue - radical, moderate, and conservative - Bamabodhini not
only demonstrates the liberal spirit of its editors but also reveals the com
plex interplay of gender, culture, class, and colonial interpellation in the
formation of the contemporary discourse on women.
Bamabodhini's battle was not an easy one, for it had to struggle against
the shibboleth of a reified and traditional Hindu patriarchy that garnered
support from an extremely selective reading of the Shastras or Smritis to
exercise hegemonic control over its women and the Muslim patriarchy
that employed similar strategies in their motivated interpretation of their
sacred texts: The worst crime which our brothers commit against us is to
deprive us of education .... Can they quote from the holy Quran or Hadis
any injunction prohibiting women from obtaining knowledge? (Hossain
497). Furthermore, an emancipatory ideology with respect to women car
ried the stigma of Westernization or capitulation to an alien ethos.
Gandhi's ambivalent stand on this matter, coming more than half a cen
tury after Bamabodhini began its campaign, illustrates the complexities:
... it is sad to think that the Smritis contain texts which can command no respect
from men who cherish the liberty of woman as their own and who regard her as
the mother of the race. ... I have already suggested ... that what is printed in the
name of scriptures need not be taken as the word of God or as the inspired word.
(Gandhi 85)
His central image of the woman as mother is troubling. The inherent
ambiguity becomes clearer in a speech Gandhi delivered at the Bhagini
Samaj (Society of Sisters) at Poona (now Pune), printed in the March
1918 issue of Stree Darpan (A Mirror for Women), a Hindi journal for
women's uplift published from Allahabad by Rameshwari Nehru of the
celebrated Nehru family. Gandhi invoked the revered triad of epic and
mythological heroines - Sita, Damyanti, and Draupadi - whose names
were bywords for woman's self-abnegation and unwavering devotion to
husband and home, and who were equated with devis or goddesses:
In order to rectify social inequities ... we shall have to reimbue women with the
purity, firmness, resolve and the spirit of self-sacrifice of Sita, Damyanti and
Draupadi. ... [T]hen today's women, pure as satis, would begin to command the
same respect in Hindu society as was enjoyed by their ancient prototypes.
(Qtd. in Talwar 231; sati here refers to its etymological sense of faithful wife, not
self-immolation)
The cultural politics underlying the nationalist elevation of the Hindu
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182 Victorian Periodicals Review 37:2 Summer 2004
woman to the status of a devi, or goddess, and idealized as the Grihalak
shmi, or goddess of the home, has been regarded as compensation for
colonial emasculation.4 New forms of social control that this analogy
implied were apparent even to contemporary women who saw through
this equivocatory stance.5 Writing in Stree Darpan, Uma Nehru, daugh
ter-in-law of the Nehru family, quips that such lofty expectations
scarcely become the contemporary Indian male attired in coat, pant, col
lar and necktie : A Sita or a Savitri is conceivable only in the context of a
Ramchandra, a Krishna, a Bharat and a Yudhisthir (Talwar 228).
Decades earlier, these arguments and counter-arguments had appeared in
Bamabodhini.
In the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns, the issue of women's
education was particularly sensitive as it addressed emotionally fraught
questions of the mind and its attitudes and values. For the Ancients (para
doxically including many upper class literate women), the whole issue
could be reduced to the tidy cultural binary or opposition between
dharma (roughly, one's cosmically-ordained station in life) and adharma
(zn?-dharma, usually equated with a subversive modernity or Western
ization). A lengthy anonymous piece in May 1870 translates into Bengali
a couplet from a poet named Pope to the effect that a little learning is a
dangerous thing and expresses the fear that the mental liberation gained
through education may be dissipated in license and defiance towards duly
constituted authority. Such a woman runs the risk of turning into a bibi
or a dolled-up memsahib (European lady), absolutely useless for house
hold chores and the care of the children (bibi was a pejorative term among
conservatives). The article lists ten cardinal points of a woman's dharma:
piety, charity, caring for members of both paternal and conjugal families
(samsar dharma), truthfulness, benevolence, self-sacrifice, absolute fidel
ity to the husband in body and mind, an abstemious life, faith in God, and
belief in and preparation for the afterlife (Ray 83-87). Several correspon
dents, including named women, aver that a woman needs only religious
education instead of academic subjects (Ray 16, 83, 13 iff).
Interestingly, what is at work in many cases is not a regressive obscu
rantism but a genuine fear of social destabilization. A woman from Bhat
para, Prasannatara Gupta, wonders whether women who have been
repressed for generations can handle their sudden access to knowledge
and freedom of thought without compromising themselves (July 1872;
Ray 130). An anonymous correspondent declares, If women are not ini
tiated into religious studies from the very beginning, if they deviate from
religion as a result of an unnatural education, then we can well imagine
the terrible chaos that will engulf human society (April 1873; ^ay I31)
There is a genuine uncertainty even among these skeptics. A three-part
article by Kulabala Devi (the honorific devi signifies an aristocratic
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KRISHN SEN
1 83
woman), The Hindu Woman's Education and her Subjugation
( Hindu Ramanir Vidyashiksha o Paradhinata ), serialized in April, May,
and November 1892 (Ray 229-36), admits that lack of knowledge makes
for narrow-minded and superstitious women, and that a well-educated
woman best fulfills the woman's greatest vocation of being a good
mother, but then asks whether wisdom and learning are synonymous and
whether an educated woman will perform household duties. These
doubts continued even into the twentieth century. In February 1915,
Hemantakumari Devi distinguishes between external or superficial and
internal or true education and laments that whereas women's education is
a noble ideal, it has produced a breed of precocious, haughty, and luxury
loving women more proud of their ability to read novels than their ability
to cook. The kind of education dispensed struck at the roots of traditional
womanly virtues of kindness, gentleness, decorum, propriety, diligence,
and selflessness (Ray 316-19). Girija Prasanna Sen, a gentleman from
Kumartuli in Calcutta, suggests changes in Bamabodhini's antahpur syl
labus to include childcare and cookery (Ray 306). Authors expressed baf
flement over the education of women. An unnamed contributor in
September 1880 claims that highly-educated American women suffer
severe health problems, an argument supported with statistics gathered
by an American, Dr. Clark. The correspondent piously hopes that a large
dose of moral education in the curriculum will help Bengali women sur
vive the high mortality rate of excessive learning (Ray 225-27).
Many of those who voiced doubts or opposition towards women's
education were really more concerned with its anticipated or perceived ill
effects on women, the family, and society than with ideological caveats
against the endeavor per se. Those who sought to allay these misgivings
without falling into the trap of Westernization and the consequent rejec
tion of their proposals were caught in a double bind like that expressed by
Tennyson in In Memoriam: Let knowledge grow from more to more /
Yet more of reverence in us dwell. By propagating the inherently contra
dictory ideal of antahpur education designed to produce nothing more
than well-informed housewives and mothers rather than independent
women, Bamabodhini shared the ambivalence of Gandhi and many other
national leaders, male and female. The February and March 1870 numbers
carry the two-part Bengali translation of Keshub Chunder Sen's English
address to the Social Sciences Association (Samajik Vigyan Sabha) at Cal
cutta, Proposal for the Improvement of Our Women (Ray 106-20). It is
replete with Sanskrit slokas and Vedic and Upanishadic allusions, a char
acteristic co-opting of tradition to the service of modernity. Sen docu
ments achievements as well as shortcomings of the women's education
movement and proposes institutional improvements (e.g., teacher training
colleges, appointment of an Inspectress of Schools, better text books,
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184 Victorian Periodicals Review 37:2 Summer 2004
Government intervention). Quoting James Mill's disquisition on mar
riages in England, Sen asserts that educated women make better wives, a
reference to the new liberal ideology of companionate, as opposed to
hierarchical, marriage that assumed that Western-educated men would be
happier with literate, somewhat sophisticated partners than with illiterate
wives. He writes that by teaching women the value of truth, science and
religion, men will confer on them social equality and purity, and
through this reconstruct India in a way which is not superficial. If you
truly wish to establish a civil society in India, you must search for the
means to instill in our women the qualities of purity and dutifulness
(Ray 120). This is one of the earliest phases of nationalist rhetoric that
made women central to a culturally resurgent India able to withstand
colonial interpellation. But this conferring was a gift from men rather
than a right and required the woman's fulfilling traditional ideals of
Indian womanhood with the extra qualification of education. Similarly,
the Bengali intellectual, Amritalal Gupta, writes of the bhadramahila in
the April-May 1903 number that women no longer as housemaids to
their husbands ... are completely endowed with all the good qualities that
an educated husband expects in his wife . ... Just as, like Hindu women,
they are devoted to their husbands, so too, like English women, they can
be for their husbands comrades of the mind, partners at work, and com
panions of the heart (Ray 244). The reference to conjugal love rather
than wifely duty is Western. Yet in conceptualizing the New Woman
(always the creation of man and cast in his chosen mould), the liberal
Indian male strained to escape any suggestion of colonial hegemony.
Even in Bamabodhini's idealistic discourse, the goal of the newly liber
ated bhadramahila is not self-fashioning but to fashion a (relatively mod
ern) self to please her husband.
Commentators on Bamabodhini and on women's responses to the
Woman Question have pointed to women's acquiescence to what was
only a more benevolent form of patriarchy.7 Despite Bamabodhini's
mainly Hindu women contributors' debates on women's education and
women's social and cultural worth, the verdict often was that however
educated the woman, she must never forget her dharma of being a good
daughter, wife, and mother. But some compromise was mandated for
such a radical innovation to become universally accepted. Even the fiery
Roquiah Sakhawat Hossain, founder of the Sakhawat Memorial School
for Girls in Calcutta, observed that the future of India lies in its girls,
but added, In short, our girls would not only obtain University degrees,
but must be ideal daughters, wives and mothers - or I may say, obedient
daughters, loving sisters, dutiful wives, and instructive mothers ( Edu
cational Ideals for Modern Indian Girls, The Mussalman, 5 March 1931;
Hossain 501-02).
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KRISHN SEN
185
The newly articulated liberation discourses in fact contoured the para
digm of woman in more demanding ways than ever before. The edu
cated, upper-class/caste woman, whose badge of difference from her
lower-class/caste sisters was her literacy and liberated access to com
panionate marriage, must now please as well as serve her man. In Koyl
aschandra Bose's trenchant observation in On the Education of Hindu
Females (1846), an English tract marking the earliest stages of discourse
formation on the empowerment of Indian women, the New Woman is as
much the possession of man (in a different way) as the traditional woman:
She [the genteel woman] must be refined, reorganized, recast, regener
ated (Sangari and Vaid, Epigraph ). Sister Nivedita (Margaret Noble)
projected this typology of the cultured yet domesticated upper-class
Indian wife as India's contribution to the global ideal of the family in her
paper entitled The Present Position of Women, at the First Universal
Races Congress in London in 1911.
Yet, remembering Foucault's injunction to turn to the evidence, we
find in Bamabodhini women struggling toward self-fashioning through
independent opinions and radical choices in contrast to socialization and
collusion. Srimati Bibi Tahren Lechha, a first year Muslim student of
Boda Girls' School, asserts that education will make women better moth
ers by teaching them to be less superstitious (February 1864; Ray 26).
Soudamini Devi of Bakhargunge feels that death is preferable to patriar
chal exploitation (April 1865; Ray 27-28). Kamini Datta of Khoipara que
ries whether God could have created knowledge solely for men (August
1867; Ray 46). S. D. from Konnagar laments, Have we been born in this
country only to live like animals? (May 1868; Ray 55). Mrs Mahalanobis
(Mahalanobisjaj throws down the gauntlet: If the need arises and the
woman is capable, then why should she not work outside the house? Is it
impossible or unnatural for a woman to earn her living? (September
1878; Ray 154). Kamini Kumari Gupta of Mahilara, Barisal (now in Bang
ladesh) concludes in Women's Education and Women's Liberation
( Strishiksha o Striswadhinata ) with a ringing challenge to all unscru
pulcus and selfish men. ... Whatever be the case, if Hindu ladies are not
given equal liberty with men in every sphere, Hindu society will be
destroyed in the conflagration caused by their curses (December 1882;
Ray 181). One L questions the received wisdom about the degeneration
of literate European women by giving the example of Mother Teresa and
her Little Sisters of the Poor (August-September 1914; Ray 260-61).
Amala Devi asks, Are women not part of the human race? (April 1917;
Ray 322). Srimati ( Miss ) says, Giving women their rights will bring
peace to the world (December 1917; Ray 339). Charushila Mitra suggests
that an educated woman can manage her own property (November 1922;
Ray 339-43). There are supportive male voices as well. Niranjan Prasad
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186 Victorian Periodicals Review 37:2 Summer 2004
Chakraborty speaks of the need for a total transformation of society
before women can be given their due (July 1919; Ray 332). Men and
women did not merely relive socialized, interiorized paradigms. It is diffi
cult to agree completely with Himani Bannerji's reading of Bamabodhini
solely in terms of Gramscian hegemony and Althusserian interpella
tion (Bannerji 135-78). Individual voices, however scattered and some
what unformulated, break through the barrier of collusion. Providing a
forum for such voices was Bamabodhini's contribution, although its edi
torial policy was not fully aligned with these radical voices.
In some essays there is a lively awareness of woman's unique subjectiv
ity or mon (mind or inclination). An anonymous piece in August 1868
featured an imaginary conversation between Gyanada (the wise woman)
and Sarala (the simple woman). To Gyanada's query as to why she will
not learn to read and write, Sarala replies, Friend, I have heard that there
is a taboo against women's education in the [Hindu] Shastras. Is it right to
disregard the Shastras} She cites commonly held beliefs about educating
women: it will bring on the curse of widowhood, make women immoral,
expose them to ridicule, and undermine society's foundations. Gyanada
replies, Whenever we do not understand anything we turn to the Shas
tras to justify our ignorance. She then quotes Sanskrit verses from the
Vedas that exhort parents to educate daughters, names several highly edu
cated Hindu women of yore (Lilavati, Khana, Gargi, and Rukmini), and
compares unlettered women to blind, deaf, and dumb animals unaware
even of their surroundings.
Gyanada follows this up with an historical explanation for the
decline of women's education in India: excesses of Mughal rule drove
Hindu society into a self-defensive (and ultimately self-defeating) conser
vatism, and only liberal ideas filtering down from British rule provoked
the need to broaden women's outlook, so they can become better moth
ers, wives, and mistresses of households. She adds a final caveat: the
acquisition of learning is difficult, so women must cultivate the mon and
improve by culling time from housework and cutting down on frivolous
expenses to buy books. Though many enlightened men are now willing to
help women, women must help themselves (Ray 2-6). In a second dia
logue in September 1868, Gyanada distinguishes between literacy and
learning. Literacy is only familiarity with language, whereas the object of
learning is to draw out inner potentialities of the mon. So women must
develop their minds through study of various subjects (the antahpur cur
riculum) that will acquaint her with her world and its values: history,
geography, astronomy, biology, zoology, and biographies of great men
(Rayn-13) .
The two dialogues crystallize major arguments for and against
women's education and consequent reconfigurations of a gendered social
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KRISHN SEN
1 87
space in nineteenth-century Bengal (with Bengal at the forefront of these
concerns voiced across India). Here is a constructed history to explain
Indian women's fall from grace - a Vedic idyll followed by a demonized
Muslim onslaught and a redemptive British liberalism. This nostrum care
fully edits out the gendered tyranny of Hindu Brahminical patriarchy and
is repeated elsewhere in Bamabodhini (qtd. in Ray 180). Here, too, is a
selective invocation of Hindu scriptures (the Vedas in place of the Shas
tras, especially their most patriarchal representative, the Manusamhita or
Laws of Manu) to refute British liberal critics such as James Mill (Mill
445-47), who believed that Hinduism is barbaric because it repressed its
women
Nevertheless, there is an (unintentional) equivocation at the heart of
Gyanada's discourse. Who are the women she is aiming to reform?
Who are the women for whom she speaks? The unavoidable inflection
of class directs her remarks to those who will be mistresses of households
who are to be educated. This takes us back to Datta's manifesto in the
first issue of Bamabodhini: If by the will of God this effort of ours is
accepted by our cultured society and found to be of use to its women,
then it will have served its purpose. Only women of our cultured soci
ety are to benefit. This points to a curious anomaly in the stratification
of women; the women of elite classes were the most repressed by patriar
chal control and needed to learn modalities of self-fashioning, whereas
non-elite women had always constituted part of the menial and agricul
tural working classes in India, and therefore had always possessed a
greater degree of agency, if not of formal education. Bamabodhini sought
to inculcate lessons in self-fashioning for elite women whose patriarchally
dictated seclusion was paradoxically an index of their social privilege.
These lessons had their own motivated trajectories. They rejected exist
ing Bengali women's popular oral culture of songs, poems, jingles, stories,
and age-old sayings derived from the Hindu mythological tradition.
Gauri Viswanathan has cited the Serampore-based Orientalist William
Ward to the effect that
... it was claimed that the chief reason for the Indians' opposition to the education
of females before the nineteenth century was that Hindu literature was basically
immoral and sensuous and that no Hindu woman who acquired claims to learning
could later make claims to respectability. (Viswanathan 87)
Within this line of thinking Bamabodhini, too, opted for a formal West
ernized academic culture designed to create a lady fit for companionate
marriage, the only indigenous element in this new curriculum being the
attributes required to run a conventional household. This, indeed, is a
curious compromise. Sumanta Banerjee has written:
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188 Victorian Periodicals Review 37:2 Summer 2004
The woman's magazine, Bamabodhini Patrika emphasized a ... need for naram
naram or gentle and tender education for women. ... The lesson indicated for
andarmahal women in these suggestions was clear.... Any sign of assertiveness or
of departure from their domestic roles that might be inspired by stories about the
adulterous Radha or the assertive Vidya, had to be suppressed. Bamabodhini
Patrika warned against the tendency to subvert the objective of female education
by some women who still read Vidya-Sundar and panchalis in the andarmahal.
(Banerjee 163)
Mrinalini Sinha has pointed to a similar equivocation in Bamabodhini
with respect to the controversial Age of Consent Bill (1891) that sought
to eradicate child marriage, despite its own repeatedly stated opposition
to this institution as one main contributor to women's illiteracy: It was
only in 1894 when the Bamabodhini Patrika, one of the leading journals
for women in Bengal, was celebrating its thirtieth jubilee that [Ghulam]
Murshid finds a passing reference to the Consent Act (Sinha 170).
Himani Bannerji has described this approach in general as hegemonic
social reform (Bannerji 72-98). Partha Chatterjee somewhat harshly calls
this the dead end [of] the nationalist resolution of the women's question
... (Chatterjee 252).
This judgment is only partially correct. Bamabodhini was located at a
particular time and place in the development of Indian modernity and had
to grapple with ingrained social preconceptions that constituted its own
cultural background. However imperfect its endeavors, it did seek to con
ceptualize a third space beyond the reified binaries of civilized/primitive,
modern/traditional, or rational/irrational. This third discursive space
allows for the gendered inflection of conventional male-authored nine
teenth century Advice to Women texts in the Mother and Daughter
dialogues that appear in Bamabodhini. Typically, these texts, even those
written in the context of companionate marriage, assume that women are
ignorant, frivolous, superstitious, and in need of male guidance. A well
known treatise such as Satyacharan Mitra's Streer Prati Svamir Upadesh
(A Husband's Advice to his Wife) assumes a condescending attitude to
women despite Mitra's being a progressive who favors remarriage for
widows (Mitra 129). The imaginary husband says, the husband is
learned, the wife is stupid, the husband speaks the truth, the wife tells lies.
... We see this in home after home. ... The cause of this is that women are
not being educated (Mitra 140). By contrast, the three-part Advice to a
Daughter in Bamabodhini (April, May, and July 1864; Ray 12-21) writes
of the ways education draws out and develops a woman's natural faculty
of reason by eliminating superstition.
What did Bamabodhini Patrika ultimately achieve for the cause of
women's education in Bengal and elsewhere in India? However fraught
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KRISHN SEN
1 89
with inherent epistemological contradictions, editors and contributors
used Bamabodhini as a platform to think through the beliefs of an exist
ing culture in the hopes of glimpsing a new horizon. This discursive
vision constitutes the journal's historical importance for the education of
women. Bamabodhini contributed not a little to subsequent changes.
Rasasundari Devi's Amarjibon (My Life) belonged to the era before for
mal antahpur education. She learned to read and write by secretly study
ing books belonging to her sons and wrote her autobiography after she
was sixty:
Wasn't it a matter to be regretted, that I had to go through all this humiliation just
because I was a woman? Shut up like a thief, even trying to learn was considered
an offense. It is such a pleasure to see the women today enjoying so much free
dom. These days parents of a single girl child take so much care to educate her.
But we had to struggle so much just for that. The little that I have learned is only
because God did me the favor. (Tharu and Lalitha 201-02)
Admittedly, Rasasundari is speaking of her own class. Nevertheless,
along with many other reformers and institutions, this was Bamabo
dh ini s legacy .
University of Calcutta
NOTES
i The Brahmo Samaj, founded in Bengal in 1828 by Raja Rammohan Roy, was
an Upanishadic reform movement directed against the conservative and ritual
istic forms of Brahminical Hinduism. Its leaders, including Maharshi Deben
dranath Tagore, the father of Rabindranath Tagore, were Western-educated
liberals who, however, were not Westernised but deeply influenced by the
spiritual message of the Upanishads.
2 All references to Bamabodhini Patrika are from Bharati Ray, ed., Sekaler Nar
ishiksha: Bamabodhini Patrika [Women's Education in Those Days: Bamabo
dhini Patrika] (Calcutta: U of Calcutta P, 1994), a collection of all the essays on
women's education from Bamabodhini Patrika between 1863 and 1922. This
volume was sponsored by the Women's Studies Research Centre, University of
Calcutta. All translations into English from the original Bengali are mine.
3 Answer scripts were handwritten answers to questions in the test.
4 On the many ambiguities and tensions in the nineteenth-century Education
of Women Debate in India, see Ghulam Murshid, Reluctant Debutante:
Response of Bengali Women to Modernization, 1849-190f (Rajshahi: Rajshahi
UP, 1983) 19-62; Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Ben
gal, 1849-190j (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984).
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190 Victorian Periodicals Review 37:2 Summer 2004
5 Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation (New Delhi: Permanent Black,
2000).
6 A similar sentiment had been expressed earlier by Nistarini Devi (qtd. in Ray
190-1), writing in July 1884 from Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh.
7 Sumit Sarkar, The Women's Question in 19 Century Bengal, Women and
Culture, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (Bombay: SNDT Women's
UP, 1985) 157-72; Partha Chatterjee, The Nationalist Resolution of the
Women's Question, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, ed. Kum
kum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989) 233-53;
Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation (New Delhi: Permanent Black,
2000); Himani Bannerji, Inventing Subjects: Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy
and Colonialism (Delhi: Tulika, 2001) 99-178.
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