A Bengali Lady in England by Krishnabhabini Das (1885)

A Bengali Lady in England by Krishnabhabini Das (1885) PDF Author: Somdatta Mandal
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443882399
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
This is a translation from Bengali to English of the first ever woman’s travel narrative written in the late nineteenth century when India was still under British imperial rule with Bengal as its capital. Krishnabhabini Das (1864–1919) was a middle-class Bengali lady who accompanied her husband on his second visit to England in 1882, where they lived for eight years. Krishnabhabini wrote her narrative in Bengali and the account was published in Calcutta in 1885 as England-e Bongomohila [A Bengali Lady in England]. This anonymous publication had the author’s name written simply as “A Bengali Lady”. It is not a travel narrative per se as Das was also trying to educate fellow Indians about different aspects of British life, such as the English race and their nature, the English lady, English marriage and domestic life, religion and celebration, British labour, and trade. Though Hindu women did not observe the purdah as Muslim women did, they had, until then, remained largely invisible, confined within their homes and away from the public gaze. Their rightful place was within the domestic sphere and it was quite uncommon for a middle-class Indian woman to expose herself to the outside world or participate in activities and debates in the public domain. This self-ordained mission of educating people back home with the ground realities in England is what makes Krishnabhabini’s narrative unique. The narrative offers a brilliant picture of the colonial interface between England and India and shows how women travellers from India to Europe worked to shape feminized personae characterized by conventionality, conservatism and domesticity, even as they imitated a male-dominated tradition of travel and travel writing.

A Bengali Lady in England by Krishnabhabini Das (1885)

A Bengali Lady in England by Krishnabhabini Das (1885) PDF Author: Somdatta Mandal
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443882399
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is a translation from Bengali to English of the first ever woman’s travel narrative written in the late nineteenth century when India was still under British imperial rule with Bengal as its capital. Krishnabhabini Das (1864–1919) was a middle-class Bengali lady who accompanied her husband on his second visit to England in 1882, where they lived for eight years. Krishnabhabini wrote her narrative in Bengali and the account was published in Calcutta in 1885 as England-e Bongomohila [A Bengali Lady in England]. This anonymous publication had the author’s name written simply as “A Bengali Lady”. It is not a travel narrative per se as Das was also trying to educate fellow Indians about different aspects of British life, such as the English race and their nature, the English lady, English marriage and domestic life, religion and celebration, British labour, and trade. Though Hindu women did not observe the purdah as Muslim women did, they had, until then, remained largely invisible, confined within their homes and away from the public gaze. Their rightful place was within the domestic sphere and it was quite uncommon for a middle-class Indian woman to expose herself to the outside world or participate in activities and debates in the public domain. This self-ordained mission of educating people back home with the ground realities in England is what makes Krishnabhabini’s narrative unique. The narrative offers a brilliant picture of the colonial interface between England and India and shows how women travellers from India to Europe worked to shape feminized personae characterized by conventionality, conservatism and domesticity, even as they imitated a male-dominated tradition of travel and travel writing.

A Bengali Lady in England

A Bengali Lady in England PDF Author: Krishnabhabini Das
Publisher: Hawakal Publishers
ISBN: 8194421209
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Englandey Bangamahila is the first travel writing by a Bengali woman in England, published in 1885. A Bengali Lady in England is the annotated translation with a critical introduction by Prof. Nabanita Sengupta. This book is a documentation of the 19th century England—its strength and prejudices, as seen through the eyes of a twenty-year-old Krishnabhabini Das, a housewife belonging to an orthodox Hindu family. Krishnabhabini did not believe in social taboos and went against quite a number of them like travelling abroad, educating herself, not adhering to the 19th century views of motherhood. Her book too was iconoclast in a number of ways because it was not normal for a woman belonging to a subject race to dare criticise the British in such bold words. The book is an exceptional study of the Indo-English relationship, postcolonial studies, 19th century nationalism and gender studies.

Travel Culture, Travel Writing and Bengali Women, 1870–1940

Travel Culture, Travel Writing and Bengali Women, 1870–1940 PDF Author: Jayati Gupta
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000088227
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
This book chronicles travel writings of Bengali women in colonial India and explores the intersections of power, indigeneity, and the representations of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ in these writings. It documents the transgressive histories of these women who stepped out to create emancipatory identities for themselves. The book brings together a selection of travelogues from various Bengali women and their journeys to the West, the Aryavarta, and Japan. These writings challenge stereotypes of the 'circumscribed native woman’ and explore the complex personal and socio-political histories of women in colonial India. Reading these from a feminist, postcolonial perspective, the volume highlights how these women from different castes, class and ages confront the changing realities of their lives in colonial India in the backdrop of the independence movement and the second world war. The author draws attention to the personal histories of these women, which informed their views on education, womanhood, marriage, female autonomy, family, and politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Engaging and insightful, this volume will be of interest to students and researchers of literature and history, gender and culture studies, and for general readers interested in women and travel writing.

Words of Her Own

Words of Her Own PDF Author: Maroona Murmu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199098212
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Words of Her Own situates the experiences and articulations of emergent women writers in nineteenth-century Bengal through an exploration of works authored by them. Based on a spectrum of genres—such as autobiographies, novels, and travelogues—this book examines the sociocultural incentives that enabled the dawn of middle-class Hindu and Brahmo women authors at that time. Murmu explores the intersections of class, caste, gender, language, and religion in these works. Reading these texts within a specific milieu, Murmu sets out to rectify the essentialist conception of women’s writings being a monolithic body of works that displays a firmly gendered form and content, by offering rich insights into the complex world of subjectivities of women in colonial Bengal. In attempting to do so, this book opens up the possibility of reconfiguring mainstream history by questioning the scholarly conceptualization of patriarchy being omnipotent enough to shape the intricacies of gender relations, resulting in the flattening of self-fashioning by women writers. The book contends that there were women authors who flouted the norms of literary aesthetics and tastes set by male literati, thereby creating a literary tradition of their own in Bangla and becoming agents of history at the turn of the century.

Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular

Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular PDF Author: Charu Gupta
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000511189
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
This collection brings together nine essays, accompanied by nine short translations that expand the assumptions that have typically framed literary histories, and creatively re-draws their boundaries, both temporally and spatially. The essays, rooted in the humanities and informed by interdisciplinary area studies, explore multiple linkages between forms of print culture, linguistic identities, and diverse vernacular literary spaces in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. The accompanying translations—from Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and Urdu—not only round out these scholarly explorations and comparisons, but invite readers to recognise the assiduous, intimate, and critical labour of expanding access to the vernacular archive, while also engaging with the challenges—linguistic, cultural, and political—of rendering vernacular articulations of gendered experience and embodiment in English. Collectively, the essays and translations foreground complex and politicised expressions of gender and genre in fictional and non-fictional print materials and thus draw meaningful connections between the vernacular and literature, the everyday and the marginals, and gender and sentiment. They expand vernacular literary archives, canons and genealogies, and push us to theorise the nature of writing in South Asia. Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular is a significant new contribution to South Asian literary history and gender studies, and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of History, Literature, Cultural Studies, Politics, and Sociology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.

Women and Literary Narratives in Colonial India

Women and Literary Narratives in Colonial India PDF Author: Sukla Chatterjee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042994439X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
In the colonial context of South Asia, there is a glaring asymmetry in the written records of the interaction between the Bengali women and their European counterparts, which is indicative of the larger and the overall asymmetry of discursive power, including the flow and access to information between the colonizers and their subjects. This book explores the idea of gazing through literature in Colonial India. Based on literary and historical analysis, it focuses on four different genres of literary writing where nineteenth-century Bengali women writers look back at the British colonizers. In the process, the European culture becomes a static point of reference, and the chapters in the book show the ideological, social, cultural, political, and deeper, emotional interactions between the colonized and the colonizer. The book also addresses the lack of sufficient primary sources authored by Bengali women on their European counterparts by anthologizing different available genres. Taking into account literary narratives from the colonized and the less represented side of the divide, such as a travelogue, fantasy fiction, missionary text and journal articles, the book represents the varying opinions and perspectives vis-à-vis the European women. Using an interdisciplinary approach charting the fields of Indology, colonial studies, sociology, literature/literary historiography, South-Asian feminism, and cultural studies, this book makes an important contribution to the field of South Asian Studies, studies of empire, and to Indian women’s literary history.

Indian Literatures in Diaspora

Indian Literatures in Diaspora PDF Author: Sireesha Telugu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000604101
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This book analyses diasporic literatures written in Indian languages written by authors living outside their homeland and contextualize the understanding of migration and migrant identities. Examining diasporic literature produced in Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, Indian Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Marathi, and Tamil, the book argues that writers in the diaspora who choose to write in their vernacular languages attempt to retain their native language, for they believe that the loss of the language would lead to the loss of their culture. The author answers seminal questions including: How are these writers different from mainstream Indian writers who write in English? Themes and issues that could be compared to or contrasted with the diasporic literatures written in English are also explored. The book offers a significant examination of the nature and dynamics of the multilingual Indian society and culture, and its global readership. It is the first book on Indian diasporic literature in Indian and transnational languages, and a pioneering contribution to the field. The book will be of interest to academics in the field of South Asian Studies, South Asian literature, Asian literature, diaspora and literary studies.

Women and the Romance of the Word

Women and the Romance of the Word PDF Author: Sreemati Mukherjee
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9356406049
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Around the middle of the 19th century, woman emerges as a new sign disrupting the cultural economy of Bengal and reversing and realigning conventional notions and expectations of woman's agency and power. The colonial interface would have been important because a need for women's overall development was felt amongst the male intelligentsia of the period and some of the key texts that circulated at the beginning of the 19th century were Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791), James Mill's History of British India (1817), Richard Carlile's Every Woman's Book (1826) and William Thompson's Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men (1825). The inaugural moment of this outstanding efflorescence of women's writing in polemics, travel writing, autobiography and journal articles could be said to begin with Kailashbasini Devi's Hindu Mahilaganer Heenabastha (The Woeful Plight of Hindu Women, 1863), in autobiographies like Rassundari Devi's Amar Jiban (My Life, 1876) and Binodini Dasi's Amar Katha (My Words, 1913) and in personalised travelogues like Krishnabhabini Das's Englande Banga Mahila (A Bengali Woman in England, 1885). As Kailashbasini, Rassundari, Krishnabhabini and Binodini write, the romance of the word, the romance of learning and self-realisation is enacted. A new dramatic script emerges as Bengali women become the scriptwriters of their own histories.

Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia

Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia PDF Author: Harald Fischer-Tiné
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429774699
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 697

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia provides a comprehensive overview of the historiographical specialisation and sophistication of the history of colonialism in South Asia. It explores the classic works of earlier generations of historians and offers an introduction to the rapid and multifaceted development of historical research on colonial South Asia since the 1990s. Covering economic history, political history, and social history and offering insights from other disciplines and ‘turns’ within the mainstream of history, the handbook is structured in six parts: Overarching Themes and Debates The World of Economy and Labour Creating and Keeping Order: Science, Race, Religion, Law, and Education Environment and Space Culture, Media, and the Everyday Colonial South Asia in the World The editors have assembled a group of leading international scholars of South Asian history and related disciplines to introduce a broad readership into the respective subfields and research topics. Designed to serve as a comprehensive and nuanced yet readable introduction to the vast field of the history of colonialism in the Indian subcontinent, the handbook will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of South Asian history, imperial and colonial history, and global and world history.

'Charaiveti' (Vivekananda's Dialogue on People, Politics & Space)

'Charaiveti' (Vivekananda's Dialogue on People, Politics & Space) PDF Author: Dr Subhashis Banerjee
Publisher: Book Rivers
ISBN: 9389914647
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Vivekananda had travelled within India as a 'parivrajaka' (the travelling monk) from 1888 to 1893 and in May 1893 crossed the 'kalapani' (crossing the inland water boundary) to represent India in the Parliament of World's Religion held in Chicago. This incident led to many more travels within India and the West. He was a traveller who left his impressions, views and observations in the form of letters, diaries and memoirs. A close study of such documents, as well as secondary materials, leads to questions of imperialism, identity, self-other dichotomy, comparative religion, women and acculturation.