Words of Her Own : Women Authors in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Drawing on a spectrum of genres, such as autobiographies, diaries, didactic tracts, novels and travelogues, this book examines the socio-cultural incentives that enabled the emergence of middle-class Hindu and Brahmo women authors as an ever-growing distinct category in nineteenth century in Bengal and factors facilitating production and circulation of their creations. By exploring the intersections of class, caste, gender, language, religion, culture in women-authored texts and by reading these within a specific milieu, the study opens up the possibility of re-configuring mainstream history writing that often ignores them.

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 socio-cultural 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 display a firmly gendered form and content, by offering rich insights into the complex world of women''s subjectivities 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.