Review: Gender and Caste Hierarchy in Colonial Bengal

Review of Deboshruti Roychowdhury's Gender and Caste Hierarchy in Colonial Bengal: Inter-caste Interventions of Ideal Womanhood by Sarmistha Dutta Gupta
 

Stree, 2014
ISBN 978-93-81345-05-4 
demy octavo pb; 256 pp
Rs 600

...The author Deboshruti Roychowdhury shows that the upholding of the caste-Hindu notions of adarsha nari or the ideal woman did not remain a prerogative of the high castes in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Bengal. Linking ideology to materiality, she expounds how the upwardly mobile among the low castes—who found it materially more beneficial in appropriating high-caste gender norms—contributed in no small measure in the making of the ideal woman. The book thus is an attempt to resist the universalization of the construction of such an ideal only in terms of high-caste existence.

Focussing on certain everyday aspects of women’s lives, the book throws light on the way people with social agency amongst the low castes tried to socialize their women according to high-caste norms, thereby gaining status for their castes and at the same time helping preserve the caste hierarchy fundamentally through control of female sexuality. The tracts they wrote, the journals they produced and the caste associations these aspiring groups ran, also reveal how an almost homogenous ideal of womanhood was produced across caste and how such an ideal was instrumental in maintaining both caste and gender inequality....

Read full review in Kindle Magazine (July 2014 Issue) visit: http://kindlemag.in/gender-caste-hierarchy-colonial-bengal-inter-caste-interventions-ideal-womanhood/ 

Review: Shaping the Discourse

Review of Ipsita Chanda and Jayeeta Bagchi (eds.) Shaping the Discourse: Women’s Writings in Bengali Periodicals: 1865-1947 by Epshita Halder

 "Threading together possibilities of an ongoing multi-layered and multi-textured social conversation on women’s issues within a period that spans decades"

Stree, 2013
ISBNs 978-81-906760-5-2;
81-906760-6-9

...[T]he collection neither presumes the absence of the slips between discourse and practice nor a relative autonomy, it does try to conceptualize gender at multiple levels—personal identity, principle of organization of social structures and basis of normative value(s). In their bid to chart out a ‘literary history’ of gender as a category, the editors have tried to show how this category is constructed through belief, reason and emotion, expressed through a particular genre and medium. Threading together possibilities of an ongoing multi-layered and multi-textured social conversation on women’s issues within a period that spans decades, the articles help readers trace the dynamics of change in positions and strategies on women’s education, child marriage, widow remarriage, seclusion, ‘reform’, self-help, patriotism and its practice and so on....

Read full review in Kindle Magazine (July 2014 Issue) visit: http://kindlemag.in/shaping-writings-bengali-periodicals/

For more information visit: http://stree-samyabooks.blogspot.in/2013_12_01_archive.html

LATEST REVIEW OF DR JAYANTI BASU'S 

RECONSTRUCTING THE BENGAL PARTITION: 

NEW RELEASE December 2013 Nonfiction

Shaping the Discourse: Women’s Writings in Bengali Periodicals (1865–1947)

Edited by Ipshita Chanda and Jayeeta Bagchi

8.5”x 5.5” pb, 466 pp, ISBNs 978-81-906760-5-2; 81-906760-6-9 Rs 550; £40.00

Comprising translations of women’s writings of Brahmo, Hindu and Muslim writers of undivided Bengal (involving present-day Bangladesh), which were published in well-known Bengali periodicals (between 1865–1947), such as Bamabodhini Patrika, Prabasi, Antahpur, Bharati, Bangadarshan,Bharatlakshmi, Saogat, Nabanoor, and so on, this volume is the third reader compiled by the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, for the new Masters’ level courses in women’s studies.  

            Focussing on a period, of reform, conflict, change and debate, the reader explores the multi-layered social conversation about women’s issues and maps the changes in the life practices and beliefs of women as reflected in their writings with the progression of time. While there is Taherannesa writing in 1865 in Bamabodhini Patrika, and appealing, ‘O civilized men do not remain neglectful of educating women’, there is Saratkumari Chaudhurani’s article in Bharati, published in 1914, where she upholds the initiative of Swarnakumari Devi’s Sakhi Samiti for spreading education and literacy amidst women, helping widows, aiding orphans, and so on. Hence, the discourse that surfaces also follows the path of a historical narrative.

            This volume traces issues like relations between men and women, and amongst women themselves to more ‘public’ concerns like women’s education and employment; child marriage, seclusion of women and the position of widows. It upholds the dichotomy between the private and the public, and the prachina, the traditional, and the navina, the ‘new’, with the emerging woman proposing an alternate way of life, thereby extending the woman’s question beyond every aspect of women and men’s social existence; putting these writings in a larger context of reform, change and conflict; and projecting the discourse on gender issues as shaped by power relations between classes, castes and communities cohabiting in society.

Ipshita Chanda is Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University;

Jayeeta Bagchi is Assistant Professor in English, National University of Study and Research in Law, Ranchi.