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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




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




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




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




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




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





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




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,





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).




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





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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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:





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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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).





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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Lessons in Self-Fashioning Bamabodhini Patrika and the Education of Women in Colonial

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