Edition 10: Women writers and the Bengal Presidency

As you, my readers, have discerned, I have been exploring the lives of women and women authors of the past few centuries. My curiosity engendered a journey that started with St Perpetua in the early 3rd century, most likely the first woman to document her story, to the remarkable story of Aphra Behn, spy, poet, playwright and novelist in the mid-seventeenth century. Behn possibly made authorship a remunerative profession for women, even though they, almost until the late nineteenth century, had to use the subterfuge of a pseudonym for them to be taken seriously as writers while protecting their family from the disrepute of harbouring a woman who wrote, God forbid, for money.

In nineteenth-century colonial India, formal education was denied to lower castes and women[1] (albeit of all castes). Women of the upper castes could study religious texts and classical literature. Most girls were married by the age of 12 and were trained in child-rearing practices, practical skills like cooking, sewing and other household arts. Muslim girls were expected to be able to read the Quran. Interestingly, some women were taught accounting in order to tackle property-related issues. Mountstuart Elphinstone, Governor of Bombay’s survey of indigenous education in Bombay Presidency in 1823 found that there were no schools for girls. A similar survey done by William Adam in the Bengal Presidency in 1835 revealed the absence of formal female schooling except for home schools which taught household skills.

Clearly class and gender determined access to formal education in the West; in India, we had the massive added complication of caste. In The History Of Doing, Radha Kumar looks at how women’s issues were raised starting with the nineteenth century, initially by male social reformers and then by women themselves as they became involved in the independence movement. She writes: “The nineteenth-century could well be called an age of women, for all over the world their rights and wrongs, their ‘nature’, capacities and potential were the subjects of heated discussion. In Europe feminist consciousness began spreading during and after the French Revolution, and by the end of the century, feminist ideas were being expressed by radicals in England, France and Germany. By the mid-nineteenth century the ‘woman question’ had become a central issue for Russian reformers and anarchists; while in India the wrongs (sic) of women began to be deplored by social reformers mainly in Bengal and Maharashtra”. 

Edition 9 described the advent of an expanding British administrative structure. A growing Indian bourgeoisie in the colonial economy sought to reform itself, particularly against caste, idol worship, child marriage and sati. Social reformers, some educated in the West campaigned for girls’ education, redefining not only male-female relations but also their role in public and private spaces, in the world and at home. It must be pointed out though that rising British control in India alone did not engender social reform. The old order in India - the Mughal empire and the princely states - were disintegrating, leaving spaces for new movements to take birth. The decline of the Peshwa rule in Maharashtra, for example, saw the anti-caste movement take root. Similarly, Persian and Arabic studies along with Sanskrit and Bengali deeply influenced Raja Ram Mohan Roy. He was thus influenced by 18th-century Sufi arguments for religious reform as much as by English rationalism.

Both Hindu and Muslim families followed a Zenana system – basically, women lived separately from men inducing segregation from the social and cultural aspects of the family and society. This system along with the lack of female teachers in schools prevented any sort of understanding of the world by women. A rising English-educated elite middle class of men wanted educated wives and initially, the Zenana served the purpose of home education for girls and adult women - they were taught to read, write, compose letters and do simple accounting. In the 1840s, female Christian missionaries who came to India took advantage of the Zenana system to spread western beliefs in Indian society. This paved the way for the establishment of several schools[2] for girls all over India by the Christian missionaries and the British Government.

Attitudes towards female education changed in the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps due to two important structural changes (along with the many social reform movements). First, Wood’s Dispatch of 1854[3] considered the Zenana system as important for women’s education and recommended effectively that girls’-only schools be set up supported by a grant-in-aid system. Consequently, female teachers were required and in 1862, schools for training female teachers were set up in Bombay, Poona and Ahmedabad. Second, the Hunter[4] Commission[5]’s Report of 1882 emphasised secular education for women. Following this, many schools and colleges were established all over India with the number of girls in universities increasing from 6 in 1881 to 264 by the end of the nineteenth century. 

In her book Words of Her Own – Women Authors in Nineteenth-Century Bengal, Maroona Murmu studies a broad spectrum of writings from autobiographies to travel writings and “unmasks varied emotions and feelings – longings, pleasures, disappointments – as also priorities, modes of living, literary tastes, attitudes and opinions of women authors who were either secluded in the antahpur or had access to the outside world”. She seeks to answer some really, interesting questions – what led to the unshackling of their creativity in the second half of the nineteenth century and their emergence as a distinct category for the first time? She posits that the new socio-economic class of bhadralok (upper caste, respectable and culturally refined gentlemen with access to both Sanskrit and Western education) aspired to “emancipate” its women or bhadramahila through access to education and re-defining domestic space or the household. 

However, the question Murmu raises of the socio-economic incentives behind the production and circulation of their texts is, to me, a very interesting one. Bengal was the first seat of the vernacular press and in the 1850s, the rapidly growing printing and publishing industry demanded new literary norms for standardization of print-language – basically, the language began to become simplified in order to appeal to a wider readership. What is fascinating though is the extent of information we have on the number of works published. In 1852, Reverend James Long, a missionary scholar and one of the founders of the Vernacular Literature Society in Calcutta compiled Granthavali: An Alphabetical List of Works Published in Bengali containing a list of 1,084 titles classified according to subjects but without any mention of their authors or publishers. A second catalogue followed in 1855 as a tool to help those who wished to procure Bengali books. But this was just around the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 and before long (couldn’t resist this one!), Long supported by the Lieutenant Governor attempted to survey everything published between 1857 and 1858 to (wait for this!) trace sedition and anti-colonial agitations! 

And sure enough, 1867 saw the enactment of the Indian Press and Registration of Books Act to regulate printing presses and newspapers – every book had to be registered, officials had to be provided with three copies of every book, a publisher could obtain a copyright for two rupees! Failure to register a book was illegal and attracted a fine of up to 5,000 rupees or imprisonment of up to two years or both. Draconian it may have been, but the registration of books in the Bengal Presidency produced the most reliable data on the number, genre and authorship of books published at the time. In the four years between 1853 and 1857, Long’s data shows that the number of printed books for sale rose from a little over 300,000 to 600,000 and perhaps a few million people “listening” (in the old oral tradition plus limited literacy) to or reading books!

In the second half of the nineteenth century, over 300 books were authored by women writers and the Bengal Library Catalogue of Books has them officially listed across varied categories – art, biography, drama, fiction, history, poetry, philosophy, religion, science, travel. The list also reveals a predominant tendency among women to write poetry. It seemed therefore that female education picked up momentum slowly but surely in Bengal and led to the birth of many women authors. One such woman was Rassundari Devi whose autobiography Amar Jiban was published in 1876, the first autobiography by an Indian woman. A mother of 12, with a deep aspiration to be literate, she took out a page from her husband’s religious book and stole a leaf out of her son’s practice book for writing. She self-taught herself surreptitiously by comparing the words between the two whenever she was free from household chores. Swarnakumari Devi of the Tagore family was among the first women writers in Bengal to gain prominence. Her first novel Deepnirban published in 1876 helped in rousing the national spirit. And Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, born and married into a family where she was encouraged to study English and Bengali wrote short stories and novels mostly in Bengali and strongly advocated for women’s education through her writing. “Sultana’s Dream” is celebrated as one of the earliest examples of feminist science fiction which depicts a world in which women run everything and men are secluded!

If you google nineteenth-century Indian women writers, you will find a list of about 30 (the earlier centuries reveal just a few names); many of them from Bengal. While women used their writing as a way of condemning patriarchy, seeing their work strictly through a gender lens denies them a role in making history. Their journey into writing did not come easily – they were diffident about creating a public self and their early creative efforts were marked by self-deprecation. For example, in order to avoid male scrutiny and condemnation of this new assertion of self, they made sure to warn readers not to neglect family duties or apologized profusely for any defects in their writing. Beginning in the confines of traditional models of feminity, wifehood and motherhood, these women rebelled through their writing, creating new definitions of womanhood.  And so, their work remains important from a historical standpoint and is representative of the turbulent decades of the nineteenth century.

P.S. Let me admit that I cringe every time I use the terms “upper” or “lower” caste. 

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References:

[1] There were some deep superstitions about girls’ education, one being that the husband would die if the girl was educated. The Exercise Book, a short story by Rabindranath Tagore is about Uma who gets married at the age of nine and must hide her will to get an education from the other women in her husband’s family. When her husband discovers the truth, he ridicules her and tears her book into pieces.

[2] Upper caste Hindus did not readily accept formal education for women in the first half of the nineteenth century – for example, in 1821, the Church Missionary Society opened 30 schools for Hindu girls in Calcutta but higher castes families did not enrol their girls because of the religious instruction being given; thus, lower caste and Christian families got their children into these schools.

[3] Sir Charles Wood sent a dispatch to Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General of India in 1854. In addition to the emphasis on female education, Wood suggested that primary schools must adopt vernacular languages, high schools must adopt Anglo-vernacular language and at college-level English should be the medium of education. Wood's Dispatch is called Magna Carta of English Education in India.

[4] William Wilson Hunter was born in 1840 in Glasgow, Scotland and acquired a knowledge of Sanskrit before passing first in the final examination for the Indian Civil Service in 1862. He was commissioned by Lord Ripon, then Governor-General of India to preside over the Commission on Indian Education. He is most known for The Imperial Gazetteer of India on which he started working in 1869, covering the geography, history, economics, and administration of India.

[5] This Hunter is not to be confused with The Jallianwala Bagh massacre Hunter Commission, a 1919 investigation into a British massacre that killed 15000 Indian civilians headed by William Hunter, Lord Hunter.