BEGC-111

Women’s Writing
Indira Gandhi National Open University
School of Humanities
 BEGC - 111
Women’s Writing
Indira Gandhi
National Open University
School of Humanities

BLOCK 1
Non Fictional Prose 3
BLOCK 2
Poetry 59
BLOCK 3
Short Story 113
BLOCK 4
Novel Sunlight on A Broken Column by Attia Hossain 177
EXPERT COMMITTEE
Dr. Vijay Sharma (Retd) Prof. Anju S. Gupta (Retd)
Principal, Ram Lal Anand College Professor of English
University of Delhi SOH, IGNOU, New Delhi
Dr. Hema Raghavan (Retd) Prof. Shatrughna Kumar (Retd)
Gargi College Professor of Hindi
Un iversity of Delhi SOH, IGNOU, New Delhi
Prof. Ameena K. Ansari IGNOU FACU LTY (ENGLISH)
Department of English Prof. Malati Mathur (Director)
Jami a Millia Islamia Prof. Neera Singh
New Delhi Prof. Nandini Sahu
Dr. Anand Prakash (Retd) Prof. Parmod Kumar
Hans R aj College Dr. Perna Eden Samdup
University of Delhi Ms. Mridula Rashmi Kindo

BLOCK PREPARATION
Course Writers Content and Language Editing

Dr. Rimika Singhvi (Block-1 Unit-1) Prof. Malati Mathur

HOD, Dept of Engl ish School of Humanities, IGNOU
IIS Un i versity, Jaipur Prof. Neera Singh
Dr. Rajesh Kumar (Block-1 Unit-2) School of Humanities, IGNOU
Associate Professor (English)
SOH, IGNOU
Dr. Sunita Yadav (Block- 1 Unit-4)
HOD, Department of English
GD Girls College, Alwar
Dr. Anamika Shukla (Block-2 Unit-1)
Associate Professor (English)
SOH, IGNOU
Dr. Vandita Gautam ( Block-3, Unit-3)
Department of English
Motilal Nehru College
University of Delhi
Dr. Vinita Goyal (Block-3 Unit-4)
Department of English
GD Girls College, Alwar
Some units have been adapted from existing
IGNOU material Course Coordinator

Prof. Malati Mathur

Director
Cover page: Tamal Basu, MPDD, IGNOU School of Humanities, IGNOU

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 BEGC - 111
Women’s Writing
Indira Gandhi
National Open University
School of Humanities

Block

1
NON FICTIONAL PROSE
Course Introduction 5
Block Introduction 7
UNIT 1
Introduction to Women’s Writing 9
UNIT 2
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral
Subjects 22
UNIT 3
A Woman's Retelling of the Rama-Tale: The
Chandrabati Ramayana 34
UNIT 4
A Testimony of Our Inexhaustible Treasure
By Pandita Ramabai 46
COURSE INTRODUCTION
Writing, whether fiction, poetry, essay or drama, provides a window into society
and, as such, is a useful tool in the analysis of sociological, political and
anthropological facets of culture and civilization, apart from its intrinsic worth
as literature. And when the writing is done by a marginalized section of the
world’s populace – women - its significance increases a hundredfold. In this
course, we will read some works by women from different countries of the world
and see whether their experiences are similar in certain ways. Does being a
woman mean being discriminated against in certain ways? What does this entail
in terms of physical and psychological trauma? By the end of this course, you
would be more aware of the position of women who are often not considered to
be part of the mainstream and the courage it takes to pen down their thoughts,
feelings and experiences. Not all the experiences and feelings expressed are
negative, of course. But they do reveal the workings of a woman’s mind in great
depth and variety.
Concepts of creativity, literary history or literary interpretation were, for a long
time, and still, in some measure continue to be, based entirely on male experience
and put forward as universal. Women writers are often taken less seriously than
their male counterparts. As students of literature, you must ponder over these
issues and try to form an opinion of your own, based on what you have read.
BLOCK INTRODUCTION
In this Block, we will first introduce you to the idea of women’s writing and the various
stages of its journey through society and literature. You will read some prose writing
by women which is out of the realm of fiction and is concerned with criticism and
issues related to women and society. The writers’ views on various matters will help
you to understand what women feel and what they have expressed in different ways.
Non Fictional Prose

8
 Introduction to Women’s
UNIT 1 INTRODUCTION TO WOMEN’S Writing

WRITING
Structure

1.0 Objectives
1.1 Introduction
1.2 The Waves of Feminism: An Overview
1.3 Women’s Writing: Trends and Development
1.3.1 Women’s Writing: Locating the Genre
1.3.2 Perspectives in Feminist Thought
1.4 Women’s Writing: The Indian Context
1.5 Let Us Sum Up
1.6 Aids to Activities
1.7 Glossary
1.8 Unit-End Questions
1.9 References and Suggested Readings

1.0 OBJECTIVES
By the end of this Unit, you will be able to:
 understand the different aspects of, and the conflicts within, the concept of
feminism over time.
 trace women’s writing throughout history, and across cultural and
geographical boundaries.
 get acquainted with the literary figures associated with the struggle for the
acknowledgement and acceptance of women’s writing.
Words in bold are explained in the Glossary.

1.1 INTRODUCTION
Feminist literary criticism, in reading cultural artefacts from a feminist standpoint,
has transformed the study of literary texts. When employed in the context of
literature, feminist criticism assesses a text by a female or a male author for its
literary value as well as for its representation of women characters.
Across the centuries, women have been the subject of innumerable
reconfigurations and with every reinscription comes the necessity of rereading.
In the space of the text, woman can be both defamed and defended, and it is here
that the most persuasive possibilities can be found for imagining the future of
the female subject. (Plain & Sellers 2)
Feminist literary criticism helps reassess existing literary canons for the
patriarchal ideologies, political beliefs and value systems that they perpetuate, 9
Non Fictional Prose which more often than not, belong to the European, White man. It has
simultaneously also influenced the concomitant aspects of publishing and critical
reception with particular focus on the analysis of how the literary techniques
employed by women writers are different from the prescriptions of the male
canon. The blossoming of feminist theory in the past few years has also led to
new developments in the field of Women’s Writing.

Activity 1: Rereading of canonical works is also followed by retellings of

such texts. Do you think they justify the representation of women characters?

The roots of the earliest feminist discourse have to be traced in the eighteenth
century when Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman, a work she was vilified by many fellow writers for endeavouring. Inspired
by the notions of equality and liberty that the French Revolution emblematized,
the work was one of the world’s first sustained feminist arguments and challenged
many of the conventional notions of femininity of her time. Wollstonecraft’s
emphasis on female education–the kind which enforces solid virtues as against
artificial graces– made her one of the earliest proponents of gender equality.
However, unlike latter-day feminists, she did not seek freedom for women from
the domestic sphere. Wollstonecraft’s efforts were paralleled by Margaret Fuller
in the US for she too emphasized on the need to educate women. Unlike
Wollstonecraft, however, she did not subscribe to the notion of specific gender
roles and sought solidarity between African-Americans and women.
Another founding figure of feminism as we know it today is Virginia Woolf
whose ideas continue to influence feminist theorists even today. She was an
early proponent of the notion of the ‘androgynous’ creative mind (Fuller too
had talked about androgyny but her notion of it was rooted in mysticism unlike
Woolf’s). The best artists, believed Woolf, were always a blend of masculine and
feminine qualities, or ‘man-womanly’, and ‘woman-manly’, as she called it (Woolf
103). She was also the first theorist who argued in favour of a reading practice
that was woman-centric–the kind which would allow women to read as women
without having to employ patriarchal yardsticks of aesthetics and values.

1.2 THE WAVES OF FEMINISM: AN OVERVIEW

The history of feminism, which usually begins with the writings of Wollstonecraft,
followed by Fuller and Woolf, has usually been divided into three waves. The
first wave, which lasted from the 1830s to the 1920s, was characterized by the
suffragette movement dedicated to achieving equality for women in the West.
The women activists of the time also expressed their concern for such issues as
property rights and the opposition to chattel marriage. An important strand of
first-wave feminism was Evangelical Feminism, which sought to uplift those
who were considered morally ‘fallen’. Significant feminist works of literature
written during the first-wave included Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, and Henrick Ibsen’s The Doll’s House,
each of which deal with the restrictive and oppressive roles of women in Victorian
society. The second wave of feminism roughly began in the year 1963 with the
arrival of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. The mantra of this wave was
that ‘the personal is the political’, i.e., the issues that women were dealing with
10 on the personal front were actually political and systemic. Authors like Doris
Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Margaret Drabble, Angela Carter and Muriel Spark Introduction to Women’s
Writing
appeared on the literary scene, rendering the private and social lives of women
in vivid detail. They depicted liberated women in their works, who could carve
their own niche both in their personal and professional lives. Third-wave feminism
began in the 1990s and continues to the present times. This wave was rooted in
the works of such theorists as Luce Irigaray, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Judith
Butler. Largely influenced by a post-structuralist view of both gender and
sexuality, third wave feminism also challenges what it perceives as the failures
of the previous wave. Gender was no longer a rigid or stable category, but a
shifting, contingent, negotiable and fluid entity.
Various analytical categories such as class, caste, race, ethnicity, were added to
the study of feminism. In a paradigmatic shift in feminist criticism, third-wave
feminism also responds to the breakdown of the category of ‘women’ by
emphasizing on individual narratives of different women rather than the canonical
narratives of the middle-class, White women. Authors such as Margaret Atwood,
Jeanette Winterson, Joyce Carol Oates, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith
became the popular women writers of the third wave. Recent women’s writing
has attempted to theorize the act of narration too. Whose voice narrates a story,
whose voice is paid attention to, who holds authority over a narrative, who
represents himself/herself and who is represented by another person, have all
become significant points of entry into works of literature. Likewise, researchers
who study feminism have also made sure that one of their major concerns is their
own position in relation to the population they are studying.
Many twenty-first century critics, however, have levelled their criticism against
the emphasis on individuality by post-feminists stating that if the personal is
truly the political, then a focus only on the individual, defeats what is actually a
collective program. For these critics, an over-emphasis on difference impedes
the development of the feminist movement. In emphasizing difference, feminists
also run the risk of focussing on certain differences (such as race, caste) more
than others (such as workplace).

Activity 2: ‘Anti-essentialism’ is a major force in driving the different waves

of feminism. What are some of the problems concerning women in the current
times? Are they different from those faced by women of previous
generations?

1.3 WOMEN’S WRITING: TRENDS AND

DEVELOPMENT
As a social constructionist view of gender began to take shape–the seeds of
which were sown in the first wave, and sex and gender were distinguished
between, feminists began to look at and identify the psychological, socio-cultural
and political implications of gender norms. Gerda Lerner aptly summarizes this
when she says: “Women writers, as women, negotiate with divided loyalties and
doubled consciousnesses, both within and without a social and cultural agreement”
(Duplessis 40). The tendency to look at certain behaviours and actions as being
typical to a particular gender resulted in women writers being in a double bind–
they were expected to limit their writings to those areas of which they had first- 11
Non Fictional Prose hand experience (i.e. the domestic sphere) but in a rather clever distortion of
reason, when they would stick to conventionally ‘feminine’ topics, they were
accused of being self-serving and parochial. As the prolific author Margaret
Atwood had said “when a man writes about things like doing the dishes, it’s
realism; when a woman does, it’s an unfortunate feminine genetic limitation”
(Nischik 176). To their nineteenth-century peers, women writers were women
before and writers later. A woman writer had to often resort to using a male nom
de plume if they wished to be assessed solely for the uniqueness of their writing
and not for writing well only when compared to the women writers of her time.
The awareness that their literary brilliance would be neglected, owing to the
many stereotypes that are attached to their gender, served as a perpetual source
of vexation to women writers.
Women writers had a strong role to play in undoing these implications. In fact,
the uptake of women’s writing as a distinctive literary culture, since the last few
decades, has been manifold. This trend has given rise to a whole set of literary
studies which specifically cater to women’s texts. However, there are certain
critics who oppose the employment of the term ‘women’s writing’ stating that it
privileges an author’s gender over her literary productions, almost suggesting
that the privilege is a compensation for the wrongs they have suffered.
Nevertheless, traditionally marginalized by men, women, in their capacity as
writers, have challenged not only the conventional structures of power and
dominance, but also the notions of what comprises literature. Their employment
of unconventional literary modes, narrative techniques, diction and style has led
to the creation of the separate genre of ‘women’s writing’ that occupies a unique
position when compared to men’s writings. The written word inevitably then,
became a means to empower women. One of the most popular themes of women’s
writing is its avowal to express and value women’s own views about themselves
as well as the world around them. Over the years, women’s writing has bravely
progressed towards an exploration of a woman’s identity. In the women writers’
refutation of a masculine literary tradition, they have steadily moved towards a
literature that is anchored within the ‘inner space,’ and ‘a room of one’s own’
was a significant symbol of the same.

1.3.1 Women’s Writing: Locating the Genre

If we examine the major writers of nineteenth century England, we see that a
host of women writers like Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Kate
Chopin, Elizabeth Gaskell, Emily Brontë and Maria Edgeworth, among others
have written works which were groundbreaking for the age in which they were
written. These works, for the past few decades, are being looked at as presaging
the issues and themes of latter-day feminist enquiry. Even more revolutionary
were the works of the American novelists of about the same time such as Louisa
May Allcot, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rebecca Harding Davis and Winifred
Holtby. In their seminal study on nineteenth century women novelists, Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar state that the major thematic concern of the nineteenth
century was “the woman’s quest for self-definition” (76).
At the turn of the twentieth century, women writers who wrote novels and prose
pieces adopted new literary approaches and experimented with narrative
12 techniques and styles. Disjointed, non-linear narratives marked by analepsis
and prolepsis, explicitly addressed those issues which were earlier swept under Introduction to Women’s
Writing
the carpet such as women’s sexual desires, sexual violence, same-sex desire and
the woman’s psychology. Writers began to explore how unfulfilling the traditional
roles of a daughter, wife and mother can be and how romantic engagements and
marriage cannot be a woman’s only dream. According to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese,
modern women writers have been “especially interested in the woman alone.
The lovers and husbands of their heroines clearly play a secondary role, not in
the trivialized mode of narcissistic fantasies or underdeveloped characters (to
the contrary, these men are finely delineated) but as particular figures among
many in the difficult lives of struggling women” (272). Women poets of the
time, like their prosodic counterparts, also embraced a new literary mode, charging
their works with unique stylistic and structural characteristics, using the poem’s
physical structure as a means to challenge the traditional literary forms. Poets
like Carol Rumens and Anna Wickham in England and Marianne Moore and
Hilda Doolittle in America have posed a veritable challenge to mainstream literary
traditions. Even so, they were treading on thin ice here because while writing in
as distinct a manner as they could, they also had to carefully avoid being ‘personal’
rather than universal because they had to rely on mainstream literary circles for
getting published and being held in esteem. However, as the times progressed,
women writers, who were financially independent, started their own printing
presses, journals and magazines.
The twentieth century also witnessed a massive output of African-American
literature. African-American writers’ texts were characterized by different issues
than those of the White writers of the period. Authors like Toni Morrison, Alice
Walker, Maya Angelou, and Zora Neale Hurston produced works that focussed
on issues of racial injustice, rigid standards of beauty, desire, motherhood,
interpersonal relationships, misogyny, gender roles, violence, incest, community
and society and God. These stalwarts of Black women’s writing inspired a whole
generation of young novelists such as Toni Cade Bambara and Gloria
Naylor. Black Feminism insisted on the need to include the analytical category
of race in feminist arguments. Thinkers like Patricia Hill Collins, Hortense Spillers
and Hazel Carby were the pioneers of Black feminist thought. Postcolonial
feminism, which emerged soon after, went a step forward and extended the
concerns of Black feminists to the issues faced by the Chicano and Asian American
women as well as the women of other cultures and nations.

Activity 3: Women writers in the nineteenth century often resorted to using

pseudonyms or anonymity to avoid the label of a “woman writer” and to
have a wider readership. Do you think the emergence of Women’s Writing
as a distinct genre hinders its reception in the zone of ‘mainstream’ literature
and renders women’s writings as belonging to the ‘other’?

1.3.2 Perspectives in Feminist Thought

Since the 1970s and 1980s there has been seen a surge of critical works that
analyze women’s writings in terms of the growing body of feminist thought.
French feminism, in particular, which evolved during the 1970s, with the works
of Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, and Luce Irigaray, has extensively explored
female subjectivity. Drawing upon psychoanalysis, Cixous challenged the
tendency towards ‘phallogocentrism’ in literature and instead suggested how 13
Non Fictional Prose the only way forward was to overthrow the hierarchies of language prevalent in
an androcentric society. She conceptualized men women as A and B, or as
independent entities, rather than as A and A–. Women, would no longer be the
‘other’ of men. Kristeva, likewise, suggested that since women could not become
an active part of the ‘symbolic order’, their writings expressed themselves in the
form of poetic language which she referred to as ‘genotexts’ (McCance 148), for
they evade the norms of language. The realization that language is an instrument
of oppression in the hands of patriarchy was one of the major developments in
feminist thought in the 1980s.
Language has been credited by many feminists as possessing a power which
allows it to control social relations in ways we are not privy to, disguising
patriarchal ideologies in misleading rhetoric. Dale Spender in her work Man
Made Language meditated at length on how unlike the declarative and assertive
manner of men’s writing, women’s writing was almost always deferential and
apologetic in its tone. Since then, language has been credited by many feminists
as possessing a power which allows it to control social relations in ways we are
not privy to. Spender goes on to also highlight how the connotations of masculine
forms of words tend to be more positive when compared with their feminine
counterparts and she states the example of the master-mistress word pair to
emphasize the same. (Kate McKluskie 51)
With language inevitably skewed in the favour of men, the obvious task before
women writers was to develop a language that was “their own”. Writers of the
last three decades of the twentieth century like Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter,
Fay Weldon and Kathy Acker, among others, reflect what Helene Cixous described
as the “écriture feminine” in The Laugh of the Medusa. Their writings reflect a
female consciousness which bring into being styles, themes, diction and tropes
intrinsically distinct from male writers. Use of mystic language, puns, word play,
and even visual alterations such as hyphens and parentheses became common.
Their characters were more fluid and difficult to categorize. Jeanette Winterson,
for example, created characters marked by a certain gender fluidity; Angela Carter
tried to subvert patriarchy through the use of magical realism and through showing
absent father figures and focussing on mother-daughter relationships. In fact,
the emphasis on gender fluidity in the works of these writers and critics set the
stage for the gender-queer theories of the twenty-first century.

Activity 4: Can you think of some other ways of using language, employed
by women writers, to portray the oppression and trauma of women
characters?

Another seminal work of the 1970s was A Literature of Their Own by Elaine
Showalter. Showalter effectively divided the literary culture of the feminist
movement into three phases, that is, the feminine, the feminist, and the female
apart from charting the repetitive issues, tropes, symbols and style in women’s
writing. She also coined the term ‘gynocriticism’ to underline the employment
of a feminist framework for the analysis of women’s writing. Certain other works
like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine
Mystique, Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity have influenced literature written by
women across the world. The task of feminist literary criticism is then to call
14
into question the legitimacy of masculine literary aesthetics and values that have Introduction to Women’s
Writing
been assimilated by both male and female writers. In the words of Annette
Kolodny’s, it pays “attentiveness to the ways in which primarily male structures
of power are inscribed (or encoded) within our literary inheritance: the
consequences of that encoding for women–as characters, as readers, and as
writers” (Cho 19) Most feminists would agree with the fact that literature serves
as an important instrument for the perpetuation of unequal power relations in a
society. By popularizing and reinforcing stereotypical portraits of women which
usually fall into two categories–that of the angelic mother and the predatory
seductress– literary texts naturalize these roles making them acceptable and
worthy for girls who are exposed to such texts.

Activity 5: Can you trace some examples of the portrayal of the power of
women and the mechanisms for ‘controlling’ them?

Some of the most incisive criticism of feminists has been directed at the way the
female body is perceived, specifically at the notions of what an ideal ‘feminine’
body should look like, what are fitting feminine behaviours which the body must
be trained to practice and also at her reproductive biology. In fact, it is the repeated
performance of certain roles prescribed by a culture-specific script that makes a
body gendered– an idea explored at length by Judith Butler. Consequently, a lot
of research has been done by feminist thinkers in the field of the ‘ethics of
embodiment’. Failure to embody a certain gender, class, race or other social
constructs is thus seen in most cases as a transgression which ultimately leads to
them being marked for oppression and/or ostracism. One such philosopher, Gail
Weiss points to specific feminist philosophers, critical race scholars, and disability
theorists who … illustrate, and ultimately combat, the insidious ways in which
sexism, racism, and “compulsory able-bodiedness” (McRuer 2006), impoverish
the lived experience of both oppressors and the oppressed, largely by
predetermining the meaning of their bodily interactions in accordance with
institutionalized cultural expectations and norms. (77)

1.4 WOMEN’S WRITING: THE INDIAN CONTEXT

With cultural norms becoming an important concern within feminist enquiry, the
need for feminist and cultural theories, that could cater to the needs of specific
groups of women (intersectional feminism) such as Blacks, Indians, lower-class
women etc., was deeply felt. To steer clear of essentialism, and of the
oversimplification of the experiences of women, became the major focus. The
influence of Western feminist philosophy has been unmissable in the way Indian
feminism has taken shape but the critical theories of the first-world countries are
absolutely divorced from the circumstances of women who are operating at the
grassroots. The whole idea behind ‘feminism without borders’ is to widen the
scope of feminism and to not privilege feminist theories about and by White,
middle class women. It thus emphasizes on the need to maintain cultural-
specificity when talking about women’s experiences.
To state an example, in nineteenth century Britain and America, the problems
addressed by feminists included the right to vote, to be free from wearing corsets,
to be allowed to hold meaningful occupations outside of the home etc. At about
15
Non Fictional Prose the same time in India, feminism encompassed such causes as the abolition of
the practice of sati, child marriage, female infanticide, restrictions on female
education, inheritance laws, etc. Even then, the reformatory efforts were largely
limited to upper class, and mostly Brahminical women. It was only later that
issues like women’s health, domestic abuse, wage legislation, the rights of the
tribal and the Dalit women were acknowledged. Such wide-spread disparity in
the issues being addressed speaks volumes about the need for culture-specific
feminism and women’s writing. Hence, the syllabus of this paper has been
designed in a manner that takes into account the various perspectives of women’s
writing to highlight the richness and diversity of women’s voices across
temporal and spatial boundaries. It brings together a spectrum of texts by and
about women.
The world of literature in the Indian subcontinent was for long marked by an
overpowering presence of male writers with women appearing on the scene late,
and garnering popularity and critical acclaim even later. When observed under a
feminist stance, the trope of having a voice and being listened to generally serves
as a symbol of agency, a trait which has originally been understood as a masculine
attribute. Most contemporary Indian women writers have emphasized on the
woman as an individual in her own stead, attempting to give their women
characters the freedom of self-definition, or in some cases, self-redefinition.
In the latter half of the twentieth century writers like Kamala Markandaya, Anita
Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Nayantara Sahgal, Githa Hariharan, among others,
became popular for exploring middle class women’s quest for fulfilment. But
there were authors like Ismat Chugtai, Amrita Pritam, Krishna Sobti, Gaura Pant,
Rashid Jahan who had dealt with women’s issues with unconventionality and
rigour in pre-Independent India as well. The Bhakti tradition has also been an
inalienable strand of India’s religious and literary tapestry and the writings of
women Bhakti poets like Akka Mahadevi, Andal, Jana Bai, Mira Bai, Lal Ded,
and Bahina Bai can be seen as the earliest manifestations of autonomy and liberty
in the face of the arbitrary and unbridled religious authority of the high-caste
Brahmin male.
Active resistance, as opposed to passively accepting oppression, has become
one of the major hallmarks of modern Indian women’s writing. They have
reiterated through their works the importance of bringing ‘women’ into the
category of ‘human’. Authors like Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy have
managed to bridge the gap between activism and the academy and have employed
their works of fiction to voice their concerns about marginalized communities
such as women, Dalits, transgenders, tribals and have also levelled their strident
criticism against bureaucrats, policy makers, police officers and upper caste men.
Modern-day critic-writers like Nivedita Menon and Namita Gokhale have dealt
with other issues such as the threat that caste politics pose to women
empowerment, sexual harassment in the workplace, politicization within
households, intersectionality and queer identities. Activist-writers like Laxmi
Narayan Tripathi (the first transgender to represent his/her community at the
United Nations Organization) and Aka Revathi (the first transgender person to
write an autobiography) have also contributed to the amelioration of the
circumstances and status of gender-queer persons in India. However, queer theory
16 emerged in the West in the 1990s and most of what is identified as queer theory
in India today is an interpretation of the views of Western theorists rather than it Introduction to Women’s
Writing
being a culture-specific framework.
Feminism in India has come a long way with the setting up of centres of research
devoted specially to women, women’s organizations, NGOs fighting domestic
violence and child abuse, and the pioneering of women’s journals such as Indian
Journal of Gender Studies and ANTYAJAA. Critics and scholars like Rajeshwari
Sunder Rajan, Susie Tharu, Kumkum Sangari, K. Lalita, Nira Yuval-Davis and
Chandra Mohanty have published politically informed and nuanced works of
feminist enquiry rooted in the Indian context. Nonetheless, many critics are of
the opinion that feminism in India still has a long way to go especially with
respect to the intertwined areas of criticism and interpretation.
In India, the idea of the nation and the home surfaces time and again when
examining issues related to gender. Critics like Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta
Kaviraj have emphasized on how the “inside” was marked as the domain of
women–they were responsible for maintaining the home’s purity and sanctity.
The “outside”, on the other hand, was the man’s domain and a part of their task
was to shield the “inside” from the corrupting influences of the “outside”,
especially during the colonial regime. Likewise, the practice of looking at the
nation as being synonymous with a mother figure has been a source of debate
among feminist critics. Many of them have argued that it allows the man to
control the woman and the country under the guise of shielding her/it from harm.
Further, even if the nation state promises certain rights to women, these rights
are in conflict with the personal laws of their community and the latter often take
precedence over the former. Gayatri Spivak used the term “asceticism”
(Rassendren 22) in elucidating the manner in which the men of the house tried to
exert as much control within the house by regulating female desire. This ascetic
self-control was supposed to perpetuate a certain ideal of womanhood embodied
by such mythical figures as Sita and Savitri. Nira Yuval-Davis has also suggested
that “women are constructed as the symbolic bearers of the community’s identity
and honour, both personally and collectively” (45). Consequently any moral lapse
on their part is treated more harshly. This centrality of the family and the
community gives rise to an important challenge to Indian feminism–autonomy
and liberty for women in India needs to be established in a manner that does not
alienate them from their family, community and culture. Modern feminists have
also tried to engage with issues related to sex work. While many consider it as an
extension of patriarchy’s crimes against women and their tendency to relegate
women to the status of a mere object, others have suggested that sex work should
not be treated differently than any other profession and should be seen as what it
is — work. Interestingly, since these women never make it to mainstream
feminism, gender violence against these women is often overlooked.

Activity 6: The collectivistic community standards in India present layers

of restrictions to women writers for a true expression of their reality. Discuss.

1.5 LET US SUM UP

 Women’s writing across the world and in India has, since the beginning,
also seen the trend of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical 17
Non Fictional Prose writing. This trend garnered greater vogue in the latter half of the
twentieth century when ‘authentic realist’ feminist reading practices
stressed on the importance of knowing about the experiences of other
women through literature which would feed into their understanding of
their own lives. Such intellectual engagements with the lives of other
women helped women readers make sense of their own lives.
 By examining women as recipients of literary texts, we can analyze how
they employ these texts to challenge the narratives imposed on them by
the society. Feminist theories, therefore, concern themselves with not
only women as writers or producers of texts but also as readers and
consumers. Like their Western counterpart, autobiographical writings
by women in India have been endowed with increasing critical and
scholarly attention.
 Feminism in today’s times is a sprawling, manifold academic and political
concept. It insists on being change-oriented rather than being simply a
theoretical framework devoid of practical applications. Feminists argue
against the creation of a distinct academic field and instead insist on
integration with other fields of knowledge. To ensure this, the inclusion
of feminist values in the field of research is seen as an important
manoeuvre.
 The ultimate aim is to create the space and opportunity to unravel the
pervasive inequality present in the society, and suggest ways of dealing
with the same. Most critical works have, therefore, tried to engage with
‘materiality’ of texts, that is, with the works’ non-fictional aspects or
the works’ grounding in reality.
 Latter-day materialists have actually suggested that materiality brings
to the fore ‘things that matter’. Over the years, feminism has moved
from its limited scope to encompass a more critical understanding of
women’s experience.
 Not only are there different types of feminisms (Liberal, Marxist, Social,
Ecological, Cyber etc.) but the very meaning of the term ‘feminism’ is
open to debate and negotiation. From Simone de Beauvoir’s celebrated
epithet “one is not born, but becomes, a woman”, to notions of gender
performativity, to the acknowledgement given to subversive and ‘queer’
gender identities, feminism and gender studies have definitely come a
long way and have always been in a state of flux.
 Over the last few years, a growing body of work has explored the concept
of ‘doing gender’, that is, exploring how one’s gender is enacted in social
situations and interactions. Theorists today have also started analyzing
how body movements and gestures have also come to be recognized in
terms of an abiding gendered self. Suggestions have also been made
with regard to looking at feminism not as a movement about women but
about how performativity discourses prevalent in a society produce the
categories of man/woman and masculine/feminine.
 The largely heteronormative codes that have been followed for long
preclude the possibility of reflecting on the experiences of certain
18
 individuals (gays, lesbians, bisexuals, pansexuals, asexuals etc.) In the Introduction to Women’s
Writing
past few years, feminists have engaged with LGBTQ+ identities in their
works and have examined the part that literature can play in understanding
how diverse sexual relationships play out.
 Modern protagonists at once belong everywhere and nowhere. A
perpetual jostling for turf is evident in most works. In disproving the
myth of the heteronormative society, they bring to light a whole gamut
of diverse sexual manifestations.
 Gender, therefore, still remains a topic of much contention and debate.
Apart from the concerns of LGBTQ+ identities, feminists have also tried
to incorporate other oppositional movements in their fight for gender
equality, thereby widening their outreach. They have linked feminist
movements to anti-racist, anti-casteist, anti-classist, environmentalist,
and other movements.
 Thus, feminism has come to subsume many areas of knowledge and
experience. In the words of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “The cogency of
female literary culture as a whole lies in the multiplicity of its voices
and its insistence upon the collective foundation of individual
consciousness” (270)

1.6 AIDS TO ACTIVITIES

Activity 1 : For example, such retellings of mythological characters as
The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood and Yajnaseni: The
Story of Draupadi by Pratibha Ray
Activity 2 : The emergence and relevance of the fourth wave of feminism
in the era of internet and technology for addressing problems
such as body-shaming, rape-threats, and sexual harassment,
among others
Activity 3 : The problem of stereotypes and generalizations with regard
to women writers, their writing styles, etc.
Activity 4 : For instance, fragmented narration and the use of silence in
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple to represent racial injustice
and gendered oppression
Activity 5 : Witch-hunts/trials, hysteria, madness, turning/ pitting women
against women, etc.
Activity 6 : Indian women writers through a history of restrictions and
oppression: family-honour, rules and norms of the social
space/ public domain, threats and trolling in cyberspace

1.7 GLOSSARY
 Analepsis - a literary device, where a past event is narrated at a
chronologically later point of time.
19
Non Fictional Prose  Androgynous - having both masculine and feminine qualities
 Canons - Literary works considered to be the most important, influential
and of the highest merit.
 Chattel Marriage - A form of marriage where the wife becomes a
possession of her husband, devoid of all her rights and property which
too then belong to the husband.
 Embodiment - concrete representation of an abstract idea; here,
according to the normative and socially constructed ideas of categories
like gender and race.
 Gender - Social manifestation of sex as a social and cultural identity.
 Heteronormative - the concept of the gender binary and heterosexual
relationships as the only normal.
 Phallogocentrism - A term used in Critical Theory to refer to the
privileging of the masculine in understanding meaning.
 Prolepsis - a literary device, where a future event is narrated to have
occurred already before its turn.
 Sex - usually assigned at birth, based on the biological and anatomical
characteristics of a person.
 Suffragette Movement - 19th and early 20th century movement
demanding women’s right to vote in elections in the West.

1.8 UNIT-END QUESTIONS

1. Examine the categorization of Women’s Writing as a distinct literary
area. How is it approached in two ways: as a space for encouraging
writing, representation, and criticism by women; and, as a means of
rendering them the ‘other’, outside the zone of ‘mainstream’ literature?
2. What has the public response to Women’s Writing been like: from
ignorance and ostracization to trolling?
3. How do you see the rise of the new ‘New Woman’?
4. Comment on the role of Women’s Writing in representing the Nation.

1.9 REFERENCES & SUGGESTED READINGS

Cho, San Jeong. “Marking of the Feminine: The Possible Happening of the
Impossible.” An Ethics of Becoming: Configurations of Feminine Subjectivity in
Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, Routledge, 2006, p. 19.
Dawne, McCance. “L’écriture limite: Kristeva’s Postmodern Feminist Ethics”
Hypatia, vol.
11, no. 2, Wiley, 1996, p. 148. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3810268?read-
now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3A5cedee34c99894c6d5f0e98baf260b4c&seq=8#page_
20 scan_tab_contents. Accessed 26 July 2021.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. “The New Female Literary Culture” The Antioch Introduction to Women’s
Writing
Review vol. 50, no. 1, Antioch Review Inc., 1992, p. 270-72. JSTOR, https://
www.jstor.org/stable/4612517?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Accessed 6 October 2021.
Gilber, Susan & Gubar, Sandra. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer
and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press, 2020,
p. 76.
McKluskie, Kate. “Women’s Language and Literature: A Problem in Women’s
Studies.”
Feminist Review, no. 14, Sage Publications, 1983, p. 51. JSTOR, https://www.
jstor.org/stable/1394654. Accessed 17 August 2021.
Nischik, M. Reingard. “On Being a Woman Writer: Atwood as Literary and
Cultural Critic.”
Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood, Ottawa UP, 2009, p. 176.
Plain, Gill & Sellers, Susan. “Introduction.” A History of Feminist Literary
Criticism, edited by Gill Plain & Susan Sellers, Cambridge UP, 2007, p. 2.
Rassendren, Etienne. “Producing Nation: Gender and the Idea of India.”
Contemporary Women’s Writing in India, Lexington Books, 2014, p. 22.
Weiss, Gail. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality, Routledge, 1999,
p. 77.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015, p.
103.

21
Non Fictional Prose
UNIT 2 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT'S A
VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF
WOMAN: WITH STRICTURES ON
POLITICAL AND MORAL SUBJECTS
Structure

2.0 Objectives
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Life and Works of Mary Wollstonecraft
2.2.1 Her Literary Career
2.3 Summary
2.4 Critical Analysis I
2.4.1 Why was A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Written?
2.4.2 Critical Assessment
2.5 Critical Analysis II
2.5.1 Inadequate Education System
2.5.2 Marriage and Beauty
2.5.3 Reason and Rationality
2.6 Let Us Sum Up
2.7 Answers to Check Your Progress: Possible Answers
2.8 Suggested Readings

2.0 OBJECTIVES
After studying this unit, you should be able to:
 be acquainted with the life and works, and literary career of Mary
Wollstonecraft
 develop a critical understanding and thematic considerations of Mary
Wollstonecraft’s essay A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

2.1 INTRODUCTION
Published in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
is an essay which deals with the rights of humankind, particularly of women. Of
all her writings A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is known as her best work
given the fact that in this essay, she sets out to establish her distinct voice in the
form of a postulation that all things were not equal, particularly a woman’s place
in society when compared to that of a man’s. She emphatically argues that women
are not naturally inferior to men but appear to be as such only due to lack of
education. Imagining a social order fundamentally based on reason, she suggests
that both men and women should be treated as rational beings (Wollstonecraft,
1792). Sulkin (Sulkin, 1990), argues that the essay was her stand against the
22 injustices not only of women, although that is the major thrust, but also of men.
She wished to become through her writing the “voice” that would generate Mary Wollstonecraft's A
Vindication of the Rights of
participation of the natural rights of mankind. Her essay thus creates an alternative Woman: with Strictures on
discursive opening for women voices by questioning and displacing the locations Political and Moral Subjects
of power within discursive spaces. This essay emerges discursively as a powerful
visible form of protest literature, becoming an entry point to explore the
emancipatory potential of dialogue.

2.2 LIFE AND WORKS OF MARY

WOLLSTONECRAFT
William Godwin, her husband, who wrote a Memoir of her life in 1978, described
her in the following words: “Lovely in her person, and in the best and most
engaging sense feminine in her manners”. Her contemporary noted
Wollstonecraft’s provocative presence—thin, medium height, brown hair,
haunting brown eyes, and a soft voice. Jim Powell writes that she was ‘without
being a dazzling beauty, … of a charming grace’. Jim Powell further adds that
her face, so full of expression, presented a style of beauty beyond that of merely
regular features. There was enchantment in her glance, her voice, and her
movements.(Jim Powell,1996) Writer, teacher and champion of Women’s rights,
Mary Wollstonecraft was born in a struggling family in April 1759 in London.
She was the second child and eldest daughter of Elizabeth Dixon, who hailed
from Bally Shannon, Ireland. Mary’s father, Edward John Wollstonecraft, was a
handkerchief weaver. The family moved seven times in ten years as their finances
deteriorated. Her father Edward drank heavily, and Mary often had to protect her
mother from his violent outbursts. She had rocky relations with her siblings. She
did not have access to formal schooling, which was limited, but she got
tremendous help from one of her friends in Hoxton, outside London, who had a
respectable library, and Mary used to spend a considerable time exploring it.
Through these friends, she met Fanny Blood, two years older and skilled at sewing,
drawing, watercolors, and the piano. She inspired Mary to take an initiative in
cultivating her mind. (Jim Powell,1996)
Owing to her family financial problems, Mary resolved to somehow make her
own way. At 19, she got a job as live in helper for a wealthy widow who
proved to be a difficult taskmaster. In 1781, Mary tried and failed to establish
a school at Islington, North London. Mary, with the help of Fanny, and Mary’s
sisters, Eliza and Everina, started a school nearby at Newington Green.
However, that school too after initial success, failed. She then worked as a
governess for an Irish family and saw firsthand the idleness of landed aristocrats.
These discouraging experiences were compounded by the death of Fanny Blood
from tuberculosis. After Mary’s mother died in 1782, she—not her oldest
brother—assumed primary responsibility for taking care of her volatile father.
(Jim Powell,1996)
As far as her personal life is concerned, she became infatuated with the eccentric
genius Henry Fuseli, but he was married and brushed her off after extended
flirtation. While still in France, she fell in love with an American adventurer
named Gilbert Imlay, who was always looking for a scheme to strike it rich.
They had a daughter, Fanny, but he lost interest in both of them and walked
out. Wollstonecraft attempted suicide twice. While recovering from despair 23
Non Fictional Prose over Imlay, she took a three month break with Fanny in Scandinavia and
produced one of her most poignant works, Letters Written During a Short
Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The letters were addressed to the
unnamed American father of her child. They provide a travelogue laced with
commentary on politics, philosophy, and her personal life. After witnessing
the French Terror, she tempered her hopes for social change. Throughout the
book, Wollstonecraft struggled to cope with her grief about Imlay, and she
conveyed an immediacy and tenderness that touches the heart. William Godwin
said that if ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its
author, this appears to me to be the book.
Wollstonecraft decided to pursue her acquaintance with Godwin. He had a large
head, deep set eyes, and a thin voice. “He seems to have had some charm which
his enemies could not detect, or his friends define, but which had a real influence
on those who attained his close friendship,” reported Godwin biographer George
Woodcock. Like Wollstonecraft, he had started a school, but his ideas were too
radical, and the effort failed. His literary career had begun with a dull political
biography, a book of sermons and some potboiler novels. Then London publisher
George Robinson offered to pay Godwin enough of an advance that he could
work out his philosophy.
Critics are of the view that at the time Wollstonecraft called, Godwin was a 42
year old bachelor courting Amelia Alderson, a doctor’s daughter. But he was
intrigued with Wollstonecraft, despite his initial impression that she talked too
much. He invited her to a dinner party the following week. Included were James
Mackintosh and Dr. Samuel Parr, both of whom had written rebuttals to Burke’s
Reflections on the Revolution in France. After Alderson rejected Godwin, he
became more responsive to Wollstonecraft, and her passion overwhelmed him.
“It was friendship melting into love,” he recalled. But Wollstonecraft was haunted
by fear of another betrayal. Godwin reassured her that he longed for a relationship
between equals. Her passion surged again. “It is a sublime tranquility,” she wrote
him, “I have felt it in your arms.” By December, she was pregnant. Both
Wollstonecraft and Godwin had criticized marriage as a vehicle for exploitation,
but they tied the knot on March 29, 1797. She rejoiced that she had found true
love at last.
It is said that she went into labor during the early morning of Wednesday, August
30, 1797. She was attended by one Mrs. Blenkinsop, an experienced midwife.
After 11 o’clock that night, a daughter was born—Mary, who grew up to be
Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. For a while, it appeared things were fine,
but three hours later, Mrs. Blenkinsop notified Godwin that the placenta still
hadn’t come out of the womb. The longer the placenta remained, the greater the
risk of infection. Godwin called a Dr. Poignand who succeeded in removing
much of the placenta. Wollstonecraft reported that the procedure was the most
excruciatingly painful experience of her life. That Sunday, she began suffering
chills, an ominous sign of infection. Doctors offered wine to help ease the pain
and tried other measures to stimulate her body to eject the remains of the placenta.
Wollstonecraft continued to decline. She died Sunday morning, September 10,
1797. Godwin was so overcome that he didn’t attend the funeral, held at St.
Pancras church where they had been married just five months before. She was
buried in the churchyard.
24
Check Your Progress I Mary Wollstonecraft's A
Vindication of the Rights of
Woman: with Strictures on
1. Write a short note on the life and works of Mary Wollstonecraft.
Political and Moral Subjects
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2.2.1 Her Literary Career

Wollstonecraft’s literary career began with the publication of a pamphlet. Hewlett
encouraged Wollstonecraft to write a pamphlet on education and submit it to
Joseph Johnson, the radical publisher and bookseller with a shop at St. Paul’s
Churchyard. He was known as a visionary entrepreneur who backed a number of
unknowns including the poet printmaker William Blake. Johnson published works
by Joseph Priestley and poets William Cowper and William Wordsworth, too.
He distributed materials for Unitarians.
Literary critics are of the view that most of Wollstonecraft’s early productions
are about education. She published an anthology of literary extracts “for the
improvement of young women”, which was entitled The Female Reader and she
translated two children’s works, Maria Geertruida van de Werken de Cambon’s
Young Grandison and Christian Gotthilf Salzmann’s Elements of Morality. She
deals with the same topic in her own writings. In her books entitled Thoughts on
the Education of Daughters (1787) and her children’s book Original Stories from
Real Life (1788), she promotes the idea of educating children into the emerging
middle-class ethos: self-discipline, honesty, frugality, and social contentment.
Moreover, both these books also lay emphasis on the importance of teaching
children to reason, revealing Wollstonecraft’s intellectual debt to the educational
views of seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke. However, the prominence
she affords religious faith and innate feelings, which very distinctly distinguishes
her work from his, links it to the discourse of sensibility popular at the end of the
eighteenth century. It is a fact that both texts also advocate the education of
women, a controversial topic at the time and one which she would return to
throughout her career, most notably in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Wollstonecraft maintains that well-educated women will be good wives and
mothers and ultimately contribute positively to the nation.
Some of her prominent works include Thoughts on the Education of Daughters:
With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life.
London: Joseph Johnson, 1787; Mary: A Fiction. London: Joseph Johnson, 1788;
Original Stories from Real Life: With Conversations Calculated to Regulate the
Affections and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness. London: Joseph Johnson,
1788; A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable
Edmund Burke. London: Joseph Johnson, 1790; A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman with Strictures on Moral and Political Subjects. London: Joseph Johnson,
25
Non Fictional Prose 1792; Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and
Denmark. London: Joseph Johnson, 1796.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s biographer Claire Tomalin maintains that Mary was
homeless again, without a job or a reference; she had nothing to live on, and she
was in debt to several people. She had no marriage prospects. She was 28, with
a face that looked as though it had settled permanently into lines of severity and
depression around the fierce eyes … her most remarkable trait was still that she
had refused to learn the techniques whereby women in her situation usually
attempted to make life tolerable for themselves: flattery, docility, resignation to
the will of man, or God, or their social superiors, or all three. Johnson explained
it to Wollstonecraft that she had talent and could succeed if she worked hard. He
published her pamphlet in 1786 as Thoughts on the Education of Daughters,
with Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life. Sales
were negligible, but the work launched Wollstonecraft’s literary career. She sent
her author’s fee to the impoverished Blood family and redoubled her efforts. It is
believed that by 1788, Johnson offered her steady work. She translated books
from French and German into English. She served as an assistant editor and
writer for his new journal, The Analytical Review. She contributed to it until her
death, perhaps as many as 200 articles on fiction, education, sermons, travelogues,
and children’s books. Johnson was a good man. It was he who helped
Wollstonecraft find lodgings. It was he who advanced her money when needed.
And it was he who dealt with her creditors, helping her cope with her father’s
chaotic situation.
Check Your Progress II
1. Write 50 words about the literary career of Mary Wollstonecraft.
........................................................................................................................
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2.3 SUMMARY
In this essay Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) argues against both Burke and
Rousseau, defending the notion of natural rights, particularly rights for women,
such as equal education. She insisted that women could not become virtuous,
even as mothers, unless they won the right to participate in economic and political
life on an equal basis with men. Although she did not specifically demand the
right to vote for women, her emphasis on women’s rights made her an object of
ridicule for some, heroism for others. Contending for the rights of woman, her
main argument is built on the simple principle that if she is not prepared by
education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of
26
knowledge and virtue; for truth must be common to all, or it will be inefficacious Mary Wollstonecraft's A
Vindication of the Rights of
with respect to its influence on general practice. She raises a few questions such Woman: with Strictures on
as: how can woman be expected to co-operate unless she knows why she ought Political and Moral Subjects
to be virtuous, unless freedom strengthens her reason till she comprehends her
duty, and sees in what manner it is connected with her real good? If children are
to be educated to understand the true principle of patriotism, their mother must
be a patriot; and the love of mankind, from which an orderly strain of virtues
spring, can only be produced by considering the moral and civil interest of
mankind; but the education and situation of woman, at present, shuts her out
from such investigations. (Wollstonecraft, 1792)
In this work she has produced many arguments, which to her were conclusive, to
prove that the prevailing notion respecting a sexual character was subversive of
morality, and she has contended that to render the human body and mind more
perfect, chastity must more universally prevail, and that chastity will never be
respected in the male world till the person of a woman is not, as it were, idolized,
when little virtue or sense embellish it with the grand traces of mental beauty, or
the interesting simplicity of affection.

2.4 CRITICAL ANALYSIS I

Now let us go on to a critical analysis of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

2.4.1 Why was A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Written?

On September 10, 1791, Talleyrand, former Bishop of Autun, advocated
government schools which would end at eighth grade for girls but continue for
boys. This made clear to Wollstonecraft that despite all the talk about equal rights,
the French Revolution wasn’t intended to help women much. As a reply to
Talleyrand’s document on education, she began planning her most famous work,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She wrote for more than three months and
was finished on January 3, 1792. Johnson published it in three volumes.

2.4.2 Critical Assessment

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is, more often than not, regarded as a
purely political treatise. However, like Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Emile, it
can be seen as both a political and an educational treatise. It is, above all, a
celebration of the rationality of women. It constitutes an attack on the view of
female education put forward by Talleyrand, former Bishop of Autun, Rousseau
and countless others who regarded women as weak and artificial and not capable
of reasoning effectively. Mary Wollstonecraft rejected the education in
dependency that Rousseau advocated for them in Emile.
For Mary Wollstonecraft, rationality or reason formed the basis of our human
rights as she argues that it was our ability to grasp the truth and, therefore, acquire
knowledge of right and wrong that separated us, as human beings, from the animal
world. She maintains that through the exercise of reason we became moral and
political agents. This worldview was acknowledged by all progressive thinkers
of the time. However, it was essentially a man’s world, and the work of Rousseau
was typical of this. What Mary Wollstonecraft did was to extend the basic ideas
27
Non Fictional Prose of Enlightenment philosophy to women and Rousseau’s educational ideas of
how to educate boys to girls.
She develops an exclusive discourse arguing against the assumption that women
were not rational creatures and were simply slaves to their passions. Mary
Wollstonecraft argued that it was up to those who thought like this to prove it.
She described the process by which parents brought their daughters up to be
docile and domesticated. She maintained that if girls were encouraged from an
early age to develop their minds, it would be seen that they were rational
creatures and there was no reason whatsoever for them not to be given the
same opportunities as boys with regard to education and training. Women could
enter the professions and have careers just the same as men. In proposing the
same type of education for girls as that proposed for boys, Mary Wollstonecraft
also went a step further and proposed that they be educated together which
was even more radical than anything proposed before. The idea of co-
educational schooling was simply regarded as nonsense by many educational
thinkers of the time. It was fashionable to contend that if women were educated
and not docile creatures, they would lose any power they had over their
husbands. Mary Wollstonecraft was furious about this and maintained that ‘This
is the very point I aim at. I do not wish them to have power over men but over
themselves’. (Burke, 2004).
Wollstonecraft believed education could be the salvation of women. She asserts
that the exercise of their understanding is necessary, there is no other foundation
for independence of character. She strongly is of the view that they must bow
only to the authority of reason, instead of being the modest slaves of opinion.
She insisted women should be taught serious subjects like reading, writing,
arithmetic, botany, natural history, and moral philosophy. She recommended
vigorous physical exercise to help stimulate the mind. Mary had a nive faith that
the same governments which restricted women could inexplicably be trusted to
run schools uplifting women. Twentieth century government schools have been
catastrophes for women as well as men, graduating large numbers at high cost
without the most fundamental skills.
That men prefer emotion and common sense for women over reason and common
sense is well contested by Mary Wollstonecraft very emphatically in a critical
manner, demonstrating the dominance of patriarchal mindset. She demonstrates
how men have created a separate realm for women, particularly girls, who are
inculcated such a culture where they are taught to be concerned with persons
only not virtue. This practice creates such a trend which becomes very problematic
for mothers who either don’t care for their children or are not able to mould their
children’s future in a positive direction. She argues that both husband and wife
must treat each other like friends or companions then only their marriage would
be a successful one.
Commenting about modesty, she claims that there is a huge difference between
modesty and humility and both are not the same. Linking modesty with reason,
she explains that those women who make use of their reason the most, are the
most modest ones, and this can happen only when such women are strengthened
in both their body and mind, making them reasonably strong. Further, Mary
Wollstonecraft advocates for women’s economic independence, expressing the
28 demands for women’s more active participation in the public sphere, asking them
to go for various other responsibilities on their shoulders so that they become Mary Wollstonecraft's A
Vindication of the Rights of
good citizens and good mothers. Woman: with Strictures on
Political and Moral Subjects
There is no denying the fact that with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
Wollstonecraft emerged in a class by herself, going beyond her contemporaries
who had written passionately about educating women, by postulating her own
ideas for education reform, suggesting opening up of more public and private
co-educational schools which would promote more democratic and more
participatory educational structures. Finally, she concludes by claiming that
women’s weaknesses are not resulting from any natural deficiency but from their
lower status in the society and inefficient education system being regulated by
the patriarchal framework of thought and structure.
Check Your Progress III
1. Write a short critical assessment of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
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2.5 CRITICAL ANALYSIS II: THEMES IN A

VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN
2.5.1 Inadequate Education System
This essay’s major concern is to present a strong critique of Talleyrand’s document
on education and female education model advanced by Rousseau and other
contemporaries who considered women to be weak and artificial and not capable
enough of reasoning effectively. It can be observed that Mary Wollstonecraft
outrightly rejected the education in dependency model that Rousseau advocated
for women in Emile. She was of an understanding that a woman is and should be
intelligent in every manner.
Mary Wollstonecraft strongly argues that women of the eighteenth century were
not considered the same as their male counterparts. This situation did not happen
due to the weakness of the women but due to the inadequate system of education
as women of the eighteenth century did not have full access to education. They
were assumed to be essentially housewives meant to please their husbands. As
we have already seen earlier how the roles of the women were circumscribed by
the powerfully regulatory mechanism of patriarchal thoughts and women were
in effect confined to domestic works only. Women were expected to be
characteristically virtuous and submissive. Girls were taught to keep their beauty 29
Non Fictional Prose intact by grooming themselves, maintaining their beauty and tenderness in order
to woo their husbands. Their upbringing was done in such a way that they maintain
their external beauty. These treatments of women demonstrated that women were
not free in their minds, not having a very healthy mindset at all. Mary
Wollstonecraft calls such nurturing as ‘barren blooming’ which was a product of
a false system of education. She expresses her concern for women by stating that
it was sad to learn that women of that period were only anxious to inspire their
love whereas they should have had nobler ambitions and high spirits of a broad
mindset.
She is of the view that women tend to stagnate due to lack of an adequate education
system without which women would always remain to be immature, behaving
like a child who even after marriage would not be able to take care of their
household in a proper responsible manner. This would lead to women’s
infantilizing situation. She suggests that the only solution to this problem is giving
women full and complete access to education, developing higher goals for
women’s education which would enlighten their minds, empowering them with
rights.

2.5.2 Marriage and Beauty

Mary Wollstonecraft puts a lot of emphasis on the practice of marriage in her
essay, rather criticizing it for the way it was being customized in the eighteenth-
century society. She relates marriage and beauty together arguing that girls were
brought up and taught to maintain their beauty intact so that they could be able to
win suitors or husbands. Girls were nurtured with such principles in their lives
which would eventually lead them to marrying immoral husbands because of
their youthful passion.
Mary argues very strongly that women were taught to develop their weakness as
virtue, using it as a power play to woo men, clearly giving an indication that it
was going to make their lives a living hell. She asserts that women were moulded
like this since childhood in order to make themselves more appealing to suitors.
This kind of practice, she argues, was going to create a lifelong negative effect
on the society as a whole and was going to lead to elevating gratification and
romantic conquest over a relationship which should have been based on mutual
respect. This clearly demonstrates the fact that the marriage of that time did not
give any value to compatibility which happens to be the crucial factor for any
marriage. Rather the marriage of that period was based on the concept of the
transaction of a business. She is of the view that the inadequate education system
is to be blamed for these which sets women up for the unhappiness of their
marriages, making their lives vulnerable.
She suggests that women should learn to be the lifelong strong companions of
their husbands to protect themselves from potentially weak, unhappy and even
disastrous and unsuccessful marriages. Women should learn to strengthen their
body and be mentally strong so that they become not only good wives but also
very good contributors to the welfare of the society.

2.5.3 Reason and Rationality

For Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘Reason’ happens to be one of the key concerns. She
30 believed that it was the reasoning power which formed the very basis of human
thoughts giving us an understanding to distinguish between what is right and Mary Wollstonecraft's A
Vindication of the Rights of
what is wrong, making a human being a rational being, distinguishing him/her Woman: with Strictures on
from an animal. Animals don’t have reasoning power. Reason makes human Political and Moral Subjects
beings to be progressive. That is the reason why Mary Wollstonecraft, again and
again, advises women to use their reason. Moreover, Mary Wollstonecraft wanted
to extend the basic ideas of Enlightenment philosophy to women. She argues
that women need to develop their reasoning power very strongly if they want to
have control over their emotions and also in order to become virtuous.
Mary Wollstonecraft points out that education and reasoning cannot be separated
from each other. Education helps people to elevate themselves as human beings.
Reason, on the other hand, helps human beings to elevate themselves over animals.
Therefore, both entities are intricately related with each other, and both,
consequently, are essential for the human being to be an independent or free or
progressive entity. She brings in here the third entity which is virtue. She argues
that it is virtue by which one individual elevates him/herself over other human
beings. She further maintains that it is with the help of God-given reasoning
power that human beings can attain virtue.
She feels very sorry to note that women are taught to rely on their feelings and
sentiments rather than developing their reason. Wollstonecraft is laying emphasis
on the mind rather than on the heart and she keeps motivating women that they
should be using their minds in order to keep a balance between head and heart
rather than wasting time and energy on pleasing their lovers or husbands. If they
don’t behave in this manner, then they won’t be in a position to develop their
mental faculty necessary for attaining higher virtues which would prove to be
very detrimental for their moral development and will lead to an unhappy life.
She comes up with a proposal that to ensure equality, girls should be given the
same intellectual education and the same mental training in reason and virtue
that boys are given, and the understanding of the girls should be trained in order
for the girls to regulate emotions through reason.
Check Your Progress IV
1. Write briefly the various themes in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
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2.6 LET US SUM UP

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman argues that women are not naturally inferior
31
Non Fictional Prose to men but appear to be as such only due to lack of education. Imagining a social
order fundamentally based on reason, she suggests that both men and women
should be treated as rational beings. The essay was her stand against the injustices
not only of women, although that is the major thrust, but also of men. She wished
to become, through her writing, the “voice” that would generate participation of
the natural rights of mankind. Her essay thus creates an alternative discursive
opening for women voices by questioning and displacing the locations of power
within discursive spaces. This essay emerges discursively as a powerful visible
form of protest literature, becoming an entry point to explore the emancipatory
potential of dialogue.

2.7 ANSWERS TO CHECK YOUR PROGRESS:

POSSIBLE ANSWERS
Check Your Progress I
Refer to the section 2.2
Check Your Progress II
Refer to the section 2.2.1
Check Your Progress III
Refer to the section 2.4.2
Check Your Progress IV
Refer to the section 2.5

2.8 SUGGESTED READINGS

Mary Wollstonecraft. 1792. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures
on Political and Moral Subjects. London: Joseph Johnson.
Mary Wollstonecraft, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” in Mary
Wollstonecraft, The Rights of Woman (London: Scott, 1891), xxvi–xxix,17–18,
155–56, 159.
Burke, B. (2004) ‘Mary Wollstonecraft on Education’, The Encyclopedia of
Pedagogy and Informal Education. [ https://infed.org/mobi/mary-wollstonecraft-
on-education/]
Janet Todd. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (London: Phoenix Press,
2000).
Claire Tomalin. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. (London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1974).
Gary Kelly. Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary
Wollstonecraft (London: Macmillan-now Palgrave Macmillan 1991).
Janet Todd. The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Penguin,
2003).
32
Macdonald, D.L. Ed. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. (Ontario: Broadview Mary Wollstonecraft's A
Vindication of the Rights of
Press, 1997). Woman: with Strictures on
Political and Moral Subjects
Carol H. Poston. Ed. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York and London:
Norton, 1988).
Gary Kelly, Ed. Mary and The Wrongs of Woman (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1976).
Eleanor Flexner. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Biography (Coward McCann &
Geoghegan, INC.).
Powell,Jim, (1996) “Equal Rights for Rights for Women”. This article was
originally published on FEE.org
Sapiro, Virginia. A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary
Wollstonecraft (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992).
Barbara Taylor. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Craciun, C. (2002) A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Mary Wollstonecraft’s
“A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, London: Routledge
Jacobs, D. (2001). Her Own Woman: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Gordon, L. (2005). Mary Wollstonecraft: A New Genius. London: Little, Brown.
Johnson, C. L. (2002). The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft.
Cambridge companions to literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press.
Martin, J. R. (2001) ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’ in J. A. Palmer (ed.) Fifty Major
Thinkers on Education: From Confucius to Dewey, London: Routledge.
Sulkin, Gail E. Rogers, “A Rhetorical Analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1990). Theses Digitization Project. 553.
https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/553
Taylor, B. (2003) Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, Cambridge:
University of Cambridge Press.
Todd, J. (2000) Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson.

33
Non Fictional Prose
UNIT 3 A WOMAN'S RETELLING OF THE
RAMA-TALE: THE CHANDRABATI
RAMAYANA
Structure

3.0 Objectives
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Chandrabati, the Writer
3.3 Excerpts from Essay by Nabaneeta Deb Sen
3.4 Analysis
3.5 Narrative Techniques
3.6 Insights
3.7 Let Us Sum Up
3.8 Aids to Activities
3.9 Glossary
3.10 Unit End Questions
3.11 References and Suggested Readings

3.0 OBJECTIVES
This unit will help you to understand the Chandrabati Ramayana on the basis of
our reading of the essay by Nabaneeta Deb Sen. You will discover that the
Ramayana written by Valmiki and Tulsidas, which is generally considered the
standard version of Ramayana, has been written and re-interpreted by different
writers down the ages. As such, the story line and the characters are greatly
altered. Chandrabati Ramayana will help you appreciate the Ramayana from
Sita’s perspective. It is an imaginative and unique adaptation of Ramayana where
you will see that when women write, their style and focus is different from a
man’s, and also how personal relationships are more important for a woman
compared to war, politics and the public sphere. Reading some excerpts from the
essay by Nabaneeta Deb Sen on the Chandrabati Ramayana will enable you to
understand how patriarchy and patriarchal structures eventually take over
women’s writings because of which the original structure of the Chandrabati
Ramayana has been greatly altered.
Words in bold are explained in the Glossary

3.1 INTRODUCTION
It is difficult to separate religion from everyday life. Do you agree? All of us
follow an unwritten code of conduct that has been passed down to us from one
generation to another. Still, every community and each person has a different
and distinctive approach to religion, and feels differently about their gods and
goddesses. This is more so in a country like India which has a pluralistic society
34 and social structures that are absolutely dissimilar. You can think of some very
basic beliefs and religious practices/rituals which are alternatives to mainstream A Woman's Retelling of the
Rama-Tale: The
approaches. The Ramlila is a socio-religious event in India where people from Chandrabati Ramayana
various walks of life and religious communities come together to enact and re-
interpret incidents from Ramayana. It is through such enactments and gatherings
that religion continuously evolves and avoids becoming stagnant. In India, we
venerate religious icons whom we consider sacred as well as intimate members
of our family. Here “religion is not something separate and apart from ordinary
life. It is life... lived in the fuller awareness of its human quality and spiritual
significance.”

Activity 1
Does gender affect our reading and interpretation of texts?

3.2 CHANDRABATI, THE WRITER

Most of us are not familiar with Chandrabati and so, a good starting point would
be getting to know her. Chandrabati holds the honour of being the first ever
woman to re-write the Ramayana. She was born to Dij-Banshidas Bhattacharya
and Shulochona Das Bhattacharya in 1550 in the village of Patuyari, on the
banks of the Fulesshori River in Kishoreganj, East Bengal. Her father was a
prolific writer who composed the Manasa’s ballads.
Chandrabati wrote during an age when no one could even begin to imagine
that a woman could write and render religious texts in her own way and on her
own initiative. It was indeed revolutionary. Chandrabati’s life was quite
extraordinary. What brought her to writing was disillusionment in love: she
immersed herself in the written word which helped her survive her grief. She
fell in love with her childhood friend, Jayananda whom she dreamt of marrying.
However, Jayananda married someone else and this broke Chandrabati’s heart.
She decided to never marry, and devoted her life to serving Lord Shiva on the
advice of her father. She re-wrote the Ramayana from Sita’s point of view.
However, Chandrabati’s Ramayana could not be completed. In a dramatic twist
of events, Jayananda realised his folly and returned to Chandrabati who refused
to accept him. Rejected and repentant, Jayananda committed suicide by jumping
into the River Fulesshori.
Chandrabati also ended her life by drowning in the same river. At the time of her
death in 1600, she was fifty years old. We are indebted to this lady who faced
odds in personal life and still gave us a rich legacy that continues to inspire
many.
It is rather sad that such an intellectual and progressive woman like Chandrabati
should be written off as a ballad writer, and her contribution as an outstanding
epic writer should not be recognised by critics. In patriarchy, critics found it
difficult to accommodate a woman-oriented adaptation of the Ramayana, which
was more secular than martial and jingoistic. Till recent times, Chandrabati
Ramayana remained a ‘silenced text’. It is rather stimulating to re-visit this ignored
text and see for ourselves how a woman thought that Sita felt, and how the social
and emotional world would be if a woman became its central subject.
35
Non Fictional Prose
Activity 2
Why do you think the Chandrabati Ramayana is referred to as a ‘silenced
text’?

3.3 EXCERPTS FROM ESSAY ‘A WOMAN’S

RETELLING OF THE RAMA-TALE:
NARRATIVE STRATEGIES EMPLOYED IN
THE CHANDRABATI RAMAYANA’ BY
NABANEETA DEB SEN
The author of this essay, Nabaneeta Deb Sen, writer, critic and academic, was a
Professor at the Department of Comparative Literature in Jadavpur University.
She has many books to her credit in a variety of genres: short stories, essays,
travelogues, poetry, fiction, children’s literature and verse-plays. Even her most
scholarly essays are remarkable for their charming and humorous prose. She is
one of the most popular authors in Bengal today. Among several honours, she
has received the Padma Shree (2000), the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Kabir
Samman, the Rabindra Puraskar and the Sanskriti Award. She is a Fellow of the
Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Vice President of the Indian National
Comparative Literature Association. She was the Radhakrishnan Memorial
Lecturer of Oxford in 1996-7.
Excerpt:
...(All) scholars agree that what is found as Chandrabati Ramayana is an
incomplete text, an incomplete Ramayana. All the collectors, the editors and the
historians of Bengal literature support the view that the whole of the Rama-tale
is not to be found in it. It is only a fragment.
...Chandrabati Ramayana... is the Rama-story retold by a Bengali Hindu village
woman, a woman who had known suffering, a woman who had the courage to
choose the lonely intellectual life of a poet, in sixteenth century rural East Bengal.
Sukumar Sen, when he mentions the life of Chandrabati in his history of
literature... says – after telling us about her unrequited love – ‘she remained a
virgin all her life. This is the sum total of the ballad.’ This is not the sum total of
the ballad. The ballad mentions that she wrote the Ramayana and worshipped
Shiva for the rest of her life.
Are we to note this as a silencing tactic? It is no wonder that this text had been
silenced by the urban literate male mediators in the role of literary historians...
In this unusual Ramayana, Rama himself is gently pushed back to a corner where
he is hardly visible except in relation to Sita. The narrative pattern clearly and
unmistakably follows the story line of Sita’s life and the tale as it stands is
unabashedly a Sita-tale under the traditional guise of a Rama-tale. The only
episodes of the Ramayana depicted here are the episodes of Sita’s life, beginning
with the supernatural birth of Sita, going through her tales of woe, ‘Sita’s
Baromasi’ (which mentions her childhood, her marriage, her life as an abducted
woman), describing her pregnancy, exile and her entry into mother earth. In a
Ramayana you would expect the ‘janmalila’ section to treat the birth of Rama...
36 The supernatural birth scene is supposed to tell us about Rama’s birth and the
purpose of his appearance on earth to destroy the evil Ravana... ‘According to A Woman's Retelling of the
Rama-Tale: The
rule, Rama’s birth story should come first and Sita should come next.’ Chandrabati Ramayana

Chandrabati breaks the accepted pattern by beginning her epic with Sita’s birth
story... the first six long sections are devoted to describing the complex tale of
conception and birth of Sita. Sita is born out of a sorrow – the blood of tortured
ascetics and the death wish of a neglected Mandodari mingle to create a Sita and
she comes to destroy Ravana and his clan. The evil Ravana, strengthened by the
boon of Brahma, was tyrannizing all three worlds and collected the blood of the
ascetics, in a box as a poison to destroy the immortality of gods... Mandodari felt
neglected and heart broken. So she decided to take the poison that was strong
enough to kill the deathless tribe. She took the poison... Instead of dying she
gives birth. Sita is born in the form of an egg. Soothsayers in Lanka predict that
this egg would produce a dangerous daughter who would cause the total
destruction of the demon dynasty. Hearing that Ravana wants to destroy the
egg... She manages to make him throw the egg into the ocean, protected in a
golden casket. It flows across the Bay of Bengal and a very poor but honest
fisherman, Madhab Jalia finds it. He brings it home to his very poor but honest
wife, Sata, who has nothing to eat, nothing to wear and nothing to complain
about. She performs various auspicious rituals and receives the egg reverentially.
Hence, Laksmi, the goddess hiding in the egg as Sita, showers her with riches.
The poor fisherman becomes wealthy. In the meantime, his wife Sata gets a
dream message that Laksmi wants her to deliver the egg to the wife of King
Janak. She immediately follows the divine instructions. The only reward she
wants from the queen is that the daughter when born, should be named Sita,
after her own name Sata... So with the name of a poor fishwife, Sita was born
out of an egg in Chandrabati’s text, not found by the king while tilling the soil
as in the classical legend. King Janaka, in fact, has no role to play here. It is his
wife who takes care of the egg which produces Sita. This is the supernatural
birth of the heroine, to destroy evil. Sita is born to bring about the total
destruction of Ravana and his clan... Ravana desires Sita without knowing she
is Mandodari’s child (she is not Ravana’s child, only Mandodari’s). The story
also reminds us of Krishna and Kansa, and also of the Prahlad legend... Call it
intertextuality if you like.
Chandrabati devotes only two comparatively shorter, later sections to the birth
of Rama, his three brothers and one sister, the evil Kukuya who has the Bengali
(and Sanskrit) term for evil (ku) pronounced twice in her name. In the next section,
Book II, Sita herself is now the narrator. She sits in the inner apartment of Rama’s
palace, talking to her girlfriends, who ask her all kinds of questions about her
personal experiences. Having returned from Lanka, Sita is now at ease and talks
freely about her childhood, her marriage, her life with Rama as a bride, and in
the exile, and her life in Lanka as an abducted woman.
Rama’s achievements – the breaking of Haradhan and the entire epic battle are
only summarily referred to (not described) through Sita’s ‘Baromasi’ (the song
of twelve months, relating the incidents of one’s life to the seasonal changes).
The heroic code is thus gently broken. There are no gory battle scenes, no details
of heroic achievement given at all. Most of the epic actions are referred to through
the conceit of dream, as dream messages. 37
Non Fictional Prose This section is most interesting because in an epic the epic battle is of central
importance. But in Chandrabati Ramayana, twice mediated through feminine
sensibility, once by Chandrabati’s as the composer, and once by Sita’s as the
narrator, the epic battle loses all its glory and gets only a few lines to itself.
Maximum colour and space are spent on the interludes of Sita and Rama in the
forest...
After her return from Lanka, there are four more important events in Sita’s life:
(1) pregnancy (2) exile (3) childbirth and (4) voluntary death or entry into Mother
Earth.
All these experiences are described in great detail. Mother Nature seems to appear
in the form of Mother Earth to put an end to the human injustice that Sita was
being subjected to.
The Chandrabati Ramayana most logically ends here with the death of Sita, and
it is here that our third narrative begins. It is our story, yours and mine. The
reader’s story... We could... call it a heroic epic – if heroism is taken to signify
man’s superhuman ability to stand and overcome human suffering. Because this
is what Sita displays here. It is not an epic battle with visible special weapons,
but with weapons of moral values. And this is where we hear the clashing voices
of Chandrabati I and Chandrabati II. Her Sita wins the battle by fighting with the
traditional weapons of value supplied by the dominant ideology of Chandrabati’s
time, whereas Chandrabati herself, as the narrator-composer is challenging the
same values in the very structure of the narrative.
We have here a narrative about a woman, narrated by a woman (by two women,
in fact) meant for female audience. Yes, the text was originally intended for a
female audience as the recurring formula here is ‘shuno skhijana’ (listen
girlfriends), not ‘shuno sabhajana’ (listen, members of the court) nor ‘shunu
sarbajana’ (listen one and all) as the regular formulae go. Hence the producer of
the text is a woman, the product depicts a woman’s life and the intended consumers
are women.
In Book III the narrator changes once again. Chandrabati returns as the narrator
but a male character finds his way in too, Lakshmana. He strongly voices the
general patriarchal values, even... of Rama’s superhuman quality once (of which
there are no visible signs in the text – it is in that sense a secular Ramayana).
...In the first edition of the epic... this section is absent. But... in the second
version this portion is found. Clearly, the poem had become a property of the
bards of East Bengal long ago and was sung to a mixed audience... we also find
that the regular form of the earlier address ‘shuno sakhijana’ becomes ‘shuno
sabhajana’ or ‘shuno sarbajana’ from time to time. The intended audience remains
female in Sita’s own narrative about Rama where she is privately conversing
with her girlfriends... in her inner chambers.
The patriarchal voice is clearly audible in the last section of the second version,
where Lava, Kush and Hanuman interact heroically and the ascetics Vashistha
and Valmiki appear in their full Brahminical splendour.
Hence, we can read it today as a silenced text of yesterday. Ramayana is a
38 misnomer for our narrative. It should have been called ‘Sitayana’, the route of
Sita, Sita’s journey. Rama is not at the centre of the narrative...Chandrabati often A Woman's Retelling of the
Rama-Tale: The
intrudes into the text and directly addresses the characters herself. Chandrabati Ramayana

The Chandrabati Ramayana does not tell us about the route of Rama, but it tells
us all about the life journey of a woman – a complete biological life-cycle – her
birth, her marriage, her pregnancy, childbirth, maturity and death. It is a woman’s
text, for the selection of episodes, for the highlighting and detailing of intimate
feminine experiences (like the pregnant woman’s craving for chewing burnt clay),
like pregnancy, childbirth (Mandodari’s description), maternal feelings... the
woman’s desolation and desperation at being neglected, worship of local
goddesses... and the performance of religious rituals. Chandrabati even uses
bratakatha-style formulaic language when describing Sita’s ritualistic
performances...
As narrators, Sita and Chandrabati differ in that one is a character, the other is an
outsider... Sita is an ideal representation of the dominant ideology but Chandrabati
is a dissenter. She openly questions, challenges and punctures the ideology of
her time in her personal intrusions, and also in her selection of episodes, depth of
detail and silences. But, she does not criticize Sita for acting according to the
dominant ideology.
... In Indian epics the epic battle is between good and evil, and in a patriarchal
system (which produces the epic) both are represented by male characters. In
Chandrabati Ramayana also, there is this war of good and evil – but both are
represented by women, Laksmi and Alaksmi, Sita and Kukuya.
... Chandrabati Ramayana... is what we call a silenced text... a poor literary work
because it was a Ramayana that did not sing of Rama... Today, a re-reading of
the narrative exposes an obvious failure: to recognize Chandrabati Ramayana as
a personal interpretation of the Rama-tale, seen specifically from the woman’s
point of view.

Activity 3
In what way does Chandrabati make her own thoughts and feelings known
in her narrative?

3.4 ANALYSIS
You have had a glimpse into Chandrabati’s personal life and you must be quite
eager now, after reading Nabaneeta Deb Sen’s essay, to know about the text
itself. Some of you who are real enthusiasts could visit the library of the University
of Calcutta where Chandrabati’s manuscript is kept. Just scanning through it
would in itself be really exciting! We will group our analysis of this text under
three heads –
i) Text
ii) Narrative techniques
iii) Insights
Once we have completed our analysis, you will be able to understand the
importance of woman-speak and how a woman approaches and interprets her 39
Non Fictional Prose life and its problems differently. We have with us a text that deals with and
narrates Sita’s entire life span – her Baromasi (a Hindi term which literally
translates into barah mahina, i.e. twelve months – which represents a life cycle,
each season representing a stage of life) – telling us about her happiness, sorrows
and her eventual tragic death. You will find it interesting to see that war, and
public appearance and affairs, which matter enormously in a male-centric society
are treated very casually here. Even the people who are addressed and the way
they are spoken to is remarkably different from the regular forms of social
intercourse one finds in Valmiki’s Ramayana.
Valmiki’s Ramayana begins with janmalila – an entire section devoted to Rama’s
birth. Chandrabati departs from this tradition to begin her epic by devoting its
first six sections to describing Sita’s birth. Sita is born as an incarnation of Goddess
Laxmi to fulfil a divine prophecy. She comes into this world to bring Ravana’s
end. She thus becomes the protagonist. In Valmiki, Sita is found abandoned in
the fields by Raja Janak. However, in Chandrabati, Sita is Mandodari’s offspring
and has no father. Chandrabati Ramayana paints for us a Ravana who is dissolute,
tyrannical, and over-ambitious because of Brahma’s boon.

Activity 4
How does Sita gain a prominent place in the Chandrabati Ramayana?

Ravana murders sages and collects their blood in a box as poison with which to
end the immortality of the gods. He abducts beautiful women and spends time
with them, completely neglecting his wife, Mandodari. Out of extreme sorrow,
Mandodari drinks this potent potion to end her life and miseries. But in a dramatic
twist, instead of dying, she gives birth to Sita in the form of an egg. Sita is thus
conceived out of the blood of ascetics who had been brutally murdered and the
agony of a much neglected and suffering Mandodari. When Mandodari gets to
know that Ravana is out to destroy the egg, she puts it into a golden casket and
makes Ravana throw it out of her castle window into the ocean. The egg floats
across the Bay of Bengal. Ravana’s threatening an innocent life seals his
damnation.What happens to the egg? Does it get broken? No. It is found by
Madhab Jalia, a poor and honest fisherman. His religious wife, Sata performs
holy rites and receives the egg worshipfully, which pleases Goddess Lakshmi,
who blesses the couple with wealth and prosperity. Lakshmi visits Sata in a
dream and asks her to deliver the egg to King Janak’s wife. Sata goes to the
Queen and gives her the egg, requesting the Queen to name the child, Sita, as her
namesake. Her wish is granted and the new born is named Sita – a derivative of
Sata. Her conception and birth are as befitting a traditional male hero.
Chandrabati’s Sita’s miraculous and divinely ordained birth without a male
authoritative figure makes her one of the earliest radical feminists.

Activity 5
What is the importance of the character Madhab Jalia in Chandrabati
Ramayana?

Chandrabati devotes only two comparatively shorter, later sections to the birth
of Rama, his three brothers and one sister, the evil Kukuya who has the Bengali
40 (and Sanskrit) term for evil (ku) pronounced twice in her name. The heroic code
is subtly defied and re-written in Chandrabati Ramayana. Traditionally, epics A Woman's Retelling of the
Rama-Tale: The
are regulated by a heroic code which demands that the central character should Chandrabati Ramayana
be a man who is virtuous and masculine, and has martial prowess. He should
uphold the dominant patriarchal social code of conduct. Chandrabati speaks up
in her own person to denounce patriarchal ideology: Sita takes the centre stage
with a supernatural birth generally reserved for heroes.
In Book II, we find that Sita has returned from her exile and subsequent abduction
by Ravana, and is in her married home. In a flashback sequence, she recalls her
entire life from her childhood to her life during her exile accompanied by her
husband, and her loneliness in Lanka. It is very interesting that the thrust of this
book is not on Rama’s heroic exploits but Sita’s emotions. Rama’s achievements
– the breaking of Haradhan and the entire epic battle are mentioned briefly while
the epic actions are referred to through dream sequences. Sita, however, has
much to say about her relationship with Rama. Sita’s pregnancy and her
abandonment, her giving birth to their children, her and death or entry into Mother
Earth to end her experience of injustice are described in detail. We have
descriptions of exclusively feminine experiences like Sita’s yearning to chew
burnt clay during her pregnancy.

Activity 6
How does shifting the focus from Rama to Sita in Chandrabati Ramayana
alter the storyline?

Apparently, the original edition of Chandrabati ends here. However, we have a

second edition which is in all probability an interpolation by male writers. We
have the entry of Lakshmana, a representative patriarchal figure in Book III. He
praises Rama’s heroism on which Chandrabati Ramayana had remained silent
so far. The text gets a patriarchal slant. Male characters take centre stage: we
have the heroism of Lava, Kush and Hanuman; the ascetics Vashistha and Valmiki
appear in their full Brahminical splendour.

3.5 NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES

Chandrabati Ramayana has a narrative sequence in which the speakers change
from book to book, as does the mode of address to its audience and readers. The
narrator of Book I is Chandrabati while the narrator of Book II is Sita herself.
These two books are women-centric – they are written by women and articulated
by women to an audience comprising women. The form of address is
overwhelmingly, ‘shuno skhijana’ (listen girlfriends). Sita’s confidantes are her
close women friends with whom she shares her experiences. Typical women-
centric ways, like bratakatha-style language, i.e. narratives of fasting are used
here.
In later editions and in Book III, patriarchal authoritative voices take over. In all
probability, the poem had become a property of the bards of East Bengal long
ago and was sung to a mixed audience. The modes of address change: ‘shuno
skhijana’ is replaced by ‘shuno sabhajana’ (listen, members of the court) and
‘shunu sarbajana’. The tone shifts from intimate and emotional to public and
celebratory. 41
Non Fictional Prose It is interesting to note that Chandrabati remains critical of the dominant male
ideology. At times she directly addresses the characters and shows her annoyance
at their behaviour which brings sorrow into Sita’s life. However, Chandrabati
does not criticize her heroine, Sita for acting in accordance to the very same
dominant ideology; Sita is celebrated because she follows this ideology
unquestioningly.

3.6 INSIGHTS
Chandrabati Ramayana is undeniably an exciting text which helps readers to
relate to the pain of women, and understand that every text has an authoritative
voice against which many dissenting voices rise. These dissenting voices create
alternative text(s) which help maintain an ongoing discourse on ethics and value-
systems. In a society which is patriarchal, it is the man and his supporters who
call the shots. Here, literary works do not provide any space for woman-speak. It
does not surprise us that it was only as recently as the sixteenth century that a
woman-oriented Ramayana was written.
Chandrabati Ramayana is beyond doubt about Sita – her life, her problems and
her personal experiences. Rama is a character in the margins. Chandrabati
Ramayana is a ‘Sitayana’ – telling us about the journey of Sita’s life; to call it
Ramayana is misleading. This Ramayana is a heroic epic with a difference.
Traditionally, heroism translates into masculine valour and a fight between the
forces of good and evil which are generally violent, even virulent. However,
here evil and good are represented by inner conflict, as ethical and moral forces.
There are no visible weapons, and signs of traditional warfare are absent.
Chandrabati Ramayana is of great importance as it provides us with an alternative
woman-centric point of view to understand, analyse and interpret religion. In
this Ramayana we meet an anguished and stricken Sita who suffers despite being
innocent and blameless. Here, the focus is not on Rama’s martial prowess or his
kingly attributes but the emotional aspects of Sita’s life and her very limited
happiness. We are made to feel the helplessness of women who are victimized
because their morality is suspect and which has to rely on the judgement of male
authority that sentences and punishes. Such mindless harshness destroys a
woman’s peace of mind and existence forever. Chandrabati paints for us a pregnant
and lonely Sita who yearns to be pampered by her husband. Through Chandrabati,
we re-visit a vulnerable Sita who tells us that she has always felt lonely and
without a real home since she never knew her real parentage. Unlike Valmiki’s
Sita eclipsed by her husband, Lord Rama, Chandrabati’s Sita comes out of the
margins and shares the centre stage with her friends.

Activity 7
Can the Chandrabati Ramayana be referred to as a Ramayana?

3.7 LET US SUM UP

Chandrabati Ramayana is a text that was penned by a woman who was well read
and critical of her times. Through her Ramayana, she gives us the woman’s
42
point of view. This piece of writing was generally neglected and overlooked by A Woman's Retelling of the
Rama-Tale: The
critics as trivial since it did not follow the typical patriarchal pattern of narration Chandrabati Ramayana
or writing. It remained a “silenced text” for long and was only rediscovered in
the 1920s. What has intrigued the critics by and large is its creative intertextuality.
Chandrabati Ramayana borrows across various mythologies like those of Krishna,
Prahlad and Shakuntala. The concepts of a biological mother, a foster mother,
fisherman and a cruel male-relative are not part of the original Ramayana.
Chandrabati has encouraged fresh perspectives on Ramayana. Above all, it is
extremely significant that Chandrabati’s Sita is named after a fisherwoman, Sata
– a deliberate strategy to underscore women and defy their secondary status in
society.
Undeniably, Chandrabati Ramayana is and will continue to be a text which will
continue to engage our intellect and force us to re-assess our moral yardstick.

3.8 AIDS TO ACTIVITIES

Activity 1 : Gender affects our reading and interpretation to a certain extent
in the process of identification with the thoughts and feelings
of the characters.
Activity 2 : It is called as such as it has been largely ignored within a system
of patriarchy.
Activity 3 : Chandrabati often intrudes into the text and directly addresses
the characters herself.
Activity 4 : Sita, not Rama, is the central character who brings an end to
Ravana’s evil rule. She is Lakshmi’s incarnation who is
destined to defeat Ravana and the first sections of the book
are devoted to her.
Activity 5 : Madhab Jalia in Chandrabati Ramayana rescues the egg which
contains Sita’s life after it is thrown into the sea by Mandodari.
Sata chooses the name, Sita as a derivative of her own name.
Activity 6 : Valmiki’s Ramayana is built around Rama and his public and
political image as a ruler and a brave warrior. In sharp contrast,
Chandrabati Ramayana is written from Sita’s point-of-view
with hardly any mention of war and kingship.
Activity 7 : The central character of Chandrabati Ramayana is Sita, not
Rama. Therefore, it would perhaps be more appropriate to call
it a Sitayana, not Ramayana since it narrates the life of Sita
and expresses her point-of-view.

3.9 GLOSSARY
abducted : kidnapped
ascetic : a holy man/sage who has given up worldly pleasures
43
Non Fictional Prose auspicious : holy
ballad : a folk song that tells a story
Baromasi : covering a period of twelve months
casket : basket/ case
clan : a group of closely knit families
dissenter : a person who disagrees
exploits : brave acts
gory : bloody
guise : a fake appearance
ideology : a set of beliefs and ideas
intertextuality : borrowings across texts
janmalila : story about birth
legend : famous person or story
mediator : a person who helps bring in an agreement between two parties
mingle : mix
recurring : happening again and again
soothsayer : a person who tells the future
tactic : method/ strategy
tyrannizing : behaving like a cruel and heartless ruler
unabashedly : frankly

3.10 UNIT END QUESTIONS

1) Who was Chandrabati? What is so special about her Ramayana?
2) Who are the narrators in Book I, Book II and Book III of Chandrabati
Ramayana? How does it impact our reading of the text?
3) What do you understand by ‘heroic code’? To what extent is it found in
Chandrabati Ramayana?
4) How is Rama in Chandrabati Ramayana different from in Valmiki’s
Ramayana?
5) Why is Sita named after Sata in Chandrabati Ramayana? Why is this
significant?
6) Which Book is written from a patriarchal viewpoint? Why?
7) Why is the Chandrabati Ramayana considered a ‘silenced text’?
44
 A Woman's Retelling of the
3.11 REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Rama-Tale: The
Chandrabati Ramayana
1) Amirthanayagam, Guy. Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue. Ed.. London:
The Macmillan Press Ltd. 1982. Print
2) Bedekar, D.K. and Kelkar, Ashok R., ‘Indian Consciousness through Ages:
Marathi Literature (1870-1970).’ Maharashtra – A Profile: Vishnu Sakharam
Khandekar Felicitation Volume, V.S. Khandekar Amrit Mahotsava Samiti,
1977. Web
3) Bose, Mandakranta. “Reinventing the Ramayana in Twentieth Century
Bengali Literature.” In Bose, Mandakranta (ed) Ramayana Revisited. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Print
4) Dasgupta Sanjukta and Lal, Malashri (eds). The Indian Family in Transition:
Reading Literary and Cultural Texts. New Delhi: Sage Publications India
Pvt Ltd, 2007. Print
5) Iyengar, Radhika. ‘Diwali Special: A Ramayan, but not about Ram.’ livemint.
Web
6) Paniker, Ayyappa K (ed). Medieval Indian Literature: An Anthology. New
Delhi: Elegant Printers, 1997.
7) Patel, Utkarsh. ‘Birth of Chandrabati’s Sita.’ http://talkingmyths.com. Web
8) Sen, Geeti (ed). Crossing Boundaries. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1997.
Print
9) Sen, Nabaneeta Dev. ‘When Women Retell the Ramayana.’ http://
www.manushi.in/docs/906-when-women-Retell-the-ramayan.pdf. Web
10. Shetiya, Vibha. ‘The Chandravati Ramayana: A Story of Two Women.’ https://
feminismandreligion.com. Web

45
Non Fictional Prose
UNIT 4 A TESTIMONY OF OUR INEXHAUSTIBLE
TREASURE BY PANDITA RAMABAI
Structure

4.0 Objectives
4.1 Introduction
4.2 About the Author, Pandita Ramabai
4.3 Excerpts from A Testimony of Our Inexhaustible Treasure
4.4 Analysis
4.5 Narrative Technique
4.6 Let Us Sum Up
4.7 Aids to Activities
4.8 Glossary
4.9 Unit End Questions
4.10 References and Suggested Readings

4.0 OBJECTIVES
On the basis of reading the text, this unit will enable you to understand A Testimony
of Our Inexhaustible Treasure by Pandita Ramabai as an autobiographical
reflection of a person whose life extends over different and distant cultural spaces,
times and practices.
You would also be able to infer that the book is not only about the spiritual path
of her life but also about the space and context for self-scrutiny at the secular
level as well.
While reading and analyzing the text the readers will agree that it is almost
impossible to appropriate a single genre to Pandita Ramabai.
Taking into account the numerous challenging issues she chose to take up, it is
difficult to restrict her to a single field. To name a few, she deserves to be called
a feminist, a diasporic writer, an educationist, a social reformer, a spiritual leader,
an empowered woman and, most importantly, a humanitarian.
As students of English literature, your objective is primarily to analyze her
contribution to the variety of literary compositions that go to her credit, namely,
books, essays, pamphlets, letters, translations and autobiography.
In this section our focus is on her autobiography titled A Testimony of Our
Inexhaustible Treasure.

4.1 INTRODUCTION
An autobiography has always been considered as an authentic and important
source of knowledge about the complex, intricate and ambivalent character of
an individual. Pandita Ramabai’s autobiography, written in March 1907 (14 years
46 before her death), stands apart by the fact that while a typical autobiography
usually depicts a person’s life simply as a journey along a linear passage that A Testimony of Our
Inexhaustible Treasure
eventually finds its goals and aims of life. A Testimony of Our Inexhaustible by Pandita Ramabai
Treasure deviates from the normal because there is neither a chronology nor a
history.Probably because it is the story of a person whose life was not like a
road, a career, an advancement or a history or a simple passage from birth to
death. It was dictated, impacted, channelized and mouded by familial, cultural,
social and political events of her time. The roadblocks that she encountered and
overcame in her life are startling and compel the readers to keenly observe and
evaluate the sensitive sociological, cultural, religious and historical issues that
shaped Ramabai’s persona, including her conversion from a high-caste Hindu to
a Christian.
She was fortunate that she had access to education. This was indeed a privilege
that she had over her contemporaries. The translation of the Bible, from Greek
and Hebrew into her mother tongue Marathi, was her magnum opus and marked
the apogee of her religious divergence from her orthodox Brahmin origins, via a
series of intermediate stages landmarked by her earlier writings. Meera Kosambi
calls her writing as “militant feminist rhetoric of Pandita Ramabai.”
Therefore, reading of autobiographies allows us to deduce that a simple, personal
history of an individual is actually a collective reality.This book is a prism through
which the readers view the myriad shades of Ramabai’s life: her growth from
being an offspring of her time to succeeding and becoming so important, so
relevant and inspiring as to influence and shape creatively and meaningfully the
prevalent social doctrines by her active role.
As Ramabai’s spiritual autobiography, it also testifies to key moments in her life
and conversion and explains how she “felt bound to tell as many women as
possible that Christ Jesus came to save sinners like me.”

4.2 ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

In spite of her privileged background and her conversion to Christianity, Pandita
Ramabai is very much a heroine of our times. She was a pivotal social reformer
and women’s rights activist of India in the late 19th century.She was born on
April 23, 1858 to Lakshmibai and Anant Shastri Dongre – an enlightened and
orthodox Chitpavan Brahmin couple. Though orthodox, Anant Shastri Dongre
advocated education for women. A Sanskrit scholar and a Puranika himself, he
educated his wife and children in Sanskrit texts even at the cost of ostracization.
Ramabai had a rather unusual childhood.While she was still very young, her
parents fell into poverty and left their home and became religious vagrants,
travelling the length and breadth of the Indian subcontinent and learning many
of its languages.Growing up as the children of a wandering couple, Ramabai and
her siblings escaped being tied down by the conventional demands of a social
group.Learning and progressive ideas were at the center of this family whose
strength was nobility of character and it enabled her and her elder sister Krishnabai
to escape the rigid gender code as well.But the famines of 1874-77 proved
disastrous for the Dongre family because it resulted in the demise of Ramabai’s
father, mother and sister within a few months of each other.Left to fend for
themselves and true to their religious commitments, she and her brother, Srinivas,
continued with their peregrination.
47
Non Fictional Prose Her inclination for reading enabled her to become, at the age of twenty,the first
woman in India to earn the titles of pandita and saraswati, after examination by
the faculty of the University of Calcutta. It is here that she lost her only surviving
sibling, Srinivas, to cholera. She then married a shudra in a civil court and drew
the ire of high caste echelons. Combined with her scholarly achievements, this
decision represents a remarkable commitment to the questioning of tradition.
Though happy, the marriage was brief. Her husband died within two years leaving
her with a daughter.It was undoubtedly the worst fate that could befall a woman
in a society which never considered a woman as an individual but an appendage
to her husband.She talks vividly about this plight in her book The High Caste
Hindu Woman.
Within first year of her widowhood, she founded the Arya Mahila Samaj, a society
of high-caste Hindu women working for the education of girls and against child
marriage. She published her first book, Morals for Women, or in the original
Marathi Stri Dharma Niti. She also testified before the Hunter Commission on
education in India, an enquiry set up by the British Government. She presented
an impassioned case saying that “it is evident that women, being the half of the
people of this country, are oppressed and cruelly treated by their other half.”
This testimony was later printed and is said to have influenced the thinking of
Queen Victoria.
Next year, she sailed to England with the intention to study medicine so that in
the end she could return to India as a doctor. This plan could not materialize
because she was diagnosed with incurable deafness. She, now, used her time in
England to study Christianity which she had started in India. If we analyze this
move objectively, we can infer that the person travelling to England was an
anxious mother-widow, determined to draw more from life than was offered her,
with an honest heart to genuinely help women and also a person in quest of
answers to her existential and religious quest.
Her faith in Hinduism had been shaken after reading the Vedas and Upanishads—
books actually forbidden for women. A thorough study of these texts opened her
eyes to the position accorded in them to women and shudras. She was puzzled
by the variety of religious options these texts offered but found the thread of
commonality in each of them about their unanimity on the deprived status of
women and shudras in India’s social fabric. It turned her into a sceptic.
She says “My eyes are being gradually opened, I was waking up to my own
hopeless condition as a woman, and it was becoming clearer and clearer to me
that I had no place anywhere as far as religious consolation was concerned. I
became quite dissatisfied with myself; I wanted something more than the shastras
could give me, but I did not know what it was that I wanted.”
She and her young daughter were baptized as Anglican Christians. Many aspects
of English life appealed to her, but having rejected the caste-system in her own
country she was not at ease with hierarchy of social classes in England. Having
given up her dreams of a medical degree, she travelled on to the USA in 1886
and, in the active world of nineteenth century American feminism, she succeeded
in capturing the limelight through the series of lectures as a zealous and ardent
advocate of the cause of Indian women’s education and status in
48 society.Simultaneously, she learned very quickly how to write a book that would
correspond to western criteria resulting in the publication of her bestseller, The A Testimony of Our
Inexhaustible Treasure
High Caste Hindu Woman(1887). It was also her fund-raising tract.She was by by Pandita Ramabai
now full of plans for reforms in India. She took up American causes too, supporting
in print the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and
speaking at the first meeting of the International Council of Women in 1888 (a
body which brought together activists from the US, Britain and Canada).
She observed the American educational system very closely and also took a
course in kindergarten teaching and later on introduced it in India. In America
she found the kind of democracy and the kind of women’s education she was
looking for. It is here that she conceived the idea of ‘home’ for the high caste
Hindu widows in India. Her keenness towards her goal and role as a social
reformer led her to appreciate the liberating democratic nature of American
society as opposed to the stifling orthodoxy of Indian society. She compiled and
published these observations in Marathi in 1889 as The Peoples of the United
States. She wrote, “The national might of the United States does not lie in its
standing army, cannons and swords; it lies in the educational advancement and
diligence of the nation’s inhabitants.” She was, perhaps, contrasting Britain with
America.
After travelling and encountering the Western countries for six years, Ramabai
returned to India in 1888 and began realizing her dream project by opening a
widows’ home ShardaSadan immediately and later expanded it into the Mukti
Mission. The move was greatly applauded and enthusiastically approved by the
nationalists and social reformers. But problems crept up when she shifted it to
Pune in 1890, a bastion of conservative Marathi Brahmin culture, which would
not allow the intrusion of Christian religion and through the medium of
newspapers Ramabai was accused of proselytizing upper caste widows and
women of lower castes on the pretext of social welfare. This criticism and
marginalization made her turn towards Christian religion more actively. Initially
she considered religion as an option but in the aftermath of these attacks from all
quarters, she openly praised Christianity and even invited women to convert if
they wished so. When famine and plague struck the central Indian provinces in
the late 1890s, she turned her attention to the housing and education of famine
victims, creating a new organization for this purpose.
She also set up the Kripa Sadan, a rescue home for the sexually abused women.
Mukti Sadan was renamed as Pandita Ramabai Mukti Sadan in 1969 and has
been a beacon of light in the lives of many women till today. This place developed
as an exemplary ‘female’ microcosm because Ramabai’s focus was on
empowering women not only through knowledge of reading and writing but also
in training them in various vocations like teaching, nursing, tailoring and helping
them to become financially independent.
As far as her writing goes, she published in Hindi and Sanskrit as well as in
Marathi and English. Her travel books about England and America interestingly
reverse the conventions of the western travel writers in the East. The epistolary
exchange she had with her spiritual mother, her daughter and others form a
considerable part of her literary corpus. Her last, posthumous work was a
translation of the entire Bible into Marathi from Greek and Hebrew. Indian society,
as it is today, certainly owes an immeasurable debt to the educationist, feminist,
social thinker and reformer Pandita Ramabai. 49
Non Fictional Prose
4.3 EXCERPTS FROM THE TEXT
The book opens with the lines:
“….Jesus…said….Go home to thy friends, and tell them what great things the
Lord has done for you ….”
And these lines encapsulate Pandita Ramabai ‘s intention for writing this book
which also happens to be her spiritual Odyssey which discloses her retrospective
perspective on her own life.
She derives pride in her upbringing and captions this chapter as An Honourable
Heritage. Speaking of her father she minces no words and says:
“My father, though a very orthodox Hindu and strictly adhering to caste and
other religious rules, was yet a reformer in his own way. He could not see why
women and people of the Shudra caste should not learn to read and write the
Sanskrit language and learn sacred literature other than the Vedas.”
So he tried the experiment at home by teaching his wife and tutored her into a
Sanskrit scholar who passed the knowledge on to her children. The move outraged
the entire Brahmin community which tried to dissuade him from this “heretical
course” but he was adamant and succeeded in convincing the assembly of Pandits
that he was not going against the law of the scriptures.
“Some people honoured him for what he was doing, and some despised him. He
cared little for what people said, and did what he thought was right. He taught
and educated my mother, brother, sister, and others.”
Speaking about her education she says:
I did not know of any schools for girls and women existing then, where higher
education was to be obtained. Moreover, ….my parents….wanted us to be strictly
religious and adhere to their old faith. Learning any other language was out of
question. Secular education of any kind was looked upon as leading people to
worldliness which would prevent them from getting into the way of Moksha, or
liberation from everlasting trouble of reincarnation…. To learn the English language
and to come in contact with the Mlenchchas, as the non-Hindus are called….”
Dwelling on her parents’ vocation she says:
“Ever since I remember anything, my father and mother were always travelling
from one sacred place to another, staying in each place for some months, bathing
in the sacred river or tank, visiting temples, worshipping household gods and the
images of gods in the temples, or reading Puranas in the temples or in some
convenient places……The readers of Puranas, Puranikasas they are called, are
the popular and public preachers of religion of the Hindus.”
The audience revered them and out of gratitude offered money, flowers, fruits,
sweetmeats, garments and other things to them and therefore “…. We never had
to beg, or work to earn our livelihood.”
But when Pandita introduces the readers to the next chapter called Famine, Death
and Doubts, she is candid about the flaws of her family’s vocation. Specially
50 during the famines when crops failed and people starved.
According to her, A Testimony of Our
Inexhaustible Treasure
by Pandita Ramabai
“We were not fit to do any other work to earn our livelihood, as we had grown up
in perfect ignorance of anything outside the sacred literature of the Hindus.
We could not do menial work, nor could we beg to get the necessities of life…..We
suffered from famine which we had brought upon ourselves….My father, mother
and sister all died of starvation within a few months of each other.” This was in
the year1870.
She and her brother survived and travelled through India for many years.
“We had walked more than four thousand miles on foot without any sort of
comfort, sometimes eating what kind people gave us, and sometimes going
without food, with poor coarse clothing, and finding but little shelter except in
Dharma Shalas;….. We wandered from the south to the north as far as Kashmir,
and then to the east and west to Calcutta in 1878……
We stayed in Calcutta for about a year and became acquainted with the learned
Brahmans.We did not know what it was, for we had never come in social contact
with either the Hindu Reformers, nor with Christians before that time.”
It was during this time her disenchantment with the Indian religions begins. She
realized together with her brother that religion did not hold its promises; their
prayers and ritual acts were not effective.
So, Calcutta played a decisive role in Pandita Ramabai’s life, both for her
recognition as a profound scholar and her stepping into the world of social
reformation.She sums up the gist of all the Hindu religious books, Dharma
Shastras and Vedic literature, as follows:
“The woman has no right to study the Vedas and the Vedanta, and without knowing
them, no one can know the Brahma; without knowing Brahma no one can get
liberation, therefore no woman as woman can get liberation; that is Moksha.
The same rules are applicable to the Shudras…….
……..I stayed in Bengal and Assam for four years in all and studied the Bengali
language. While living with my husband at Silchar, Assam, I had found a little
pamphlet in my library. I do not know how it came there but I picked it up and
began to read it with great interest. It was St. Luke’s Gospel in the Bengali
language………..”
Gradually her interest in Christian religion deepens and she confesses,
“Having lost all faith in my former religion, and with my heart hungering after
something better, I eagerly learned every-thing which I could about the Christian
religion, and declared my intention to become a Christian, if I were perfectly
satisfied with this new religion.”
“I had at this time begun to study the English language, but did not know how to
write or speak it.”
“I realized, after reading the 4th Chapter of John’s Gospel, that Christ was truly
the divine Saviour He claimed to be, and no one but He could transform and
uplift the downtrodden womanhood of India, and of every land. Thus my heart 51
Non Fictional Prose was drawn to the religion of Christ. I was intellectually convinced of its truth on
reading a book written by Father Goreh, and was baptized in the Church of
England in the latter part of 1883, while living with the Sisters at Wantage.”
For some years after my baptism, I was comparatively happy to think that I had
found a religion which gave its privileges equally to men and women; there was
no distinction of caste, color, or sex made in it……
I can give only a faint idea of what I felt when my mental eyes were opened, and
when I, who was “sitting in darkness saw Great Light,” and when I felt sure that
to me, who but a few moments ago “sat in the region and shadow of death,
Light had sprung up.”
Pandita Ramabai could see the difference between the teachings of the two
religions. “The Brahman priests have tried to deceive the women and the Shudras
and other low caste people into the belief that they have some hope. But when
we study for ourselves the books of the religious law and enquire from the higher
authority we find that there is nothing, not anything whatever, for us…….”
Her ecstasy is visible in the following lines:
“…….How good, how indescribably good! What good news for me a woman, a
woman born in India, among Brahmans who hold out no hope for me and the
likes of me! The Bible declares that Christ did not reserve this great salvation for
a particular caste or sex.
The Holy Spirit made it clear to me from the Word of God, that the salvation
which God gives through Christ is present, and not something future. I believed
it, I received it, and I was filled with joy.”
My readers will not, therefore, find fault with me for making this subject so
very personal. The heart experiences of an individual are too sacred to be
exposed to the public gaze. Why then should I give them to the public in this
way? Because a “…necessity is laid upon me; yea, woe is unto me, if I preach
not the gospel!” (1 Corinthians 9:16.) I am bound to tell as many men and
women as possible, that Christ Jesus came to save sinners like me. He has
saved me, praise the Lord! I know “…He is able also to save them to the
uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever lives to make intercession
for them.” (Hebrews 7:25).
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own
soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Mark 8:36-37.) we
have nothing to fear from anybody, nothing to lose, and nothing to regret. The
Lord is our Inexhaustible Treasure.
My work, in the beginning, was a purely educational one, and religious liberty
was to be given to the inmates of my school, and all plans were made to start
the Home for Widows as soon as I should land in Bombay. If I were to write all
that the Lord has done for me, even as much as it lies in my power to do so, the
book would be too large for a person to read, so I have made the account of my
spiritual experience as short as possible. I am very glad and very thankful to
the Lord for making it possible for me to give this testimony of the Lord’s
goodness to me.
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 A Testimony of Our
4.4 ANALYSIS Inexhaustible Treasure
by Pandita Ramabai
“At every step, her writing reflects her biography.”
A Testimony of Our Inexhaustible Treasure was written by Ramabai in 1907 and
she named it as an “account of my spiritual experience…”Through this book
she expresses her gratitude to God for bestowing on her the privilege to give this
testimony of the Lord’s goodness.
The book has also been acclaimed as Ramabai’s spiritual autobiography since it
testifies to key moments of her life. The unfolding of events is almost dramatic
in which tragedy is slowly built up to culminate in her silence and exit from
social life. Apart from being an illustrative throwback, the book forces the readers
to observe the interplay between her personal and creative ventures and the
contextual barriers.
Pandita Ramabai wrote her autobiography in English and probably intended it
for both the Indian as well as the Western Christians. The book reveals how she
sees her own history and how she wants the reader to understand it. It is a
passionate outpouring of a heart full of devotion. She had already spent twenty-
four years practising Christianity and she, therefore, reads her life not merely as
an ‘outer’ convert but as one who had realized Christ within herself. And yet her
life was not as simple as that – we cannot ignore the complex issues that the
book addresses. The readers have the advantage of uncovering the widely
misunderstood plans of Ramabai for national revival. She dwells on a variety of
diverse issues of the eighteenth century India, like religion, culture, gender and,
most importantly, nationalism. Noticeably, all these were predominantly male
prerogative and commanded by strict orthodoxy of a patriarchal tradition. But
Ramabai’s unwavering determination for nation-building enabled her to overcome
strategic exclusion at various levels. In A Testimony of Our InexhaustibleTreasure,
she views her whole life from a perspective enriched by her religious faith. It is
a candid account of the trials and tribulations refracted through a religious lens.
She does not hesitate to confess her dissatisfaction with the Hindu religious tenets
and the skepticism that disturbed her through the trying times during and after
the famine. She was bewildered by the variety of opinions these tenets contained.
But they all had one thing in common and that is the acceptance of the deprived
status of women and shudras and the conviction that they cannot access salvation
or liberation from the bondage of life cycles. This was unacceptable to her. She
was in “search of something better”. In Christian religion she was promised
salvation which she appreciated but was not “intellectually convinced”. Her
fascination with the Christian religion was mainly because it did away with all
the man-made barriers of discrimination and exclusion as opposed to the rigid
and crippling caste-system and gender-biases professed by Hindu religion. For
her, Christianity was not merely a religion but it held the vision of an egalitarian
society – almost a Utopia
She believed that Indian society lacked the capacity to regenerate and, therefore,
adoption of the new religion and social order was the only solution to this crisis.
Her visit to the Rescue Home in England which sheltered “the so-called fallen
women” further strengthened her belief in Christianity because her own ancestral
faith did not offer such provisions for its victims. The compassionate nature of
Christianity convinced her that “no one but He (Christ) could transform and
uplift the downtrodden womanhood of India and of every land”. 53
Non Fictional Prose Her conversion to Christianity led to scathing attacks on her from all corners,
accusing her vis-à-vis her gender for fickleness and betrayal – also seen endemic
to her sex. On the issue of her supervision of home for widows, she was accused
of proselytizing. She, in return, drew on the nationalists demand for
‘independence’ and ‘equality’ and insisted that women were also entitled for the
same. She brought to fore the inherent contradictions in the nationalists’ vision.
Although Ramabai’s tract clearly delineates her trajectory to the broad Anglican
tradition, it is equally honest about her critical attitude to religion. She did not
blindly accept any religion but embraced only certain aspects of her new faith in
the light of personal, social and cultural circumstances and considerations. She
clearly states that, “I want to find out the truth about everything including religion
by experiment”. Her initiation into Christianity found her grappling for this truth
because she was encountered by the different denominations and their
contradictory teaching-”a Babel of religion in Christian countries”. (308) She
accepts that she had to “labour under great intellectual difficulties” for “something
better which I had not found.”
The autobiography reflects her objectivity and she had subjected her ancestral
faith (Hinduism) to a similar scrutiny. She was equally critical of the Puranikas
who were indifferent towards their audience as of the dogmatic beliefs of orthodox
followers like her parents who did not advocate ‘secular education’ as practical
investment. Readers of her autobiography can easily analyze her individualistic
take on religion when she says that she had been reading ‘about’ the Bible and
not the text itself as she should have done. Her intellectual soundness does not
allow her to accept everything that the new faith offers and professes. There
were many points of contentions with her own spiritual mentor. In fact, her
personal interpretations of Christian tenets were termed as instances of the native’s
proverbial pride and ignorance. Her tours to the western countries made her
confront the truth about West’s evaluation of the Orient.
She objected to Hindus being called as ‘heathens’ by the Europeans. Her
experience in America needs to be dwelt upon because while on one side she
praises the status of women in that society but on other she is critical of the
barbaric custom of slavery practiced in this temple of democracy.
Ramabai faced one more allegation forced upon her by the Christians. This was
her position with reference to the colonial regime because, despite her conversion,
she never failed to interrogate the imperial enterprise. Her religious and political
orientation left her isolated at times but she was not deterred. Her outrage at the
segregation camp at Pune during the Plague of 1897 and especially the treatment
of women there, which made her write that Lord Sandhurst, the governor of
Bombay, was answerable to the British Parliament. While the governor dismissed
the charges and described them as highly exaggerated and hence deceptive,
Ramabai quickly responded by labeling the accusations as baseless and deceitful
a ‘vice’ which the west would usually associate with the Orient. She did not
allow the issues to die down easily and invoked the Christian community to
condemn the incident as a betrayal of the Christian values of truthfulness and
impartiality. She confesses and apologises in the book for being ‘so very personal,’
yet she admits that the new faith had put a responsibility on her to offer her life
as concrete illustration of its wonders.
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 A Testimony of Our
4.5 NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE: Inexhaustible Treasure
by Pandita Ramabai
Susie Tharu and K Lalita draw attention to the features of the modern autobiography
claiming that it “exhibits certain ambivalence” where often “the accent is personal…
the preoccupation with intimate (and) even the confessional.” Emphasis on the
personal often obscures the fact that “the autobiography always draws on the
repertoire …(that) cultures provide at particular junctures in their history.” This
almost seems true of Ramabai-although she is careful in chronicling the social,
cultural and historical anxieties of her times, she does it in relation to the issue that
affects her mission. Meera Kosambi also comments on this aspect and points to
the “efforts to plot her entire past on the meridian of Christianity”, especially in her
later writings. Undoubtedly, her autobiography can also be seen as revolutionary
because it explores uncharted territories of experience. She is definitely aware of
being the ‘site’ on which ideologies of caste, class and nation, all coloured by
dictates of patriarchy, fight themselves out. From this marginalized space her voice
that emerges also deviates from the usual trajectory of the traditional ‘male’
autobiography as she set about constructing herself as an exemplary figure who
does not merely recount and retell her accomplishments and experiences. Rather it
is a touching portrayal of the growth of her feminist consciousness alongwith her
trust on specific areas of social reforms and also her choice and practice of religion.
The message of her autobiography must not be confined or mistaken for
proselytization. Christianity assured Ramabai of a space where liberty was the
foundation of a society and any divorce between these two would result in a collapse
of the latter. The ideas of equality and justice inspired Ramabai’s enterprise for
socio-cultural and religious change as well as her mission for women’s reforms. In
this moving personal account the readers can clearly visualize how Ramabai is
way ahead of her father, the “orthodox reformer” in her objective of social reform.
And much like him, she dismantled the patriarchal bastion and “stood the
persecution with…. characteristic manliness” and also “cared little for what people
said and did what (S)he thought was right.”
Reviled and glorified widely, read and silenced, evoked in historical narratives
and erased from them, Pandita Ramabai remains an allusive personality, difficult
to appropriate and to ignore.
Activity 1 : Trace the influence of differenct cultures and religions in the life
of Pandita Ramabai.
Activity 2 : Mention a few incidents that had a decisive influence in shaping
Ramabai’s personality.
Activity 3 : State the purpose for which Ramabai wrote her autobiography.
Activity 4 : List the different types of autobiographies that are written.

4.6 LET US SUM UP

Pandita Ramabai Saraswati was a feminist, women’s rights activist and an
educationist. She was not only a pioneer of women empowerment and liberation
but also a social reformer who led from the front.
Her proficiency, initially in Sanskrit language, later on expanded to other Indian
languages and ultimately culminated in her authority over the language of the
55
Non Fictional Prose ruling masters-English. Other than being a Puranika she was a versatile writer
and a poet. During her stay abroad-when she even accepted Christianity as her
religion- she developed a penchant for reading the textbooks subscribed in the
schools of the US, and translated and even introduced them in schools back in
India. She became the first educationist to introduce the Kindergarten system in
India. She transcribed the Bible into her mother tongue Marathi.
ln recognition of her service to the human community she was honoured with
the highest award Kaisar-i-Hind by the British Colonial Government of India in
1919.
For her unrelenting contribution to the advancement of Indian women the
government of India issued a commemorative stamp in 1989 in her honour.
Such was the contribution of Pandita Ramabai Saraswati— a woman ahead of
her time.

4.7 AIDS TO ACTIVITIES

Activity 1
The life of a person can often provide for a study of transcultural influences. In
case of Pandita Ramabai it also included the mingling of religions.
Activity 2
Every phase in a person’s life has bearing on his/her personality. Some incidents
have a very decisive influence.
Activity 3
Purpose for writing an autobiography can be different. Sometimes the writer
decides to remain quiet on certain issues which have actually been contentious.
Activity 4
Some autobiographies are linear in proceedings and some are like just a name of
a person to which bits and pieces are attached. Some autobiographies gain meaning
when studied against historical and cultural events.

4.8 GLOSSARY
Ashram : Residential school which imparted religious
instruction.
Chitpavan Brahmin : A Brahmin community from the Konkan, the
coastal region of western India.
Pandita : Eminent female scholar and teacher.
Proselytization : Converting someone from one religion to another.
Puranas : Collection of ancient tales used to convey Vedic
teachings to women and lower-caste men.
Puranika : A male or female Purana reciter.
56
Saraswati : The goddess of learning. A Testimony of Our
Inexhaustible Treasure
Shastri : A scholar or theologian. by Pandita Ramabai

Shudra : The lowest of the four castes.

Hunter Commission : Also known as the First Indian Education
Commission and was appointed by Lord Ripon,
the then Governor-General of India, under the
chairmanship of Sir William Hunter. The
Commission mainly focused on the state of
primary education in the country.

4.9 UNIT END QUESTIONS

1. Define autobiography. Bring out Pandita Ramabai’s contribution to this genre.
2. How does Pandita Ramabai qualify as an educationist, social reformer and a
crusader of women’s rights?
3. What role did education play in making Pandita Ramabai an exceptional
person?
4. Since her life extends over different and distant cultural spaces, times and
practices can her testimony be called transcultural?

4.10 SUGGESTED READINGS AND REFERENCES

Amoia, Alba, and Bettina L. Knapp eds. Great Women Travel Writers: From
1750 to the Present. New York: Continuum, 2005.
Bodley, Rachel. ‘Introduction’. The High-Caste Hindu Woman. By Pandita
Ramabai. Bombay; Maharashtra State Board for Literature and Culture, 1977.
Forbes, Geraldine. Women in Modern India. (The New Cambridge History of
India.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Kosambi, Meera. Pandita Ramabai Through Her Own Words: Selected Works
(translated, edited and compiled) New Delhi, University Oxford Press 2000.
——————”Indian Response to Christianity, Church and Colonialism, case
of Pandita Ramabai.” Economic and Political Weekly, October 24-31: 61-71.
Shah, A B. The Letters and Correspondence of Pandita Ramabai compiled by
Sister Geraldine. Maharashtra State Board for Literature and Culture, Bombay
1977.

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Non Fictional Prose

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