Gender and Modernity, ed. Amitava Chatterjee, 224-243.

Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2015

Kahake: Swarnakumari Debis Literary

Resistance?
Maroona Murmu

W
autonomy

hen the genre of novel emerged in the West, themes such

as socio-political mobility, romantic love or domestic
related

to

the

concept

of

individualism

figured

prominently. Colonial India, with its deeply-embedded caste, class

and gender hierarchies, political servility and economic insufficiency
permitting little opportunity for mobility and individual choice, was
not the most suitable of places for the adoption of the western model
of novel writing.2 Thus, scholars argue that the novel in India
emerged not as a new form with aesthetic possibilities but as a
utilitarian mode for the dissemination of social-religious and didactic
ideologies.3
Curiously, the novel was often disparagingly perceived as a
female form; leisured ladys amusement in the west. Without a
long history of male authorities, status and tradition, it was thought to
demand less intellectual rigour. 4 Being a realistic mode dealing with
ordinary life, writing novels supposedly required bare observation of
characters and nuances of inter-personal relations. In colonial India,
socio-cultural construction of women as self-effacing and desireless
beings posed problems for women writers. Cultural limitations
required that their writings did not valorise their feelings and
individuality, features characteristic of realist novel writing. 5 Thus,
subordination to socio-cultural prescription was likely to fragment the
women novelists literary subjectivity and curbed social possibilities
of depicting feminine subjecthood. They had to resolve tentatively in
literary terms the voices and the silences of women characters and
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Gender and Modernity

were to deal with matters of passion, transcendence, and desire with
caution.
The novel-reading women became a trope of anxiety for the
nationalist bhadralok in nineteenth century Bengal. Complaints were
raised about the novels tendency to corrupt moral sensibilities of
tender minds, causing mental stultification,6 making women
neglectful of house work, defiant and shameless. It was alleged that
the identification with and imitation of the central characters in novels
encouraged immoral habits and transgressive desires.7 It was
presumed that the adherence to the imagined world of female power
could destroy womens contentment with realities of their lives and
would arouse extravagant desires and fantastic notions of happiness.8
The fear of novel-reading womens sexuality led to greater
surveillance over womans reading habits.

The conduct books

advised that even if women read, it was to be for the cultivation of

moral, spiritual and intellectual faculties in a systematic pursuit for
character improvement, self-betterment and moral elevation. Reading
was congealed with behaviour modification, a measure of right
conduct, right mind and appropriate femininity.9
She Bends the Norm of the Female Form

While it was expected that novels would impart a normative account

of womanly code of conduct and naturalise the stereotypes of
womanly deportment and duties, we shall explore how Swarnakumari
Devi, the most prolific of women novel writers of nineteenth century
Bengal,10 challenged the sensibilities and concerns of a nationalist
patriarchy that eulogised de-sexualised domestic women. In her novel
Kahake? (To Whom?)11 the protagonist Mrinalini, in her desire for
autonomous agency, asserts herself as a sexual and emotional being
rather than a supplicant and powerlessness woman. She is a strong

Kahake: Swarnakumari Debis Literary Resistance?

character with a dynamic mind, who desires to be an architect of her
own fate holding the reins of her destiny. The emotional and
intellectual depth, a keen sense of self-definition, an unexpected
development of mind and character, empower her to refuse
compliance to accepted social codes of behaviour.
Swarnakumari Debis life gives us an insight into historical
conditions that enabled her to pen her protagonist as mostly a
transgressive individual who is rarely in conformity with patriarchal
ideologies. It might be that Swarnakumaris liberal Brahmo
background allowed assertion of her freedom of choice, the will to
defy socialised dependency on male will. She belonged to the
illustrious Tagore family of Jorasanko. Born in 1856, she was the
eleventh child of Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Debi. By her own
admission, she was given an education unusual for girls of those
days.12 She was taught by Acharya Ayodhyanath Pakrashi of Adi
Bramho Samaj and a European lady. One fathoms her range of
reading through the utterances of the male characters in Kahake who
quote from Thomas Grays Elegy in a Country Churchyard,
Shelleys Epipsychidion, Shakespeares Hamlet, and George Eliots
Middle March in Kahake. She acknowledges her cultural enrichment
resulting out of interactions with distinguished male members of the
Tagore household. Swarnakumari possessed a rare versatility, being a
novelist, a poet, a playwright, an essayist, a song writer and a
journalist. She holds the distinction of being the editor of the
renowned Bengali journal Bharati between 1884-95 and 1908-14.13 In
1886 she founded Sakhi Samiti (Society of Friends) to ameliorate the
condition of widows and orphans through providing of education and
shelter. Between 1889 and 1890 she was a member of the Indian
National Congress.
Scholars argue that Kahake drifted away from the basic
literary requisite of a novel: realism. While Chakraborty describes the

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Gender and Modernity

book as a story of life among educated Bengalis who have adopted
the English style of living illustrated from her own family,14
Bandopadhyay finds the novel artificial and untrue to realities of life
for it deals with an aristocratic family which had little contact with
the general Bengali society.15 But in nineteenth century Bengal, a
novel with an idealised love plot, the courtship framework and the
intricacies of relationships that the protagonist underwent alone could
question the custom ridden societal and familial conventions. It is true
that in a society where free social interaction between the sexes was
atypical, love and subsequent marriage betraying individual choice,
flouted social reality. But it is this tension between the imagined
romantic structure and the social reality of a womans unfree
existence that enable the questioning of the standard categories of
romance. Despite the romantic exuberance, Swarnakumari did not
lose touch with reality. Powerful emotions of love and affection,
tender domestic sentiment, lofty humanism are counterpoised to tragic
themes of estrangement. The plot embedded in the reality of
progressive Brahmo families, reflected the life and ethos of the new,
urban, upper middle class Bengalis of Calcutta.
Unlike the didactic manuals which prescribed love to be a
female virtue entailing self-sacrifice, care, tenderness, responsibility,
and emotional self-discipline dissociated from sexuality, Kahake
gravitated towards an ethos of liberal self-interest, individual desire
and self-actualisation through love. It is a story of the search for a
sovereign identity through an intellectual understanding of the
concept of love. Love for Mrinalini is neither an ideal to be valorised
nor an emotion larger than life. It is a this-worldly emotion that
ensures personal gratification through reciprocity. She is not a passive
recipient of love but actively claims love from her loved ones. The
agility of the mind of Mrinalini allows her to transfer her love from
one person to another when betrayed. While women were held

Kahake: Swarnakumari Debis Literary Resistance?

responsible for upholding social and moral economy and prescriptions
of ideal femininity in marriage and norms of domesticity conceived of
women as exemplary altruists lacking self-assertiveness, Mrinalini did
not cherish the ideal of feminine self-abnegation through marriage.
She even did not condemn love outside the marital arrangement.
In a decisive novelistic moment one finds a forced insertion of
a discussion regarding societal role of a novelist. Talking about
Middle March, Mrinalinis sister Kumudini derides George Eliot for
portraying Dorothea Brooke as a selfish lady who marries twice,
initially the elderly Reverend Edward Casaubon and later his cousin,
Will Ladislaw. Dr. Benoy Kumar Bose, a family friend, says:
One tends to forget that a novelist is not a moralist...
George Eliot does not wish to evoke moral judgement
through characters; she does not endeavour to make them
inanimate or God-like either. Through compassion and
love she wants to unravel evolving humanity in
thempathos out of failure in life.16
Choosing of Eliot, who wrote as an author unconstrained by the
stereotype of a woman as a guardian of ethical standards, was a
deliberate move on the part of Swarnakumari. She refuses to project
feminine selves as carriers of culturally prescribed womanly values.
The interesting use of the first-person narrative and personal
pronoun makes Kahake almost an autobiographical narration. The
authenticity of the narrators voice is established by depiction of lifes
journey through written words, internal monologues, verbalised
stream of consciousness, conversations and letters. It creates an effect
of realism, establishing both the genuineness of the narrators
character and her rootedness in the social milieu. Occasional
confessions apart from lending a sense of intimacy and dramatic
force, delineates the specific moments which shaped her. There are
two levels in her storythe time of her writing, and the time of her
childhood. Mrinalini is fairly successful in modulating her point of

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Gender and Modernity

view from that of a child to that of a woman whose expanding
consciousness unravels new horizons. As a mature individual, she
weighs submission against independence, desire against duty, moral
prudence against passionate romance. Mrinalini is an enigmatic blend
of childhood innocence, youthful fascination and astuteness that
comes with age.
The modernist notion of the author as the omniscient,
organising principle is questioned by Swarnakumaris frequent
dilemmas, hesitancies, and indeterminacies within the plot. Mrinalini
through her monologues makes oblique suggestions about the
frequent change in her thought processes and asserts the sovereignty
of her mind. Hers is a fractured individuality making alternative
choices. Her gradual unfolding as a social subject, emotional growth
as an individual, her changing consciousness show a dynamic female
self. The ambivalent emotional processes and sensibilities which map
the development of Mrinalinis mental and moral selfhood make the
readers wade through convoluted emotional/ethical/social crises faced
by her. Her hesitant gestures make room for readers who are made
active accomplices in the fabrication of the text. She makes indirect
addresses to the readers and acknowledges their presence but does not
insist on a sympathetic identification with the heroine. While
promising a dialogic interaction with them, she expects objective
detachment and critical distance. Rather, she asks for evaluation of
the novel as a literary artefact: I am presenting the outcome of my
knowledge to the discretion of the readers to judge its literary
value.17
In the foreword to the translated version of Kahake named An
Unfinished Song (1913), E.M. Lang mentions: it should be of
great interest to all those who are concerned with the womanquestion, for it presents a careful study of the Indian girl at this
intensely interesting stage in the history of her development, and

Kahake: Swarnakumari Debis Literary Resistance?

particularly of her attitude towards love and marriage.18 Throughout
the narrative, Mrinalini demonstrates sensitivity to relationships and
bonds, not necessarily romantic in nature. Kahake with its use of the
technique of shifting narrative perspectives makes incursion into the
psychic world of women of the time: Mrinalinis elder sister,
Kumudini; her friend Chanchal; Kusum who is a rival in the arena of
love. Reflections on mental states and interior developments make
women characters full-blooded individuals.

Interrogating Obligatory Fidelity for Women

Swarnakumari deftly deals with emotions and personal relations

which are conceived to be the core of womans experience. Clinching
womanly authority on feminine sentimental values, she begins by
specifying gender-inflicted distinctiveness of perceptions on love.19
The opening line of the novel reads Mans love is of mans life a
thing apart, it is the womans whole existence. At the beginning of
the text, love to her is spiritual union, a way of finding of
completeness and even self-actualisation. Her nuanced understanding
of love is further exemplified when she dramatically adds:
The person who wrote these lines was a man. It is a
wonder that a man could capture the essential nature of
woman. When I consider my own life I feel this to be
literally provedlove and life are synonymous for me. If
I detach love from myself, life becomes empty and
without substanceI lose my selfhood.20
In fact, this is an extension of Swarnakumaris conception of love as
expressed in her first novel Dipnirban (1876). She had differentiated
between two levels of love: the higher selfless feminine love which
found its fulfilment in self-effacement for the loved one and the baser
individualistic masculine love whose triumph lay in winning over the
loved one.21 She acknowledges that biological difference pre-

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determines the varied ways in which men and women feel and
articulate their feelings of love.
Having begun so, the narrator delineates a creed about love
which is different from the societal paradigm of the unique, once-in-alife time relationship which is supposed to be an entirety in itself:
I have loved even before I had been married. Besides, I
did not fall in love with that person with the idea of
getting married. Moreover, this is neither my first nor my
last love. When I did not love this person I loved another.
Neither was my heart vacant before thisthere is a
popular notion that love for ones parents is entirely
opposed to that of conjugal love but my experience
shows that there is little difference between filial love in
childhood and conjugal love in youthactually I feel that
whether it is parental love, sibling love, friendship or love
in marriage, all are essentially the same.22
The protagonists belief in pre-marital love, the conceptualisation of
love for its own sake, the notion that marriage need not be a logical
corollary to love is exceptional for her times. Mrinalinis assertion
that womens love is not for the husband alone and that conjugality is
not a compulsion is a critique of the normative structures of society.
Mrinalini had a deep affection for her father who was a Deputy
Magistrate. However, she could not distinguish between the degree of
her attachment with her father and with a senior schoolmate named
Chhotu, who used to supervise the junior classes in her school days.
She felt similar desire for togetherness with and monopolisation of
affection of both. She talks of her possessiveness towards her father
and her jealousy towards her elder sister Kumudini. Her father being
the centre of her existence, she at times asked him as to whom he
loves most amongst the sisters. Even when told that he loved them
both, she was convinced that her father loved her the most.23 One is
here reminded of Swarnakumaris cherished bonding with Maharshi
Debendranath. She too, like Mrinalini, offered flowers to her father at
the break of dawn. Swarnakumari doubted whether a devotees

Kahake: Swarnakumari Debis Literary Resistance?

contentment in offering obeisance to the God could match her
pleasure in the act.24
Mrinalinis memories of the childhood playmate left a
permanent impress on her life and she cherished the memory of their
intimacy with great affection. She writes:
Returning from Chhotu I used to frequently tell my father
I love you very muchhe used to smile and kiss me; I
reciprocated and used to ponder why Chhotu does not kiss
me. If he does not love me as much as my father, why
should I love him then? Who says love does not desire
reciprocity? 25
In the nineteenth century, it needed an enormous amount of strength
of character to profess longing for the physical touch of a friend. The
much vaunted respectability of a woman was associated with sexual
self-denial. In an age when womens writing and her life tended to be
judged by the same terms, such a blatant flouting of the moral
requirement for feminine writing and propriety is commendable.
Moreover, scholars write about the presumption that the public world
would be affected by moral values that are introduced by the private
mode of novel writing.26 For Swarnakumari, prescriptive teaching of
incorruptible female purity and innate chastity never formed a part of
her novel writing.
In keeping with the nineteenth century trend of Bengali
bhadraloks visit to Victorian England to fulfil professional
aspirations, we find in the novel Mr. Ramanath Ghosh, a barrister.27 A
friend of Mrinalinis brother-in-law, she fell for him in the youth. Her
feelings for him deepened when she heard from all quarters that he
was going to be her husband. She expressed her desire to be a
virtuous wife of Mr. Ghosh. Habitual transference of affections and
tender feelings to the one considered the husband was a result of
cultural conditioning. Thus, Mrinalini depicts fidelity in man-woman
relationship with a sentimental equation of it as a virtue entailing self-

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renunciation. When Mrinalinis self-chosen love seemed to lead to
marriage she declared that in the absence of deeply instilled
disaffection, there is no reason to think otherwise against love leading
to marriages:
No matter whoever is the husband she is the wifes
worshipped deity, the adorable beloved, lifes
meaningMaking others happy by self-sacrifice is the
all-encompassing
desire,
wish,
disposition
of
womanhoodin its fulfilment, with this conviction, the
womans heart is replete with love, life is gratified. In this
belief alone she is deluded, tarnished, held guilty and
passionately falls in love.28
Dr. Benoy Kumar Boses appearance in Mrinalinis life makes a
dramatic change in the plot. Mrinalini overhears a conversation
between Mr. Ghosh and Dr. Bose which reveals that the former was
engaged to Miss. K. in England. Mrinalinis elder sister Kumudini
had internalised the double standards of morality exercised by society
and chided Mrinalini for doubting Mr. Ghoshs feelings for her.
Anxious that failure of marriage with Mr. Gosh shall taint Mrinalini
with irreparable social disrepute and end all prospect of marriage
in future, made Kumudini insist on it.
Though marriage in Bengal is seen as the foundation of moral
and emotional development of a woman, Mrinalini is not convinced
by her sisters arguments. With moral corruptibility creeping into her
self-chosen love, she no longer perceives marriage as an institution
that completes a woman, a release from the agonising insufficiency of
an unmarried bluestocking. By disapproving her marriage Mrinalini
protested against the societal/moral double standards that overlooked
promiscuity and deception of men but severely chastised women for
breach of gender-normative fidelity. At the time of penning Kahake,
Swarnakumari had evolved from her former writing self in the novel
Snehalata ba Palita where the protagonist once asked: I cannot
understand why men love women? Women possess no worthy

Kahake: Swarnakumari Debis Literary Resistance?

attribute by the virtue of which they can attract the attention of
menIt is sheer benevolence and magnificence of men that they love
women!29 In Kahake, the protagonist no longer felt gratified in just
being loved. She demands fidelity from men just as patriarchy desires
it from women.
Mrinalini sets intimidating standards of masculine virtue in the
man who ought to be her husband. This can also be read as an oblique
problematisation of male possessiveness and monopolistic claim over
the love of a woman, by claiming the same from the man:
The man who is the object of my forgiveness can never be
my lover, my husband. I want to reign supreme in his
past, present and future. My all-encompassing desire for
love cannot endure my absence at any point of his life.
Just as a man desires eternal, untarnished purity from his
wife, yearns everlasting devotion, I too want to possess
his entire life as mineWill such manly feeling in a
woman be treated with compassion?30
Mr. Ghoshs infidelity and betrayal of another woman and
misdemeanour towards

her was,

therefore,

unpardonable in

Mrinalinis eyes. While Kumudini disdains the concept of

engagement before marriage as a momentary enchantment two
souls, a notoriously ploy of bewitchment by girls of foreign
countries,31 Mrinalini reproaches Mr. Ghosh: What might have been
flirtation for you might have been flaming love for her marriage
would have been your appropriate conduct. I cannot be the thorn in
the happiness of the one who had loved you.32
Swarnakumari movingly depicts the inner turmoil and pangs
of guilt in Mrinalinis conflict-ridden mind. Soothed by Dr. Boses
compassion and care during her period of illness, she falls in love
with him and finds an uncanny resemblance between him and his
childhood love, Chhotu. But she admonishes herself and decides to
expiate for her fickle mindedness by marrying Mr. Ghosh. She thinks
aloud: Of course Ramanath would marry me despite my

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unpardonable behaviourNo matter how I am, he is my God and
with his love he shall redeem my sin.33
A few days later she heard a rumour that Mr. Ghosh was
marrying a girl named Kusum whose father agreed to pay him a
dowry of Rs. 50,000. But again, Mr. Ghosh agrees to a marriage of
convenience with Mrinalini. Both the arrogant assumption of Mr.
Ghosh that women ought to grasp any eligible offer for marriage and
the conventional wisdom of the time that the choice of the bride is a
patriarchal privilege were overturned by Mrinalini. Being a selfrespecting woman she refused Mr. Ghoshs humiliating proposal
when he suggested that considering her own welfare, she should
marry him. Mrinalini by then had spiritualised love34 and romantic
desirability became a sign of a God-ordained oneness, a spiritual ideal
of self-forgetfulness in the other.35 Marriage was unacceptable to
Mrinalini if it involved compromise of ones moral principles.
Swarnakumari here gives primacy to the womans right to refuse over
the mans privilege to choose.
No one supports her decision to break off the marriage and
everyone saw Mr. Ghoshs engagement as a trivial error. Her
brother-in-law condemns this as womanly fickleness and drawing
from Shakespeares Hamlet says: Oh Frailty, thy name is woman!
The adage seems trueThis is what liberty ensuing from education
leads to! The outcome of freedom!36 The debate about role-specific
curriculum womanly education is brought forth here. Dr. Benoy
Bose becomes friendly with Mrinalinis family. Mrinalinis brotherin-law now suggests that he could be a prospective bridegroom for
Mrinalini. Unfortunately, Kumudini informs her husband that the
doctor was engaged to Kusum. This perhaps is the same Kusum
whose father wanted to give a huge dowry to Mrinalinis former love,
Mr. Ghosh. Unlike last time, Mrinalini was shocked by this
revelation. Against the popular conception of the time that hostility

Kahake: Swarnakumari Debis Literary Resistance?

and jealousy are inherent attributes of women, true love liberates
Mrinalini from such meanness. She becomes an embodiment of
magnanimity connecting her love with the larger moral universe of
selflessness. The possessiveness that she has expressed over Mr.
Ghoshs love had disappeared when it came to the doctor. She writes:
when I felt that Kusum is the beloved of my love, she then became
my loved one.37
Though the prime concern of most of the parents, irrespective of
their societal position remained the marriage of their daughter at the
proper time, Mrinalinis father had brought her up as a woman with a
mind of her own. The limitation of the liberating process in the
changing times is exposed when he too thinks that marriage with an
accomplished husband is the end a womans life. The father criticises
courtship marriage and proposes the name of childhood friend
Chhotu as the groom. The dreamy hope of her childhood days
torments Mrinalini. Things became grave when her paternal aunt
admonished her father for not having married her off. Mrinalini
relates the trauma she underwent at her home in Calcutta. People
flocked together to see a girl still unmarried at 18/19 years, almost as
an exhibit. She was far beyond the prescribed age of marriage, both
religiously and legally. While the law of Raghunandan prescribed
marriage prior to the first menstrual flow, the Act X of 1891 (the
Age of Consent Act) raised the minimum age of marriage for girls to
twelve.38 Even in the Tagore family which was more progressive than
many other elite families of Calcutta, early marriage for girls was a
matter of convention.
The readers are allowed to probe into the subtle workings of
Mrinalinis heart and mind, her reflections and introspections as she
utters with profundity: My life became an unmitigated disaster.
However, pondering over this, I decided that it is better to eternally
endure and accept this troubled existence than to get married to the

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Gender and Modernity

one that I do not love. Mrinalini wrote a letter to her father
expressing her unwillingness to get married and endorsing an
independent career of social service as in England. After much soulsearching about marriage as a suitable form of union, Mrinalini turns
to her radical best by questioning the structures of marriage and
family. Though her spinsterhood was viewed as an instance of
individual misfortune by the people around her, she felt that life could
be valuable even outside marriage. She felt that a single woman rather
than leading an inward looking and solitary existence should seek
self-fulfilment by channelling her feminine agency to a vocation that
would contribute socially. However, Mrinalinis appeal falls on deaf
ears. Her father told her: you seem to possess a misconception that
marriage becomes a hindrance to devotion for the cause of societya
womans temporal as well as otherworldly well-being lies in
marriage. She was now left with the sole choice of abdicating her
free will which she had exercised so long. She had to suffer a life as a
virtuous daughter and Mrinalini laments: In the heart of hearts I was
made to realise that I am a weak Bengali woman, an obliging
daughter. I could sacrifice my life but could not resent my marriage.
Self-denial was the only expedient.39 Swarnakumari here astutely
delineates the crisis of individual will, subtle tension in assertion of
agency, anomalies and fissures in the new-born self-consciousness in
women of the nineteenth century which stood in their way of
affirming strong individualities.
The novel ends on a happy note when Chottu of childhood
days turns out to be Dr. Bose. Past is recuperated within the present as
the centre of the childhood affection becomes her passionate love of
youth. However, the interrogative tone persists till the end: Did my
heart get attracted to the new, finding the semblance of old in it or is it
that being charmed by the new, I have attained the old? To whom
have I bestowed my love?40 The ambiguousness that plagued the

Kahake: Swarnakumari Debis Literary Resistance?

mental processes of Mrinalini stayed with her till the end enabling
non-fixity and multiple reading positions.
Thus, western ideal of romantic love is amalgamated with
Indian concept of wifely devotion when Mrinalinis pre-marital love
ends in marriage. In marrying the man she loved, Swarnakumari
released Mrinalini from the insufferable existence as a wretched
woman without agency. Relieving her from becoming an object
moulded according to masculine societal requirements, Mrinalini is
bestowed an autonomous subjectivity. It is true that prevalent societal
value is upheld with love finding its culmination in a happy marriage,
but this conventional strategy lends credibility to the plot which
otherwise seems a bit too unrealistic in nineteenth century Bengal.
Imagination here is not just a form of evasion or an ideological
illusion. It is a strategy for making compromised resistance. Delving
in the world of romantic fantasy, love and tenderness, Swarnakumari
gives Mrinalini the strength to protest against both individual
prescription and socio-cultural norms. In fact, literary critics suggest
that romance is the alternative reality to the powerless. 41 Though
denial was the existential reality of women subjected to colonial and
patriarchal norms, the changing times entrusted upon women
novelists the power to negotiate their position in familial and social
set-up. Despite their disadvantageous social location and physical
confinement, they had the liberty to unleash an unbridled social
imagination in the realm of the novel as a literary discourse to depict
transgressive female characters who could re-draw a new social/moral
order.

Claiming Authorial Recognition

It would be wrong to restrict Swarnakumaris claim to a distinguished
authorial identity with regard to distinct ways of articulating
feminine emotions such as love alone. One would do injustice to her

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Gender and Modernity

if one overlooks her dissatisfaction over not being recognised as a
worthy Bengali author despite her versatility. In Kahake it is as if
Swarnakumari conflates herself with George Eliot who masqueraded
as a male author. In the discussion over George Eliot who exemplified
the honorary male mode of writing, Mrinalinis brother-in-law is
shown to measure creative potentials of women authors by the
standards shaped by the andocentric culture and in comparison to
real male authors like Shakespeare. He believes that the success of a
creative author lies in depicting gender-stereotyped characters. Eliot
became his target of attack for her female characters were
unconventionally autonomous, overtly passionate. Even Eliots
contemporary Arnold Bennett observed about her style thus: People
call it masculine. Quite wrong! It is outright aggressive, sometime
rude, but genuinely masculine never. On the contrary it is
transparently femininefeminine in its lack of restraint, its
wordiness, and the utter absence of feeling for form that characterize
it.42 The doctor who appreciates the possession of an androgynous
mind retorts: if you choose to bring in Shakespeares name I have not
the slightest hesitation in pronouncing her to be as a great in her
sphere, as Shakespeare is in histhe genius shown in the works of
George Eliot is in no way inferior to any renowned poet or novelist of
England, dead or alive.43
Under the excuse of comparing Shakespeare with George
Eliot and declaring the latter as superior, Swarnakumari was trying to
erase the discrimination meted out to women authors like her.
Curiously,

Bandopadhyay

observes:

This

women

novelist

(Swarnakumari) is easily comparable with any male-novelist of her

time in her narrative technique and creations of characters
[however] her novels are rather virile and devoid of the soft feminine
touch.44 (italics mine) A woman authors creative imagination was to
be harnessed to display womanly qualities. She ought to be praised

Kahake: Swarnakumari Debis Literary Resistance?

for her naturally sensitive, poetical, compassionate, familial
creations alone. Need for public approval of their creative endeavour
and fear that their androgynous writing would meet uncharitable
reception, made many women writers write eponymously or adopt
nom de plume. In fact, Swarnakumaris first novel Dipnirban (The
Smothered Lamp) (1876) was published incognito.
One ought not to look for exact parallels between life and
work, but Swarnakumari herself had to suffer comparisons with her
younger brother Rabindranath Tagore. As an author, her brilliance
was weighed against higher male standards. In 1913, soon after
Kahake? was translated and published by her as the Unfinished Song,
Rabindranath wrote to William Rotheinstein criticising the effort:
She is one of those unfortunate beings who has more
ambition than has ability. ..just enough talent to keep her
alive for a short period. Her weakness has been taken
advantage of by some unscrupulous literary agents in
London and she has had stories translated and published. I
have given her no encouragement but have not been
successful in making her see things in proper light.45
Rabindranaths apprehension was unfounded, as a critic wrote:
Remarkable for the pictures of Hindu life, the story is overshadowed
by the personality of the authoress, one of the foremost Bengali
authors of to-day. In fact only a year after its publication, the English
version had to be reprinted testifying its popular appreciation.46 It is
heart wrenching to find her treated disparagingly by Rabindranath
Tagore when she had dedicated her first book of poems Gatha
(Couplet) to her younger sibling:
To my younger brother.
To whom else will I present this carefully gleaned and
strung garland?
Dear Rabi, come hither so that I can do the honours.
I Hope you will not snap and scatter these flowers in your
playfulness.
O mischievous brother of mine, I fear so. 47

240

Gender and Modernity

Swarnakumaris dissatisfaction with her non-recognition as a
renowned Bengali author despite her versatility also seeps through the
novel as Mrinalini quips after writing a letter in English: Had I
written so zealously in Bengali I would have become one of the
leading authors of Bengal.48

Notes and References

1

See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding,
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1957, p. 15; T.W. Clark, ed., The Novel in
India: its Birth and Development, Berkley, University of California Press, 1960.
2

Meenakshi Mukherjee, ed., Introduction to Early Novels in India, Delhi, Sahitya

Akademi, 2005; Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and Reality: Novel and Society in India,
Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1985.
3

Sisir Kumar Das, A History of Indian Literature 1800-1910 Western Impact: Indian
Response, Delhi, Sahitya Akademi,1991, pp. 114-5.
4

Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, New
York, Blackwell, 1986, pp. 3-7.
5

Susan Kirkpatrick, Las Romnticas: Women Authors and Subjectivity in Spain, 18351850, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, Clarendon Press, 1989,
p. 10.
6
Kate Flint, The Woman Reader: 1837-1914, Oxford, 1993.
7

Meenakshi Mukherjee, ed., Early Novels in India, Delhi, 2005, p. xvi-xvii; Anindita
Ghosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in
a Colonial Society 1778-190. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 95-9; 137.
8

Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist, p. 186. The adverse effect of novel
reading is dealt in many of the farces written in nineteenth century. See Anindita Ghosh,
Power in Print, p. 220.
Suzanne M. Ashworth, Susan Warners The Wide, Wide World, Conduct Literature,
and Protocols of Female Reading in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America, Legacy, vol. 17,
no. 2, 2000, pp. 141-64.
9

10

Swarnakumari Devi wrote 11 novels in her lifetime. Sudakshina Ghosh, Swarnakumari

Debi, Delhi, Sahitya Akademi, 2001.
11

Swarnakumari Debi, Kahake, Calcutta, Bharati Karyalaya, 1898.

Kahake: Swarnakumari Debis Literary Resistance?

12

Cited in Sudakshina Ghosh, Swarnakumari Debi, p. 2.

13

Brajendranath Bandopadhyay, Bangla Samayik Patra: 1868-1900, vol. 2, Calcutta,

Bangiya Sahitya Parishat, 1951, pp.19, 23.
14

Usha Chakraborty, Condition of Bengali Women around the Second Half of the 19th
Century, Calcutta, Author, 1963.
15

Asit Kumar Bandopadhyay, History of Modern Bengali Literature: Nineteenth and

Twentieth Centuries, Calcutta, Modern Book Agency, 1986, p.105.
16

Swarnakumari Debi, Kahake, p. 70.

17

Ibid., p. 51.

18

Cited in Sudakshina Ghosh, Swarnakumari Debi, p. 50.

19

In the comedy called Gorai Galad, by Rabindranath 1892 Kamalmukhi declares that
the love of woman was utterly different from that of man. Just as a baby is loved from the
moment (s)he is born, a woman loves her husband immediately. If she fails to do so her
own condition becomes miserable.
20

Swarnakumari Debi, Kahake, p. 1.

21

Swarnakumari Debi, Dipnirban, Calcutta, 1876.

22

Swarnakumari Debi, Kahake, pp. 3-7.

Ibid., pp. 4-5.

23

24

Sudakshina Ghosh, Swarnakumari Debi, p. 2.

25

Swarnakumari Debi, Kahake, p. 13

26

Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, New
York, Oxford University Press, 1987.
27

Tagore holds to ridicule the anglicised society in Sesher Kavita and Bansari. That free
mixing among men and women of this community lead to excesses in some cases is
hinted at in the presentation of the behaviour of the members of the Jagani Club in
Laboratory.
28

Swarnakumari Debi, Kahake, p. 24.

29

Swarnakumari Debi, Snehalata ba Palita, Calcutta, Satishchandra Mukhopadhyay,

1893.
30

Swarnakumari Debi, Kahake, pp. 37- 8.

31

Ibid., pp. 35- 6.

242

Gender and Modernity

32

Ibid., pp. 39- 40.

33

Ibid., pp. 46-9.

34

Ibid. p. 54.

35

Ibid., p. 8.

36

Ibid., p. 63.

37

Ibid, pp. 95-6.

For an understanding of the Age of Consent Bill see Tanika Sarkar, Rhetoric against
Age of Consent: Resisting Colonial Reason and the Death of a Child-Wife, Economic
and Political Weekly, vol. 28, September 1993, pp. 869-79; Himani Bannerji, Age of
Consent and Hegemonic Social Reform, in Inventing Subject: Studies in Hegemony,
Patriarchy and Colonialism, New Delhi, Tulika, 2001, pp. 72-98.
38

39

Swarnakumari Debi, Kahake, pp. 104-7.

40

Ibid., p. 121.

41

Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature,
Chapell Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
42

Quoted in Rosalind Miles, The Female Form: Women Authors and the Conquest of the
Novel, London and New York, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987, pp. 38, 42.
43

Swarnakumari Debi, Kahake, pp. 71-3.

44

Asit Kumar Bandopadhyay, History of Modern Bengali Literature, p. 105.

Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, eds., Women Writing in India, 600 B.C. to the Early
Twentieth Century, vol. 1, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 238.
45

46

See Sudakshina Gosh, Swarnakumari Debi, p. 51.

47

Swarnakumari Debi, Dedication to Gatha, Calcutta, Author, 1880.

48

Swarnakumari Debi, Kahake, pp. 50-1.