Exercise Book

In ‘Exercise-Book’, Rabindranath Tagore explores the condition of females in a highly prejudiced and
repressive patriarchal Indian society, during late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It aims to
raise issues such as child marriage, denial of right to education to women, patriarchy, oppression of
women, their voices, their potential talent and dehumanization of women leading them to be the
‘Other’ in the society and marginalisation of them as ‘The Second Sex’.
However, he also, consciously or unconsciously manifests the need for a woman to have a ‘private
space’ (which his protagonist lacked), similar to what Virginia Woolf portrays through her essay, ‘A
Room of One’s Own’. Though, initially she seeks her private space in her exercise book (diary),
which was her only mode of expressing her emotions, is soon seized by her husband and never
returned. The story hints towards the significance of diary in the life of a woman and why it is
essential for them.

Young girls like Uma, who’s just a nine-year-old and one day, “a sānāi began to play one morning”
and she’s married to someone much older. The author highlights the fact that how her family and the
society neglected her feelings and fear residing in her innocent mind, by commenting, “I doubt if
anyone in that crowd of wedding-guests really understood what the girl felt in her trembling heart,
behind her veil, Benares sari and ornaments”. The female is repressed and thus relegated as the
‘Other’ in this society as described by Beauvoir in his book ‘The Second Sex’.
When caught writing Pyarimohan taunted her, “So the wife wants to go to an office with a pen behind
her ear?”, with which “she was deeply humiliated, and wished that the earth would swallow her up”.
All this humiliation just because she tried to pen down her feeling in her diary, but everyone reacted
as if it was a ‘misdeed’, a taboo. For them women are just ‘The Second Sex’ whose there to serve and
obey the first, the men evident from these lines, “‘Give me that book,’ he thundered. When his
command was not obeyed, he growled in an even deeper voice, ‘Give it to me.’”. Pyarimohan is the
embodiment of the typical repressive patriarchal society who subjugate women and treat them as the
‘Other’.

Woolf in ‘A Room of One’s Own’, points out that “a woman must have money and a room of her own
if she is to write fiction” or just to write. But Uma despite “in her room with the door closed” didn’t
had the luxury of privacy, her private space had cracks like the door of her room and hence she lost
her only mode of expression of her emotions and suffering. So, the Woolf’s conception of ‘a room of
one’s own’ is something that can be found only in their dreams.
The diary “gave her, in the midst of domestic duties that had come too early, a taste of the cherished
freedom that is a young girl’s due”, it was a “a brief record of parental affection” and eventually her
only companion though for not for long, but it was the only thing that truly knew what she felt and
wanted. The diary/exercise book symbolized the voice of the women the right of self-expression
which is taken away from them by the society and ironically, “Pyarimohan also had an exercise-book
full of various subtly barbed essays, but no one was philanthropic enough to snatch his book away and
destroy it.” Hence, men’s voice was/is not only left unrestrained and unchecked by the society no
matter if it lacks logic like that of Govindlal or it is regressive like Pyarimohan’s, but sometimes even
idealised.
The diary gives women a temporary sense of freedom, a world where they can freely express
whatever they wished without facing any prejudices by the society and for some time they can forget
about the oppression they’ve been and going through.
Exercise-Book precisely presents the hypocrisy of the society and the irony of the hypocrite society is
that, “the Goddess of Learning had never before made so secret a visitation to the female quarters of
the house”, men worshiped women in the form of Goddesses and simultaneously exploited them as
humans, only if they even considered them to be.

ROUSHAN KUMAR SINGH

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B.A.(H) ENGLISH
2017-2020