• Amar Jiban (1868) is known as the first

published autobiography in Bengali language.

• Rassundari Debi- born in Potajia in Pabna
(western Bangladesh) in 1809/1810.
• She lost her father, raised by her widowed
mother with whom she developed a deep
emotional attachment for life.
• Rassundari’s writing is full of references to
her mother and to God, both performing a
central role in structuring her thoughts and
actions.
• Rassundari never received a formal education
– educating girls was considered a
sacrilegious act in her days.
• Rassundari was married at the age of twelve -
the marriage took her to the far off village of
Ramdia.
• She was a Vaishnavite like her husband and
his family.
• She bore 12 children, of whom 7 died early.
• Unassisted and confined to the antahpur of the house, Rassundari kept performing her domestic duties.
• One day, her husband left his Chaintanya Bhagavata in the kitchen before going out. Rassundari gathered
courage, detached a sheet from the book and hid it in the khori of the kitchen. Then she stole one of the palm
leaves on which her son practiced handwriting. By comparing the words written on the two sheets and with
people’s speech, by recollection and recognition of the letters she had learned in childhood, by constant effort
and determination, Rassundari taught herself to read at the age of twenty-six.
• She learned to write years later when her son expressed his annoyance about her not answering his letters.
• Rassundari was widowed at the age of 59 and a few months after her husband’s death, she finished and
published the first version of her autobiography Amar Jiban in 1868. A final version was published in 1897 (when
she was 88)
• Amar Jiban was written and published in two parts. The first consisted of sixteen rachanas or compositions. The
second part came out in the year 1906, consisting of fifteen rachanas or compositions. Every composition is
preceded by a devotional poem dedicated to her Dayamadhav, the Vaishnav godhead whom Rassundari Devi had
chosen.
• Written in chaste Bangla.
 Title of the work
• Her life story contained none of the criteria that presumably makes
one's life note-worthy.
• written word-public space- hierarchy
• “The book calls itself – with a thundering audacity – My Life. It
makes a bold and a bald statement, presumptuous in the extreme, in
a woman householder. A woman, moreover, who is not connected to
a figure of religious or temporal significance, who cannot claim any
miraculous powers or capacities. The life of such a woman would
not be written – far less read – before the 19th century.”
- Sarkar, Tanika. ‘Words to Win: The Making of a Modern
Autobiography.’ New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1992
• “EVENT” - gaining literacy.
 Some features of Life Writing
• Historically speaking, the first life writings were often cast in a confessional mould.
• The first published autobiography- The Confessions of St. Augustine (4th century A.D.)
• Central to this text is the sense of a dual self which is temporally displaced. In other words, there is
a distinction made between the past self and a later present one (that is, present at the time of
writing).
• This sense of a “then” and “now” is crucial for lifewriting because it indicates the presence of a
certain consciousness of the self and also a sense of reflexivity or a willingness to reflect on the
self in a critical and conscious way.
• For Augustine, sin predates the growth of self-reflection and he is able to look back on his past
actions and the past self with an awareness of the moral and temporal distance between the two
selves. In addition he shows his acute awareness of God’s grace in so far as he, a hardened sinner,
has been the recipient of divine grace, which has allowed him to distance himself from his past days
as a sinner. His redemption is thus a living proof of the divine benediction of the Christian Church.
• Many women like Hildegaard of Bingen (11th centuryA.D). and Dame Juliana of Norwich (14th
century A.D.) also furnish examples of early religious autobiography.
Style in Amar Jibon
• Two voices in the narrative.
• The struggle to learn to read is being described when she has already mastered
the art of writing.
• She describes the past in terms of vivid immediacy of feelings; she ignores
dates, time, and other factual details, and focuses on descriptions of her
everyday household life.
• Whereas at othet times she uses very factual details, for example when she
speaks of her children.
• Amar Jiban is written in a dispassionate, objective style.
• Where the autobiographies by men and women differ maybe in the varying registers
within which they treat the question of agency. Where men represent themselves as
active agents, women often represent themselves as acted upon. There is in a sense a
displacement of agency onto the other.
• This may be seen as a kind of safeguard or rationalization in cultures where women are
generally supposed to be passive and thus they seem to refer to the personal pronoun
with great difficulty.
• Rashsundari Debi- her desire to learn to read and write - The originating moment of this
desire is shown as a dream where she sees herself reading the biography of Chaitanya
Mahaprabhu, or Chaitanya Bhagvat by Brindavan Das.
• Inspired with this vision, she teaches herself to read and then write in utmost secrecy
since she is aware of the taboo against women’s literacy. This taboo was based on a dual
premise: a widely held belief that educated women would either lose their husbands and
become widows, or that they would misuse their ability to read by writing clandestine
letters to lovers in secret. A similar set of anxieties was also expressed about the novel
and the immoral effects it would have on female readers.
“Strange are the ways of god”
Rassundari has narrated her life story in two ways-
• On one hand, she writes that God’s mercy and benevolence towards her has made it
possible for her to achieve literacy - praising God's leela.
• On the other hand, she also shows how she has made her own decisions in life by
learning to read despite the fear of family disapproval and social ostracism- recounts all
the hard work and self-determination she has put in to learn reading.
• Rashsundari talks about social injustice and personal deprivation, yet in a kind of
double-speak says, “Strange are the ways of god”
• Scholars like Tanika Sarkar and Meenakshi Malhotra have observed that Rassundari Devi
creates the persona of a “bhakt” (devotee) for herself, and presents all the small and big
events of her life as exemplars of God’s mercy or leela, including her access to the
written word.
• Thus her transgressive act of learning to read becomes an instance of godly intervention,
a divine purpose, a consequence of God’s will and mercy. That is why, in the text, “the
prayers tend to occur before she narrates some departure she makes from given norms,
so as to take away the sting from her transgression.” (Sarkar, 1999)
 Religious Autobiographies- Women's Writing
• Speaking from a historical point of view, the earliest women’s autobiographies were
religious in nature.
• Perhaps the first life writings were the “therigatha’, the songs of the Buddhist nuns of
the sixth century B.C. They included a minimal amount of detail by the nuns about
their own lives; the narrative focus is rather on how their lives were transformed under
the impact of Buddhism.
• Accounts of transformation are a key feature of many early accounts, both Indian and
western. Much of Bhakti poetry written by Mahadeviakka, Mirabai, Muktabai, Janabai
and Lal Ded, besides inscribing the devotion of the female devotee, also give details of
ordinary lives transformed by devotion to “Chennamallikarjun” (the subject of
Mahadevi’s devotional verse) or Mira’s “Giridhar”, which strengthens her in the face of
opposition from her in-laws.
 Chaintanya Bhagavata
• Vaishnav religious practice enabled certain modes of address on the part of the devotee
as part of his or her extended dialogue with God. The devotees’ or Bhakta’s sense of
themselves and their articulation of their embodied identity is so imbued by their feeling
of intimacy with Krishna, that their utterances take the form of an informal dialogue or
extended monologue with God.
• Often, there is an exploration of a wide spectrum of moods and emotional states. The
mood is occasionally joyous but more often angry, resentful, pained. What we observe
here is how the dialogic structure enabled the exploration of one’s self or subjective
states.
• Tanika Sarkar’s makes a relevant inference in this context: “Vaishnavism stimulated a
radical sense of interiority and a highly individual form of devotion or conversely, a
devotion centred selfhood in the individual” (Sarkar, 1999, p. 55).
• Vaishnav devotion, in encouraging a continuous inner dialogue with God, helped create a
radical sense of interiority. This inner dialogue stimulates a constant self-examination.
• The other distinct feature about women’s confessional life-writings is the sense of great
trial and tribulation that had to be suffered by them.
• Rassundari mentions harsh domestic circumstances and surroundings, ill-health,
numerous childbirths as trials sent by God to test their faith and strengthen their belief
in divine design.
• This is a constant and recurring motif in the very early autobiographies by women that
show religion as a site which affords some space for the articulation of self and
agency.
• Idea of God’s will is utlilised as central explanatory trope or idea to apparently vindicate
all her sufferings.
• Further, her own desires get accommodated within this notion of divine will.
• When she has to go without food for two days or when she loses her child, she
concludes with a statement “such was the will of god”.
• Similarly, Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a SlaveGirl (1861) refers to her
grandmother’s attribution of events to the will of God, even when Harriet recognizes
that it is not the will of God but social inequality and injustice, which lies behind certain
events.
• Rashsundari Debi also talks of going without a meal for two days.
• Coming from an affluent family, she had really no reason to go
without food.
• But such was the force of cultural prescriptions that she had
internalized that she could not bring herself to eat at what was
deemed an inappropriate time.
• The decision to deprive oneself presents a kind of paradox in that it
shows an agency which is negatively deployed.
 In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens
• Amar Jiban
• Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography- Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)- Hurston writes of her sense of homelessness and wandering
which is related back by her to the death of her mother which, for Hurston, as for Woolf, disrupted the world “which had been built out
of her body and her heart” (Hurston 1984, p. 89). Further, Hurston is in a sense given the responsibility of speaking for the silent
mother, prefiguring her future role as writer. When she is too ill to speak, she observes that her mother “looked at me, or so I felt, to
speak for her. She depended on me for a voice”
• Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman (1986) - Writing of her own mother’s death, Carolyn Steedman emphasizes it as a
working-class life and a working-class death. She writes: “Simone de Beauvoir wrote of her mother’s death (and ) said that in spite of
the pain it was an easy one: an upper-class death. Outside, for the poor, dying is a different matter” (Steedman, 1986, p. 2). She also
recounts her working class father’s helplessness in the face of authority. She thus questions the equation/identification of masculinity
and power.
• - in all theree texts the mother’s death becomes a moment of unusual poignancy, helping shape the contours of the writing self.
- Something that is highlighted in Amar Jiban is Rashsundari’s sense of bewilderment when people refer to her as her father’s daughter. As
a child who lost her father before she gained consciousness, she thinks of her self as her mother’s daughter and is surprised when people
refer to her otherwise.
Representation of Childhood
• Common to most of the life writings emerging from women writers in the late 19th century and early 20th
century Bengal and Maharashtra is a sense of the carefree nature of childhood, unencumbered by the bonds
which were to tie women down in their later life.
• Thus childhood days are valorized and narrated with a nostalgia steeped in a sense of loss - Recall the detail
with which Rassundari recounts her childhood.
• . While childhood is narrated in many life writings by men, they are not marked by this sense of pain or loss as
they are in women’s life writings.
• Later, in her book, tied to her in-laws’ house and unable to go to her dying mother, Rashsundari writes: “I was
like a bird in a cage, an oil-presser’s bullock.” She bemoans her fate of being born a girl. This motif is present in
many of the life writings written by Indian women, who articulate a saga of dispossession.
• Rassundari’s experience of childhood and puberty is of pure innocence, bordering on immaturity. She is silent of
her bodily experiences, pleasant or not, except in a symbolical way when she recalls with joy and wonder, in
Āmār jīban, how her body flowered and bore fruits through god’s miraculous ways.
• A sense of loss is manifested even in life writings by affluent women, which is evident in the title of Sarala Debi
Chowdhurani’s autobiography, called Life’s Fallen/Scattered Leaves (1945).
• the man who was my master happened- ABSENT YET LOOMING FIGURE OF THE
HUSBAND. (UNLIKE GOD WHO IS PERSONAL)
• THOUGHTS ON MARRIAGE- “[P]eople keep birds in cages for their own amusement. I felt
my predicament to be similar” (Debī 1981: 17).
DOMESTIC WORLD
“Women were not educated in those days. They had to do all the work at home. If they had
a single moment of leisure, they were expected to tend to the head of the household. That
meant they had to stand at his side meekly and humbly. People used to insist that women
were only meant for domestic chores. Newly-wedded girls had to be especially
hard-working and quiet. They had to work from behind a long veil and then they would get
to be known as good wives.”
Tanika Sarkar’s commentary in this context “[T]he woman enters saṃsār through the
sacrament of marriage, the only sacrament that is available to her. For her, saṃsār is the
unending flow of domestic work and responsibilities, primarily connected with cooking,
serving, and child-rearing” (Sarkar 2001, p. 101f.).
 OTHER NOTABLE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
• Binodini Dasi’s Āmār katha [My Story] (1910)
• Sarala Debi Chaudhurani’s Jībaner jharāpātā [Life’s Fallen Leaves] (1945)
• Haimabati Sen’s Memoirs
• Rokeya Sakhwat Hossain (1880-1932) has been one of the leading crusaders of female education in colonial
Bengal. She wrote extensively on purdah (pardā) practices of Muslim women, education and their freedom. She
also authored the first feminist utopias in Bengal, Sultana’s Dream (1908) and Padmarag (1924). The former is
originally written in English.
• Krishnabhabini Das- travelogue- Iṃlaṇḍe baṅgamahilā- A Bengali woman in
England (literal translation).
The 1860s have been described by Malini Bhattacharya and Abhijit Sen (2003) as the ‘watershed period’ when
women started coming out and actively contributing to the ‘literate culture’: “[a] fairly large number of writings by
women may be found between this time and the beginning of the twentieth century in various periodicals and
magazines of the period. Some of the pieces were also independent publications” (Bhattacharya, Sen 2003, p. 4).