AMAR JIBAN

 Born in 1810, in a village. So essentially rustic environment when growing up. Father
passed away when she was a small child.
 Hence, no patriarchal authority experienced nor patriarchal protection. She was
raised by her mother and relatives. She never touched the slate; she always watched
the students- emotional, intellectual education.
 Exposed to missionary education where boys too studied. At the age of 12, she
married Sitanath Sarkar from Ramkali village and brought 12 children. Her husband
died in 1868. Of her children, Kishori Lal Sarkar became an advocate of the Calcutta
High Court and authored several books on social issues.
 Rassundari Devi was a religious vaishnavite by fate and driven by her passion for
Bhakti, she read Valmiki Purana and Chaitanya Bhagvata.
 Amar Jiban was published in 1876. The book is in two parts, the first of which has 16
shorter compositions. The second part published in 1906, contains 15 compositions,
each preceded by a dedicatory poem. Jatindranath Tagore wrote the foreword to the
second edition of Amar Jiban: “A book on wonderful train of events with simple
sweetness of expression…her prose is an epitome of compositions of a bygone era”.

TEXT (CRITICAL APPRECIATION)

 In the 19th and early 20th century, the upper caste Hindu women and the Muslim
women were living lives imprisoned by customs of the veil and the purdah. The
plight of these women is recorded in the novels of Bankim Chandra Ray and
Rabindranath Tagore, the description in Amar Jiban is more intimate description is
more intimate because of the autobiographical intent. A lady had to work with the
bondage of ghunghat, she has to lower her voice while communicating with maid –
servants – the voice of a woman must not be heard in male quarters. “Purdah” was a
part of the culture of Bengal. Centuries of patriarchal domination had conditioned
women to live under such shackles of practices (Streer Potro by Tagore).
 Rassundari writes that when she was 25, her son was horse riding. She could watch
her son on the horse Jai Hari and then someone said that the horse belonged to her
husband and “It struck me suddenly that I couldn’t go suddenly in front of his horse.
 It would have been shameful if my husband’s horse saw me, so I hid inside the
house.” The conventional metaphor associated with the horse and riding, is sexual. A
woman’s voice must not be heard as it would uncalled for sexual arousal in the male.
A woman should not watch a horse because she will be aroused into sexual
thoughts. These had been the practices and the performances of the age and the
women willingly or otherwise will find herself subjected to it and subjugated by it.
 Rassundari Devi makes a feminist statement about female solidarity and reinforces
Bracha Ettiger’s idea of “breast envy” as opposed to “penis envy”. Her life is a series
of actions and decisions that are serious departures from patriarchal social norms
and are therefore “transgressions” punishable by the society. Amar Jiban reveals a
distinct genealogy that recovers the sense of lineage in tracing the psychological
disorientation created by the loss of her mother and the subsequent retaliation
through the attribution of significance to her mother in her literature. As she mourns
her inability to attempt her mother’s funeral, she transgresses the limitations of
conventional representation. Meenakshi Malhotra discusses the problematics of
codifying “women’s absence of life and loss” and psychoanalytic studies state that
this loss is indicative of the injuries to wholeness that a woman experiences after
separation from her mother.
 This loss exists in Rassundari’s sacrifices for her family and her bodily sacrifices for
the fulfilment of her reproductive destiny as she gives birth to eleven children in
twenty-three years.
 The very act of writing an autobiography, of documentation of experiences and of
articulations of subjectivity, explicates Rassundari’s feminist ethics and analyses her
sociocultural departures from constructed icons. Rassundari re evaluates
womanhood through her assessment of deprived homely nurture. In the fifth
composition of the text, she discusses her state of starvation: “i had been forced to
fast the whole day...nobody knew that i had not eaten the previous day-“, this is the
process of internalisation of cultural prescriptions which are often rooted in the
family’s ignorance or lack of care for the female member. “People put birds in cages
for their own amusement. Well, i was like a caged bird...”. E.P. Thompson
demonstrates how food deprivation is an essential tool to integrate women into a
lineage of revised caste and class after marriage. This forms another motif of Aamar
 Jiban- of the intersection of womanhood and education in nineteenth century
colonial India. The emancipatory narrative shows how manual labour in the kitchen,
the supposed expertise with domestic work and religiosity, the positing of the
woman as “griha Lakshmi” takes her away from the scope of education, of expansion
of her identity beyond the cage that gets committed upon her.
 Rassundari’s secretive pursuit of literacy is however detached from popular social
reforms. She rather appropriates the socially sanctioned brand of religion in an
attempt to strategically legitimise her desire to read. The “zenana” system of
education, the introduction of education of women by Christian missionaries,
remained unpopular and ineffective in advancing women’s plight. That which made
women’s education a central plank in reform proposals was the later social activism
of liberal reformers like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar. Rassundari’s secretive pursuit of
literacy is however detached from popular social reforms.
 As a ’bhakt’ she participates in the divine ‘leela’, through this accepted mode of the
woman’s behavioural code, she reaches out to her pursuit of literacy. Her desire to
read Chaitanya is catalysed as she finds herself reading the text in her dreams. She
ascribes her suffering to God’s will, but, even as she describes her subservient
relationship with God, she emerges as the feminist protagonist whose success in
learning to read and write enables her to undercut the patriarchal norms prescribed
by religion. God is an omnipotent but unkind entity. Rassundari reformulates
patriarchies from her dis-privileged perspective.