Abstract
When I first became interested in women’s history in the 1970s, we, in India were still hunting for sources. Now, thirty five years later, scholars have come a long way. Those engaged in research have uncovered autobiographies, memoirs, letters, journals, magazines and pamphlets, all authored by women.
Sharmistha Dutta Gupta focuses on the writings of middle class Bengali women in six or seven literary and political journals between the 1920s and 1950s—Probasi, Saogat, Jayashree, Mandira, Ghare–Bairey and Swadhinata. Each of these represented a different political ideology and the author explores how this influenced the policy of the journals and women’s writing. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the ideal of a ‘new’ woman was being shaped. Men and women in Bengal, as elsewhere, were trying to redefine the woman’s role at home and outside. Was her role only in the house? Was it in the home primarily, but also outside in social work and philanthropy but not in politics? In Gandhian satyagrahas, women took part in active politics, marched in protests, attended and organized meetings and went to jail, but they did not challenge patriarchy. Women in Bengal were involved in revolutionary, left movements but often male domination continued in the party and at home. A few women did however, challenge this.
Probasi, founded in 1901 by the liberal social reformer Ramananda Chatterji, is the best known of these journals. Its English counterpart, Modern Review, was read widely by the urban intelligentsia all over India. Probasi perceived women as basically non-political and subscribed to a view which may be described, as ‘liberal feminist’. Women’s roles were primarily domestic but they were encouraged to be educated and engage in philanthropic work. Their role outside the home was ‘social’ not ‘political’. From the beginning of the twentieth century, every issue of Probasi carried three or four articles on various topics concerning women, highlighting women’s achievements. It supported women’s education, the demand for votes for women, the Child Marriage Restraint Act, the Hindu Code Bill and other movements for women’s political and social rights. Saroj Nalini Dutt, a pioneering social worker of early twentieth century Bengal, who set up women’s welfare associations in the districts, travelled with her husband, Gurusaday Dutt, an ICS, who insisted on cutting vegetables for the meals every day. She is supposed to have told her husband, ‘If I neglect my duties at home, I would cease to have the right to serve society’. She represented the image of the ‘new’woman, balancing household duties with social work. There were regular columns on Mahila Sambad, and Bibidha Prasanga that frequently discussed women’s questions. The editor of Probasi, however, avoided publishing Saratchandra Chatterji’s novels on the ground that they would ‘corrupt the mind’ as women considered ‘fallen’ were integral to many of his novels. A distinction was made between elite, respectable women and poor fallen women. Probasi tried to guide upper class women in the making of their individual and class identity. The author says that the readers and contributors to the journal were mostly upper and middle class women but then these were the only literate women of the times.
Saogat, a monthly journal that appeared for the first time in 1918 and was addressed, like Probasi, to middle class women but mainly Muslim. The views of the two editors, Ramanand Chatterji and Mohammed Naseeruddin, were quite similar. Liberal Muslims like Syed Amir Ali, the noted Bengali novelist Syed Ismail Hossain Shiraji and above all, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain emphasized the importance of women’s education. Fazilatunnesa, the first Muslim girl student at Dacca University, discarded burkha and started attending classes in a sari in 1925–26. After she got a first class master’s degree, Saogat’s editor, helped in arranging her trip abroad.
Saogat’s aim was to wage a campaign against superstition and to work for women’s emancipation. The participation of Muslim women in public life was, however, much less than that of their Hindu sisters. Discussion of women’s rights in the light of Islam occupied a major part of the discourse in Saogat. The type of education for Muslim girls, purdah, seclusion, women and the ulema, women’s place in the home, were some of the other issues discussed. The journal played an important role in influencing the thinking of Muslim middle class women. Hindu writers like Anurupa Devi, Ashapurna Devi, Radharani Devi, Kalyani Sen (Karlekar) and others contributed to Saogat. Gradually women’s writings got channelled into special numbers of Mahila Saogat and finally an illustrated weekly, Begum was launched just before 1947. The journal’s secular views changed and it started supporting the demand for Pakistan.
Jayashree, edited by Leela (Nag) Roy, was more radical in its views. It was started in 1931, in the year following the Chittagong Armory Raid and its history is linked to the participation of women in the freedom struggle. It argued that men and women did not have separate spheres and women’s role was as much in the public sphere as in the private. ‘Masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ were social constructs, not biological. Leela Roy was one of the first women to enter the core of a revolutionary party. She was very active in public life and joined the Congress Mahila Sangh when Subhas Chandra Bose was the Congress President. She later joined the Forward Bloc and as a consequence, those opposed to her political views ceased writing for Jayashree. Roy gave precedence to nationalism over feminism. The journal closed down in 1942 when the government banned the Forward Bloc and Jayashree’s popularity declined after Independence.
Mandira was founded in 1938 by Kalyani Bhattacharya and Kamala Mukherjee who met when they were jailed for seditious activity and decided to start a journal for women once they were free. They joined the Congress Mahila Sangh, inspired by Bose. Initially, Mandira was somewhat left wing in its views and socialist and communist women contributed to it. But so did women with a Gandhian ideology, like Ashoka Gupta, who wrote about her work in Noakhali or Rani Chanda of her prison days. Mandira increasingly became a mouthpiece of the Congress and after independence, was taken over by men.
Swadhinata, a daily and Ghare Bairey, a monthly, were ideologically, distinctly left wing. They reflected the views of the Atma Raksha Samiti which was the women’s wing of CPI. But Ghare Bairey reversed its policy after 1953 and wanted to cut across party lines. A non-communist editor took over and eminent non-communists were appointed on the Board. It tried to reach out to a wider audience by publishing cooking recipes, news on childcare, information on birth control, family planning, etc. It started reflecting the views of the Congress party on political issues. The voices of marginalized groups such as tribal women in the Tebhaga movement also found expression in Swadhinata which had been started by the CPI in 1945.
These journals reflect the different political strands in Bengal. The views expressed in them, no doubt, influenced women’s views and writings. Women’s literacy was, however, very limited. In 1951, hardly 8 per cent Indian women were literate and even fewer went to secondary schools and colleges. Hence the readership of these magazines was confined to a small urban educated middle class among whom there were deep rooted class and caste prejudices. Nevertheless, the book reveals that women were not politically passive and that these journals contributed in creating political awareness and a space for women to debate and write on issues which were not purely domestic. Journals linked to political parties seem to have had a shorter life span and often lost their contributors and readers as they changed their political affiliations. A non-political journal like Probasi had a longer history and perhaps a larger readership and influence in shaping women’s identities.