Amar Jiban Summary by Rassundari Devi

An Introductory Note :

‘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. The complete, unabridged translation of the Bengali text, with the original introductions by Jyotirindranath Tagore and Dinesh Chandra Sen. later, Enakshi Chatterjee translated it into English with the title ‘My Life’ in 1999.

Substance:

Rassundari was widowed at the age of 59 in 1868 and the following year she finished and published the first version of her autobiography ‘Amar Jiban’ (My Life). (Ghulam Murshid, however, is of the opinion that it was first published in 1875) She added a second part in a new version published in 1897 when she was 88. Jyotirindranath Tagore wrote the preface to this edition.

Unfortunately there is no mention of her in the standard histories of literature from those times, nor is her death mentioned. Rassundari’s life was lived out far from the din and hustle of Calcutta, the cultural epicentre of Bengal. Yet she has the honour of being the first writer of an autobiography in Bengal, a genre just coming into vogue. Written in chaste Bangla, Rassundari’s ‘Amar Jiban’ portrays the changing world of rural Bengal and places women there.

In her life and text Rassundari maintained many of the restrictive norms and rituals enjoined upon a traditional Hindu housewife, yet through her dispassionate, objective style and subject matter, through the very act of writing, forbidden to women not so long ago, Rassundari Dasi was engaged in a unique act of emancipation.

An Analytical Summary :

I. Some time between 1821 and 1823-the precise year is uncertain—a girl of twelve woke up in the morning to find herself on a boat amongst strangers. She started to cry. Her companions tried to console her, but the more she heard their kind, well-meant words the more the tears flowed.

All she could think of were her mother, her brothers, other relatives, playmates, neighbours, none of whom were present. To make matters worse, the boat ride was making her sick. Terrified, she thought of God and spoke His name as her mother had told her to do whenever she was afraid.

II. The girl was probably bedecked in wedding finery, for she had got married the evening before. The boat was bringing her from her parental home, her baper bari, in a village called Potajia, to another village called Ramdia, in the East Bengal district of Faridpur-to her brand new sasurbari, the home of her new in-laws and of her new husband. Her companions on the boat belonged to the groom’s wedding party.

III. A commonplace story in nineteenth century Bengal, of ancient vintage, no doubt: the story of a prepubescent girl being married off and whisked away from the familiarity of a childhood environment to an alien, hostile world. This was the social institution of child marriage that Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar would rail against. But this particular story we are listening to here was not one narrated as a cauti tale by Vidyasagar or any other reformist writer. Nor was it a story narrated by a socially conscious novelist of that time or after.

IV. It was, rather, a fragment of a tale told by the girl herself-or rather, by the woman who had been the girl. Her name was Rassundari Debi (1810-?). This was what made this particular story unique: that it was a tale told by Rassundari of her own life. We are hearing her own voice. We are listening to Rassundari telling us what it was like to be a traditional Bengali Hindu female in the nineteenth century.

V. Rassundari Debi’s ‘Amar Jiban’ (My Life) was published in two parts: the first, consisting of sixteen ‘compositions’ in 1876, the second comprising fifteen ‘compositions’ in 1906. What she could not have known when she wrote the book was that she was making literary history. ‘Amar Jiban’ was probably the first autobiography of any kind, authored by male or female, in the Bengali language. It was almost certainly the first autobiography by an Indian woman.

VI. In fact, Rassundari made more than literary history. As the story will relate, she was acutely conscious of her womanhood and of what being a woman meant in the world she inhabited. If feminism arises out of one’s awareness ofand discontent with the disempowerment of women in a society, then Rassundari must count as a feminist-moreover, as a female feminist in a milieu which nurtured eminent male feminists such as Rammohun Roy, Derozio and the Derozians, and Vidyasagar.

Thus, quite unselfconsciously, Rassundari was a revolutionary thrice over: as an autobiographer when autobiography was virtually unknown in Bengal; as a woman autobiographer when women reading and writing was a rarity in India; and as a woman who espoused what in a later time would be called a feminist consciousness.

VII. Most strikingly, in writing ‘Amar Jiban’, Rassundari quite unwittingly melded into the cross-cultural mentality of the Bengal Renaissance. For, if we are to believe autobiographical scholars, the autobiography was a peculiarly Western literary genre, reaching back to St Augustine’s Confessions (late fourth century CE). Indeed, the autobiography entered the Indian literary scene only in the nineteenth century.

Ram Mohan Roy’s Autobiographical Letter (1832/1833) was a pioneering example of the genre in Indian literature. In ‘Amar Jiban’ Rassundari had consciously or unconsciously transposed a very Western literary genre into a very Indian setting. This act, as the story has elaborated so far, was a prime feature of the Bengal Renaissance.

VIII. Uncountable, unnameable, faceless women all over India suffered as she suffered, experienced as she experienced, thought as she thought. But she took it upon herself to turn all of that into literature. In so doing she became a representative voice of her sex; and also the voice of her own self.

When we read ‘Amar Jiban’ we are hearing at once the voice of Everywoman of her time, space, and circumstance who had no voice, as well as the voice of one particular woman in desperate search of identity. The distinguished scholar Dinesh Chandra Sen, a contemporary of Rabindranath Tagore, recognized this when he wrote that ‘Amar Jiban’ ‘is…not merely the account of Rassundari but a story of all Hindu women of her time’.

IX. She was nothing without God, she recognized and said again and again throughout her story. Rassundari’s quest for identity was inextricably entwined with her faith. Lest we forget this she prefaced each composition with an invocation, a kind of one-voice chorus that set the theme of that composition.

She began the whole story with an invocation to Saraswati, goddess of learning and wisdom, in the hope that the goddess would ‘dwell’ in her voice. Her personal relationship with God, her closeness to Him was, perhaps, yet another reason why she wrote her autobiography, as has been suggested by one historian: she wished to record this closeness.

X. As a little girl, she was in a perpetual state of apprehension, indeed, fright, of one thing or another. Being timid, she was an easy victim of teasing and bullying, even physical abuse, by both boys and girls. She was more naïve and credulous than her playmates and, thus, more vulnerable, more susceptible to their often cruel pranks.

They told her improbable tales which she believed, stole from her, and made her obey their commands. They made her cry. She cried all too easily and so, inevitably, she was known as a crybaby, an object of some ridicule both at home and outside.

XI. Rassundari had no memory of her father who died when she was four years old. Since by her own admission she had no memory of her own self for the first four or five years of her existence, she had no idea that she had had a father. Indeed, she had no inkling of the idea of fatherhood. She thought she was her mother’s daughter, and when one day she overheard her uncle tell someone that she was the daughter of one ‘Padmalochan Rai’, she was profoundly upset.

XII. She brooded over this intelligence, and asked her father’s sister (pishi) where this Padmalochan Rai had gone. Thus she learnt that she had had a father and that he was dead. She also learnt that her father had married her mother, and that was how she came into the world.

Perhaps this was her first intimation of the mystery of sex-and entwined with it, her first acquaintance with the mystery of death. More fear. Her mother had told her that whenever afraid she should pray to the family deity, Dayamadhav. And so whenever she saw a dead person she called to their god.

XIII. At first she personified Dayamadhav. Once, fleeing from their house which had caught fire, Rassundari stood by the river bank with her two brothers and stared at the fiery spectacle. Fearful for their lives the siblings called out to Dayamadhav. Some neighbours seeing them alone took them home, and later one of them delivered the children to their grateful family.

Rassundari thought that the man who brought them home was Dayamadhav. Even her younger brother was more savvy than her: he scoffed at her and told her that their benefactor was no god but a human being. Her mother explained that Dayamadhav, though their family deity, was God; that God was omnipresent and omniscient; that there was only one God who was everyone’s God.

XIV. When she was eight, she was permitted to attend-just attend, nothing more a boys’ school, located in the outer house of their family home. The teacher was an Englishwoman. (Who was this Englishwoman, we wonder, teaching in a Bengali school in some obscure village? Was she a missionary? Where did she live?)

Rassundari observed the boys write the letters of the Bengali alphabet on the schoolroom floor and heard them read out the letters. In the course of the two years she kept the English lady company, she secretly taught herself the Bengali alphabet.

XV. She was a girl. She was not allowed or encouraged to learn to read or write. Her furtive ‘education’ abruptly came to a halt when their home, including the outer house, caught fire. On the other hand, as a girl, no one objected to her developing domestic skills. A distantly related aunt at whose home she spent entire days, taught her household chores and cooking.

Again, no one in her own home knew this. It seems that Rassundari delighted in learning by stealth. When eventually they came to know of her newly acquired domestic skills the family was naturally delighted.

XVI. Thus passed the first twelve years of her life. Despite her fears and anxieties, they were ‘happy and carefree’ years. Then came the talk of marriage. Her emotions at the prospect were mixed. On the one hand, she understood the inevitability of this; every girl gets married.

Moreover, there was the prospect of the joyous sounds and sights that one associated with a wedding: wedding music, the peculiar, celebratory yet poignant sound made with the mouth by Bengali women known in English as ‘ululating’, jewellery, the red wedding sari. On the other hand, marriage meant venturing into, being hurled into the unknown, and the thought made her miserable.

XVII. The wedding ceremony was over; came the dreaded day after when she must leave. She entreated her mother not to send her away but to no avail. She was a girl, and every girl must go to her in-laws’ house, her mother told her.

And so, amidst all the tears-her own, her mother’s, her brothers’, aunts’ and uncles’-she departed in a palanquin. Emotionally spent, she fell asleep. When she awoke it was the next morning and she was in a boat, being escorted by a sea of strangers, the grooms’ folks, to her sasurbari: the home of her in-laws (and, of course, of her husband).

XVIII. As it turned out, Rassundari was extremely fortunate for she found herself in a loving sasurbari. Homesick and miserable in the beginning, she was embraced by a mother-in-law who comforted her as she would her own daughter. Indeed, she was treated lovingly by all around her in her new environment.

They took more care of her, she admitted, than had her own people in her parental home. Her mother-in-law showered the new child-bride with all sorts of toys; the neighbourhood girls were invited to play with her and keep her company.

XIX. The elderly Rassundari, looking back, had nothing but affectionate things to say not only about her immediate Sasurbari family but even the servants and neighbours. They were always kind to her. ‘It is as though God had asked them to be particularly nice to me.’ She remembered her three sisters-in-law, her husband’s sisters (nanads). All three were widowed and had returned to live in their baper bari.

They too loved Rassundari. She admitted, dryly, that the love they bore for their brother’s wife was ‘something of a rarity’ in Bengali circles. She reciprocated their affection. Even when she became mistress of the house and, as their elder brother’s wife their boudi-their senior in the hierarchy, she consulted them on domestic matters.

XX. Thus, as was the case with other young brides in countless families in countless villages, towns, and cities all over India, Rassundari’s identity evolved. What had been her home-her parental home, baper bari-was no longer that; her sasurbari became home. It was her sasurbari she identified with. Her baperbari receded from the forefront of her consciousness. Except for her mother, we hear no more about her parental family, not even of her two brothers.

There was nothing uncommon about this transformation. What was uncommon was her recording of it. And if any one of the millions of anonymous Indian women of the nineteenth century (or even of the early twentieth century) were to have read this account, she would no doubt murmur to herself, ‘This is me this is my story.

XXI. The transformation of child-bride to mistress of the house-kartathakurani, as everyone called her-entailed certain obligations. And it had its pains. The mother-in-law was struck with typhoid which left her blind and helpless. It was Rassundari’s task to care for her, and to assume her mantle. She had to run the household-and it was no small household to run. The family deity must be appeased with daily offerings; guests must be given hospitality; everyone must be fed.

XXII. Rassundari’s sasurbari was affluent, and there was no dearth of domestic help-some twenty-five all told at one time, including eight or nine maidservants-but only one worked inside house. And they too, all of them, had to be fed. Her husband had no brothers, hence she had not even a sister-in-law (‘ja’) to share the load with.

In effect, she was on her own. She was a cook and housemaid-and nursemaid to her mother-in-law-rolled into one. Her daily grind began early morning and ended well past midnight. Then there was the pain of childbirth. Unending childbearing.

XXIII. In a span of twenty-three years from the age of eighteen, she was pregnant twelve times. She miscarried once and gave birth to nine sons and two daughters. She delivered her last child, a son, when she was forty-one, a year after her eldest son married and her first daughter-in-law entered the home. ‘God only knows what I had to go through during those twenty three years.’ She suffered the pain, as did many women of the period, of outliving five of her sons and one daughter.

One son died at the time of his annaprasan, the ceremony at which a child is fed its first rice; another at age three; a third when he was four; another at thirteen; the fifth when he was twenty-one. A daughter died at seventeen soon after giving birth. She also lost two grandchildren. Yet, as she was fortunate in her sasurbari people so also in her children, for they-both those who survived and those who did not-never troubled her. ‘I never had to suffer on account of their character.

XXIV. Still, they all needed to be fed and bathed and clothed and tended to. There were days when she had no time to eat at all, for by the time the chores were done and the children put to bed, she must still wait for her husband to return and serve him his food, only then could she eat; there were days when by this time one or another child would wake up and had to be tended to again, and after that she could hardly be bothered to dole out rice for herself.

XXV. The husband! As a good Hindu wife she couldn’t take his name, so he remained anonymous. With all her frankness about all else, Rassundari scarcely mentioned him in her story. He was a shadow whose presence was implicit by way of his manifold fatherhood. A few times he appeared in the narrative as the ‘master’. On one rare occasion she mentioned him as working in his office located in the outer house.

Her husband possessed and rode a horse. Since the horse belonged to him she even felt ‘bashful’ of appearing before it. ‘Suppose the horse saw me that would be a matter of great shame. Another time she waited for his return from work so that she could serve him food. Elsewhere, she admitted that ‘the man who was my master happened to be a likeable person’.

XXVI. Only near the end of the first part of the book, almost as an apologetic afterthought, she gave her husband narrative space. By then he had passed away. It was a brief but unexpected reference to his physical appearance: he was ‘flabby’. He was very much the master of the house, we learn, but he was a kind, generous, and good man; a solicitous host to guests and visitors. And ‘competent in administration’.

A man of influence apparently, and much given to lawsuits with zamindarsand always successful in such legal battles. Precisely what his occupation was she did not say, but he was most likely a zamindar himself. At any rate he was a great man’ who did ‘many good deeds’.

XXVII. Even as a child, well before marriage, Rassundari was aware of what her gender entailed: girls did not go to school. She had the unusual experience of witnessing close at hand the privilege of being a boy when, sitting alongside the English schoolteacher, she observed the boys learning the alphabet. The first embers of her recalcitrant mind were fanned: she was not willing to accept the dictates of her era. And, as we have seen, in the two years spent in the schoolroom, from age eight to ten, she taught herself the Bengali alphabet.

XXVIII. We are reminded of the boy Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar learning the English numerals from milestones encountered on the road to Calcutta. The difference was that while the boy Ishwar Chandra could demonstrate his newfound knowledge to his father who then publicly bragged about his son’s prowess, Rassundari, a girl, had to keep her learning a secret.

No one must know. One wonders how her mother, her uncle, her brothers would have reacted had they known. Would they too have boasted about her prowess to others? Or would they have shushed her not to tell others?

XXIX. The prospect and then the experience of her marriage reinforced her self-awareness of femalehood: girls were married off young and then given away; girls had no say in the matter. She compared herself to the goat dragged to the sacrificial altar in the ceremony known as pathabali. It was ‘the same hopeless situation, the same agonized screams’, she would write. She would describe her marriage with yet another animal metaphor, one that Maya Angelou would also use a century later:

she was the ‘caged bird’. Despite the kindness and lovingness of her sasurbari folks, she felt trapped. ‘People put birds in cages for their own amusement. Well, I was like a caged bird. And I would have to remain in the cage for life. I would never be free. Reflecting back on those early days of her married life, she acknowledges, ruefully, that very soon the bird was tamed.

XXX. Or was it? Unlike a tamed cage bird, she chafed at the emptiness of her first years when she was still a child-bride, when she was not allowed to work; for there were the maidservants and, of course, her mother-in-law. She tried to occupy her time by designing stone moulds to make sweets; she shaped clay into images of various sorts. Did her new husband help alleviate her ennui in these first few years?

Was he sufficiently near her age that he could empathize with her, or was he so much older as to rule out the possibility of teenage conjugal romance? There is no word on her husband’s place in her early marriage but then, perhaps she was reluctant to talk of such matters. Eventually, her apprenticeship as the future mistress-karta-thakurani-began.

XXXI. She was then fourteen years old. A thought crept into her head: ‘the idea that I should learn how to read books.’ She was aware that this smacked of heresy. She was a girl, and girls were not supposed to read! The elderly narrator Rassundari remarked that things were very different ‘now’: ‘These days women are becoming famous and men seem good for nothing. Indeed, there was ‘even a woman ruler on the throne’.

XXXII. The young Rassundari was petrified by her realization of her desire to read. As she had never told anyone she had learnt the alphabet all those years ago, so also now she could not divulge this desire to anyone. She felt so guilty she did not even dare to glance at a written page lest this betrayed her secret desire. The need to read emanated from her piety. She wanted to read religious books, and naturally, she prayed that God might help her. Ultimately, the only one she could confide her desire to was God.

XXXIII. The desire became overwhelming. It ‘grew very strong in me? It became an all-encompassing need. And this fact-the fact that she had this need made her angry with herself. ‘What a peculiar situation I had placed myself in. What was I to do?’ She remembered the time spent in the boys’ schoolroom when she secretly learnt the alphabet. Perhaps she could dredge up that knowledge. She realized that she really needed a teacher, but that was out of the question. Her desire infiltrated her sleep: she dreamt one night of reading a holy book, the Chaitanya Bhagavata. Waking up, ‘enthralled’ with the experience, she tried to relive that dream.

XXXIV. The Chaitanya Bhagavata was one of several religious books in her home which her husband read, and one day, by chance, he left the book-which was in the form of a sheaf of sheets held between wooden frames-in the kitchen where she was working. She took her chance. She removed a page and hid it in a storage place in the kitchen where no one but herself was likely to go. Now what? She had an idea. She stole one of the palm leaves on which her then eightyear-old eldest son practised his handwriting.

(She was twenty-six at this time, which meant that she had nursed her secret desire for a dozen years!) ‘One look at the leaf, another at the sheet, a comparison with the letters I already knew, and, finally, a verification with the speech of others-this was the process I adopted for some time. She was like the decipherer of some forgotten script. Her son’s palm leaf and the fragmentary remembrance were her precious Rosetta Stone. This was her modus operandi.

XXXV. But all done furtively, even though her husband-her ‘master’ and a ‘likeable person’-would probably not object. She was palpably aware of the power of custom and tradition, by which women were not meant to read.

The elderly narrator mused over the customs and prejudices that governed womanhood of her younger days: the prejudice against women being educated; or, for that matter, the heavy dresses and jewellery women were expected to wear, the conch-shell bangles, the ‘large vermillion dots’. The elderly autobiographer, no longer frustrated, could afford to be phlegmatic: `it is no use crying over spilt milk.’

And so slowly, painfully, methodically, constantly comparing the letters of her memory and those scratched by her son on the palm leaf with the contents of the precious page from the holy book, she unravelled the secret of the written word. Eventually she was able to ‘stumble through’ the Chaitanya Bhagavata. In time she would read all the other books, all scriptural texts, available in the house.

XXXVI. She was not yet able to write, and would not do so for a long time. That was another endeavour altogether, for it needed material resources, ‘paper, pen, ink, ink pot and so on’. One could hardly embark on that project in secret.

The first ones to know of her new skill were the maidservants and some of the village neighbours. Eventually, she plucked up courage to confide in her three widowed sisters-in-law, the nanads. They were delighted, and two of them even started taking reading lessons from her, for a while. Now that the secret was out she could read aloud the scriptures to them.

XXXVII. For a very long time, till her sons were old enough to go to Calcutta WEST to study, she did not learn to write. But not knowing writing was as much her 16H Tom secret as had been her knowing reading, for her seventh son, studying in Calcutta, one day complained that she never replied to his letters. She confessed that she did not know how to write. He was adamant; she must reply to his and his brothers’ letters, and left her with paper, pen, and ink in an inkpot.

The assumptions and expectations of her sons’ generation-these were the 1860s-were already different from those of her own: this son was surprised that she could not write; would her husband have expected her to know how to write? Surely not. Thus she was forced to teach herself to write. She was in her mid fifties. It was a laborious task, and housework did not give her much spare time to practise.

Came a time when she accompanied her husband to Krishnagar for treatment of his eyes, damaged by an attack of typhoid, and there, living with one of her sons, with much lighter housework, she found more time. It was then that she finally learnt to write. The caged bird could now properly sing.

XXXVIII. Rassundari’s fear of revealing even her desire to read was not some unfounded paranoia. There was an extraordinary belief held by Hindus, including their women, that a girl who learns to read and write may become a widow soon after marriage. Were Rassundari to express her desire aloud or, worse still, if she were to reveal her secret efforts to learn to read, she may well have been accused of wishing her husband’s death. There was also a fear, shared by Hindus and Muslims, that literacy fostered intrigue amongst women.

XXXIX. There were, ere, of course, some women from the privileged classes who were literate even in the first decades of the nineteenth century. We know that Madhusudan Datta’s mother, roughly Rassundari contemporary, was not only literate, she could recite chunks of poetry from memory.

Some of the women from such notable Calcutta families as the Tagores and the Debs were known to be literate. But they were a miniscule minority. The elderly Rassundari somewhat wistfully recognized that by the time she was writing her autobiography in the last quarter of the century, things had changed. ‘These days, women are becoming famous.

XL. Things were indeed very different by this time (the mid 1870s). Rassundari must have been aware of the progress made in women’s education. Perhaps this awareness added to her compulsion to write her life story: it was not only a means to establishing her identity; it was also a way of announcing her identity to the world beyond her home; and so a way of partaking in the movement for women’s emancipation.

Perhaps her awareness of this movement gave her the courage to write. If she was indeed so motivated then in this sense the awakening marking the Bengal Renaissance made her as much as she in turn was a maker of the awakening.

Title :

Rassundari Devi (c 1809-?), a Bengali Woman, wrote a story of her life, “Amar Jiban’ (“My Life”), that was published in 1876. This detailed memoir revolves around her day to day experiences as a housewife and mother. Obsessed with a desire to read, she stole a page from a book and a sheet of paper from her and kept them hidden in the kitchen where she furtively pursued her education.

This is the first autobiography written in Bengali and it is rich in details of the period when reformers were attempting to change the lives of women. When Rassundari Devi was finally able to write about her own struggle to master simple reading, she commented!”. These days parents of a single girl take so much care to educate her. But we had to struggle so much just for that”.

Background:

‘Amar Jiban’ is extraordinary precisely because it recounts the ordinary, humdrum life of an Indian woman in the 19th century. For the first time, we start getting glimpses of a woman’s emotions in her own words, of what it was actually like for Indian women of the 19th century.

**************************

Amar Jiban Summary by Rassundari Devi

An Introductory Note :

Substance:

An Analytical Summary :

Title :

Background:

READ MORE……

Related

Leave a Comment Cancel reply