Papers by Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty
When we engage with the woman question in Postcolonial India, we do hear the voices of women writ... more When we engage with the woman question in Postcolonial India, we do hear the voices of women writers and thinkers who reroute the issues of woman agency and emancipation within the postcolonial context. Theirs is not the derivative thoughts, brought from the western feminist scholarship and applied in their native soil. Rather they offer fresh optics to look at the woman question from their own space and shared experiences, with its divergent developments, with its pluralistic perspectives, and within the intersectional structure of the gender, caste, religion, family and state. The last couple of years in India faced the sad demise of these two women thinkers in IndiaSukumari Bhattacharji and Jasodhara Bagchi who left us in 2014 and 2015 respectively. Their physical absence obviously does not annihilate the culture of their thoughts in the numerous texts they leave their legacy with. But this remembrance is necessary to recast their intervention into the women’s issues in India to ...
Feminist politics necessitates a kind of essentialism of the category of woman to reconfigure the... more Feminist politics necessitates a kind of essentialism of the category of woman to reconfigure the theoretical coherence of the feminist standpoint. So the destabilization of the subject can somehow dislodges the ground of feminist politics. The stable subject presumes a kind of fixity which internalizes the possibility of universalization and homogenization of both the categories of the dominator and dominated. The subject position of the woman can be engaged from two different standpoints-the feminism of identity and the feminism of difference questions. The notion of the female subject position is also necessary to form the notion of the female citizen. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and Julia Kristeva show in their works how a kind of strategic essentialism is necessary to consolidate the feminist politics through the subject position of the female. So a complete destabilization of the female subject will disturb the theoretical consolidation.
Women’s negotiation with the city in the late nineteenth century began with the advent of the ref... more Women’s negotiation with the city in the late nineteenth century began with the advent of the reformist agendas by the urban middle class elites and the white colonizers. The relationship of women with this colonial city space in the nineteenth century Calcutta was two-fold. On the one hand the city witnessed the gradual exodus of men and women of the lower class and castes under the impact of rapid industrialization and urbanization who gave birth to and nurtured Calcutta’s rich repertoire of popular cultural forms, the Battala literature. On the other hand, the colonial administrative and culture set-up introduced the social category of the middle class urban elites, popularly known as Bhadralok . Under the social reformist agenda of female emancipation, these middle class urban elites cultivated the “new woman”, the bhadramahila who, through the strategic compliance and contestations to the modes of new patriarchy, curved a space of her own in the colonial city. The present paper...
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2018
Critical engagements like the first autobiography written by a Bengali woman, Rasasundari Devi, a... more Critical engagements like the first autobiography written by a Bengali woman, Rasasundari Devi, and the non-fictions by Kailashbasini Devi, Krishnabhabini Das, and other women writers in the second half of the nineteenth century contested the imagined idealization of the Hindu domesticity and conjugality as spaces of loveableness and spiritual commitment. They criticized coercion in child-marriages and the forceful injunctions of the Hindu scriptures on both married and widowed women. Such rhetoric of quasi empowerment needs to be disaggregated to perpetuate issues of ‘double colonization,’ ‘dual-hold’ in feminism in India. The question is whether there can be any grounds of women’s agency in the Indian tradition. Eurocentric critiques are ill-equipped to politicize all modalities of a culture of social exclusion in Hindu imaginaries. Henceforth, as questions of equality, emancipation, and empowerment are fiercely debated in the public domain in contemporary India, we need to argue ...
Feminist Review, 2018
While discourses of development construct the category of 'progressive' India, the upsurge of vio... more While discourses of development construct the category of 'progressive' India, the upsurge of violence against women in public spaces projects a contradiction that is rooted in a regressive patriarchal system that still governs average Indian lives. Locating this violence against women's bodies within the binary of private and public, Nalini Natarajan's The Unsafe Sex draws from anthropology, myths, literature, films, history and feminist theories to explicate issues of safety and security of women in public spaces, especially when rape is used indiscriminately to perpetrate sexual coercion and abuse. As violence subsumes itself into everyday experiences of women, forms of violence invite scrutiny to comprehend the volatile conditions of contemporary lives. Natarajan takes the 'ongoing visceral war waged by men against women' (p. ix) to task through her intense analysis of the 'body blows'-especially of rape as the 'most extreme cases' (ibid.) of violence-that lurk for women in public places in India.
The partition of Bengal following the Independence of India in 1947 caused traumatic diasporic mo... more The partition of Bengal following the Independence of India in 1947 caused traumatic diasporic movements for a large number of people. Any attempt to map this process of dislocation and relocation, acculturation and adjustments in the post-Partition era inevitably brings in the Diaspora experience. Women, as being soft targets of violence -physical, emotional or culturalfound themselves at the receiving end of this dual process of partition and Diaspora. On one hand, they suddenly discovered themselves caught up in the rapidly changing socio-political relations which dismantled the prevailing relationships of caste, class, religion and gender. On the other hand, their resistance to this rampant violation was also articulated through their resilience represented in some literary texts. In this context, the present paper contemplates on the two Partition texts in English translations --Agunpakhi (The Firebird) by Hasan Azizul Huq and Sunanda Sikdar's moving memoir Dayamoyeer Katha, translated as A Life Long Ago by Anchita Ghatak.
When Bengali women crossed the thresholds of their "home" and stepped out into the world for the ... more When Bengali women crossed the thresholds of their "home" and stepped out into the world for the first time in the nineteenth century, this evental moment became a moment of rupture-a break away from the cage, the Pinjar. Women had been the pinjarabaddhapakhi or "caged birds" as portrayed by Nagendrabala Mustafi in colonial Bengal. The first flutters of this caged bird into her "emancipated" existence introduced her to the unknown world of Bahir, the Outside. The different spaces in the city-its streets, markets and the public domains of education and work, constitute this outside world which witnessed woman's journey from nivritocharini or domesticated being to bhadramahila, the Bengali New Woman. The city is inextricably linked with the making of this "reformed" New Woman who was conscious of her social existence in the urban space as the woman citizen.
Gender as a marker traces the varied socio-political, cultural, religious understanding of man's ... more Gender as a marker traces the varied socio-political, cultural, religious understanding of man's and woman's roles. Therefore the category of womanhood cannot be simply understood either in the legal parameters, or in the poststructuralist deconstruction of gender as a category. The notion of womanhood in India is fraught with the various socio-political, cultural, religious conceptualizations and thus the proper understanding of the woman question in India needs to take into consideration of the intersection of religion, caste and gender which plays a formative part in the consolidation of a particular idealized version of 'Hindu woman' and also to normativise this model of gender discourse. In this context, the relation between woman and man is quite complex as women abide by the patriarchal religious discourse to attain a social and spiritual status for themselves, within the domestic fold. At the same time they use religion to bend this patriarchal fold a little, thus to create their agency and space of negotiations within the religious discourse. It is intriguing that ritual practices actually condense women's societal and conventional roles and these gendered ideologies spill over to the other socio-cultural realms.
When we engage with the woman question in Postcolonial India, we do hear the voices of women writ... more When we engage with the woman question in Postcolonial India, we do hear the voices of women writers and thinkers who reroute the issues of woman agency and emancipation within the postcolonial context. Theirs is not the derivative thoughts, brought from the western feminist scholarship and applied in their native soil. Rather they offer fresh optics to look at the woman question from their own space and shared experiences, with its divergent developments, with its pluralistic perspectives, and within the intersectional structure of the gender, caste, religion, family and state. The last couple of years in India faced the sad demise of these two women thinkers in India-Sukumari Bhattacharji and Jasodhara Bagchi who left us in 2014 and 2015 respectively. Their physical absence obviously does not annihilate the culture of their thoughts in the numerous texts they leave their legacy with. But this remembrance is necessary to recast their intervention into the women's issues in India to provide an alternative discourse of women's agency. Their sustained intellectual probing into the broad field of India studies offers us an alternative imagery of postcolonial India.
This excursus examines the tropes of gendering the trajectories of development and it seeks to do... more This excursus examines the tropes of gendering the trajectories of development and it seeks to do that through an assessment of the Towards Equality Report which was a path breaking attempt to evaluate the range and scope of development through the optics of gender. Equality has been the goal of the women's movements in India through its teleological development. The triggering point can be traced back to the path-breaking report -Towards Equality: Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India, published in 1974 which provides a vantage point to have a parallax view of the women's movement in India vis-à-vis Indian democracy and the building of the modern nation. This publication which is called a 'benchmark' indicated the beginning of the new phase in the women's movement, along with other two factors. One is the oppositional movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the other is the resistance developed towards the Emergency issued by the first female Prime Minister of India. This report not only offered a reality-check on the condition of women in India, it also unravelled the disenchantment of women with the existing models of development and the process of modernisation in the Nehruvian era. It offers a critique of the role of the state vis-à-vis women's development and it uncovers how state policy failed to live up to the constitutional mandates of equality in every field for man and woman. Thus, it necessitated a kind of shift from the egalitarian scientific method of development. It forced a kind of reconceptualisation of the prevalent discourses on development, economic empowerment, policy-making, political
Non-coercive, emancipatory cultural transportation-this is the central axiom with which intercult... more Non-coercive, emancipatory cultural transportation-this is the central axiom with which interculturalism as a cultural mode of articulation came to its being. As a resultant product of a liberalized, horizontalized world, interculturalism talks about bridging all cultural fissures. The anti-foundational critical movement starting with Nietzschean genealogy underlines the importance of constructing a parallel epistemological order in contrast to that of the Cartesian 'I'.
But the hearts that once adored me Have long forgot their vow, And the friends that mustered roun... more But the hearts that once adored me Have long forgot their vow, And the friends that mustered round me Have all forsaken now. 'T'was in a dream revealed to me, But not a dream of sleep: A dream of watchful agony Of grief that wouldn't weep. …………………………………………….
1. The Indian religious pantheon, consisting of canonical texts such as the Dharmasastras, have u... more 1. The Indian religious pantheon, consisting of canonical texts such as the Dharmasastras, have usually been treated as sacrosanct, something that transcends new interpretive optics or hermeneutic. For nearly three thousand years these theologico-ethical texts have governed as disciplinary discursive tools to hold Indian society in the path of dharma or righteousness. The absolutist hegemony of these theological texts over Indian society has for centuries induced an unquestioning subservience to their discursive content and the present book under review is an exception in that trend as it revisits the Dharmasastras from the perspective of gender. Relocating Gender in Dharmasastras, therefore, is a significant work that reexamines the status of women inDharmasastras which were foundational texts that prescribed norms on everything in Indian life including the rights, positions and duties of women. Existing research on the condition of women as enshrined in the Dharmasastras can be divided in two perspectival categories-the Utilitarian and Evangelical schools of western scholars and the Nationalist Indian perspective. The former shares a negative reading of the representation of women in the Dharmasastras and arrives at a gloomy conclusion about women's condition at that time. This view is shared by western Indologists or Orientalists, such as James Mill, Robert Orme, Mark Wilks and Grant Duff.
Theatre has been a democratic literary medium to constitute a synergy of resistance and activism ... more Theatre has been a democratic literary medium to constitute a synergy of resistance and activism and it allows its representational mode to encapsulate issues like gender with intensity and fervor. It cannot be denied that women are projected in the stereotypical patriarchal roles which reinforce the feminine subjugation and inferiorization. The assimilation of violence into the identity-formation of woman is becoming a norm, reinforced by multiple patriarchal strategies and ideologies. Invasion on the woman's body is taken as natural. This violence imposed on the
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Papers by Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty