The ‘Self’ that is very ‘Public’: A Reading of Assamese Women’s
Autobiographical Narration
Lakhipriya Gogoi
Assistant Professor, Department of English,
Dibrugarh University, Dibrugarh, Assam, India.
ABSTRACT
Life Writing scholars like Hannah Arendt,
Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler have agreed to the fact that at the heart of
any self-narration, is the biographical desire to get ‘exteriority’ or in other
words, to hear one’s story being told by another. This position of the
narrator, then, is interesting keeping in view the fact that s/he is the object
of narration as well. Hence the ‘publicness’ of the personal space is inherent
from the very beginning of an autobiographical act. As in the words of Udaya
Kumar, “instead of seeing the autobiographical act as a movement from the inner
domain to the outer, we may see it as located from the outset in a public,
exhibitionary space” (20). This very focus on the exteriority of the utterance
help us see the autobiographical act as performance that has been taken into
account by Sidonie Smith while reading women’s autobiographical utterances as
acts of performance. She suggests in her essay “Performativity,
Autobiographical Practice, Resistance” that “a specific recitation of identity
involves the inclusion of certain identity contents and the exclusion of others;
the incorporation of certain narrative itineraries and intentionalities, the
silencing of others; the adoption of certain autobiographical voices, the
muting of others” (110).
And since the audience for whom it is targeted
themselves are a heterogeneous group soliciting conflicted effects in the
autobiographical subject and therefore, “the cultural injunction to be a deep,
unified, coherent, autonomous “self” produces necessary failure (and ) in that
very failure lies the fascination of autobiographical storytelling as
performativity” (110). These interesting insights then prepare us to witness an
interplay between the so-called ‘public’ and ‘personal’ identity of the
speaking subject and when it comes to women speaking about themselves in the
early twentieth century Indian society, the constant negotiation between the
‘individual’ and the ‘collective’ takes an interesting turn. The early
twentieth century Indian society can once again be studied as another
heterogeneous collectivity where caste, religion, language and geopolitical
conditions were crucial factors to determine the way the society was developing
during those times. The state of Assam, situated in the north-east of India,
during the early twentieth century was under the British rule and many interventions
of the colonial encounter could be seen in the way the society was flourishing
during the time.
KEYWORDS
Life-writing, autobiography, women’s writing, narrative, Assam
In all the talk about the social construction
of the subject, we have perhaps over- looked the fact that the very being of
the self is dependent not just on the existence of the Other-in its
singularity, as Levinas would have it, though surely that-but also on the
possibility that the normative horizon within which the Other sees and listens
and knows and recognizes is also subject to a critical
opening. (Butler 23)
Udaya Kumar in the introduction to his recent
book Writing the First Person: Literature, History and autobiography in
Modern Kerala (2016) brings to the fore one very important question
regarding the approach towards the notion of ‘self’ in any study of
self-narratives in India. He states that the late emergence of autobiographies in
India has often been explained as the consequence of a civilizational absence
of ‘the individual’ before the colonial encounter. This very notion of the
individual and its late reception in India during the Colonial rule has also
been acclaimed by life writing scholars like James Olney and which is why
scholars like David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn in their book Telling
Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History (2004)
opined that India can be seen as a country where the ‘individual’ and the
‘collective’ are always inseparably tied up and very often the individual or
the ‘personal’ voice is subsumed and muted by the public voice . This study of
the autobiographical form and its reception in India, on the other hand, are
contested by historians who claim the existence of ‘the individual’ and
personal narratives in India prior to the colonial encounter. Keeping in mind
this debate on life writing, Udaya Kumar posits some very interesting questions
as to how should one proceed in the studies of autobiography in India. He gives
us two different approaches- one is to question the relationship between the
individual and autobiographical expression and to examine whether personal
narratives are to be seen as the ‘necessary discursive choice’ of a pre-existent
form of social and political life or is the very capacity of autobiography
constitutive of what we recognise as the individual. The other approach,
according to him can be to look more closely at the varied nature of
autobiographical practice instead of treating the relationship between the
individual and autobiography as a casual one. The important question in the
second approach is to examine the conditions under which one occupies the
position of the subject in relation to self-narration. Or in other words, the
task is to take into account the varied conditions under which the act of
self-narration has been adopted and the situations in which this very
subjective approach to one’s self, which is the object of study, tends to blur
the marked distinctions between the ‘personal’ and the ‘public’.
Life Writing scholars like Hannah Arendt,
Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler have agreed to the fact that at the heart of
any self-narration, is the biographical desire to get ‘exteriority’ or in other
words, to hear one’s story being told by another. This position of the
narrator, then, is interesting keeping in view the fact that s/he is the object
of narration as well. Hence the ‘publicness’ of the personal space is inherent
from the very beginning of an autobiographical act. As in the words of Udaya
Kumar, “instead of seeing the autobiographical act as a movement from the inner
domain to the outer, we may see it as located from the outset in a public,
exhibitionary space” (20). This very focus on the exteriority of the utterance
help us see the autobiographical act as performance that has been taken into
account by Sidonie Smith while reading women’s autobiographical utterances as
acts of performance. She suggests in her essay “Performativity,
Autobiographical Practice, Resistance” that “a specific recitation of identity
involves the inclusion of certain identity contents and the exclusion of
others; the incorporation of certain narrative itineraries and
intentionalities, the silencing of others; the adoption of certain
autobiographical voices, the muting of others” (110). And since the audience
for whom it is targeted themselves are a heterogeneous group soliciting
conflicted effects in the autobiographical subject and therefore, “the cultural
injunction to be a deep, unified, coherent, autonomous “self” produces
necessary failure (and) in that very failure lies the fascination of
autobiographical storytelling as performativity” (110).
These interesting insights then prepare us to
witness an interplay between the so-called ‘public’ and ‘personal’ identity of
the speaking subject and when it comes to women speaking about themselves in
the early twentieth century Indian society, the constant negotiation between
the ‘individual’ and the ‘collective’ takes an interesting turn. The early
twentieth century Indian society can once again be studied as another
heterogeneous collectivity where caste, religion, language and geopolitical
conditions were crucial factors to determine the way the society was developing
during those times. The state of Assam, situated in the north-east of India,
during the early twentieth century was under the British rule and many
interventions of the colonial encounter could be seen in the way the society
was flourishing during the time. The first periodical in the vernacular
language, i.e. Assamese was published in 1846 under the patronage of American
Baptist Missionaries and the literacy rate till the first half of the twentieth
century was very low. The caste system was very orthodox and Hinduism was the
major religion followed by Islam and others. In such a time one very vibrant
organisation called the Assam Mahila Samiti (Women’s Organization of Assam)
came into existence in 1926. The concern over the status of women in a patriarchal
society, and the urge to fight for the rights of women was the primary thrust
of this organization.
Women were not encouraged to have formal
education and marriage and procreation was considered to be the primary duty of
women. Similar to that of other Indian languages like Bengali, Marathi etc.,
Assamese language till the mid twentieth century had a rich set of literature,
mostly dominated by men. Many pamphlets and notes in the fashion of the conduct
books were written by Assamese men on the duties of women. In such an
environment, those women who could go for formal education were considered as
examples of ‘bad’ women defying the norms of ‘ideal Indian woman’ posited as
counter to the ‘Memsahib’ or the British women. The Assamese periodicals like Assam
Bandhu (1885-86), Jonaki (1889-1903) and Banhi (1909-1946) provided
a platform for educated Assamese women to express their views on different
things and most importantly it was the periodical named Ghar
Jeuti (1927- 1932) edited by two Assamese women, Kamalalaya Kakati and
Kanaklata Chaliha, that heralded a renaissance in Assam in terms of women’s
venture into literature. The early twentieth century, thus, geared the women’s
movement in Assam and the educated Assamese women of that time took upon themselves
the responsibility of creating awareness in the society about the need of a
better position for women. Owing to this social mobilisation, the
autobiographical writings of those women who played a crucial role during this
period record in the guise of self-narration, the socio-historical developments
in the society. The three works selected for the study Tinikuri Dah
Basarar Smriti (1971), Eri Aha Dinbor (1976), Adha
Lekha Dastabez (1988) are examples of this statement. Despite being
autobiographies, these works are not stories of the self, in the western sense
of the term; rather, interesting examples of how ‘personal’ stories are read
through the ‘public’ purview.
Rajabala Das (1893-1985), the founder
principal of the first women’s college in Assam, Handique Girls’ College,
established in 1939, choose to write her autobiography Tinikuri Dah
Basarar Smriti (Recollections of Seventy Years) in the fashion of a
memoir, where instead of a recognition of an ‘individual’ or ‘personal’ self,
she uses ‘memory’ as a tool to construct that idea of the self, which is very
much ‘public’ in nature. It is Partha Chatterjee, who recognises this mode
of smritikatha (tales from memory) as dominant in the practice of
autobiography writing by Bengali women in the early nineteenth century,
contrary to that of the atmakatha (stories of the self) mode
adopted by contemporary Bengali men. In similar fashion, Assamese women too
adopted the dominant mode of memoir to talk about their own lives. The first
autobiography written in Assamese language, Harakanta Sadar Aminor
Atmajibani (Autobiography of Harakanta Barua Sadaramin) written
in the 1890s and published later in 1960, has the word atma (self)
in the title and records the life of the speaker exploring mostly his
professional life as a Sadar Amin under the British. Contrary
to this, Tinikuri Doh Bosoror Smriti being the first
autobiography written by Assamese women chooses the mode of memoir to project
one life lived. This very choice of mode and narrative, then, is suggestive of
the way both men and women conceived of their lives in the Assamese society and
especially in case of women, the kind of social parlance she had to use while
defining herself. Das began her autobiography with a statement that her days
were different than the time when she is writing the book. A note of comparison
between ‘then’ and ‘now’ pervades all through her autobiography. In fact, the
preface to her book states the objective behind writing the book as to record
the changing times and the changing status of women in Assam during her life
span of seventy years. The narration of the ‘self’ then takes the secondary
place, and to record the socio-historical movement of the society and
especially the espousal of women’s education in Assam becomes her primary
intention. The speaker’s mentioning of her birth, education, personal and
professional life are intricately woven together with the developing status of
Assamese women in the pre as well as the postcolonial times.
However, it is very interesting to notice that
when in the neighbouring province of Bengal, women started writing about their
‘own’ lives, in the sense of an ‘individual’ life lived, a sense of the
‘personal’ was executed through writing, women in Assam did not quite follow
that trend. Rashsundari Debi wrote her autobiography Amar Jiban (My
Life) almost hundred years before Rajabala Das wrote her autobiography.
Whereas Amar Jiban as an autobiography celebrates the idea of
‘self’ as distinct and separate from the collective notion of the same, Tinikuri
Doh Bosoror Smriti projects a version of the self that is very much
collective in nature. Rashsundari Debi in her autobiography records the
realisation of her ‘personal’ identity that comes through her act of learning
how to read and write in a time when women, especially a married woman, a
mother, would be considered a sinner even when she expresses her desire to be
literate. Her secret attempts to read the letters and words and thereby the
aspiration to be literate enough to read the sacred Hindu text Chaitanya
Bhagavat herself in order to be one with God, is one of the daring acts
women of her contemporary society could think of doing. Pervading through
Rashsundari’s autobiography is the narration of this realisation of the
‘individual’ identity that otherwise is suppressed by the patriarchal society.
Tanika Sarkar says, “...Rasasundari is declaring her emancipation from all the
resources that have been emotionally attached to her. Her resistance to her
inherited and imposed world lies in her act of writing in more ways than one”
(5).
Rajabala Das, despite talking about the similar
condition of Assamese women, having her focus on the achievement of education
as an act of identity construction, did not chose the discursive or the
reflexive as the mode of articulation; rather her narration becomes entirely
descriptive or emotional. Her narration gets subsumed by the dominant social
framework where she sees herself as one among many other such women who had to
struggle hard to receive formal education. To express and to record the private
life of a woman during these times was unthinkable because as per the societal
norms, the ‘private’ is to be protected from the ‘public’ in order to keep it
distinct. The fact that Rajabala Das choose to write about her life is
reflective of her desire to talk about a life that is lived, yet at the centre
of narration is the social framework through which that life is perceived.
However, there might be a reason behind this. Rashsundari Debi wrote Amar
Jiban at the age of fifty-nine, in 1868, the year after the death of
her husband and added a second part to it in 1897 at the age of eighty-eight.
In her otherwise placid life as a wife and mother, this one act of
‘disobedience’ (to use Tanika Sarker’s term) to the familial and social codes
by learning how to read and write was the statement through which she could see
herself as a person of accomplishment. Rajabala Das, on the other hand, wrote
her autobiography late in her life, after establishing herself as a successful
woman in the society. Her service to the society as the principal of a premier
women’s educational institute in Assam, on one hand, and her active involvement
with the women’s movement in Assam gained her a reputation in the society. This
very act of writing an autobiography, then, for her, was to look back into a
successful life instead of an attempt to understand the unexplored or
uninvented private world.
Somewhat different to this consciousness of
the ‘personal’ through the ‘public’ is the understanding of Nalinibala Devi
(1898-1977) when she in her autobiography Eri Aha Dinbor (The
Days Left Behind), talks about the life of a widow in a patriarchal society.
Contrary to Rajabala Das’ focus on the public appearance and treatment of women
in the Assamese society, Devi begins her narrative with a close description of
her childhood and her family life. It was after the death of her husband when
she was just twenty-one years old that her life took a different turn. However,
this privileging of the ‘personal’ than that of the ‘public’ is seen only in
the first part of the book. In the middle and the concluding part of the book
she mostly looks at her life through the public realm as she starts narrating
the course of the Indian freedom struggle, her father’s active involvement in
the struggle, the women’s movement in Assam, her literary career as a poet, and
finally her journey to different places of Assam and India in order to attend
literary and political meetings. Both the autobiographies of Rajabala Das and
Nalinibala Devi are important socio-historical documents that record the growth
and development of Assamese women in the colonial times. Their involvement in
the Assam Mahila Samiti, the organisational works such as the
implementation of the Child Marriage Restraint Act, 1930 (popularly known as
the Sarda Act) in Assam, etc. occupies a large narrative space through which
their collective identity as women mutes the very private or the individual
self. In fact, the way these episodes are narrated in a detached language,
emphasising mostly the empowerment of Assamese women, the autobiographical
narration takes the form of a public oration.
Hemjyoti Medhi in her essay “‘Great Sensation
in Guwahati’: Mini’s Marriage, Assam Mahila Samiti and the Sarda Act in late
colonial Assam” points out the emergence of two major threads in the studies of
women’s history, writing and mobilization in India. According to her,
the first group eulogizes social reform
movements, colonial modernity and nationalist modernization as facilitating
‘improvement’ of women’s condition, often couched in vocabularies such as
‘parda to modernity’. The second group of studies emerging in the 1980s and
later shows how a new patriarchy emerged in this colonial idea of the modern
and how women internalized offered models in complicacy rather than in
contestation. (19)
Such an insight leads us to examine the
autobiographies of both Das and Devi as examples of the way the first group of
scholars study women’s writing and history in India. Their self-narrations are
narratives of the social reform movements in the colonial times, of the way the
western notion of modernity has been attached to the women’s question in Assam
and yet their autobiographies fail to stand as resistances against the larger
patriarchal or social order. Women’s education for both of them is means of
emancipation and yet their narratives remain just as descriptions of how women
struggled in the society to get a respectable position. A
recognition or even a search for a ‘self’ that is realised through the
reflexive and discursive mode is absent in their self-narrations. For the
first-generation women writers, the first-educated ones of the colonial
society, be it in Assam or elsewhere, the act of writing itself was a radical
way of constituting their subjectivity and for the next generation writers like
Das and Devi writing their own lives could have brought several other ways of
exploring the female subjectivity and yet interestingly their narratives remain
‘silent’ about the study and understanding of a very private self. In this
sense, self-narration does not actually achieve the narrating of a self, that
is the speaker’s own self as it is claimed by Shari Benstock that
Autobiography reveals gaps, and not only gaps
in time and space or between the individual and the social, but also a widening
divergence between the manner and matter of its discourse. That is, autobiography
reveals the impossibility of its own dream: what begins
on the presumption of self-knowledge ends in the creation of a fiction that
covers over the premises of its construction. (11)
More than an autobiography in the western
sense of the term, where the ‘personal’ can be shared in ‘public’, these two
autobiographies are typical examples of the way it is conceived in an Indian
society. It can be assumed that the exposure to the genre of autobiography in
Assam is one of the many influences of the colonial intervention. British
annexed Assam partly in 1828 and fully in 1838.The arrival of the American
Baptist Missionary in Assam, had a huge impact in the Assamese society as it
brought the printing press. Hence, colonial modernity’s influence on the
nineteenth and early twentieth century Assamese society can be seen in the
writings of that time. The fact that the first Assamese autobiography was
written by a person who worked as a sadar-amin under the British justifies the
way the native people of Assam were introduced to the idea of modernity
espoused by the West. Keeping apart this impact of the written word, on the
other hand, it can also be argued that the very idea of writing about oneself,
the core of an autobiographical writing, is not a completely colonial import.
Rather, the tradition of writing carita (life history) of the
Vaishnava saints was prevalent in medieval Assam. Written in the sanchipat (leaves
of the Sanchi tree prepared as papers) the manuscript of the Guru-Carita-Katha (a
biographical account of Vaishnava saints) that chronicles the Sankardeva
Movement in Assam from the fifteenth century till the seventeenth
century, is a brilliant example of how the ‘lives’ of the Vaishnava saints in
medieval Assam was recorded. Written in Brajawali (an
earlier form of the Assamese language), this caritas give an
account of the career of twenty-five Vaishnava saints. In fact, there are quite
a good number of biographical works called guru-caritas in Assamese prose and
verse. These caritas also mirror the medieval Assamese society and its diverse
religio-cultural aspects. An impact of this carita tradition as well
as the strong influence of the colonial encounter can be seen in the male model
of Assamese autobiography written in the early twentieth century. Written
mostly in the smritikatha mode, all these autobiographies
posited the ‘collective’ status of the self at the centre of their narration,
where the public realm becomes the scanner of an image of the self. The
deliberation of Assamese men, on their lives and times, definitely provided the
model for the Assamese women to follow in their own writings.
If we look at the social structure of Assam
during the Ahom rule from 1228-1828, it comes into notice that the process of
Hinduisation or Aryanisation of the Mongoloid people in Assam gradually
affected the position women used to enjoy in the earlier semi-tribal society.
Women’s superior position in a tribal society by virtue of their role in
procreation and in agricultural activities was contested by the Hinduised
society and gradually the matriarchal system was overthrown. According to
Tilottama Mishra, “the final elimination of women from all important positions
in the religious and social life of the Assamese Hindus for over five centuries
(thirteenth century to the eighteenth century) was effected by the great
Assamese Vaishnava Saint, Sri Sankardeva (1449-1568)” (107). Sankardeva was
successful in establishing an egalitarian base for Assamese religious and
social life, defying the influence of Brahmanical Hinduism and of Tantrism and
yet in case of women his attitude was different. He considered women as an evil
influence on the male devotees and hence advised them to avoid women’s company.
Unlike Bahina Bai (1628-1700) from Maharastra, a female saint who wrote her
autobiography Atmacarita in verse which was later published in
1913, we do not see any such strong female figure playing a crucial role in the
Vaishnava order. Female saints like Aai Kanaklata and Aai Padmapriya were
unable to influence the way women were treated in the Vaishnava faith. In fact,
the Vaishnava influence and Bengali Brahmanism that affected the tribal culture
of pre-colonial Assam shaped the way women are treated in the nineteenth
century Assamese society. The arrival of the British in the
nineteenth century and their influence in the Assamese society initiated a
whole new debate on the women question. The prominent social reformer
Gunabhiram Barua (1837-1894) married a Brahmin widow, after the death of his
first wife and he was also the first Assamese to send his daughter Swarnalata
to Calcutta for higher education. Thus, under the leadership of people like
Gunabhiram Barua, Anadaram Dhekial Phukan (1819-1859) nineteenth century
Assamese society initiated the process of reforming the social status of women
and a positive environment in favour of women’s rights in different fields had
been created. As an outcome of these social reforms, women like Rajabala Das,
Nalinibala Devi and many others could carry on their fight for the causes of
women in Assam.
In such a scenario, then, it is almost obvious
that the lives of these women were bound to be narrated through their ‘public’
engagement. But when it comes to the genre of autobiography, the expectation of
discovering a ‘personal’ life as detached and different from the public persona
makes one notice how in the autobiographies of these women there is a constant
interaction and negotiation between the ‘public’ and the ‘personal’. Both of
their autobiographies are replete with episodes of various socio-historical
events happening in the public realm and their involvement in these and it is
through the reading of these episodes, an image of the speaker’s lives is
produced. How then, is the question of the ‘self’ explored and addressed by
these speakers in a narrative, which they present as the narration of their
‘own’ lives? To investigate into questions like these, then, it becomes
necessary to mark the differences between the very notions of the personal and
the public and their appropriation in societies like India. Sudipta Kaviraj in
his essay “The Invention of Private Life: A Reading of Sibnath Shastri’s Autobiography”
draws two interesting processes through which the dominantly Western idea of a
‘private life’ is accepted in other non-Western societies. He says, “Firstly,
the incorporation of these practices requires experimentation with their lives
by adventurous individuals. But, secondly, these experiments cannot affect
social practice without a discursive accompaniment” (84). The acquiescence to
social practice, the conformation to the social codes, then, very much shapes
the way even private lives are understood in the nineteenth and early twentieth
century Assamese society. Because it was not just women who narrated their
lives as understood through the public affairs of life, rather, Assamese men
too did not comment on the so-called ‘private’ aspects of life in their
autobiographies written during those times. Sexual relationships, personal
conflicts, etc. were carefully avoided and only those emotions and issues were
narrated which can be shared in the public. Different to this public expression
of the self is the autobiographical work of Mamoni Raisom Goswami, a prominent
novelist and short story writer of Assam.
Mamoni Raisom Goswami (1942- 2011) wrote the
first part of her autobiography Adha Lekha Dastabez (The
Half-written Script) in 1970 and as she has written in her preface it is
basically autobiographical episodes of her life till 1970 structured like a novel.
Centred on one major setback of her life, the death of her husband Madhaben
Raysom after one year of conjugal life and her emotional struggle to cope up
with the societal norms, the work is written in a very suggestive language,
where her resistance to the patriarchal society becomes evident. The constant
reference to the motif of ‘death’ as she has witnessed it in her personal life,
during her stay at Brindaban and the consequent struggle to live the life of a
Brahmin widow made her comment on otherwise ‘selectively omitted’ aspects of
life such as desire, sexuality, human greed etc. The orthodox caste Hindu
society’s treatment of a widow is replicated in her narrative, where, she as
the protagonist narrates her constant struggle to accept the absence of her
husband in her life and the society’s constant reminder as to how a Brahmin
widow should live. The fact that she has devised the work in the form of a
novel provided her ample space to comment on ‘private’ affairs of life. She has
in a very detailed manner talked about the people who were affectionate to her
and how they were trying to win her heart. Yet at the same time, she maintains
a silence regarding her own role in these affairs. The absence of any such hint
at personal likings and the acceptance of fictionality as a narrative mode,
make one notice that Goswami too adheres to the public image of the self. The
confessional mode of autobiography writing has been exercised with a strict
censoring of the ‘private’ life. Yet in comparison to Rajabala Das and
Nalinibala Devi, she in her autobiography explores the inner world of a woman,
by not always restricting to a description of the life lived. Rather, her
effort to narrate a woman’s private world as different from the publicly
projected world initiates a new trend in the genre of autobiography in Assamese
language. The impact of this can be vividly seen in later women’s
autobiographical writings where women are seen working on the construction of
self through personal episodes of illness, physical accident, rebellion against
the state etc. among many other such ‘sites’ of identity-construction.
It is interesting to note that whereas
Rajabala Das and Nalinibala Devi through their narratives primarily talked
about the emancipation of Assamese women since the late nineteenth till the
later decades of the twentieth century projecting their own lives as examples
of that discourse, Mamoni Raisom Goswami initiated a completely different
approach to autobiography writing by relegating the public space to some
extent. Although their intimate ‘personal’ lives were hardly examined outside
the ‘public’ space, a change in the general attitude towards female
subjectivity can be seen towards the last decade of the twentieth century. The
growing number of female writers and their deliberation through poetry, fiction
and other forms of non-fictional writing such as travel writing in the last
three decades of the twentieth century provided opportunities and occasions to
the female mind to conceive of their own lives as distinct and unique from the
public view. It is interesting to note that in their narratives the
‘I’ persona is very often blurred and adopts the narrating voice of ‘we’ or
‘us’ or even a third person narrative voice of ‘them’ (mostly suggesting the
communities of women). For example, Rajabala Das devotes one small chapter to
the description of her conjugal life where she comments on the treatment of
women in Guwahati (which is in the lower part of Assam) comparing it with her
maternal place Dibrugarh (situated at the upper side of Assam). She narrates
the way she was first welcomed at her husband’s home after marriage,
The bride and the groom were brought home from
the station by a car. My elder sister-in-law welcomed us at the gate of the
house. I was wearing a pair of sandals. Phukan told me to leave the pair of
sandals at the gate and I thought perhaps Guwahati is more orthodox than
Dibrugarh in these issues. Later my assumption proved to be true. The ladies of
Dr. Das’ (Devi’s husband) family never went out of the house. They did not go
to anyone’s house and strictly observed the rituals. (52)
Deviations of this kind are suggestive of the
way even the very personal is presented through a censorship. In this sense,
then, does autobiography inevitably talk about the speaking individual? Or is
the choice of the subject rather dependent upon the collective way of
understanding the individual? Acceptance of the western model of autobiography,
in societies like India, thus, bewilders us about the very notion of
autobiography as the story of self. When the ‘personal’ is understood as
inextricably linked to the ‘public’, or rather, the very understanding of one’s
self accepts the conditionality of being understood through the ‘other’s eye’
(in our case, the society at large), autobiography as a genre needs to be
studied outside the western theories.
Works Cited
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