Analysis Of Partha Rassundari's Ideas

. Moreover, it would also augur well for the future generations, who could reap the benefits of an educated mother, and consequently, contribute to the larger cause of the nation as such. Thus, a woman could never be thought of as an individual but always as an appendage to her husband. Her highest aspiration could only be to have a husband blessed with a long life and to be the mother of sons. Education or any of the other liberating measures could never be pursued for their own sake. It would be pertinent here to refer to Partha Chatterjee’s argument in his seminal work The Nation and its Fragments where he asserts that women played a crucial role in the inception of nationalistic ideas through their inclusion in the spiritual paradigm. This

Not only is she spoken of as being a bhadramahila (middle class woman; bhadra also has connotations of civility) but is even held up as an example of what would materialize if the reformist projects were to see the light of the day. But what is astounding is the fact that Rassundari was far away from the din of all these projects in urban Calcutta and her narrative is only an attempt at ‘self-discovery’ for her. Amar Jiban is completely uninfluenced by the reformist jargon and is the result of a momentous moral leap into the dialectics of representation, whether personal or textual. The choice of the genre of the autobiography hence becomes even more crucial as while she seems to be reticent about history, the latter seems to have made all attempts to appropriate her. The immediate history that she talks about through the prism of her mature gaze is only so far as to locate her persona through certain co-ordinates. However, emphasis should also be given to the other major trope that she uses for herself throughout the narrative –which is that of a devout bhakt. This introduces the sub-text of the confessional into the text which deserves to explored in detail as her religiosity was much eulogized by the society. It would be pertinent to mention here that the first autobiography to be ever written was called Confessions by St.Augustine of Hippo (354 A.D.- 430 A.D.), an early Christian theologian and philosopher whose writings influenced medieval European worldview. Significantly, the title of the work points out how the genre, from the very inception, has been inclined to define itself as a point where attempts at the discovery of the self