Tradition and Modernity: A Study of the Articulation of Feminist Modernity in Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Bangali Jibane Ramani (Women in Bengali Life)

Abstract

Nirad C. Chaudhuri has always been the sentinel of abounding controversies especially pertaining to his autobiography’s dedicatee. But there exists a rich corpus of his works in Bengali where he succinctly explores various themes pertaining to Bengali life in the early and late nineteenth century. This work of his, ‘Bangali Jibane Ramani’, serves as a point of converge in the women’s question in Bengal (as Partha Chatterjee had masterfully enunciated) primarily in the scenario of literature and cross-cultural literary influences. Through this particular text of Chaudhuri’s, the question about the nascent transvaluations about the engaging transformations of the alternating role of ‘as the alter ego’ of her male counterpart emerges in contrast to the rather restrictive inclusionary secluded mode of patriarchal domination which pervaded the feminine microcosm before the advent of modernity. This work does not exactly touches the women’s question as such but rather the changing contours of the literary portrayal of the ‘feminine’ in a society which had been entangled under the reels of a colonial ages just a century ago. In a co-incidentally equivalent scenario, the portrayal of the feminine, though gushing forth in sublime beatitudes, still is in the process of reeling underneath the patriarchal values, enunciated by her male counterpart. The cardinal purpose of this study is to offer an alternate feminist reading of a work pertaining to late modernity wherein a fundamentally poignant structural episteme was enunciated so as to provide a new framework for approaching this question. Chaudhuri’s approach to the question reveals his dependence on literature as a mode of understanding the changing contours of feminist consciousness and also the drawbacks of such a kind of over-reliance on a literary constructs and its innuendoes.