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The Imperial and the Colonized Women's Viewing of the 'Other'

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The Imperial and the Colonized Women's Viewing of the 'Other' Gazing across the Divide in the Days of the Raj: The Imperial and the Colonized Women’s Viewing of the ‘Other’ Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Philosophischen Fakultät der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg Vorgelegt von Sukla Chatterjee Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Hans Harder Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Benjamin Zachariah Heidelberg, 01.04.2016 Abstract This project investigates the crucial moment of social transformation of the colonized Bengali society in the nineteenth century, when Bengali women and their bodies were being used as the site of interaction for colonial, social, political, and cultural forces, subsequently giving birth to the ‘new woman.’ What did the ‘new woman’ think about themselves, their colonial counterparts, and where did they see themselves in the newly reordered Bengali society, are some of the crucial questions this thesis answers. Both colonial and colonized women have been secondary stakeholders of colonialism and due to the power asymmetry, colonial woman have found themselves in a relatively advantageous position to form perspectives and generate voluminous discourse on the colonized women. The research uses that as the point of departure and tries to shed light on the other side of the divide, where Bengali women use the residual freedom and colonial reforms to hone their gaze and form their perspectives on their western counterparts. Each chapter of the thesis deals with a particular aspect of the colonized women’s literary representation of the ‘other’. The first chapter on Krishnabhabini Das’ travelogue, A Bengali Woman in England (1885), makes a comparative ethnographic analysis of Bengal and England, to provide the recipe for a utopian society, which Bengal should strive to become. Toru Dutt’s romantic novella Bianca, or the Young Spanish Maiden (1878) and The Journal of Mademoiselle d’Arvers (1879), discussed in the second chapter, portrays a young writer’s depiction of European society and gender relations in a romantic and idyllic fashion. The third chapter deals with the nineteenth and early twentieth-century journal articles written by Bengali women, reinventing the preexisting ideas of charity and service in Hinduism, by projecting western female philanthropic figures as role models. The final chapter on a missionary novel, Kardoo the Hindu Girl (1869) exemplifies the blurring of narrator and focalizer divide, when an American missionary imagines herself as a Hindu woman and writes an autobiography highlighting the paganism and corporeal sufferings of the Hindus, to fit her missionary purpose. All these narratives, in one way or the other, are essentially about cultures and social reforms, as viewed through a counter-image of elsewhere. Gazing, which is used as a trope in my thesis, is not a homogeneous action, nor is its documentation. The different literary genres brings out the plurality of perspectives, which is manifested in the characters’ or narrators’ subjective worldview. At a more theoretical level, the research subscribes to and simultaneously refutes Gerard Genette’s idea of narrative i focalization, which differentiates between the voice of the author and the protagonists’ perspective. The texts used in my research are considered as transgressive writings disrupting and redirecting the flow of power and textual authority between the colony and the metropole, thereby questioning the canonical colonial discourse. The exclusivity and non-canonical nature of the texts also voice their marginality of perceptions. However, their undeniable importance lies in charting the subtle yet dynamic undercurrents of a transforming society. Finally, my research points out that perception of the other is a far more complex and nuanced psychological and cultural act than just dubbing another as the other. It is worth reinforcing that perception of the self either precedes or co-exists with a perception of the ‘other.’ Hence, the research simultaneously explores both the colonizer and the colonized in a non-Eurocentric light. ii Notes on Transliteration a ka ta sa ā kha tha ha i ga da ṛa ī gha dha ṛha u ṅa na ẏa ū ca pa t∙ cha pha ṃ e ja ba ḥ ai jha bha ˜ o ñ ma au ṭa ya ṭha ra ḍa la ḍha śa ṇa ṣa I have followed the standard conventional transliteration of the Bengali into Roman based on script. The vowels and the consonants are represented by their respective equivalents as listed in the table above. However, there are some other points to be noted as follows: 1. If the inherent vowel is omitted in pronunciation, this is marked as '. For example, would be written as āmˡrā. 2. The hasanta is represented as -dot- in the middle of the line [∙]. For example, should be written as chaṭ·phaṭ·. 3. The apostrophe in a word is retained as such. For example, ´ is written as kaˡre. 4. When two words sound similar but are written with dissimilar mātrās, the mātrās are denoted differently. For example, with the mātrā is denoted as bai whereas with , where the vowel does not appear as a mātrā is written as baï. iii Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………….i Notes on transliteration…………………………………………………………………...iii Contents ............................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….vi 1. “The colonized woman as the spectator”: gaze, perspective and voice in a transcultural setting ........................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1 1.2 Social history of the period ..................................................................................... 2 1.5 Key theories for textual analysis ........................................................................... 16 1.6 Discourse, power, and public sphere ..................................................................... 18 1.7 Orientalism and representation .............................................................................. 23 1.8 Gaze in discourse .................................................................................................. 26 1.9 Translating gaze into voice ................................................................................... 28 1.10 Perception across cultures ................................................................................... 30 2. State of the art ............................................................................................................. 34 3. Bilet as a spectacle: Krishnabhabini das’ Iṃlaṇḍe Baṅgamahilā and observations of the female spectator ........................................................................................................ 52 3.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 52 3.2 Travelogue, emergence of travelogue and gazing via travelogues ....................... 54 3.3 Travelogues and colonialism ................................................................................. 57 3.4 Overview, nuances and themes ............................................................................. 63 3.5 Perceptions of English life and society ................................................................. 66 3.6 Freedom and unfreedom: comparative analysis of women at home and women in England ........................................................................................................................ 72 3.7 Social and conjugal life ......................................................................................... 76 3.8 Remarks on alcoholism ......................................................................................... 78 3.9 Ideas of nation-building as learnt from England ................................................... 81 3.10 Major points of analysis ...................................................................................... 83 3.11 ‘Construction’ of the English society by Krishnabhabini ................................... 90 3.12 Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 91 4. Fantasizing the ‘other’ in Toru Dutt’s novels ............................................................. 93 4.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 93 iv 4.2 Toru Dutt’s life and times ..................................................................................... 94 4.3 General overview of plots and narration ............................................................... 98 4.4 Dominant themes: love, death, illness, alienation ............................................... 101 4.5 Gothic elements: repression, madness, castle, nature .......................................... 114 4.6 Faith and religion ................................................................................................ 116 4.7 Protagonists, alienation and viewing the self through the other ......................... 118 4.8 Intertextuality ...................................................................................................... 122 4.9 Interplay of multiple gaze and concluding remarks ............................................ 124 5. Kardoo the Hindoo Girl and impersonation of the heathen ‘other’ .......................... 128 5.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................
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