| Article Name : | |
| A “SILENT” PROTEST IN THE VOICE OF BENGALI WOMEN: RE-READING THE NOVELS OF ASHAPURNA DEVI AND BANIBASU |
| Author Name : | |
| Ananya Mukherjee |
| Publisher : | |
| Ashok Yakkaldevi |
| Article Series No. : | |
| GRT-5289 |
| Article URL : | |
 | Author Profile View PDF In browser |
| Abstract : | |
| Ashapoorna Devi and BaniBasu have always tried to focus on the marginalized condition of Bengali women. For them Bengal had given birth not to women but to the future mother. Bengali culture at that time affirms only one identity that is the motherhood. In colonial Bengal female body should be a reproductive one and the climactic torturous moment comes when a ten years old girl is forcibly married to an old person and with the death of that person the girl finds its new identity and as she is not able to give birth to a child the only way left to her is that she had to accept death on her husband’s funeral pyre. This was the history of colonial Bengal where women were only the means of production. Twentieth century has experienced many protective voices of many women novelists but most interestingly all of them portrayed the situation with a clear vindictive narrative. But Ashapoorna Devi and BaniBasu have carefully created a very different narrative as it starts from the silence and also ends with a silence. A silence never ending and a narrative never voiced. So what lies within this “silence” and how it gradually giving birth to a “protest” that is something I have tried to bring out in my paper. |
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