Paper short abstract:

Piro’s autobiographical and dramatic 160 Kafis have in recent years been re-imagined in two plays. This paper will look at the questions that emerge out of her fabrication and a contemporary re-fabrication of her life.

Paper long abstract:

Piro's autobiographical, the One Hundred and Sixty Kafis, lends itself to the theatrical metaphor. Here Piro (d. 1872), a Muslim prostitute of Lahore, Punjab, relates her abandoning her profession in preference for a spiritual life, taking refuge with Guru Gulabdas, a Sikh of liberal, even libertarian mould. In her verses Piro assuages the fears in her Gulabdasi establishment of her Muslim background and degraded profession by re-enacting the drama of the heroine Sita of the epic Ramayan, in terms of her abduction and rescue, in her own life. The theatrical tone of her writing is visible at other moments too, for instance Piro dramatizing her encounter with her former co-religionists. She also uses the imaginary of Bhakti devotion to legitimize her spiritual quest and her place beside her guru.

In recent years Piro's story has captured the imagination of the Punjabis. Two plays have been penned on her life, where her autobiographical writing have been supplemented with doses of (gendered) imagination. Her various writings have begun to be compiled, and she is compared to various women bhaktas, one in a tradition rather than as one setting her own rules. Piro's performance of herself and the various performances of Piro's self - the fabrication and the re-fabrication of Piro - raise multiple questions. Significant among these are the specificity of voice that her ambiguous status on the edges of society gave her, and the representation of that liminality by a contemporary literary imagination.

Paper short abstract:

In my reading of Manoda Debi’s autobiography from colonial Bengal I wish to focus on the tensions generated by her conscious autobiographical project of self-condemnation and the access that her position of liminality allows her to modes of self-articulation denied to other women autobiographers.

Paper long abstract:

Shikkhita Patitar Atmacharit (The Autobiography of an Educated Prostitute) by Manoda Debi was published in 1929/BS 1336. She was born in an aristocratic Brahmin family, studied at the Bethune school and was influenced by the nationalist movement. In the preface to her autobiography she explains that she was writing this autobiography to apprise society with the nature of "evil" - the absence of which knowledge during her adolescence led to her "fallen" life.

This assumption of the 'role' of the defender of morality in the preface charts out the trajectory of unequivocal self-condemnation that her autobiography is going to take. But if the self is to be understood as a dialectical interaction between the 'given' notions of self-hood and one's lived experiences, then writing the self would typically involve affirmation of one's self-worth. In my reading of the text, I intend to focus on the tensions engendered by such an approach - a self-conscious determination of the reception of the text - and the manner in which she attempts to execute the project whether by claiming vestiges of morality - she declares that she has never smoked or drank - or by tilting ideologically towards anti-reformist positions. My reading would also bring out how her liminality gives her access to modes of self-articulation - for instance the imbrication of the personal and national that is there in the text - which was a-typical of other women autobiographers of the period.

Paper short abstract:

This paper, through a missionary text called Kardoo the Hindu Girl (1869), addresses the strife between a claim of biographical facticity and performativity of the autobiographical self which lies in the heart of autobiography. In this text the author performs the ‘I’ and narrates the life story.

Paper long abstract:

At the heart of autobiography lies a claim of biographical facticity which is in constant conflict with performativity of the biographical self. This paper addresses the climax of such strife where the author performs the 'I' or the biographical self of the autobiography. Kardoo the Hindu Girl (1869) is a missionary text by Hariette G. Brittan. In the book, the author imagines herself as a Hindu woman and narrates her life story from childhood till Christian missionaries save her from the burning pyre of her dead husband. True to the nature of an autobiography, the text creates an imagined, unnatural self—that of a Hindu lady, and through exoticizing the tragedies in her Hindu life, brews up a Hindu society and culture which in turn serves the missionary aim: to highlight the horror of heathendom.

The author's Victorian gender ideas rarely match her concern for the Hindu girl Kardoo and it is apparent in the anathema of the protagonist/narrator towards the Hindu goddess Kali who could otherwise have been the epitome of female empowerment.

The analysis takes into account the following points: the assumed authenticity of autobiography and the missionary politics behind choosing it as a form of narration; how power is yielded through performance of powerlessness in a missionary text; how self is invented for consumption of the selected audience of the text; and how the process of this invention asserts and destabilizes identity, thereby creating a rift between the author and the narrator.

Paper short abstract:

This paper draws attention to the so far obscured letters of women who subsisted as concubines in the early modern royal household of Marwar (Western Rajasthan). Addressed to their masters, these letters of concubines help to reveal their perceptions about their ‘self’ and their structured surroundings.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws attention to the so far obscured letters of women who subsisted as concubines in the early modern royal household of Marwar (Western Rajasthan). The letters of concubines, known as pardayat and paswan in Rajputana, are a gamut of formal and informal Marwari correspondences written by the concubines to their masters viz. the Rajput chieftains. Numbering more than twenty, the letters were written individually as well as collectively by two or more concubines and their efflorescence in 18th century reflects a new found concern with gender relations, norms of femininity, expression of feelings as also literary conventions. While the pre-modern tyranny of women's choice to conjugal status is well known, these letters are momentous sources revealing to us the responses of concubines' vis-à-vis their sexually defined ranks. Engaging with the intent, form of expression and the traditionally ignored metaphors in these messages, the present paper attempts to reveal the perception of concubines about their 'self' and their surroundings, in conjugal status and familial bonds. In this effort, the paper scrutinizes the lexicons representing the concubines-selves, the tone of their writings, and the obvious, if ulterior, motives in navigating particular information and specific emotions to the head of the household. Recovering these voices of concubines this paper maps the emotional worldview of concubines noticing these shaped by and actualised in the incessant interaction of these women with the wider socio-cultural forces, entangled relations between marginality and affect, and the recursive relationship between household and court.

Paper short abstract:

A reading of Landan-yātrā (Journey to London), a travelogue by Hardevi of Lahore published in 1888, with focus on the narrator of the text, and her staging of self-transformation through encounters with the wider world, structured and published with an explicitly didactic purpose.

Paper long abstract:

In February 1886 Shrimati Hardevi of Lahore undertook a long journey, by rail and ship, to London. Her account of her travels, titled Landan-yātrā (Journey to London), would be published some years later. My paper is a study of this travelogue, which was written by an educated, reformist woman member of the Indian elite, while she was still in her twenties.

I focus on the narrator of the text, and how this figure changes with growing distance from home. These changes are staged in a variety of ways: dramatic accounts of Hardevi being questioned by village elders, outpourings of grief for chickens cruelly killed to satisfy angrez meat-eaters, pointed escapes into lyricism and soliloquy, carefully ordered events that add up to an ethical or political instruction, and the constant refrain 'Dear readeress', intended to create a collectivity of readers and listeners qualified only by their gender.

I argue that Landan-yātrā is meant to nourish and sustain just such a collectivity; that it is meant to show the benefits of travel and escape from the domestic sphere; and that it does so not through reformist harangues about women's inadequacies, but a careful staging of pleasant and unpleasant experiences that have taught its narrator something. Hardevi engages with India, Egypt, Italy, Switzerland and France (though not, curiously, London) as a private, individual mediator between her readeresses and the wider world. She does so with the explicit intention, outlined in her preface, of helping create a polity (samāj) and society (sosāiṭī) of women.