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.