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The Changing Role of Women in Bengal 1849-1905
By Meredith Borthwick PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05409-4
CHAPTER 1
Traditional Roles of Women in Bengali Society
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By the middle of the eighteenth century, the British had already acquired almost monopoly control over the foreign trade of Bengal, and were subsequently to extend their control to include the system of land tenure. Changes in the socioeconomic structure that came in the wake of the British presence unsettled the earlier indigenous balance of power. The old aristocratic elite, both Hindu and Muslim, continued to perform a useful function for the new British rulers, but it was not large enough to fulfil all the needs of the rapidly expanding colonial administration. A new social group emerged out of the upheaval to serve the needs of the rulers, dependent on their patronage for its rise to power. Although this "middle class" owed its rise to prominence entirely to opportunities for gaining wealth and status provided by the British, the relationship with the conquerors was one of interdependence. This class was vital to the maintenance of British rule. Its members functioned as intermediaries between the rulers and the bulk of the ruled, serving as clerks and junior administrators in the expanding colonial bureaucracy, and as brokers, financiers and agents in trade with the East India Company. These were advantageous positions that allowed them to build up their own fortunes. Wealth gained was invested in the joint stock market and in the expansion of building in Calcutta, as well as in rural property.
The new social group was known collectively as the bhadralok, meaning literally "respectable men" or "gentlemen." The term is imprecise, and has been the subject of scholarly debate. In its broadest sense it includes all those who are not chotolok, or the hoi polloi. However, in the context of nineteenth-century Bengal, it is generally used to refer to a group sharing certain characteristics — "a de facto social group, which held a common position along some continuum of the economy, enjoyed a style of life in common and was conscious of its existence as a class organized to further its ends." The bhadralok represented a highly significant social phenomenon, using the authority conferred by recently acquired wealth to gain status according to traditional caste categories.
The term bhadralok encompassed two main groups: the abhijat bhadralok and the grihastha bhadralok. The abhijat bhadralok became permanent residents of Calcutta in the second half of the eighteenth century. They rapidly acquired fortunes, and consequently social status and influence, by working as junior partners for the British. In the first half of the nineteenth century, and even later, they exercised undisputed social leadership in Calcutta through gaining control of the dals, multicaste social factions formed under the leadership of rich men who had the authority to arbitrate disputes over caste rules and customary law. The grihastha bhadralok, also known as the madhyabitta sreni, were a middle-income group including small landholders, government employees, members of the professions, teachers, and journalists.
Women in the bhadralok household
The pace of change in the early nineteenth century makes it extremely difficult to pinpoint a distinctly "typical" bhadralok lifestyle. However, it is possible to draw out certain common features of social organization and their effect on the position of women. The nucleus of the new middle class was in Calcutta, the center of British economic and political activity, although through the colonial administrative system in rural towns it had a solid mofussil base as well. When men came to Calcutta seeking their fortunes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they came alone, leaving their families in the village home. There was a high preponderance of males over females in the urban population of Calcutta. As they became established, they brought their families to Calcutta. The presence of women played an important part in consolidating the social identity of the bhadralok.
In Calcutta, control over women's behavior according to orthodox practice was adhered to with greater rigidity than ever before. In the fluid and uncertain social atmosphere of the new colonial metropolis, the position of women was an additional means of determining social status. The practice of purdah was a well-established feature of social organization governing women's behavior in Bengali society. Under strictest purdah, women were confined to the antahpur, or to the "invisibility" of closed carriages when moving around outside the home. These rules applied to women of the bhadralok in Calcutta, but social commentators noted that women in the mofussil were able to move about with greater freedom:
Even in Bengal, if you are travelling through an unfrequented part of the country, you will sometimes meet women of the more respectable classes walking out of doors. As soon as they observe you, they try to get out of the way; or if this cannot be done, they will veil their faces by drawing their white cotton scarf over their heads. The women of the most respectable classes are also allowed to leave their apartments to bathe in the Ganges. They rise early for this purpose, and return home before daybreak. I have often heard their shrill voices very early in the morning, about three or four o'clock, when passing on their way to the river.
The rigid observance of purdah in Calcutta is encapsulated in the image of the women of the Tagore family being taken to the Ganges in a closed palanquin and lowered into the water to bathe, in order to ensure complete invisibility in a public place. In Hindu society the position of women had always been a symbol of male honor, to be maintained by careful control over female sexuality. The move from the mofussil to Calcutta brought women's behavior under much closer scrutiny because of the need to enforce rules of behavior in order to determine and maintain social status in a loose and dynamic social situation. In the mofussil, respectable women were to be seen bathing publicly alongside men, smoking, and even walking in groups through the streets, but these "liberties" were not possible in Calcutta. A practical reason for circumscribing women's freedom of movement in the city was a fear of the real dangers of the unfamiliar urban environment.
In Calcutta and the mofussil alike, the antahpur was the center of the female world. It represented a separate community of women, subject to male control through confinement to an enclosed space without access to the world outside it. The bhadralok themselves moved freely between the public world of streets and offices and the private world of household affairs. The houses they built gave architectural expression to the division between public and private space. Women carried out the daily domestic routine within the antahpur, an inner courtyard surrounded by a kitchen and living apartments. The male recreation and reception area was located beyond this, around an outer courtyard from which there was access to the public street (Fig. i). The inner courtyard was smaller, darker and less airy than the outer (Figs, z, 3). According to one missionary visitor to a Calcutta zenana, it was "a collection of dirty courtyards, dark corners, break-neck staircases, filthy outhouses and entries, overlaid with rubbish, or occupied by half-clad native servants, stretched about on charpoys, or on the ground indifferently — narrow verandahs, and unfurnished, or semi-furnished, and very small rooms." A Bengali observer gave a more favorable impression:
Making allowances for a queer taste, the women's apartments are always prettily ornamented. The furniture is not very rich or expensive; but everything is neat and orderly, from the door-mat and the spitting-vessel to the daubs pasted on the walls, representing the countless millions of gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon. One of the most prominent articles of furniture, almost in every room, is the cot or tuktposh to sleep upon. The beds are almost all of them well-made and very commodious, for the Bengali loves to roll in bed. There is first the tuktposh, which is a very wide bench, or rather a number of wide benches put together; then a mat or carpet on it; then a mattress, commonly of cotton, which makes the bed somewhat too warm; then a cotton lape, which is a light and soft mattress, over it; and then the bed-sheet, and an infinite number of pillows. Carpeting the room is not in fashion in the zenana, but there are small carpets for the ladies to sit upon, which have the advantage of being moveable at pleasure.
In wealthy houses one would pass through court after court to reach the zenana. In a less wealthy family, sometimes it would be just "one small room, no windows for ventilation." The only exposure women had to sun and light was the time spent in recreation on the rooftop, if it was not too publicly visible, where they played games and tended potted plants. Women were not allowed to cross the threshold of the antahpur into the outer apartments of the public male world.
The typical bhadralok house would have been occupied by a joint family. This was the basic unit of social organization in Bengal, and would usually have spanned three generations of the paternal line. Within the joint family authority was vested in the oldest male member, the karta, and the oldest female, the ginni, except in cases where the most senior person had abdicated his or her authority in favor of someone younger. The karta was responsible for the financial support and general welfare of the whole family. The ginni looked after the household stores, made arrangements for meals, and supervised the behavior of family members. The average number of females in a joint family would be hard to determine in the absence of reliable statistics, but the Reverend Krishna Mohan Banerjea estimated in 1840 that "the number of females in each family is on the average about six or eight, including grown-up and elderly women." The women in the joint family household were usually the ginni, her prepubertal unmarried daughters (if she was not herself very old), her daughters-in-law, younger granddaughters, and often a widowed aunt or sister.
The smooth functioning of the joint family depended on the degree of harmony among its womenfolk, who were responsible for maintaining the daily domestic routine. Whereas males in the family were related by ties of blood, women were "strangers" brought in from outside. Daughters left their natal home between the ages of ten and twelve to live with their husband's family, only returning home for occasional short visits. Their place would be taken by other girls of the same age who joined the household as daughters-in-law. If there were a number of sons in a family, there would be a continuing procession of young brides, or bou. A woman was culturally bonded into her husband's family on marriage, and in the subsequent socialization process of the young bou. This bond was always regarded as more tenuous than the blood tie between males, however, and women were often treated with suspicion and accused of attempting to disrupt filial and fraternal solidarity. A well-defined set of prescriptive roles provided guidelines for harmonious living and for avoiding conflict that would upset the solidarity of the joint family, but at times personality clashes between individuals undermined the authority of the ideal.
When a young bou was taken into a family on marriage, her relationship with other members was governed by intricate rules of conduct. The "intruding" bou avoided becoming a source of tension by strict observance of the rules governing familial relationships. A husband's relation to his wife was subordinate to that with his mother. In order that men could maintain the mother-son link as the primary relationship even after marriage, wives were not allowed to speak with their husbands in the daytime, or in the presence of others, and were only permitted to attend to his most private needs. On occasions when a meeting was unavoidable, symbolic distance was maintained by the woman covering her head with her sari border as a sign of invisibility. A bou had to observe purdah with all senior males in her husband's family, and defer to their wives. She could only relax in a nonhierarchical relationship with her husband's younger unmarried brothers (debar) and sisters. She was expected to wait on her father-in-law, and to obey the orders of her mother-in-law. The latter was often the most forceful presence in her early married life. The authority structure was strictly hierarchical, with the old ginni at the top and the youngest bou at the bottom.
The young bou was generally made well aware of the lowliness of her position, and her life was fraught with the hardships of being a newcomer. Her training "commences under the superintendence of a mother-in-law somewhat advanced in life, and not unoften of a tyrannical disposition. She is a stern disciplinarian, keen observer, and eloquent admonisher. The elderly lady is sometimes seconded by one or two of her grown up daughters, to whom the youthful daughter-in-law is an intruder and rival. And between the mother and the daughters they make the life of the poor novice, during the first years of her tutelage, sometimes very uncomfortable indeed."
A woman would move up in the household hierarchy when a younger bride came, but a surer means of ensuring her status was by becoming the mother of a son, the progenitor of a link in the patriarchal system. In a large household not all women could ever expect to rise to the elevated position of ginni. They would have authority only over their own immediate family, particularly over their sons, who remained with them after marriage.
The young bou would be taught to perform the domestic tasks and religious rituals that constituted the daily routine of the antahpur. The sacred and the mundane were intertwined in her life, giving it greater significance and satisfaction than purely routine housework would have done. The day began with sweeping the floors and washing utensils. Then she would bathe and carry out the morning's religious duties. Next came cooking — a communal activity participated in by all the women in the house. Older women served the meal to the men of the house. Women ate afterwards, and would then wash at the tank. The main period of leisure was the afternoon. In the evening the bou performed the worship of the family deity again, and then cooked the last meal of the day. Apart from this routine, there were children to attend and sick patients to care for. An important feature of her work was that it was all communal. Although there was often inequity in the distribution of the workload, causing resentment, domestic life constituted social life and was not something separate from it.
Whether a woman did most of this household work herself or supervised servants depended on the family's economic position. Born in 1809, Rassundari Debi was the first Bengali woman to write an autobiography, in which she gave a full description of her domestic life. She had a relatively easy life for the first few years of marriage, but suddenly, at the age of eighteen, found herself responsible for about twenty-five servants, after her mother-in-law became blind. None of these servants was internal to the household, so that she also had to do all the housework. She mentioned that she had to attend to food offerings for the family deity, give hospitality to guests and travelers, cook twice a day for the family and all the servants, and wait on her blind mother-in-law. The amount of work was so great that she worked ceaselessly from dawn till late at night.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Changing Role of Women in Bengal 1849-1905 by Meredith Borthwick. Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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