Domesticity

Critical questioning of broad framework of normative assumptions regarding womanly duties is studied in this chapter through close reading of Kailashbashini Debi’s polemical piece Hindu Mahilaganer Heenabastha and Swarnakumari Gupta’s didactic tract Usha Chinta Arthat Adhunik Arya Mahilaganer Abasthya Sambandhe Kayekti Katha . Beginning as an expression of femininity rather than a rebellion against it, they conceded that women bear innate potency and dedication to deliver these socially sanctioned duties. However, they chose domesticity as a vocal and publicly confessed pledge for gaining access to freedom, location, and power from which they entrust men with equal responsibility to make an orderly home. As agential voices with an enhanced moral role, they made an effort to transcend the prescribed ideal of domesticated, self-denying, self-regulating, self-effacing, and self-cancelling subjectivities. While Kailashbashini adopts the civilising-cum-nationalist critique of societal mores with a linear trajectory of progress in keeping with the project of creation of modern patriotic citizens/subjects, Swarnakumari, with her liberal-nationalist consciousness, seeks progress in re-establishment of Aryan/shastric societal order as a remedy to women’s fallen condition. Maintaining an exquisite balance and adroitly negotiating power equations, both the authors subverted certain indigenous patriarchal ideals of domesticity/conjugality (through contestation of non-consensual child marriage, kulin polygamy, non-allowance of widow remarriage) and colonial projection of ideal femininity (through debunking of the bibi or memsahib ). Their complex contestations from within made them non-compliant within the discourse of domesticity.

Antithesis · Art · Femininity · Ideal (ethics) · Literature · Nationalism · Patriarchy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Prerogative · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · Law