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What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice: Rewriting Patriarchy in Late-Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2024

Judith E. Walsh

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Here are two passages chosen from a genre of Bengali domestic science/advice manuals for women in late-nineteenth-century Bengal. The first passage is from Strir sahit kathopakathan [“Conversations with the Wife”], one of the most popular of all advice manuals, first published in 1884 and reissued eight subsequent times, the last in 1909. Its author was Dhirendranath Pal, a prolific writer who published seven books in Bengali and eleven in English between the 1880s and the early twentieth century. The second passage is from Nari dharma [“Woman's Dharma”], a manual of advice for women written by Nagendrabala (Mustaphi) Dasi in 1900, and one of only two advice manuals authored by women I have found in this period. Its author was born in 1878, and, by her death in 1906 at the age of twenty-eight, she had published numerous collections of poetry, two books of advice for women, and one novel.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 3 , August 1997 , pp. 641 - 677
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1997

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