Social History through Women’s Writings
Somdatta Mandal
WANDERING WOMEN: TRAVEL WRITINGS IN BENGALI PERIODICALS, 1900-1940 by Edited by Sarvani Gooptu. Translated from the original Bengali by Sarvani Gooptu and Indrani Bose Primus Books, Delhi, 2023, 466 pp., INR 1650.00
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Though Indians have been travelling for the last few centuries, documentation of their travels have been scarce and far between. Pilgrimage, trade, and conquest drove the earliest subcontinental travels, but it was specifically a male domain. Though much less in number as compared to the men, women’s travel writing from colonial Bengal resulted in the co-existence of conservatism and emancipation in the social history of the region. Though historically women have been more associated with fixity,

with home rather than the road, the spread of English education for the middle class since the late nineteenth century also played a significant role in developing such narratives. Also, the emancipation of women, inculcated largely by the progressive Brahmo Samaj movement, made the weaker sex venture into Victorian homes. For many of the women who travelled to different countries of Europe and to England in particular, it meant visiting the land of freedom, and the journey gave access to this freedom. Though most of the time the Bengali woman, who belonged to middle-class Hindu/Brahmo, liberal, educated, bhadralok class families, had a male chaperone (in most cases they were their husbands who were travelling for professional reasons, though they do not discuss their activities much), the very act of travel bore the signature of modernity. But very few of them documented their experiences and those came out as occasional autobiographical accounts published in book form primarily for personal and private circulation. It is only from the beginning of the twentieth century that we find women’s travel narratives started appearing regularly in popular Bengali literary periodicals of the time. With the spread of education, newspapers and periodicals became the means through which prevailing ideas and ideologies were transmitted to a large audience within a short period of time. These vernacular periodicals reflected the dreams, aspirations, and motivations of the newly educated middle class, who picked travelogues to both entertain and educate their readers.
This is where the present volume under review is significant. Realizing that accessing Bengali periodicals more than a hundred years old and reading them is not an easy proposition for many readers, and that too in a serialized format, the editors of Wandering Women have specifically handpicked travel narratives published between 1900 and 1940 that were written in the form of diary entries or letters. The multifarious text and context of each entry is really mind boggling in its diversity. Some of the travelogues translated in this book were printed in women’s magazines like Antahpur, Bamabodhini Patrika, Bangalakshmi, and Mahila, but others came out in mainstream literary magazines like Bharatvarsha, Bichitra, Masik Basumati, and Prabashi, and even in children’s magazines like Ramdhanu. The editors have selected a total of sixteen such narratives by Bengali women out of which eight comprise travels to the East, and the remaining eight to the West. Each one was styled differently as some women travelled for brief periods and wrote down what they ‘saw’ as tourists, whereas others who stayed for longer periods wrote in a nuanced manner on a particular aspect of their experiences abroad. All these women were affluent, and more or less well-connected, with one or two exceptions. All of them were educated, some more than others, or else their writing would not have been included in the literary journals which took great pride in their high quality of writing. Also, interestingly, none of their accounts of the countries they visited in Asia or in the West were simple and descriptive; instead, they were layered with analyses and an awareness of local and global environments. Also, whatever their background might be, one notices a ‘nationalist tone’ when they negotiate their position in the world.
Arranged chronologically, the first entry in the section ‘Travellers to the East’ begins in 1902 with Mrinalini Raha narrating about her travels in Rangoon. Rangoon as the site of travel was inevitable since, from 1886, it gradually came under British rule and immigration by Indians was encouraged. The very next year in 1903 we have Pushpamala Devi, who describes herself as a resident of Rangoon, travelling to Malaya, Singapore, and Malacca and writes about her experiences.  Abala Bose, the wife of the great scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose, travelled extensively around the world and we read about her views on ‘Women’s Education in Japan and Our Duty’ written in 1915. Saratrenu Devi travelled with her husband who worked at the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), writes in 1916 about ‘A Bengali Woman in Persia’. Sita Devi, the youngest daughter of Ramananda Chattopadhyay, who wrote regularly in her father’s journals Prabashi and Modern Review narrates here the lifestyle of Burmese Women (1928). Though not strictly a travelogue, her article was part of her lived experience since she stayed in Rangoon for seven years after her marriage. The very next year in 1929 we find Sarala Devi Chaudhurani writing about her ‘Travels to Burma, Rangoon and Shew Dagon’. Instead of being published in the Tagore-family-run journal Bharati, it came out in the rival Bharatvarsha where she wrote about her frustration of not being given enough chance to travel despite the freedom from convention that she experienced. Travelling ‘abroad’ to next door Burma was for her ‘practically the other side of Greater India’.  As the daughter of Deshbandu Chittaranjan Das and Basanti Devi, who inculcated in her patriotic fervour and social commitment, Aparna Devi wrote in ‘What I Saw in Japan’, the reasons for Japan’s greatness. A few years later we read about Shanta Chattopadhyay’s ‘Travels in Japan, 1938-1939’. As the elder daughter of Ramananda Chattopadhyay, she travelled to Japan with her husband Kalidas Nag, who was a close confidant of Rabindranath Tagore and a strong proponent of Greater India.
Arranged chronologically once again, the ‘Travels to the West’ section begins with ‘An Anthology of Letters, 1903’ by Pramila Devi sent for publication in Mahila after her untimely death. She was deeply respected in Bengal and in the West through the spiritual connections between the Unitarians of the West and Brahmo Samaj and her travel narrative represents this awareness.  Bimala Dasgupta was a noted Sanskrit scholar who as a widow, left her child behind and travelled with her brother and his daughter to Norway and Sweden. That a journey into a hitherto-untraversed terrain for a Bengali woman has been lyrically expressed in her travelogue, with literary metaphors and musings of a philosophical, yet also a critical mind, is remarkable. Tapati Sarkar’s ‘Tales of London’ written in 1929, was pathbreaking for Bengali literature since it includes the musings of an eleven-year-old visiting London with her parents. In the brief article she acquainted other Indian children with important sights of London. ‘Letters of a Bengali Woman Travelling to Geneva, 1930’ by Sukumari Roychowdhury is an important document of interpersonal connections in the politics of Europe as well as connections between Indian and western leaders in the Labour Movement. It is also an important document for a study of the history of women’s associations in India.
‘A Discussion about England, 1923’ by Renuka Devi which came out in Bichitra in 1930 is quite unique as her family connections were extended deeply into political circles making her politically aware since her childhood and subsequently made her deeply committed to political and social causes in the service of India. It was out of respect for Mahatma Gandhi and her parents’ wishes that she went to England for higher education. So, her article rejects the usual touristic descriptions of England and focuses on social issues.  Himangshubala Bhaduri’s long travelogue, ‘On the Way, 1930-1933’ is written in the form of letters and she writes for the public and carefully starts with an introduction giving background information unlike the others. Her husband was a member of the Indian Medical Service (IMS) and was posted abroad in many places during the two world wars and her son was studying near London in 1929. She travelled to Oxford and Cambridge to physically explore the academic ambience of the two places and decide where to send her son for further studies. Sudha Sen’s travel to Niagara Falls in 1934 is the only travelogue to America and it falls into the category of a touristic description of physical exotica where the traveller is hardly present. The last entry published in Prabashi in 1938 is Shobharani Hui’s ‘Travels in Germany’. It is intriguing since she travelled to various factory sites with her husband in 1937, to a country that would be engulfed in a war within two years. Though she does start by denigrating the spread of Nazism indirectly, her descriptions of the workers’ lifestyle and industrial growth in Germany are unique.
As the editor has rightly mentioned, one common feature of all these travel narratives is their contemporaneity. They are very important for assessing the position of women and their intellectual development within societal growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in India. Though for a long-time travel writing was considered not canonical enough to be treated as a serious literary genre, even now it is important to use these narratives to fill in the large lacuna in the construction of social history, especially regarding women’s position and intervention. Also, the editors have rightly pointed out how unlike conventional western women’s narratives these travel narratives by colonized women are unique since they reiterate, confront, and subvert inherited colonial stereotypes in their encounters with the West; however, in their travels to the East they themselves become colonial in their analyses. By translating these Bengali texts, the two translators have done yeoman service for further research in this area, especially in the pan-Indian context.
However, one must mention that one particularly long entry titled ‘Letters of a Bengali Woman Travelling to Geneva, 1930’ by Sukumari Roychowdhury has too many grammatical and typographical errors that mar the otherwise well-translated and well-structured book. The copy-editing of this particular narrative should have been done a bit more carefully (cf. pp. 318, 321, 322, 331, 332, 333, 338, 339). The book of course is strongly recommended for serious and casual readers alike.
 
Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, West Bengal.