The Private World of Bengali Women: A Story of Human Emotions

In 1897, the year Bijay Chand Mahtab, the ‘Raja’ of Burdwan got married, Anurupa Devi was 15 years old, and already a wife for four years or so. She was old enough to understand what the excitement was about and recall the events in her novel that she began writing more than a decade later. This was a historical occurrence as was the fact that Mahtab was an amateur littérateur. Perhaps it was also true that he had invited some well-known contemporary poets on this occasion, though we do not know who these real-life writers were. In Anurupa Devi’s novel, neither the Raja is mentioned by name, nor the date of his marriage; we are told by the narrator that a few ‘budding writers’ flocked to the Burdwan railway station to welcome the famous writers with banners. Among the budding writers was Ajit, the son of Aurobindo, the hero of the novel. I see this reference to the historical figure of the said Raja of Burdwan as a deliberate attempt on the part of the novelist to cultivate a form of realism that lends a certain degree of authenticity to her tale of human suffering. She goes to great lengths to lend credibility to the plot and character that goes beyond her commitment to the realist mode, by bringing in the names of real-life characters like Tagore and Aurobindo Ghosh, and place names Botanical Garden, the Calcutta Zoo and even Bowbazar’s famous sweet-meat shop Bhim Chandra Nag (which exists even now and in the Zomato network). Fictional characters in the novel visit these places and eat at the sweet-meat shop. These chronotopic conjunctures in the narrative encourage the reader to look for other kinds of intertextuality, too. Surely, Anurupa Devi had a reason that goes beyond the need to remain faithful to her chosen narrative technique as a woman who was involved in many social issues, especially concerning women of colonial Bengal. Entangled in this narrative of fact and fiction is a fictional character, the namesake of the historical Sri Aurobindo. It is not without any significance that, during the visit of the writers in Burdwan, Anurupa’s fictional narrative mentions Sri Aurobindo too: