Articles by Jasodhara Bagchi

Feminising Political Discourse: Women and the Novel in India 1857-1905 by Jasbir Jain; Rawat Publications, Jaipur and New Delhi, 1997; JOSODHARA BAGCHI Jasbir Jain is a well known name in the field of literary studies in India. Using her base in English Studies, she has unpacked the complex relationship of women with the process of novel writing in its early days in India, that is, between the first war of independence in 1857 and the onset of the swadeshi movement in 1905. The new writing took place in the vernacular languages that signalled the formation of class subjectivities, that were simultaneously hegemonising and hegemonised. The socio-cultural dynamic that this set into motion has been analysed in its multifariousness by critics writing both in English and the vernacular languages. Jasbir Jain

Motherhood in Colonial Bengal Jasodhara Bagchi The burgeoning nationalism in colonial Bengal of the last quarter of the nineteenth century caught hold of the image of the mother to represent the nationalist aspiration. The ideology of motherhood was given an enormous importance in the cultural life of Bengal Was the choice of the mother merely an accidental one? Or was there something about the culture of the Bengalis that created the requisite precondition for such a choice?

Of all the models of social regeneration that arrived from the West in the second half of the nineteenth century, Comte's Positivism appealed most to the Janus-tike intelligentsia of Bengal. It enabled them to look back on the order of the Golden Age of Hindus and at the same time look forward to the progress generated by British rule. Bankimchandra's later novels such as "Anandmath", far from dismissing the modernising influence of Positivism, in fact, represents a crisis in his nationalist consciousness. These novels create a parable of the nationalist confrontation and womanhood becomes the emblem of both the threatened and ravaged order as well as of the resistance to such ravages. Comte's glorification of woman undergoes a sea-change and Bankim's neo- positivist heroine of Anandmath is a fighter to the last who refuses to go back to the 'enclosed space' of domesticity.