Diary entry: Imagine that you are Rassundari Devi. Write a diary entry how you learnt to
write your autobiography.
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Rassundari Devi: The secret student who defied society
We know exactly how she felt, because much, much later, Rassundari Devi would go on to write the very first autobiography in Bengali.
Updated: October 31, 2018 1:11:12 pm
Rassundari Devi is among the earliest woman writers in Bengal. (Source: Samarkumar Basu/Facebook)
She would take a letter from the text, match it to one on son’s scribblings, remember her secret study of the alphabet and remember the sound of that letter.
By Archana Garodia Gupta and Shruti Garodia
(This is part of the series Make History Fun Again, where the writers introduce historical facts, events and personalities in a fun way for parents to start a conversation with their kids.)
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It was 1822. An age where Indian girls were married off young and hoped and prayed they wouldn’t get widowed. Because that usually meant either a painful end through sati or a miserable half-existence in the shadows-dressed in rough white cloth, perpetually shorn head, no jewellery, plain food and having to hide in plain sight lest their unlucky shadow fell on the rest of the family.
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It was an age where people truly, genuinely believed that an educated woman would lead to her husband’s death. Leaving girls totally illiterate was natural in the face of such unflinching belief.
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So in 1822, it was time for little Rassundari Devi, the 12-year-old girl from an affluent family in rural Bengal, to be dispatched to her husband’s house. She felt the same fear and terror that countless young Indian girls must have felt when they were parceled off with total strangers, knowing that their lives had just changed forever. She imagined that she was a goat being led to sacrifice, “the same hopeless situation, the same agonized screams…”
A scene from rural Bengal. (Source: Sujay25/Wikimedia Commons)
Unusually, we know exactly how she felt…because much, much later, Rassundari Devi would go on to write the very first autobiography in Bengali!
Rassundari was lucky, luckier than many, in that in her mother-in-law she found a second mother. Love and affection was lavished on her and she was unusually close with all of her in-laws and her husband.
Rassundari soon got down to the business of daily married life at her new home. Though the wealthy family had dozens of servants, all of the cooking was done personally by her, and she was busy with household chores from dawn until after midnight. As a dutiful wife, she would wait to feed her husband before eating herself, and often ‘forgot’ because it became so late and there was so much to do. And of course there were the children to bear, and to take care of-she had 12 over her lifetime.
Still, when she was 14, an insidious thought struck her. She should learn to read, she thought…so that she could read Hindu texts for herself, and get closer to her beloved Lord Vishnu. The thought terrified her in its audacity, but it lingered. It was a full dozen years later, when she was 26 that she dared to do something about it.
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