Amar jiban autobiography of rashundari debi PDF

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In this assignment, I wrote about the lonely efforts of Rashundari Debi to attain education in an environment where education for women was forbidden....

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NAME- SARITA ROLL NO- 19/ENG/41 B.A. ENGLISH (HONS) SEMESTER 5

Amar Jiban is an autobiography of Rashundari Debi which was published in 1876. She is the first Indian woman who wrote an autobiography. Amar Jiban describes the struggle of education for women in nineteenth-century colonial India. It depicts the lonely journey of Rashundari Debi to attain education in a world where receiving education for women was unimaginable.

With constant effort and determination, Rashundari taught herself to read at the age of twenty-six. She had a burning desire to read from childhood but in her time “People used to despise women of learning”. One night she dreams of reading the Chaitanya Bhagavata. The next day her husband leaves the book on the table. She gets thrilled to see the book and extracts a page from it. She stole a palm leaf from her son to practice writing but regrets her actions and says “Wasn’t it a matter to be regretted, …considered an offense.” She hides her effort from the public eye and continues relentlessly to learn the alphabet. Though she was imprisoned in the kitchen, she was emancipated in mind. Tanika Sarkar says that “Rashsundari is declaring her emancipation from all the resources that have been conventionally allotted to her”.

Rashundari Debi confers legitimacy to her transgressive act of reading by attributing her desires and following human drama to divine intervention. She chooses the idiom of devotion to serve her purpose of articulation of the self. At

the time of her marriage, her mother tells her “If you ever feel afraid, think of God”. So she subtly submits herself to God’s will. She recognizes her life as a plaything in God's hand and satirizes his ways by saying “Strange are the ways of God! Your laws are so wonderful!” .Tankia Sarkar says that “the more smilingly and patiently she described her submission the better she underlined the tyranny of his rule” Her instance of reading the Chaitanya in her dream molded her pursuit of literacy as God's will.

She shows her life publicly and says “ every human being should know this”. She records the events and details of her everyday domestic life in a book and publishes it. She entered a public sphere that was forbidden to upper-class Hindu women. A published work no longer remains a private act of writing but enters the public domain where it is open and available for perusal and interrogation by anyone and “ at the end of which, with the beginning of a new century, we find women's activism, organizations, and movements”(Tanika Sarkar). It also states the concept of Bildungsroman as she from a lower stature has successfully developed herself into a published writer.

Amar Jiban is an individualistic narrative, shapes the material life of Rashsundari Debi. Tanika Sarkar says that “The book calls itself – with a thundering audacity – My Life. It makes a bold and a bold statement, presumptuous in the extreme, in a woman householder. A woman, moreover, who is not connected to a figure of religious or temporal significance, who can't claim any miraculous powers or capacities. The life of such a woman would not be written – far less read – before the 19th century.” Rashundari Debi’s life story is an inspiration and a testimony of a woman’s willpower to fight all odds to gain education and liberation.

Bibliography 1. ‘Representing Self, Critiquing Society: Selected Lifewritings by Women.’ Edited by Meenakshi Malhotra. Worldview Critical Editions. 2016 2. Sarkar, Tanika. ‘Words to Win: The Making of a Modern Autobiography.’ New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1992 3. ‘Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century.’ Edited by Susie J. Tharu, Ke Lalit. 4. https://feminisminindia.com/2021/03/04/analysis-rashsundari-debi-amarjiban/...