The Voices of Rebati's Sisters

Early Women's Writing in Orissa, 1989-1950: A Lost Tradition (edited by Sachinananda Mohanty). Sage Publications, New Delhi/Thousand Oaks/ London; 2005; pp 241. Rs 550.

Although the tradition has continued, the processes of gender bias and literary domination by other kinds of discourses have pushed these works into near oblivion. In this recent collection, based on extensive archival research, Sachinananda Mohanty brings to light the translated writings of twenty Oriya women from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These women, unlike the fairly well-known literary women of Bengal, are little known writers. Mohanty refers to them as 'literary domestics', women who found themselves in a domestic setting and yet had literary aspirations. Mohanty clarifies that this term carries no derogatory connotation but is merely a statement of fact of the condition literary women found themselves in during the middle of the 19th century.

The selection presents the variety of forms employed by these women writers; short stories, poems, essays, travel writing, novels, and letters. Their writings, coming primarily from the domestic context, also interface with the history of many progressive movements in Orissa, such as the rise of female education, trade movements and women's participation in civic and political life. Their interpretations of the cultural, political and ideological issues of their times provide valuable insights into the condition of Oriya women of the period.

The book articulates polyphonous voices speaking to women, urging them to empower themselves, coaxing them to speak, to write, to tell their stories. The process of writing, which implies education, is identified by nearly all the writers as the key to empowerment. Again and again, through prose and verse, they urge women to break their silence. In poems like The Sound of Silence, Reba Ray (1876-1957) condemns this silence as a denial of human rights. She attempts to provoke women into action with lines like:

In silence I came to this world

And my life will sing unceasing,

In silence will my life forever

Her songs of silence sing.

These writers, who can be classified with the early feminists, make every effort to expose this silence as imposed by a patriarchal society. Reba Ray's feminist lines provide a characteristic example:

Silent, shorn of strength is woman

Beside a man forever strong.

When she can't even cry for You

For fear of loud-voiced man so long,

Haripriya Devi (1915-1996) in her poems Tears and Woman, the Prisoner continues this vein of posing provocative questions like:

When there is a body

Must it not have free mind?

---

Will she remain a prisoner forever?

On what right do you imprison her, this woman?

Their poetry often tends to have spiritual undertones as prayer was possibly a means of some release for women. This is characterized by the works of Reba Ray and Nirmala Devi (1906-1986). Relating the struggle to establish literary aspirations with the rights of women to education, the poet Bidyut Prabha Devi (1926-1977) tries to inspire a defiance of social restrictions in the poem The Assault:

The grinding is half done

Where are you

Eldest daughter in-law?

---

How can there be in all this,

Time for poetry?

Today it's the son's health.

And tomorrow, it's

The daughter's stomach ailment

---

Let people say what they like

I shall go on flowing

---

Writing is the balm

For all my pain.

The poetry encapsulates the emotional turmoil of balancing stereotypical social roles and individual creative urges and rights. With recurrent images of darkness, imprisonment and silence, the poems seem to carry deeply philosophical and existential undertones.

If the poetry versifies humiliation, the prose attempts to break down the parameters within which women were confined, using logic, argument and inspiration. Sarala Devi (1904-1986), the first Oriya woman to take part in Gandhi's 'Satyagraha Movement' and consequently jailed, exposes the plight of women in the feudal and patriarchal society. In her piece The Rights of Women, Sarala outlines a manifesto for women's empowerment. Comparable to Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, what is impressive is her extraordinary reading into contemporary history, law and social life in India and abroad.

Like Sarala, her contemporary Kuntala Kumari Sabat (1901-1938) was also an emancipator, activist and literary artist who expressed extensively in prose and poetry her concerns for the plight of her homeland Utkal, the freedom of India and the cause of women's emancipation. She spoke out in many forums for the empowerment of women and the collection presents one of her speeches The Crisis of Religion in Modern Times as well as an excerpt from one of her novels which illustrates her empathy for the dispossessed and underdogs in society. Kuntala's writing makes an important statement at the national level and was undoubtedly a source of great inspiration for many literary women in Orissa. Her successors who expounded powerful poetry and prose that centred round the themes of women's experiences during the partition and in the post-independence period include Shakuntala Devi, Sushila Devi, Nandini Panigrahi, Urmila Devi, Malati Choudhury, and Hemalata Mansingh. Their literature dealt with social realities such as industrialisation, poverty, exile, widow remarriage and all the symptomatic effects of women trapped in a patriarchal order.

Other literary women like Sailabala Das (1875-1968), the first Oriya woman to travel to England for higher studies, presents in her travel writing piece a female perspective on travel and a view of colonial India seen from Britain. The contributions of these literary domestics have indeed not been totally unrecognized. Basanta Kumari Pattanaik was the first Oriya woman to receive the highest award of the Orissa Sahitya Academi, the 'Atibadi Puraskar'. The works of these women from Sailabala writing in the early 19th century down to Basanta Kumari Pattanaik writing in the late 20th century and all their contemporaries mark milestones in a journey down a road that Basanta's excerpted text most aptly provides the title for- The Untrodden Path.

Sachinananda Mohanty professes that his assessment of texts for the selection has been objective and not hagiographic. By including texts like travel notes, speeches and letters as well as fiction and poetry in his selection he aims to show the extraordinary range of interests of these literary women. The choice of texts also attempt to show how the Oriya literary women responded to the issues and ideologies of their times and the linkages that existed among them. A linkage that can indeed be defined as a sisterhood.

Rumana Siddique teaches English at Dhaka University.