Ashapurna Devi’s Trilogy and the Feminine Style of Writing

Chandreyee Niyogi
Reader, Department of English
Jadavpur University

Many years ago I had the privilege of reading a translation of Ashapurna Devi’s
presidential address at a conference in Jadavpur University. Playing the same role of
Ashapurna Devi’s unofficial public secretary (somewhat like her own way of
representing herself as the “stenographer of Mother Saraswati”), I must acknowledge at
the beginning of this paper that there is very little that can be said about Ashapurna’s
style that she had not herself anticipated, and offered as astute critical observation on the
strengths and limitations of her own achievement in comparison with the styles of her
admired novelists. So in many ways I will be speaking the words of Ashapurna Devi
herself, applying my translation skills to the best of my ability.

Let me explain why I think that the technique of Ashapurna’s trilogy was adumbrated as
a consciously feminine style of writing. The term ‘feminine style of writing’ is no longer
used to delimit the space of a woman novelist to the kitchen or to denote her pathetic
addiction to culinary vessels over the more soulful varieties of human experience. Rather,
in Ashapurna’s trilogy (Pratham Pratisruti, Subarnalata, and Bakul Katha), we can
locate a long deliberated literary strategy and method of introspection which await their
reading in the light of the French Feminist theory of l’ecriture feminine, and that is what I
will try to do in this paper. The advantage of this kind of reading is that the form and
content of writing need not be separated out for analysis. What Ashapurna had observed
about the emergence of global trends in literary ideas at a given time in history would
also hold true for her innovation in style. “Sitting thousands of miles apart”, wrote
Ashapurna Devi, “more than one intellectual succeeds in establishing the same truths
about life on the basis of the same shared values....This unbroken consciousness of
literature is like the light and the wind – it permeates the currents of thought over all the
world, and throbs with the whole world’s visions and beliefs.”1

In the decade between 1964 and 1974, during which these three novels of Ashapurna
Devi were published, the western world was witnessing the rise of the new left and a
second resurgence of the feminist movement. “Even in this country, the roots of
humanity have not changed since the age of the Mahabharata....Everywhere, and at all
times, society is ruled by men,”2 remarked Ashapurna when her contribution to literature
was officially recognised. It is impossible to overlook in this paradoxical statement her
profound awareness of the modernity of her time, which Ashapurna was able to capture
in her critique of the universality of patriarchal norms. Evidently, she had not set out to
write a mere history of the generations past. She wanted to represent women’s aspirations
in a traditional society, and the agony of encountering those obstacles to self fulfillment,
which could only have been perceived as keenly as Ashapurna did in her trilogy at a
turbulent moment of the reawakening of feminist consciousness.
Contemporary male writers had long admired the masculine boldness of Ashapurna’s
style; some of them had been shocked by the unfeminine cruelty in her way of writing, or
criticized Ashapurna’s tendency to make suffering the singular theme of her fiction.3 But
Ashapurna refused to be swayed by these compliments and allegations directed towards
her gender. The same self-assurance with which she had once warded off her mother-in-
law’s request to read and write ‘religious books’4 is heard in her later assertion that
“Literature today is as swift, untrammeled, and tumultuous as life is in the present time; it
is as rough and ruthless, angry and bitter as the modern age. Nor is it possible for it to be
otherwise.”5 Under such circumstances, the trilogy that she had initially planned as a
“history of the inner chambers (antahpur)” would inevitably turn into an alternative
history – a history written for women by a woman. Ashapurna wanted it to be a woman’s
documentation of domestic life. The histories of domestic life written by men, observed
Ashapurna, had been concerned only with the union and separation of men and women in
love, traversing the conflicted terrain of failed romance; but she was going to give her
readers a different history of the processes of construction and destruction in the domestic
sphere, which were perennially changing the shades of the times, society, and social
mentality.6

But Ashapurna’s trilogy was also undertaken as an account of women’s nameless

intellectual struggles – against the hostility of their environments, as well as against their
own instinctual drives. Literature itself was for Ashapurna “an endless commentary on an
unending war”—no matter how it was defined or what external form it came to assume.7
In her personal life Ashapurna had not been much of a rebel; so she thought it was the
silent protest of her own anger, pain and frustration that was incarnated as Satyabati, the
remarkable heroine of her first novel. Satyabati does not strike us as a woman of flesh
and blood. In the sharpness of her skilled reasoning, in the dazzling brilliance of her
intellect, and in her unearthly transcendence of all feminine desires and weaknesses –
Satyabati is really an argument embodied. Ashapurna had conceived Satyabati as the
instrument of her fierce battle, and an eloquent advocate of her own indictment of gender
discrimination. Perhaps it was this which made Pratham Pratisruti her favourite volume
of the trilogy. Among those who could not quite swallow the hypercombativeness of
Satyabati (and Ashapurna) was the celebrated short-story writer, Banaphul, who sent
Ashapurna this ambiguous ‘blessing’:

Sharatbabur Shesh Proshner uni Kamalmani

Ek nombor jhagrate, tarka shiromani
Syantsente Bangladeshe bidrohini nari
Khunti chhede dhorechhen masta tarabari...8

(Of Sharatbabu’s Shesh Prashna she’s the Kamalmani –/ that belligerent shrew at the
head of the company; / a rebellious female in swampy Bengal, / she’s put down her stirrer
to swing the scabbard over all)

Ashapurna Devi did acknowledge that Saratchandra Chattopadhyay had been more
perceptive than most male novelists in portraying the inner lives of women.9 But in
Ashapurna’s own writing, the language in which women express their authentic being is
far more incisive; the articulation of their intellectual striving far surpasses
Saratchandra’s authorial compassion in the mordant universality of its appeal. Having
conceived the character of Satyabati as a radical critic of nineteenth century social
practices, and yet as a woman more familial and domesticated than Kamalmani (the
protagonist of Saratchandra’s novel The Last Question), Ashapurna then went on to
reconstruct the ‘historical credibility’ of her social settings.10 Ultimately it is the familiar
historical background that gives Satyabati’s character its timeless radiance, because she
will not be confined within or measured by the standards of her conservative upbringing.

We can try to explain the continuity in the three volumes of Ashapurna’s trilogy in
several ways. In terms of the serial order of their publication they may appear to be a saga
of three generations set in the background of certain historical shifts in social attitudes to
women – as Ashapurna herself was fond of observing; they are “the portraits of three
women in the backdrop of three ages”.11 But if we consider the trilogy as a premeditated
magnum opus, we must also remember that Ashapurna thought of reconstructing the
narratives of an earlier generation of women only after she set out to recollect the
domestic struggles of the woman she had most closely observed in her childhood – her
mother.12

Shortly before the publication of Pratham Pratisruti Ashapurna had written and
published some short stories around the characters which reappear in her second narrative
– Subarnalata. Much later, these stories were published in the form of a novel named
Aangshik (A Partial Account).13 Subarnalata is the only volume in the trilogy which
Ashapurna calls “a life-story.” Short vignettes of that life story appear in some of her
autobiographical reminiscences, like ‘Chhelebelar Utsabe Borodin’ (‘Christmas among
our childhood festivities’). The “contradictory winds” in the family14 which a child begins
to apprehend early in life are sometimes the most unforgettable impressions of the gender
war that a child of either sex learns to contend with. Perhaps it is this immediacy of
experience conveyed so magnificently in Subarnalata that makes the volume particularly
endearing to the common reader. In Bakul Katha, however, we are forbidden to find any
trace of the writer’s personal experience in her participatory observation. Its protagonist,
Bakul – we are told – has been deferring the writing of her own story year after year,
until it gets mingled as the particles of pollen dust in the tales of the more-than-ones
(“renu renu kore mishiye diyechhe anek-der galper modhye”, p. 101). These stories have
now become the spinster writer Anamika Devi’s “hundreds of sons and daughters” (p.
226). So we are explicitly warned against looking for any continuity of narrative
development or personal evolution in Ashapurna’s trilogy, as we might find in
Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s famous trilogy which is primarily a bildungsroman of
Apu. Nor can we read Ashapurna’s trilogy altogether as a family saga in the way that we
do Gajendrakumar Mitra’s trilogy (Kolkatar Kachhei, Upakanthe and Poush Faguner
Pala), which was written around the same time as Ashapurna’s. Through the progression
of events from one novel to another, Ashapurna’s three women protagonists are
ceaselessly decentred, and this is what strikes us as the structural dis/continuity of
Ashapurna’s trilogy.
Viewed in another light that might focus on the narrative strategy of the trilogy, we can
see at once that its unity of narration is achieved by making the third generation exponent
Bakul the single narrator of three narratives which ostensibly unfold, to a retrospective
gaze, the inevitable continuity in the lives of their protagonists. But Anamika Devi, the
author, is not the same as Bakul the narrator, or even Bakul the displaced protagonist of
the third novel. Unlike Apu, Bakul merely serves as a frame which contains the narrative
flow and separates its artificial continuum from the dangerous flux of life. Bakul is not so
much a witness to the events as she is a self-circumscribed side character. No less
precarious is the role of Anamika Devi herself. Not only does she assume a studied
distance from Bakul – her personal and familial alter-ego – but she also disappears
behind the mask of the anonymous authoress who claims to have recovered the lost diary
of Bakul that Anamika did her best to suppress. This act of sympathetic retrieval,
however, does not necessarily give the anonymous writer the authority to use its materials
at her will; and she must, repeatedly in the third novel, fall back upon the perspectives of
both Bakul and Anamika Devi to get her prerogative of interpretation justified. Indeed,
the capacity to make a distinction between the stories of her narrative and the facts of
Bakul’s records is not within her grip at all. This may suggest Ashapurna’s own
awareness of the difficulties for women attempting to rewrite history as the biographies
of other women, but it also shows how many different narrative voices jostle against each
other in the process of arriving at a cohesive ordering of experience as narrative.

The retrospective connection of the three narratives, as Ashapurna herself observed, does
not derive from their individual incompleteness, and their sequence is not so much a
structural imperative as “the necessity of binding the ideas of a particular age with those
of its immediate future”.15 So there is another aspect to the fragmentation of narrative
voices that we find in Ashapurna’s trilogy. A transition from one age, and from one novel
to another, occurs in the overarching authorial self. The authorial self that represents
Satyabati in Pratham Pratisruti adopts the perspective of transparent reverence and
detachment of a historian attempting hagiography with some difficulty, in that it is never
critical or judgmental in its interpretation of even the most eccentric actions of Satyabati.
In representing Subarnalata, the authorial self mediates between the personal gaze of a
daughter embarrassed out of her wits, and the perspective of an older woman speaking
with the social authority of her secure position within the patriarchal establishment, from
where she can repeatedly claim with impunity that Subarnalata is not mad. And in Bakul
Katha the authorial self has clearly transcended the limits of her earlier protagonists’
personal struggles, yet represents her alter ego as a tamed, if not more matured,
philosophical beneficiary of their hopeless resistance. Altogether, Ashapurna’s narrative
strategy in her trilogy is a matchless exposition of the collective identity of the feminine
self.

This connection between one novel and its sequel, as Ashapurna elaborated in her
narratives, is above all the consciousness of a matrilineal inheritance. In Ashapurna’s
trilogy we may find a resonance of what the Black feminists have described as ‘maternal
narrative.’ If the third novel, Bakul Katha, makes us wonder how Bakul could have
become so submissive, and whether it does not take away the message of protest in
Ashapurna’s style, it also suggests that Bakul’s successful career as a writer is indebted to
the doomed resistance of her mother and grandmother. When Ashapurna began to think
of writing about her mother whom she considered the greatest influence on her choice of
a literary vocation, she felt that she “must write first about the era that came before”.16
The compulsion that informs the feeling that she ‘must write’ is reminiscent of the French
feminist imperative, except that in Ashapurna’s novels it is fraught with layers of irony.
Bakul may be an acclaimed writer, but Sabita, the colourless housewife who wants Bakul
to get her writing published, is also caught in the tragic compulsion to write her own
story – just as Subarnalata burns with the desire to see her name in print. Their
painstaking compilation of the episodes of their lives in diaries and notebooks, sheltered
away from the unkind gaze of interlopers, is brought to an end by the same chastising
fate. They are consumed in the fire of the women’s sublime and senseless egotism which
exhausts itself in the face of patriarchal vengeance. Ashapurna’s third generation
protagonist seems to have internalized the lessons of Virginia Woolf – that a woman can
never be a successful writer as long as she is a “goddess of anger” (Pratham Pratisruti, p.
472). A great writer must aspire to be neither a man nor a woman in feelings. Bakul has
acquired the art of dispassionate writing only because the lessons were learned by her
maternal progenitors who never knew how to attain it. And with the necessary diminution
of her ego, Bakul has ceased to be a valid protagonist of her own novel. Matrilineal
inheritance, as Ashapurna suggests, is not quite an evolutionary unfolding of woman’s
consciousness; it involves sudden mutations, which can either be seen as a new accrual of
efficient adaptability or as a sacrifice of earlier colossal traits.

Conscious of this acquired forgetting of the vitally personal trajectory of her growth,
Bakul tries to make an ineffectual return to the repressed desire of telling her own story at
the end of the third novel when she knows that she has no woman successor to write it
out. A woman’s narrative is cyclical, after all – in the same way that Anamika Devi reads
in the story of human progress an insidious cyclical plot. Satyabati’s father had taught her
to be a human being before she became a woman. Many years later, Satyabati leaves her
family to go back to her father because she knows that it is as difficult to be true to
human ideals as it is for a woman to uphold them in her life. But in Subarnalata Satyabati
comes back from the dead in the epistolary advice to her daughter that for a woman it
matters more to keep her family intact than to retain her human integrity. Confined within
the four walls of her home, Subarnalata longs to view the world outside; but by the time
she moves into a house with a south-facing balcony, she is too spent to cherish its
openness. When she steps outside the house on her own initiative for the first time to go
on a pilgrimage, her husband Prabodh contrives to bring her back even before she has
boarded the train. It adds to the structural significance of the novel Subarnalata that its
middle episode has no other relevance in Subarnalata’s life except that her God
“suddenly brought a new wave to float her away for a few days at least, and did not send
her back to the kitchen beside the big pot of rice (p. 128).” Inevitably, such a novel can
begin and end only with Subarnalata’s death.

Although Bakul had promised her dead mother that she would write her mother’s stories
anew, the cyclical life history of Subarnalata draws attention to yet another feature of
feminine writing. A woman cannot write her autobiography, no matter how desperately
she feels the need to write it. Women do not, they can not, and they will not, write
autobiographies. Parul’s husband, a man who is otherwise attentive to his wife’s needs,
cannot bear to see her writing love poems or making entries in her diary. Bakul knows
that there is a world of difference between her own words and Anamika Devi’s made-up
stories – “those words which, to be written down in a notebook, are trivial, pallid,
monotonous (Subarnalata, p. 334.)” Or, “In the casual respite of negligence and
carelessness, many episodes in Subarnalata’s life got lost (forever).” (Subarnalata, p.
219) Besides, the very source of a woman’s autobiography is unremarkable; there is
nothing in it that does not arouse the laughter of ridicule or pose a danger to the well-
guarded privacy of her personal relations. To remind us of these hurdles in the way of a
woman’s writing, the method of narrative expansion in Subarnalata is deliberately halted
and erratic; it carries all the imprints of a woman’s uncertainty and confusion about the
worth of women’s writing. In Bakul Katha Ashapurna makes use of women’s journal
excerpts and fragments of poetry, intended only for intimate eyes, to uncover the depths
that remain unarticulated by its authorial voice. Namita decides to enter the public world
as a showgirl because she has only taken account of the bad investments piling up in the
ledger book of her life. All these instances serve to justify Bakul’s decision not to write
about her self; for to “paint up one’s own story in gaudy colours to make it look attractive
(Bakul Katha, p. 287)” merely signifies a woman’s harlotry in attemping to write her life
in her own words. It is not the same as taking one’s life in one’s own hands, as Anamika
Devi is perfectly able to do. But in trying to evade that trap, Anamika Devi’s private life
gets swamped with the celebratory advances of men, to which she must respond by
churning out an endless flow of lectures on demand. Anamika Devi is not allowed for a
moment to forget that she is a celebrity. On the other hand, “what is so special about
Subarnalata, that her day to day entries in the diary should be preserved in a bound
notebook, and be opened in a sequential order” to the reader’s gaze? “Subarnalata can
only be glimpsed in the tattered pages of an unbound exercise copy” (Subarnalata, p.
274) — occasionally, evanescently, and only after she has given her best to the family.

Any significant reading of such memoirs, therefore, suggests Ashapurna, can only be
attempted by women. When her earlier work was admired for its masculine style,
Ashapurna felt deeply suspicious, not only about the accolade, but about an inherent
anomaly in her power of representation. “Perhaps what gave them this idea was that in
what I used to write earlier – the informing ‘I’ was a man. That is to say, I think I
observed the world with the gaze of a man,” said Ashapurna.17 Although her trilogy
begins with excerpts from Bakul’s khata (notebook), it ends with Bakul’s katha (the
words of Bakul), and leaves the reader with an untold hint that after Bakul, there will be
no woman survivor to sing her gatha (heroic legend), even though she is committed to
memorializing the struggles of Shampa’s life. Shampa has inherited the spirit of Bakul’s
predecessors, and, like them, she is capable of bridging the gap between tradition and
modernity, but with her decision to be reconciled to her bourgeois parents (while her aunt
Bakul watches the scene of reunion with the anguished feeling that Shampa will
henceforth be lost to her), Shampa forfeits the right to represent Bakul. When Ashapurna
was asked by an interviewer why women writers of earlier generations are often
forgotten, Ashapurna replied, “It is the responsibility of men to commemorate writers.
And they don’t remember women at all because they have never read their works.”18 It
may be a little unfair to say that men never read women’s writings; but what Ashapurna
might have meant was that they do not – and perhaps can not – read women writing in the
way that women can.

Ashapurna’s trilogy is presented as the fulfilling of Bakul’s obligation to pay back the
debts of her father’s foremothers – i.e. her paternal grandmother and great grandmother –
before she can come into her own as a woman. On the face of it, this gesture may appear
to be an emulation of the Hindu patriarchal rite of tarpan in which men have the
exclusive right to commemorate their male ancestors. But the narrative strategy of
Ashapurna reveals its subversive intent when paternal grandmothers like Elokeshi or
Muktakeshi are symbolically invested with the power of patriarchal authority and rites of
oppression, while the mothers of commemorating daughters appear to be possessed by a
formidable inner strength that makes them the most unlikely victims of oppression – from
the points of view of their husbands as well as mothers-in-law. Again, it establishes
Ashapurna’a trilogy as a maternal narrative which addresses itself to women readers in a
subtext that runs counter to the narrator’s declared ritual of reminiscence. It is the lost
subjectivity of the mother’s mother that animates the images of all the women worth
remembering. Ashapurna herself believed that “some overwhelming, uncontrollable,
relentless force takes possession of an individual to achieve its own expression. Literature
is its manifested form.”19

Like Jane Austen, Ashapurna had an unflinching awareness of the limits of her range. But
even without trying to step outside her known world, Ashapurna was able to stretch the
web of her words far beyond the narrative requirements of style, transcending nineteenth
century conventions of social realism with a magical touch that was entirely her own.
Ashapurna avoids descriptive prose, especially the observation of nature and scenic
details, without which a male novelist can hardly hope to achieve a masterpiece. She is
not adept at the “kite-flying method” of letting out and drawing in the threads of a
narrative, in which Bimal Mitra, to her great admiration, was particularly skilled.20 In her
comments on the style of Gajendrakumar Mitra, Ashapurna had praised its “faultless
cohesion of idea, idiom, and description,” noting with approval the dense, compact
texture of his novels, “which was never loose or slovenly in construction.”21 But
Ashapurna steered clear of the tendency to emulate any of them.

Critics have often admired Ashapurna’s dialogic style of writing. Again, one might say
that Ashapurna’s style approaches Jane Austen’s in its wonderful modulations of
argument and counterargument. But Ashapurna’s individuality in Bengali prose style lies
in her extraordinary use of what is called the ‘free indirect discourse’ of psychological
realism in European novels, i.e. a style of third-person narration which uses some
characteristics of third-person along with the essence of first-person direct speech. The
most remarkable thing about Ashapurna’s way of using it is the occasional conflation of
social conversation with interior monologue, which leaves a reader guessing about the
agency of an utterance, and even whether a remark is to be read as an utterance or
regarded as a pointer to the silence that surrounds it. This permits the narrator to alternate
between identification and detachment, and to speak in many voices (and silences) about
the irregularities as well as the social conformities of characters. Sometimes the narrator
invites the readers to quietly and cautiously turn their ears to the inaudible sobs that
women suppress in their hearts; at other times she directs us to their follies and excesses
which only the reader is expected to understand and forgive. Not even the narrator can
jeopardize her social position to risk such dangerous empathy. Despite, or perhaps
because of the narrator’s satirical commentary on the characters, the reader is provided
with a rudder to steer through the unfathomed depths beneath the tempestuous violence
of words.

Deliciously colloquial and idiomatic, the spoken words in Ashapurna Devi’s novels are
also constitutive of her exceptional style – for Ashapurna knew that there was a vast
difference between a storyteller and a writer of fiction. “The technique of telling the story
is most important,” she said in one of her interviews, “because people are far better
listeners than readers.”22 But beyond this process of listening through reading (if we are
readers enough not to be entirely arrested by the charm of her spoken words), we begin to
see the distinct pattern of a web emerging in each of Ashapurna’s novels, where the
protagonist is trapped in a cross movement of the insurmountable instincts of her nature,
and the cultural imperatives that are ineffectually thrust upon her. The spinning of this
web is literally enacted through Ashapurna’s performative utterances. The entire
narrative of Subarnalata, for example, is spun out like an inextricable spider web, in
which a self-destructive rationality gets caught in the contrary senselessness of irrational
social habits, gradually poisoning and paralyzing the sensibility of the eponymous
heroine. As Ashapurna observed about the defects of contemporary writing, an excess of
sympathy between author and character would fail to produce such an effect.23

Ashapurna often claimed that her novels were psychological in their approach to human
predicaments, but Ashapurna’s psychological exposition of characters is not based on the
Freudian model as explicitly as in Manik Bandyopadhyay’s novels. What Ashapurna
understood as psychology was more in the line of feminist theories of women’s writing,
including her allusion to the web-like structure of her narratives. “Man is helpless not
only against his environment, but he is also vulnerable to the impulses of his own heart.
He does not know how his unconscious mind directs his conscious being; he does not
realize how he is incessantly spinning a web around himself to bring about his own
entrapment.”24 The web of Ashapurna’s narrative often extends beyond the frontiers of
the real to encompass a transcendental space of ironic incongruities. The playful God
who rules over the fate of her female protagonists refuses to resolve their problems,
occasionally inciting them to entangle themselves even more hopelessly in their own
behaviour patterns. Yet that God is for them an indispensable interlocutor. Like
Ashapurna, her protagonists have grown into the habit of conversing alone with God.
Suspecting that God may, after all, be the ultimate appointee of patriarchal order,
Ashapurna’s heroines nonetheless find that they are indebted to him, and repeatedly turn
to him as the only silent listener to their complaints about the ways of men. It is only
when they turn away from God in their moments of incomprehension that they discover
their relationship with the earth. Nor do they learn to sympathize with their mothers until
it is too late, when that mother has become a shadowy presence beyond their grasp. In
trying to recollect the memory of the mother, one protagonist devotes herself to the
raising of a fallen woman’s daughter as a woman after her own heart (Pratham
Pratisruti); another discovers in the wife of her renegade lover a worthier object of love
(Bakul Katha).

Ashapurna’s style, like that of many other women, employs metonymic images more
freely than metaphors. She does not attempt to present the actions of her characters with
an air of objective detachment, nor does she offer any causal account of their moral
progression. And yet her writing suggests metonymic directives for evaluating characters,
which are not imposed as binding upon readers. When Bakul asks her sister Parul for her
book of poems, Parul rises to fetch it, but finds that in the darkness of their ineffable
communion the lights have gone out due to a power failure.

“Look at that,” Parul broke into a childish ripple of laughter, “That’s the symbol
of my life and art! The lights went out!” (Bakul Katha, p. 215)

In the same way, Namita’s death becomes a metonymic image of her absurd desire to
become the subject of a novel. Anamika Devi is cast into a sea of doubts when Namita,
on her determined journey out of the confinements of domesticity, looks up the author
who had refused to fictionalize her life. How might Anamika Devi have concluded the
novel if she had chosen to write about Namita? “Would I have broken her wings and
thrown her down on a freeway or moorland? ... It is possible that I would have given
exactly that kind of an ending to Namita in my novel. (Bakul Katha, p. 155)” Anamika
cannot evade the pangs of responsibility when she does come to know of Namita’s end.
Was it because she had rejected Namita’s request to write a novel about her insignificant
life that “Namita made up her mind to supply a plot that was more complicated”? “But
will Anamika Devi sit down to write a novel with such a complicated plot? (p. 293)”

Metonymic events also function as moral directives in Ashapurna’s novels. In Bakul

Katha a common housewife sells her ornaments to publish a slim volume of her life’s
works, and, when she suffers endless mockery and reprisals for her thoughtlessness,
throws “all her life’s precious possessions into the fire” (p. 262). Anamika Devi makes it
very clear that she has no illusions about the literary worth of the books that were burned
to ashes; she is only concerned with the immensity of the loss. But the same event in
Subarnalata is metonymically represented as the dreaded climax of a proud woman’s
abjection. The printer’s devil that laughs at her from the pages of cheap almanac paper is
only a variation of the jests that God and her fate have always played on her; perhaps it is
also a mocking reminder that her writing does not deserve any better print. Again, as
Ashapurna Devi herself observed, the metonymic events of a character’s life seem to
have some logic of their own. “Sometimes the events go out of my reckoning to keep the
character right, which means, to keep a character as I want it to be. Often the events that I
have in mind change a lot. Sometimes I feel that I do not control them; they go their own
way on a will of their own.”25

Shortly after writing Bakul Katha Ashapurna Devi had alluded to another kind of web.
“Now that they are out of their cages, are not the birds caught palpitating in a new trap set
by the most omnivorous hunter? Is not the hunter called modernity – in the tinsel glitter
of whose net, not only women, but all of society, literature, art and civilization are
struggling and suffocating?”26 Occasionally Ashapurna blamed the “irresistible impact of
western lifestyle”27 for this malady. But inevitably as it seems to me, Ashapurna also
fashioned a language to write a woman’s body in response to this ‘modernity’, although
she may not have known the French feminist dictum of ‘writing the body’ and may not
have intended it as an exploration of women’s sexuality. Here again, we can locate
Ashapurna’s departure from male practices of writing. Shampa, in Bakul Katha,
complains to her aunt about men’s voyeuristic style of representing women’s bodies: “It
seems that the men of letters can only see young men writhing with the agony of the age;
but did anyone ever notice that young women feel it too? All that the literary men know
is that women have anguishes of the body – they suffer no other pain. It’s shocking, it’s
disgusting – it simply sets my brain on fire!” Tactfully evading this charge to protect
contemporary male writers, Anamika Devi mildly rebukes Shampa for being “rustic,
outdated” (p. 107). But Ashapurna seems to have addressed this issue in her different
project of writing the body, and doing it with no affront to traditional Indian values even
when the catchword of the day was ‘sexual liberation’. Asked to define the limits of
realism in literature Ashapurna had quietly observed: “What’s more real than the human
body? But do we expose it uncovered to the eye of an observer?”28

It may be worthwhile to compare Ashapurna’s style of writing a woman’s body with

Gajendrakumar Mitra’s way of writing the female body to avoid turning it into an object
of the male gaze. In Kolkatar Kachhei, for example, Gajendrakumar attempts what is
undoubtedly laudable and difficult for a male writer – to write a woman’s body from the
inside. “After returning from outside Shyama fell prostrate with pain. What a sharp
unbearable spasm in the stomach – it felt like someone was ripping the flesh off her
entrails with a pair of pincers. (p. 25)” The sensation is not sufficiently internalized in
Gajendrakumar’s description, which needs an external agency of reference (‘it felt like
someone’) to validate his female protagonist’s experience of pain. In contrast, Ashapurna
is able to transform the irritation of interrupted thought into the agony of a tortured body
quite effortlessly in a description that fuses the brutalized mind and body of her female
subject in Bakul Katha – both indiscriminately subjected to the social pressures of
coercion: “Nothing more could be written. The telephone shrilled. Just as it always does –
dragging you by the hair from the depths of thought to knock you down in the open
courtyard. (p. 172)” When Subarnalata is about to deliver her first child she ‘curls up’ in
pain but does not stop badgering her mother-in-law with questions about the efficacy of
unsanitary customs to be observed at childbirth. In the mounting tension of the moment,
Subarnalata’s labour pain becomes less unbearable than Muktakeshi’s anxiety,
anticipating another battle of wits with her sharp-tongued daughter-in-law. “Having
pricked herself on a barb of the bamboo cane she was honing, Muktakeshi was struck
dumb” (Subarnalata, p. 34), and at the audacity of Subarna’s last words, all the nerves of
her sister-in-law Umashashi “applied in unison for a leave (p. 35).”

Nor did Ashapurna Devi’s ‘traditionalism’ stand in her way of engaging with the
differences in male and female sexualities. Gajendrakumar writes: “With increasing age,
husband and wife grew more attached to each other to be sure, but the insults and abuses
heaped on Shyama were not one whit the less for that matter (Kolkatar Kachhei, p. 14).”
Ashapurna goes deeper into the terms of such mutual attachment between a husband who
wants to make love to his wife shortly after beating her, and a wife who is the mother of
his three children – but in the prime of her youth and exceptionally desirable: “Let us
leave unsaid those strange words of flattery that a lustful man can utter in the dead of
night. And what can Subarna do to resist them, except to wish that she were dead and her
bones buried in the earth? (Subarnalata, pp. 60-61)” No one but Ashapurna Devi could
have shown with such superb economy that a humiliated wife who consents to her
husband’s advances in the privacy of the domestic space may not, after all, be attached to
the man in the same way as he is to her.

The rhetorical questions directed to the reader in Ashapurna’s novels have an open-
endedness that leaves the reader free to interpret them as the author’s invitation to
participate actively in the story, especially by offering opinion about a character’s action
or the possible outcome of an event. Ashapurna forges a feminine style of writing in her
trilogy by repeatedly soliciting the advice of the reader and keeping up an illusion of
dialogue as democratic interaction between reader and author. After all, literature playing
the role of “the second maker of destiny”29 cannot consciously substitute itself for God.
Then why should the author pretend to an omniscience she never had to begin with?
Ashapurna’s most successful technique of popular appeal also had a philosophy behind it,
to which Ashapurna alludes in a riddle that may not be as simple as it looks:

Lekhak thaken apon ghare

Apon ghare pathak
Dui nayake chalie jan
adrishyo ek natak

...

Tobe achhen antarale

Arek mahajan
Abaha sangeeter dhara
Dharen anukkhon

Lekhak pathak dui nayakei

Tanr kachhete rhini
Jabab din to henyalitar
Bolun to ke tini?30

(The author lives in a room of his own,

The reader in a room that’s far away;
Yet these two heroes, all unknown,
Engage each other in an unseen play.
...

But there is one behind the wings

To whom they owe their mutual time;
For without him who might have played
Background music so sublime?

Author and reader are both in debt

To him who holds their interest fast.
Answer me this riddle straight,
Can you identify him at last?)

The answer, again, depends on the attitude we bring to read Ashapurna Devi. For a
traditionalist, the unequivocal answer would be God; but from another point of view,
might it not be the publisher too?
1
Ashapurna Devi, Presidential Address at Banga Sahitya Sammelan (Siliguri, April 1972), Aar ek Ashapurna, p. 144
2
Ashapurna Devi, ‘Ja Hay Tai Aami Likhi’ – an interview, Korak, pp. 190-91. Ashapurna made this remark in the context
of explaining that she had access to other literatures only through Bengali translation, but avidly read such translations
wherever she could find them. Reading world literature, however, made Ashapurna even more convinced that “whatever the
variations in environment, time, locality or character type, all human beings were the same inside.”
3
Ibid., p. 189; Tarashankar Bandyopadhay’s comment on Ashapurna’s early stories and novels, quoted in ‘Trija Ashapurna’
by Soma Sen, Korak, p. 126; Rajshekhar Basu’s letter to Ashapurna Devi, dated 20.2.53, Korak, p.186.
4
Ashapurna Devi, ‘Ja Hay’, Korak, p. 196
5
Ashapurna Devi, Presidential Address at Nikhil Bharat Banga Sahitya Sammelan (Cuttack, 26 December, 1964), Aar ek
Ashapurna, p. 135
6
‘Ja Hay’, Korak, p. 196
7
Ashapurna Devi, Presidential Address at Nikhil Bharat Banga Sahitya Sammelan (Delhi, 1989), Aar ek Ashapurna, p. 156
8
Banaphul, ‘Aashirbad’, Korak, p. 133
9
‘Ja Hay’, Korak, p. 196
10
Korak, pp. 196-97.
11
Tapasya Ghosh, ‘A-kapat Satyabati’, Korak, p. 104
12
‘Ja Hay’, Korak, p. 197. Elsewhere Ashapurna acknowledges that her mother was the inspiration behind her writing
(‘Sangsar O Lekhika Jibane Aami Paripurna’, p. 231).
13
‘Ja Hay’, Korak, pp. 196-97
14
Ashapurna Devi, ‘Chhelebelar Utsabe Borodin’, Aar ek Ashapurna, p. 58
15
Alok Chakravarty, ‘“Subarnalata”: Haarie Jaoa, Na –Lekha Meyeder Itihaas’, Korak, p. 111
16
Ashapurna had this in mind while conceiving her first stories around the characters which would return in Subarnalata,
even before she had planned the first volume of her trilogy. ‘Ja Hay’, Korak, p. 197
17
Ibid., p. 189
18
Ibid., p. 200
19
Ashapurna Devi, Presidential Address (Siliguri, 1972), Aar ek Ashapurna, p. 144
20
Ashapurna Devi, ‘Nesha nay, pesha nay, lekhai janr jiban’, Korak, p. 250
21
Ashapurna Devi, ‘Gajendrakumarer Sahityakarma’, Aar ek Ashapurna, p. 124
22
Ashapurna Devi, ‘Nesha nay’, Korak, p. 251
23
Ashapurna Devi, “Apart from the tendency to hyper-realism, literature is now showing another trend of over indulgence.
We may call it hyper-empathy.” Nikhil Bharat Banga Sahitya Sammelan (Jamshedpur, 15 December, 1973) in Aar ek
Ashapurna, p. 152
24
Ashapurna Devi, ‘Aamar Sahitya Chinta’, Aar ek Ashapurna, p. 20
25
Ashapurna Devi, ‘Ja Dekhi, Tai Likhi’, Aar ek Ashapurna, p. 15
26
Ashapurna Devi, ‘Khela Theke Lekha’, Aar ek Ashapurna, p. 12
27
Ashapurna Devi, ‘Ja Dekhi’, p. 18 Ashapurna compares this with the kind of influence that western literature has always
exerted on Bengali literature.
28
Ibid. p. 19
29
Aar ek Ashapurna, p. 144. Cf. Bakul Katha, p. 156
30
Korak, p. 236

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Devi, Ashapurna, Pratham Paratisruti (Mitra and Ghosh, 1964; reprint, 2009)
Subarnalata (Mitra and Ghosh, 1965; reprint, 1997)
Bakul Katha (Mitra and Ghosh, 1974; reprint 2009)
Aar Ek Ashapurna (Mitra and Ghosh, 1994; reprint, 1998)
Bhaumick, Tapas (ed), Korak Sahitya Patrika (Ashapurna Devi Sankhya), Jan-April, 2009
Mitra, Gajendrakumar, Kolkatar Kachhei (1957, Mitra and Ghosh, pb. 1972; reprint, 2006)