Words to Win: The Making of Amar Jiban: A Modern Autobiography

Abstract

Published in 1868, Amar Jiban is the first autobiography by a Bengali woman, as well as among the earliest examples of the autobiographical genre in Bengali prose. It was an urge to read a medieval sacred text, dealing with the life of the god Krishna and his devotees, that drove Rashsundari Debi into acquiring literacy in secret. The text was important in that she needed to comprehend the meaning of those secret lives and their relationship to her own. This search for meaning inspired her to write her own life story. The interlocking themes of devotion and writing, of biography and autobiography thus constituted her sense of her own self and provided the axis around which the narrative revolves. The editor's reading is grounded in an understanding of the new social environment that generated possibilities of writing lives, of women's construction of the self through writing. She situates this work at the confluence of two distinct systems of patriarchy: the medieval convention of mystical piety which shaped her own ideology of faith; and the reformed Hinduism of the 19th century.

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