REPORT: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF INDIAN WOMAN
Introduction
The report is all about the experience Shudha Mazumdar went through in her life from childhood to adulthood. Shudha was a woman born at the turn of the century to Indian parents whose ideas on child rearing differed greatly. Her father, who was a wealthy Europeanized Zamindar, tried to instill Western values, while Shudha's mother emphasized the traditional, even going as far as arranging a marriage for her daughter when she was thirteen. This report will comprehensively and coherently discuss Shudha’s memoires focusing in her experiences as a woman from child hood to adulthood.
Despite the fact that it is extremely difficult to generalize the Indian women story from Shudha’s, it is prudent to note that it contributes greatly to a deeper understanding of Indian history, more so to the understanding of the perception and role of women in India. The story will also enable us to understand the social, political and the economic struggle that Indian women were going through during the twentieth century a time when the republic of India was in constant struggle to free themselves from the British rule.
It is clear from the story that Shudha respected the nineteenth-century reformers such as Rammohan Roy, Vidyasagar and Keshub Chandra Sen. This is because of their tireless effort to ensure that the place of women in the society was improved especially in a patriacho society like India and the Benguela village in particular. Shudha accepted the traditional guardianship of men of the father in youth, the husband in maturity, and the son in old age.
Shudha’s autobiography expresses her awareness of being a female. She is narrating how she has been taught while still young how females were inferior to the males. She explains how her child hood was spent in observing’vitras. (Shudha 5) meaning to get a good husband. She is also narrating how she was being taught it was ‘a sin to displease one’s father and the husband.
Shudha is seen naturally considering women as a second sex. She outlines how she was not allowed to eat meat even though her brothers ate it. In the book we realise that Shudha’s father supported her frequently in all make. However, her father doesn’t seem to be in terms with the mother’s advice and this makes her mother to withdraw her from the Christian school matters. Her mother never objected her husband but issued him with a strong advice that he should adhere to.
As the daughter of a high chaste, wealthy landowner, she was prepared from childhood to think of her father in laws house. We later see that Shudha’s marriage began when she was of about eleven years of age. Although at that age her grandmother considered her to be young old enough for marriage, in real sense going with the standards of the time she was still very young. It is prudent to note that in the twentieth century, child betrothal was the norm of the day. The marriage act of 1872 had set a minimum age of females at fourteen years. However, this only applied to the individuals who did not belong to any India’s major faiths for instance, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Judaism.
Like many women of her generation, she lived within the role prescribed for women and tried to do what she could to improve the quality of life for women through education and medical care, and through efforts to fight against the harshness of social prejudice. She was sharing some of these social prejudices, and on those occasions where her progressive notions of what would be right were opposed by senior women, either her mother or her mother-in-law, she deferred to their wishes (Shudha 1989).
Despite the fact that a few Indians rejoiced that India had finally had a marriage law that included a minimum age of marriage, prohibited polygamy and allowed for widow remarriage and intercaste marriage, it is prudent to note that the law had little immediate impact on the majority of the population. Later, the age of consent controversy focused attention on the minimum age for sexual intercourse with a female married or unmarried. It was until 1891 that the penal code was changed. From that point in time, twelve rather ten became the consent age. (Shudha 1989).
Most conservative elements of the society defended the earlier age of marriage, it was crucial to note that slightly older age became fashionable especially to those who considered themselves progressive. During this time, marriage was the only mans way through which women would acquire status in the society. In a nut shell, it was described as being the only sacrament for Indian women.
Shudha describes the experiences behind her own marriage which she partially understands. It is important to note that whether the girl-bride was to go and live in her husband’s home differed from area to area. For instance, in Bengal village, it was a requirement according to their culture that the new bride moves to her father in law’s home.
Therefore, going with Shudha’s perception, marriage simply means isolating her from her father’s house and moving to a new place where she had to summon all of her childish wisdom and to come into reality with new challenges that she was to face in her marriage. However, Shudha was lucky because her husband and his family were loving and considerate. Her adjustments were however prompted by her constant travel to her father’s home and the camaraderie that was established by her husband’s younger brother.
We realise that after Shudha has been married, she has to live with her in laws simply because her husband was still in school. In her marriage village, she decided to study the Bengali literature, music, English grammar and household management. Her teacher was however her husband and her didis- the women of the neighbourhood whom she regarded as her elder sisters.
It is important to note that despite the fact that Shudha’s beliefs and practices fit into the “timeless appeal of the pativrata” (Malhotra 118), it is surprising that her lifestyle was majorly influenced by men in her life, her father, husband and brothers. The influence enabled Shudha to acquire British lifestyle and feminist practice. This is said to have made her balance between her father’s British modernized views with her mother and the traditional roles for women.
In two years of her marriage, she became pregnant and bore a son. This raises her status in the society because childbearing was seen as being the next logical step in a woman’s life. According to Indians cultures, bearing a son establishes woman’s Identity, gives her status in the community and proves to her husband, her family and the community at large that the woman had become of age.
It was while in her marriage life that she became civic-minded and began to take interest in social work. A woman known as the Saroj Nalini Dutt who was the daughter of Brojendranath and who was one of the first Indians to pass the highly competitive Indian service exams and who was the wife of the District Magistrate when Shudha and her husband were transferred to Suri in Birbhum district. It is Saroj Nalini who brought Shudha into a newly organized mahia samiti meaning women organization. At the beginning, this was a social gathering, but even that was a radical departure for “refined” women who were expected to keep to their homes. Gradually the women began to take on civic responsibilities, uniting in order to secure medical and educational facilities for women. Despite the work being difficult for Shudha, she finds it rewarding as her husband moved from place to place, and she was working tirelessly in order to set up mahila samitis.
As Shudha Mazumdar was maturing she grew spiritually. It is important to note that as a child she had learnt to perform bratas “vows” (Shudha 15) and participated in the many ceremonies celebrated in her family’s household. These rituals were punctuated by pilgrimages: short ones—to bathe in a tributary of the holy Ganges River; and long ones—to the holy city of Benares. As a child she was moved by many of the rituals performed; as an adult she began to express her cynicism about rituals devoid of meaning. In these memoirs Shudha writes about her transcendental experiences. Gradually the rituals she had participated in as a child acquired new meaning as they merged with her new sense of the ultimate. The ritual is believed to have been performed simply to protect her husband and to prevent her from being widowed at early days of her marriage.
In the years covered by these memoirs, Shudha experienced firsthand the changes that were affecting middle-class Indian women. Female education, the end of seclusion, the integration of women into political activities, women’s activities in both social work and social reform, women’s entry into respectable professional roles, birth control, dress reform, and increased age of marriage, nuclear families, and compasionate marriage were all contributing to what journalists at the time called “the new woman.” The nineteenth century saw the introduction of these changes, but it was not until the first decades of the twentieth century that the middle class pursued them in earnest.
She is seen working to improve the lives of other women in the society something she count do before. Improving the lives of fellow women and children became her lifelong career. As Shudha’s own family increased, so did her family responsibilities. In turn, she was called upon to aid in the search for and securing of possible brides, to care for ailing relatives, and to take part in important family ceremonies. As these “extended family” responsibilities increased, so did her responsibilities for her own family: the education of her sons, household and financial management, and entertaining her husband’s official guests. In this context, her patriotism and interest in politics were placed on the back burner. While Congress was holding meetings and activists were demonstrating, Shudha, always the respectable matron, took on the responsibilities of finding a bride for her husband’s younger brother and caring for sick children. Had she been a college student at this time she might have become a Congress Volunteer, but even Gandhi was insisting that young mothers fulfill their responsibilities to their children rather than undertake political work. According to (Tryambakayajvan 260), Shudha can now be described as being a perfect woman unlike the time she was being married.
Despite Shudha considering men as her worst enemy to an extent that she even calls them wild animal, it is surprising that she is married at the age of thirteen to a man who was in Bengal civil service. We realise that the man persuades her to give up ‘Purdah’ and learn to read and write in order to become a perfect wife. Shudha later became a social worker, adapted new ways of life but it is surprising that she never abandoned her traditional values that she had acquired at her parent’s home. Later her husband died but it is unfortunate that she defied the social norms and wore the coloured Saris and attended meetings a broad against the culture of the society.
CONCLUSION
According to (Bell Hooks 2), it is apparent that pitting women against men and enshrining individual autonomy are no longer central issues. Focussing on the story of Shudha and both the women from her family and the ones she came to know in the course of her life Shudha Mazumdar truly helps us see that the “personal is political,” that women’s lives are irrevocably intertwined with responsibilities for nurturance, caring for the sick, and ensuring family ties, and that liberation is too complex to explain away in terms of individual autonomy.
It is crucial to note that Shudha experienced mixed life because of the conflicting demands from her father and mother and other family members. While her father wanted her to be educated at a convent school, her great aunt worried that the child was still not betrothed at age eight. Shudha and her young husband fell in love after marriage. With the freedom to develop both the romantic and companionate sides of their relationship, they became deeply attached to one another. Although the somewhat stubborn and impetuous young woman had a mind of her “own and a sharp tongue,” she learnt to act her “proper roles” as daughter-in-law in a prominent household, wife of a district magistrate, and responsible. It is however painful that her husband later died. She is seen ignoring their culture and travelling abroad against the customs of their community.
References
Shudha M. (1989). Memoirs of an Indian Woman. Amonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., ISBN-13: 978-1563245527. Pg 1-
Malhotra, Anshu. "Controlling Women: Recreating the Pativrata Wife as the Ideal Upper Caste Woman." Malhotra, Anshu. Gender, Caste, and Religious Identities: Restructuring Class in Colonial Punjab. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 116-163.
Hooks, B. (1984). Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press.
Tryambakayajvan. (1989). The Perfect Wife (Stridharmapaddhati). Trans. I. Julie Leslie. London: Penguin Books, 246-272, 304-314.
