Between two worlds: Cultural Conditioning and Struggle for Identity in the Works of Nineteenth Century Bengali Women

Abstract

Human thoughts are largely shaped by cultural influences, and cultural conventions and values embedded in language of the race or clan coordinate the multiple subsystems of a larger societal organization. The fact that language, thought and socio-cultural dimensions are inexplicably intertwined, in a way indicates a deterministic perspective. Benjamin Lee Whorf in 'A Linguistic Consideration of Thinking in Primitive Communities' observes, "The problem of thought and thinking in the native community is not purely and simply a psychological problem. It is quite largely cultural. It is moreover largely a matter of one especially cohesive aggregate of cultural phenomena that we call a language." The problematic of a profoundly linguistic base of culture emerges as Benjamin Whorf in 'The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behaviour to Language', jeopardizes the equal partnership of autocratic language and a dependent culture. If language itself hovers at the edge of continual flux and indeterminacy, the socio-cultural context of relevance and interpretative exercises in any given context, assume kaleidoscopic variety and generate intriguing questions. Interestingly enough GayatriChakrabortySpivak in her A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, refers to a cultural "foreclosure" signifying a colonial conditioning that recodes the colonized person's thought and literary endeavours, quite distinct from that of the original "native informant", rendering him/her "a blank, though generative of a text of cultural identity that only the West (or a Western model discipline) could inscribe." The linguistic paradigms are intriguing. A concomitant overt tension of the increasingly marginalized and self-consolidating new identity, thoroughly conditioned by the English linguistic bases of a new evolving culture and yet restricted by the native traditions and cultural norms, can be traced in the works of women of the nineteenth century. The woman exposed to Western cultural conditioning and yet restrained by the ingrained patriarchal traditional societal structures often traverse labyrinthine mazes in the quest of her true identity amidst the overlapping frontiers, through her poetic efforts in a language of the power-centre. How the "other", the colonized, educated, "emancipated" yet restrained women like Swarnakumaridevi ,Sarala Devi, and others negotiate the overt cultural tensions through their linguistic literary endeavours, offers intriguing prospects of investigation.