Fiction as Resistance: Perspectives from Colonial and Contemporary Bengal

Abstract

The proposed paper will focus on fictional literaturepenned by women incolonial and contemporary Bengal and see such fiction as resistance to patriarchy. It will examine the practice and practicalities of writing in a milieu that was and to a great extent still is inhospitable to women’s intellectual development and creativity, and also reveal the diverse strategies adopted by women to subvert patriarchal attempts to constrict their creativity and control their lives and leisure.Writing fiction moreover, appears to serve for womenthe purpose of a safety valve for the release of the pent-up frustrations, agonies and unfulfilled cravings. Though their fiction they have soughtto resolve their inner dilemmas and the questions that plague them. Finally,women novelists often tend to write their own lives into their fiction, merging their own selves with those of their women protagonists, their protagonists becoming their alter ego. Their fiction then becomes the vehicle through which they protest the oppression that they had been subjected to in their personal lives and also tell the world how they either chose the path of compromise and subservience or overcame odds, broke shackles, and eventually assumed control of their own lives.The paper will especially focus on Ashalata Singha’s JeevanDhara, Maitreyee Devi’s Na Hanyate, Mandakranta Sen’s Jhanptaal, Tilottoma Majumdar’s Ektara, and Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s Sankhini and will see howthese novelists sought to pen a bildungsroman of the woman writer whose creativity was dialectically linked to a turbulent and oppressive marital life, recording the eventual surrender to or triumph over patriarchal mores.