Ties that Bind: Women's Sociality in Bengal, 1920-1965

Abstract

This dissertation argues that women’s sociality offers critical insights for the history of women and of twentieth-century Bengal. Women’s everyday connections, as reconstructed from their writings, provide an alternative history to nationalist and male dominated historiography. Recovering and highlighting the voices of Bengali women through their autobiographies and oral history interviews reveals a history of the everyday that is obscured in histories of big events and moments. The first three chapters each focus on a particular site—educational institutions, neighborhoods, and occupational settings—to examine how sociality is fostered and negotiated there. The chapter on educational settings points to the significance of women’s interactions as influenced by school policies as well as student-led initiatives. Schools were sites where women created makeshift family relations with people of the same class. Here women formed friendships with women from different religions, linguistic backgrounds, and even with those who held different political ideologies. The chapter on neighborhoods reads “friendship rituals” through a theory of the “ordinary” and everyday life to argue that the neighborhood acts as a site of sociality between the public and the private. The neighborhood provided opportunities for girls’ and women’s pleasure and desire, the broadening of their social networks beyond the home and the family, and access to professional and civic opportunities. The third chapter explores how women’s class backgrounds allowed them to flourish in two arenas of work—social service and the performing arts. This chapter emphasizes that class was one identity marker that social ties could not always cut across, especially when it came to certain professions. These three chapters interrogate the significance of peer friendships in shaping women’s lives, as well as the cross-generational connections that provided support to women throughout their lives. The influence and role of friends in women’s lives impacted everything from women’s political activism, hobbies, opportunities for pleasure, to their careers. These sites of women’s sociality are critical to my argument that social bonds can cut across boundaries of family, community, and the state. Hindu-Muslim relations and friendships among women were shaped by the sites in which women interacted. Even though the sites themselves changed over time, the ties that they had fostered remained intact. A final chapter analyzes women’s mentorship networks through the social memoir of Bangladeshi poet and activist Sufia Kamal. It reads Kamal’s autobiographical writing as an example of an alternative women centered history of Bengal’s past that foregrounds women’s sociality. Throughout, this dissertation demonstrates the significance of women’s sociality in providing a space that cuts across the boundaries of family, religion, and the nation-state in twentieth century Bengal. This is illustrated through women’s writings that point to this neglected history of women in twentieth-century Bengal.