• ISBN13: 9780199498000
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: History
• Publisher: Oxford UP
• Publisher Imprint: Oxford UP
• Publication Date: March 11, 2020
• Pages: 456
• Original Price: INR 1395.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 610 grams

Words of her own situates the experiences and articulations of emergent women writers in nineteenth-century Bengal through an exploration of works authored by them. Based on a spectrum of genres—such as autobiographies, novels and travelogues book examines the sociocultural incentives that enabled the dawn of middle-class Hindu and Brahma women authors at that time. Murmu explores the intersections of Class, caste, gender, language and religion in these works. Reading these texts within a specific milieu, Murmu sets out to rectify the essentialist conception of women’s writings being a monolithic body of works that displays a firmly gendered form and content, by offering rich insights into the complex world of subjectivities of women in colonial Bengal. In attempting to do so, this book opens up the possibility of reconfiguring mainstream history by questioning the scholarly conceptualization of patriarchy being omnipotent enough to shape the intricacies of gender relations, resulting in the flattening of self-fashioning by women writers. The book contends that there were women authors who flout the norms of literary aesthetics and tastes set by male literati, thereby creating a literary tradition of their own in Bangle and becoming agents of history at the turn of the century.

Maroona Murmu teaches in the Department of History at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.