Rashsundari Debi (1809-1900)

“I would start working at dawn, and I would still be at it until well beyond midnight. I had no rest in between. I was only fourteen years old at the time. I came to nurture a great longing: I would learn to read and I would read a religious manuscript. I was unlucky, in those days women were not educated. Later, I began to resent my own thoughts. What is wrong with me? Women do not read, how will I do it? Then I had a dream: I was reading the manuscript of Chaitanya Bhagabat (the life of a saint)… Later in the day, as I sat cooking in the kitchen, I heard my husband say to my eldest son: “Bepin, I have left my Chaitanya Bhagabat here. When I ask for it, bring it in.” He left the book there and went away. When the book had been taken inside, I secretly took out a page and hid it carefully. It was a job hiding it, for nobody must find it in my hands. My eldest son was practising his alphabets at that time. I hid one of them as well. At times, I went over that, trying to match letters from that page with the letters that I remembered. I also tried to match the words with those that I would hear in the course of my days. With tremendous care and effort, and over a long period of time, I learnt how to read…”

Later, because of her incessant desire to read and learn, she was able to teach herself the alphabets and then read the Chaitanya Bhagabat.

This was the experience of Rashsundari Debi who was born in a so-called Hindu upper caste, landed family in colonial Bengal, some 200 years ago, when it was believed that if a woman acquired an education then it would bring bad luck to her husband and become a widow. Only at the age of twelve, she was married to an affluent landlord. She came to have twelve children and thus the inescapable responsibility of running a large household. There were days when she had not a moment’s rest, no time even to sit down and eat. In spite of such a hostile and adverse environment, she secretly taught herself to read at the age of twenty-five and to write at the age of fifty, defying all social conventions and obstacles.

Despite household chores and the demands of the many children she bore, she finally succeeded in writing her autobiography, Amar Jiban, at the age of 73, perhaps the first autobiography ever to be written in the Bengali language and certainly the first by a Bengali woman and maybe the first by an Indian woman.

Situations have changed a lot since then yet there are people and some are my so-called modern friends only who still hold fast to the idea that the kitchen is for a woman only and a man should never take a step inside unless the woman is unavailable, though they are not at all averse to the idea of her bringing in some money by working in an MNC or even better in a Govt Organisation.

Courtesy: NCERT and the World Wide Web