Introduction
As a part of our ongoing series to paint a portrait of nineteenth century Bengal, we bring you a series of vignettes about everyday life in late nineteenth century Calcutta. These short and informative accounts were penned by Mahendranath Dutta, the younger brother of Narendranath Dutta, better known as Swami Vivekananda. He covers a wide range of subjects in his memoirs Kalikatar Puratan Kahini o Pratha or Stories and Customs of Old Calcutta, from the streets and water supply of the city and festivities such as Charak, to domestic rituals and home remedies. It resuscitates the city and the century in all its eccentricities and splendor. From these, we have picked four accounts dealing with the way women in the city experienced space. While the first two look at domestic space, the others are more about women navigating public spaces.
The second half of the nineteenth century saw the growth of women’s education in Bengal, among other reforms. It was also when upper and middle class women started entering the professional sphere. This had spatial connotations. Wedged between nationalist and western notions of womanhood, the bhadramahila began to step out of her house cautiously. She was, of course, subject to a lot of limitations including sartorial ones. These were readily remedied through the innovations in clothing pioneered by women from the Tagore household such as Jnanadanandini Debi who introduced the Parsi way of draping the sari which, in turn, immediately boosted women’s mobility.
The following vignettes, however, deal with more traditional spatialities associated with womanhood. While upper caste and upper class women of Hindu households are seen to be confined within the andarmahal or the inner quarters of the house, women from economically marginalized sections of the society, such as the jhumurwali Dutta talks about, were compelled to ply their trade outside the bounds of the household. Jhumur was a traditional folk form, traditionally associated with religious singing such as the kirtan. However, over time, jhumur, as with other traditional forms of performing arts, began to offer a “space for dissent” to the relatively independent working women of the lower classes – and their themes began to shift towards comedic social commentary and parodies of conventional male-dominated art styles. Dutta however, being the savarna, upper class, educated man that he is, looks at the figure of the jhumurwali and her apparent coarseness with great disdain.
What is also interesting is that the apparent restrictions on the mobility of the former group of upper class women are subverted in the form of internal passageways connecting all the houses in the neighbourhood. These allow women to gather and socialize without having to access public space. This almost forms a parallel to the streets running beyond the wall, an interior city dedicated to women.
Dutta’s tone is simultaneously nostalgic and playful when he describes the everyday experiences of these women, both familiar to him and unfamiliar, as they are to us.
Women in Domestic Spaces
আলপনা (Alpana)
In those days, women used to paint a variety of designs on stools. Not just with white rice powder solutions, sometimes they even painted wheels with red paint. This was especially true for the seats used during wedding ceremonies. Respected women from the neighbourhood would paint the stools intended for the bride and the groom, along with the front door and other doors in the house. They would often paint chains of lotuses or other such pictures near the threshold of the house. I have seen that women can still apply alpana quite well in East Bengal. The practice seems to have faded in Calcutta. The alpana is a very good custom. It adorns the floor of the house. In Karachi, Parsi women wash their front doors in the morning. Then they fill up a tin can with a white powder. This ornate can has a perforated bottom so as the women shake it, the white powder falls on the ground and makes patterns which resemble the alpana. I have often seen these designs in Parsi households. I have seen how in Santhal households, they clean up the wall and paint flowers, human beings and tigers on it. Santhal women are very good at applying alpana on their walls. This is an age old custom which has stayed with us since primeval times, and it has given rise to art as we know it. Jungle people cannot paint these intricate designs but they use bits of charcoal to draw a variety of animals and birds. Alpana used to be quite a well established practice in Calcutta, but it is mostly gone now.
দুপুরবেলা মেয়েদের একসঙ্গে হওয়া (Women coming together in the afternoon)
After finishing their lunch in the afternoon, all the married and unmarried women of the neighbourhood would gather in the courtyard. They would come by the interior path that led through the houses. In those days, all the houses of the neighbourhood had such paths. Women would never step out of the main entrance. They would discuss what they had cooked that day. The younger married women would be respectful towards the older ones from their mothers-in-law’s generation. They would take turns to tell them what they had cooked. Then they would talk about the ingredients they used to cook something like Sonamuger daal. You have to add a tiny bit of milk but no turmeric to prepare a delicious daal. Then they would discuss the ingredients and their proportions in dishes like thod’er ghonto or mocha’r ghonto. Younger women would learn from older ones. This was a useful way to learn life skills. Kalicharan Bandyopadhyay had actually hailed it as an exemplary pedagogical practice at a lecture of his at City College. With a chuckle, of course. I was there. Then the women used to discuss illnesses, what remedy to use for what illnesses. How to massage old ghee on the chest and the nerves to ease a bad cough, how it was especially effective for children. Then they would discuss various domestic problems, unemployed sons and such others. After these discussions, some women would often convey these issues to their husbands, that so-and-so was going through such-and-such problems. Someone’s daughter is too old but cannot get married or someone’s son is sitting at home, unemployed, all this information would travel from the andarbati or the inner quarters inhabited by women to the sadarbati or the outer quarters where men socialized. In the latter place, elders of the neighbourhood would then discuss these issues and arrive at solutions. This is how everyone knew everything about what was happening in the neighbourhood at a particular time. The neighbourhood was like a village in itself. This is what neighbourhoods used to be like when I was a child. Women would stuff betel leaves and dokta (tobacco flakes) in the ends of their sarees and bring them to these gatherings. The hosts would also supply betel leaves and dokta. They would wrap the leaves around the dokta and chew on it, and spit, and then they would begin gossiping with gusto. Back then, they didn’t have lime sourced from quarries. Instead, their lime came from snail shells or other more unsavoury sources. Conservative widows thus often avoided this lime which came from ‘burnt bones.’ Many widows often burnt hay and leaves and make tiny balls with dokta which they would stuff into their mouths like khaini which was usually enjoyed by Hindi-speakers. My mother and grandmother used to have these tobacco balls.
Women in Public Spaces
মেয়েপাঁচালী (The Folk Ballads of Women)
In those days, it was customary for women to participate in folk theatre or jatras, during certain festivities. In fact, there used to be women troupes performing jatras. They would dress themselves up and stage plays. There were jatras like “Dakshayagna” (The Sacred Ritual of King Daksha) and “ParbatirBibaho”(Parbati’s Wedding) – I have been to many of these myself in my childhood. These plays usually had a comedic tone – the artist playing the role of the central Buffoon (Bhaanr) would come on stage and pronounce witticisms like “Take a pail of bull’s milk, grind in it a wreath of moonlight – and your maladies will be remedied immediately!” These women could not play sophisticated musical instruments like Tanpura or violin. Instead, they made do with cymbals, tabla, and a vigorous clapping of hands– the entire band singing in chorus to make up for the lack of music. But these women troupes did not last. Before long, the educated class began to discredit them and soon, Meyepanchali or women’s folk-theatre went out of practice.
ঝুমুরওয়ালী (Women “Jhumur” Dancer)
I do not know if this custom was prevalent in other parts of Bengal. But in those days, Calcutta still had jhumurwalis. They were usually lowly, dark-skinned wenches, who stank when they passed by. They would wear anklets when they sang. In those days, during wedding ceremonies, they would set up ornate papier-machete Mayurpankhi-s on bullock carts and get jhumurwalis to dance on them for entertainment. These women would dance on the boats, and behind them, a man would play some instrument like the tom-tom or simply, a bell metal plate. Let me give an example of their lyrics – this one is a description of the Goddess Kali: “Down threw her man, the wench/ On his chest her feet she put/Stared at him with beady eyes/From her lips, not a hoot!” Their language was coarse and crude, yet some of them were quite the poets. But the songs never made much sense – they would simply wail at the top of their voices: “Aare Ree”. During later years, these jhumurwalis began to be denounced widely. In fact, in case of a fight with someone, certain depraved rogues would even make one of these jhumurwalis sit in front of the opponent’s house, she would cast unthinkable slurs from their doorstep – yet no one ever raised a hand at them because they were women. At the time, the police were not well-equipped to deal with such nuisances either. In the end, one would have to give some token amount as bakhshish to the jhumurwali simply to get her to leave. It came to be that jhumurwalis started to be associated with these instances – it became a colloquialism to say when you fought with someone that you would “let loose a jhumurwali at their door”.
Translation : M.D. Mahasweta and Priyanjana Majumder
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