Swarnakumari Devi

Swarnakumari Devi (1855 – 1932) was a Bengali poet, novelist, musician and social worker from the Indian subcontinent. She is widely regarded as the first Indian woman novelist and the first women writer in Bengal to gain prominence.

Devi was the youngest of four daughters of Debendranath Tagore, and older sister of the celebrated poet Rabindranath Tagore. While her siblings were educated at university level, it seems she was educated primarily at home. However, education was cherished by the family and when her father learned that her governess was merely writing something on a slate and having the girls copy it, he stopped the mechanical practice and brought in a better teacher. In his memoirs Rabindranath wrote, "We learnt much more at home than we had to at school."

In 1868, Swarnakumari married Janakinath Ghosal, a well-educated and strong-willed young man belonging to a wealthy land-owning family. However, Ghosal had been disowned by his family for adopting Brahmoism and marrying under controversial anusthanic Brahmo and consequently deprived of all inheritance. However, with his capabilities and determination he succeeded in business and wa eventually granted the title of Raja. He was also a theosophist and was actively associated with the Indian National Congress from its earliest days, being considered amongst its founders. Together, the couple had three children, including Sarala Devi Chaudhurani (who I recently did a post about in her own right! Check it out if you missed it!) The entire Tagore family was accomplished in the fields of music, theatre, and writing. As the generations enabled the women greater freedom, Swarnakumari flourished.

“Here was a woman writing first in Bengali and later in English in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a woman who contributed some of her own autobiographical moments as well as many more imaginative constructions to the discourse about Indian women, which was so central to the causes of nationalism, imperialism, and social reform in India. A list of her published output includes novels, stories, poems, essays, plays, and even the first opera in Bengali. A nationalist herself, she also participated in the first Swadeshi movement and was a member of the Indian National Congress. She was an avid activist on behalf of other women. In 1886 she founded Sakhi Samiti, an organization dedicated to promoting friendship between women and to providing education and shelter for Hindu girls. She served for years as the first female editor of Bharati, a literary magazine which provided a place for Bengali writers to articulate their grievances with the frequently cooperative systems of British imperialism and Indian patriarchy and to celebrate their own literature.” (Hubel 2011, p169).

Swarnakumari’s first book Deep Nirban, an emotionally nationalist novel, was published in 1876. There is some dispute about whether she was the first Benagli author, as Hana Catherine Mullens published her Bengali language book in Phoolmani O Karunar Bibaran in 1852. However, Mullens was a white Christian, and thus Swarnakumari was is largely considered the first woman novelist amongst the Bengali people.

Swarnakumari continued to write extensively – novels, plays, songs, poems and scientific essays. She was keen on developing scientific terminology in Bengali. In 1879, Swarnakumari composed what was possibly the first opera written in Bengali, Basanta Utsav. Comparatist Swapan Majumdar, argued that the rise of woman writers such as Swarnakumari was exceptionally important as they "represented a flourishing generation of educated women writers, discharging with total zeal the responsibilities of their pursuit".

In 1877, Jyotirindrath Tagore started a family magazine, Bharati, which was edited by the eldest Tagore son, Dwijendranath Tagore for the first 7 years of its publication. After 11 years, Swarnakumari took over as editor and worked hard to enhance the uniqueness of the journal, alongside her daughters. The publication ran for nearly half a century. 

 Swarnakumari was actively involved in politics. In 1889 and 1890 she served Indian National Congress, the first time that women publicly participated in the Congress’ sessions. In 1896, she founded the Sakhi Samiti (Society of Friends) to assist helpless orphans and widows. The following report was published in 1898:

"The first aim of the Samiti is to help helpless orphans and widows. This will be done in two ways. In those cases where such widows and orphans have no near relations or if those relations have not the means of maintaining them the Sakhi Samiti will take their full responsibility. In other cases the Samiti will give them help as far as possible. In the case of those women whose full responsibility the Samiti will take they will educate them and through them spread women’s education. After they have finished their education they will take up the work of zenana (female) education. The Samiti will give them remuneration for their work. In this way two objectives will be accomplished. Hindu widows will be able to earn through service to others according to sanction of Hindu religion."

As the subscriptions from members were not sufficient to run the organisation, an annual exhibition was held in Bethune College to raise funds. Apart from saris from Dhaka and Santipur and handicrafts from Krishnanagar and Birbhum, there used to be a large collection of handicrafts from outside Bengal – Kashmir, Moradabad, Varanasi, Agra, Jaipur and Mumbai.Her objective was to display indigenous products and sell them, and many were crafts undertaken primarily by women. The fair created a sensation and successfully raised money to keep the society afloat.

The activities of Sakhi Samaiti continued till around 1906, when they were taken over by Hiranmoyee Bidhaba Ashram, her daughter, who also founded the Mahila Bidhaba Ashram whose executive committee was comprised wholly of women. As late as 1949, it was ‘still running quite efficiently’ under the leadership of Swarnakumari’s granddaughter. 

Researching this post was frustrating because it was hard to find any info that was not preoccupied with Swarnakumari’s more famous male relatives and their amazing accomplishments. That is why I wanted to highlight the amazing women who were central to the intellectual pursuits of the Tagore family, and remind everyone that without the groundbreaking women, there would be no groundbreaking men! I am going to quote at length an article by Theresa Hubel which I think personally sums up Swarnakumari’s legacy:

“To get some sense of Swarnakumari Devi’s place in that liminal time, I must quote a few sentences from the back-page advertisement that follows the announcement of her new title. Ganesh and Co., Madras called on the Aberdeen Press to approve her writing, and this is what some unidentified Scot apparently had to say about her and her Short Stories:

Mrs. Ghosal is a sister of Rabindranath Tagore, to whom the noble Prize (sic) was recently awarded. If the Poet’s merits are great, those of his sister are scarcely less, and both East and West will agree that it [the collection] is a charming revelation of the workings of a woman’s heart. In its sweet simplicity and delicacy of tough (sic), faded readers will experience a new sensation. (“Indian National Literature” 1)

The reviewer...shows all the signs of also being a product of his time. This was an unashamedly imperial, unabashedly masculine time, when an Indian woman’s fiction could be so readily disarmed by unthreatening adjectives like “charming” and “sweet” and when it was assumed that the principal thing at work when a woman sat down to write was her heart. It was too a time that produced the ad nauseam reiteration of the names of a few famous men..So, what in only three sentences does the reviewer manage to convey about Swarnakumari Devi Ghosal? That she is not quite white, not quite male, and not quite Rabindranath Tagore.

However, those nots are the very things I particularly appreciate about Swarnakumari Devi and her fiction.... In their introduction to her work in the first volume of Women Writing in India, Susie Tharu and K. Lalita make the claim that “During her life-time Swarnakumari’s novels were as popular as those of the great novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee,” but lament in this 2002 edition of their two-volume collection, “Yet today it is difficult to lay one’s hands on the writings of this versatile artist” (235–236). To highlight the absurdity of the difference between her descent into almost oblivion and her brother’s ascent into something like literary godhood in India, they add that “A whole publishing house was set up to preserve and reprint the works of her famous brother, Rabindranath” (236). There’s just something ridiculous about the historical imperatives that would create such an enormous discrepancy. In the 5 July 1932 issue of The Amrita Bazar Patrika, just days after her death, Swarnakumari Devi was remembered as “one of the most outstanding Bengali women of the age” who “did her best for the amelioration of the condition of the womanhood of Bengal” . She must have been unambitious or humble, or else she was supremely motivated because she carried out her life’s work, which was both politi­cal and literary, during a historical period when the fact of her gender combined with her race would inevitably function to marginalize that work. Even her brother had a hand in that marginalization: after the 1914 publication of her first novel in English...he sent an English friend the following colossally condescending description of his older sister: “She is one of those unfortunate beings who has more ambition than ability. But just enough talent to keep her alive for a short period. Her weakness has been taken advantage of by some unscrupulous literary agents in London and she has had stories translated and published. I have given her no encouragement but have not been successful in making her see things in the proper light”...’ 

One of Swarnakumari’s main intellectual insights was into the plight of widows, who in Brahmanical Hinduism were forbidden to remarry and were even encouraged to committ sati by throwing themselves on their husband’s funeral pyre. While sati is a discussion for another day, I again quote Herbel’s article at length to show how Swarnakumari’s writing’s betrayed her progressive views on widowhood:

“In the introduction to their 2004 translation and republication of her novel Snehalata ba Palita (The Uprooted Vine), Rajul Sogani and Indira Gupta argue that Swarnakumari Devi’s take on the perennially popular figure of the Indian widow was far more progressive than that of her famous father, Debendranath Thakur, who was not at all in favour of the remarriage of high caste Hindu widows, as well as of her even more famous brother, who chose a fate for the widow character in his later novel Chokher Bali that cast her into a conservative obscurity, a spiritual withdrawal that conveniently left the political ground to the men. Contrary to this careful choice, according to Sogani and Gupta, “Swarnakumari Debi’s answer to the problems of women like Snehalata is not remarriage, but more education and financial independence” (xiii), a stance which had much more in common with the one that Indian feminists took up in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s in regards to widows and women generally. She has the widow protagonist of her The Uprooted Vine commit suicide to make a point about the untenability of their situation and the injustice of their lot in colonial India. Today Swarnakumari Devi’s name is rarely, if ever, mentioned in nationalist histories and even in feminist histories she usually occupies a secondary position, behind her daughter Sarala Devi.4 And, as the few literary scholars who have written about her have observed, it is difficult to find any of her English novels or short stories in India or in the West...’

For more info, I highly recommend reading Teresa Hubel’s article in full here.... It does her much better justice than I ever could.  (6/6)