Rethinking the Literary World:

Prabhabati Debi Saraswati and Her Detective Novels

Abstract

This paper, delving into the necessity to excavate the lost traditions of women’s thought in order to break down the patriarchal, monolithic notion of ‘intellectual tradition’, intends to look into the fictional works of Prabhabati Debi Saraswati (1905-1972) whose career of writing domestic novels spanned between 1920s-1960s.  Prabhabati also created the first woman detective in Bengali detective fictions, a fact that critical discussions on the canon of Bengali/Indian detective fictions, which is considered to be a genre moving from men to men, conveniently forgets. Prabhabati’s first detective novel introducing her woman detective, Krishna Choudhury, was published in c.1950s. Beginning by situating the impulses that provoked women’s writing during the colonial era, the paper would engage in a brief discussion of Prabhabati’s domestic novels to understand the drift of thought and themes operating in her works. Then, the paper would introduce Prabhabati’s woman detective, Krishna Choudhury, and critically discuss Prabhabati’s venture, in order to comprehend the impulses, constraints and possibilities inherent in such a creation. This endeavour hopes to unravel how the women writers, writing within literary traditions which are associated with mass appeal, negotiate with the motivations and restrictions imposed upon her by the expectations of such literary genres. Prabhabati’s experimentation opened up the constrictions imposed by the genre for future experimentations and improvements, as is quite the case with the canon of Indian women’s detective fictions, which still stands critically unrecognized.