At the Crossroad of Decolonial Studies: : The Gaze of a Woman in a Travel Narrative in Colonial Bengal

Dhritiman Chakraborty

doi:10.35684/JLCI.2024.11105

Authors

Dhritiman Chakraborty Assistant Professor, Joint-Director Abid Ali Khan Center for Digital Archive and Translation of Cultures Gour College University of Gour Bangal https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4351-2298

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.35684/JLCI.2024.11105

Keywords:

Decolonial Studies, Nepal Studies, Buddhism, Bengali woman, South Asia

Abstract

Based on a close study of a travelogue written by a Bengali woman named Hemlata Sarkar in the first decade of twentieth century and a few journal entries by another woman, Dr. Jamini Sen, who composed them while working as a doctor, this paper wants to argue how these otherwise innocuous and effusive pieces are steeped in deep meditations on society and culture in South Asia, thus effectively giving birth to a new idea of South Asia premised on commonalities and similarities across difference and alterities. What is at stake in this discussion is the question of what new perspectives the ‘gaze of a woman’ can bring in the field of decolonial studies. In liberating these women from the narrowed optics of a woman writer who carries her ‘home’ to visualize and wonder about ‘otherness’, this paper wants to see them as epitomizing a serious discourse on social thinking from a decolonial angle.

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Author Biography

Dhritiman Chakraborty, Assistant Professor, Joint-Director Abid Ali Khan Center for Digital Archive and Translation of Cultures Gour College University of Gour Bangal

Dhritiman Chakraborty, works in the field of social movement studies, postcolonial political and intellectual traditions of political thinking in South Asia. His seminal publications include chapters on Marx and Postcolonial Theory, and Antagonistic Politics from Aakar, Left Populism in India from Sage, Mahatma Gandhi’s Asketic Politics from Routledge, and Postcolonial Foucault from Oxford. He was part of an invited book discussion panel on Decolonising Theory by Aditya Nigam for an international journal in 2022. His articles and book reviews have been published in journals such as ZAA, EPW, Social History, Textual Practice, Postcolonial Studies, Contemporary South Asia, among others. His forthcoming works include a jointly edited book titled, In Search of Creative Common: Crisis, Catastrophe and Responsive Literature from Springer in December 2024. He also teaches Literature and Cultural Studies as Assistant Professor in Gour College, University of Gour Banga, India.