Crossing the Threshold: Women in Colonial City Space

Authors

  • Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty University of North Bengal

Keywords:

New Woman, colonial city, middle class, urban elites, tradition, modernity

Abstract

Women’s negotiation with the city in the late nineteenth century began with the advent of the reformist agendas by the urban middle class elites and the white colonizers. The relationship of women with this colonial city space in the nineteenth century Calcutta was two-fold. On the one hand the city witnessed the gradual exodus of men and women of the lower class and castes under the impact of rapid industrialization and urbanization who gave birth to and nurtured Calcutta’s rich repertoire of popular cultural forms, the Battala literature. On the other hand, the colonial administrative and culture set-up introduced the social category of the middle class urban elites, popularly known as Bhadralok. Under the social reformist agenda of female emancipation, these middle class urban elites cultivated the “new woman”, the bhadramahila who, through the strategic compliance and contestations to the modes of new patriarchy, curved a space of her own in the colonial city. The present paper looks into the processes of crossing the thresholds by these women, who, being situated within the structure of dual colonization of tradition and modernity, attempted to redefine the city space from a new perspective.

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Author Biography

Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty, University of North Bengal

Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty is now a Doctoral Research Scholar in the University of North Bengal. She is doing her PhD on interconnection between religion, caste and gender in Bengali Women’s writing in the colonial period. She has contributed in journals like Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific (Australian National University), Global Media Journal (University of Calcutta), The Criterion: An International Journal in English, Cafe Dissensus, an e-journal and in the books like Different Americas: Resituating American Identity in the post 9/11 Third Worldian Classroom, published by Authors Press, New Delhi ,Shaping the Discourse: Women’s Writings in Bengali Periodicals 1865-1947, published by Stree and School of Women Studies, Jadavpur University, DE-CODING THE SILENCE! Reading John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women published by AADI Publications, Jaipur, India and Dynamics of Development and Discontent, published by Bookwell. Delhi, India.

She has participated in the Winter School, on Critical Thinking, Reading and Writing Skill in Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur in 2010 and took part in the workshop organized by Global South, SEPHIS at Jadavpur University, India, 2013, The title of the Workshop was Comparative Gesture.

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Published

2017-12-01

How to Cite

Paul Chakraborty, S. . (2017). Crossing the Threshold: Women in Colonial City Space. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 3(2), 127–165. Retrieved from https://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/218