New Nationalism, Legendary Women: Panchanan Bhattacharyya’s Ideals of Indian Womanhood (1921) after the Great War

A Co-authored Series of Posts ‘About 1919,’ that is, about English-language books published from 1914 to 1921, according to the online bibliography and database, Collective Biographies of Women.

Introduction

In the aftermath of the Great War, the Bengali educator Panchanan Bhattacharyya published a collective biography analyzing the virtues of twenty Indian women from the mythic era to the present. An unusual text among pre-1940 Anglophone collective biographies of women, Ideals of Indian Womanhood (Calcutta: Goldquin & Co., 1921) draws moral lessons from the lives of Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim women in Indian literature and history. When formatting Bhattacharyya’s text for the Collective Biographies of Women database, I recognized important relationships to the biographical practices represented throughout the database, particularly to those examples our team selected for “A World World One Gallery of Women.” In the process of selecting and retelling the featured life narratives, Bhattacharyya portrays the ideal Indian woman as resisting the ancient injustices of religious intolerance and familial strife, while simultaneously continuing a tradition of femininity distinct from the Westernized, Christianized New Woman represented in other collective biographies of his era. At a pivotal historical moment, and with the support of various intellectuals associated with the Bengali Renaissance, Bhattacharyya’s didactic project intervenes in complex narratives of nation, empire, gender, and religious reform.

Marketing a National Collection of Biography

The presenters directly oppose Ideals of Indian Womanhood to other Anglophone collective biographies of women. More than a marketing strategy, the vehement publishers’ note contrasts Bhattacharyya’s timeless ideals of self-sacrifice with the prosaic focus on “academic laurels,” “continental travels,” and “litigation” portrayed by a “European lady” in her “sketches of five ‘distinguished’ Indian women,” the product of “a materialistic civilization” (i). Bhattacharyya’s publishers most likely referred to E. F. Chapman, Sketches of Some Distinguished Indian Women (London; Calcutta: 1891), which presents biographies of Pundita Ramabai Sarasvati, Dr. Anandibai Joshee, the Maharani of Cooch Behar, Toru Dutt, and Cornelia Sorabji. Emphasizing that “most of these ladies are Christians,” Chapman represents conversion to Christianity as a strategic advantage in pursuing “education and enlightenment” (13), and indeed Chapman’s five subjects are comparatively known in Anglophone publications in Britain and the United States. Writing for Scholars’ Lab in 2020, Zaina Ujayli argues that Chapman’s work and its predecessor Gems of India, Sketches of Distinguished Hindoo and Mahomedan Women (New York; Cincinnati: 1875) dramatize “self-sacrificing deaths” in order to advocate the “conversion [of Indian women] to Christianity or Western education.” In contrast to such biographies celebrating Christianization, Bhattacharyya lauds the self-sacrificing virtues of two Buddhist, one Muslim, and seventeen Hindu women, ranging from famous epic heroines to figures that he wishes were more widely recognized. Examining late colonial Bengal’s erasure of Muslim women from nationalist historical texts, the sociologist Mahua Sarkar cites a 1927 review of Ideals of Indian Womanhood as an example of a Hindu author blaming the Mughal conquest for the oppression of women in twentieth-century India (63, note 76). Even Bhattacharyya’s chapter structure is designed to foreground Hindu women: The table of contents divides the work into “The Mythic Cycle”; “The Epic Cycle” (subdivided into “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata”); “The Historic Cycle” (subdivided into “Ancient”, “Medieval” and “Modern”); and “The Cycle of Transition.” This plan allots two chapters to Hindu mythology, two chapters to each of the major Sanskrit epics, two chapters to Buddhist nuns periodized as “ancient”, four chapters to “medieval” women of the Rajput dynasty, five chapters to “modern” women of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries (beginning with the sole Muslim figure Chand Sultana, who at five biographies in Collective Biographies of Women attained a higher recognition rate than Bhattacharyya’s other subjects), and three concluding chapters to nineteenth-century Bengali philanthropists. Consequently, the work’s construction underscores Bhattacharyya’s ideological curation of national biography.

Detail: Panchanan Bhattacharyya, Ideals of Indian Womanhood (Calcutta: Goldquin, 1921) table of contents. Accession # AS-003871, Central Secretariat Library, New Delhi, India. Page images provided by the National Virtual Library of India.

Regarding the ideal readership for Ideals of Indian Womanhood, the Goldquin publishers claim that while “the young undergraduate of the Indian university” is capable of analyzing European mythological and literary classics, only a book such as this can provide him with what the Calcutta University vice-chancellor Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee (1864-1924) described in 1909 as “‘virtues appropriately selected from the great national books of Hindus and Muhammadens [sic]…cameos of character’” (v). While Mukherjee describes the Calcutta undergraduate as an “‘Indian youth,’” the publishers also hope to inspire “young boys and girls” as well as the “general reader” (iv, v). Thackers Indian Dictionary (1937-8) shows that Bhattacharyya lectured at Calcutta University and its affiliate Bethune College for Girls, and the Calcutta Gazette credits Panchanan Bhattacharyya with three textbooks on elementary English reading and composition published between 1930 and 1934. Bhattacharyya’s insistence on patriotic education reflects the two-century tradition of the Bengali Renaissance, as suggested by his use of literary and scholarly sources and endorsed by the influential Bengali jurists and literary figures presenting this work. In his author’s note, Bhattacharyya emphasizes his reliance on eight Indian authors and six European authors, and thanks two named Indian scholars and an anonymous European chair in English literature “in one of the Indian universities” for editing the work (ii-iii). The only woman thanked in the front matter is the subject of the dedication, Lady Mukhopadhyaya [Jogamaya Devi Bhattacharyya (1871–16 July 1958)], the wife of Ashutosh Mukherjee, and, as my research suggests, Bhattacharyya’s own sister.

Lending international context to the goals of national biography, English-language collective biographies of women from the 1914-21 era on non-English and non-U.S. national types include France: a358: Women of the Revolutionary Era (London: 1914) and a359 : Remarkable Women of France, 1431-1749 (London: 1914); Russia: a659: The Fair Ladies of the Winter Palace (London: 1914); Ireland: a194 : Helena Concannon, Women of ‘Ninety-Eight (Dublin and St. Louis: 1919, 1920, 1930); and Japan: a539 : Maude Whitmore Madden, Women of the Meiji Era (New York; Chicago: 1919); and a611 : Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan. With an Introduction by Amy Lowell (Boston and New York: 1920, London: 1921, Tokyo: 1935). Of this set, only the progressive Meiji New Women and the patriotic Irish women of the 1798 Irish Rebellion are treated as role models by their authors, with the remaining biographies emphasizing historical interest, especially the excitements of court life or revolutionary turmoil. Bhattacharyya, however, negotiates the British empire that the Irish biographer Concannon denounces; and he opposes the Westernization and Christianization that the American chronicler of Japanese women, Madden, celebrates. Bhattacharyya’s emphasis on literary, legendary, and traditional tales matches the suspense and tragedy of the court-scandal and revolutionary-drama collective biographies of women, but his insistence on the idealized qualities of each woman has more in common with martyrologies and inspires frequent comparisons to saints. At the same time, Bhattacharyya’s interest in analyzing character hints at the popularized psychoanalytic topologies we find in Gamaliel Bradford’s biographies, as examined in Mackenzie Daly’s recent Scholar’s Lab blog for our team’s World War One series. In an era of literary experimentation, Bhattacharyya’s conservative, didactic writing style sought to exert an authoritative influence over the national character of Indian women.

Ranking National Heroines after 1919

Published amid postwar reckonings with the ideology of self-determination, the work propagandizes a trajectory of India’s historical progression from heroic mythological and medieval conflicts to a peaceable modernity. Bhattacharyya is not alone in preferring continuous nationalistic typologies to direct discussion of the Great War: Of the 107 Anglophone biographies of women published between 1914 and 1921, only about three of these dealt specifically with women during the Great War. Bhattacharyya’s most explicit reference to WWI draws a shockingly, anachronistically nationalistic lesson from the sixteenth-century Rajput nursemaid Panna Dai (Panna Bai), who sacrificed her own infant’s life to thwart the intended assassination of her royal charge: “She holds her place secure in the hearts of the wondering band of patriots who have learnt to love their king and the country as manifested in the spirit of loyalty shown to our King in the recent European War” (165).

While such references to twenty-first century topics are rare, Bhattacharyya is much more eager to competitively contrast Indian and European national heroines. Generally, Bhattacharyya prefers to represent modern Indian women as continuous forces for peaceable reform, and their early modern and ancient predecessors as self-sacrificing legendary heroines. Bhattacharyya’s narrative style blurs the differences between the beneficent reign of the Maratha queen Ahilya Bai Holkar (1725-1795) and the lifelong virtues of the nineteenth-century Bengali women Devi Sarada Sundari (1819-1907), Maharani Swarnamoyee CI (1828-1897), and Devi Aghore Kamini (1856-1896). Bhattacharyya’s competitive ranking of Indian heroines with British and European heroines contrasts with delicate avoidance of criticism of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British empire. Bhattacharyya is far from militant in his attitudes toward British imperial rule, and largely follows Mukherjee’s 1909 call for education in “‘devotion to duty, womanly chastity, filial piety, loyalty to the King,’” as cited in the note from Bhattacharyya’s publishers (v).

Allusions and analogies to famous historical women are common narrative strategies for the genre, as shown by the BESS textual analysis schema used for Collective Biographies of Women, but for Bhattacharyya this conventional practice is a vehicle for vehement national contrasts. Bhattacharyya layers European and British symbols to articulate the valor of the sixteenth-century warrior queens Rani Durgavati (whose chapter is subtitled “Love of Country”) and Chand Sultana (subtitled “Patriotism”), among other biographical subjects. According to Bhattacharyya, Chand Sultana made wartime speeches as effectively as Elizabeth I facing the Spanish Armada, only to die like Caesar at the hands of her own allies and earn a warrior’s funeral from her imperial opponent (208, 220). Proposing to add Durgavati to the “Valhalla of nations’ heroes,” Bhattacharyya describes Durgavati as an “Indian Boadicea” who deserves the poetic and historic treatments accorded to “the British warrior queen” and to “the heroic peasant-maid of Domremy” (233). Bhattacharyya’s professed envy of the biographical treatments of European icons such as Joan of Arc (69 collective biographies to date, the highest recognition rate in the database) and Elizabeth I (59 biographies) is a framing device for his vehemently nationalistic pantheon. In this light, eighteenth-century Ahalya Bai (subtitled “The Ideal Queen”) haunts the narrative as an ideal queen coexisting with British military dictatorship and putting Pax Britannia to shame through her orderly, peaceful, self-sacrificing management of her native country.

Referring to a scholarly consensus that the ideal respectable woman in late nineteenth-century Bengal “was chaste, pious, educated and disciplined,” the historian Durba Ghosh claims that forms of respectability continued to be enforced by “an elite nationalist patriarchy” even for twentieth-century radical activists (358). Alison Booth (2004) makes a parallel observation that from 1893 through the early twentieth century, collective biographies of African-American women tended to use rhetorical and formal conventions to elevate model respectable middle-class women (214-215). However, contrasting with Bhattacharyya’s citational neglect of Indian women biographers, in 1893 African-American biographers Dr. Lawson A. Scruggs and Dr. Monroe A. Majors celebrated and credited African-American female biographers such as Susan I. Shorter and Gertrude Mossell (Booth [2004], 214-215). While Bhattacharyya writes with the early twentieth-century educator’s scholarly pomp, and proudly includes imperial honors in his recitation of his heroines’ accomplishments, the long life of transnational respectability informs this work’s relationship to a discursive form crossing ideological and generational bounds.

In an era retrospectively peopled by the New Woman debates and masculine citizenship, Bhattacharyya’s Ahalya Bai joins an imagined lineage of alternatives to Victoria: self-sacrificing avatars of a feminine patriotism indistinguishable from familial and religious devotion. Rather than wear India’s jewels, Chand Sultana fires them from a cannon; rather than hoard the property she wins back from the East India Company, Maharani Swarnamayi spends it on essential humanitarian aid (Bhattacharyya 324, 327). With a few words of justification for the minority of non-royal subjects, Bhattacharyya could have subtitled each chapter “The Ideal Queen” as he did with Ahalya Bai, fitting the work smoothly into the sea of collective biographies of royal women and queens both literal and metaphorical. Instead, Ideals of Indian Womanhood leaves each figure’s queenliness a matter of biographical accident, to be gained or lost based on a higher authority’s recognition of merit or demand for self-sacrifice. In this work promoted so variously to men, women, boys, girls, and the general reader, Bhattacharyya ushers female authority into the realm of nostalgic fantasy, displacing the contemporary New Woman in favor of a national procession of self-effacing ideal phantoms.

Works Cited

Bhattacharyya, Panchanan, and Sir A. Chaudhuri. Ideals of Indian Womanhood. With a Foreword by A. Chaudhuri. Calcutta: Goldquin, 1921. http://cbw.iath.virginia.edu/cbw_db/collections.php?id=1399.

Booth, Alison. How To Make It As A Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Chapman, E. F. Sketches of Some Distinguished Indian Women; With a preface by the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. London: W.H. Allen & Co., Limited, 1891. http://cbw.iath.virginia.edu/cbw_db/collections.php?id=1480.

Daly, Mackenzie. “Gamaliel Bradford and Psychography.” Published July 05, 2024. https://scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/blog/gamaliel-bradford-and-psychography/. Accessed on July 8, 2024. Previously accessed in draft.

Devi, Sunity, Maharani of Cooch Behar, CIE. Nine Ideal Indian Women. Calcutta: Thacker, 1919. https://cbw.iath.virginia.edu/cbw_db/collections.php?id=6

Ghosh, Durba. “Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s.” Gender & History 25, no.2 (August 2013): 355-375.

Sarkar, Mahua. Visible Histories, Disappearing Women: Producing Muslim Womanhood In Late Colonial Bengal. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

Ujayli, Zaina. “Death Politics in Collections of Indian Women’s Lives.” Published October 07, 2020. https://scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/blog/cbw-indianwomen/. Accessed on June 30, 2023.