Hupomnēmata vs. Historical Contextualization: (Re-)Reading the Memoirs of a Fallen Woman in Colonial Bengal

Abstract

While public records on the Indian colonial “fallen woman” are abundant and so are personal narratives catering to voyeuristic literary representations (such as works of Priyanath Mukhopadhyay and Panchanan Ghosal in Bengal), instances of self-writing by the self-proclaimed fallen woman are scarce. This historiographical lacuna often leads scholars to inevitably treat memoirs such as those of Binodini Dasi as telling accounts of socio-cultural circumstances and thereby contextualized, and often authentic, historical records pertaining to national cultural processes like theatre. I argue that this representational function contradicts what Foucault calls the “hupomnēmata” in self-writing; subjected to historical contextualization, the written self, as deconstructed and reconstructed in the memoir, is severely compromised. Explaining why it is crucial to assign the theory of hupomnēmata to marginalized voices in life writing, I propose to read Dasi’s Amar Katha (My Story) and Amar Abhinetri Jiban (My Life as an Actress) as an exercise of self-care. In so doing, I explore how the textual performance of feminine subjectivity of a marginalized figure is subsumed within the historical context of and propagated by the memoirs. By navigating the development of the written self in Dasi’s memoirs published over 10 years apart, this paper renders them a site of negotiation between identity-(re)construction (or self-actualization) and national socio-cultural history-writing.