Reprint of the original, first published in 1881.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1881.

Excerpt from The Hindoos as They Are: A Description of the Manners, Customs, and Inner Life of Hindoo Society in Bengal Babu Shib Chunder Bose is an enlightened Bengali, of matured conviction and character, who, having received the stirring impulse of Western culture and thought during the early period of Dr. Duff's work in the General Assembly's Institution, has continued faithful to it through all these long and changeful years. His extended and varied experience, his careful habit of observation and contrast, his large store of general reading and information, and his rare sobriety and earnestness of judgment, eminently qualify him for lifting the veil from the inner domestic life of his countrymen, and giving such an account of their social and religious observances as may prove intelligible and instructive to general English readers. In the sketches which he has now produced we are presented with the first-fruits of "the harvest of a quiet eye" that has long meditatively watched the strange ongoings of this ancient society, and penetrated with living insight into the springs and tendency of its startling changes. Although I had no special claim to any right of judgment upon the present phases of Hindu life, the writer took me early into his confidence, and from the apparent quality and sincerity of his work I had no hesitation in encouraging him to persevere, recommending him, however, to leave historical speculation to others and to confine himself to a faithful delineation of facts within his own experience. While his manuscripts were passing through my hands, I took pains to verify his descriptions by frequent reference to younger educated natives, who, in all cases, confirmed the accuracy and reliability of the details. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Words of Her Own situates the experiences and articulations of emergent women writers in nineteenth-century Bengal through an exploration of works authored by them. Based on a spectrum of genres—such as autobiographies, novels, and travelogues—this book examines the sociocultural incentives that enabled the dawn of middle-class Hindu and Brahmo women authors at that time. Murmu explores the intersections of class, caste, gender, language, and religion in these works. Reading these texts within a specific milieu, Murmu sets out to rectify the essentialist conception of women’s writings being a monolithic body of works that displays a firmly gendered form and content, by offering rich insights into the complex world of subjectivities of women in colonial Bengal. In attempting to do so, this book opens up the possibility of reconfiguring mainstream history by questioning the scholarly conceptualization of patriarchy being omnipotent enough to shape the intricacies of gender relations, resulting in the flattening of self-fashioning by women writers. The book contends that there were women authors who flouted the norms of literary aesthetics and tastes set by male literati, thereby creating a literary tradition of their own in Bangla and becoming agents of history at the turn of the century.