The focus in this brief essay-book is to retrieve the voice of a
nineteenth century subaltern in Bengal, India, Rani Rashmoni
(1793-1861) and the conditions under which she lived. By having a
dialogue with a subject from the past, by recuperating a history
that has been elided by feminist historians, we are compelled to
conclude that Rani Rashmoni was an agent on her own rights.
Oftentimes, we have to be willing to venture into documented
sources out of the norm in order to create a space from where we
can make ethical contact with the subaltern, even if the subaltern
seems not to have any agency - complying and conforming to most
norms of patriarchy, caste and class. We have to create new
interpretative parameters to read within and into the stories which
create these social matrices that construct the oppressed female
subaltern. More importantly, where do we locate primary or even
secondary material about women who lived at this time period? If
we, as feminists, are willing to broaden our focus on what texts we
are willing to read, then we can sketch out the lives of women who
were living at this time period. It is because of Sri Ramakrishna
(1836-1886), the mystic saint of Bengal, that we know so much about
the life of Rani Rashmoni but why is it that we hear little about
her, or there is little mention of her, outside the works published
on Sri Ramakrishna by the Ramakrishna Mission? When the Britishers
arrived, towards the end of the eighteenth century, were all native
women victims of sati and patriarchy? It is within this premise
that I try to understand the life of Rani Rashmoni, who can be
considered as actively involved not only in philanthropy but also
in business and management. It is at the interstices of the
religious interiority of her life, and the public-ness of being a
member of the rich elite that we have to deconstruct her life. Was
Sri Ramakrishna more a closeted social revolutionary than anything
else, and through his politics of allowing for a lower caste woman
to be his patron, articulating a position that was socially
radical? In the early nineteenth century, through the life of Rani
Rashmoni, we do get to hear the subaltern speak, thus
problematizing the feminist conundrum - can the subaltern speak? If
Rani Rashmoni was after all, a hybrid, westernized female
entrepreneur, under the disguise of conforming within the
patriarchal mould, she was legitimized within mainstream Hinduism
by the presence of Sri Ramakrishna.
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