What's Love Got to
Do with It?
Choosing between Love and Family
in Late 19th Century India[1]
by Judith
E. Walsh
[Girls]
think constantly of love love and, in the end, some get as
obsessed with it as a character in a novel. They can think of nothing
else their husband s love seems to be the only purpose of their
life. This is harmful both to them and to their husbands. For when the
husband thinks My wife is my all and the wife thinks, My
husband is my all. household dharma
gets burnt to ashes. Family dharma
gets burnt to ashes. And only two people, sitting face to face,
night and day, pass their lives.
The
Laksmi of the Home (Grha laksmi), 1888, 1.
In late nineteenth century India,
romantic love challenged much in indigenous Hindu marriage practices and
family life. Even if Western-influenced and English educated Indian men
of the period viewed romantic love as fundamentally Western and
foreign, they were enthusiastic about the more intimate, dyadic
relations it allowed between husband and wife. For such men, love
was part of the full panoply of the colonial modernity they
desired from their wives they wanted literacy, education and
companionate marriage, in their
homes, system, order, efficiency, and hygiene.
Yet, even as reform-minded Indian men spoke
enthusiastically about the new relations they imagined, they still
hesitated to abandon older patterns of family life. They still feared a
future cut off from the world of the extended family. On the one hand,
there was colonial modernity and the foreign attractions of its romantic
love and of that love's promise, an intimate, exclusive relationship
with a life-long companion and friend. On the other hand, there
were the compelling bonds and practices of indigenous home and family
life of parents, uncles and aunts, of a wife s devotion to her
husband (embodied in a sati s
self sacrifice) the myriad intimacies of family connectedness,
symbolized by family dharma and visible in the daily practices of the home.
Romantic love (in its 19th century
incarnation) may have been as new to peoples in England and the United
States as it was to those in India. In the US, a new domesticity
emphasized romantic love as distinct from marriage for money (Ryan 1985,
37). Men and women now expected to fall in love before marriage and to
find a soul mate, a companion with whom they could share their
innermost secrets (Clement 1997, 46). In England, similar conflicts
between marriages undertake to ensure economic security and those based
on romantic love and mutual attraction animate most, if not all, of
English writer Anthony Trollope s popular late 19th century
social novels. Trollope s books revolved around the social struggles
and complexities inherent in young people s efforts to secure
marriages that would give them financial security while still allowing
romantic love.[2]
In 19th century India, however, romantic
love was less about self choice and/or financial ruin and more about a
range of ideas and practices identified with British colonial modernity.
Love, the literacy and education of wives, the range of daily and
domestic practices compatible with the structures and demands of life in
British-ruled India all were mutually constitutive, mutually
implicated, in the lives young Indian men imagined for themselves.[3] To
illustrate this embeddedness (and its problems) I focus in this essay on
a popular, late 19th century Bengali domestic manual, The
Laksmi of the Home. This manual read against the discourse on love
of middle class Indians throughout British India shows us how entwined
the idea of an exclusive love relationships with a literate wife was
with a colonial modernity young Indians very much wanted for themselves.
But it also illustrates the ambivalence with which men could view
these relationships and the life cut off from the world of the extended
family they seemed inevitably to imply.
What s Love Got To Do With It?
Advice manual authors
were willing enough to challenge the older patriarchal traditions of
extended family life, but they insisted on identifying those practices
with elderly women in the family and contextualizing the older
patriarchy's beliefs and practices as old women's ignorance and
superstition. Wherever possible, however, they preferred not to see the
extent to which their reconfiguration of family life challenged the
central concepts and practices of the indigenous domestic world. In
particular, they often ignored the way their new patriarchy challenged
both the authority structures of the extended family and older
formulations of family obligations (family dharma) that demanded young couples, both wives and husbands,
subordinate themselves to the authority of family elders.[4] From that
older (Hindu) perspective, if either a husband or a wife put his or her
own interest as individuals or even their joint interest as a
couple ahead of the larger family unit, their actions threatened the
family s survival. As one Bengali manual author wrote, speaking of a
head housewife who chose to further her husband s interest at the
expense of the larger family She may be the karta s
(the master s) housewife, but she is not the family s! (BWa,
22)
One way to rewrite family
authority without challenging family dharma
was to redefine the nature of the family itself, that is, to draw family
life in such a way that authorities other than the husband disappeared
from the picture. In Bengal, several manuals for women approached the
problem in this way. Dhirendranath Pal, author of the most popular
advice manual of the period, did this in Conversations
with the Wife. In his book, the center of family life was the
companionate marriage of husband and wife; the larger extended family
was simply assumed to be compatible with this relationship (CWW).
Two other Bengali manuals
also used this same approach and took it even further. The
Duties of Women, for instance,
a household compendium published in 1890, presented detailed
instructions on the organization and maintenance of the Bengali home. In
its final chapter, its reform-minded authors described Three
Families, the last of which was intended to offer a model for family
life. But this last family consisted only of a wife, three offspring and
a very accommodating husband. Here is the manual s description of that
husband as he comes home after a day at work:
Just at that moment the master of the house
arrived home and sat down to help with his wife s household tasks.
He cut up the fish, he picked up the little boy to hug him and
then took the two boys off to give them a bath. Meanwhile the
housewife prepared the rice and cooked dishes and was ready to serve
her husband, son and guests. After everyone had eaten and she had
bathed, the housewife ate her food in a cheerful frame of mind and
rested. After a little rest she began to sew, after that she wrote
some letters as necessary to friends.
The master and mistress of this family, the manual
concludes, were religious, dharmik
people.
This family is very happy. Their income is
very little. But on this insignificant income, how happily they run
the household (DW, 118).
A second reform-oriented text, Mother and Son, rewrote family structures even more explicitly in
its quest for the proper atmosphere within which to raise a child. This
Bengali manual s main focus was on childrearing, particularly on the
role of a mother in the life of a child. It opened in a small household
of four a husband (Subodhcandra), his wife, their young son and
Subodh s widowed mother. When
(after several chapters) the elderly mother died, Subodhcandra (the
husband) took additional relatives into his family. But in this larger
family context it proved impossible to raise a child safely. The son
became gravely ill his mother had been distracted by excessive
housework. After the child s life was saved, his doctor advised the
break up of the extended family as a matter of health. Subodhcandra
sent his other family members away, thus granting the heart s
wish of his wife that she should live alone with her husband and
son (MS, 104).
Manual writers were not the only late nineteenth
century authors who found the extended family an impediment to
explorations of new home relations. Household novels of the late 19th
and early 20th century did not always set their explications
of home life and marriage relations within the extended family context.
Rabindranath Tagore, the famous Bengali poet and novelist, wrote two
novels in the early 20th century, both of which explored
romantic and married love within the context of an older (Hindu)
arranged marriage system. In The
Broken Nest (Nastanir), 1901, a wealthy husband and wife live in a
Calcutta household with the husband s younger male cousin. The young,
childless wife's arranged marriage has coupled her to an educated but
disinterested and dull husband; over the course of the novel, she
becomes romantically obsessed with the young male cousin and the
marriage is destroyed. In The Home and the World (Ghare baire, 1916), a wealthy landowner
lives in the East Bengali country side with his wife and his widowed
older sister (Tagore 1971; 1992) . Here the English educated husband s
desire to liberate his wife to give her freedom and self
choice leads to her romantic infatuation with an unscrupulous
nationalist and to the husband s injury and (possible) death. In both
books, the absence of family elders facilitated the plot; neither story
could be as clearly focused within the larger extended family setting.
Rajat Ray (2001) suggests that in much Bengali fiction of the period the
characters romantic attractions are either frustrated or postponed.
In Rabindranath s two stories, however, the dangers of romantic love
are even more dramatically framed, as the author underlines the
importance of acknowledging love s potential not only for disrupting
older style marriage and family relations, but for destroying them.
In general, however, Bengali and Indian men were
enthusiastic about romantic love, seeing it as an attractive (if
foreign) intruder. Bengali English-educated college students of the
period, it is said, knew the balcony scene of Romeo
and Juliet by heart, and autobiographical reminiscences suggest that
exposure to Western literature produced an intense yearning for romantic
love in young Bengali men (Raychaudhuri 1999, 14). Fiction writers such
as Bankim Candra Chatterji produced many stories revolving around
romance and the English word love itself written lob in
Bengali transliteration appeared frequently in the period s fiction
(Ray 2001, 108; Chakrabarti 1995, 302). The sentiments of love and
affection were seen to structure new family relationships not only
between husbands and wives but also between parents and children (Bose
1995, 122).
Chakrabarti (1995) describes several passages from
this period s literature in which Bengali men's memories of wives are
suffused with the drama and passion of romantic love. In Bankim s
novel The Poison Tree, the
hero kisses the mat on which his wife used to sit and describes (with
pain) her relationship to him:
Is Suryamukhi only my wife? To me she is
everything. She is my wife in relation, brother in companionship,
sister in care, a kindred in entertainment, mother in affection,
daughter in devotion, friend in pleasure, a teacher in counselling [sic],
a maid in waiting, an ally in the world, goddess of fortune in the
house, religion in my heart, an ornament of the neck (Chakrabarti
307).
Similarly, in the less well known 1899 novel, Wife
and Husband ( Stri o svami)a husband meets his wife after a long
absence and is ecstatic to be near her:
She whom I had been crazy to see for so
long, to hear a word from whose lips I experienced heavenly bliss,
whose name I repeated in my mind constantly and frequently for four
years, whose thought had become my chief preoccupation at times of
eating, moving, sleeping and dreaming .(307).
Chakrabarti also quotes a long autobiographical
fragment in which the author similarly describes his intense feelings
for his wife: My heart went out to Jagadamba, this man recalls,
like the turbulent flow of water through the broken banks of a river
during the high tide in monsoon times. . . The whole world appeared to
be brimming with love; I saw the adoring face of Jagadamba wherever I
looked (305).When this wife left on a visit her parents home, the
writer found her absence unbearable. I left every thing aside and was
always brooding over Jagadamba, he recalls.
At night my suffering became unbearable. . . .
I kissed the bed so many times when I remembered that my Jagadamba had
used it. She used to touch with her pretty hands the mosquito nets, the
bed-posts and all the things in the room, and she had lived there too. I
embraced all these so many times. I fell on the floor of the room when I
recalled that her fair feet had walked on it so often (306).
Romantic love and companionate marriage were also
seen as essential for a happy married life in regions outside Bengal.
An educated man, wrote a well known Gujarati poet, cannot share
his life with an illiterate wife. (Basu 1988, 69)Similarly a west
Indian Maharashtrian man (the husband of Kashibai Kanitkar) was
overheard telling a friend that he could share his life only with an
educated wife (Kosambi, 143). In literature on husband/wife relations
produced by the Arya Samaj (a religious reform association of northern
and western India) a wife was expected to win her husband s heart with
her charms and accomplishments and to embody the virtues of love,
tolerance, and faithfulness (Kishwar 1989, 111). The
Gujarati reformer Karsondas Mulji described his ideal woman in the
following way:
Look at the picture of the woman who
delights the heart of a man, who overpowers him by her pure love;
observe her traits: she walks gently, she speaks only melodious words.
She is both mild and guileless. She neither sits idly nor wanders here
or there. She neither eats or drinks like a glutton but like a
temperate woman. By her good and amiable disposition her smiling face
is suffused with love. . . . (Quoted in Chakravarti 1998, 207).
Similarly European and
English writers from outside India notably Mrs. Speier (Life in Ancient India) and Clarisse Bader also contributed to
Indian men s preoccupation with romantic love. They found in the
ancient Aryan past of traditional Hindu literature in the
stories of Nala and Damayanti, for instance, or of Savitri and Satyavan illuminating
examples of beautiful romantic and conjugal love (Chakravarti 1990,
38-60).[5]
In a recent study of 20th
century love and marriage in a small (Hindu) Nepali community, Laura
Ahearn (2001a) draws out the multiple interconnections between 20th
century literacy practices, romantic love and development
discourse. Using a collection of pre-marriage love letters between
men and women contemplating self choice elopements (rather than arranged
marriages), she shows how a twentieth century development discourse
emphasizing individual agency and success finds expressions in new
structures of feelings regarding love and marriage relations. Love
happens to young people in this Nepali community (as they see
it) it comes unbidden and unchosen and seizes peoples hearts and
minds. But those who love then find themselves empowered to
greater acts of self determinancy and self choice. Love, Ahearn writes,
afflicts and torments them [villagers],
catches them in a web, makes them feel like they re going crazy. Yet
it also empowers them, giving them a sense of agency in other realms
of their lives, thereby connecting them up with development
discourse and Western, commodified notions of success (2001a,
149).
Love is the union of two souls, writes one
young Nepali man to the woman who will become his wife, The
main meaning of love is life success.
May our love reach a place [this same young
man writes in a later letter] where we can in our lives overthrow any
difficulties that arise and obtain success (2001, 151).
These Nepali villagers associate love with
enabling life success. This means, Ahearn suggests, carving out lives
based on images presented to them through a wide range of media, through
written textbooks, and advertisements and through Hindi and Nepali films.
These images promote a lifestyle based on formal education, knowledge
of English, lucrative employment, the consumption of commodities, and a
sense of self founded on individualism (151). Over the decades of the
1980s and 1990s, self choice marriages (elopements) have increased
within this community and older style arranged marriages have decreased
to the point that elopements actually represent more than half of all
first marriages (Ahearn 2001a, 76-77). Capture marriages (an older form
of marriage in which young women were kidnapped and forced to marry by
the family and/or friends of young men, sometimes with the women s own
families collusion) have become increasingly rare in the past ten
years. It s not all right for there only to be the boy s consent,
you know, one young man told Ahearn, indicating an aspect of the new
structures of feeling she sees now contributing to marriage practices in
this village.
. The biggest, the main thing of
all, now, [he continued] in this day and age is for the girl to
consent totally and freely when it comes to the boy (98).
Although Ahearn saw mostly love letters written by
men (she was given them by the women to whom they were written), she
emphasizes that the practice of writing such letters is inextricably
tied to the growth of women s literacy in this community, to young
women s ability to read and write. Such literacy practices are
embedded in the cultural practices of the village: far from a
culture-free technology, literacy exists as social practice within
particular and contingent social (and economic, political) contexts.
Women s (and men s) literacy in Nepal exists in a context defined by
development discourse by economic structures which encourage more
individualistic activities on the part of men and women alike, within a
language (a discourse) which emphasizes individuals agency and self
choice as key to an individually defined life success. When young
Nepali villagers love and when they create their love
relationships through mutual love letters they see themselves within
contexts defined for them by contemporary development discourse (as
found in textbooks, magazines, and films). It may not be that these new
contexts create more individual
agency, but certainly they allow the development of more self-conscious
attitudes towards and more open acceptance of individual agency. Love
happens to young people who then see themselves consciously
choosing to act on that love.
A hundred years earlier, in colonial Calcutta and
India, love and literacy practices were equally embroiled in another set
of ideas and practices that colonized Indians saw as constitutive of the
modern in this case the colonially modern self. When English
educated young Indian men yearned for romantic love, that
yearning was part of a new construction of self that included a
knowledge of English, work in Western style jobs created by the British
presence in India, daily habits of eating and dressing reshaped by
colonial styles (and, sometimes, British demands), and a domestic world
and family relations appropriately reformed for the colonially modern
present. Young men s reading and writing practices were as fully
embedded in the 19th century British colonial world as
Ahearn s Nepali villagers practices were/are in the 20th/
21st century worlds of Nepal and America. Reading and writing
practices that began in India for men with English education (or for
women within a wide range of regional languages) carried with them the
full range of the socio/cultural/economic ideas and practices of the
colonial modernity that had brought those literacy practices into
existence.
Girijaprasanna and The
Laksmi of the Home
In the Bengali manual, The
Laksmi of the Home, the author's attraction to an intimate
companionate husband/wife relationship is clear, even as the same author
expresses his hostility towards romantic love and the threat it poses to
extended family relations. Girijaprasanna Raycaudhuri, the
manual's author, was only 22 when he wrote the book. Youth may be an
issue here, for as much as many authors (and perhaps more than most)
Girijaprasanna Raycaudhuri was attracted to the colonial modernity
embodied in a domestic world characterized both by household order and
by the intimacy and romance of a dyadic, exclusive, companionate
marriage. But he was also strongly repelled by the degree to which such
a relationship implied the destruction of family dharma
and the loss of the moral and emotional bonds of indigenous home and
family life
Girijaprasanna was born in 1862 into a Vaidya
family in Barisal district. He graduated from prestigious English
language colleges in Calcutta and became a lawyer practicing in the
Calcutta High Court. He also became an author. At the time of his early
death in 1899 he was 37 he had written at least seven books: three
studied the novels of Bankim Chandra Chatterji and established his
reputation as a critic of that well-known novelist. The other books were
advice manuals: A Few Letters (Kayekhani patra) in 1882; The
Laksmi of the Home (Grha
laksmi) in 1884 and 1888; Beneficial
Words (Hitakatha, date
uncertain), and A Couple s
Letters and Conversation (Dampatir
patralap) in 1896.[6]
Girijaprasannawas relatively well known at the end
of the 1880s. His books on Bankim had gained him great attention; in
addition several of his advice manuals were reviewed in the woman s
journal, Bamabodhini patrika. The
reviewer of the first edition of The
Laksmi of the Home praised
the book s good advice about household dharma,
and its author s good taste, magnanimity and discretion. At the
same time he noted his own disagreement with some of the author s
opinions: with Girijaprasanna s support of child marriage, for
example, and with his opposition to couples meeting before marriage (Bamabodhini 1884, 233-234).
The title page of Girijaprasanna s manual tells
us it was written to educate women about all those good qualities
which are necessary for a woman to be a true Laksmi
of the home. The greater proportion of the book focused on women s
family relationships. Chapters on Husband and Wife, The
Father-in-law s House, A Husband s Travels, The
Mother-in-law and the Daughter-in-Law, among others, addressed
women s roles, relations, obligations and responsibilities within
their in-laws families. Women s literacy and education , the
husband s role as his wife s teacher, and the greater weight his
advice should have in determining her conduct, the importance of order,
cleanliness, economy and efficiency these issues were discussed in
chapters such as Reading and Writing, Clothing and
Ornamentation, and Housewifery. The author excuses himself in
the introduction, however, from any detailed discussion of domesticity.
It has seemed to me quite unnecessary, he notes in the preface to
the first edition,
to write on subjects such as art, cooking,
hygiene, midwifery, the rearing of children and so forth in such a
book, especially as there are already books written specifically on
these matters. What would be the point of reading this book instead of
those? (LH, ii)
Love and Family Dharma
The central point of The
Laksmi of the Home s opening chapter and a recurrent theme in
many others as well was the primacy of dharma
in family life. In Husband and Wife (the manual s first chapter) the author
defines the responsibility of wife and husband in terms of their duties
to the family. This householder stage of life, says the husband,
is not for one s own happiness, it is not
for earthly pleasures and luxury, it is not for fame and glory. The
stage of the householder is for the practice of dharma,
for doing good for others (LH, 7).
But the fictional wife only imperfectly understands
the meaning of this. Asked to describe the duties which husband
and wife owe each other, she puts forward a description of romantic and
exclusive love:
They should each [she says] love [bhalobasibe] each other; They should each tell each other their
innermost thoughts. Each should be made happy by the other s
happiness and unhappy by the other s unhappiness and each should
try to increase the other s happiness (LH,
7)
Stop! says the husband, I don t want
to hear any more.
An argument follows about the purpose of marriage
and love in which the husband argues bitterly against
a romantic and or in any way exclusive relation between husband and wife.
Husband and wife, says the husband, have a mutual obligation to support
each other's household duty and to restrain any bad instincts in each
other.
WIFE:
And what I said, was that nothing? Shouldn t they love each other?
HUSBAND:
Sure they should.
WIFE:
Sure they should! Is it so
insignificant? What has happened to you today? (LH,
8)
Calm down a little and listen, says the
husband, and in what I m going to say there is even something
about love.
Who knows what kind of mania modern girls
have got [says the husband] day and night
they drive themselves crazy thinking of nothing but Love! Love!
They know nothing about love, they re just playing with words.
If you love without saying I love you out loud or without
making childish demands isn t it still love? Just look at our older
generation of women. They probably wouldn t even understand the
meaning of this Love you people are so excited about. But does
this mean they loved any less or got any less love? (LH,
8-9)
Any insistence on the individualistic love of
husband and wife, the manual insists, will in the end destroy the family.
Whatever you talk about whether it is enjoyment or happiness dharma
must be the foundation for it all, says the husband .
Too much emphasis on love, in fact, produces an obsession which is
unhealthy for girls; Girls who
receive such ideas, says the husband,
cling to them from childhood as if they are the very goal and
purpose of marriage.
They think
constantly of love love and, in the end, some get as
obsessed with it as a character in a novel. They can think of nothing
else their husband s love seems to be the only purpose of their
life. This is harmful both to them and to their husbands. For when the
husband thinks My wife is my all and the wife thinks, My
husband is my all. household dharma
gets burnt to ashes.[7] Family dharma
gets burnt to ashes. And only two people, sitting face to face, night
and day, pass their lives (LH,
10-11).
Neither
the husband nor the wife may live only for their own love and happiness.
Where the manual s second chapter, Reading and Writing, will
urge women to become literate, implying that a new relationship with
their husbands awaits them when they do, Husband and Wife forbids
any couple to live only for each other.
Bhalobasa, romantic,
exclusive love, is trivial and selfish; family, household and dharma must all take precedence over personal happiness, personal
choice or mere love. For,
it would not be
enough for the husband and wife just to love each other. Nor would it
be enough for each of them just to search for each other s happiness.
The Hindu wife must become her husband s co practicer of dharma.[8]
How can you women even call a thing love when it leads to the
destruction of your husband s dutiful work?
How can you call a thing a search for happiness when it
will bring your husband sorrow in the future?
Love is a good thing, says the husband,
concluding the restatement of an older position, The
search for happiness is a good thing.
But you women do
not understand these things well. That s why you have to be given
instruction in this way (LH,
12).
Other chapters in The
Laksmi of the Home echo the same theme. In Father-in-law s
House great emphasis is placed on the need to avoid quarrels with
one s in-laws. In a chapter called A Husband s Travels the
wife is discouraged from asking to accompany her husband when he travels
away from home for work or school; her departure might disrupt the
family. A wife s obligation is not only to fulfill her own household
and family obligations but to help her husband do the same.
This then is the work of women, says the husband summing up,
They must encourage the husband in his dharmictasks
and keep him away from things which are not dharmic. Causing a husband to fall into danger for her own happiness
is the work of an unfaithful wife (LH,
33).
Love and the Reading Woman
The second chapter of The
Laksmi of the Home, Reading and Writing, is a plea for
women s literacy. Here we can trace the impact of both colonial
modernity and new structures of education and employment. English
educated boys had to anticipate spending time away from home whether at
college or for employment; they had to be prepared for the demands of
both. They wanted wives equipped to help them cope with the new
conditions of their lives. Discussions of literacy frame situations in
which a wife s inability to read could bring disaster. In another
Bengali manual of the period, A
Husband's Advice to His Wife, dreadful possibilities are imagined in
the course of scenarios arising out of the wife s illiteracy: a
brother-in-law fails his school examination because he is not sent a
crucial book; a mother, unable to read the doctor s instructions gives
her child a fatal overdose of medicine (HAW,
2-5). Given the new circumstances of school and working lives, boys
wanted wives who could read and write (at least in Bengali if not in
English); over the second half of the nineteenth century, a girl s
literacy became a major requirement in middle class marriage
negotiations (Borthwick 103).
In The Laksmi
of the Home s chapter on Reading and Writing, the author s
arguments for literacy recapitulate the new demands of home life in
British India. Women, the husband asserts, should be able to
produce their own letters for husbands away at college or at work. They
should be able to keep household accounts and count and add without
error; then the husband coming home after a whole day of working in
dripping sweat at the office can be released from these tasks (14).
Women should be educated for the joy of education, to learn about the
world each day you can learn where, when and what is happening,
the husband exclaims enthusiastically, from the newspaper even while
sitting in your own home! (15) Finally women should know how to read
and write so they can pass this knowledge on to their children.
See what you re saying. . . you don t
want to learn to read and write from fear of your mother and later
perhaps, your own children won t want to read and write from fear of their
mother. . . . A child educated by his mother gets an education he could
not get from a thousand gurus (16).
But the women to whom these pleas were addressed
only half lived in the colonial present. The
Laksmi of the Home wife easily
rejects most of the husband s arguments. Women already keep the
household accounts, she points out, the elder women of the household do
it doesn t her husband think they do them properly? As for the need
to write letters how long will they be separated, she asks, that she
would need this knowledge? Besides writing and reading is necessary only
for those who work outside the house. Ah! she says, So the wife
should put on pantaloons and a loose robe [office clothing] and go off
to the office every once in a while, is that it? (13) Only the
husband s final argument, that education will make her a better
mother, carries sufficient weight to overcome her reluctance.
The case for literacy proceeds, in this chapter, on
several levels, through the husband s explicit arguments, but also
through the implicit suggestion that accompany them.
For literacy, the author implies, will enable a wife to have a
different, more intimate and exclusive relationship with her husband.
Education will enable her to share his life more fully; in fact, if a
wife is to be her husband s friend and assistant in all worldly
matters, then education is her duty. (14) Literacy will not only make
the wife more her husband s friend, it will enable husband and wife to
communicate in a more intimate, direct manner. The wife who learns to
read will share the secret thoughts of her husband. Saroj, says
the husband,
don t you see how wrong it is not to
learn how to read and write. I'll write to you but you won t be able
to read my letter. Someone
else will read it to you. Because of that I won t be able to write
you my most innermost thoughts. Or
perhaps I'll be anxious to get news from you. But before you can send
a letter, you ll first have to flatter someone else into writing it.
So only at the end of the month (if even then) will you be able to
send me a letter. That letter will also have been written by someone
else so I won t be able to learn everything you want to say from
it either (13).
All the things he has told her on previous visits
will become part of an exclusive bond between them. By remaining
illiterate she may even be rejecting this bond. When I come, I say
the same things over and over , the husband says, you don t
pay any attention. (13)
In a long sequence at the end of the second chapter
the husband dreams of what it will be like when his wife has
finally learned to read and write. You don t know how delighted
I ll be, he tells her, the day I get the first letter you write
yourself.
Today, finally, after such a long time,
you ve said I will learn to read and write . Can I make you
understand how much this pleases me?
Just now, as if in my dreams, I see you
sitting down to write me a letter. How shy you feel, writing for the
first time. How many things you write down only to cross them out.
Finally you write a letter and send it to me, I can see myself reading
that letter, reading it over and over again, one time two times so
many times and still I can t get enough of it.
Again, as if in my dreams, I see you
sitting in front of me reading, very slowly, one of the Betal
stories. Your hair has blown loose and keeps falling
forward across your face. Your two lips are moving very slowly. I
watch all this with insatiable eyes. The whole world seems empty as
the sky, all of my senses center in my eyes and as I watch this
incomparable sight, I seem to have reached heavenly bliss. Ah ha! Will such a day
come? (17)
In this dream, husband and wife are alone in the
world. She is the sole focus of his attention, the only object of his
insatiable eyes. Neither the world nor the family can
come between them and only his relationship with her has significance.
The intensely romantic and exclusive relationship imagined in this
chapter was, one suspects, equally attractive to the young girls for
whom the text was intended and to the twenty-two year old author who
wrote this book.
Love and the Ancient Aryans
But the exclusive intimacy of the literacy chapter
takes on a different significance within the manual as a whole. For it
is exactly this kind of love relationship that the author has already
explicitly rejected as selfish, foolish and undesirable in much of the
rest of his book. Maintaining a simultaneous commitment to the reforms
of colonial modernity and to family dharma,
requires some fancy footwork and the rapid shifting of several
analytical categories. Here Girijaprasanna follows a path taken by many
proto-nationalists of the period and, even more explicitly, by
nationalists at the turn of the last century. Outdated ideas on
women s roles and conduct (old patriarchy) are dismissed as the
superstitions of elderly women; the tensions of domestic life are
attributed to the malice, envy and quarreling of family women; and the
roles and relationships of a reformed domesticity necessary to meet new
demands of life in British ruled India (new patriarchy) are discovered
not to be new at all. Instead, such reforms are identified as the
reassertion of ancient Aryan customs, a revival of the far distant past
in the colonial present. In Father-in-law s House the author
argues that girls should speak freely with their in-laws, and repeats a
common manual axiom: just as daughters speak freely with their own
parents, so daughters-in-law should speak freely with their newly
adopted parents , that is, with their in-laws. Fine, says the
wife dismissively, all your ideas are English. No, no, says the
husband, this isn t an English idea, this is our own native
country s view.
WIFE:
[sarcastic]
Oh yes And where have you seen a newly married girl speaking
with her father and mother in law? (LH, 31)
Nowhere, concedes the husband, but it is important
to understand the reason why:
It's in our Sastras
that one should not spend too much time in the presence of the
elders. Who knows whether by some chance word or action one might
insult them. So, in the same way, you should realize that this
business of not speaking to the in laws also exists for the same
reason. If you did speak to your elders, such as your
mother in law, or your elder sister in law and so on, then
perhaps one day, they might be slighted by something said, or perhaps
one day you might even quarrel openly with them to their faces. (LH, 32)
Still such restrictions, however rational in the
past, no longer serve the colonial present. New patriarchy requires that
wives enjoy greater freedom within the domestic world. Thus,
Girijaprasanna s manual explains that not speaking to one s in-laws
is only for uneducated people. I don t want you to be like
that, says the husband.
What I want, he continues,
is for you to behave with whomever you may
call Mother or Elder Sister as if they really were your mother or your elder sister then there should be no
possibility of a quarrel or an argument developing. And as long as you
can understand the reason for the custom of not speaking with them,
then even if you did talk to
them, it couldn t do very much harm.
Okay, says the wife, but won t people
criticize me if I do this? But in the imaginary world of Indian advice
literature no wife is ever faulted for following her husband s
advice. If there s nothing to criticize you for on any other
account, says the husband, then it seems to me they should never
criticize you for this. (LH, 33)
In Girijaprasanna s manual, a husband s
authority over his wife and the degree to which his advice demands
changes in her education and behavior is not seen to challenge the
older family order, but to support it. For many manual authors, as for
Girijaprasanna himself, the domestic world was not being newly imagined
but reformed. Rid of the degradations caused by the ignorant and
superstitious practices of elderly aunties , domestic life would be
returned to the Sastric glories
of the ancient Hindu past. As domestic life was freed from the grip of
quarreling and envious womenfolk (and re-established once more firmly
under the control of men), family dharma
would be maintained; devotion to family elders would be maintained.
And, once more under the watchful authority and guidance of her
husband , the reformed wife would rule over the household, a
household she would maintain (as in the past) in peace, harmony and good
order. Be devoted to your in-laws as you are to your parents, the
text intones, as the convolutions of this argument dissolve into a
simpler plea for family harmony:
Look on your elder and younger
sisters in law and the wives of your elder brother and younger
brother as elder sisters and younger sisters. Never allow yourself to
feel envy, malice, anger or hurt feelings towards these people. If you
do these things, there will be happiness in the family. There s no
one more ill fated than the husband of a malicious wife. In a home
where there s always envy, malice, rivalry, bad feelings, where
there are always quarrels and grumbling in those homes Laksmi
does not stay (LH, 34).
*
* *
Two roles for women in relation to husband and
family: one requires the subordination of all personal wishes and
desires to family obligations and responsibilities; the second, imagines
a household of good order and a husband and wife in an intimate and
exclusive love relationship from which the rest of the world is excluded.
To some extent, context helps produce these contradictions. The manual's
chapter on Housewifery, for instance, takes place in a conceptual
context shaped by colonial modernity and transnational ideas on system,
order, efficiency and hygiene, by separate spheres and a wife s
obligation to rule over her domestic realm.
For in fact, [says the manual] the home is
a small kingdom the housewife is its queen.
All these concepts are
familiar to Girijaprasanna even if he has little to offer in the way
of specific advice. Keep the household s things in their proper
places, he has his husband say, quoting vaguely, Do the
proper tasks at the proper time and so on and so forth.
But, as this author turns to consider women s
family relations in Husband and Wife, for example, or in
Father-in-laws House, or The Mother-in-law and the
Daughter-in-law, the context shifts: now we are in the world of
indigenous Hindu home and family life. This is the world of the griho-lokkhi,
the world of family dharma, of
multiple family obligations and connections, the world of the sati
(the devoted wife) and the pativrata
(the wife devoted to her husband through her prayers and vows). As we
have seen Girijaprasanna not only uses the language of indigenous home
life in these sections, he restates that world s older concepts and
values.
Finally, in the chapter on literacy the author
returns to the more modern context a context marked by the discourses
of colonial modernity and made inescapable by the changed circumstances
of life in British India (and by young men s wishes to determine the
conduct and behavior of their wives). The manual here is set in a world
changed by British rule and British institutions. Literacy here
stands for far more than the ability to read and write it represents
colonial modernity and adaptation to a new cultural order in the hybrid
world of British India. The subject itself carries these connotations
and Girijaprasanna adjusts his view of women s relationship to the
demands of this new context.[9]
In the end, the author of The Laksmi of the Home is unable to reconcile the demands of
romantic love and dyadic, nuclear husband/wife relations with those of
family dharma. Most late 19th
century manuals avoid this conflict, as I have suggested, by not
discussing it. And by the 20th century, the conflict would
seem moot: nationalist rhetoric would so thoroughly appropriate the
language and discourse of the transnational (once Western) domesticity
as to render invisible their origins in the transnational worlds of the
earlier period. By the 20th century, the husband s role in
Hindu family life and his authority within that family over his
wife would come to be seen as axiomatic, another element of lost Aryan
traditions now restored to nationalist consciousness in the present.
In 1888, however, none of this had happened and
young men such as Girijaprasanna had to live with their uncertainties.
If The Laksmi of the Home was
unwilling to reconcile the demands of romantic love with those of family
dharma, it may be because its
author could not bear to imagine a life outside the embrace of the
indigenous family, a life without the daily habits and practices of the
indigenous home. Living in a world which demanded system, order and
timeliness (as adaptations to its new cultural order), attracted to the
romantic intimacy and exclusivity of companionate marriage, this author,
and others like him, could still dread a future cut off from the world
of the extended family. The emptiness that awaited those who forsook
family duties the unbearable bleakness of the world beyond the
connections of extended family life is captured in an early image of
the text: Love! love! says the husband, girls will go mad if they think only
of love If the husband thinks My wife is my all and the wife
thinks, My husband is my all. household dharma
gets burnt to ashes. Family dharma gets burnt to ashes.
And only two people, sitting face to face, night
and day, pass their lives (LH,
11).
Notes
[1]
This essay has been excerpted from Chapter 5:
'Love and Misogyny' in my study What Women Learned When Men
Gave Them Advice: Rewriting
Patriarchy in Late Nineteenth Century India.
The larger work studies changing gender and family relations in
late 19th century Bengal and India by reading a collection of Bengali
language domestic manuals against domestic and biographical literatures
from other regions of India.
[2]
See the six novels of the
Palliser series, for example: Can
You Forgive Her?, Phineas
Finn, The Eustace Diamonds,
Phineas Redux, The Prime Minister, and The
Duke's Children (Oxford University Press).
[3]
Here I follow Ahearn (2001a) who has shown in the context of 20th
century Nepali villagers' lives and relations that love, literacy and
development ideology and language are all mutually constitutive and
mutually implicated in the construction of those villagers' modern
selves.
[4]
By new patriarchy (a term first used by Chatterjee, 1986, 1993) I mean
the collection of ideas and practices relating to women's roles and
relationships in family life advanced by reform-minded
(proto-nationalist) English educated men in this period.
These changes were "new" because they challenged
indigenous customs and practices by
allowing women's literacy and education, by encouraging them to travel
outside the home; but they were "patriarchy" because they maintained
women in a dependent and subordinate status within Indian society.
[5]
We must also contextualize the period's romantic preoccupations,
however, in terms of the many sources that speak of (middle class,
urban) husbands' physical violence towards their wives.
Kosambi makes this point about Maharashtrian family relations,
but physical violence towards women in this period is certainly not
limited to western India. The
Bengali manual, The Laksmi of the Home, includes a chapter on
"Reforming the Character of the Unfaithful Husband."
There a wife, physically abused by her drunken and drug addicted
husband is advised to use perseverance and suffering to soften her
husband's heart and reform his behavior. The 19th century Maharashtrian
writer, Kashibai Kanitkar, abhorred the violent treatment often given to
both wives and children. She
questioned the basis of the claim sometimes made that men could not
treat wives affectionately without spoiling them and making them
difficult to handle. "Men
keep on beating their wives as if they were animals, and then say that
they feel love for them although they may not demonstrate it," she
said, noting that a rational person could not find such claims
credible (Kosambi 2001, 150-151).
[6]
Vidyalanka 1938, 372; Sengupta
1976, 121; Bengal Library 1882, 12-13).
Girijaprasanna Raycaudhuri had some help writing the first
edition of The Laksmi of the Home.
The first four chapters "Husband
and Wife," "Reading
and Writing," "Clothing and Ornamentation," and
"In-laws' House" were
written by Haridas
Bandyopadhyay, the editor of the journal Kalpana.
In the second edition, Girijaprasanna rewrote the entire manual,
noting that he had changed the original text to conform "to my
wishes" (LH, preface to the
second edition).
[7]
Or, more literally, it goes to the cula, an iron cooking oven
that sits on that floor. Wood is
burnt in its bottom and food is cooked on its top.
[8]
She must be her husband's sahadharmini, the one who
practices dharma together with her husband.
[9]Although
Girijaprasanna identifies the desire for 'bhalobasa'
as a contemporary nineteenth century obsession-an identification
with which most nineteenth century Bengalis would have agreed-the
conflict between love and family duty (dharma) had a longer history
within the Hindu and Indian pasts.
Even the Hindu king/god Rama had had to abandon his wife Sita when his love for her conflicted with his social and religious
obligations.
Appendix:
The Laksmi of the Home (Grha Laksmi)
by
Girijaprasanna Raycaudhuri
[Girijaprasanna
Raycaudhuri's The Laksmi of
the Home was published in two editions in 1884 and 1888. One copy of the second edition is in the National Library.
Here I translate chapter 2, 12-18.]
Chapter
2: Reading and Writing
HUSBAND:
What's this? You're very early today!
WIFE:
If I wasn't, would I ever hear the end of it from you?
HUSBAND:
[sarcastic] Well this is quite like Laksmi!
WIFE:
Do you have to go tomorrow?
HUSBAND:
Of course I have to go. My
vacation's over.
WIFE:
When will you come back?
HUSBAND:
How can I say? I have to take my exams now, so it may not be very soon.
WIFE:
And I'll be left behind here-won't you please write me a letter
from time to time?
HUSBAND:
Suppose I do-what about you?
What will you do? Don't I want to get news from you too sometimes?
WIFE:
What can I do about that? Since
I don't know how to read and write, I'll have to get someone else to
write for me.
HUSBAND:
Saroj, don't you see how wrong it is not to learn how to read and
write.[i] I'll write to you
but you won't be able to read my letter. Someone else will read it to you. Because of that I won't be able to write you my most
innermost thoughts.[ii]
Or
perhaps I'll be anxious to get news from you.
But before you can send a letter, you'll first have to flatter
someone else into writing it. So
only at the end of the month (if even then) will you be able to send me
a letter. That letter will
also have been written by someone else-so I won't be able to learn
everything you want to say from it either.
Saroj,
when I come, I say the same things over and over-you don't pay any
attention. True, before you
were a child, but now you've grown up, you've become wiser and you've
learned to understand things. Even
now, won't you learn to read?
WIFE:
It is my dearest wish.
But Auntie Kanto says 'Women
shouldn't read. Isn't it
said that if a woman learns to read, she's bound to become a widow?'[iii]
HUSBAND:
This is all just superstition!
Don't put this off any longer!
As soon as I go, I'll send you a book.
You study it with your elder brother everyday.
WIFE:
But there's no point in my reading and writing.
HUSBAND:
Chi! How can you
understand how much good there is in learning to read and write and how
much harm in not learning, and still not want to learn?
WIFE:
The only reason for me to learn is to write you letters.
Other than that there's no point to it-it's not as if women are
going out to work in an office. And
I'd rather not learn if people are just going to talk about me if I do.
After all, how long will we be apart?
HUSBAND:
[sarcastic] You've a fine understanding of this.
I suppose there's no reason, other than employment, for learning
to read and write! If a
wife is to be her husband's friend and assistant in all worldly matters,
then education is her duty. Education
is not just a matter of learning to read what's in a book, it's a matter
of mastering what's written there.
The purpose of education is to develop intelligence and
knowledge.
WIFE:
Ah! So a wife should
put on pantaloons and a capkan and go off to the office every once in a
while, is that it?[iv]
HUSBAND:
Is that the only way for her to help her husband?
Let
me make this one small point-when a husband comes back from a whole day
of working in dripping sweat at the office and still has to check over
all those niggling little household accounts, it's extremely
troublesome. But if,
instead, you women would finish off those accounts while you stayed at
home, that would be a great help to your husbands.
WIFE:
But we do them now. If we don't do them, who does?
HUSBAND:
Of course you women do them now.
But can you honestly say you do them in the same way that you
would if you knew how to read and write?
When
the washerman takes the clothes away perhaps it's true that if you count
on your fingers you can remember that the number of items were
two-twenties or three-twenties.[v] But if, among all those clothes, he returns an ordinary shawl
instead of one made of very fine material-can you so easily catch that?
Or
say the milkman begins to leave milk everyday and you scratch a mark on
the wall for each day that he does.
But if one of your marks gets erased or if, by mistake, you make
too many marks, you'll be completely befuddled.
Yet this is what you women call 'doing the accounts'!
But if you knew a bit of reading and writing, how well these
things could be managed!
WIFE:
But look at Ma and Auntie-they don't know how to read and write
and aren't they keeping these accounts?
HUSBAND:
Don't think for a moment that learning to read and write is just
for running a household. Reading and writing is more for the benefit of you yourself
than it is for anything else.
WIFE:
How can it benefit me myself?
HUSBAND:
If you know how to read and write, you can always learn new
things and your mind isn't so narrowed by superstition.
You can learn so many things about so many countries-each day you
can learn where, when and what is happening from the newspaper even
while sitting in your own home!
Reading
good books can teach you how to improve your mind.
When you feel sad and you read the right kind of book, it makes
all your troubles disappear. Somehow
reading a book at a time of great sorrow lessens the weight of your
sorrows.
There
are many virtues to reading and writing, just study a little and
gradually you'll be able to understand.
WIFE:
There are many virtues, it's true-but I'm still worried that Ma
may object.[vi]
HUSBAND:
See what you're saying-this is the even greater danger of not
learning to read and write. The children of a mother who knows how to read and write
learn to read and write quite easily.
But you don't want to learn to read and write from fear of your
mother and later perhaps, your own children won't want to read and write
from fear of their mother. It
is the nature of infants to learn first whatever they see around them.
And it is especially true that a mother's faults and virtues are
most easily carried over to her offspring.
A child educated by his mother gets an education he could not get
from a thousand gurus. I'll
speak about all this later. But
do be aware of this-it is also a mother's duty to become educated for
the welfare of her children.
WIFE:
It seems you wish me to learn to read and write?
HUSBAND:
That goes without saying! When
will my wish be fulfilled?
WIFE:
What if it were?
HUSBAND:
Truly?
WIFE:
Truly. I have also
wanted to learn very much. No
matter what, you're going away. And
I'll just be dying from restlessness. Who can I flatter? Who
can I ask, 'Please, take pity and write a letter for me sometime'?
I should learn to write for myself.
Send me a book.
HUSBAND:
I'll send it as soon as I go. Try to study it carefully.
Can you tell me how long it will be before you can write me a
letter?
WIFE:
Be reasonable, how can I tell?
HUSBAND:
You don't know how delighted I'll be the day I get the first
letter you write yourself. Today,
finally, after such a long time, you've said 'I will learn to read and
write'. Can I make you
understand how much this pleases me?
Just
now, as if in my dreams, I see you sitting down to write me a letter.
How shy you feel, writing for the first time.
How many things you write down only to cross them out.
Finally you write a letter and send it to me, I can see myself
reading that letter, reading it over and over again, one time-two
times-so many times and still I can't get enough of it.
Again,
as if in my dreams, I see you sitting in front of me reading, very
slowly, one of the Betal stories.vii
Your hair has blown loose and keeps falling forward across your
face. Your two lips are
moving very slowly. I watch
all this with insatiable eyes. The
whole worldviii seems empty as the sky, all of my senses center in my
eyes and, as I watch this incomparable sight, I seem to have reached
heavenly bliss. Ah ha! Will
such a day come?
WIFE:
You certainly know what to say!
And you even managed to dream while you were awake!
HUSBAND:
No, Saroj, this is not a joke.
Won't this dream of mine come true?
WIFE:
It will-it will!
HUSBAND:
Will you be able to write me a letter in one year then?
WIFE:
I will. But don't be
disgusted when you see my scribbling.
HUSBAND:
Disgusted-what did you say?-that I would be disgusted?
That scribbling of yours will be more precious to me than letters
of gold.
WIFE:
At the end of one year I will write to you, but even so, don't
put all this out of your mind until then.
Send me a letter every two days.
Make your handwriting a little large and I will try to read it.
HUSBAND:
Saroj, how can I say how happy you've made me today?
Now go to sleep, its gotten very late.[ix]
WIFE:
I don't know why, I don't get sleepy when I'm with you.
I only want to hear you talk.
When will you come back?
HUSBAND:
I've already told you, my return's not fixed yet.
WIFE:
I've listened to so much from you, won't you listen to one thing
from me?
HUSBAND:
I will-what is it?
WIFE:
Come back quickly.
HUSBAND:
I will.
[i]
In orthodox Hinduism, literacy was forbidden to women and members of the
lowest castes and most advice manuals included a chapter on lekhapora-"Writing/
Reading" or "Education." Note how, in the following
discussion, the presence of a large extended family obviates against a
young wife needing to learn how to read.
[ii]
Moner katha: one's secret thoughts, feelings and
intentions. This is also a pet name for women's intimate female friends.
[iii]
This Auntie is given a rather unsophisticated name and perhaps
the author means this to indicate that such older superstitions were
still current among the unsophisticated city "aunties" or
among the village relatives of bhadralok girls like the Laksmi of
the Home wife. The name Kanto itself (which might be translated
to mean something like 'please stop') might be given to a child by a
Bengali mother who had had a number of girl children in a row (and was
desperate for a boy). For a further discussion of such names are see
Sukumar Sen's Women's Dialect in Bengali (1979, 55-57). Thanks to
Sucharita Guha for pointing out the derivation of the name and its
significance.
[iv]
Pantaloons (penalun) and a capkan (a loose flowing
robe) were considered standard nineteenth century office dress, derived
most probably from Muslim court dress of the late 18th and early
nineteenth century.
[v]
The assumption here is that illiterate women would know the
numbers up to twenty (the sum of the digits on one's hands and feet) and
everything above that would be calculated as multiples of this 'twenty'.
[vi]
The general context of this conversation makes it clear that the
couple is discussing the wife's mother. This manual is not always clear
about whose house the wife is in when her husband visits her.
By custom she should be in the husband's home-married girls lived
with their in-laws and at their in-law's home. But in several chapters
of this text she seems to be visiting her parents. The young age of
wives in the nineteenth century made long visits to their natal homes
more likely, especially in the early years of marriage (and if the
girl's family could afford it). In spite of Brahmo efforts to establish
fourteen or (later) eighteen as the appropriate age for a girl's
marriage, even in 1887 an unmarried girl over the age of twelve or
thirteen was still unusual. The 'wife' in Conversations with the Wife is
married before her first menstrual period-that occurs about half way
through the book).
[vii]
Probably a story in Betal Panchabingsati ["Twenty-five
Betal Stories"] by Isvarcandra Vidyasagar. This Bengali reader,
written in 1847, was produced for students at Fort William College, a
Calcutta training institute for British civil servants. These twenty
five stories relate the conundrums presented to the legendary King
Vikramaditya by a wily betal (a spirit which inhabits a dead body).
Vidyasagar, a social reformer especially famous for his advocacy of
widow remarriage, wrote a number of Bengali primers and readers, some of
which are still used in Calcutta today (De 1962, 625; Sen 1971, 170).
[viii]
jagat sangsar: "the world and the family."
[ix]
Here, as in other dialogue manuals, the setting is the night
meeting of the husband and wife. A new wife was not to speak to her
husband in the presence of family elders nor spend time with him alone
during the day. Consequently all the tutoring (and lecturing) of wives
depicted in advice manuals was imagined to take place in the depths of
the night, when the rest of the family was assumed to be asleep.
Select
Bibliography
Translated Bengali Domestic Manuals
MS Bandyopadhyay,
Candicara. 1887. Ma o chele [Mother and Son]. Calcutta: Sahitya Sangsad.
BWa Bisvas, Taraknath. 1887. Bangiya
mahila [The Bengali Woman]. 2nd ed. Calcutta:
Rajendralal Biswas.
WD Dasi, Nagendrabala (Mustophi) 1900. Nari
dharma [Woman's Dharma].
Calcutta: Self published.
EG Dasi, Navinkali. 1883. Kumari siksa. [Education for Girls]. Calcutta: Self
published.
BWb Gupta, Purnacandra. 1885. Bangali bau [The Bengali Wife]. Calcutta: A. K. Banerji.
DW Mitra, Jaykrsna. 1890. Ramanir
kartavya [The Duties of Women]. Calcutta: Giribala Mitra.
HAW Mitra,
Satyacaran. 1884. Strir prati svamir upades [A Husband's Advice to His Wife].
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CWW Pal,
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