Inside Tarini Bhavan: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Padmarag and the Richness of South Asian Feminism in Furthering Unsectarian Gender-Just Human Development

Bagchi B

Working Papers from eSocialSciences

Abstract: The first section of this essay considers the personal narratives of suffering and growth of the Tarini Bhavan workers and inmates. The second section analyses the ideological contours of the reformist, gentlewoman-centred feminist project in the novella. The third section is devoted more specifically to Rokeya’s humorous, realistic account of working women leading and administering an educative and philanthropic institution. The fourth section focuses on the eponymous heroine of the work, Padmarag/ Siddika/ Zainab. The fifth examines the striking and unusual ending of the work, in which Rokeya refuses to give her heroine the conventional ending of the courtship novel, and rejects marriage and heterosexual domesticity as the telos of women’s lives: she explodes the romance-style courtship narrative in which the highminded, well-educated, suffering young woman is reabsorbed into the world of patriarchal domesticity.

Keywords: domesticity; development; human; well-educated; young; workers; womenwoman; patriachal; heroine; india; hetrosexual; conventional (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-10
Note: Institutional Papers
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.esocialsciences.org/Download/repecDownl ... &AId=1730&fref=repec

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:1730

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from eSocialSciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Padma Prakash ().