Rassundari Devi: The Bengali Housewife Who Taught Herself To Write In Secret In a kitchen in rural Bengal, sometime in the 1830s, a young wife tucked a single torn page among the twigs and dried leaves she used to light the cooking fire. The page had come from her husband's copy of the Chaitanya Bhagavata, a sacred text she was forbidden to touch. Beside it she kept a palm leaf covered in her small son's handwriting practice. Whenever the household emptied, and nobody was watching, she drew them both out and matched the shapes against half-remembered sounds. Her name was Rassundari Devi, and she was teaching herself the one thing a respectable woman of her world was never meant to possess. Also Read: At 92, Dr Suri Srimathi Is Still Delivering Babies Six Decades After Her First Rassundari was born around 1809 in Potajia, a village in the Pabna district of what is now Bangladesh. She was married at twelve into a landed family, and from that day her life narrowed to the cooking hearth, the children and an endless round of domestic duty. Formal schooling for girls simply did not exist in her society, and the few women who wished for it faced something darker than mere disapproval. Early Bengali Script Of The Kind Rassundari Taught Herself To Form (Picture Credit - Facebook) A woman who knew her letters, many believed, would bring ruin upon her household and would be punished by the gods with early widowhood. Books were objects of superstition and suspicion when a woman's hands came near them. To want literacy at all was treated as a kind of wickedness, a threat to the natural order of the home. By her own account, Rassundari was 26 when she began in earnest. She had been stirred by a dream in which she sat making out the words of the scripture, and she woke resolved to turn that vision into something true. With no teacher, no primer and no permission from anyone, she worked only in snatched and solitary moments, burying her stolen page and palm leaf where no watching eye would find them. Amar Jiban, The First Full-Length Autobiography Written In Bengali (Picture Credit - Amazon) Progress was painfully slow. Years went by before she could string a full line together, and longer still before she could form the letters herself with any confidence. Every scrap of her schooling had to be stolen from a life that left almost no time for it, and concealed from a family that would not have approved. Widowed in later life and freed at last from the duties that had bound her, Rassundari turned all of that hard-won skill towards a book of her own. Amar Jiban, meaning My Life, first appeared around 1868, and it carries a remarkable distinction. It is counted as the first full-length autobiography written in the Bengali language by anyone at all, woman or man. In its pages she set down the loneliness, the drudgery and the quiet defiance of a life spent aching for the written word. The torn page she once hid in the kitchen ash was, in its moment, an act of theft against her own age. It became, in time, the cornerstone of a literature that no longer had to hide. Seasoned Editor and Author with over a decade of experience in literary journalism, author interviews, and publishing trends. Known for curating impac... View More