CDS (I) 2022 General Knowledge · Question 68 of 120

Correct — A, Binodini Dasi. Amar Katha is the memoir of Binodini Dasi, 1863 to 1941, the actress the Calcutta stage knew as Nati Binodini. She was put on the professional stage at about twelve, at the National Theatre, under the mentorship of its founder Girish Chandra Ghosh, and she had left acting before she was twenty-five. The book reached print in 1913 and stands as the first autobiography by an Indian actress: its subject is not only her own life but the theatre seen from the inside, the money that raised a playhouse and the respectability that the public stage withheld from the very women who filled it. The other three names on the list are real pioneers of Bengali women's writing, which is exactly what makes the option set hard — every one of them wrote, and none of them wrote this book.

• (b)Rashsundari Debi — Rashsundari Debi wrote Amar Jiban, first published in 1876, with a second part in 1906. It is generally counted the first full-length autobiography in modern Bengali by anyone, and the first by an Indian woman; she had taught herself to read in secret in a household that did not permit it. A different book, and a generation earlier.
• (c)Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain — Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain is remembered for the feminist fable Sultana's Dream and for Abarodhbasini, and for the girls' school she ran in Calcutta. She wrote essays and fiction with a reformer's purpose rather than a memoir of her own life.
• (d)Kailashbashini Debi — Kailashbashini Debi belongs to the same generation of women writers and wrote on the condition of Hindu women, but Amar Katha is not her work.

The Bengali public theatre of the 1870s and 1880s was the first Indian stage to put women in women's roles, and it recruited them almost entirely from the households of the city's courtesans. Binodini Dasi was its most celebrated performer, playing across the repertoire of Girish Chandra Ghosh, and her earnings and patronage were central to the building of the Star Theatre in Calcutta — a playhouse she was then not permitted to have named after her. That grievance runs through Amar Katha and is a large part of why the book is read today, in Bengali and in English translation.

The item is a straight recall of an author-and-title pairing, but the four names are chosen so that recognising them is not enough — you have to attach the right title. The clean way to hold the set is by genre. Binodini Dasi wrote a memoir of the stage; Rashsundari Debi wrote a memoir of a domestic life and of learning to read; Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain wrote satire, essays and campaigning prose on the seclusion of women; Kailashbashini Debi wrote on the condition of Hindu women. One caution about the printed stem. Its window of 1910 to 1913 refers to the serial run of the memoir before it appeared as a book, and that serialisation could not be confirmed against a primary source while this card was written. The securely documented date is the book's publication in 1913, so rest the answer on that; the authorship is not in doubt either way.

• Binodini Dasi lived from 1863 to 12 February 1941 and began acting professionally at about twelve at the National Theatre in Calcutta.
• Girish Chandra Ghosh, the founder of that theatre, was her mentor and the playwright of much of her repertoire.
• Amar Katha was published in 1913 and has been translated into English as My Story and My Life as an Actress.
• Rashsundari Debi's Amar Jiban, 1876, is the earlier landmark — the first full-length autobiography in modern Bengali.
• Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's Sultana's Dream, 1905, is a very early work of feminist utopian fiction written in English.

• Swapping Amar Katha with Amar Jiban; the titles are close and the authors are not.
• Assuming the earliest Bengali woman autobiographer must be the actress; Rashsundari Debi comes almost forty years earlier.
• Filing Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain as a memoirist because she is the best known name on the list.

Almost always as a book-to-author match, sometimes reversed into which of these wrote about the theatre, or set as a chronology of women's writing in Bengal.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Amar Jiban, generally regarded as the first full-length autobiography in modern Bengali, was written by

  • (a)Binodini Dasi
  • (b)Rashsundari Debi
  • (c)Swarnakumari Devi
  • (d)Kailashbashini Debi

  Answer(b) Rashsundari Debi — Amar Jiban was published in 1876, with a second part in 1906.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Sultana's Dream, an early work of feminist utopian fiction from Bengal, was written by

  • (a)Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
  • (b)Binodini Dasi
  • (c)Pandita Ramabai
  • (d)Toru Dutt

  Answer(a) Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain — published in 1905, and written in English.