This is a translation from Bengali to English of the first ever woman’s travel narrative written in the late nineteenth century when India was still under British imperial rule with Bengal as its capital. Krishnabhabini Das (1864–1919) was a middle-class Bengali lady who accompanied her husband on his second visit to England in 1882, where they lived for eight years. Krishnabhabini wrote her narrative in Bengali and the account was published in Calcutta in 1885 as England-e Bongomohila [A Bengali Lady in England]. This anonymous publication had the author’s name written simply as “A Bengali Lady”. It is not a travel narrative per se as Das was also trying to educate fellow Indians about different aspects of British life, such as the English race and their nature, the English lady, English marriage and domestic life, religion and celebration, British labour, and trade. Though Hindu women did not observe the purdah as Muslim women did, they had, until then, remained largely invisible, confined within their homes and away from the public gaze. Their rightful place was within the domestic sphere and it was quite uncommon for a middle-class Indian woman to expose herself to the outside world or participate in activities and debates in the public domain. This self-ordained mission of educating people back home with the ground realities in England is what makes Krishnabhabini’s narrative unique. The narrative offers a brilliant picture of the colonial interface between England and India and shows how women travellers from India to Europe worked to shape feminized personae characterized by conventionality, conservatism and domesticity, even as they imitated a male-dominated tradition of travel and travel writing.

Englandey Bangamahila is the first travel writing by a Bengali woman in England, published in 1885. A Bengali Lady in England is the annotated translation with a critical introduction by Prof. Nabanita Sengupta. This book is a documentation of the 19th century England—its strength and prejudices, as seen through the eyes of a twenty-year-old Krishnabhabini Das, a housewife belonging to an orthodox Hindu family. Krishnabhabini did not believe in social taboos and went against quite a number of them like travelling abroad, educating herself, not adhering to the 19th century views of motherhood. Her book too was iconoclast in a number of ways because it was not normal for a woman belonging to a subject race to dare criticise the British in such bold words. The book is an exceptional study of the Indo-English relationship, postcolonial studies, 19th century nationalism and gender studies.

Basing her work on Bengali-language sources, such as women's journals, private papers, biographies, and autobiographies, Meredith Borthwick approaches the lives of women in nineteenth-century Bengal from a new standpoint. She moves beyond the record of the heated debates held by men of this period—over matters such as widow burning, child marriage, and female education—to explore the effects of changes in society on the lives of women and to question assumptions about "advances" prompted by British rule. Focusing on the wives, mothers, and daughters of the English-educated Bengali professional class, Dr. Borthwick contends that many reforms merely substituted a restrictive British definition of womanhood for traditional Hindu norms. The positive gains for women—increased physical freedom, the acquisition of literacy, and limited entry to nondomestic work—often brought unforeseen negative consequences, such as a reduction in autonomy and power in the household. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book chronicles travel writings of Bengali women in colonial India and explores the intersections of power, indigeneity, and the representations of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ in these writings. It documents the transgressive histories of these women who stepped out to create emancipatory identities for themselves. The book brings together a selection of travelogues from various Bengali women and their journeys to the West, the Aryavarta, and Japan. These writings challenge stereotypes of the 'circumscribed native woman’ and explore the complex personal and socio-political histories of women in colonial India. Reading these from a feminist, postcolonial perspective, the volume highlights how these women from different castes, class and ages confront the changing realities of their lives in colonial India in the backdrop of the independence movement and the second world war. The author draws attention to the personal histories of these women, which informed their views on education, womanhood, marriage, female autonomy, family, and politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Engaging and insightful, this volume will be of interest to students and researchers of literature and history, gender and culture studies, and for general readers interested in women and travel writing.

'British Women Missionaries in Bengal, 1793-1861' looks at the role and contributions of the early British women missionaries in Bengal, in eastern India, between 1793 and 1861. It traces the role of and challenges faced by women missionaries from Hannah Marshman to Hannah Mullens in the context of colonial evangelism.

Words of Her Own situates the experiences and articulations of emergent women writers in nineteenth-century Bengal through an exploration of works authored by them. Based on a spectrum of genres—such as autobiographies, novels, and travelogues—this book examines the sociocultural incentives that enabled the dawn of middle-class Hindu and Brahmo women authors at that time. Murmu explores the intersections of class, caste, gender, language, and religion in these works. Reading these texts within a specific milieu, Murmu sets out to rectify the essentialist conception of women’s writings being a monolithic body of works that displays a firmly gendered form and content, by offering rich insights into the complex world of subjectivities of women in colonial Bengal. In attempting to do so, this book opens up the possibility of reconfiguring mainstream history by questioning the scholarly conceptualization of patriarchy being omnipotent enough to shape the intricacies of gender relations, resulting in the flattening of self-fashioning by women writers. The book contends that there were women authors who flouted the norms of literary aesthetics and tastes set by male literati, thereby creating a literary tradition of their own in Bangla and becoming agents of history at the turn of the century.

In the colonial context of South Asia, there is a glaring asymmetry in the written records of the interaction between the Bengali women and their European counterparts, which is indicative of the larger and the overall asymmetry of discursive power, including the flow and access to information between the colonizers and their subjects. This book explores the idea of gazing through literature in Colonial India. Based on literary and historical analysis, it focuses on four different genres of literary writing where nineteenth-century Bengali women writers look back at the British colonizers. In the process, the European culture becomes a static point of reference, and the chapters in the book show the ideological, social, cultural, political, and deeper, emotional interactions between the colonized and the colonizer. The book also addresses the lack of sufficient primary sources authored by Bengali women on their European counterparts by anthologizing different available genres. Taking into account literary narratives from the colonized and the less represented side of the divide, such as a travelogue, fantasy fiction, missionary text and journal articles, the book represents the varying opinions and perspectives vis-à-vis the European women. Using an interdisciplinary approach charting the fields of Indology, colonial studies, sociology, literature/literary historiography, South-Asian feminism, and cultural studies, this book makes an important contribution to the field of South Asian Studies, studies of empire, and to Indian women’s literary history.