Far from its somber beginnings with Nathanaiel Brassey Halhed's A Grammar of the Bengal Language (1778), and thereafter at the Serampore Mission Press in 1800 with the publication of the Bengali New Testament, the world of the Bengali language in print in colonial Bengal (a province in British‐governed India) expanded to a robust publishing industry by the end of the nineteenth century (Reference Chakravorty and GuptaChakravorty and Gupta 2004; Reference GhoshGhosh 2006; Reference Chakravorty and GuptaChakravorty and Gupta 2008). This growth in print and the emergence of a Bengali middle class—the so‐called Bengali bhadralok—“with political ambition” through a “complicated process of migration, and economic and socio‐spatial restructuring that occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century” (Reference ChattopadhyayChattopadhyay 2005, 14) would lead to a consequent emergence of a vocal public sphere (Reference ChattopadhyayChattopadhyay 2005). Apart from colonial institutions such as the university and the bureaucracy, and missionary‐run enterprises like the aforementioned Serampore Mission Press, that were integral to the opening up of this public sphere, the educated Bengali middle classes produced “an entire institutional network of printing presses, publishing houses, newspapers, magazines, and literary societies … outside the purview of the state and the European missionaries” (Reference ChatterjeeChatterjee 1993, 7). The so‐called enlightened bhadralok, keen to transform the Bengali language into a language befitting the articulations of a modern society, forged a “cultural project” (9) to give shape to this modern language, and what followed was a rapid proliferation of a body of literature—from novels and advice manuals to street literatureFootnote ¹ deemed obscene—with a readership well outside the bounds of Calcutta (the erstwhile capital of British‐governed India). It also gave rise to a thriving public sphere that debated myriad things from politics to social reform, from culture to the condition and education of Bengali middle‐class women, the bhadramahila.

The undeniable intellectual influence of the Bengali bhadralok in this public sphere, however, was not a uniform, uncontested one. Sumanta Banerjee has analyzed the various forms of urban folk culture that proliferated in the newly urbanized colonial capital, and the impact of the “cultural project” of Bengali modernity upon the same (Reference Banerjee, Sangari and VaidBanerjee 1990). Anindita Ghosh—in her exploration of the much‐maligned street literature patronized by the “polluting ‘others’ [of the modern guardians of culture],” that is to say “women, the lower middle classes, and poor Muslims”—has argued that “the written word” had become “an essential tool for ordering power relations in the cultural sphere,” one that made for anxious policing of boundaries between respectable and obscene literature and “contesting” literary cultures (Reference GhoshGhosh 2006, 5). This alignment of the bhadramahila with the less‐than‐respectable producers and readers of “street literature,” the “contesting” other to the project of becoming modern, is a significant one, as is the observation that women's patronage kept a flourishing sub‐genre of what Ghosh dubs “women's literature” in circulation (178). Judith E. Walsh, in her study of advice literature composed for women, has highlighted the ironies of a sub‐genre of literature that sought the patronage of the aforementioned female readers even as it cautioned them, among other things, on the dangers of injudicious reading (Reference WalshWalsh 2004). This gendered world of readership in nineteenth‐century Bengal is the concern of this article.

A considerable body of work devoted to women in nineteenth‐century Bengal concentrates on the proliferation of women's education and the intense debate in the public sphere over the same (Reference MurshidMurshid 1983; Reference BorthwickBorthwick 1984; Reference ChakrabartyChakrabarty 1995; Reference WalshWalsh 2004). Although women writers of the period have garnered increasing scholarly attention (Reference SarkarSarkar 2001; Reference DeyDey 2010), studies in readership and women's participation in book production and circulation remain scarce in the emerging field of book history in India (Reference SenSen 1984/2008; Reference DarntonDarnton 2001; Orsini 2001; Reference DarntonDarton 2002; Reference Chakravorty and GuptaChakravorty and Gupta 2004; Reference Ghosh, Gupta and ChakravortyGhosh 2004; Reference Ghosh2006; Reference StarkStark 2007; Reference Chakravorty and GuptaChakravorty and Gupta 2008). It is important to note, as Partha Chatterjee has observed, that women's education gained cultural legitimacy in colonial Bengal only with the rise of print capitalism and the establishment of institutions of secondary education that legitimized modern Bengali language and literature outside the direct purview of the colonial state, in a domain governed by the bhadralok (Reference ChatterjeeChatterjee 1993). Women's access to the public sphere, and indeed, to public institutions such as the theater, remained anxiously policed and curtailed, even as women's roles and responsibilities in the domestic sphere were eulogized to construct the idealized figure of the grihalakshmi or the goddess of the household (Reference ChatterjeeChatterjee 1993; Reference ChakrabartyChakrabarty 2000). Women, as objects of reform on the part of the colonial state and the modern Bengali bhadralok, could not be “allowed” to “navigate the world of knowledge, unchaperoned” (Reference GhoshGhosh 2006, 25). It is in this light that this article considers women's reading practices in colonial Bengal, addressing in particular the practice of reading aloud in the antahpur (the inner or the domestic sphere), often in the company of others—reading together. This article will argue, drawing upon texts from the period, that the practice of social or “communitarian reading” (Reference ChartierChartier 1994, 21) formed a defining aspect of the cultures of reading among Bengali women at the time—a form of female sociality that opens up different possibilities for women's participation in the public sphere in colonial Bengal. The article will further argue that the seeming absence of active resistance to patriarchal norms that confined the Bengali bhadramahila to the domestic sphere need not imply that there was no attempt on the part of women to negotiate such stipulations, that this very sociality, often clandestine in nature, enables us to consider women's negotiations with the boundaries of acceptable behavior.

In order to do so, this article will, first, contextualize its foregrounding of cultures of reading in the domestic sphere in the light of feminist scholarship of South Asia and the necessity of reinscribing women's voices in history. The article will emphasize the “social nature of reading” (Reference LongLong 2003, 2), made visible by the practice of “communitarian reading.” It will argue in favor of reframing our conceptualization of the practices of reading, wherein silent/solitary reading is granted a certain privileged theoretical position (Reference Certeau and RendallCerteau 1984; Reference FlintFlint 1993). The argument for this reconceptualization is intended to offer a sufficient framework for the consideration of the reading practices of historical readers in Bengal at the time of colonial modernity. Following this, the article will delve into the historical terrain of nineteenth‐century Bengal, looking into narratives from the period that offer glimpses into the elusive reading cultures of the antahpur such that it is possible to reorient contemporary theorizations of women's participation in the public sphere while seemingly excluded from its space.

Reading culture

Feminist “rewritings” of women's history in South Asia have placed increasing importance on women's narratives. In the words of Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “[feminist] analysis has always recognized the centrality of rewriting and remembering history,” as it is “a process which is significant not merely as a corrective to the gaps, erasures, and misunderstandings of hegemonic masculinist history, but because the very practice of remembering and rewriting leads to the formation of politicized consciousness and self‐identity” (Reference Mohanty, Mohanty, Russo and TorresMohanty 1991, 34). Writing—or rather, women's traditions of storytelling—seen as the “context through which new political identities are forged” and “a space for struggle and contestation about reality itself” (34), has been considered crucial to this process of feminist rewriting, dismantling literary canons and reinscribing women's voices as testimony for lived experience. Even as anthologies of women's narratives—written and oral—(Reference Tharu and LalitaTharu and Lalita 1991; Reference Tharu and Lalita1993; Reference DharmarajanDharmarajan 2004; Reference ZaidiZaidi 2015) set about the task of this necessary re‐inscription, contemporary feminist scholarship has sought to problematize the same (Reference SpivakSpivak 1988; Reference SuleriSuleri 1992; Reference ManiMani 1998; Reference DasDas 2007), asking questions about voice and subjecthood.

Gayatri Spivak's now famous question, “Can the subaltern speak?,” has in many ways set the tone for this questioning (Reference SpivakSpivak 1988, 90). Spivak elaborates on the problems of locating the “woman‐in‐imperialism” (102)—the colonized (Hindu) female subject in nineteenth‐century India—and her “historically muted” (91) voice, raising a series of methodological concerns about representing the subaltern woman's “voice‐consciousness,” systematically critiquing academic assumptions about making visible a “pure form of [subaltern] consciousness” (81), unmediated by ideology. Veena Das's ethnographic forays into the lives of the survivors of the communal riots of 1947 (in Punjab) and 1984 (in Delhi) further complicates this question of women's voices as she points out that “voice is not identical to speech; nor does it stand in opposition to writing” (Reference DasDas 2007, 8). Probing into the insidious world of rumors and the callousness of state authorities that accompanied the violence, Das speaks of the “threat” of “words animated by some other voice”—an act of what she terms “forgery.” The task of “recovering” the voices of such survivors, for Das, demands a consideration of their “everyday life” and its “eventfulness,” wherein “[female survivors of such violence] give an expression to their violation” (53).

This mode of questioning is pertinent to this article, concerned as it is with women's eventful everydays in nineteenth‐century Bengal. Reading, as a practice, firmly falls in the domain of those practices of everyday life that resist being seen, “flexible and adjusted to perpetual mutation” (Reference Certeau and RendallCerteau 1984, 41); a practice that nonetheless merits, in nineteenth‐century Bengal, volumes cautioning women about the dangers of the same (Reference WalshWalsh 2004). Foregrounding the practice of reading, this article seeks to delve into the manner in which Bengali women at the time negotiated regarding their exclusion from public spaces and conditional access to the public sphere. This negotiation, as the article will point out in its consideration of the specific circumstances of nineteenth‐century Bengal, did not necessarily take the shape of explicit condemnation, or of strident, activist demands for inclusion. In a social structure with deeply embedded notions of a woman's place within the domestic sphere, Bengali women's negotiating the limits of acceptable conduct often involved engaging in forms of being social woven into the fabric of their everyday lives. The delicate task of reinscribing women's voices in feminist historiography therefore cannot but entail delving into the ordinary, wherein “self‐creation is a careful putting together of life” (Reference DasDas 2007, 218).

Cultures of Reading

Roger Chartier's influential analysis of the cultures of reading and reading communities in France in the period between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries identifies three “fundamental cleavages” that distinguish modern reading practices from the nonmodern: first, between reading aloud and silent, visual reading; second, between a “reverential” reading of a limited number of texts and a voracious, irreverent reading of a wide variety of texts; and third, between a “private, cloistered, solitary reading,” and “the collective reading—both disciplined and rebellious—of communitarian spaces” (Reference ChartierChartier 1994, 17). Chartier does not hold these cleavages as absolute; indeed, he questions an uncritical chronology of transition from nonmodern cultures of reading to the modern as he points out that these transformations did not occur at a uniform pace. Chartier thus makes a case for a measured approach to understanding the use of the printed book in early modern France, addressing the various facets of the many representations of the act of reading. Chartier asks for a careful negotiation between the dichotomies of “the reading of a text and the reading of an image,” of “literate reading and hesitant reading,” of “intimate reading and communitarian reading” (21).

Sights and Sounds of Reading

Reverend James Long, in his account of the state of print in mid‐nineteenth century Bengal, writes,

Long's momentous Returns relating to Publications in the Bengali Language, in 1857, to which is added a list of the native presses, with the books printed at each, their price and character, with a notice of the past condition and future prospects of the vernacular press of Bengal, and the statistics of the Bombay and Madras Vernacular Presses (henceforth referred to as Returns) was composed out of an urgent desire to “understand the Native mind,” following the events of the Mutiny of 1857. Long's report was composed laboriously, after a year spent gathering information on the vernacular presses, visiting each printing press in the erstwhile Calcutta (then capital of British India), buying all available books, making note of prices, attending oral readings, and ended up becoming what was, in Darnton's words, “a panoramic view of Bengali literature in general, measured by statistics and colored by sympathetic readings of the books themselves” (Reference DarntonDarnton 2001, 241). The report, among other things, is significant for the glimpse it offers of the female reading public at the time, as evident in this quotation.

Reverend Long, like his fellow missionaries in colonial Bengal, had a keen interest in the proliferation of literacy among native women in particular. Long's Returns therefore argues for an “improved” vernacular press for the purpose of female education, observing that “considering the short time Hindu females can remain under school instruction, their domestic duties, and the state of Hindu society, the staple of sound tuition must be given through their own language—this will lead to a large demand for Vernacular books, both for schools and to form a family library” (Reference LongLong 1859). Long has words of praise to offer for the “intelligence” of Bengali women, and speaks of multiple books published by the Vernacular Literary Society that have grown popular among them.

Produced at a time when female education and literacy had taken significant steps forward (Reference MurshidMurshid 1983; Reference BorthwickBorthwick 1984) following decades of effort on the part of European missionaries and native reformers, Long's Returns captures an era of thriving vernacular print. It is also an era of a considerable female reading public who consumed books deemed both good and bad, and whose practices of consumption contributed significantly to the proliferation of the printed book and print culture in Bengal (Reference Ghosh, Gupta and ChakravortyGhosh 2004; Reference Joshi, Gupta and ChakravortyJoshi 2004; Reference GhoshGhosh 2006). Indeed, the necessity of female education and literacy in reformist rhetoric by the mid‐nineteenth century gained a near commonsensical tone, as British and native reformers alike made a case for the same as a necessary component in the production of conjugal harmony. Women's narratives of the period similarly emphasized the significance of literacy and education. For instance, Nabinkali Dasi, writing an advice manual for young women, defines reading as a kind of pleasure that “will remain with you your whole life,”

For Nabinkali, reading is a pleasure that is never “inappropriate” and never at risk of being under siege at any point in one's life—regardless of one's household responsibilities and the ties of kinship and blood.

Rasasundari Debi, in a text that is considered the first autobiography in the Bengali language, writes,

Rasasundari and Nabinkali were products of a thriving culture of reading, aided and abetted by the proliferation of print and the privileged status enjoyed by “education”—lekhapora (writing‐reading)—in Bengali middle‐class ideology at the time. It is important to take note of the particular emphasis placed on the act of reading in these narratives. Rasasundari's self‐narrative, Amar Jiban (My Life), is centered around her account of her solitary, heroic endeavor to master the written word in the secrecy of her kitchen. Her need for secrecy, one that prevented her from attempting to write, also necessitated reading in comparative silence, lest she be discovered by other members of her household. “Communitarian reading” (Reference ChartierChartier 1994, 21) nonetheless finds a place of significance in Rasasundari's text. She uses the word “moaning” to refer to her early reading skills—the halting, unpracticed reading of the autodidact as opposed to the polished, performative reading of the professional reader, a kathak or a pandit. Her earliest reading audience comprised a group of women—domestic servants and a few neighbors who did not betray her confidence as she displayed her newly acquired skill by reading out loud to them. Rasasundari would go on to find a community of readers in more of her neighbors, in whose company she read the devotional Chaitanya Bhagbat: “Afterwards, I would sit in a quiet spot with the neighbours who were often around me, and read the Chaitanya Bhagbat. One person would be on guard, ensuring no one saw us” (Reference Debi and GhoshDebi 1868/2008, 48). Even later, as she overcame her fear of masculine censure and spoke candidly of her mastery of the written word, Rasasundari would find fellow readers in her three sisters‐in‐law,

Rasasundari's delight in overcoming her sense of fear and shame and finding a community of readers underlines the social nature of this endeavor, one wherein the act of reading aloud ensures comprehension on the part of a community with varying levels of literacy. Indeed, Rasasundari's self‐narrative underlines the easy coexistence of cultures of solitary as well as “communitarian reading” in the antahpur at the time.

There are glimpses of such practices of “communitarian reading” in advice manuals written for women at the time as well, often tinged with a note of paternal concern. Jadunath Mukhopadhyay, in a manual titled Bangali Meyer Neeti‐Shiksha (Moral Education for Bengali Women), thus writes that “[there] are far greater chances of a girl learning from novels than that of a boy. There are few girls who have not heard novels being read out by their aunts, grandmothers, mothers and ayahs” (Reference MukhopadhyayMukhopadhyay 1889, 307). Mukhopadhyay underlines the sheer ubiquity of the practice when he notes that a good book is one that can be read without shame in the company of all and sundry (319). Mukhopadhyay's advice—resulting in an elaborate set of guidelines for appropriate reading, including an entire chapter dedicated to “books appropriate for women”—itself takes on a conversational tone that is characteristic of a number of advice manuals of the time. For Chartier, such “dovetailing” of writing with speech itself derives “from the culture of the tale and oral recitation,” traces of a past orality “coming to surface” in a world dominated by print (Reference ChartierChartier 1994, 20). In the context of nineteenth‐century Bengal, perhaps, such “dovetailing” might be deemed a conscious attempt to emulate the speaking voice, to engage with the ubiquitous practice of “communitarian reading” that allows for interaction and discussion with an immediate readership. Anindita Ghosh calls this co‐existence of “heterodox reading cultures” a hallmark of the reading cultures of Bengal in the nineteenth century: “The printed book in the nineteenth century is thus situated amidst strong surviving oral traditions as well as communal reading practices in Bengal that considerably compromised its impact as a ‘civilising’ tool” (Reference Ghosh, Gupta and ChakravortyGhosh 2004, 184).

Despite pervasive concerns about the passive or uncritical consumption of bad books and the varying levels of literacy in such communities of female readers, the glimpses of readerly engagement in the act of “communitarian reading” in narratives of the time suggest the very opposite. Saratkumari Debi, writing about women's majlises (gatherings), has her women readers passionately discuss their readings, “Have you read that book? That part in that particular book makes me want to cry,” its very generic nature suggesting a certain sense of familiarity (Reference BiswasBiswas 2011, 109). Kalyani Dutta's collection of anecdotes, drawing upon experiences of women of varying ages—from those who were born in the last decades of the nineteenth century to many who had lived in colonial Calcutta in the early twentieth century—in the antahpur, speaks of similar reading practices (Reference DuttaDutta 1992, 107–108). The illustrated print edition of the Ramayana composed by the medieval poet Krittibash was a much‐read text. Dutta speaks of emotionally charged readings of Oriya texts, largely devotional in nature, by the Brahmin cooks from Orissa on many afternoons, especially on the occasion of sankranti or on a particularly auspicious day. Another anecdote, narrated by Sashishekhar Basu, paints the portrait of an outright critical audience:

Dutta's anecdotes make no mention of how the sensational Adi Leela or Kashi'r Kechcha were consumed or discussed, just as they delicately “forget” to name the sources who obtained such salacious street literature for the female readers in the antahpur in the first place. There are, however, women in her anecdotes—figures who lived through the tumultuous early decades of the twentieth century and often carved a difficult path of their own making, one that involved copious amounts of reading and writing—who display an encyclopedic knowledge of the much‐disparaged popular novels and plays. Sarayubala Devi, of Goalbagan, is one such figure. Dutta speaks of a deep bond forged between herself and Sarayubala mashima over their discussions of theater and her collection of books. Sarayubala Devi's collection also included wedding poems printed by elite households such as the zamindars of Uttarpara and the Sarbadhikaris—another popular, feminine form that had its roots in women's oral rituals in the basarghar (the traditional female gathering at the bridal chamber with the bride and the groom on the Hindu wedding night, involving coarse, abusive banter that is often explicitly sexual in nature). In a remarkable instance of print redefining a traditional practice, “[the] songs and dialogues at these [basarghar] sessions [following the expansion of print] were often provided by commercial publications specifically catered for this purpose, and women organised carefully rehearsed performances based on these texts” (Reference Ghosh, Gupta and ChakravortyGhosh 2004, 180).

At a time when the distribution of books was dependent on an informal network of vendors hawking books in various parts of the city and beyond, the antahpur of respectable households did not merely obtain books from—approved by—male family members with subscriptions to public libraries and appropriate periodicals. Reverend Long speaks disapprovingly of the daring “female of the higher class [who] wished a European Lady, her teacher, to procure for her the licentious tale Videa Sundar,” which “the latter refused and gave her [Sushilar Upakhyan] one of the Vernacular Literary Society's publications—the result was that half a dozen copies of the last work was sold to the friends of the family” (Reference LongLong 1859). But bhadramahila also obtained books from vendors, outside the supervision of male members of the hosuehold. This informal network of book vendors did not distribute books in the Indian‐dominated parts of Calcutta alone but, as Reverend Long testifies, in towns nearby as well. “The poet and colonial servant Nabin Sen,” Ghosh writes, “described his dismay when, on return to his native village in 1866 after some years in Calcutta, he realised ‘what female education had done to [his] … land’” (Reference Ghosh, Gupta and ChakravortyGhosh 2004, 184). The poet's disapproval of and horror at women's reading practices in his native village notwithstanding, the spread of women's education beyond the confines of the colonial capital and the circulation of books by the way of hawkers who, in Long's words, “[devoted] the rainy season to the cultivation of their fields” (Reference LongLong 1859) ensured that the printed book from the city's printing presses made its way to the libraries of rural households as well. Many of these vendors were women—often of lower‐caste origin and therefore not subject to concerns about respectability and the dishonorable nature of waged labor. Rabindranath Tagore's elder sister, Swarnakumari Debi, thus recalls the “commotion” in the women's quarters with the arrival of the “flower woman” carrying books from the Battala presses, from poetry to fiction to fantasy (Reference BannerjiBannerji 2002, 53). Swarnakumari's anecdotes, furthermore, mention the visits of an educated Vaishnavi to the women's quarters, wherein she would read and sing to the inhabitants of the antahpur. These marginal women and their labor played a vital role in book distribution in the burgeoning consumer economy of colonial Bengal.

The books plied by vendors would range from cheap devotional chapbooks produced explicitly for female readers, such as Satyanarayaner Bratakatha or Lakshmir Pachali, as well as more inappropriate reading material such as sensational narratives of crime and adultery. As the public theater grew in popularity, on the first night of the performance, playhouses often distributed among audience members theater handbills and printed books containing the text of the play being performed. Handbills were also distributed directly to households, usually by female employees hired by the theater companies for the very purpose of distribution and circulation. Printed books were sold alongside other products of the colonial economy, such as “porcelain utensils” and “Japanese glassware,” and such sales would involve haggling like any other sale: “Sometimes, they would only pay 5 pc. instead of 6 pc. if they bought three books [worth 2 pc. each]” (Reference DuttaDutta 1992, 107). The sadar or the main courtyard of the household, Dutta reminds us, was left “wide open” (30) not only for guests and the extended family, but also for hawkers from every quarter, producing a sort of space that does not quite rest on a “fixed script” (Reference ChattopadhyayChattopadhyay 2005, 163).

There is much to be gleaned from these admittedly brief glances into the elusive practices of “communitarian reading” in the Bengali antahpur in the nineteenth century. Sumanta Banerjee, writing about what he calls “the rise of the bhadramahila” and her literature in nineteenth‐century Bengal, constructs a narrative of loss marked by an enforced “snapping” of ties between women from various sections of the society who were traditionally brought together by centuries of women's popular cultural forms that spoke in a distinctive voice (Reference Banerjee, Sangari and VaidBanerjee 1990). Banerjee's apprehensions about the loss of a “vigorous,” transgressive feminine voice, defined by the linguistic peculiarities of the women's sphere and the centuries‐old literary‐cultural traditions of women, is not entirely unfounded—the scrupulously chaste linguistic choices of Nabinkali Dasi or Rasasundari Debi reflect none of the “coarse, ‘untutored’ expletives and expressions that [the bhadramahila] shared with the women of the streets” (Reference Banerjee, Sangari and VaidBanerjee 1990, 163). The note of finality struck in the image of the “snapping” of ties between the andarmahal of the educated, middle‐class households in the modern city and the female performers from lower rungs of the caste and class ladder, though overstated, is not entirely inaccurate: “[the] gradual elimination of women folk performers from Calcutta in the last decade of the nineteenth century is suggested by the following figures. According to the 1891 Bengal census, there were 17,023 actresses, singers, dancers and their accompanists. In 1901, the number had gone down to 3,527” (Reference Banerjee, Sangari and VaidBanerjee 1990, 9, 132).

And yet what is evident herein is the shifting terrain of leisure practices available to middle‐class women at the time, with an increasing delegitimization of traditional forms of leisure on grounds of concern over obscenity or potential dishonor. The rise of the bhadramahila and her literature, as Banerjee calls it, is significant in this regard, as it draws our attention to the increasing importance of reading as a leisure practice made available to women. For all the caveats placed upon reading inappropriate texts and demands for critical reading, the note of urgency struck by many of the advice manuals for women suggests an irrevocable shift in the leisure practices of Bengali bhadramahila. Banerjee's mourning of the loss of ties between women of various social classes thus does not take adequate note of the newer ties forged over the circulation of the printed book—ties of the sort made possible by informal networks of book distribution and leisured communities of reading.

Reading Public

The discursive space in colonial Bengal is tied to the specificities of colonial subjugation and a firmly entrenched notion of a woman's place that can be traced back to precolonial domestic ideologies. Women's narratives from the nineteenth century thus seldom argue for roles beyond those prescribed for women. “Caged bird” is an oft‐repeated metaphor in these narratives, the confinement of the bhadramahila within the domestic sphere an oft‐lamented one; indeed, Rasasundari Debi echoes many of her contemporaries when she speaks of being locked up like a thief, her resentment seeping through in the strong choice of words, despite the narrator's protestations otherwise. Women's activist groups dedicated to social reform, however, were few and far between—the short‐lived Sakhi Samiti (1885), founded by Swarnakumari Debi (and modeled on the women's branch of the Theosophical Society); the Bharat Stree Mahamandal (1910), founded by her daughter Sarala Devi Chaudhurani in Punjab, with branches in several places in India including Calcutta—such activism being the forte of male reformers on most occasions. It is thus in the banal, eventful everydays of the bhadramahila, in acts as seemingly innocuous as gathering around a book to read out loud what might be the entirely respectable Ramayana or a scandalous potboiler, that one must look for expressions of self‐creation, for reinscriptions of the domestic with meanings altogether different from the ones ascribed to it. Everyday spaces, after all, are not “self‐evidently innocent” (Reference RoseRose 1993, 37) and gain the meanings inscribed upon them by the subjects who inhabit them. The “wide open” sadar or main courtyard of the household—as this article has noted earlier—frequented by male and female hawkers and street vendors of different castes, or the easy movement of women of various ranks into the innermost spheres of the antahpur, leads to the production of a space that does not rely on a familiar script but instead allows for being in public, albeit located firmly within the domestic sphere. This versatile rearrangement of space “opens up to unpredictable possibilities challenging ‘strategies of containment’” (Reference ChattopadhyayChattopadhyay 2005, 163), and of women's participation in the emerging public sphere.

Such versatile spaces were not uncommon in Bengali dwellings at the time—the dalan (courtyard) of many an elite household became a site for performances open to the public. The roak (sitting area attached the house) and the baithak khana (public drawing room) served as the venue for many a majlis or an adda, from the gathering of luminaries in the households of the educated gentlemen to the banter of young men, doubling as the public sphere and facilitating conversation and rational‐critical debate despite their attachment to the household. The romanticized adda or majlis of Bengali literature, however, was an all‐male terrain, wherein women were a peripheral or outright intruding presence, silently serving tea and snacks, interrupting the enthusiastic visitors who lost track of time in conversation and overstayed their welcome (Reference ChakrabartyChakarabarty 2000; Reference ChattopadhyayChattopadhyay 2005). It is important, then, to take into account the forms of female sociality that emerged in such informal, leisurely gatherings, even more so in the light of the “witty banishment of women from the privileged [masculine] space of the adda [a leisurely gathering in a public space]” (Reference ChattopadhyayChattopadhyay 2005, 185). Perhaps one of the lasting impressions of the valorization of the all‐male adda in Bengali cultural memory is in the erasure of such forms of female sociality, with the printed book at its center—as ephemeral and elusive as the adda, impossible to recover except in the shape of fleeting anecdotes—from literature, as well as from critical‐historical inquiry.

The seeming absence of resistance to patriarchal norms that confined the Bengali bhadramahila to the domestic sphere need not imply that there was no attempt on the part of women to negotiate such stipulations. Indeed, there is, in the very thrill and fear of transgression in the clandestine gatherings or the covert networks of supply of less‐than‐respectable books, in the comfort of a leisurely reading session of the Ramayana, an everyday renegotiation of the prescribed boundaries of meaning that seek to “secure the identity” (Reference MasseyMassey 1994, 10) of the domestic sphere as a static domain of tradition. Such renegotiations are essentially time‐bound, confined to the specific moment of the act of “antidiscipline” (Reference Certeau and RendallCerteau 1984, xv) that transforms the domestic sphere into a site marked by “the affect of communal speech; speech as passionate, multi‐sensory experience” (Reference ChattopadhyayChattopadhyay 2005, 183). The study of the everyday, Certeau writes, concentrates “on the ways of frequenting or dwelling in a place … on the many ways of establishing a kind of reliability within the situations imposed on an individual, that is, of making it possible to live in them by reintroducing into them the plural mobility of goals and desires” (Reference Certeau and RendallCerteau 1984, xv). The “communitarian” practices of reading of the Bengali bhadramahila—the act of reading together—brought together conversation and reading, and made “habitable” the demands of reform and modernity upon them.