Saptarshi Mallick's remarkable collection of travel writings by feminist and social activist Lady Abala Bose together with selected correspondence between Lady Bose and Nobel-winning writer Rabindranath Tagore challenges the western framing of modernity. These carefully assembled resources with commentaries offer students a compelling revisioning of the chronology and nuanced meanings of transnational lives between 1895 and 1936. A must read for the understanding of changing identities in the modern world history classroom.
Dr Candice Goucher, Professor Emerita of History, Washington State University.
Travel, in colonial times, has been largely seen as the preserve of the colonial male; the native is only
travelled to, but does no traveling themselves. In this book, we are introduced to the journeys of the Bengali feminist Abala Bose to the US, England and Japan as also her epistolary exchanges with Tagore within a paradigm of a transnational sensibility. This is a significant and original book that engages with the little discussed question of an Indian xenology, a view on the foreign, redefining the notion of native agency under colonialism
Dr Dilip Menon,
Professor of History and International Relations, University of Witwatersrand.Saptarshi Mallick has opened a window on a fascinating period of Indian literary history. Not only has he taken us to one of the earliest examples of international travel-writing at a time when women were barely permitted to leave their home, but he has selected one of the best-traveled Indian women of her generation, the Bengali Abala Bose (1865-1951).
The wife of Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose, India's first Nobel Laureate for Science, Lady Abala's accomplishments were readily acknowledged by the Scottish social scientist, Patrick Geddes whose biography of Sir Jagdish was published in 1920. Geddes, who had tragically lost his wife to typhus in Calcutta three years before, clearly recognised Abala's strength of character and the qualities she contributed to a successful marriage, "like the fly-wheel steadily maintaining and regulating the throbbing energies of the steam-engine" (Geddes, 1920).
It is thought that the genre of travel writing in English first appeared with the epistolary account of travelling around the British Isles, by Tobias Smollett in 1771. It would be interesting to establish if and when Smollett's book, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker was made available to Bengali readers as a result of the 1813 Charter Act. But it was the intention of the governor Lord Minto, a Scot like Smollett, and a former pupil of David Hume, that the printing press at Fort William in Calcutta should be used for publishing European literature translated into Hindi, Urdu and Bengali, thus laying the essential groundwork for the Bengal Renaissance.
Born four years after Rabindranath Tagore in 1865, Abala represented a generation of educated Bengalis whose parents' lives inevitably had been deeply affected by the 1833 Charter Act, and the enacting of the Macaulay Minute which made literacy in English obligatory. Mallick explains that combined with the opening of the Suez Canal, this was a watershed moment, not only enabling overseas travel, but permitting Indians to establish for the first time "links of communication with Europeans". Continuing this theme, he compares and contrasts Abala to other post-colonial writers such as V.S. Naipul, Siddarth Pico, Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh, who also contribute "towards dismantling the Eurocentric structures and prejudices of travel".
A consummate world traveller who visited London, Italy, Austria, the United States, and Japan, Abala's published her travelogues in the journal Mukul with the intention of generating "hope and wanderlust in the youth of Bengal...inspiring them to think beyond borders and get connected to other cultures" as Mallick suggests. He believes that ultimately her writings "harmoniously merge India with the world as a journey of refined tranquility towards wisdom". This is a beguiling concept, and perhaps more relevant today than ever before.
Lord Charles Bruce,
Patron of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies, Edinburgh.Lady Abala Bose, the daughter Sadharan Brahmo Samaj founder Durga Mohan Das, and wife of the famous physicist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, was a noted educationalist. After graduating from Bethune College, she studied medicine at Madras Medical College but never completed her degree. As Secretary of the Brahmo Balika Shikshalaya, the second girls' school established in Bengal, from 1910 to 1936, Abala Bose worked to provide girls with a rigorous education. Despite her importance as an educationalist and social activist, Abala Bose is most often cited as the "ideal wife" who made her husband's career possible. In recent years, scholars of travel literature and especially women's travelogues have translated and analysed Bose's travel writings.
In Connecting Spaces: The Travelogues and Letters of Lady Abala Bose, Mallick pairs his translations of previously unexplored Bose travelogues with a series of letters exchanged between Bose and Rabindranath Tagore between 1901 and 1937. Meticulously annotated, the travelogues and letters inform us about India and educated middle-class Indian sensibilities in the first four decades of the twentieth century. While the travelogues, designed to inspire children to learn about the larger world, tell us a great deal about how Bose saw the world, the letters are a treasury of intimate exchanges and reflections on the larger world. Both inform us about a woman who has not yet received the attention she deserves.
Dr Geraldine Forbes,
Professor Emerita, Department of History, State University of New York Oswego.Saptarshi Mallick has put together a fascinating selection of records and exchanges from the early 20th century figure Lady Abala Bose - a widely travelled Bengali authoress who describes a whole set of very different landscapes: the Hindu sculptures of Chittorgarh, the boat-filled harbour of Chennai/Madras, the peaks and customs of Kashmir, the Moghul architecture of Lucknow, not to mention the behaviour of the English in the Houses of Parliament. Her letters to Tagore also offer an intriguing insight into how Tagore was managing his international time and his own thoughts about the countries he visited. Together with an excellent introduction by the translator himself, these writings feel fresh and vivid, as though they were written during the last decade, not the last century.
Dr Ian Almond,
Professor of World Literatures, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University in QatarIn this engaging work, Saptarshi Mallick delves into the correspondence of Rabindranath Tagore and Lady Abala Bose, bringing to light the candid thoughts of two figures who stood at the cusp of today's globalized world. The transcultural and transnational orientations of Tagore and Bose, which are revealed in their correspondence, serve as important reminders of the value of learning across cultural boundaries. In an era when many are bent on erecting walls between diverse nations and peoples, it is refreshing to be shown the value of cross-cultural knowledge through the letters of these two thinkers from over a century ago.
Dr Jeffery D. Long,
Professor of Religion, Philosophy, and Asian Studies, Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania.A unique glimpse into cosmopolitan literary lives in late-19th and early-20th century India. Through her diaries and letters exchanged with Rabindranath Tagore, Lady Abala Bose emerges as a striking figure, as deeply committed to supporting and nurturing lives around her as fascinated by worlds far beyond her space and time.
Dr Saikat Majumdar,
Professor of English & Creative Writing, Ashoka University.
