From Bogura to Calcutta Medical College in Colonial India and Beyond: A Post-colonial and Feminist Perspective on my Mother's Life

My paper is a biographical account of my mother’s life (1918?-1965), from Bogura in then East Bengal (now Bangladesh) to Calcutta Medical College and subsequently, till her early death in 1965. I offer a postcolonial and feminist perspective on her circumstances, as a woman of modest means in colonial India, her aspirations, the new opportunities available for women to enter medical education, and her achievements. However, at a particular juncture in Indian history (approaching Independence and Partition), my paper discusses the choices she would need to make and the consequences for her of those choices. Western scholarship on the representation of mothers in text and culture is largely dichotomous in relegating women (as mothers) to the private sphere, and fathers to the public one. I suggest it is possible to offer a more integrated and authentic perspective on an Indian woman’s life, drawing from indigenous sources such as religion, philosophy, and Ayurveda. In the end, however, I suggest that a “real” life does not conform tidily to theoretical schemas, whether Western or postcolonial, even as a feminist perspective does throw light both on women’s agency as well as systemic, patriarchal constraints that stand in their way.