“My Story and My Life as an Actress” as feminist autobiography/ Growth of a Thespian

From its very outset, Binodini’s memoirs have been used as material for social as well as theatre history.
As Rimli Bhattacharya writes in her introduction to Dasi’s memoirs, her work has been widely considered
as filling the lacunae in the existing records of the late 19th-century Bengali stage instead of her own
stories or social texts. Due to her extensive involvement with the theatre and her dedication to her
profession, perhaps writing the history of the Bengali stage in the course of representing her “katha” or
story was inevitable. However, academic interest and scholarship have mostly tended to overlook
Binodini’s other (literary) performance in their examination of the theatre history. Alongside her identity
as a prominent colonial-era stage actress and a founder of Kolkata’s Star Theatre—the latter identity, as
she reveals, being denied to her—she was one of the first women writers and primary feminist icons of
South Asia, actively asserting, negotiating with, and recreating her socio-cultural status as a “fallen
woman.”

Propelled into theatre by her grandmother as a means to tackle poverty, Binodini joined the Great
National Theatre at the age of nine in the minor role of Draupadi’s handmaid in Haralal Ray’s Shatru-
Sanhar (Destruction of the Enemy). Curiously, her fear of being on the stage amidst the public gaze for
the first time is very similar to her discomfort with her own writing. Describing her “extreme
nervousness” on the first day on the stage, she writes:

When I saw before me the rows of shining lights, and the eager excited gaze of a thousand
eyes, my entire body became bathed in sweat, my heart began to beat dreadfully, my legs
were actually trembling. I had never had occasion to perform or even appear before such a
gathering. In my childhood I had often heard my mother say, “Call on Hari when you
arefrightened.” (Dasi 67).

This uneasiness is somewhat reenacted when, concerning her writing, she says, “I have tainted these
pure white pages with writing. But what else could I do! A polluted being can do nothing other than
pollute” (Dasi 107). The focus must be directed to how this constant self-denigration could be a
conscious exercise of her expertise with the bhava. She further says that she could “surrender” herself
to imagination, stating, “I forgot my own self: the joys and sorrows of the character I played were mine
and I was always surprised to find that I was only acting out these emotions.” The oscillations between
different forms of the bhava become evident in her own assertions. Before turning to the other bhavas
(the lamentation being primary) that she performs in text, the extent to which she is devoted to each of
these must be taken into account. For instance, most of both “My Story” and “My Life as an Actress”
contain her declarations of her own faith in her acting. In the former, when narrating her new
association with the Bengal Theatre shortly after the Great National was shut down, she recalls how she
had become “skillful and powerful as an actress” even though she was “still a little girl” (Dasi 70). Later,
she writes how, under the disciplined tutelage of “Girish-babu” she would “become the very character
[she] was representing”(Dasi 79). It is this expert control over her expressions which she is able to both
evoke and sustain through her performance of the self in her memoirs.
Uncommon in the profession and owing to her skills, the second role that she was offered was that of
the lead actress Hemlata of the play of the same name; she would go on to commit 12 years of her life
to the stage. The subjectivity that is often evoked in writing is that of an actress to whom acting is not
simply a sadhana (meditation) but a way of being. In My Life as an Actress, she writes, “I cannot quite
explain why, but as for myself, I thought only of when the carriage would come to fetch me and when I
would find myself in the theatre. I wanted to see how the others conducted themselves on the stage. I
forgot almost to sleep or eat in my excitement” (Dasi 138).

As theatre actresses were recruited mostly from prostitute quarters, Binodini was designated the social
identity of the “fallen woman” right from the start; however, she was not quite the antithesis of the
bhadramahila, simply because her self-assertion tends to cast her as an entity totally liberated from
binarized social systems. By constantly asserting herself as a “despised prostitute” instead of a
bhadramahila (even though the very act of writing may situate her as one and even though she says she
has been living as a bhadramahila in the andarmahal),

Binodini is also able to challenge binary systems of thought where the masculine is privileged and the
feminine is rendered passive. A bhadramahila is the passive position that is assigned as the counterpart
in a hierarchical social order and establishes a balance for discourses surrounding the active bhadralok.
However, a “fallen woman,” on account of being beyond the periphery of the bhadra society, even
though bound in its oppositional association with the bhadramahila, is exempt from a direct dynamic
with woman–man binary structures. The fallen woman instead dismantles all essentializations of woman
(versus man) and makes writing possible through literary emancipation, while rendering it a “political
motivation to constitute one’s self as subject”.

In stark contrast to the portrayal of the obstinate actress, the other bhava is of the lamenting wronged
woman. Describing her memoirs as “bedonagatha” (narrative of pain), Binodini goes to a great extent to
legitimize her personal story and privileges her pain in this representation. In fact, her usage of “facts”
throughout the memoirs which makes it possible to historically contextualize them in the first place
would serve to only enhance the credibility of her performance when she narrates the self. Bhattacharya
in her introduction notes how it would be foolish on our part to consider the assertion of her
“artlessness” of her own writing as anything other than an extension of her mastery of bhava and
therefore a manifestation of “self-conscious craftsmanship” (Dasi 235).

My Story conveys her lamentation in an exalted manner, whereby parts of her narration appear to be
confessional accounts of a wronged woman who claims that she deserves the wrongs on account of her
being a sinner. However, not once does she stop questioning this notion of cosmic justice; she
continuously engages the notion of “Fate,” often entering into an accusatory dialogue with it:

Then why did He snatch her [Binodini’s deceased daughter] away from me? I had been told
that the gift of the gods is never exhausted! Is this the proof? Or is this the fate of an
unfortunate woman? Alas! if Fate be so powerful, why is He called Patitpaban, the
Redeemer of sinners? (Dasi 57)
Contrary to similar representations in contemporary women autobiographies there is also a certain rage
that surfaces in Binodini’s writings where she expresses her disillusionment with universal categories
like god and repentance. Ironically calling herself an “unbeliever since childhood” (Dasi 59), she writes:
As to repentance! My entire life has been wasted in repentance […] But has repentance borne anything?
where indeed is Hari? (Dasi 57–58)

Comparable to a soliloquy, she often uses her bhava to indulge in a monologue where reading the
exchange seems like eavesdropping. She first accuses herself, reflecting on her “sins,” then recalls that
she was pampered despite her shortcomings, and finally returns to self-accusatory ruminations, which
only allow her to be “in character.” However, a more pertinent connection can be drawn between her
self-accusations and what Cixous calls the tradition of “self-admiring, self-stimulating, self-
congratulatory phallocentrism” (879) that has dominated all writing practices. By not adhering to a
linear, coherent narrative of the self and instead revealing it in its fragmentations and contradictions,
Binodini perhaps pioneers a new feminine writing which is dissociated from phallocentric obsessions
with a unified understanding of the self.