Thread by @sheshapatangi1

“The nation is regarded as the Mother while women are forbidden to crusade for her cause”.

In fact, it’s not the Right, but the Leftists should worship him, his works were way, way ahead of his time especially about the woman characters, but what to do, he wrote BandeMataram.

On his Punyatithi, I’m deliberating how #BankimChandraChatterjee became a voice for millions of women with his works.

In his sociological essay “Samya”, Bankimchandra offers a breathtaking and penetrating analysis of inequality in India's caste system, gender inequality and

that of the establishment of the supreme truth of equality between men and women. He bitterly condemns inequality in Hindu society making gender oppression his focus of attack, since sexual hypocrisy is most blatant. It permits male polygamy while demanding from woman chastity

seclusion and an ascetic widowhood, and forbidding widow remarriage. He laments that the degree to which women are enslaved by men here cannot be found anywhere else. He refutes the argument that unequal rights are grounded in unequal capabilities, since capabilities are not

naturally unequal but have been thus created by unequal conditions.

Kazi Abdul Wadud, prominent Bengali critic has rightly remarked: The modern critic of Bankimchandra finds no basis for the charge against him of anti-Muslim spite. For one thing, he has created some beautiful

Muslim characters; for another, as a socialist, he championed the cause of the have-nots against the haves, irrespective of race or creed.
He emphasises that our society does not recognize that if capabilities differ, it should lead to unequal rights.
@upma23 @Sassy_Hindu

Advocating the absolute value of liberal rights, he appeals for women’s education, economic independence by earning and fair property inheritance rights, freedom from seclusion through fair division of sexual and domestic labour and denounces the demand for
@kavita_tewari

“absolute and unconditional chastity” from women, because men are not expected to conform to those standards.
Bankim Chandra’s early literary efforts were produced in verse. In 1853, he brought out two volumes of poems entitled Lalita and Manasi, but after this

@NAN_DINI_

Bankimchandra discarded poetry for fiction. Under the influence of the contemporary craze for writing in English, his first novel, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864)
Bishabriksha (1873) is his first social novel which centre’s on the plight of widows.
Krishnakanter Uil (1878) is a realistic

social novel and revolves around a widow’s socially inhibited love and its grim tragedy.
Bankim wrote in the preface to Krishnakanter Uil that, “novels are expositions of difficult problems of human life.”
Both Bishabriksha and Krishnakanter Uil make widow remarriage the

central problem of the story.
Anandmath (1882) is a soul-stirring novel, wherein Bankimchandra introduced his celebrated song ‘Bande Mataram’. Here, the insurrection of the Sannyasis that erupted in North Bengal in 1773 is given an interesting politico-religious twist.

It also projects a bitter dichotomy of the patriarchal perception of women: the nation is regarded as the Mother while women are forbidden to crusade for her cause.

Debi Chaudhurani (1884) is romantic, appealing and a glorious testimony to the valour and prowess of unfettered

womanhood. In Debi Chaudhrani, Bankimchandra has made a woman character comment upon the sanctity of the orthodox Hindu marriage. He also illuminates the dignity of wives who perceived their most important duty in the service and devotion to their husbands.
His women characters

assert his deep understanding of the human mind and his remarkable power of delineation. All his novels including the historical novels have the theme of love as their principal human interest, which easily lends the women characters a certain level of prominence.

@DetheEsha

Bankim can deftly narrate a story centring on a domestic problem even while narrating a historical romance. His language is simple and supple, and his descriptions, realistic. His sense of the comic runs throughout his narratives. His characters all belong to the landed gentry

or the educated middle class, but almost all his women characters are beautiful, intelligent and memorable as artistic creations. His natural inclination as a writer was towards portraying a grand, majestic and mysterious history. His imagination had a sweeping power, tempered

by his strong, ethical views and conservatism.

On one hand, Bankimchandra moves beyond the codes of practice and belief acknowledged by Hindu texts and on the other he is critical of the fact that the society perceives the advances of progressive women as whimsical aberrations.

This is particularly noticed in Debi Chaudhurani for Prafulla and in Durgeshnandini for Bimala.
Bankimchandra’s objection to the impact of domesticity on a woman’s inner self and his radical representation of the powerful, assertive and self-sufficient woman are more influential

than the reformist agendas of his time.
He does not argue for the drastic structural changes in women’s immediate social predicament. In these novels, the sense of guilt towards women has been dissipated as reformable aspects of women’s social existence or as concrete

perspectives of normal human existence. It is dealt with, instead, in individual tragic situations which result in mental insanity or imbalance in psychotic situations rather than in social ones. The novels tend to throw open-ended conflicting points of view.
Bankimchandra’s

essay “Prachina O Nabina” (The Old-Fashioned and the Modern Woman) expresses the view that under the pretext of improving the condition of women, men actually confine them to their own standards and manipulate to accommodate them according to their changed views and expectations

Bankimchandra dismisses the need for a woman’s absolute chastity on the grounds that it probably does nothing to improve her life but affords a feeling of security to that of a man. Thus, he probably proposes an equal distribution

@ShefVaidya @Anu_2208 @jkd18 @Srividya_3jan

of rights and responsibilities between men and women.
Bankim asserts that if India was to progress, she would have to change “her archaic beliefs and outmoded social institutions”.

#VANDEMATARAM