In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Binodini Dasi: My Story and My Life as an Actress
  • Kathryn Hansen
Binodini Dasi: My Story and My Life as an Actress. Edited and translated by Rimli Bhattacharya. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998; pp. xii + 277. Rs. 300 cloth.

Binodini Dasi (1863-1941) performed on the public stage of Calcutta for only twelve years. Recruited from the prostitutes’ quarters at age eleven, she soon became the leading actress of several major theatrical companies, appearing in eighty roles during her meteoric career. Although her autobiographical writings were composed and published many years later, they form a rare testimony to the talents and travails of the first generation of Bengali actresses, who came to the theatre from impoverished, disreputable families. Playing the roles of warring heroines and self-sacrificing satis, these working women embodied middle class aspirations for moral purification and national glory, and struggled to find economic and social refuge in their own lives.

Bhattacharya has scrupulously contextualized Binodini’s writings and her theatrical world, offering both ample documentation and a set of interpretive reflections that decenter any simplistic reading. Binodini’s life narratives, enveloped in layers of commentary, comprise the core. The glosses, including the editor’s three essays and notes, thematize central problems thrown up by her career as an actress and author and present a richly textured digest of Bengali-language source materials. This critical apparatus far extends the significance of the volume, which both illustrates the usefulness of [End Page 555] actors’ autobiographies and contributes substantially to South Asian performance studies.

The tone of the autobiographies differs measurably. Translation cannot fully register the formal and colloquial styles they respectively employ, but the translator’s skill makes the rich emotive effects of Binodini’s pen come alive. My Story is written in grief at the loss of the three most important individuals in Binodini’s life: her protector; her mentor, playwright and actor Girish Chandra Ghosh; and her daughter. Formulas of lament and self-denigration thus open her narrative, but even here the actress’s lack of faith and her frank, even hostile pronouncements underscore some resistance. For instance, she later tells of her momentous contributions toward establishing the Star Theatre in Calcutta, and her lingering sense of betrayal at not having the theatre named after her as promised. Descriptions of her heightened imagination off and on the stage and her intense, trance-like states while enacting religious plays enable readers to visualize the drama of her life and performances. My Life as an Actress, although more truncated, covers the same terrain in a lighter vein. Particularly delightful are the travel accounts, based on the tour of the Great National Theatre in 1875 to the “foreign” realms of Delhi, Lahore, and Vrindavan. Binodini sees herself as a vivacious, affectionate child who thrived in the family-like atmosphere of the theatrical company. Her later sorrow stands in contrast to the initial innocence of her explorations of the world and of the characters whose essence she intuitively grasps.

In her introduction, Bhattacharya traces the background of the nineteenth-century Bengali theatre, noting the participation of three groups: aristocratic patrons who founded the first stage or “babu theatre,” social and religious reformers who guided its agenda, and the middle-class “misfits” who substituted devotion to theatre for more conventional professional pursuits. She explores the anomaly of the actress, whose class position was so different from these upper- and upper-middle-class males, and yet whose presence was essential to theatre’s commercial success. It was this class position that also separated Binodini from other Bengali women who were beginning to write. The public actress was arguably even at a disadvantage with respect to the older courtesans (baiji, tawaif) who at least enjoyed the protection of performing in private. Also important to an understanding of the autobiographies is Bhattacharya’s analysis of the theatre journals in which they were published, filled primarily with the male-authored “autobiographies” of fictional actresses, and her description of the existing models for Bengali autobiographical writing from which Binodini appears to draw inspiration.

In “Notes on the Bengali Public Theatre,” Bhattacharya pursues in detail the specific character of the theatrical performances in which...

Share