“Behind Latticed Marble: Inner Worlds of Women” by Jyotirmoyee Devi Sen

Behind Latticed Marble: Inner Worlds of Women, Jyotirmoyee Devi Sen, Apala G Egan (trans)(Niyogi Books, January 2023)

Jyotirmoyee Devi Sen (1894-1988), a pioneering Bengali feminist writer in the first part of the 20th century, is well-known for her novel Epar Ganga, Opar Ganga (The River Churning: A Partition Novel) and her short story collection Sona Rupa Noy (Not Gold and Silver) for which she received the prestigious Rabindra Puraskar, the highest honorary literary award in West Bengal, in 1973. Born in Jaipur, the present-day capital of Rajasthan in India, she spent her childhood in the princely state where her grandfather worked as dewan or prime minister to the maharaja of Jaipur. 

Behind Latticed Marble: Inner Worlds of Women is a collection of ten of her short stories, which offers a glimpse of the lives of Rajasthani women in colonial India. These stories, a mixture of facts and fiction, are based on the author’s childhood memories of observing the world inside the palace of a Rajput ruler and the feudal society outside his palace premises.

 

The title highlights Jaipur’s fame for its architectural heritage and suggests sophistication in the architectural grandeur of a Jaipur palace built of marble. The lattice in question is a carved window screen that allowed outward observation, not inward. In other words, it conceals the home space from the world outside.  The title, then,  reveals the author’s focus on the private domain of the palace, which was called harem or “women’s quarters”. Following royal tradition, the king had multiple consorts, several mistresses and  numerous concubines in his harem. Maids, beauticians, masseuses, dancers and singers also resided there to take care of the inmates. No man, except the ruler and his royal eunuch, could enter this inner circle.

In the stories of Dhapi (in “Beneath the Aravalli Hills”), Maji Saheb (in “Frame-Up”) and Kesar (in “The Queen and the Concubine”), the harem is a place of horror, mystery, exotic plenitude, ennui and weariness. Dhapi, a young girl, was sold to the palace by her father, a poor villager, for two hundred rupees. In the harem, she was called Godaveri Bai. Though a child, she was beautiful and it was her beauty that made Prem Rai, the king’s favorite concubine, her rival. Insecure in love, she decides to take revenge on the little girl and imprison her in one of the harem’s damp underground cells.

“Maji Saheb” was a title given to a widowed queen mother. In “Frame-Up”, Maji Saheb Rathorji was widowed a few months after her marriage. The honorary title and the material comforts could neither compensate for her loneliness nor make her oblivious of the conspiracy that led to the king’s untimely death.

In “The Queen and the Concubine,” Kesar, a beautiful maid in the queen’s villa, wins the king’s heart with her musical talent and grace. The king requests the queen to send her to him but is refused twice. Finally, the queen gives in and sends Kesar to the king’s concubine quarters, where she falls prey to his chief concubine’s machinations and succumbs to an accident but returns to haunt the queen as an apparition.

 

In “The Courtesan’s Tale” and “The Mistress Wife” the harem is represented as a place of   punishment. In “The Courtesan’s Tale”, Umda Bai’s rustic in-laws deposited her at the palace so that the hard life of a maid in the harem could transform her from a headstrong woman to submissive wife. Yet with her beauty and cunning, soon she established herself as the king’s chief courtesan and became the power behind the throne. Blinded by her charm, the king took her to be an incarnation of Goddess Ganga and consulted her for all affairs of the state. However, after the king’s death, she lost all authority and dignity, sinking into obscurity and madness.

“The Mistress Wife” narrates the plight of a businessman’s wife, whose unrestrained desires drove her to seek royal company in the palace but soon she discovered that the king’s attention was a trap from which escape was impossible. The liberty she enjoyed as a businessman’s wife in the city vanished on entering the harem. The king then asked for her daughter.

The collection shows that  the lives of these women were under  strict surveillance. Irrespective of their social status—a queen, a concubine, a farmer’s wife, a destitute widow, a royal protégé—all had to abide by the strict norms of purdah  that kept them under constant patriarchal vigil. Daughters were considered a burden because they had to be married off with dowries. As a result, the girls were either killed during infancy with an overdose of opium or were sold and abandoned at the palace gates to tempt fate as concubines in the harem. The darker side of this reality is revealed  in “The Princess Baby”, “Beneath the Aravalli Hills” and “The Child Bride”.

Although the book focuses on representing women’s history, two stories—“Ungendered” and “The Taint”—show that the harem conventions  of Rajput kings and the racist attitude of British colonizers affected the lives of local men, who were either, due to indigent family conditions, initiated as eunuchs guarding the harem or were discriminated as “half-bloods” (half-castes) for being descendants of royal concubines. With the rise of British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent the power of the local royal houses declined. As traditional ways got gradually replaced by thoughts of Western modernity in 20th century British India, the descendants of the concubines were treated as illegitimate and were deprived of good academic and job opportunities.

Though the stories in this collection can be read as individual pieces of fiction, they are inter-connected in their representation of women’s issues against a particular socio-cultural milieu and regional setting. These stories also have a broader historical significance. Translator Apala G Egan notes in the Introduction that  they bear evidence to the local women’s contribution to the development of Indian art and culture: the women in the harem were often talented in music, dance, oratory and decoration, while the maharanis were the connoisseurs of art and culture. Under their patronage temples were built, and musical soirees and tableaux were organized in the palaces. As far as the history of women’s aesthetics is concerned, the translator compares them with Marie Antoinette, queen of France in the 18th century, and Madame de Pompadour, mistress to the French King Louis XV. It is through Egan’s lucid translation of their “inner worlds” from Bengali into English that a Bengali feminist writer’s work crosses transcultural borders in world literature and history. Her skill as a translator is reflected in the spontaneity of her narration and also in the vividness of descriptive passages.


Shyamasri Maji teaches English at Durgapur Women’s College, West Bengal.