Manada Devi and the Literary Elevation of a ‘Fallen’ Woman
Image courtesy: Simon & Schuster, India
“Floundering in a bottomless ocean”: A new English translation of Manada Devi’s landmark 1929 book, An Educated Woman in Prostitution: A Memoir of Lust, Exploitation, Deceit underlines the historical and cultural value of this text.
In a recently-published translation of her landmark 1929 memoir, Manada Devi recalls a set of “educated young men from cultured families” entering the theatre. Calcutta, her hometown, was becoming a unique cultural hotspot, and Devi observes epochal changes in literature as well as women-centric narratives in this time. She then probes this same society, which has given a ‘fallen’ tag to a prostitute, if the rest of them aren’t ‘fallen’ like she is. Her outlook and gaze resemble that of an informed individual—one mired in the juxtaposition of conformance and defiance.
Shikshita Patitat Atmacharit (“Autobiography of an Educated Fallen Woman”) is arguably one of the seminal South Asian feminist texts—albeit a contested one. Since its first publication, the identity of the author Manada Devi Mukhopadhyay remains in question. Some think it’s a work by a male author, and others argue that Manada was indeed a real person. In its new translation in English, An Educated Woman in Prostitution: A Memoir of Lust, Exploitation, Deceit (Calcutta, 1929), published this year by Simon & Schuster India, Arunava Sinha underlines, without rejecting the “motive of publishing Manada Devi’s work,” the historical and cultural value of this text.
Born in 1900, Manada Devi was the first child of her parents, belonging to an affluent Bengali-Brahmin family. A story goes that her father spent 750 rupees in 1910 to get his wife’s photograph made in sepia stones! She wasn’t neglected on grounds of her gender. As she puts it, her father gave her all the freedom. But she was close to her mother, who passed away while giving birth to a stillborn child. She was just ten years old at the time, but asserts “no one could delude me with falsehoods or console me.”
After her mother’s death, Devi would sleep in her “father’s room, on a second bed,” but one day she was told to sleep with her “pishima [aunt] from now on.” The next day, her stepmother arrives, who Devi mentions “possessed neither my mother’s gravity nor her ability to discipline me.”
The stepmother, however, is no clichéd enemy: In a fictional narrative, this may be the significant moment where the conflict starts to build up and the story braids the personal and political, moral and immoral, right and wrong to advance the plot. But this is real life—however contested it may be—and it takes a significantly sharp turn.
Devi has a fundamental question to ask: “The lawyer sells his intellect, the teacher sells his education, even the spiritual leader sells his incantations; why should alluring women not sell their bodies then?”
Tasting blood
In the absence of specific requirements, Devi’s meetings with her father began to fade. Coupled with a lack of motherly love, she found comfort in storybooks recommended by her home tutor. However, her father insisted that her old-fashioned tutor be replaced with “someone familiar with teaching methods in schools and colleges.” This marked, as Devi writes, the beginning of her ruination.
Devi’s new tutor, Mukul Bandyopadhyay, was attractive. She shares the minutest details of his appearance and the impact his looks had on her, making the sexual tension evident. He insisted that Devi address him by his name, offering a prelude to some high-octane action. Mukul-da, as Devi used to call him, pulled her into literature, unlike her previous tutor. Reading Shireen-Farhad’s story brought her great joy, she writes that she “felt a sleeping creative within me coming to life.” Devi takes this opportunity in this book to offer her gratitude and confess that she will “never be able to repay this [Mukul-da’s] debt of affection.”
With the entry of Ramesh-da — Devi’s distant cousin, who approached her father for employment purposes — into her life, Devi felt, because of her proximity with these two men, an “unbridled sensuality” swelling in the “first flush of my youth.” Describing an intimate incident with Ramesh-da, she writes how she “was like a wild tiger who had tasted blood for the first time. There was no fear or repentance—on the contrary, my anxiety and hesitation disappeared. I realized that if there was an inclination there would always be opportunities.”
She blames her present situation on books and stories. She’s smart but gullible at the same time, as she fell prey to Ramesh-da’s cunning plot to trick her into eloping with him to marry and start a new life. Later, having left by Ramesh-da in Mathura, she learned of how a life of rejection—by friends, family, and society—is fated to women alone. It makes one question, as Devi’s father’s social outlook was liberal: Wouldn’t he have accepted her if she had ‘returned home’ after this misadventure?
Devi writes, toward the end of an “illicit” relationship, society “extols” a man’s virtues. It’s always a woman who has to face condemnation. To what degree this simplistic calculation, which is potentially convincing, influenced Devi’s decision to not return to her family is left for scholars to speculate and comment on. However, she did return, not to her family, but to Calcutta, the city of her birth. She began to live in a rescue institution, before eventually becoming a prostitute and “floundering in a bottomless ocean.”
Rules of the business
Though An Educated Woman… is a thin volume, it’s delightfully stuffed with details. Among other things, Devi provides insights into her journey of becoming a professional prostitute; however, she remains mindful of not alluding to her family members, well-known people, and other clientele as she has “no desire to disconcert them.”
She writes about her bariwali (madam), Rani Mashi, who taught her how to cruise and lure men and informed her beforehand to not be surprised “to run into your own father in my room some day.” The profession brought with it much more than its bouts of excitement and thrill. Devi mentions the various occupational hazards, including popping pregnancy-prevention pills that eventually led to several diseases. She mentions how men often “robbed prostituted women and even murdered them at times.” Devi faced much of her own troubles along the way, but survived each time.
After several years into this profession, Devi started enjoying the prospect of wooing people, building clientele, and having a strong presence in the entertainment circle. It’s evident when she mentions how she and her friends decided to “put ourselves out in the market, gauge the rate we can command and choose an appropriate price.” On being price-tagged, to the traditionalists, who ridicule women voluntarily choosing prostitution as a source of livelihood, Devi has a fundamental question to ask: “The lawyer sells his intellect, the teacher sells his education, even the spiritual leader sells his incantations; why should alluring women not sell their bodies then?” While there are risks and problems involved in every business, why does society take a moral high ground when it comes to sex workers?
Journey to acceptance
The initial bit of the memoir reads as if Devi has fully accepted herself, and is at complete peace with who she has become. She does mention that she was driven and passionate, but comments rather naïvely that religious books could’ve cured her ‘sexual drive’: “No one ever gave me books of piety that induced religious devotion in me, that taught me self-restraint.” She feels that “the young women and men of this land being led toward their death by going to the theatre and reading novels. I say this from my own experience; I am certain that others in my situation will testify in my support.”
Her experience also allows her to appreciate that married people, who love “their wives also love their mistresses,” which in itself is a commentary on the definition of love, separating it from the mechanical act of sex.
I am uncertain if professional sex workers will attest to Devi’s opinion, but this commentary on acceptance reads paradoxical, accusing oneself of one’s actions borne out of particular circumstances. It’s baffling to assess reading through many such conflicting segments of this prose whether it’s written by the same person. Devi responds rather emotionally to her present state but her stand remains firm about her profession, which makes readers feel that there are two different stories within one. Or this could be Devi’s defense mechanism to fight an internal conflict arriving out of this thought, as how an educated woman could be mired in the sex industry, as most enter the profession without a way out to another life.
While often moral policing herself, Devi is a liberal and experimentative woman who reads “political news” and refuses to participate in a funeral procession of a political leader—whom she admired—out of shame because she thinks that prostitutes harmed his political movement.
On many occasions, Devi writes how she has degraded, but her political assessment and active participation in intellectual pursuits seem to say otherwise. When a young Brahmin customer offers her a stylish and cultured life, she reflects whether “there a caste system in this [prostitution] world too?” She also outlines the dichotomy of acceptance of prostitutes by the society when she mentions how every man who frequents “the homes of women in prostitution furtively accept[s] every kind of food and drink they are offered—in fact, to use the word ‘accept’ is to leave the story incomplete; they feel grateful at the opportunity.” Her experience also allows her to appreciate that married people, who love “their wives also love their mistresses,” which in itself is a commentary on the definition of love, separating it from the mechanical act of sex.
But the business of prostitution is as unforgiving in the same vein as the glitzy-and-glamorous Bollywood. Upon losing their sheen, a prostitute will settle for anything. Realising it sooner, Manada Devi, the educated prostituted woman, reinvents herself as a woman of taste. She reincarnates herself as ‘Miss Mukherjee’, who caters to a high-class and political clientele, organises tea parties, and participates in political discussions. She knew that educated men often played pimps for harlots, which is what she did by hiring two lawyers to attract a meaningful, rich audience.
While I was reading Devi discussing Talaq Bill with influential people, arguing how society has laws to insults a “fallen” woman “but the same law works for ‘fallen’ men, for men write the law,” and how poets and novelists visit her “in search of realistic art and speak in culture voices, seeking to understand the true nature of art free of cost” at a tea party, the book abruptly ends. I wondered what happened to the promise that she made in several chapters to recount her customers’ and well-known people’s “stories where appropriate.”
Arunava Sinha, whose astute translation elevates the beauty of this work, writes in the forward: “If Manada Devi’s story appears to end abruptly, it is left to us to investigate the reasons. Did events overtake her life in a way that prevented her from continuing with her memoir? How, in that case, did the manuscript find its way to a publisher? And what happened to Manada Devi eventually?”
By providing the historical context, tabling unresolved questions, and piquing interest by supplying excerpts from several prefaces of various editions of this book, Sinha pivots the attention to the most critical tasks of being a reader: to examine, question, investigate, and pursue the motives and the positionality of a text that one is reading. He isn’t dismissive of the controversiality of the text but highlights the importance of culturally examining it. His translation is a renewal, reemergence of Devi’s poignant prose and voice, as he does with an array of translations he has done from the Bengali, a pursuit he has dedicated his life for, reviving stories that need telling and enriching the Indian literature in English.
In its deft translation, which almost reads like a new creation, this memoir not only frontloads the ubiquitous pursuit of chasing adolescent desires, but does so much more. It tables the legitimacy of sex work, which the society profits from but is never ready to identify as a profession. This text also becomes an active site for exploring the evolution of cultural changes in Bengal and, in turn for the rest of India.
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Saurabh Sharma is a reader and a writer. He works as a writer in an IT research and advisory firm in Gurgaon. He reviews books and pretends to write on weekends. You can find him on Instagram: @writerly_life and Twitter: @writerly_life.
