ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes Krishnabhabini Das' travelogue and her attempt to bring out the metropole to the realm of her readers in Bengal with all its inherent determinations and conceptions in addressing the questions of class, race, and gender. It discusses her travelogue as one of the most detailed yet under-researched travelogues written by a Bengali woman of her time. A voluminous amount has been written on domesticity and Bengali women in the nineteenth century. Simonti Sen provides a comprehensive analysis of Bengali travel narratives as a mode of literary and nationalist expression in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. In her book, Sen traces the idea of travel among Bengali Hindus, which was not so widespread and well-enthused as in the West. The stakes of Bengali women, in adding up to the body of discourses and counter-discourses that were being produced in Bengal, weighing the pros and cons of foreign travel, are somewhat difficult to ascertain.
