ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an exposition on speech and mediation through the study of ‘confessional’ narratives, purportedly written by actresses, and the images accompanying them in popular theatre magazines. Constructed largely by male writers whose professional credentials were as important as their names, the ‘first-person voice’ seeps into a variety of topics that later becomes the exclusive terrain of middle-class women’s magazines – advice on beauty, health, companionship – apparently outside the world of theatre. The discourses on sexuality move towards a definition of conjugality that eschewed the everyday working life of the actress, but absorbed the colour and spice (roop o rang) attributed to stage women. The magazines seek to consolidate and legitimise the past decades of the history of the Bengali public theatre, even as they offer tantalising glimpses of an unfettered female sexuality, explicitly set against a western frame. They function like new age conduct books, quite different from prescriptive conduct books an earlier era, and far removed from the idealised ‘Arya nari’ who haunts nationalist discourse. The ‘actress-stories’ may be read as intimations of an uneasy modernity in attempting to sieve definitions of art and accomplishment; they announce the advent of the accomplished bhadramahila, and signal her entry into cinema.
