ABSTRACT

This chapter examines female relationships in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Bengal in a limited domain outside the family home cutting across class and caste barriers particularly in the countryside. The gossipy scene enacted at the ghat offers interesting insight into the female world and social life in colonial Bengal. An interaction between women and their neighbours in the rural countryside offers a good opportunity to probe how they constituted their hegemony over their subordinate sisters in the world outside the domestic domain. The interactions describe the social world in which the rural women lived, the indigenous and colonial structures of power as they perceived it. The bathing ghat was the main site for interaction for the rural women, where the 'ladies parliament' was held daily. The rural women too succumbed to the changes ushered in by colonialism and its accompanying effects.