ABSTRACT
Hemlata Sarkar was the daughter of the Brahmo social reformer and scholar Pandit Sivanath Sastri and his first wife Prasannamayee. Hemlata, the eldest of the couple’s four children, was born into an orthodox Vedic brahmin family in the year 1868 in the village of Majilpur, South 24 Parganas. Hemlata wrote regularly for Mukul, a Bengali periodical for children, launched in 1895 by her father, Sivanath Sastri. Some of her articles on Nepal were published in Ramananda Chattopadhyay’s periodical Prabasi. The Himalayas adorn, like a crown on its head, the vast land, surrounded by the oceans, that is, renowned in the world as the land of Hindustan. Nothing is available but coarse rice and flattened rice. If one isn’t carrying enough provisions, food becomes a problem. It is a gradual descent from Gari to a beautiful place called Kulekhani. Moreover, unlike Calcutta, there are no streetlights here, and everything is covered in darkness.
