ABSTRACT
A feminist historiography of performing women demands travelling to, tracing, and recording the voices that have been violently erased, hidden, or falsified over time. Dulali Chitrakar's biography is vital as a trace and in the act of tracing a feminist historiography of marginalised performing women. It highlights her grandfather's discrimination and her own wish to ‘trace’ his manuscripts through her own obligation as a writer. Additionally, it shows the value of the print medium through which Dulali's grandfather wished to publicise his work and his voice. The challenges of finding references to performing women in the colonial Bengali archive are many, thus making the search for the woman kobiyaal even more difficult. The conspicuous absence of the woman kobiyaal in nineteenth-century archives throws up several issues. Primarily, it shows how the figure of the woman kobiyaal is equated to a prostitute and looked down upon as the ‘polluted’ other woman in opposition to the domestic wife.
