Changing Together, Changing Apart: Urban Muslim and Hindu Women in Pre-Partition Bengal

This article approaches the story of women’s negotiations with social reforms in late colonial urban Bengal through an analysis of private reminiscences of elderly Muslim and Hindu women. Skirting the larger stories of nationalist transformation, conflict and dislocation that so often dominate discussions of Muslim-Hindu relations in the subcontinent, the life stories analyzed here foreground an intimate realm of everyday experiences that captures a “feeling” for a bygone time and context, and the complex linkages between public memory and individual biography. The article also pays attention to the oral narratives as intersubjective, dialogically produced “texts” that are fraught with tensions.