/ 91 An Indomitable Urge to Penetrate the World of Words: Reading Amar Jiban in South Asian Context SRIJA SANYAL B orn into a society vehemently opposed to female education, Rassundari Devi (1810- 1899) was a woman of her own kind at the time. The proposed essay intends to discuss Devi’s autobiographical account, Amar Jiban (My Life, 1876), in the context of the broader South Asian framework and how it stood not only as a testament of the women’s position at the time but also reflected on the struggles that women were to undertake in the time that followed. Being the first ever full-length autobiography in the Bangla literary space, Amar Jiban received praise and warm welcome, especially so as it was authored by a woman with extremely restricted economic means in a time when female literacy was not even a spared thought. Apart from this fact, what makes the autobiography a valuable treasure is its commentary on the changing times of the then Bengal and the author’s own viewpoints on the same. The paper will primarily focus on this narrative that runs through the text, which, at that point of time, echoed the voice of dissent in a heteronormative environment characterized by imperialism and reigned by the upholders of patriarchy. The paper further extends its cynosure to the realm of a fierce struggle of creating an identity of her own, as undertaken by Devi herself in her lifetime, and her enduring experiences as a reflection of the striving of women writers in the time to come. The paper shall culminate the discussion by tracing the economic and social vulnerabilities, and socio-religious-political constructs behind these vulnerabilities, which restrict women’s voices while situating Devi’s struggle as a universal one rather than individual in wider South Asian narrative of both women writers and their writings. Introduction The urge to write is a natural one, which, surprisingly and strangely, like many other aspects, has always been restricted to the menfolk. This is perhaps the foremost challenge that a “writer with the female gender” has to face while attempting to penetrate an area which has predominantly been a male one. This becomes quintessentially explicit when one notices the paucity of autobiographies of women in the literary canon, as transcribing experiences of a woman’s life has often been deemed as unnecessary as her existence itself. Meenakshi Malhotra in her book Representing Self, Critiquing Society: Selected Lifewritings by Women, wonders whether autobiographies are always gendered and argues that texts are always gender-marked, i.e., the gender of the writer or subject is perceptible and can be discerned through the writing. This is not to say that the act of writing is biologically determined or to say that there is a distinct and discernible feminine style. But, as Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) argues that the stress falls differently with a woman (Woolf, Orlando). This essay intends to discuss Devi’s autobiographical account, Amar Jiban (My Life, 1876), in the context of the broader South Asian framework to explore how it not only stood as a testament of the women’s position of the time but also how it reflected the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 43, No. 4, Winter 2020 [91-99] © 2020 Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute, India