This personal rereading of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Darpachurna explores changing ideas of womanhood, from childhood admiration for devotion to an adult questioning of self-erasure, asking why women’s obedience is praised as virtue while their self-respect is so often mistaken as pride.
By Srabony Alam Biswas
Picture: Via Pixabay (edited), CC0
Sometimes the present leads us back to an old book, only to mirror our old selves. Such an unexpected reunion happened this year when, at a give-away book rack in Göttingen, I found a Bengali book titled Darpachurna by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, one of the most beloved early 20th century Indian authors. I picked it up immediately, expecting nostalgia. Instead, it challenged the values my younger self had once accepted without questioning.
The Title and the First Judgement
The title Darpachurna can be translated as »The Shattering of Pride« which seems to immediately trigger the readers to identify a proud character whose ego must be broken. As a child, I did not take long to locate that »supposed« pride in Indumati, the central female character, daughter of an educated wealthy family and wife of Narendra, a struggling writer. Her privileged background is visible not only in her education but also in the money and gold ornaments she has received from her parental family.
The novel introduces her as defiant, outspoken and assertive. She becomes enraged on learning that Narendra must repay his father’s large debt. Demanding her right to transparency, she condemns that Narendra should have disclosed this financial burden before their marriage as this could further strain their already modest household. She is equally critical of Bimala for accepting an inferior position in comparison to her husband’s. As a child, these confrontations made me feel that Indumati was the arrogant woman whose pride the title was pointing towards.
The »Ideal« Woman I Once Admired
Bimala, however, was the woman I admired, who was docile, soft-spoken, and deeply devoted to her husband. To my younger self, she embodied the ideal woman I had often seen celebrated in Bengali social imagination: a wife who erased her own needs before her husband’s, and who treated sacrifice as the highest form of love. The contrast seemed obvious. Indumati criticized and challenged; Bimala accepted and served. As a child reader, I did not yet have the language to ask why one woman’s obedience was called virtue while another’s self-respect was called arrogance.
Rereading the novel made me question that ideal. Alhough Bimala is loving, sincere, and emotionally generous; the problem is not that she cares for her husband, but that her understanding of love seems to require making herself smaller. Women like Bimala are appreciated because they do not disturb others’ comfort or demand too much space, while their suffering disappears beneath the language of virtue. As a young reader, I mistook this self-erasure for grace. As an adult, I can no longer ignore how much of Bimala’s goodness is built upon her own relinquishment.
Rereading as a Different Person
Rereading the story after almost twenty years, I realized that nearly every judgement once I had has been altered. Neither the story had changed, nor the characters; what has changed is the reader. As a child, I had been shaped by a society that praised women for sacrifice. As an adult, I returned with an awareness of how inequality can disguise itself as love. The book did not offer me nostalgia as much as it offered me a reality check.
One scene near the beginning was the eye-opener for me. Indumati and Bimala plan to watch a bioscope together — but when Indumati arrives at Bimala’s house, Bimala informs her that they must wait for her husband’s return. Before leaving, she must first seek his approval, like a servant seeking permission from a lord in a medieval setting. What strikes me now is how naturally she accepts this hierarchy, even taking pride in surrendering her independence as if it proved her virtue.
Devotion or Self-Erasure?
When I first read this scene, I interpreted Bimala’s tendency to lower herself as evidence of love and respect towards her husband. I must admit that this was not only my personal misunderstanding. It reflected a social expectation deeply rooted in the Bengali world in which I grew up. A woman who placed her husband before herself was rarely seen as diminished. She was rather praised as noble for her sacrifice.
Today, the same scene reads very differently to me. I am disturbed because Bimala seems to accept herself as a naturally lesser human being than her husband. She does not merely love him; she places him above herself in a hierarchy that feels emotional, social and spiritual at the same time, as though such imbalance were simply the natural order of things. What unsettles me most is how normal such self-erasure had once seemed to me.
Indumati Reconsidered
Indumati reacts sharply to Bimala’s behaviour. With strong determination, she tells her: »I know how to preserve my self-respect and maintain my boundaries. Unlike you, I would never forget that I am his companion in life – his partner; not his servant.«
As a child, I thought her response was unnecessarily harsh. Now, however, her words sound less like arrogance and more like awareness to me. She recognizes that love should not require a woman to reduce herself and the marriage cannot be built on worship from one side and authority from the other. Her criticism may not always be gentle, but the question behind it feels urgent: Why should devotion demand the surrender of one person’s dignity?
The Pride the Narrative Chooses to Break
The novel’s own moral framing also becomes impossible for me to ignore. I cannot say with certainty what Sarat Chandra personally intended his readers to think, but the narrative repeatedly directs our sympathy in particular ways. Narendra is described as gentle and enduring while Bimala is constructed with patience, kindness and sacrifice. Indumati, by contrast, is repeatedly associated with selfishness and pride.
The contrast grows stronger after Indumati leaves for her parents’ house following a conflict with Narendra. During her absence, Narendra becomes seriously ill but chooses not to inform her. Bimala, instead, takes care of him. Several weeks later, Indumati returns to learn from Bimala, not only of Narendra’s illness, but also that he has finally managed to publish one of his novels which he has dedicated to Bimala. She is seen to realize that she is being excluded from her husband’s emotional life. Bimala warns Indumati that her pride may be costing her something precious.
The gold ornaments gain symbolic weight when Narendra is arrested for failing to repay his father’s debt. Bimala mortgages her jewelry for his release and later notes Indumati’s unused ornaments. Yet Narendra never asks Indumati for help, preferring imprisonment over her inherited wealth. Indumati is thus judged for a sacrifice she was never offered. The final scene connects this contrast directly to the title as Indumati sheds her gold ornaments symbolizing wealth, returns to Narendra submissively, and her pride is depicted as shattered and dissolved into dust. This is exactly where my adult reading begins to resist it. I cannot help seeing the novelist presenting her transformation as correction.
Flashbacks
In the series, we return to the books, films, series, music albums and games of our childhood and youth. What was our view of these things back then? And how has this view changed after years of academic studies? Reflecting personally as well as scientifically on such questions, we perceive not only the objects of our enquiry in a new way, but we also recognize the long road we traveled since our first encouter with them.
The texts are published at irregular intervals and can be found here.
Changing Sides
In this conflict between two versions of womanhood, I have changed sides. As a child, I stood with Bimala because I had learned to admire submissiveness as devotion. But as an adult, I stand closer to Indumati; not because she is perfect, but because she refuses to accept that a woman’s worth lies in submission. I no longer want to celebrate a woman for considering herself a maid before her husband. I want to ask what kind of world has taught her to feel proud of such self-abasement.
By the end of my rereading, the title Darpachurna as well had changed its meaning for me. Earlier, I thought the pride that needed to be shattered belonged to Indumati. Now I wonder whether the pride that truly needs breaking is the society’s pride, in its own idea of womanhood. It is the pride of a culture that turns obedience into beauty, silence into virtue, and self-abandonment into love. The first time, the book taught me what I had been conditioned to see. The second time, it showed me how far I had travelled from that conditioning.
