Negotiating History: Re-presentation of Women in Colonial Assam

The main objective of this paper is to examine the agency and resistance of women in colonial Assam. This calls for an understanding of the social engagement of the texts studied and how they reflect and constitute culture. Further, it would demonstrate how women participated in the crucial social and political questions of colonial Assam as recorded in the journals published during that time. These journals provide us an insight into the contemporary attitude of the colonized in Assam which need to be deliberated upon in order to understand the status of the colonial women. The dire need and struggles for emancipation of women can be traced in these writings; the intelligentsia of colonial Assam had mixed feelings, but the fact that women took to writing is a proof enough of their repressed desires for equality. Their self-assertion in carving an identity for themselves and thereby establishing their inherent position in history is to be explored. Re-presentation of these remarkable Assamese women in colonial times is itself a new way of negotiating history to establish their significance in present times. Negotiation of history through re-presentation calls for an exploration of lived experiences and the thrust would go to life stories of such historical women personalities of colonial Assam that are no less exciting than fictional characters. Such explorations seek to establish that contemporary authors like Tilottama Misra, Mamoni Roisom Goswami, Nirupama Borgohain and Anuradha Sarma Pujari, have made significant exploration of colonial Assamese women as transmitters of culture and bearers of change, thus offering an alternative perspective that challenges the traditional views of women’s role and agency.