Subaltern to 'Signora': Feminist Factors in Binodini Dasi's Autobiography My Story

Binodini Dasi’s lifelong contribution to the rise of Bengali theatre and the beginning of the Bengal renaissance has been deliberately subjected to historical amnesia. Her mentor, Grishchandra Ghosh, whom she had requested to edit her maiden attempt at writing an autobiography, ridiculed her efforts, equating the manuscript to ‘mad black scrawls’ (Binodini, 1998, p. 31). This paper critically examines how Binodini Dasi’s autobiography, My Story, reaches its crescendo of feminist resistance by highlighting the meticulous strategies she adopts to legitimize an alternate femininity. My endeavour in this article will be to present Binodini Dasi not merely as a victim of social constraints but as an empowered individual who navigates and subverts the expectations and attributes imposed upon her, thereby contributing to a richer understanding of feminism and gendered defiance in historical and literary contexts.