1: Mythography and the Maid: Speaking for the ‘Bad Girl' in Kabita Sinha’s Writing

In this paper, I will read Kabita Sinha’s novel The Story of a Bad Girl (1958) as an example of new feminist mythography in post-independence Bengali writing. Kabita Sinha was a Bengali Communist author and poet in the 1950s and 60s. As an outlier in the global 60s literary canon which was intensely masculinist and voyeuristic, Sinha feminist writing was politically and aesthetically provocative. Her emphasis on the female experience in the history of the subcontinent frequently clashed against the Communist party’s prioritization of class revolution as well as the foregrounding of sexual audacity among male authors of her times. In order to posit a political imagination which could bring all these three strands together, Sinha took recourse to subcontinental mythologies.

In her poetry she repeatedly invokes the annihilation of patriarchy specifically through images of Draupadi and Sita. In her prose about the “bad girl”, the latter is given history and legitimacy through mythological iconography including temple architecture, rather than being represented merely as a “new woman” with the allure of ‘modern’ times. In this capacious imagination, the straitjacket of the ‘bad girl’ can no longer fit the woman being described: she is located within a longer history of female liberation in the subcontinent, and cannot be dismissed as a new phenomenon from the 1960s. I argue that Kabita Sinha’s feminist mythography for ‘bad’ women provides a robust site to debate the tensions and ambivalences in the feminist epistemologies of the 1960s in South Asia, beyond easy moral binaries.