Poets and Revolutionaries: Three Women of Calcutta - Essay Example

Elizabeth Bumiller’s May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons showed oppression and exploitation. In Chapter 9, Poets and Revolutionaries: Three Women of Calcutta, she reveals the lives and insights of three strong-willed and talented women in the city, Aparna Sen, a filmmaker, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, a poet and Veena Bhargava, a painter. The chapter discussed their careers and their womanhood. In this chapter, you’ll be able to see their individuality and how they achieved their independence and uniqueness. This chapter provided Bumiller with the contrast she needed in showing the different lives of the women in the rural villages and the women in the cities. Her interviews with the three successful women of the city showed that none of them think they faced problems because of their womanhood. This is in contrast to the other women she was able to interview during the previous chapters.

It shows here in this chapter that these three women were leading their lives not very differently from their Western counterparts. They grew up having dinners with their families. They also have differences with themselves to the point that sometimes they question their actions, choosing between their family life and their careers. Though they might not have any problems or issues that they encounter that will make them feel oppressed and exploited, far different from the other women of India living outside the cities, they have the common problem of the dilemma of doing one thing over another. This can be seen in the sacrifices that they have to make to become successful.

The women in this chapter were only a few of those that were able to define their personal and social identities. They were able to master control over their lives, sometimes even control over the men. Much different from the women of the rural, where most are slaves to a very oppressing and exploitative society. Here, it showed how they used the many issues of oppression and exploitation of other women of India to push their successes and to make it their agenda to show and tell other people about it. They were able to use the lives of other women as their inspiration and to be able to change how women are supposed to be living.

The book did not conclude that the plight of Indian women is the same. It showed how diverse it can be. And Chapter 9 brought the hopeful diversity wherein there can be Indian women who are independent and not restrained by their womanhood. The chapter was able to bring the diversity of the women from India to a positive note that there can still be emancipation to happen to those who are not in the same plight as the less fortunate ones. That there can be an optimistic view of being an Indian woman. It might be that because she was from a different culture she was not able to capture the entirety of the differences between the women from India and how they can be different.

Her Western thinking hampered her ability to see that the women from the cities can live differently from the women of the rural because of their lifestyle and capabilities and opportunities presented to them. It had an ethnocentric view, much shown in Chapter 9 where women were able to be successful because they were not far from their counterparts.
However, this book still shows the contrasting features of being a woman in India. And the chapter still gave a point that not all women in India are bound to their cultural and societal norms and traditions. Read More