Binodini Dasi, My Story and My Life as an Actress

Binodini Dasi: My Story and My Life as an Actress Binodini Dasi: My Story and My Life as an Actress. Edited and translated by Rimli Bhattacharya. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998; pp. xii + 277. Rs. 300 cloth.

Binodini Dasi (1863-1941) performed on the public stage of Calcutta for only twelve years. Recruited from the prostitutes' quarters at age eleven, she soon became the leading actress of several major theatrical companies, appearing in eighty roles during her meteoric career. Although her autobiographical writings were composed and published many years later, they form a rare testimony to the talents and travails of the first generation of Bengali actresses, who came to the theatre from impoverished, disreputable families. Playing the roles of warring heroines and self-sacrificing satis, these working women embodied middle class aspirations for moral purification and national glory, and struggled to find economic and social refuge in their own lives.

Bhattacharya has scrupulously contextualized Binodini's writings and her theatrical world, offering both ample documentation and a set of interpretive reflections that decenter any simplistic reading. Binodini's life narratives, enveloped in layers of commentary, comprise the core. The glosses, including the editor's three essays and notes, thematize central problems thrown up by her career as an actress and author and present a richly textured digest of Bengali-language source materials. This critical apparatus far extends the significance of the volume, which both illustrates the usefulness of actors' autobiographies and contributes substantially to South Asian performance studies.

The tone of the autobiographies differs measurably. Translation cannot fully register the formal and colloquial styles they respectively employ, but the translator's skill makes the rich emotive effects of Binodini's...