Writing History, Writing Life: Re-scripting Nation through Rassundari's Words in the Autobiography Amar Jiban

The act of history writing has been predominantly a male prerogative for a long time. In fact, the official history is still very much preoccupied with the male narrative which has been collectively written to remove the women from history. By taking Rassundari’s autobiography Amar Jiban as a text for analysis, the paper intends to present a counter historical narrative, which is set against the 19th century traditional hegemonic narratives of the Hindu nationalists, where women folks were reduced into the repositories of the prestige of the nation. With the deployment of Annette Kolodny’s concept of “herstory”, the paper examines the potentiality of a female narrative in re-writing the history debunking the male centric discourse called “history”.