Shweta Kataria Essays (1364 words) - Gender, Odia Literature

Shweta Kataria Dr. Smita Gandotra Modern Indian Writing 20 th September 2017 Rebati is the one of the first and major modern Oriya work by one of the great writer Fakir Mohan Senapati. The story contains the theme like feminism, girl education, superstition, etc. Story main theme moves around the protagonist girl Rebati, who wants to study. Girls and their education are one of the most controversial issues of Indian history. It had been 69 years of our independence and we are living in 21 century where we are talking about the smart cities and bullet trains. But the other-side government is forced to run the campaign like "B eti padhao, Desh Badhao aandolan ". This type of 21-century campaign shows that till today India did not totally change on the matter of girl's education. In this story, Rebati is the main character, a portrait of innocence. She belongs to an interior village of Orissa where education of a girl child seems to be a taboo. She invited the misfortune by just one forbidden thought of "learning". Once she decided to be educated, she w as heavily opposed by her grand mother. But irrespective of the strong opposition, she started learning. She has just one support that is from her teacher. But story turns tragic when the epidemic cholera hits the village. The whole village including the family of Rebati gets into the grip of this devil epidemic. It killed her father and her teacher! And the grand mother of Rebati blames her for the misfortune happens in the surrounding. According to her, all these happen because Rebati wants to be educated . The educational and cultural gap between literary Fakir Mohan and his child brides' remains at present an area of darkness and enigma. But the fact of the gap is certain to have shaped the novelist's thinking on the issue of woman's education and her place in society. The difference between the relatively advanced members of the Christian community and the more orthodox Hindu parents who confined their daughters to home was bound to be a matter of interest and concern for an educationist-novelist like Fakir Mohan. Education, especially female education, therefore, occupies a pivotal place in his life and art. P ublic education in Orissa was pathetically dismal; education for women was more or less absent. Whatever education was traditionally given to them was private and confined to home . For all others, formal education for girls was confined to a few members of the Christian community. For the first time in 1871, a school for Hindu girls was set up at Cuttack in the house of Abinash Chandra Chattopadhya. A school with mere 13 or 14 students. The number of girls increased merely to 25 . Fakir Mohan does not present a merely naive account of the joy that a restricted girl child feels in suddenly encountering the world of reading. He shows the powerful effect images produce upon the learner. "Some feel happy to ride an elephant or a horse, our Rebi delights in seeing their pictures," For Rebati, images as icons are important. For they help her escape from her entrapment and mediate with the outside world. That way, reality and fantasy get blurred. Education becomes the primary means of empowerment. Rebati learns her alphabet on the day of Sripanchami, traditionally observed as a day dedicated to Saraswati, the goddess of learning. However, Rebati's plea for education was not a cry in the wilderness. It had much earlier echoes in neighbouring Bengal too. The early narratives of many upper-caste Bengali women, the Bhadramahila for instance, offer interesting tales of women's education. Rasundari Debi, a woman from a respectable upper-caste background, movingly narrates her travails of learning the simple Bengali alphabet. In a milieu where education was a male preserve, even handling the alphabet was perceived a political act. And so it was with a furtive excitement that Rasundari managed to steal a page from a primer left behind by her son in the kitchen. She concealed it within the fold of her saree and thus began her arduous and heroic attempt to learn the alphabet. On the other hand, the short story, "The Exercise Book",