Womanhood exploration of life space and identity

Introduction 1 Everywhere you shut me in. always you assign a place to me. Even outside the frame that I form with you...you set limits even to events that could happen with other...you mark out boundaries, draw lines, surround, enclose. Excising, cutting out. What is your fear? That you might lose your property. What remains in an empty frame. You cling to it, dead. -Luce Irigaray (1992, pp. 24-25) Woman and her place has always been an issue which either been discussed in a very typical way, by limited or particular group of people or has not been discussed at all. As expressed in the above quotation of Irigaray, defining and limiting the place has mostly been a part of the societal discourse. Woman as an "individual‟ has rarely been discussed, instead of "as a Woman‟ or "as a no-Man‟. This picture holds true for most parts of the world, where India is not an exception. In India the discourse around woman becomes more complicated as this country has traditions of matripuja (worship of women as goddess) from historic times. Curiously enough, along with this tradition, the violation of woman rights or rather the sheer absence of concept of rights for women can also be observed. Bengal epitomizes this paradox, where years old traditions and contemporary vicious situations are in startling contradictions. Being a Bengalee, I have witnessed our traditions of "matri-puja‟ throughout life, where we live and breathe the festivities and rituals of "Durga-puja‟ along with worships of other goddesses (lakshmi, saraswati etc). Since childhood I was marveled with the number of goddesses we worship and used to bother my mother with numerous questions about it. Middle-class Bengali culture teaches children stories from scriptures and epics as "ideal‟ ways of life and most of these stories glorify the pervasive motherly feature of women. Looking back now I realize that these stories also taught us to blame women themselves to be the "reason‟ for most of the misfortunes in their lives. I got to hear stories from two ladies, my mother and maternal-grandmother, which provided me perceptions of two generations regarding same stories and characters. Ma used to explain things with a mixture of logic and modern ideas into it, whereas grandmother was pure old-days storyteller, whose stories we all siblings enjoyed the fullest. But years old Bengali proverbs like "pathe nari biborjita‟ (women should be left behind for a journey), "nari e binasher karon‟ (women are reasons of destruction), "nari sorbongsoha‟ (women are tolerant of everything) or "nari jogonmata‟ (women are mother of universe) were parts of both of their stories. These,