Designing a Modern Self: The English Travels of Pandita Ramabai and Krishnabhabini Das

In 1882, Krishnabhabini Das travelled to England and wrote a travelogue, Englandey Bangamahila (A Bengali Lady in England) in Bengali. A year later in 1883, Pandita Ramabai also travelled to England and wrote a letter in Marathi describing her travel experiences, which was later published as Englandcha Pravas (Travel to England). This article reads the two travel accounts together and in relation to one another aiming to compare and juxtapose their differing and at times overlapping navigations and negotiations with the West in an attempt to understand the early expression of gendered subjectivities via narratives of travel at a time when both travel and writing by women were discouraged, if not proscribed. With a focus on two related aspects—(1) the textual construction of the 'self' and (2) the trope of the reverse female gaze on the West—the paper argues that these travel writings produce as they record the making of distinct modern female subjectivities at the end of the nineteenth century.