Writing the Self: Life Writing as an Emerging Trend with Reference to Manobi Bandyopadhyay's A Gift of Goddess Lakshmi

This paper examines life writing as an expanding and influential literary mode in contemporary scholarship, foregrounding its role in reshaping literary canons and social discourse. Moving beyond conventional understandings of autobiography as mere self-narration, the study situates life writing as a dynamic and inclusive category encompassing memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, diaries, and emerging digital self-representational forms. Drawing on theoretical interventions by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Philippe Lejeune, Shari Benstock, Jay Prosser, and Judith Butler, the paper explores how the “self” in life writing is relational, socially embedded, and politically charged rather than isolated or autonomous. The study offers a focused reading of A Gift of Goddess Lakshmi by Manobi Bandyopadhyay as a case study of transgender life writing in the Indian context. Bandyopadhyay’s narrative—tracing her journey from Somnath to becoming India’s first openly transgender college principal, demonstrates how autobiographical writing becomes an act of self-fashioning, resistance, and reclamation. The memoir documents experiences of gender dysphoria, familial abuse, institutional discrimination, and social exclusion, while simultaneously foregrounding resilience, education, and agency. The paper argues that transgender autobiographical narratives complicate traditional distinctions between body and identity, self and society, memory and performance. Through motifs such as the mirror and bodily transformation, Bandyopadhyay’s text articulates a “split consciousness” characteristic of trans narratives, wherein life writing functions as both testimony and self-legitimation. The work also interrogates broader concerns surrounding life writing, including questions of truth, ethical representation, and the commodification of trauma in contemporary publishing cultures. By situating Bandyopadhyay’s memoir within the broader trajectory of autobiography studies, the paper highlights life writing’s capacity to democratise literary space, challenge hetero-patriarchal norms, and foreground marginalised voices. In the Indian socio-cultural context where discussions of gender and sexuality remain fraught, A Gift of Goddess Lakshmi emerges as a politically transformative text that reclaims narrative agency and expands the contours of inclusive storytelling.