Locating Women in Colonial
Assam
Dr. Rashmi Buragohain
ABSTRACT
History books are not explicit enough to highlight
the role of women in society – gaps remained while recording the
happenings of life and society. These are the gaps that involved
women and the task remains to fill those gaps and provide a clear
and unambiguous picture of a society where women too had their roles
to play. Therefore, in order to study Indian women, it is very
important to reckon with the colonial women who had their first
encounter with the outside world. This was the time when they were
first exposed to the new ideas of the western world with the advent
of the British in India. In Assam too the rapidly changing scenario
encouraged the women to awaken their consciousness and find their
‘voice’. So, this paper is an exploration of women in colonial Assam
who stood at the centre of many of these changes. These were the
women negotiating the pull between tradition and modernity, domestic
expectations and public engagement, silence and self-expression.
Keywords: Women, Assamese women, colonial, self-expression
