Narrative Selfhood and Cultural Memory Chains: Examining Autobiographical Narration through Class and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Abstract

Autobiography is often read as a private record of selfhood; however, life writing also takes shape within cultural systems that decide what can be remembered, narrated, justified, or silenced. This article studies autobiographical narration in nineteenth-century Bengal through gender, class, colonial modernity, and narrative authority. Drawing on cultural memory studies, cognitive narratology, autobiography theory, and postcolonial criticism, it proposes the concept of cultural memory chains: patterned sequences through which lived experience is selected, emotionally prioritized, morally framed, rhetorically positioned, and retrospectively turned into narrative selfhood. The framework is applied to Rashsundari Devi's Amar Jiban, Binodini Dasi's My Story, and Rabindranath Tagore's My Reminiscences. The analysis shows that Devi's narrative is shaped by devotional endurance and morally sanctioned literacy; Dasi's by stigma, trauma, artistic labour, and the search for dignity; and Tagore's by aesthetic formation and elite masculine autonomy. The comparison demonstrates that autobiographical memory is not a neutral archive but a culturally mediated architecture of self-representation shaped by respectability, class privilege, and colonial social hierarchy