Naaju Breaking News, Live Updates, Latest Headlines, Viral News, Top Stories, Trending Topics, Videos
[ad_1]
Dorothy Bonarjee was Indian by birth, English by training, French by marriage and Welsh at heart.
To put it another way, it was the eternal stranger, sometimes by chance and sometimes by choice.
And her greatest achievement – in 1914, she won one of Wales’ most prestigious cultural awards as a teenager – is also notable for the same reason.
In India, Dorothy Bonarjee and her family were different, in class, culture and religion. They were high caste Bengali Brahmins, but Dorothy spent her childhood living a simple life on the family farm hundreds of miles from Bengal, in Rampur, near the Indo-Nepal border.
They were also Christians: their grandfather was a priest in Calcutta after being converted by the famous Scottish missionary Alexander Duff.
Dorothy’s life changed completely in 1904, when – along with her brothers Bertie and Neil – she was sent to London for her schooling. I was only 10 years old.
Their parents, who had once passed through Great Britain, wanted their children to be, like them, part of the “returned England” which increasingly ruled India in the name of imperial power.
Among the Indian elite, this British experience had “a certain snobbish value, like being a nobleman in Britain,” noted one of the Bonarjee clan members.
A photograph is kept of the three young Bonarjees from about when they arrived in London.
Dorothy looks demure in a white dress and a black ribbon in her hair. Bertie, his older brother, wears a suit and tie. It is a statement of how they had become English, although the world around them would always see them as Indians.
Dorothy’s father was a lawyer and landowner. She was probably more attached to her mother, who was a strong advocate for girls’ education.
Wife and stranger
Both the daughter and the mother were active advocates in Britain for the vote for women. And thanks to her mother, Dorothy had a rare privilege in Britain or India a century ago: she was to receive as good an education as her siblings.
“At the time of World War I there were around 1,000 Indian students in British universities,” says Dr Sumita Mukherjee of the University of Bristol, who has written a book on Indians “returning from England”. “Between 50 and 70 were women.”
In 1912, Dorothy Bonarjee joined this select group. The family would have expected Dorothy to go to the University of London, but, according to family tradition, London seemed “too snobby” and opted for the University College of Wales, in the predominantly Welsh coastal town of Aberystwyth.
“Where the hell is that!” Apparently her father exclaimed. But Dorothy succeeded. And his brother Bertie signed up too, in part to serve as his sister’s rifle.
Dorothy’s decision may have been determined by the progressive reputation of the university. “One of the founding principles of Aberystwyth University College was that all religious beliefs and cultural roots were welcome,” says Susan Davies, archivist and historian at the present University of Aberystwyth.
And the faculty, the oldest of the three that made up the University of Wales at the time, also had an impressive record on gender equality.
When Dorothy arrived there, almost half of the students were women, a much higher proportion than in most British universities at the time.
By the time of their graduation in 1916 – when many men were fighting in Flanders and France – women were in the clear majority.
Dorothy was clearly a popular student who played a leading role in debate and literary society and helped edit the college magazine.
Awarded in Wales
Its highlight came in February 1914 during the venue’s annual Eisteddfod, a spectacle and celebration of Welsh culture in which writers and musicians competed for prizes.
Even though he wasn’t as prestigious as el Eisteddfod national, was an important cultural event in the Welsh heart of the country.
Entrants in the main competition, for poetry in the traditional Welsh style, had the chance to win an imposing hand-carved oak chair.
All poems were submitted under pseudonyms. A Welsh newspaper, the Head of the Cambria daily, echoed the event on its cover:
“The first prize went to ‘Shita’, for an ode written in English, and described as an excellent and very dramatic treatment of the subject. […]. Miss Bonarjee received a thunderous applause when he stood up and revealed himself as “Shita” […]. The ceremony took place with great enthusiasm. ”
Dorothy’s parents were on hand to see their 19-year-old daughter’s success. They persuaded their father to address the crowd, thanking them for the way they had “welcomed a successful competitor from a different race and country.”
If India had given birth to a poet, he said, Wales had raised her and given her the opportunity to develop her poetic instincts.
Dorothy Bonarjee was the first foreign student and the first woman to succeed at Eisteddfod University. It was a historic achievement: the first woman to win the National Eisteddfod was in 2001..
Encouraged by her success, she wrote poems for magazines such as The Welsh Outlook, a monthly magazine that reflected and promoted Welsh cultural nationalism. Even after leaving Wales he continued to post there.
“He loved Welsh,” says his niece Sheela Bonarjee. “She couldn’t speak Welsh, so she was always an upstart in that sense. But they accepted her.”
Racist disappointments
However, Dorothy suffered a disappointment in Aberystwyth as well.
Sheela Bonarjee still has the battered black notebook her aunt collected her verses in. Along with one of the poems, Dorothy made a note: ‘Written at the age of 22, when a Welsh student, after three years of secret dating, left me because her parents said:’She is very beautiful and intelligent, but she is Indian‘”.
“He destroyed her. She was upset,” Sheela said, recalling her aunt’s confidences of their failed romance. “There is a poem from him [llamado ‘Renuncia’] showing the loss of this boyfriend. ”
Dorothy had grown used to being the stranger, but there is a painful price to be paid for being different.
His younger brother, Neil, went on to study at Oxford University, and there he ran into a wall of prejudice.
“Indians in general, it must be said, as well as other colored races, were not popular in college,” he writes.
The English comrades “had something that I didn’t have, which is an empire. They owned him, while I belonged only to him ”.
Dorothy was not intimidated. From Aberystwyth, she and Bertie returned to London, where they both did second degrees.
Once again, she was a trailblazer: the first student at University College London to earn a law degree.
The family hoped that the young people would return to India for their lives and careers. His brothers obediently boarded the boat. Dorothée rebelled.
Marriage with a French painter
I was caught between different cultures and social values. She was free-spirited and committed to the equality of women; He was not someone who would easily consent to an arranged marriage by his family in India. She therefore fled with a French artist, Paul Surtel.
Her father was furious; her mother seems to have been more understanding. The couple married in 1921 and settled in the south of France. As Surtel gained notoriety as a painter, his wife retired from public life.
They had two children, one of whom died in infancy, but by the mid-1930s the marriage was over. “Nothing is more morally exhausting,” commented Dorothy, “than a weak husband.”
His family begged him to return to India. Again, she refused, a decision she apparently later regretted. His father bought it a small vineyard in Gonferon, in Provence, to serve as home and sustenance. Money was tight. It was not the easy life she expected. He never remarried.
Sheela Bonarjee followed in her aunt’s footsteps from India to London in the 1950s and made several visits to the south of France. She remembers her “Aunt Dorf” as elegant, confident and unconventional. She was very French in some ways, recalls Sheela.
“I drank wine with every meal which to me as an Indian was very strange and sometimes I wondered why I was so sleepy all day.” But he spoke French with a strong accent.
It now has the distinction of being in the “Biographical Dictionary of Wales”, the only person of Indian origin among nearly 5,000 entries. It is written by Beth Jenkins of the University of Essex.
“Dorothy has certainly embraced the national Welsh culture,” he argues, “and made a significant contribution to it during her time in Aberystwyth.”
He lived almost 90 years. Corn no longer set foot in India.
However, his Indian side remained important. On special dates and holidays, she delighted her French neighbors by dressing in a sari.
But in many ways she was more French, more English, maybe even more Welsh than Indian. And everywhere it was always the stranger.
.
[ad_2]
Source link
