The First Promise: Female Agency at the Threshold of Modern Bengal

Set in colonial Bengal in the middle of the nineteenth century, Ashapurna Devi’s 1964 novel Protham Protishruti (The First Promise), translated from Bengali by Indira Chowdhury, is the story of social change during the Bengal Renaissance—the first tentative openings of women’s education, the slow push for widow remarriage, the replacement of traditional medicine with ‘English’ medicine, the joint family giving way to the nuclear, and the village giving way to the city. However, as The First Promise reveals, the transition to modernity is painful and contradictory, and never the dramatic and clean break we would like it to be. Through its cast of characters, Ashapurna Devi shows that both tradition and reform carry ethical costs, and social change happens slowly, unevenly, and imperfectly.

At the center of the novel is Satyabati. When we meet her for the first time, she is already married—a nine-year-old girl who is sharp of tongue, quick of wit, and intellectually restless. Her name is significant: Satya means truth, but also integrity, and throughout the novel, her actions are marked by a fierce honesty that refuses hypocrisy. Satya constantly questions customs that others accept without thought; she engages in activities forbidden to girls, such as fishing with a rod, climbing trees, or educating herself. But she is not simply a rebellious heroine. Her rebellion is rooted in ethical seriousness, not mere defiance. She is unafraid and never unjust or inconsiderate. When she asks why daughters-in-law cannot simply be treated with affection and kindness—“Why can’t they love her a little? Talk to her sweetly!”—the question becomes quietly radical in a world where cruelty has been normalized. The novel follows Satya into her marital home, through the birth of her children, to her eventual migration to Calcutta, where she teaches women to read. 

Yet before Satya emerges as the novel’s central force, we meet another transgressive figure: her father, Ramkali. He runs away from home as a child, defies the rigid orthodoxy of the kulin brahmin society in many ways, and returns to his village as a respected traditional doctor. He sees the cruelty in some social customs, rejects superstitions, and recognizes the suffering caused by child marriage and widowhood. However, Ramkali is not a reformist hero—he gives his own daughter in marriage at the age of eight through Gauri-dana, which promises great religious merit to the father. He rescues a child-bride from widowhood by arranging a second marriage for his nephew with her, thereby dismantling the life of the nephew’s first wife. He remains emotionally distant from his own timid wife, whom he sees as incapable of intellectual companionship. In fact, though progressive in many ways, Ramkali has nothing but contempt for women, whom he sees only as “creatures of the kitchen”—it is Satya who begins to make him question this. These contradictions are precisely what Satya inherits from her father; Satya herself opposes many oppressive customs but does not support widow remarriage and remains invested in caste hierarchy. These contradictions make the novel profoundly realistic: people rarely transcend their historical moment completely. Reform happens through a series of partial awakenings.

Like her father, Satya’s integrity isolates her; it inspires fear more than affection. Her own daughter calls her “a goddess of wrath,” and she feels as though she is “walking alone on a road parched of tenderness.” Her husband, Nabakumar, is the ordinary man caught in the middle between his domineering mother and intellectually formidable wife. The novel suggests that patriarchy damages men too, producing in him not authority but timidity, indecision, and an obsessive fear of social shame.

Satya vows that her daughter Subarna will not be married before sixteen. When her husband tricks her and marries the eight-year-old Subarna off in her absence, Satya leaves her household for Kashi, determined to confront her father and ask why he, too, participated in this cycle by marrying her off at eight.

Ashapurna Devi’s writing shows the texture of women’s lives of the time in an almost anthropological way. Their lives unspool across seasons: the painstaking pickling of mangoes in the fierce summer heat, the washing, cleaning, drying, pounding, and rolling of sesame into balls for Durga Puja, followed by the making of various sun-dried boris—white pumpkin, poppy seed, sesame seed, jeera, and lentil— before rolling into plum and tamarind season. This is one of the novel’s strengths—its refusal to romanticize either tradition or modernity. Ashapurna Devi carefully reveals the immense labor required to sustain ‘traditional’ life, especially for women. One of the most memorable figures of the novel is Satya’s widowed great-aunt, Mokshada. Mokshada lives a life of relentless austerity and self-denial, inflicting penance upon herself with ritualistic severity (for instance, she bathes fourteen to sixteen times a day to maintain ritual purity). Yet, the novel suggests that such deprivation does not produce spiritual transcendence. Mokshada sits for hours in the blazing summer sun making pickles, her back “raw and sunburned,” an image deeply symbolic—Mokshada herself seems to have dried out and withered by widowhood into a husk of resentment. As a vicious gatekeeper who constantly surveils the household, Mokshada turns her own bitterness into a tool to police other women. When a relative expresses pity for a wife facing a polygamous marriage, Mokshada reacts with venomous mockery, showing that the victims of a cruel system can become its most vigilant guardians.

The novel also contains the story of Puti, a child-wife murdered for refusing her husband—an echo of the real-life death of Phulmoni, a child bride killed due to marital coercion by her twenty-nine-year-old husband in 1889. The Age of Consent Act, which set the minimum age of consummation at twelve, was passed only in 1891, long after such deaths had become common. This story reminds us that ‘the old ways’ were often matters of life and death for young girls.

Yet the novel does not dismiss traditions entirely. Indeed, many of Satya’s most joyous memories of childhood are inseparable from this clockwork cycle of festivities and domestic commotion—the bustle of preparations, the seasonal foods, the household gatherings, and the excitement surrounding rituals and pujas. Ashapurna Devi captures the sensory richness of this disappearing world with great affection. Reading these passages, one feels both the beauty and the brutality of tradition.

Ashapurna Devi also reminds us that abandoning tradition carries its own costs. The movement from the village to the city represents liberation, but also dislocation. Calcutta appears as a place of possibility and escape from oppressive village customs. Satya is drawn to the city partly because “Sahib-doctors treated illnesses and the nightmare of death did not exist.” The city also represents education, even women’s education, with institutions such as the Bethune School for girls. However, the city is no utopia. It offers liberation, but also alienation, loneliness, and sometimes corruption. The distance between a village in Bengal and nearby Calcutta in the nineteenth century corresponds, emotionally, to something like the distance between Chennai and New York today. For many readers who have moved away from inherited worlds into large metropolitan spaces, Satya’s movement toward the city captures the strange doubleness of migration.

The First Promise also demonstrates the limitations of legal reform when social attitudes remain unchanged. Although the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act of 1856 legalized widow remarriage, the act was little more than a permission law, as remarriage still carried a heavy social stigma. This reality appears in the story of Shankari, whose remarriage ends in pregnancy and abandonment. Polygamy—specifically kulin brahmin polygamy—was an unaddressed obstacle that allowed men to abandon the widows they married for younger brides without any legal or social consequence.

One measure of a great novel is that its central questions refuse to stay in the past. The First Promise, written in 1964 and set a century before that, certainly has this quality. Translator Indira Chowdhury describes the world of the novel as “familiar but unrecognizable”—and this is exactly how it feels to read it. The novel functions as a kind of palimpsest: beneath the surface of our present lives, we can make out the outlines of Satya’s world. Our lives are radically different from hers, but the novel reminds us of the continuities between her world and ours. Satya’s story suggests that modernity is not an escape from tradition, but tradition recognized under new names. The novel leaves us confronting the necessarily incomplete work of living ethically within the limits of our own agency.