Noorjahan Bose: A Life of Learning

In her village along the the Agunmukha river,in present-day Bangladesh, during her childhood, female education stopped at the fourth grade, and child marriages deprived children of their childhood. Bose’s mother, Johora Begum, a small, soft-spoken woman who carried herself with reserve, felt deeply seized by the experiences of the other daughters of the Agunmukha that besieged her community. She resolved to cut a different path for her five daughters, of whom Bose was the eldest. “‘You have to get a proper education and leave this house as fully developed human beings. I won’t let you lead a life like mine,’” Johora Begum would say.  

Her determination fuels Bose, as her book, Daughter of the Agunmukha: A Bangla Life, which straddles the line between memoir and autobiography, relates. The 2009 Bengali bestseller won the Ananya Literature Award in 2012 and the Bangla Academy Literary Award for Autobiography in 2016. 

Divided into eight parts, Bose’s memoir, translated by Tamil and Bengali scholar Rebecca Whittington, reads more like the wisdom tales for which you’d pull up a stool next to your grandmother to hear. Bose takes the reader across the surge of trials and tribulations she and her fellow country people have faced, weathering seven decades and three continents of living. But learning remains the story’s core focus, whether from teachers, books, her mother or the world. 

While pursuing her education as a child and staying with relatives across the region to attend school, Bose recognizes that her female relatives and friends live very different lives from her own and rebuffs the fate of those around her. They’re married off to men decades older, divorced, abused or trapped by the dictates of their circumstances at the time. Learning doesn’t shield Bose from all of this, she knows, but it emboldens her to withstand whatever life gives her. 

Despite, seemingly enough, having been dealt a series of bad hands and suffering injustice, she plunges herself into reading (Tolstoy, Gandhi, Neru, Hardy, Russell, Shaw) and studies, becoming the first girl in her region to graduate high school. It’s in schooling that she finds refuge time and again. 

Embarking on a path of self-actualization, Bose completes her master’s degree in social work. And in this growth, halfway around the world, whether in the United Kingdom or United States, she discovers the daughters of the Agunmukha are not alone in the fate of she bore witness to back home. 

Taking inspiration and direction from her now-deceased mother, this daughter of the Agunmukha now shifts her energy toward empowering other daughters of the Agunmukha through education and opportunity.