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The paper seeks to analyze how Hariprabha Takeda, a Bengali woman, in the early twentieth century negotiated with the issues of identity, integration, and cultural assimilation in her narrative from the standpoint of an insider in a Japanese household. Through a close textual analysis of her travelogue Bongomohilar Japan Jatra (1915) and other memoirs (translated as The Journey of a Bengali Woman to Japan (1915) & Other Essays by Somdatta Mandal in 2019), the paper attempts to examine how she was influenced by the Japanese culture and blurred the strict demarcations of private and public spaces through interracial marriage. The paper argues that the notion of pan-Asian identity gained prominence due to the active interest of travelers in exploring and developing cultural and political links between colonial Bengal and Japan, which forms the background to Hariprabha’s transnational connections. A critical investigation of her translated narrative opens up various embedded cultural, gender and class issues that she encapsulated as a colonized woman and, thus, helps in situating it in the larger sociocultural and political scenario.

The construction of body in India is an ambiguous discursive process and this paper attempts to answer the following key questions clinched in the colonial monthly Bengali magazine Nara-Naree[Man-Woman]: What was the relationship of knowledge, power and sexuality among genders in colonial India? How was gender difference constituted in colonial Bengal? How did cloth define the disparity between nature and culture? How were the objects of consciousness regarding genders developed in social contexts? How did the surveillance and control over the body construct the "ideal sexual behavior"? How were the paradigms of health, psychology, nature, culture, science, morality, modernity, tradition and history integrated into the gender framework which assert the reconstruction of femininities, masculinities and sexualities? How did the rhetoric of body and sexuality in colonial Bengal become contested site of discourses as well as a device to construct a national and cultural identity? How did body become a tool of control and a territory for inscribing critical observations, the content to be evaluated and a device to reform the structure and boundary between imperial and national binaries? How did the subcultures and trans gender identities form new sexual attitudes subverting the homogeneous and hegemonic hierarchy in the east-west relations and transnational settings? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]