Ashapoorna Devi Biography - Birth date, Achievements, Career, Family, Awards

Ashapurna ji was born on 08 January 1909 in Kolkata, West Bengal. She was from a middle class family. His father was a painter and his mother had a keen interest in Bengali literature. Apart from this, he had three brothers.

Ashapurna Devi died on 13 July 1995 (87 years).

The female children of Ashapurna Devi's house were not allowed to go to school. Private tutors were employed for boys only. It is said that Ashapurna as an infant used to listen to the readings of his brothers in front of him and in this way he learned to identify the alphabets.

At the age of just 13, Ashapurna Devi's writing journey started and she was associated with literature for a lifetime. At the beginning of his writing career, Ashapurna wrote for children only - Chota Thakurdar Kashi Yatra (the great Uncle Goas Varanasi) was the first printed edition published in 1938, followed by others in his literary career. In 1936 he wrote a story for adults for the first time, "Patni O Priyoshi", published in the Pooja issue of Anand Bazar Patrika. Prem O Prayajan was his first novel for adults published in 1944. His first story-compilation "Jal aur Jamun" was published in West Bengal in the year 1940. From this period onwards, his writing continued as a never ending process. Most of his writings marked a fervent protest for both men and women, against the inequality and injustice that stems from gender-based discrimination and the pervasive narrowness in traditional Hindu society. The stories of Ashapurna Devi faced atrocities on women and a fervent appeal to the new social order, although not subscribed to modern theoretical feminism of the Western genre. Her magnum ops, Trilogy First Prestige (1964), Subarnolata (1967) and Bakul Katha (1974), symbolize an endless struggle for women to have equal rights.