To a 21st-century reader, Rajani (1877) by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, at first, comes across as a novel on caste and flowers. Rajani, a “low-born”, blind girl of 19, makes a living by selling flowers. She frequents Ramsaday Mitra’s mansion in Kolkata to sell flowers to his wife, Labangalata. Seeing her for the first time, Labangalata’s stepson, Sachindra, a medical student, asks about her:

“Flower girl! I was under the impression that she is some gentleman’s daughter.”

Labanga said, “Why do you say so? Can’t a flower girl be the daughter of a gentleman?”

Later in the novel, when Amarnath rescues Rajani on a riverbank, he immediately concludes that the person tormenting her is a vile, low-caste person.

Entering into the forest deeper I found a monstrous man forcibly assaulting a young woman… On seeing them I instantly understood that the man was a scoundrel belonging to the inferior caste, presumably a dome or a siuli.

Then there are flowers, Rajani alludes to flowers when she muses on her feelings for Sachindra:

I felt that I was enshrouded with flowers, flowers on my head, flowers on my feet. I was draped in flowers, flowers in abundance in the core of my heart…

I felt as if the petals of a lotus blooming in a pleasant morning...

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