The first question that arises when we look at a certain text is the way in which the author exercised his choice in terms of narrative modes and the ways in which the imaginary world is communicated to the reader. In the case of female writers, these questions require a more rigorous reading of the text based on the dominant ideological framework against which the test is presented. Speaking of the complex relationship between women's writing and the social matrix, Tharu and Lalitha point out that, in the post-independence period, Indian women engaged in "the profound rearticulation of the political world and imaginative life that took place in the 1940s and 1950s with the birth of the Indian nation” 1. The term “rearticulation” implies the presence of a system of articulation, of a matrix of meta-narratives concerned not only with women as objects of gaze but also by women as agents of articulation of their subjectivity, with women as writers. By problematizing the narrator's position, we can hope to detect the negotiations, the debates, the protests and above all the choices available and exercised by a writer. The first thing one would notice in The First Promise of Ashapurna Debi is the position of the narrator in relation to the central character Satyabati. The narrative process is neither an objective third-person rendering nor a subjective first-person rendering in which the narrator is usually a complex part of the narration. In Bakhtinian terms, the narrative goes beyond the monological and even the dialogical framework (exposing a variety of narrative, authorial and characteristic voices dismantling temporal boundaries) to extend to a transgenerational polylogical level. The voice...... middle of paper...... Harcourt, 2000.Debi, Ashapurna. The first promise. Trans. Indira Cowdhury. New Delhi: OrientLongman, 2004.--- Subarnalata. Trans. Gopa Majumdar. Chennai: Macmillan, 1997.--- Bakulkatha. Calcutta: Mitra and Ghosh, 1974. Eagleton, Mary, ed. Feminist literary theory: a reader. Cornwall: Blackwell, 1996. Genette, Gérard. Narrative speech. New York: Cornell University Press, 1980. Sarkar, Tanika. Hindu Wife Hindu Nation. 2001. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007. Tharu, Susie and K. Lalitha, eds. Women Writing in India: 600 BC to the Early 20th Century Volume Two: The 20th Century. New York: Feminist Press, 1993. Verma, Dominique S. and TV Kunhi Krishnan, eds. Memories of the Second Sex. Bombay: Somaiya Publications, 2000.