Women Writing in India 600 B.C. to the Present (1991) PDF

Women Writing in India: 600 B.C to the Present. Edited by Susie Tharu and K. Lalita. Volume 1: 600 B.C to the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Feminist Press, 1991. Volume 2: The Twentieth Century. New York: Feminist Press, 1993. Priyamvada Gopal I was angry with myself for wanting to read b...

Women Writing in India: 600 B.C to the Present. Edited by Susie Tharu and K. Lalita. Volume 1: 600 B.C to the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Feminist Press, 1991. Volume 2: The Twentieth Century. New York: Feminist Press, 1993. Priyamvada Gopal I was angry with myself for wanting to read books. Girls did not read... Anyway, I was pleased that I was able to perform this impossible feat at least in a dream. My life was blessed! 'Amar Jiban' As we follow Rassundari Devi's slow and arduous journey from a secret longing to read the master's book through to the amazing scenes of self-teaching, and the writing of her life in 'Amar Jiban' (My Life) after she learns to write 'in secret, by scratching the letters of the alphabet on a blackened kitchen wall' (190), issues of women's writing in India take on a significance that subsume and go beyond academic arguments about alternative canons and multicultural curricula. As Rassundari's and many other texts compiled in Susie Tharu's and K. Lalita's meticulously researched and edited anthologies Women Writing in India: 500 B.C to the Present demonstrate, the act of women's writing or reading, in various contexts and through different historical periods, has subversive connotations that have to do with more than any perceived resistances within narrative content alone. These two volumes have been published at a time when the dynamic tremors of the debate on the Western literary canon and on recovering and re-presenting hitherto marginalized voices have settled into the regulatory rhythms of business-as-usual in literature departments in the Anglo-American academy. The institutionalizing of feminist studies, ethnic studies, and more specifically, post-colonial studies, means that this pioneering compendium of writing by women in India that spans 2400 years and has been translated into English from eleven different Indian languages will find an established and growing constituency of readers in the West as well as in India. It 288 Oxford Literary Review will be instrumental in giving more definite contours and direction to nascent feminist research in these areas. Further, its editorial content clearly aims to contribute to, and to reframe, theoretical debates within feminist and colonial/post-colonial studies. For the editors themselves, the polemical project at hand is clear: they are not primarily interested in 'the refurbishment of canons' since the interests of literary studies 'as it stands are ones we wish to transform, not entrench' ('Introduction', 38). Both volumes carry the same general introduction (page references to it in this review are from Volume II). Tharu and Lalita present a detailed but somewhat totalizing critique of what they call Western feminist criticism and define their own project in terms of (what they see as) its sharp variation from that of the former. They aim to reconstruct 'the changing ideological configurations in which women wrote and were read' ('Introduction', 38) and create a context in which 'women's writings can be read... as documents that display what is at stake in the embattled practices of self and agency, and in the making of a habitable world, at the margins of patriarchies constituted by the emerging bourgeoisies of empire and nation' (39, original emphasis). This is facilitated by the densely researched section introductions and biographical notes which provide excellent historical and political background to each writer; Tharu and Lalita are also careful to point out that women's texts are not always subversive of the status quo and even when they are, can be so in problematic or unexpected ways. It is not clear, however, why they need to provide such an extensive and often careless discussion of Western feminism (not even feminisms). To point out that certain strands of feminist thought in the industrialized West neglect to take the hegemonies of class, caste, and race into account, universalize women's experi­ ences, or refuse to read 'the complicity of white women and middle- class women in the structures of domination' is salutary, but by over-generalizing and leaving out a lot more than Hazel Carby's work (which omission they acknowledge), Tharu and Lalita replicate the very strategies they indict. No significant distinctions are made between even broad categories like radical, postmodern, materialist, and liberal feminisms, and we are finally expected to take seriously the conclusion that Western feminism is basically essentialist in Priyamvada Gopal 289 thrust and that is why these editors must dissociate their project so completely from it: 'Liberal feminists... argued for a privileged affinity between women and peace or women and nature, the body or the unconscious....Since the kind of feminist criticism that naturalizes the experiences and issues of Western feminism is so easily co-opted by the academy and so widely circulated among third world scholars... we must explain in more detail why we find the subsuming of a critical method into a celebration of female nature so disturbing* ('Introduction', 34). The point here is not to apologize for some of Anglo-American feminism's obvious blunders but to suggest that sophisticated post-colonial feminist critiques will now need to do more than identify well-documented lapses in Anglo- American traditions. In some ways, to do so is to continue to address those traditions in ways that reify its authority and scope; ironical­ ly, this is what Tharu and Lalita claim that practitioners of gynocriticism do when they address the patriarchal literary institution to Voice their grievances' ('Introduction' 27). The collections in the two-volume anthology themselves are testimony to painstaking archival work, thoughtful editing by Tharu and Lalita as well as a team of eleven language editors, and generally readable translations made by an immense network of translators (one of the many achievements of this project is surely that of creating a community of literary and cultural workers across the country). The first volume (600 B.C. to the Present), is naturally somewhat more thrilling with regard to archival work than the second (The Twentieth Century) which provides significant insights into recent social and cultural history. The section on ancient and medieval literature in the former contains excerpts from nuggets like the Therigatha (Songs of the Nuns) composed by Buddhist nuns in the 6th century B. C , from Gul-Badan Begum's history of Humayun's reign, and Muddupalani's notorious erotic classic Radhika Santwanam (Appeasing Radhika) whose history of marginalization, censorship and retrieval is for Tharu and Lalita largely emblematic of the story of women's writing in India. The range of genres which comprise the selections for the section 'Literature of the Reform and Nationalist Movements' is noteworthy: there are transcripts of speeches made both by women as well known as Sarojini Naidu and as anonymous as the author of 'A 290 Oxford Literary Review Speech Made by a Woman at a Women's Meeting Organized by the Prarthana Samaj, Bombay;' short stories, Utopian fiction, satirical attacks on male hypocrisy, letters, tribal song and dance perform­ ance or jhumur; sociological records like the excerpt from Pandita Ramabai's The High Caste Hindu Woman and another anonymous author's 'The Plight of Hindu Widows as Described by a Widow Herself, and of course, autobiography, of which, as the editors point out, there are a large number in this period. This variety is in striking contrast to the composition of the second volume which comprises mainly short stories and poetry. The reasons for this, which I will discuss shortly, are implicit in both historical changes and possibly, in editorial strategies determined by Tharu and Lalitha's reading of these changes. While in Volume 1 the emphasis is on placing 'women's literary initiatives against the restructuring of patriarchy and gender that was taking place' and in Volume 2, against 'the major reorientation in the social imaginary that took place' ('Introduction', 40) in the later twentieth century, Tharu and Lalita's generalized project is to read resistances: 'we might indeed learn to read them not for the moments in which they collude with or reinforce dominant ideologies of gender, class, nation, and empire, but for the gestures of defiance or subversion implicit in them' (39). The question of resistances is, of course, always a vexed one both in terms of textual semiotics and of literary production as revolutionary practice. One of the ways in which third world and other feminist theory can make the shift away from Eurocentrism is to reconsider and further theorize the notion of 'writing' and to reevaluate its relationship to women's cultural production. While we should continue to examine the marginalizing and unavailability of women's writing and attempt to retrieve that which does survive, it is important to bear in mind that much of what we are considering are cultural terrains where writing (in the narrow graphemic sense rather than the broader Derridean reinscription of the term) is only a proportionally small constituent of cultural production and transmission at large. For instance, in ancient India, not only folk culture but liigh' texts such as grammars and scriptural treatises were transmitted orally and committed to memory (hence, the broad use of mnemonics). I am not just making the somewhat banal argument that writing is a Priyamvada Gopal 291 Western construct (just as reactionary elements will argue that feminism is a Western and, hence, alien concept), but suggesting that an understanding of its evolving social status and function will help us better understand both its use as, and in, revolutionary practice, as well as its limitations. And thus, Rassundari's words take on fresh significance: 'One needs a lot of things if one is to write: paper, pen, ink, ink-pot and so on. You have to set everything before you. And I was a woman, the daughter-in-law of the family. I was not supposed to read or write' (1: 202). Few other texts demonstrate as starkly the material conditions which determine not only women's lack of access to the real and symbolic power of the discourse of literacy but their entire subjectivity and sense of self. Considering that Rassundari and her descendants belong to a class which ultimately did allow women access to education—albeit a policed access—it is salutary to keep in mind that a large percentage of the female (and male) population in India still does not have the material means to write. This has two implications: first, as cultural critics, we will have to read other kinds of texts to find resistances, and second, we should consider questions of ideological interpellation and authority through all that takes place at the site of the dissemination of learning. In other words, we need to recognize the ways in which language is an instrument of empire, and the extent of our complicity in the ideologies of the bourgeois project of education. This is powerfully illustrated in Ramabai Ranade's account of learning to read and write with her husband as pedagogue. (Such an acknowledgement will certainly prevent slightly absurd critical claims such as 'no one who has read Gulbadan Begum's history... can think of the women in the Zenana as repressed' since they had access to learning (63)). Clearly, however, writing also has an enabling strategic power and as Tharu and Lalita point out, to read resistances in texts like these is to look for the ways in which women 'tactically redeployed dominant discourses, held onto older strains and recharged them with new meanings and even introduced new issues, new emphases, new orientations' (1: 154). Thus, Mokshodayani Mukhopadhyay writes a rejoinder to attacks on stereotypical female attributes and mocks the man who 'becomes Brahmo to emancipate women/ Drags out of seclusion the ladies of 292 Oxford Literary Review his clan' (1: 220); Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain uses inversion to take what her husband terms 'a terrible revenge on men' (340) and a grim Tarabai Shinde performs 'A Comparison of Men and Women' (221). It is the same education which allows Pandita Ramabai to read the Shastras against the grain (226) and Bandaru Accham- amba to write early feminist history (323). One of the questions which shapes a project like this and indeed frames much contemporary debate is that of the relationship of social to literary text. Tharu and Lalita see Women Writing in India as helping to develop 'an aesthetic that must undo the strict distinctions between the literary and the social text' as well as 'a critical practice that is by no means restricted to literature' ('Introduction', 39). Lalithambika Antherjanam's 'Praticaradevatha' (The Goddess of Revenge) is a compelling retelling of a true incident which dramatizes this possibility by literally breaking a social silence around the incident and resurrecting the silenced woman. The story of Thu-Tatri who becomes a prostitute to take revenge on her womanizer Namboodiri husband triggered off'an ethical debate which rocked Kerala to its very foundations' (499). Lalithambika ends the story on an uncertain note; it is unclear whether individual action works on a symbolic level powerful enough to effect social change, and thus the writer-character's opinion oscillates as it addresses Tatri: 'In truth, you are not an individual anymore; you are society itself.... Consider now, what good did it do to society, that hurricane you set into motion?... An affair that certainly created a turmoil, but did not succeed in pointing the way to anything positive.... But Namboodiri society can never forget Tatri. From the heart of a great silence, you managed to throw out an explosive burning spark... a cry of victory' (500). This question of the social Imaginary is the main editorial concern in Volume II, which deals largely with 'Women Writing the Nation' (43) in the period just before Independence to the present, and is premised on the understanding that culture and politics interacted to perform 'the profound rearticulation of the political world and imaginative life that took place in the forties and fifties with the birth of the Indian nation and continues in many ways to underwrite culture and politics into the nineties' (II: 43). The stories in Volume II are placed specifically in the context of Swadeshi, the Priyamvada Gopal 293 Progressive Writers Association, and liberal electoralism, as well as the women's movement in India. As mentioned earlier, this volume contains mainly poetry and short stories written by educated middle-class women (an astonishing number of whom have doctor­ ates or Master's degrees specifically in English Literature and also in other regional literatures) and who are doctors, journalists, academicians, or professional writers. Tharu and Lalita point out that even those stories that are about those at the margins are 'all the same, stories of the center, told by the center' (83). The notable exceptions are the actress Hamsa Wadkar's excerpted autobiogra­ phy, Baby Ramble's 'Jina Amucha' (Our Wretched Lives) and 'Dudala Salamma, Khila Shapur', the Telengana People's Struggle participant whose story was transcribed by the Stree Shakti Sangathana and who asks a still pertinent question: 'I have survived to tell you all this—you hold the pen—it all comes from my stomach. What is the use of your holding the pen?' (222). In general, however, the selection of texts for this volume collectively works to demonstrate the ways in which women's texts are co-opted into a universalist and nationalist framework, and yet are 'engaged in a bitter and difficult debate about women and the kind of hospitality gender received' within it (94). Jaya Mehta's cynical reading of democracy in 'Lokshahiman' (In a Democracy) is apt here: 'The ocean framed in a picture/ Is free to toss its waves... Sheep driven by the Shepherd/ Have the freedom to march in line' (366). Other memorable selections include Binapani Mohanty's 'Asru Anala' (Tears of Fire) and Anupama Niranj ana's 'Ondu Ghatane Mattu Anantara' (The Incident and After), for their compelling examination of female sexuality and anger. Mahasweta Devi's 'Shishu' (Children) about tribal repression and the revenge extracted by the hunted and shrunken Agarias is underplayed and chilling and intensely powerful. Malini Bhattacharya's 'Meye Dile Sajiye' (To Give a Daughter Away) is the only dramatic text in the collection. It provides an exciting glimpse of the power of theatre in a progress­ ive cultural politics and raises questions about women's presence in the field of playwriting. Varsha Adalja's 'Bichari Champudi' (Poor Champudi) and Jeelani Bano's 'Tamasha' (Fun and Games) are chilling exposes of the quotidian callousness that characterizes social behaviour towards young female street children. 294 Oxford Literary Review Of the many stories that explore modern conjugality— another recurrent theme in this volume (in contrast to the first one)—note­ worthy are Veena Shanteshwar's 'Avala Svatantrya' (Her Indepen­ dence), Sarah Joseph's 'Mazha' (Rain) and Saroj Pathak's 'Saugandh' (The Vow), the last of which looks at celibacy in tandem with new-found conjugal love as a possible way of life. Many of these stories were first published in women's magazines and a too pessimistic reading of their relationship to culture and politics must be qualified by an understanding of the ways in which these magazines did provide women with a forum for self-exploration and expression, both individual and collective. A similarly complex relation to cultural politics informs the translation of some of these stories into features for television. It is true that these texts can and have been co-opted in the interests of state-sponsored feminism, but the 'women-oriented' serials of the late 1980s did engage with questions concerning feminism. Especially when read in the context of explicitly masculist commercial cinema, and now the even more crassly macho, racist, homophobic and pseudo-global culture offered by Star TV, they do offer some liberating possibilities. The two volumes clearly are clearly invaluable contributions towards cultural and critical inquiry in feminist and South Asia studies. The editors' hope that they will not be used 'to perform the same services to society and to nation that mainstream literature over the last hundred years has been called upon to do' ('Introduct­ ion', 38)—and we may add, the services that alternative canons have been called upon to perform in the last ten years—is a laudable one, but whether it is heeded will depend on the collective efforts of all those engaged in the enterprise of reading differently for a different cause.