ISSUES
Territorial turfs
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`The book dovetails the powerful insights of two women of our times. It takes a diamond to cut a diamond.'
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THIS book is not just a critical evaluation of Shashi Deshpande's novels vis-à-vis her many statements and interviews. It is also an arena where Jain gets to explore some of her own postulates. She goes beyond Deshpande's works to raise some disconcerting questions (and they are not rhetorical questions) and issues that cry out to be debated. They touch every writer who is a woman. Many of the questions have, alas, been often swept under the carpet, or worse, silenced in that "all well" dead-pan look that people can wear whenever they wish to.
"Is a woman writer first a woman or a writer?" asks Jain. That the term "woman writer" or "feminist writing" is seen as a limiting concept by many a writer who feels circumscribed by this definition is perhaps an inevitable backlash of this movment. Besides being dated, it smacks of a sub-genre. Writers who are women have moved on while the term in itself has stayed back. Jain has empathy for the writer's discomfort: "Yet the act of writing has, more often than not, been submerged into the fact of being a woman," she observes. It is time works by women are appraised for their femininity rather than for feminism per se.
Right in the first chapter Jain points out that it is not logical to take all male writing as universal and confine only writing by women into "a cubbyhole called feminism", a one-way ghetto. One cannot take all writings by women as a rather centripetal exercise closing in on domesticity, family, marriage and so on when the best writings by women have an outflow that unshackles the writer and her protagonists alike. Deshpande does not protest too much when she declares in an article titled "Writing from the Margin": "When I sit down to write I am just a writer — my gender ceases to matter to me. I am concerned with the same problems of language, narrative, structure and continuity".
Jain, however, points out that the responsibility is on the writer. "The woman writer has to decide for herself how far she wants to de-romanticise the image created by men and also how to use her anger and resentment towards positive ends. Part of the struggle is also in the need to outgrow the socially propagated and individually internalised patriarchal values". With these unblinking vigilant issues, the book evaluates how Deshpande works within the scope of her novels. She is known to have the veracity of a social historian, but she also has the skill to use the same to subvert stereotypes and to uncover the personhood of women. So unerring is Deshpande's grip on social reality that whatever comes through as "gendered" does so as natural, almost undistorted record of reality. She tells it like it is, without lapsing into sectarian shrillness.
To write and be a woman and then to write in English has its special challenges, for, it still has to relate to the bhasha tradition and to a culture with which it has a tenuous link. Jain shares with the reader a beautiful description of the status of English by Anita Desai in her article "The Indian Writer's Problem". Stating that English is at best "an immigrant in India", Desai writes: "It is a refugee in the land. Like a refugee, it is astonishingly tenacious". What is surprising is Jain's observation as a professor of English. She says works in English are looked upon as "stray visitors" and as "a soft option". How then does one explain the easy visibility of writings in English, not to mention the over-the-top, high decibel hype in media? Who orchestrates this noise?
Coming to Deshpande's works, Jain is perhaps one of the few, if not the only, insightful critic to locate her affiliation with the bhasha literatures. Her novels could effectively lend themselves to translations in bhashas, particularly Marathi, Kannada, Tamil and Hindi. They are anchored in an identifiable social context that gives a kind of textured tangibility to the very fabric of her fiction, a factor that is often missing, or is at best vaguely outlined in many writings in English.
Deshpande's novels are as densely populated as India, with people picking their way through tangled familial relationships. With every change, they re-organise themselves in new kinship patterns. Jain gives us interesting figures of these family structures that show the mesh of power equations at a glance. Says Jain trenchantly that the family is "a place of relationships, hostilities, estrangements, refuge and rejection", in short a puzzle, for, "its pieces fall apart before our very eyes". Within these changing patterns, the woman's space is ever endangered and eroded. One must remember too the cultural climate of the times. The 1960 through the 1980s were perhaps the most conflicting and confusing decades for any thinking woman. Feminism was at a nascent stage, tentative and unsure with women constantly called upon to "explain" or justify their actions and choices. Today's street-smart young members of women's study/ feminist groups would do well to understand the sense of historic time in Deshpande's novels. The endnotes of the book should be very useful for the earnest scholar. They light up a direction with hints of perhaps another study emerging from this book.
Deshpande's novels show difficult times, but a stronger woman can slice her way through to carve what Jain calls a human space (in her title), a space that still costs dear. The more determined and , shall we say gifted, amongst the women have the ability for what could be called "anger management", to use a buzz word of the IT revolution. Not for Deshpande the wailing, whining, whimpering, howling women who luxuriate within a "victim" syndrome. Many of her protagonists give a free rein to a cathartic indignation that energises them to see, think and act. Some have painful memories and bereavement to contend with, for, people just up and leave. They die, as die they must some day.
In addressing this thing called death, along with the truth that they continue to be achingly "alive" for their near ones, Deshpande has few equals in the way she allows her fiction to register the far-reaching ramifications of a bereavement. As a writer, she does not eventually lose her "fictional/ creative interest" in the bereaved person, nor does she abdicate her creative responsibility in seeing him/her through the various stages of a painful adjustment in life. We see them through a complete range of emotions, from shock, numbness, a shattered consciousness to grief, pain, a muted, humbling acceptance of a loss set against an impersonal, uncaring, business-as-usual life. The searching effect of Anu's death in The Blinding Vine or Adit's in Small Remedies is purgatorial. At times there is even a warped personality-change, a loss of self, a desiccation of motherhood as in Dhruva's mother who shuns her living daughter Saru in The Dark Holds No Terror and who has no qualms whatever in telling her daughter: "Why're you alive when he is dead?" There is the strangeness of people's perception too, one of the toughest things to contend with for a bereaved person. Urmi, who loses her daughter Anu, cries out: "I can't bear people looking at me as if I'm — something abnormal. As if grief has pitted my skin or something." Jain's chapter titled "Private Sorrows, Public Spaces" is worth reading more than once and mull over.
The book is about women making, taking or losing spaces. Given the tangled terrain of a gendered reality, there are territories to be fought for, territories to be won, and territories to be guarded as their turf if the women have to preserve their personhood. In this embattled field, women have to struggle with not just men but with women as well, for woman is pitted against woman. Says Jain about the generational difference: "The older women have a power that is different from the quality of independence".
The woman with a strong sense of the self will still find herself up against the granite wall of a community that forces her to first qualify as someone "useful". In Jain's telling comment, "Gender roles are defined and adopted for reasons of utility and security. That is why women sew buttons and clean floors, cook food and bear children so that they can be `useful'." To carve a space for herself that goes beyond this domestic utility, a woman has to be brave enough to give up what does not matter anymore. She needs to cross over barriers that belittle her worth and maim her potential in the name of social "respectability". Savitribai, the gifted vocalist in Small Remedies, is independent enough to cut through this familial mesh only to discover that the music guru she so ardently admires is no less patriarchal than the community she rejects. But Savitribai is a delight because here at last is a woman who strongly believes in herself, is focussed on her goal and has the courage to set out on her own, to seek the fruition of her own genius. It is a calling, for the singer and the song have to merge and become one. An achiever, unafraid of being alone, she is almost like a male in razing down conventional emotions, in cutting through domestic fetters and in using people who come her way for her own ends. Savitribai is a milestone in the portrayal of women. The novel has the nerve to "transgress" (if transgress is the right word) other kinds of boundaries too. Savitribai trains her devoted disciple Hasina, who in turn lets music triumph and transcend over religious factions by singing the Devi Stotra in a temple. Hasina sings the Stotra with the same devotion she brings to her namaaz even as Mumbai rages in the background in the fury of riots. Hasina, and the music given by Savitribai, flows on.
gendered realities, human spaces marks a time of reckoning. It is about women and time. Or times. The 21st Century is hurtling on faster than ever and has left "feminism" as defined in 1980s and 90s far behind. True, there are regressive forces still. They stare you in the face from the morning newspaper or the TV but where writing is concerned, the contemporary writer/artist/woman/sociologist is way ahead of her times, even while she is living within her times. She is both outside while seeming to be "in it". Which is also why she can present a social reality so accurately, either as the writer Deshpande or as the critic Jain. The book dovetails the powerful insights of two women of our times. It takes a diamond to cut a diamond.
gendered realities, human spaces: the writings of shashi deshpande, Jasbir Jain, Rawat Publications, p.318, Rs. 595.
LAKSHMI KANNAN
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