NON-FICTION
Preoccupations
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`With this work, Shashi Deshpande further entrenches herself in the category of niche writer, because clearly she finds it the safest space from which to discuss her creative work.'
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WRITING from the Margins is a book which is useful for those who work in the specialised area of women's studies. It is a technical work, with many references and notes handy for the hundreds of students who work on Shashi Deshpande's novels. With this work, she further entrenches herself in the category of niche writer, because clearly she finds it the safest space from which to discuss her creative work.
The basic problem that one is dealing with is the placement of women within family structures — those of birth or marriage. Clearly, the accident of birth is the most significant sociological problem. To marry or not to marry is an existential problem that feminists found themselves free from. That was a problem of choice, just as staying married or having children was. Feminists are not very sure about the right to happiness, (mystics are, and utopianists), but they were certainly clear about the right to autonomy. Freedom, the right to be human, this was their first preoccupation, for themselves and of course for other humans. Shashi handles many of these issues very clearly, yet one is left curious about husband and children. Her father figures enormously, and her mother is probably the real catalyst... "not to be like my mother, yet loving father" seems the general theme of unstated creative tensions. But these are such common tendencies among women writers that it can't be the sole reason one would want to read this book.
There is an age-set gap between Shashi Deshpande and myself, not a generational one. She was born 10 years before independence, and I 10 years after. As a result the freedoms we face as readers and writers of books are substantial ones. My biases are perfectly in keeping with her claim, that there must be no prescription on what a good book is... for each writer, there is an ideal reader. It is when we target the "ordinary reader", the "common reader", the "good reader", "every man" that the problems begin..
Yet, I ask, why does Shashi hate D.H. Lawrence and Scott Fitzgerald, whom I love, so obviously there can be nothing wrong, about liking or disliking a certain kind of novel. It is merely a bias. By that account, every writer should feel dizzyingly free to write what they will. I hope Shashi will continue to exercise this right, without worrying "who is my reader... " a problem which she mulls over and over again.
There is in Shashi's work a dreadful preoccupation with being a mainstream author, and yet a charming assertion that "writers are not race horses who must be ranked 1st, 2nd or 3rd." I agree on that entirely. We sat next to one another, perfect strangers, at an award ceremony in Delhi. I found her very quiet, dignified, calm and sedate, very different perhaps from the publisher sitting on the other side of me, who laughed all the way to the prize ( for her author). However, this other lady got flung into the swimming pool later in the night by boisterous, middle-aged but boyish authors. Odd things happen at book launches, but one must go to them, they are the occupational hazard of writers' lives — up on the platform and grateful to be there, for the rest of the time loudly declaiming that prizes are not important.
The first 100 pages are in the fainting feminism mode ... weep, wail and wait. We are exhorted not to walk out on marriages because it is "easy" to do that, but staying on is harder and more virtuously feminist. There is hardly any comment one can make on that, since most women writers' real lives are about quietly confident men who have supported volatile women, (even when their spouses have said literary but nasty things in their novels,) or men who have silently abandoned them, or men who have married after the death of the wilful woman writer, and then each wrote essays on how comfortable it was to live with a new woman, a woman who had clean, ironed shirts ready for him. There is too much evidence (in real life) and literature on this.
There is one stunning moment, when Shashi throws caution to the winds and reproduces a flagrantly sexual poem written by Pratibha Nandakumar as evidence that women have desires and must announce them. This is now popularly called Woman's Agency in the general literature. I remember hearing a paper on a Tamil legendary leader, of the early 20th Century, presented by my colleague at JNU, Vijaya Ramaswami who argued that the leader abandoned his wife and cohabited with a younger woman, and that this was seen to be a betrayal by the women cadre of that time. At this a young representative of the Centre for Revivalism and Anarchy (there are so many now, I use a pseudonym for fear of Brobdignags) leapt up and said "But why do you not consider the feminist agency of that young woman, and the fact that the leader did so much work in her company?" As a sociologist, I cannot here ask questions about integrity, as Shashi the citizen of the world, does. I can however record the shifts in world-view, and the reasons why these shifts occur. As Joan Kelly would say, should we not consider the family as brittle, with the advent of feminism, and should we not look upon the single parent family as normal, if there is statistical evidence of what female agency can do? In that light single-parenting no longer seems a pathological social fact... And victimhood does not seem the only lot of labouring women.
After the essay titled Literature and Morality, Deshpande fortuitously falls into the feinting feminism mode. This may be crudely stated as to want, to wander and to win. It becomes stunningly interesting when she reaches her essay on Detective Fiction and it is on that happy note I shall say that "The Last Frontier" is a perfect piece of writing. It is lovely to see her "let go" and really have fun with the genre.
SUSAN VISVANATHAN
Writing from the Margin and Other
Essays, Shashi Deshpande, Penguin Viking, 2003, Rs. 395.
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