GENDER STUDIES
Protest and pleasure
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`Some of these essays celebrate the ways in which certain writers look forward with creativity and hope, not just back in anger.'
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IN the last two decades, Indian women's literature in English has bloomed not just in terms of fresh writing but also in the unearthing of forgotten and ignored earlier works. In the same two decades, women readers seem to have changed as well. In the 1970s and 1980s, we were possibly content to see ourselves and our milieu analysed. Today we demand revolution and subversion, or at least we should.
It was with that bias then (and with a profound disgust for women writers who are afraid of the term "feminist") that I picked up Desert in Bloom, a collection of essays by women on women's writing. From that perspective, two of the chapters stood out as particularly fresh and energetic.
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan writes of "The Heroine's Progress" in the works of Shashi Deshpande, Githa Hariharan and Manjula Padmanabhan. In her essay, she puts into black and white why so much women's literature is dissatisfying to feminist readers today. Deshpande's That Long Silence, as Rajan puts it, is so "compellingly realistic that no Indian woman [can read it] without a steady sympathetic identification and, indeed, frequent shocks of recognition", but where has Deshpande gone from there? There is little to distinguish her work of the 1990s from that of the 1980s. Her protagonists, just like Devi, the heroine of Githa Hariharan's Thousand Faces of Night, are entirely lacking in the ability to innovate or subvert. Devi, in fact, seems wilfully to close the doors her life has opened for her.
The third author discussed in the essay, Manjula Padmanabhan, gives us wicked satire and caricature in Hot Death, Cold Soup. Rajan calls her fiction post-feminist because it "does not polarise the world into essential categories of women and men". Instead, it presents the tension between the "small things" (a crying baby, a servant boy, and other underdogs) and the "big things" (custom, tradition, institutions). It is true that Padmanabhan's book of short stories is the latest work of the three, and for that reason alone is more likely to be in tune with where we are now; the author of the essay has acknowledged that. But her important point is that Padmanabhan plays more boldly and honestly with the "forces of `modernity' that allow women today greater freedom and access to rights than they have had before". Yes, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Padmanabhan fabricates, sometimes improbable, victories for her protagonists, male and female, but such literature inspires a revolution in thinking and is worth infinitely more than the introspection and whining that are in such plentiful supply. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan's essay stands head and shoulders above the rest in this collection and even her footnotes are not to be missed.
The use of humour and its essential contribution to strategies of subversion are elegantly explored by Meeta Chatterjee in her essay on the works of Namita Gokhale, Suniti Namjoshi and Arundhati Roy. The first two authors, on the face of it, simply parody a genre, a technique at least as old as Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. But feminist humour is much more serious than that. According to Chatterjee, "the intention ... is undoubtedly rebellious... . Their writing is dislocating and unconventional". Furthermore, Chatterjee finds that feminist humour is "unrecognised because comedy and anger interlock with a degree of aggression that is seen as intrusive and disturbing". Gokhale's Paro: Dreams of Passion was dismissed by one critic as "only an attempt ... to turn the value-system of male-dominated society upside down". Why "only"? What else do we require of satire?
In the same essay, Chatterjee discusses the expression of sexuality in Gokhale's and Roy's novels, especially where it overlaps with the humorous. Here the authors satirise the preoccupation with women's bodies as objects, but at the same time they celebrate those bodies. The woman is simultaneously the observer and the object. The sex perhaps titillates, but it is also "a shorthand message signalling frustration with patriarchal discourse without seeming victimised".
Rukmini Bhaya Nair's lengthy essay on The God of Small Things (which first appeared as a review of the book) talks of novels that "function simultaneously as play, as pleasure and as protest." It is hard to plough through this critique a second time (and to take seriously someone who points out Roy's "self-indulgence" and "overwriting" while piling on such phrases as "Barthesian jouissance"). But Nair ends her essay with an important observation: that there has been a radical shift from the idea of women's writing as "the body in pain" to "one that explores the narcissistic contours of pleasure and desire as well." That observation classes this chapter with Chatterjee's and Rajan's in celebrating the ways in which some writers look forward with creativity and hope, not just back in anger.
The intention in spotlighting these few essays is not to dismiss the anger and frustration that are still a reality for most women. Women will continue to write about what drives them most furiously — as Nayantara Sahgal puts it in her entertaining personal note near the end of the book, "it is an itch that has got to be scratched". But today's reader surely seeks to know not just what we are fighting, but how we can win.
Desert in Bloom: Contemporary Indian Women's Fiction in English, edited by Meenakshi Bharat, Pencraft International, 2004, p.240.
LATHA ANANTHARAMAN
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