DIFFERENT REGISTERS
Realities in women's lives
C.S. LAKSHMI
NORMALLY, women's writings are expected to contain what is considered a fixed and "essentially female nature". There is a constant effort to locate an essentially female experience and see it as a universal experience. The fact is that while experiences may be similar, like, for example, menstruation or childbirth, the subject positions of women going through these experiences are different depending on the region, family and community they belong to. There will be as many subject positions as there are bodies set in different locations in different times. Some of the collections put together of women's writings tend to become dry and monotonous, for the editor may be looking for the "woman" in the writings and when that becomes the basis for the collection, other aspects of how and why we enjoy a story are set aside.
Stree of Kolkata brought out a very different kind of collection in 1999. While looking for stories to be translated into Tamil, I had kept this book aside as a project I would take up for the sheer pleasure of doing it. The stories in the collection seemed like constantly flowing streams that showed no signs of drying up. This collection came to mind in the context of the current debate on women's writing in Tamil Nadu. The Bengali collection is aptly called The Stream Within. It is a collection of short stories by contemporary Bengali women edited by Swati Ganguly and Sarmistha Dutta Gupta. The collection takes up the difficult task of attempting to trace the map of creativity of contemporary Bengali women writers and not just put together a set of stories by women. Malini Bhattacharya, in her foreword to the book, explains in precise terms, the risks involved in a project of this kind where creativity is gendered. She says that in a roundabout way it may lead to a position where stereotyping, usually associated with patriarchy, returns through the backdoor. "Women's writings are expected to bear signatures of a particular kind," she says. And yet such risky projects are very important, for, as Malini Bhattacharya explains, the location of the woman writer is not only gender-specific but has also to be seen as being embedded in the categories of time and space. In other words, a gender-specific text has historical dimensions that make it a document of social history of a particular time. The choice of the stories in this collection amply proves that creativity is seen here in its broadest spectrum not limiting it to the so-called "reality" of women's lives. The stories cover a variety of experiences within and outside the home and there is no one woman character that can be seen as a stereotype and there is no one language in which the stories are told.
The collection begins with a story by Sabitri Roy written in 1952. The protagonist, Shakuntala, is a writer. The editor who comes to get a story from her realises that her writing is done amidst the taunts of a mother-in-law and the unending tasks of cooking and taking care of two children. She writes in an old exercise book of her daughter. She lives in a one-room house with just a screen that separates the kitchen and from behind the screen come the non-stop venomous comments of the mother-in-law. Shakuntala's writing is the least valued activity in the house. Her husband who is a professor does not read her for he is busy with his work. As the editor returns with the copybook leaving Shakuntala holding her child with high fever, he wonders how she keeps the stream within flowing.
From there the collection leads to stories that reveal so many aspects of writings of women. The stories don't pontificate on the lives of women nor do they have a message. They don't detail "reality" nor is there an attempt in any of the stories to make a woman into a particular kind of fighter or a rebel. Some of them are caught up in situations that don't offer much relief and yet they are not victims. They have ways of dealing with the hard realities of everyday life and the oppressive ways of a patriarchal society. They laugh and use their imagination to weave a different kind of life like Radha and Sarama, two working class girls in Chabi Basu's story or they just decide to break the routine of work one day to enjoy nature and refuse to cook like Radha in Purabi Basu's story.
Some of them, like Kusum in the story of Nasreen Jahan, take a decision to take hold of the weapon used against them as a ladder to climb out of the situation and be able to take their life into their own hands. Kusum is peremptorily divorced by her husband who gives her talaq with no qualms. He then decides to take her back and for this she has to marry someone else and spend a night with him. The husband arranges her marriage with a person who is considered a vagabond. The arranged marriage is just a formality for the wife to return to her husband. But Kusum decides to stay with the stranger and not go back to her husband. Similarly, Motijan in Selina Hossain's story, decides not to break down and become the slave of a mother-in-law and an uncaring husband who is hardly ever at home. Motijan takes her cue from her own mother-in-law who is considered a strong woman in that village. When she stands up to her against her dowry demands, her mother-in-law begins to demand that she produce a child to keep the family line. She thinks Motijan will not make it but Motijan has two daughters from a friend of her husband whom she chooses to be the father of her children. She is still thrown out for not producing a son. The mother-in-law shouts in front of a crowd of villagers that she would get her son married again. Motijan laughs and tells her that had she depended on her husband she would not have even had these two daughters. The last line of the story is a wonderful take off from the whole story. "Nestling against their mother's breast, Motijan's daughters stared back at the crowd with their bright, glittering eyes", ends the story. A woman is being thrown out of her house but here are two little daughters with bright and glittering eyes. That ending lifts the story to a different plane of life, where these little girls may write the story of their life differently.
Mahasweta Devi's story about the travails of tribals to get what is considered the cheapest thing in life draws a very different kind of life where the tribals have to compete with elephants of the jungle for salt. In a totally different vein is Nabaneeta Dev Sen's story of Dushyanta and his womanising ways. She introduces the character of Shalabha, the sister of Shakuntala. Shalabha is born of the union of Menaka, the celestial nymph, and the king of Ujjain. She does not think very highly of King Dushyanta and his lust for women. A whole palace is filled with the women he has brought back after a hunting trip and his ministers have requested him that he must stop till another palace can be built to house other women he may plan to bring. That is why he has to spurn Shakuntala, for there is no place in the palace to keep her. When Shalabha comes to know that Shakuntala is her sister she decides to help her out. She takes Shakuntala and her child to a welfare home for women run by the sages deep in the woods! From time to time Shalabha goes to the woods to check them out and every time Shakuntala tells her: "But Didi, the Maharaj hasn't come as yet!" Immediately Shalabha sings out: "Aayega, aayega, aayega aanewala, aayega!" in Lata Mangeshkar's voice. It is a story delightfully told with total irreverence to the classic text of Kalidasa.
What makes this collection so readable is the choice of stories. The stories are not "representative" of a particular kind of woman, or of a particular way of writing. Nor is there an attempt to grade the stories and choose the "best" of contemporary fiction. The result is a collection of 13 stories that go in different ways and directions thus providing an expanded view of women's expression, liberating it from rigid specifics of theme and language.
C.S. Lakshmi is an independent researcher and a writer. She writes in Tamil under the pseudonym Ambai. She is the founder-trustee and director of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women).
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