DIFFERENT REGISTERS
Life beyond constraints
C.S. LAKSHMI
IN 1964 Sethu Ramaswamy turned 40. She had got married at the age of 10 and her formal schooling had ended at the age of 13. She had a large family to look after and her journalist husband liked to keep an open house, and visitors, friends and relatives kept pouring in, giving her very little time to think of anything else. Sethu wanted to make her life meaningful but she did not know how to go about it. When she turned 40, she remembered reading Pearl Buck's Pavilion of Women where the lady of the house decides to become independent of her husband and presents the husband with a young wife. The idea of "becoming independent" appealed to Sethu. She did not want to abdicate her duties but she took a resolution on her 40th birthday that henceforth she would do what she liked and would take her own decisions. In her autobiography Bride at Ten, Mother at Fifteen she says it took her 40 years to take that decision. And it took her 29 more years to put down her thoughts in the form of a book. She says that she began writing this book to fill the empty hours of her life after the death of her husband. She accompanied her daughter to Shimla after her husband's death and while her daughter spent her time doing research, Sethu wrote her memoir encouraged by her daughter.
The autobiography is divided into three parts. The first part talks about her childhood, and growing up years in Kandy and years spent in Kandy with her husband. The second part is about her life with her in-laws at Thiruvananthapuram. The third part is about the move to Delhi in 1943 during the World War II and becoming a witness to the history of those years and the years that followed.
Born in 1924, Sethu is named Sethu (the bridge) because her father had crossed the bridge that very year to work in Ceylon. She spends her early years amidst the green, beautiful landscape, studying and growing up very differently from girls of her age in south India. At the age of 10 she marries her cousin Ramaswamy, eleven years her senior. She writes the details of the five-day marriage conducted in Thiruvananthapuram and one particular incident is very interesting in terms of the elements that go into such traditional marriages. For the nalangu ceremony that involves games and songs, the bride has to go and invite her husband. When Sethu goes to invite her husband, friends and cousins surrounding him tell him that he must ask her to sing a song. When she gets ready to sing a song, the friends shout that she must sing an English song. So Sethu sings:
Cotton land is in jubilation, cotton land is in Coronation.
For every one is in cotton area for the crowning of the Cotton Queen.
Don't forget that you are all invited to the crowning of the Cotton Queen.
Cotton suits, cotton coats, every kind of clothes.
For the crowning of the Cotton Queen.
Sethu writes that her music teacher had taught her the song and at that time she had no idea from where he had picked up the song. She says that only recently she came to know that the famous musician Ariyakkudi Ramanuja Iyengar had composed and sung this song on the Duke of Gloucester's visit to India!
Sethu's years in Thiruvananthapuram spent with her in-laws reveal not only an orthodox household but the ways in which women and men survive in such a household and how they relate to one another. Some people and some incidents remain etched on the mind. Kunjaman Appa, her mother-in-law's father, is an unusual character. Sethu herself describes him as a character from the Puranas. He is someone who had lost his wife at the age of 20 and he never married again. His infant daughter was just three months old. She was brought up by her maternal grandparents. When the daughter turns ten she goes to keep house for her father. The daughter, Kalyani, marries her cousin and that motherless infant of Kunjaman Appa lives to plant a family tree with many branches, more than one hundred. Kunjaman Appa develops a cataract but refuses to get operated and he remains blind all his life, sitting on a cot in the veranda of his daughter's house. Whoever comes in has to answer Kunjaman Appa's various questions. The person may walk in ever so softly, but Kunjaman Appa would roar, "Who is there?' and then would ask his name, what he wanted and so on. Kunjama Appa lives thus for many years and when he dies the entire village gathers to celebrate the life of this blind person.
Sethu's own grandafather is also a colourful personality. He is Deputy Director of Education for the whole of Travancore and Sethu says that he was the one who had coined the slogan, "A school a mile". The Director of Education is of course, an Englishman. At one point Dr. Mitchell announces the closure of some schools in the Kanyakumari district, for, he has received complaints regarding the running of the schools. Sethu's grandfather visits the villages and tells the people that if they wanted better amenities, they should raise their hands when the English Dorai asked them what they wanted. When Dr. Mitchell visits them and asks them if they wanted the schools reopened, Sethu's grandfather tells them that he was asking them if they needed more wells to be bored for water. Of course, all the hands go up and since Dr. Mitcell did not know a word of Malayalam, he assumes his question is being answered. And that is how the schools in Kanyakumari get reopened!
Sethu remembers her mother-in-law as an orthodox person who managed to run the house with very little money. She writes that she saw her relaxed only when at the end of the day, she wrote her daily accounts and sat down to chew betel leaves and betel nuts. Other women in the family and around seem to have gone through the rigours of every day life and the cycle of marriage, pregnancies and childbirths with amazing resilience and strength. Sethu describes her paternal grand aunt, Valliammai Chithi, as not only a hardy person but also a daredevil. Valliammai has a quarrel with her mother-in-law and decides not to take her help for her delivery. She bolts the front door, delivers her child, cuts the umbilical cord, delivers the placenta and after dressing up, opens the front door! Then there is Sethu's aunt Kittamma who was one of the thousands of refugees who walked back to India during the Japanese bombing of Rangoon. Aunt Kittamma, a strong and hefty woman, is supposed to have carried her husband most of the way since he was too weak to walk. Visits of concubines of grandfathers, deaths of pregnant women, dirges and rituals like planting of a burden bearing stone called sumaithangi when a pregnant woman dies are described by Sethu in a way that one can picture the rituals and customs within which life is conducted.
Love and desire and relationships get shaped within these constraints. The time Sethu falls ill with typhoid for example. When she recovers, she has to be given a purification bath. But touching her will be polluting. Her husband Ramaswami comes forward to give her a bath. She describes how he gently applied oil in her hair and bathed her lovingly and then went away to have a bath to wash away the pollution of touching her. In his college days, Ramaswami himself has to enter the house by the backdoor and be fed by his sisters when he decides to cut his tuft and acquire a crop. His sisters cannot hide him for long and all hell breaks loose when his parents discover what he has done. It takes 15 days for the storm in the family and the gossip in the village to abate.
Sethu speaks lovingly about her husband although she complains about his autocratic ways. Sethu remains his unpaid secretary and she does the newspaper clippings and sorts out his papers in the course of bringing up six daughters. She writes that all this went unacknowledged when her husband screamed at her complaining about missing papers and misplaced pens. She says all that she could do was to grumble in the kitchen and make some extra noise with the pots and pans. She keeps feeling that she is not economically independent. At one point when she opens a bank account of her own with the money earned from selling newspapers, her husband is furious and tells her to close the account. All this must have prompted Sethu at the age of 40 to be her own person. But Sethu dismisses these incidents as storms of a married life and recalls her marriage mainly as 57 years of bliss. She is very proud of her husband's principles and his career as an important journalist in Delhi.
Her life in Delhi in the 1940s and in the later years is filled with interesting people and historical events like the partition riots. She also remembers the leaders her husband interviewed. One interesting interview she recalls is that of Indira Gandhi. Ramaswami asks her in the course of the interview, "Madam, why don't you have a group of at least ten Congressmen around you who are trustworthy and on whom you could rely, enabling you to attend to more important matters?" Mrs. Gandhi's response is: "Mr. Ramaswamy, where can I find ten such people?"
Sethu's daughter Vijaya Ramaswami says in the foreword that at the age of 79 Sethu acquired a master's degree in History from Annamalai University. That speaks a lot about how Sethu finally decided to make her life meaningful in her own way. Sethu herself says, "Many old people may have got degrees late in their lives but I have made a quantum leap from kindergarten to post-graduation."
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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