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Portraying women of Kerala

Achamma Chandersekaran's Daughters of Kerala, a translation of Malayalam short stories, shows her perception of Kerala society. TANYA ABRAHAM has a chat with her

Something profound seems to touch you when you turn the pages of Daughters of Kerala, a collection of Malayalam short stories translated by Achamma Chandersekaran. Something that transports you to another world, the existence of the real, and one might believe, even the unreal. Of lives that merely existed, those that rebelled and even those that chose to re-exist in multifarious ways. Like through their children, or in the momentary existence of a wonderful world of love and touch, or a caress, those that truly allows a woman to feel and be. Little details and musings that were carried by these women in their beings that moulded their lives, their beliefs of who they were as individuals and who they were expected to be being women. Social stigma, culture, tradition, all of which weave together to form the web that seizes and binds the hearts and minds of Kerala women.

Like in When Big Trees Fall, where the author N. S. Madhavan, throws light on the many Kerala women who lived their whole lives in cloistered convents, to serve people all over the world. It allows the reader to believe that this situation, on one hand, may have arisen out of an economic need, women subjected to live their lives dedicated to others out of their families sheer need to save face than having an unwed daughter at home. Of a quiet world of piano and garden, put forth in a tumultuous story set in Delhi where a Sikh woman and her child are saved from death without causing harm to others.

Happy marriage

Other stories like The Lies My Mother Told Me by Ashita brings alive the many notions passed on from mother to daughter, of secrets to a happy marriage. Secrets like a way to a man's heart are through his stomach, only for the young wife to realise the bitter truth of life. A truth her mother chose to forget, masked by innumerable lies. As the story reads... "When I got into the bedroom after being in the smoke and soot of the kitchen the whole day, he was dissatisfied and wanted bigger breasts and thighs. I realised that, just like preparing food, I had to prepare for love also. I felt harshly betrayed by Amma... .'.

Each of the 25 works of eminent Malayalam writers in the book has traversed the world in which the women of Kerala lived and continue to do so. Clearly and cleverly translated by Achamma, a Keralite who left for the United States in 1962 as an undergraduate student, they speak much of her perceptions of Kerala society.

Uncommon for women to pursue further studies in a foreign nation, Achamma left her little village of Arthunkal in Alappuzha, to achieve what women in her days were expected not to do. Having worked with the U.S. Department of Commerce as an international trade specialist for education and training services, Achamma's travel of the world caused her to focus and depict Kerala in a new and different light. Unknown to many of the culture and beliefs of this small South Indian state, the stories she has chosen aim at throwing open the hearts and minds of Kerala women all over the world, each one of them highlighting her understanding of women, both in the early 20th century and towards the year 2000.

But she says the stories were not deliberate, but were picked from a list of award-winning authors of Kerala, each one bringing forth the situation of women over the years, enabling the English audience to obtain a taste of Kerala, its women and the socio-economic environment in which they live. Her translation is beautiful, literally allowing the reader to taste the words as penned by the authors themselves, sentences framed in simple drama whose fruitiness can be savoured easily. Like in A Rest House for Travellers where she says "the sense of guilt and embarrassment was not sufficient to melt the frost of her detachment."

So, its not surprising that Achammas's second translation (the first being Me Grandad `ad an Elephant, three novels by the late Vaikom Mohammed Basheer, co-translated by Dr. R. E. Asher) was awarded Best Book 2005 Award for the short story fiction category by U.S.A BookNews.com. Or that Shashi Tharoor reviewed it as `... .a welcome addition to the English speaking world's appreciation of Malayalam.'

But for Achamma Daughters of Kerala has been work that has thrown attention on little Kerala, "where numerous situations have hence come forth," like lectures and discussions of feminism in Kerala. But she explains that there is a desire to portray the other side of Kerala too in yet another translation. "Not just stories of suppression but of successful women who have ridden the wave of change; withstood social inhibitions and proven to be true daughters of Kerala!"

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