women narratives on nation.pdf

Daughters of Mother India in Search of a Nation: Women's Narratives about the NationAuthor(s): Jasbir JainSource: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 41, No. 17 (Apr. 29 - May 5, 2006), pp. 1654-1660Published by: Economic and Political WeeklyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4418143 .

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Daughters of Mother India in Search of a Nation

Women's Narratives about the Nation

The image of "Mother India " has often been used to represent the nation, but within this image the relationship of women to the nation does not find a place. The question of where

a woman belongs is one that has many answers but these are hardly ever related to nationhood. This article looks at how nation and nationhood have been defined in women's writings in India. It attempts to explore this through two main themes: first, narratives of partition, specifically those written by women across the border and second, the dominant

perceptions reflected in women's writings. At the same time, it questions the received wisdom as to whether women's writing constitutes a separate category and if women do

indeed experience, perceive and relate differently than men to the world they live in.

JASBIR JAIN

ne could perhaps go further back than Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya's song 'Vande Mataram' for tracing the lineage of Bharat Mata and the veneration of the home-

land as mother goddess. But Vande Mataram is an adequate take- off point as it falls right in the midst of a growing nationalism. Written in the early 1870s, it went on to be included in the novel Anand Math (1881), where the hymn is used as a war cry. It was sung in the 1896 session of the Congress. Used as a slogan in the Swadeshi movement of 1905 [Bhattacharya 2003: 21], the song has been a continuous source of controversy and conflict over the years. Translated and truncated, it has survived the many onslaughts on it.but has all along run a parallel course both as a divisive force (on grounds of the iconic image of the motherland), as well as a unifying force for militant groups.1 Vande Mataram and the image of India as the mother goddess has often been projected through school enactments, printed maps and cut- out figures and has penetrated the subconscious of the nation. It has also shaped the image of womanhood, an image based on purity and fidelity, on a morality highly regulated by patriarchal power. Its impact on popular imagination was further enhanced when in 1952, the novel was turned into a film.2

Another history that needs to be taken into account is the publication of Katherine Mayo's book, Mother India (1927), a work which opens with a description of the Kali temple and the sacrifices performed there, before going on to focus on zenana hospitals, child marriages and child mothers and examining the conditions of hygiene and health. This book was also contro- versial for altogether different reasons but the two together indicated opposite positions and Mayo's work led to a whole series of rebuttals, collection of evidence and defence statements. Dhan Gopal Mukherjee also wrote a reply to it, A Son of Mother India Answers, referring mainly to the period 1927-1928.3

Barely five years had passed after the filming of Anand Math that Indian cinema threw up another epic saga Mother India (1957). A remake of Mehboob's earlier film Aurat (1940), Mother India

had been in the making for three years. When released, it ran for 50 weeks in Mumbai, breaking all box-office records.4 Mrinalini Sinha views the film as an implicit response to Katherine Mayo's Mother India [see Roy 1998]. The three - Vande Mataram, Mayo and Mehboob's film - in different ways intermingled religion, gender and nation construction to re-examine the underlying connections between masculinity, nation and religious identities.

The opening scene of Mother India, even as the titles are being displayed, is the community's pressure on an aged woman to inaugurate the newly constructed dam. Tractors and other indi- cations of development are in the backdrop and form a contrast to the more dominant image of the woman plouging the fields, an image placed at the centre of the film. This woman is Radha (Nargis), who had come to this village as a young bride and now lives in a state of near widowhood as her husband, after having lost an arm, has disappeared. Her two surviving sons Ramu and Birju are contrasts in character with the elder mild and obedient and the younger fiery and rebellious. Birju is the one who, unable to tolerate the lecherous advances of the moneylender, kills him and is in turn killed by his own mother. This narrative of human struggle is placed against the background of the changing economic scenario and Nehruvian development. This nationalist allegory makes woman's body, her sexuality vs asexuality and motherhood a central issue. Men are either attackers or failed protectors, and when they succeed, the condition of their survival is that they continue to adhere to the moral code for their women. Struggle, sacrifice and self-denial are seen as a necessary part of womanhood. Mother India works with multiple subtexts with the religious and moralistic films of the previous decades con- stituting a long line of inheritance.5

The living presence of the Sita myth is evident not only in the framing of woman as an ideal, virtuous 'pativrata', an image acknowledged by men and women alike even during the pre- partition period6 but also in the persisting image of 'agnipriksha' in our own times. In 1976, the film Bhumika based on the life story ofHansa Wadekar, used posters of films such as Agnipriksha as a backdrop. And in a commercial film of the late 1990s; Lajja,

1654 Economic and Political Weekly April 29, 2006



the four women characters are all named after Sita - Janaki, Maithali, Vaidehi and Ram Dulari - and the episode of agnipriksha is enacted as an embedded play where the righteousness of this purity test is contested by Janaki. In fact the whole film is a critique of the Ramayana. The agnipriksha also constitutes a powerful image in the earlier film, Mother India. Lajja, following this tradition projects the arguments against this tradition in the very same terms as used by the advocates of tradition, except this time it is the male who is asked to offer proof.

The image of "Mother India" is used to represent the nation, but within this image the relationship of women to the nation does not find a place. Where a woman belongs is a question that can have many answers, but hardly do we relate it to nationhood. I would like to focus on this in the context of women's writing in India. There is no way one can generalise about it, not because they are all individuals, but also because languages carry their own cultural environs with them. Therefore my exploration seeks to address two main issues: the partition narratives more specifically those written by women across the border and the dominant perception of women's writing.

II

The moment one perceives women's writing as a separate category, the question arises - do women experience, perceive and relate differently than men to the world they live in? Jaya Mitra in 'The Other Voice: Women's Writing in India', asserts that women's writing is "a departure from mainstream literary language", the different range of experiences they go through necessitate a different mode of expression (2005:186-87). There is additionally the matter of positioning where one is located. I would add that difference is not opposition but one rooted in the individual being and underlies identity. As such individual women are also different from each other and this difference rejects essentialism and breaks away from an archetypal model. Women writers themselves have been known to resent categorisations. Mahasweta Devi has no apparent interest in feminism,7 having submerged the identity in the larger category "human", and owns to just being a writer, not a woman writer. Shashi Deshpande insists that she is "a writer who happens" to be a woman,8 and not the other way around. But with reference to her writing, she admits it is feminist. Sahgal's larger concerns are with power relations.9 One could go on listing the different perspectives, but the need is to admit the erasure implied in categorisation.10 Categorisation also limits the reading frames readers may use or researchers work through. The undue emphasis on gender difference creates fresh stereotypes and leads male readers to adopt dismissive attitudes at times. No longer is it the class or the culture of the reader that is important but the gender perspective.1l The cases of Ismat Chugtai (Chauth Ka Jaura) and of Mridula Garg (Chittacobra) are reminders that censure and censorship in the case of women writers are more often than not, related to sexuality. They have to combat the initial marginalisation by male critics. By focusing simultaneously on the "difference" and the relationship to the "nation" the intention is to break through stereotyped reading.

Ill

In a total of about 63 stories in Stories About the Partition [Bhalla 1999], only nine are by women authors. And out of the 10 stories in Debjani Sengupta's collection Mapmaking, only two

are by women. Very likely women may not have written in such abundance or their treatment of the partition may have been too personal. Though a large number of stories in Stories About the Partition are about women and children, about rape and abduction and unwanted children, they do not represent the woman's perspective. Manto's 'Open It' is not as much about the multiple rape12 and abuse of the girl's body but the father's awareness of her as his daughter, a living person and the celebration of the fact that she is alive. Rajinder Singh Bedi's Lajwanti dwells directly on the rehabilitation problem of abducted women, but even as it critiques the moral framework of the puranas and the shastras, it provides a psycho-study of the nature of masculinity. Sunderlal finds parallels between Sita's abduction and the abduction of women during Partition. In his mind the Sita of the Ramayana and his wife Lajwanti coalesce into one identity. When Lajwanti is brought back to India, he accepts her but the relationship is no longer the same. Henceforth she is a 'devi' to be treated with care and tenderness, not a woman to be loved, beaten, or treated normally. The rift between his conscious mind and the unconscious one is unbridgeable. Is his acceptance a rejection of the wife in her? Is it his guilt as a failed protector or the awareness of his own inadequacy that has affected his behaviour? The question as to where does a woman belong is not addressed head on. The story 'Where Does She Belong?' is by a woman writer and ironically enough, the list of contents in the one- volume edition has inadvertently dropped the title of the story, indirectly answering the question. She obviously does not belong anywhere. Hence the erasure. The erasure is also because she is a public woman. And as Haseena in Khushwant Singh's Train to Paktstan had told Hukum Chand, the magistrate, "Singers are neither Hindu nor Muslim in that way. All communities come to hear me" (p 103), Munni Bai in Suraiya Qasim's story, is Muslim for her Muslim lover and Hindu for the Hindu. Of unknown parentage and uncertain lineage, her religion and nationality are governed by her owners. When her lovers fail her, it is the brothel keeper's known Hindu origin that brings them to Delhi as refugees. Munni Bai's questions as to why they have had to leave Lahore, what do they have to do with politics and what have they gained, all remain unanswered.

Women's stories move away from power politics. They explore the nature of belonging: how does one belong? Jameela Hashmi's short story 'Exile' works with multiple discourses and several refrains. The dominant frame is the abduction of Sita and the nature of forced exile. The story opens with the beginning of the Dussera festivities and works through the consciousness of the nameless woman protagonist, a Muslim girl abducted during the Partition riots. Memories of her arrival in the village, of Gurpal's offering her as a handmaid to his grandmother, inter- mingle with the continuity Qf the Dussera festivities, the burning of the effigies, the glow ot fire, the swings in the fair, the setting sun and the noise of the crowd. She recalls how she had been brought to Sangraon amidst screams and lamenting, the reversal of all kinds of marriage rites and silence instead of celebration awaiting her. Further back are memories of her own childhood, her brother's affection, her mother's love, her father's protection. Then there are other separations like her brother's trip abroad. Dreams, both conscious and unconscious, form a refrain in the story (pp 51, 60, 63, 64, 66). There is a constant movement between the past and present. Short, clipped sentences punctuate the narrative: "Exile is terrible" (p 51) "Keep walking. Always" (p 54) "Life is difficult" (p 57). "I am Terrified" (p 62) "Seasons

Economic and Political Weekly April 29, 2006 1655



change" (65). And then there is the world of birds and trees, of the bond between the tree and the earth, the roots that burrow deep in the ground (p 51), of her own identification with a tree and of her home with a wilderness (p 54). The women singing under the neem tree (p 65), and the constant references to the change of seasons, all emphasise the persistence of roots. She cannot go back even when the authorities come tracing her, for suddenly she realises that besides everything else, she is also a mother and that too of a daughter (p 64). Her self-alienation is now complete: the body has been violated, dreams turned into disillusionment and kinships snapped. A complete transformation takes place, "My heart has become empty. I have become Lakshmi" (p 57). Trapped in the goddess image.

Lalithambika Antarjanam's two stories (in the same volume), work through metaphors of birth and motherhood. 'A Leaf in the Storm' is located in Punjab while 'Mother of Dhirendru Mujumdar' in Bengal. Jyoti, the protagonist of "A Leaf', is one of the 50 women recovered from western Punjab. She is furious with herself and the world at large, rejects food as she would rather choose death than life. Pregnant with the unwanted child of rape, her anger has turned inwards. The doctor coaxes her to eat, stressing the value of life and the human ability to endure. Accounts of her earlier self-assertion contrast sadly with her present state as she withdraws into her sullen world. Babies are born and babies also die or are killed. Guilt, crime, law - all have been totally erased from their lives. And then a distinguished visitor arrives, talks to them about the need for thtir social acceptance and advises them to think of their unborn children as the first citizens of a free India. And Jyoti thinks: "How ironical ...Are they citizens of Indian alone? That is, of India as we conceive of her today?" (p 167). Memories of the past crowd her mind, memories of her home, her childhood full of freedom, the flight, the capture and the rape and they all come to rest now in the refugee camp where she is the prisoner of her body and of the unborn child. When the child is born, she abandons it, only to come back and hold the baby to her breast. The child is truly the citizen of free India, her own claim to the nation legitimised through the child.

There is a reference to an old woman in the story, mother of nine and grandmother of 50. The authorial comment is, "She has indeed been.a mother to the whole village, to both Hindus and Muslims" (p 162). This woman appears in a different context in Lalithambika Antarjanam's other story, 'The Mother of Dhirendru Mujumdar'. She also has a parallel existence in Ismat Chugtai's 'Roots' with the difference that the refugee woman (in 'A Leaf in the Storm'), has lost all her family while in 'Roots' the fleeing family is brought back. 'The Mother of Dhirendu Mujumdar' is a first person narration in the voice of Shanti Muzumdar, mother of nine children, of whom five were sacrificed for India, four for Pakistan. In this manner she belongs to both the nations. Unwilling to leave, she has forcibly been brought to.India - as a refugee, as an outsider. Once again words from Vande Mataram surface in the story, "The divine mother as Suphala, Sujala, Sansyashyamala - we brought up our children as we meditated on the thousands of dazzling swords that adorn her many hands. We sacrificed them for her liberation.... Are they a part of your history?" (p 512). * Dhiren is a revolutionary and once he provides cover to the leader of a terrorist organisation in his own home, disguised as a sanyasin. Shanti Muzumdar finds out the truth only when the sanyasin is taking leave of them: "Forgive me mother, I am Surya

Sen. Also known as Master-da. We worship our motherland in the form of Maha Kali. Swords in a hundred hands. The blood smeared head of the enemy! Intestines for garlands" (p 514). At this point Shanti Muzumdar is transformed into another woman called 'Banglamata'. Her son calls her a goddess and tells her to smile at his death and sing Vande Mataram. The region and the language acquire greater importance than religion. But Partition takes place: the country is divided and she is brought to India - a refugee: "If you tell me that this is not my country. I won't let myself die on this soil" (p 519). The question of nationhood remains unanswered: where does one belong and how does one belong? There is no direct route available to a woman. It is ironical that the helplessness and rootlessness of women is ruled over by the image of a goddess.

Jasodhara Bagchi, in a very perceptive article on Partition, 'Freedom in an Idiom of Loss', quotes from Tagore's poem and refers to the vision of the goddess:

A scimitar shines in your hand And your left hand quells our fears Your eyes are tender and smiling But your third eye scorches and sears 0 mother, we cannot turn our eyes from you...

(translated by Chandreyee Niyogi)

Bagchi goes on to observe, "This extreme Hinduised form of the three-eyed mother goddess made cultural nationalism a strong divisive force..." Further, the identification of chastity with honour went on to make women 'potential victims' of communal con- flicts,13 defining nationhood through wifehood and motherhood.

In Hyder' s story 'When the Prisoners Were Released, the Times Had Changed', expansion rather than division is centre stage in terms of both time and space. History is recounted from the pre- Partition days through the childhood of the narrator and Andamans are taken into its fold. The struggles and sacrifices of the freedom fighters are recalled. Andamans have now become a home for refugees, a new home where they are trying to come terms with their dislocation. The narrative moves from the memory of the childhood at Andamans, accounts of the island's history, its Burma connections and its political prisoners to a visit to Dehradun, recollections of Nehru, to the World Agricultural Fair in Delhi and back to Calcutta and the Lalit Kala Akademi. A mix of generations of rehabilitated refugees allows the narrative to embrace the whole of India. She wants to tell the freedom fighter she meets at the exhibition of her longing to write the history of India. In this story, there is a move from personal consciousness to a national one.

IV

Debjani Sengupta in 'An Afterword' to Mapmaking: Partition Stories From the 2 Bengals,14 comments upon the difference in the situations of Bengal and Punjab. In Punjab there was a mass exodus while in Bengal there was a steady trickling in of refugees. Differences are reflected not only in the nature of the experience, but also in the response to it. Shared territories, shared languages and culture had formed a parallel on both the borders, yet there were differences. Perhaps these differences were there because of the disparity in economic resources in Punjab and the different construction of masculinity, or the different histories of dislo- cations on the two borders. Sengupta observes that narratives and films from Bengal focus more on the refugee consciousness15




and debate the notions of legitimacy and citizenship, the meaning of identity and belonging. 16 There is a great deal that is submerged in memories or even in memories pushed aside, deliberately avoiding a direct confrontation with the nature of violence.

Ashis Nandy looks for an answer to the avoidance of writing about the Partition violence by some of our leading intellectuals and asks the question why this silence? Was it a deliberate effort to start life anew and "contain bitterness, a way of repairing community life, interpersonal trust and known moral world?"17 Guilt is another area of exploration in several Partition narratives. While the women in their bewilderment ask how are they to be blamed, the men reflect on their own role in it. Intizar Hussain's 'The City of Sorrow'18 is about this guilt, recognised through the 'other'. Mukul Kesavan's novel Looking Through Glass19 looks at the question of guilt with reference to the national psyche as does Nayantara Sahgal with reference to Indian positions throughout the freedom struggle in Rich Like Us (1985) and Lesser Breeds (2003). The compromises made by many of us resulted in a half-hearted resistance, and in the supersession of national concerns in favour of personal gain.20 Nandy's perception that "memories of the Partition do not genuinely fit our acquired concepts of nationalism, progress and the state", opens out the space for reformations of the idea of the nation as well as for introspection and reflections on actual experiences.

The journey from an exploration of violence to guilt has been a long one, but there is need to imagine the nation outside the limits of patriarchal control or the notion of a universal concept applicable to all. The iconic figure of the mother goddess looms so large, as to render the woman herself invisible or reduce her to a sacrificial object. The refugee syndrome imprisons women more than the men. In Ritvik Ghatak's film Megha Dhaka Tara, the eldest daughter, the breadearner has to give up her plans to marry and later, affected by tuberculosis, is abandoned to death. Similarly, both Manik Bandhopadhaya in 'The Final Solution' and Pratibha Basu in 'Flotsam and Jetsam' centralise prostitution of the body as a possible way of surviving. Bandhopadhaya uses the woman's agency to assassinate the exploiter (who is in political terms an Indian and a Hindu), while Pratibha Basu juxtaposes the gentleness of the Muslim neighbour with the hypocrisy of the Hindu "saviour". The old woman is pushed to her death from a driving vehicle. The first, a male writer's perception, uses the Kali image, while the second projects a woman duped into the final sacrifice.

The cross-border relationship is handled differently in Dibyendu Patil's short story 'Alam's Own House'. Alam's journey to Kolkata from across the border is full of uncertain expectations and memories. For sometime Raka, the woman he loves, daughter of a former family friend, has learnt to hide behind words. His letters go unanswered and in her last letter she had written, "Like everything else, there comes a moment of return. When that moment slips away, it's impossible to ever be back" (59). Perhaps Alam has missed that moment, perhaps there is no going back to the past now that borders had separated them, now that it is "us" and "them". The country of birth, motherland and nation may not coincide. Alam is unable to come to terms with his conflicting moods of celebration and uncertainty, his feeling of homecoming and of rootlessness. The migration had been literally forced on his father, as even the patients had begun to choose their doctors on religious lines. No longer was a man member of a community, or recognised for his own worth but branded by the religious identity. Alam notices that his mother's favourite

tree is no longer outside the entrance of his former house and the portrait of his great grandfather has been removed from its place of importance. And as he is to find out a little later, there is no room for him in Raka's life. She has opted out of the relationship accusing him of wanting to uproot her. The wall has dispossessed them. Uprooted once by this shift to Kolkata from Dhaka, she is not ready for another dislocation. Even after 10 years, the family lives with the "refugeeness" of their past (pp 84-86).

V

Male narratives locate events at the centre of the story - incidents such as rape, escape, massacre - and when they move to personal consciousness it is the loss of lineage, of land, of power and of identity as in Intizar Husain' s "A Letter from India", or a self as in 'The City of Sorrow' (Stories About the Partition). There are also larger issues of human values. Women are either absent or objectified as victims. Narratives by women writers do carve a subjecthood through memory, perception, recall and dream structures. They also constitute it through the body and the act of giving birth. But more than this the narratives emphasise the flow of life by comparisons with the world of nature. The young adolescent girl in Attia Hosain's story, 'After the Storm', recalls only the journey of escape from the camp and the journey to the home of adoption. For the rest she is engaged in collecting flowers and stringing them together. The desire to revive life is apparent beyond the trauma and the amnesia. The Hindus protect the mother goddess, the Muslims the ancestral graves, but women, falling outside both these categories, begin to examine their own rootedness. This process is strongly visible in Jameela Hashmi's 'Exile' and Lalithambika Antarjaman's 'The Mother of Dhirendu Mujumdar'. And the consciousness of Raka, so sensitively explored through Alam's own consciousness in 'Alam's Own House', written by a man, is another narrative of rootedness. It is not only men who are hurt, but women too feel the pain (p 85).

The meaning of Partition narratives emerges not merely from their themes or the subject-object relationships, but from their aesthetics, which move beyond 'realism' and realistic description. They reveal psyches and subconscious selves through hallucinations, surrealism, images and aesthetics of space. They unfold their meaning through the simultaneities they create with memory recall, flow of history and individual response.

VI

Why is it that when theorisation of concepts takes place, gender concerns are confined to feminist theory? In most other discourses, theories are built on the writing of men or on the work of political thinkers - Gandhi, Aurobindo and Vivekananda, or nation construction on the basis of male discourse and narratives, such as Midnight's Children, The Great Indian Novel or The Shadow Lines. Sudhir Kakar in two of his basic texts, The Inner World and Intimate Relations has very few references to the writings or perspectives of women. And when present, they are in secondary positions. The indices of the two books support my statement. The Inner World uses western thinkers, bhakti poets, myths and novelists. But contemporary writings by women are absent. Bhuvaneshwari Devi appears as mother, Sister Nivedita as Vivekananda's western disciple. Meera, the bhakti poet, is absent. Rajinder Singh Bedi's Ek Chadar Maili Si is taken up




for analysis, no comparative narrative by a woman is juxtaposed. In Intimate Relations, Kasturba features as Gandhi's wife, Madeline Slade contains the references to Meera and films by male directors are centre stage, whereas, women film directors deal with both childhood and sexuality as well. Why does this happen? Are we in a position to construct and accept discourses based on single- gender perspectives? If not, there is need to examine the causes and the consequences of this separation.

Tentatively, one could say it is the submergence of these issues in body-society relationships: the centre staging of sex and sexuality as an area of primacy, and as a site where most con- testations take place and taboos are imposed; and also the way women's writing is "read" and "framed". Of these three over- lapping causes, the first two have some justification in linear time scales, but the third (how women's writing is read), is both a limitation and an exclusion for creativity as well as for theory.

In brief, it contains creative imagination by a realistic, episodic framework and overloads it with victim role models. Kundanika Kapadia's Seven Steps in the Sky is one such novel.20 Beautifully constructed, the novel turns the seven steps round the fire. an essential part of the Hindu marriage ceremony on their head, and turns them into seven steps towards freedom; space, relationships, economic rights, desire, assertion and reciprocity. But as the multiple subnarratives are enjoined together, an overcrowding takes place and the reader is left with a sense of repetitive bombarding, a feeling which subtracts from the aesthetic enjoyment submerging all other discourses.21 Again Alka Saroagi's Shesh Kadambari22 fails to live up to its title and the promise contained within it of narrative experimentation. By placing the older women in a counselling centre and channel ising the narrative towards feminine activism, the novel disappoints the readers. In contrast Ashapurna Devi's Suvarnlata,23 the most powerful volume of her trilogy, takes up a woman's life in the larger social context of'child marriage, education, parental ties, joint family, freedom struggle, creativity and privacy and the conflict that ensues is a powerful socio-psychological study. The novel also takes up the construction of masculinity against the same backdrop and through the very same constructs of marriage, joint family, education, freedom struggle and privacy.

Examples of the limits of monolithic discourse and of the expansive range of feminist positions within feminism that can liberate the protagonist from the victim syndrome or an observer/ participant status without stepping into gender neutral territory can be multiplied. The last takes into account the implied separation when some writers disassociate themselves from feminism, or assert that they are writers who happen to be women. The disassociation seeks to locate their writing in the open where their work is subjected to a more holistic analysis, where the liberation from patriarchal structures, interpretations and control do not end in another captivity, hence the need to read women's writing beyond stereotypes.24

VII

Reading beyond stereotypes does not involve any falsification of reality or gender neutrality. In simple words it implies reading with an open mind and a dismantling of binary oppositions. Women's writing is not necessarily about female consciousness and body, or about relationships. It also looks at women-in-the- world. As such the mind and intellectual ideas as they arise from feminist experiences also get their place. Mahasweta Devi's

'Draupadi' uses a myth in a different context, reverses it and raises it to archetypal heights to render it a critique of all power structures. Desai, as she moves from her early novels to Clear Light of Day and In Custody, shifts her subjectivity to consider Partition and cross-religious relationship. Hindu-Muslim love relationships have failed to reach the final stage in several novels. Clear Light of Day is one of the first to depict a crossing over.25 In Custody goes on to explore the loss of a language and the passing away of traditions of art. Krishna Sobti's radicalism moves from articulating sexuality in Mitro Marjani to write ethnographic fiction in ZindagiNaima. Nayantara Sahgal 's political fiction is in itself an interpretation of history from a gender perspective. The practice of sati surfaces in its most heinous form in the politically motivated murder of Rose in Rich Like Us, a novel of the time during emergency. Again Rani in Mistaken Identity defies all taboos to imagine a secular nation. The references to other revolutions and political struggles taking else- where in the world, expands the novel's scope beyond Rani's imagination, and the young prince's spell in the jail cell as a suspected revolutionary brings the whole of India into the narrative. In Lesser Breeds, Sahgal works through different metaphors - Nurullah the tutor, a Muslim orphan. born of a rape and Shan the young eight-year daughter of a freedom fighter. Nurullah is the observer-participant figure; it is Shan who is at the centre of the novel. It is her education, her growing up, entry into political life and death in an air crash that form the central theme. It is through the interaction between the two that alternatives are discovered. The grown up man and the young child as they go for their afternoon walks attempt to discover different ways of knowing, and of producing an alternate system of education, a counter perspective to the history lessons that the nuns give her in the missionary school. Alternative epistemologies are an essential route to self-discovery, recovery of a living tradition and a dismantling of the hegemonic constructs, which govern political, social and gender relations. Shan's family is a truncated family - father perpetually in jail, mother dead, grandmother old, a tutor who himself is an orphan. Through the life of Shan, Sahgal works through different ideologies, cartographies- maps marking sinister divisions of human beings into the civilised and monsters and highlighting mineral resources - international relations, trade policies and fairy tales. Lesser Breeds is the portrayal of a mother India, very different from that of an oppressed figure or of a distant asexual goddess, or an avenging Kali.

The mother figure is not always present and when present, is not necessarily close to the woman protagonist. Sonali, in Sahgal's Rich Like Us is closer to her father than her mother, both ideologically and emotionally. Anita Desai's heroines also live in a motherless world or have hostile, indifferent and ailing mothers.26 Shashi Deshpande has a powerful portrayal of a negative mother-daughter relationship in The Dark Holds No Terrors. One could expand on this from other writings but the indication is obvious - there is a psychological need to be free of the burden of the all controlling, goddess-like, strong self- sufficient mother. The mould of the mother awaits a young girl in her adulthood. The antagonism or hostility frees her to find her "self', to prevent a complete submergence in the ideal, which is all pervasive in a woman's socio-moral environment and is deeply embedded in socialisation processes as well as in the notion of acceptability and approval. Mrinalini Sinha in her essay 'Reading Mother India: Empire, Nation and the Female Voice' (1994), has observed how women themselves participated in the




shaping of gendered subjectivities around the nationalist construct of Indian womanhood (p 34).

Partition narratives of abduction and rape pose an altogether different problem. They simultaneously challenge the traditional notion of a virgin bride and the social unacceptability of a "despoiled" woman. By working on a counter narrative dealing with the freedom of sexuality and desire, women writers have confronted the notion of guilt and have transcended it. Nayantara Sahgal in an early novel, Storm in Chandigarh (1969), explores the conflict arising out of a pre-marital love relationship that leads the couple to divorce. In the novel itself Saroj, the heroine, thinks about the sexual act and the nature of desire and about her own enjoyment of it. A similar theme is explored by Shashi Deshpande in Small Remedies, where Madhu's premarital friendship becomes the source of family dissension and drives her son away from an ever squabbling, ever unhappy home.27 Krishna Sobti and Ismat Chugtai were amongst the early women writers to explore the nature of desire. When the abstract nature of desire is concretised through the body; it too is a partial recovery of the self. This counter discourse interrogates the concept of guilt, a guilt socially thrust on the woman but now resisted and transcended.

What happens to the sense of guilt when women are raped and are forced into prostitution?28 Who is guilty? Guilt is turned inwards as we find in Lalithambika Antarjanam's 'A Leaf in a Storm', or is directed towards an unborn child. Trauma, insanity and coma - all are offshoots of this guilt. Partition narratives have explored the guilt arising out of indulgence in brutal violence. but have not probed the sense of guilt that may take birth in the rapist. Gurpal's character in Jamila Hashmi's 'Exile' is not sufficiently explored, primarily because in his case, a pseudo- social approval has preceded the act. Guilt of an altogether different kind is evident in Sunderlal in Bedi's story 'Lajwanti', but for the rest, the male perpetrators of crime do not experience guilt or even remorse. From this point of view, Pratibha Basu and Manik Bandhopadhaya both present a conflict-laden surren- der of the women to prostitution but do not dwell on any introspection on part of the men. Why? Is the national construct of morality a single-sex affair?

Krishna Sobti's short story 'Where Is My Mother?' can be interpreted at several levels. Alok Bhalla categorises it as a story, which is communally charged, because it denies "the claim to holiness of all religions" [Bhalla 1999: xxvi]. I would read it as a parallel account of male and female relationships to the nation. Bahadur Yunus Khan is fighting for creation of a new country and this demands sacrifice of the self. Even as he drives through this nightmare of violence and bloodshed, his heart goes out in compassion to the little girl lying unconscious on the roadside, her body torn by rape. He picks her up in order to save her. As she lay in his arms, a vision rose before his eyes, the eyes not of a murderer, but "of a man. full of veneration" as the memory of his little sister Nooran comes to him. He overcomes his hatred for the kafir and pleads with the doctors to save her, claims her as his sister but the traumatised girl is unable to transcend that fear of the other (pp 433-39). What does this story tell us in terms of nation and womanhood? What does it say for the relationship between the self and the other? While men sacrifice the self for the nation, women are expected to hold on to the body. Their bodily self contains their whole self. The relationship with the other is also perceived in limited terms of religion and otherness of the gender. Bhalla has missed the

poignancy of the story where the man conquers his self, his upbringing, his limited sense of nationhood to experience a human emotion. But the girl,young and abandoned, is unable to transcend the fear of the religious other,which in this case is also the religious other, in her present state of trauma. Daughters of mother India have yet to work out terms of belonging that

encompass the whole self, the body as well as the mind. They need to reinterpret the body and expand the notion of space to include history and identity. The self-in-the-world has to outgrow inherited constraints of traditional moulds in order to reinvent itself. [B1

Email: [email protected]

Notes 1 See Sabyasaachi Bhattacharya, Vcande Mataram: The Biography ofa Song

25-27, and Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hitndu Nation, Permanent Black, Delhi, 2000.

2 The Encyclopaedia of Inldian Cinema (Revised ed, 2002) describes its director, Heman Gupta, as the "militant Bengali filmmaker" (p 325).

3 The copyright in the Rupa reprint is dated 1922 but apparently there is some error here. More likely the date could be 1932.

4 See B D Garga 'The Feel of Good Earth', Cinema in Ilndia 3, (April- June 1989). Also see Parama Roy Indian Traffic, 1998, Vistaar Publications, New Delhi, 1999).

5 Draupadi (1931) Savitri (1933), Sati Sulochana (1934), Lavakusa (1934), Ram Rajya (1943), Shakuntla (1943) Meera (1945) are only some of the films that centralise myth, chastity and sexual abstinence and emphasise a strict moral code. Javed Akhtar in Talking Films is on record acknowledging the influence of Mother India and Ganga Jamuna on Deewar (37), and the centrality of the mother image in Deewar (40).

6 Refer Sarojini's (probably a pen-name of Edattata Rugmini Amma) essay on "Womanliness" (Her-Self Early Writings on Gender by Malayalee Women, J Devika (ed), Kolkata: Stree, 2005. Also see Tagore's 1922 essay 'Woman and Home' in Creative Unity, (Madras, Macmillan), 1988. Tagore links up woman with a cadence of restraint, necessary for the production of poetry: "She has been an inspiration to man, guiding, most often unconsciously, his restless energy into an immense variety of creations in literature, art, music and religion. This is why, in India, woman has been described as the symbol of Shakti, the creative power" (p 157).

7 A statement she has made often enough but my particular reference is to her address to the conference 'Women's Writing at the Turn of the- Century', February 2000, organised by the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi.

8 Refer Writing from the Margin, Penguin, New Delhi, 2003. 9 Refer "Interview" with Jasbir Jain in Jasbir Jain's Nayantara Sahgal

(Revised Edition, Printwell, Jaipur, 1994). 10 Histories of literature (irrespective of the language) often tend to club

them together under a section women's writing. 11 This has been a long struggle where canon formation is concerned. When

women write about socio-political issues they fall into universal categories and hence their individual approach is submerged, when they write about women's experiences it is dismissed as trivial, domestic. confessional, romantic or excessively bold.

12 Sherry Chand, 'Manto's 'Open It': Engendering Partition Narrative', EPW. Vol XLI p 4. Also see Alok Bhalla' s 'Introduction' to Stories About the Partition. (p xxxiv).

13 Jasodhara Bagchi "Freedom in an Idiom of Loss", http://www.india- seminar/2000. "This harping on abducted women as a central core of nation-building is a pointer to the nation-community nexus. I notice in current discussions on women's rights and citizenship a tendency to put the community as a greater ally of women as against the nation stale posed as site of harsh surveillance".

14 Kolkata : Srishti Publishers, 2003. Counter positions could be argued. In Punjab also there was a shared language and culture. But as a territory open to constant invasions, the notion of masculinity has shaped itself differently. It is located in a more aggressive stance, while in Bengal the longer period of British colonialism has resulted in an almost 'island' cultural situation.

15 "...Partition is often seen in metaphysical terms.... A loss of a world rather




than a loss related to prestige" (p 189). Sengupta comments on the growth of a sub-genre called "colony fiction", which consists of narratives about 'displacement and dispossession' (p 191).

16 Jaya Mitra in 'The Other Voice', points out that the relation between nation and the novel is more acute in the case of women's writing (p 185).

17 Nandy, 'Foreword' to Mapmaking. 18 For a detailed elaboration refer my yet unpublished paper, 'Hidden Depths,

Shifting Concerns: The Self-in-the-world' presented at a seminar on 'Writing the Self. February 22-24, 2006.

19 Kesavan's unnamed hero falls back into memory, is adopted by a Muslim family of a Kashmiri Hindu, Ganju, who had converted to Islam. Later, the protagonist, in order to identify himself with the family undergoes a circumcision and moves with them to the refugee camp.

20 The novel looks within, and asks the question: Were we flawed? How much of the responsibility for being colonised rests with us?

21 Kapadia's novel was serialised in a Gujarati monthly Janmabhoomi Pravasi in 1982, amidst several kinds of protests.

22 I turned to the novel with great expectations, specially as Kali Katha Via By-pass had impressed me, but the novel read more like a feminist tract,

23 It is the middle volume of a trilogy, and in terms of feminist issues, the strongest. The first, Pratham Prathisruthi, depicts a woman who leaves her husband in protest and turns an ascetic, the third Bakul Katha is about Survurnlata's daughter, who remains unmarried, becomes a successful writer, and is caught up in dependency on her brother. Marriage and freedom do not seem to be coming together. For that matter, success also does not bring her freedom.

24 Forexample, a major undercurrent in Jameela Hashmi' s "Exile" is Gurpal's role. Gurpal is not to be dismissed merely as an abductor. He doesn't rape and abandon her. Instead he wishes to give her a social legitimacy, even if not a religious one. The title of 'Bahu' is an acceptance, the children are a relationship and his constant harping on children's getting lost in village fairs is an unconscious fear, a reflection on his own behaviour, a possessiveness about his children - a silent parallel to Bahu's memories of her paternal home. The transformation from Sita into Lakshmi is to be placed within a double perspective - the woman's and the mother- in-law's. While for the first it is a captivity within a stony-eyed existence, for the mother-in-law a final acceptance of the bahu as Lakshmi. And for the reader it is the metamorphosis of Sita, the exile, into Lakshmi, the symbol of the family's well-being.

25 These relationships feature in several novels and need to be explored further. Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column, Manzoor Ehtesham's Sookha Bargad, Yaspal' s Jhoota Such, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz' s (a Pakistani writer) The Heart Divided, Kartar Singh Duggal's Mitti Musalman Di are only some of the novels where love does not result in marriage.

26 In Cry, The Peacock, Maya is motherless, in Voices in the City the mother is hostile and egoistic, in Where Shall We Go This Summer? she has eloped and in Clear Light of Day she is bedridden.

27 Roots and Shadows (1983), explores a willed relationship of adultery without any burden of guilt. It moves away from the normal gender equations.

28 In Pratibha Basu and Manik Bandhopadhaya's stories in Mapmaking.

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