5 Self-fashioning and the ‘Gender’ Question

Dr. Sanghamitra Dey

Introduction

The question of subaltern subject position is crucial to the question of literary pedagogy and canon formation and this module “Self-fashioning and the ‘Gender’ Question” draws upon the discourse of difference and identity formation and attempts to offer a ‘gender’ perspective in terms of the representative writers and their negotiation with such ideas. The ‘gender’ perspective does not only entail the experience of the female writers. This module on self- fashioning and the ‘Gender’ question aims to offer a gendered perspective on the already known issue of cultural identity. The discussion of major female writers in all genres is a categorical choice to help the readers engage with the continuing debate concerning formation of self. The module is designed to read the history of Indian Writing in English not simply situating it in the larger socio-cultural context but also recuperating the marginal voices. An attempt has been made here to address the larger intellectual framework of self-fashioning and the politics of resistance in terms of negotiating the structures of knowledge, history of imperial domination and the consequent effect on national imaginary from the perspective of female writers. As we see, they too underwent the first phase of imitation but slowly linguistic and cultural experiments enriched their writing. Starting with Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu the mapping of the cultural contours of creative space has always been the chief concern in their writings. To elaborate, we can cite Sarojini Naidu’s example who as a public orator was involved in nationalist movement as Gandhi’s colleague thereby infusing social and creative concerns in her writing. Cornelia Sorabji’s social concerns are well known and hence mapping the ‘self’ has always been a concern in writings by women writers. Sorabji founded Social Service League in Bengal to improve the health of mothers and infants and was an active member of the movement to raise the age of consent and abolish child-marriage. We witness a shift from transition from national to personal from the early writings to post-Independence writings as the thematic preoccupations change. Bruce King voices the visible shift when the writers“had moved on from such colonial and nationalist themes as the rewriting of legends, praise of peasants, and from general ethical statements to writing about personal experiences” (147).Therefore, the module will address all aspects of women’s writing -creative, generic and cultural to address the feminine concerns of gender roles, subjugation under patriarchy, question of othering etc. The questions of women’s causes, female perception will help in mapping a contemporary sensibility thereby expanding the archive of Indian writing. As we progress, the obsessive awareness of the self dominating the female writers will find newer expression not simply in terms of descriptions of amorous adventures but also in terms of expression of feminist concerns in highly personal voices. The desire to take charge of one’s destiny, love, marriage, conjugal life, patriarchal subjugation etc. together contribute to the discourse on gender and national identity.

Objectives

The chapter is designed to help you

read critically the history of Indian Writing in English from the perspective of female writers
understand the important socio-cultural events/contexts instrumental to their conceptualization of ‘self’
position the major writers in the proper historical context
apprehend the major thematic preoccupations
understand the feminist concerns as expressed in their writings

Literary Representations

Poetry

Toru Dutt (1856-1877) is hailed as the first modern Indian poet writing in English who infuses the subjective as well as cultural dimensions of her experience into her writing. The influence of Victorian Romantic tradition is visible in her poetry. Her first publication A Sheaf Glean’d in French Fields (1876) is translations of seventy French poets, Hugo, Gautier, Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle, Nerval, Saint-Beuve and it brought her to the attention of Edmund Gosse. The notes appended at the end of the Sheaf are interesting as critical comments on the French poetry translated in the collection. The collection of lyric poems posthumously published as Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882) infuses Indian myths and legends into poetic experiments. Her other writings include the English translation of the sonnets of Comte de Grammont, the fragment of unfinished romance Bianca, or the Young Spanish Maiden, a complete French novel Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers.

Indianness and Self-fashioning in Toru Dutt’s Writing Rosinka Chaudhuri, 68-69

A glance at Toru Dutt’s use of language is enough to show the difference between her style and that of her predecessors. The poems her father and uncles wrote, and before them Derozio, kasiprasad Ghosh, and Michael Madhusudan, all belong to a recognizable school of nineteenth–century poetry. Toru Dutt’s poetry transcends that school, evolving a separate identity. The difference lies in the manner in which her language addresses her experience, her vision radiating beyond the boundaries within which most of the nineteenth- century poetry in English was confined. Her awareness of her own ‘Indianness’ is not restricted to Indian historical themes and the reworking of Indian legends. The mythological content of her poems does not exist extrinsically, but is integrated with her consciousness, her memory. In her poetry we confront for the first time a language that is crafted out of the vicissitudes of an individual life and a sensibility that belongs to modern India.

Sarojini Naidu(1879-1949) a public orator is a prominent figure in nationalist movement being the first woman president of Indian National Congress. The Golden Threshold (1905), The Bird of Time: Songs of Life, Death and the Spring (1912) The Broken Wing: Songs of Love, Death and Destiny 1915-16 (1917)The Feather of the Dawn (1961) are some of her collections where she integrates the romantic conceptualization of India as a land of myths and legends with representations of urban and rural life and celebration of the unique experience of woman and womanhood. Public and private are integrated in her verses replete with patriotic sentiments and reverent worshipping of motherland India. Naidu’s conscious effort to Indianise her verse as advised by her mentors Arthur Symons and Edmund Gosse leads to the proliferation of mythic heroines like Sita, Savitri, Damyanti, Draupadi, legendary figures like Padmini of Chittor and princess Zebunnissa in her poems. She advocated the extension of voting rights to women and her public poetry is basically a celebration of Indiannesss and the nationalist cause.

Unlike her predeccessors, the poetry of Kamala Das(b.1934), a bilingual writer born in Malabar is frank, confessional and registers a protest against the traditional role of women. The modern poetry is therefore, distinguished by “a directness of expression and natural, idiomatic, colloquial vigour”(Bruce King,161).With Das, the desire to develop and fashion a sense of self which is trapped in the trappings of social and cultural conventions comes to the surface as she explores the question of choice and freedom, emotional and sexual needs of women. Raised in a matrilineal society in Kerala,the institution of marriage, female body, sexuality come under rigorous examination in her collections like Summer in Calcutta (1965), The Descendants (1967), The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973), and Collected Poems Vol. 1 (1984). Monika Verma (b.1916) too explores similar concerns in her collection Dragonflies Draw Flame(1962), Past Imperative(1972), Alakananda (1976). Her acute responsiveness to nature distinguishes her verse. Gauri Deshpande (b. 1942), known for collections like Between Births (1968), Lost Love (1970), Beyond the Slaughter-house(1972) too infuse acute evocation of consciousness about nature and the experience of questions of freedom and choice in man- woman relationship in her love poems. Mamta Kalia (b.1942) emerges as a powerful voice who views love, marriage, relationship, sexuality, family, society with wit and irony as expressed in Tribute to Papa (1970), Poems(1978). The predominance of the figure of the father as the symbolic representation of the patriarchal order informs her poetry of protest against categorical norms of social institutions. Eunice de Souza (b. 1940) a Goan Christian offers a different perspective in collections like Fix (1979), Women in Dutch Painting(1988), Ways of Belonging: New and Selected Poems (1990) Selected and New Poems (1994). Her poetry is replete with the precision of a miniaturist and being a part of the group of Bombay poets she offers a unique perspective beyond the common themes of relationships, love and marriage in terms of dramatizing the female self in a cold, ironic manner. The use of satire distinguishes her poems on church, marriage and especially the depiction of Goan community. The conflicting relationship between Goan Catholics and Hindu India is predominant in her verse. She has also edited Nine Indian Women Poets (1997). Melanie Silgardo’s The Earthworm’s Story also explores the similar themes but in a less critical manner in terms of the depiction of Goan community and rebellion against categorical gender roles.

According to Bruce King “poetry in English by women is part of the modernization of Indian society including its participation in a global system of education and economics which has replaced the older colonial and imperial networks”(312-13). Proving him correct, Ruth Vanita’s A Play of Light (1994) contrasts the image of Sita with Saraswati whereas Menka Shivdasani’s Nirvana at Ten Rupees(1990) shows that social conventions and cultural myths are disturbing for the creative self. Shivdasani, a journalist is one of the founding members of the Bombay poetry circle in 1986. She explores the themes of urban squalor, anxieties, problems of living alone as a single woman. Her poetic world is a world of drugs, filth, sex, problems/disappointment of relationship and she mixes vulgar speech with polished language to create the sense of homelessness in urban world of increasing loneliness. Mukta Sambrani’s The Woman in this Room Isn’t Lonely (1997), Charmayne D’Souza’s A Spelling Guide to Women (1990) and Tara Patel’s Single Woman (1991) too explore similar concerns. The poetry of Imtiaz Dharker (b. 1954) is consciously feminist and infused with political commitment and gender roles. Born in Lahore, she was raised in Britain and lives in Bombay, where she writes scripts and directs audio-visuals and has edited poetry for Debonaire. Her poems offer a unique perspective on feminist concerns about the alienation of self. The veil or the purdah becomes a symbolic representation of this alienation and occupying a problematic space, a borderline as expressed in her first volume, Purdah (1989). In Purdah, Dharker offers deeply felt evocations of the experience of growing up as a woman in an Islamic society. ‘Purdah II’ elaborates on how the symbolic veil divides and suppresses. The four sections-Purdah, The Haunted House, The Child Sings, Borderlines explore the symbolic significance of the veil projects a world of suppression and stifling circumstances. Postcards from God (1994) continues the feminine aspects of entrapped existence and constant remapping of gender roles. She, being a graphic artist creates visually effective poetry infused with a sense of political and cultural commitment.

Prose

Krupabai Satthianadhan (1862-94) is the only woman writer to write two novels Kamala, A Story of Hindu Life (1894) and Saguna, A Story of Native Christian Life (1895, posthumously published) in English in nineteenth-century India. These bildungsroman sketches her concern with gender roles, caste system, ethnicity, and cultural identity in the context of the plight of women refusing to be categorized in the model of everyday domesticity. Her heroines are fond of reading and pursue their intellectual pursuits and thereby face the dilemma and consequences of being social outcast. Set in the locale of Deccan plateau near Nasik, both of her novels explore the life of untouchables, tribal men and women as she explores the idea of India as nation based on cultural identity. In her writing we trace the earliest representations of feminist and cultural concerns. Cornelia Sorabji (1866-1954) reflecting “pro-British and anti-nationalist sentiments”( Ranjana Sidhanta Ash, 126) emerges as “a true bi-cultural—not a hyphenated being but one sharing two cultures and two homes” (Ranjana Sidhanta Ash, 129) whose commitment to social causes are well-known. Her preoccupation with the plight of traditional women who lived in purdah, women confined to the zenana was central to her social work. Her first published work Love and Life behind the Purdah (1901) is a collection of eleven narratives, the ‘Indian stories’. These fictional accounts are drawn from her experience as a legal adviser and she explores the condition of women caught between traditional roles and the changing demands of society. The collection is replete with her linguistic experiments in terms of syntactic inversions like ‘garbed was she’, ‘how know we’. Sun–babies: Studies in the Child-life of India (1904) and Sun Babies (1920) tells the stories of street children in different parts of India- Calcutta, Srinagar, Allahabad. The book is rich with details of mundane life, domestic interiors, and drudgery of domestic duties in elite household. The plight of the homeless children coupled with the experiments with English prose to capture Indian dialect distinguishes her writings. Between the Twilights: Being Studies of Indian Women by one of Themselves(1908) projects her sympathy towards women subjugated by domestic patriarchy as theses women floated ‘elusively in the half-light between two civilizations sad by reason of something lost, and by reason of the move that may come to be rejected hereafter…’ . The romanticisation of Indian history as well as the reflection on her life in Britain and India finds expression in re-telling of Indian mythologies and legends in Indian Tales of the Great Ones: Among Men, Women, and Bird-people(1916).

The theme of alienation distinguishes the novelists of 1950s-60s. As opined by Shymala Narayan, “the women writers, whose emergence provides this period with one of its few of distinctive features, phrased the conflict in relation to the condition of women, but emancipation in their novels is often figured in terms of personal release into what seems a very literary realm of transcendence” (230). Kamala Markandaya (b.1924), a remarkable novelist explores the themes of conflict between tradition and modernity, erosion of values East and West, idea of progress, human relationships in Nectar in a Sieve (1954) A Handful of Rice (1966), The Golden Honeycomb (1977), The Coffer Dams (1969), Pleasure City (1982). Nayantara Sahgal(b.1927) in her novels A Time to be Happy (1958), Storm in Chandigarh (1969), Rich Like Us (1985) depicts the shallow and hypocritical life of the elite, rich section of the Indian society and the Indian heritage and its value for the educated Indian. In her first novel A Time to be Happy (1958), the narrator protagonist Sanad articulates the problem of Identity crisis rampant amongst the English-educated elite. Major national events like the partition of Punjab along linguistic lines in 1965, the Emergency form the background of her novels. She deals with the status of women, politics, corruption of civil servants, sati as entrapment of women in conjugal life. Plans for Departure (1986) and Mistaken Identity (1988) deal with the Raj and the Independence movement. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala(b.1927), born of Polish Jewish parents and married to an Indian architect is famous for novels like The Householder (1960), In Search of Love and Beauty(1983), Shards of Memory(1995), Three Continents(1987), A Background Place(1965) and Heat and Dust(1975). Heat and Dust won the Booker prize and here she offers ironic studies of the interaction between India and Britain. Anita Desai (b.1937) primarily deals with the psychology of her characters especially the female ones. Psychological studies of self-fashioning in terms of relationship between women and men, women and society, emotional traumas crowd her novels like Cry, the Peacock (1963), Where Shall We Go This Summer(1975), Fire on the Mountain (1977), Clear Light of the Day (1980), In Custody(1984), Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988) Journey to Ithaca (1995). Shashi Deshpande (b. 1938) in The Dark Holds no Terrors (1980), Roots and Shadow (1983), That Long Silence (1988), and Small Remedies (2000) deals in a direct way with the situation of women in urban, middle-class life. Shama Futehally (b. 1952) is known for Tara Lane (1993). Venu Chitale’s In Transit (1951), Zeenuth Futehally’s Zohra (1951), Mrinalini Sarabhai’s This Alone is True (1952) are important novels. Attia Hosain’s (1913-98) Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) offers a perspective on elite women’s consciousness and the representation of the distinctive Muslim culture of Lucknow before Independence. Gita Hariharan (b. 1954) takes recourse to the epic tradition and A Thousand Faces of Nights (1992) and The Ghosts of Vasu Master (1994) are concerned with the rewriting of folk tales and children’s stories. When Dreams Travel (1999) is a kind of feminist retelling of the Arabian Nights. Arundhati Roy (b. 1960) is known for The God of Small Things(1997). Jai Nimbkar (b.1932) is known for her first novel, Temporary Answers published in 1974. Her second novel, Come Rain (1933) presents a new perspective on the “East-West Encounter”.

Namita Gokhale (b. 1956) is the author of Paro: Dreams of Passion (1984), Gods, Graves, and Grandmothers (1994), A Himalayan Love Story (1996), The Book of Shadows (1999).

Mahatma Gandhi’s mercy mission to Noakhali forms the backdrop of Dina Mehta’s novel, And Some Take a Lover (1992). It also gives us insight into Parsi mores. The Partition of 1947 is mentioned in Nina Sibal’s Yatra, Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers (1999) and Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters (1998). Such novels in which political events are important is Uma Vasudev’s Shreya of Sonagarh (1993), Meena Arora Nayak’s second novel, About Daddy (2000). Kavery Nambisan (b.1947) is known for The Scent of Pepper (1996), The Truth (Almost) about Bharat (1991), Mango-Coloured Fish (1998). The foothills of Maharashtra is the setting for The Madwoman of Jogare (1998) by Sohaila Abdulali. Arundhati Roy (b. 1961), Anita Nair (b. 1966), and Susan Viswanathan (Something Barely Remembered: Stories, 2000) explore the regional fiction. Anita Nair’s The Better Man (1999) explores similar theme. Gita Mehta’s Raj (1989) offers an evocative picture of life in an Indian royal family. Suniti Namjoshhi (b. 1941) uses fantasy and surrealism in The Conversations of Cow (1985) St. Suniti and the Dragon (1994) and Building Babel (1997). In its use of Magic Realism, Nina Sibal’s novel, Yatra is reminiscent of Rushdie’s magical world. Idol Love (1999) by Anuradha Marwah- Roy (b. 1962) presents a horrifying picture of an Indian dystopia in the twenty-first century. The Mistress of Spices (1997) by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (b.1956) also employs magic realism. Prema Nandakumar’s Atom and the Serpent (1982), Rita Joshi’s The Awakening: A Novella in Rhyme (1992) and Meena Alexander’s (b. 1951) Nampally House (1991) are the campus novels. Zai Whitaker (b. 1954) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize in the Best First book category of the Eurasion region in 1993.

Women writers also explored short story as well as non-fictional genres, biography, autobiography etc. The most known are Toru Dutt’s essays including the one on Derozio in the Bengal Magazine (December 1874), Cornelia Sorabji’s Purdahnashin (1917), Shubala: A Child Mother (1920). She wrote biographies of her parents Therefore(1924). Susie Sorabji: Christian- Parsee Educationist of Western India (1932). India Calling (1934) and India Recalled (1936) are her famous works. Speeches and Writings of Sarojini Naidu (1918) Relationship(1994), Kamala Das’s autobiography My Story (1975) are some important prose works by Indian women writers. The short stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Like Birds, like Fishes (1963), An Experience of India (1966), A Stronger Climate (1968) and How I Became a Holy Mother (1976) show the themes of cultural conflict. Other collections are Anita Desai’s Games At Twilight and Other Stories (1978).Krishna Hutheesing’s Shadow on the Wall (1948), Attiah Hossain’s Phoenix Fled and Other Stories (1953), Jai Nimbkar’s The Lotus Leaves and other Stories (1971),Sujatha Bala Subramanian’s The House in the Hills and Other Stories (1973), Kamala Das’ A Doll For the Child Prostitute (1977).

Drama

Cornelia Sorabji wrote the first drama, a parable play in English Gold Mohur Time (1930). Bharati Sarabhai’s (b. 1912) plays The Well of The People (1943) and Two Women (1952)— show a distinct impact of Gandhian thought and are viewed as products of the Gandhian age. The Well of the People, a verse play is based on a true story published in Gandhi’s Harijan about an old widow who is unable to go on a pilgrimage to Benaras and fulfill her desire to wash her sins in the sacred Ganga consequently decides to spend her money in getting a well dug for the untouchables in her village.

Modern Indian women playwrights dealing with social issues and feminine concerns question gender stereotyping and categorized role playing and in their plays we get a candid reflection of gender issues and female experience hitherto marginal to dramatic representations. They also contribute to regional theatre in terms of combining indigenous and European tradition. Some important names in Indian theatre are Mahasweta Devi, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Saoli Mitra (Bengali theatre), Dhiruben Patel and Varsha Adalja (Gujarati theatre) Mannu Bhandari, Kusum Kumar, Mridula Garg, Shanti Mehrotra, Mrinal Pande (Hindi theatre). Apart from regional voices we find playwrights like Dina Mehta (b. 1928) who discusses social construction of gender roles in Brides Are Not For Burning, Tiger, Tiger, Sister Like You, When One Plus One Makes Nine,Getting Away With Murder. Brides Are Not For Burning discusses the social problem of the killing of brides who fail to assure dowry. Manjula Padmanavan’s Harvest, Lights Out, Hidden Fires, Mating Season and Poile Sengupta’s Mangalam, Keats Was a Tuber explore the issues of female subjectivity and consciousness, gendered perception and the position of women. Harvest a futuristic play offers a frightening vision of a cannibalistic future characterized by the sale of human organs. The time of this dystopia is the year 2010, and the setting is the city of Bombay. “Interplanta Services” arrange for the sale and transplant of organs of willing Indians to rich Americans. Padmanabhan’s Body Blows: Women, Violence, and Survival: Three Plays (2000), also contains Dina Mehta’s Getting Away with Murder and Polie Sengupta’s Mangalam. As the title of the collection indicates, the chief motif of all the three plays is the victimization of women in Indian society. Zahida Zaidi’s Burning Desert (1998) is a political play written during the Gulf War of 1991. Vera Sharma’s Life is Like That (1997), is a social realistic play about Lata, a middle class young woman without much education, who is compelled to take up a job when her husband dies. Reminiscences (1997) is also concerned with the plight of a woman. Sharma’s The Early Bird (1983) contains five one-act plays depicting middle-class life. Sharma is at her best in light social comedy like “The Early Bird” than when she deals with tragedy, as in “Vengeance is mine,” where a village landlord rapes a village peasant girl. The Chameleon (1991) is a collection of her radio plays.

Summing Up

This module on the self-fashioning and the ‘gender’ question integrates the gendered perspective into the problematics of cultural identity. The discussion of major female writers in all genres is designed to help the readers engage with the continuing debate concerning formation of self. The module deals with the issues of female subjectivity and consciousness, gendered perception and the position of women and attempts to show how these issues find expression in their writings imbued with the nuances of larger intellectual framework of self-fashioning and the politics of resistance.