Books

IN her moving memoir on Kashmir (The Tiger Ladies: A Memoir of Kashmir, Headline Books, 2002), Sudha Koul describes the women of Kashmir as ‘Tiger Ladies’. She follows these Tiger Ladies in their daily routines, and describes Dhanna, her grandmother:

‘One night Dhanna has a dream and she is told what she has to do to keep her children. So she goes to the village of her ancestors. She finds a well at least nine-men deep and it is near her mother’s house. Once a month she goes to the well at midnight, unties the two tightly woven braids of hair that start just above the nape of her neck. With her fingers she pries open the strands until her hair, crimped by weeklong braiding, falls loosely about her shoulders. Then she takes a bath.

‘She draws the water herself, lowering the well post with the bucket dangling at the end into the cold, silent well. Then, slowly she pulls out the water, and in the dark she can hear the reassuring licks of the water in the bucket as it comes to rest on the grass beside her. This she does for one year, bathing through the seasons, gritting her teeth as the Himalayan winter approaches, glad that her ritual is a monthly, not a daily one. If she had to do it every day, she would.

‘She says, "When you have to do something, you do it".’

You do of course, and if you are a woman, and doing something that is not easy, or sanctioned for you, you find ways of doing it that may be devious, or secret, such that the mere act of doing what you have to do becomes heroic. Rashsundari Debi taught herself to read and write in secret – inspired by watching her husband read, this young wife turned every available space to advantage in her project to read and write. The result was her life story, Amar Jiban, recently translated into English (Words to Win: The Making of Amar Jiban, a Modern Autobiography by Tanika Sarkar, Kali for Women, 2000). Binodini Dasi, well-known actress on the Bengali stage in the early twentieth century, wrote two autobiographical accounts, Amar Katha and Amar Abinetri Jiban (translated into English by Rimli Bhattacharya), the latter describing her long relationship with Bengali theatre. Not only was Binodini’s work and career exceptional, but she herself was an unusual woman, but much of the time, as Rimli Bhattacharya points out, her insights into theatre history are relegated to the footnotes of history, rather than forming its substance. Pandita Ramabai, so central to questioning Brahminical patriarchy in Maharashtra, suffered the same fate and it is in her carefully written accounts of high caste Hindu women that we begin to see some insights into what she had to tackle.

Women’s autobiographies, memoirs, first person narratives have become an important genre of writing and publishing in recent times. Many such accounts have existed for years, but are only now being published, or translated, while there are others that are being reissued because of the renewed interest in these writings as presenting an alternative view of history. Among the available ones are Lakshmibai Tilak’s, I Follow After (Oxford), Hemabati Sen’s memoir (Roli), Manikuntala Sen’s account of her years as a leftist (Stree), and more recently, Dalit writer Urmila Pawar’s autobiography, as well as Faustina Bama’s thinly veiled autobiographical novel, Karruku.

Virtually all autobiographical accounts by women describe how difficult they find the act of writing. This isn’t something specific to women of course, for writing may be difficult for anyone, but in many ways, it is symptomatic of the condition of women. Leisure and the space to write are difficult to find in the daily grind of life, and if these spaces are available, then the act of writing itself is derided – for after all, women are often asked, what will you write? WHY do you want to write? The Hindi writer, Rajee Seth, describes a story in which both the protagonists, husband and wife, have been lovers of writing in their earlier lives. Marriage changes all that: it remains all right for the man to pursue his interest, but the woman must subsume herself in daily tasks. And one day, she makes the final rebellion: she piles up all her writing in the aangan of their home, and turns it into a crisply burning bonfire. The Malyalam writer, Chandrika, has a different take on this: in her story, the woman waits for her son and husband to leave for school and work. And then, while bathing, inspiration comes to her. She rushes out and pens a few lines, returns to her bath, continues in the small spaces of time she manages to find in the day and then, just as she is penning the last line, she spies her two men returning, and quickly, she shreds her beautifully crafted poem and throws it away.

It isn’t only that women hesitate about the act of writing their lives. It’s also that they do not often have the language, or cannot find the words, or indeed the courage to say what they have to. Urmila Pawar describes how when she began to write and addressed the issue of sexuality, she found it very difficult to deal with people around her. It was as if she had betrayed something or someone.

Perhaps this is why so many of women’s first person accounts deal not with their own lives and feelings, but with those of husbands, and sons. And many others, such as Bama’s Karukku, are disguised as fiction.

There are also some issues that remain taboo. Sexuality, is certainly one of them, and also, as Nabaneeta Deb Sen will tell you, humour. Women aren’t supposed to make fun of anyone, least of all themselves, and certainly not their relatives. It is interesting that while the language that men routinely use is full of words that are inherently sexist and demean women, the language available to women – or the language that they choose to use – should be so full of restraint. Speaking of sex is much more difficult. Nayantara Sahgal’s correspondence with Mangat Rai in Relationship is remarkably restrained for an exchange of letters between two people who were obviously lovers. It is not that the letters themselves are restrained, but just that the author chose to exercise restraint in their selection. Would a man have felt constrained to have done the same thing? It’s difficult to say.

But what is clear is that it takes not only a tremendous amount of courage for women to approach the act of writing about their lives – trained as they are to believe that these lives are worth little – and in doing so, to focus on themselves. And it is in this context that the description of the quotidian tasks, the minutiae of life, become truly important, and yes, sometimes even heroic. Imagine a woman bathing at the village well under the stars once a month for a whole year, through the icy cold winter of Kashmir, only to keep a vow, not for herself, but for someone else. If this is not being a woman of substance, what is? Imagine a woman entering the male domain of theatre and making a mark for herself. Or a housewife finding moments when she can hide and teach herself to read – and teach other women alongside as well.

And these small acts of heroism, significant though they are, are available only to those women who have the luxury of education, and who can write. For others, it is difficult to find both words and spaces. Thankfully, because there now exists a hospitable environment in which women can and do actually write, and their writings are received well, and read, this acts as an encouragement to others who may wish to write but do not have the means to. In recent years, some effort has been put into recording the stories of women on the margins of society, who have been unable to take up the pen, but who do have the words. The story of Viramma, a Tamil Dalit woman, recorded and told by Jean Luc and Josiane Racine (Viramma) stands out as an important example, as does the story of tribal activist Jaanu, as told to Bhaskaran.

It is not only in India that readers are beginning to open up to the world of autobiographical narratives by women. Across our borders, in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka too one sees a proliferation of personal narratives of women, both from the early part of the twentieth century and some more contemporary ones. From Pakistan comes a notable book, The Making of a Modern Muslim Woman: the Memoirs of Begum Khurshid Mirza, which recounts the setting up of women’s schools and colleges in Aligarh and the fortunes of one of the foremost Muslim families in Delhi and Aligarh, and later in Pakistan.

Whether the scale of these stories is small or large, whether they tell of themselves or their men and their families, or whether they recount their times, they’re an important source of mapping not only the status of women, but of gaining insights of a somewhat different nature from those that are available, into the lives and times of these women and their families. There’s a rich seam there waiting to be explored, so one hopes in the future that we see many more such accounts, by women from all backgrounds and classes and further, that they will soon form part of our curricula and our teaching.

Urvashi Butalia