Essay

A ‘grand celebration’ of feminist discourse

In an interview that appeared in Naya Gyanoday (a Hindi literary magazine published by Bharatiya Jnanpith) special issue on infidelity, August 2010, Vibhuti Narain Rai, a Hindi writer, former IPS officer, founder-editor of the Hindi journal Vartaman Sahitya (Contemporary Literature) and now the vice-chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University, Maharashtra, remarked, ‘Feminist discourse has been reduced to a grand celebration of infidelity,’ and ‘Hindi women writers are competing with each other to prove who among them is the greatest slut (chhinal).’ He denounced a woman writer’s autobiography, saying it could have been more aptly titled ‘How many times in how many beds.’ Numerous women (and some men) writers and politicians protested and demanded Rai’s dismissal; however, websites show that many men agree with his views. This reflective essay on feminist discourse in the Hindi literary world by a well-known woman writer and critic appeared in Kathadesh in September.

It has been translated from Hindi by Ruth Vanita and Simona Sawhney.¹

 

ABOUT a decade ago, Kathakram’s annual November symposium focused on feminist discourse.² In one of the breaks during the two-day programme, a young journalist interviewing me asked whether the older generation’s apprehension that society may be descending into an inferno was finally proving true. Quite possibly the young journalist was voicing his own misgivings under cover of quoting the older generation. The question, however, is not about the difference between older and younger generations. Rather, it concerns respectable, middle class, Hindi speaking society in which feminist discourse has been and still is viewed with suspicion, disbelief and prejudice, perhaps with fear, and undoubtedly with hostility. Here, women are still defined in terms of the female body, and all other measures of domination, oppression or exploitation that are brought to bear upon this body result only in reinforcing the idea that it is suspect, weak and vulnerable. It is for this reason that even today a woman’s identity largely means nothing to her but surviving in a hostile world in a constantly insecure and fearful state of mind. She is burdened with the responsibility of protecting an easily damaged bodily purity which every force around her seems bent upon shattering. Her revolt is against these parameters of identity, and that revolt arouses the aforementioned suspicion that society is now descending into an inferno. As if this were the only cause of such a descent and as if the responsibility of saving society were woman’s alone, even if it were possible to save society in such a manner.

Feminist discourse has not yet succeeded in provoking our society into self-examination and self-criticism. The latest exhibition of our society’s uncritical mentality appears in a famous excerpt from a famous interview in the super special issue of Naya Gyanoday dedicated to the theme of infidelity: ‘One could say that this [feminist] discourse is like a grand celebration of infidelity. Woman writers are in a race, with each one trying to prove that she is more of a slut than the others.’

What’s in a Name? I quote this excerpt without naming the speaker. This is not only because the incident has created such a storm in the media that the reader is sure to recognize it, but also because I see this as not just the opinion of an individual but as indicative of the mould in which a consciousness is shaped.

In Hindi speaking society, feminist discourse has not moved far from its initial parameters; it is still engaged in a struggle against the social injustice and torture inflicted on women. Empowerment begins with the awakening of an enlightened consciousness. This has begun at individual levels but has yet to begin on a large scale.

There are two dimensions of the battle against social frameworks and their unwritten stipulations – immediate and long-term. The present ‘slut’ episode is an example of the immediate – this episode revolved around an individual name. Such names create waves of energy that connect to the disembodied debate of ideas conducted through the medium of common nouns. The anger and agitation that arises from confrontation gives birth to intense and agitated thought. However, it may also remain confined to personal squabbling that gets dissipated in the trading of abuses. If newspaper publicity merely broadens the scale of this dissipation without transforming the agitation into keen thinking, then it is nothing more than dust which is briefly stirred up in the arena only to settle down again.

Hindi literary feminist discourse suffers from several insufficiencies. What it has developed is not so much a mature and powerful reflective capacity as passionate emotion, which often gives rise to a loud outcry rather than a debate. But such passionate outcries provide material for analysis, a treasury of truths and facts on which a revolution in thought may be founded. It is also true that the gentleman who made the now notorious statement about women writers, also, in the same interview, made stock feminist statements containing many arguments generally put forward on behalf of women. He says that to understand infidelity one must take into account the concepts of religion, domination and patriarchy, that religions have defined women’s sexuality and developed a hegemonic analysis of it and that, as women acquire individual property rights and consumer power, religious restrictions are breaking down. He quotes Engels to say that until men and women have equal rights over property and the means of production men will emotionally exploit women, that infidelity is a power discourse and so on and so forth.

It is easy, however, to grasp the terminology of discourses prevalent in one’s times and to put forward those arguments as and when needed, but these arguments and terminology do not necessarily reflect the writer’s real intention or mind-set. At least as far as feminist discourse is concerned, one cannot assume a simple equivalence between the two. The mind-set moulded by patriarchal society sits enfolded in layer upon layer of theory and terminology, hidden behind many veils of pretension. But although our intellectual community cleverly surrounds itself with an elaborate façade of wisdom and open-mindedness in order to conceal its masculinist mentality, occasionally, in an unwary moment, the unconscious tears the veil and reveals itself.

This episode is a somewhat amusing example of poetic justice occurring in an unexpected way. I cannot help remembering that when I was editing the second special women’s issue of Hans, I postponed the publication of Rajendra Yadav’s essay, ‘Hona Sona Ek Khubsoorat Dushman ke Saath’ (To Be and to Sleep with a Beautiful Enemy), planning to publish it in the following month’s issue with other leftover materials from the special issue.³ My reason for postponing it was that its beguiling style was likely to derail the comparatively serious debate in the special issue.

Yadav’s essay took deliberate satirical aim at the male sensibility shaped by patriarchal society (not Yadav’s alone), and I intended to present it with a brief note placing it in the context of feminist discourse. However, Rajendraji did not have the patience to wait till the next issue and wanted the essay to appear at the same time as the special issue; so he gave it to Vibhuti Narain Rai, editor of Vartaman Sahitya. Rajendraji also wrote a brief foreword, humorously lamenting the injustice inflicted on him by the female editor in not publishing the piece in the special issue.

This came to the honourable editor of Vartaman Sahitya as an unexpected boon. He did not publish it in the next issue; in fact, he did not publish it for a whole year, nor would he comply with repeated requests to return it. When he did publish it a year later, it appeared without the context of the special women’s issue and without Rajendraji’s foreword which would have provided it with some sort of context. There was, of course, no question of my introductory note appearing with it. Instead, Vibhuti Narayan Rai wrote his own introductory note, loudly calling on the reader to witness Rajendra Yadav’s unhealthy and perverted sensibility.

Inevitably, Rai’s invitation resulted in the essay being read in a literal manner, ignoring its satirical intent, and for several months thereafter, dozens of newspapers and magazines devoted thousands of pages to cursing that sensibility of Rajendra Yadav’s which was (perhaps) not his but that of most men in our society and which he had voluntarily taken the risk of exposing. Starting with a masculinist sensibility, he himself had perhaps undertaken a long and arduous journey to arrive at this critical perspective. Many more men than women attacked him – those highly respectable, decent intellectuals of ours who are ever ready to spread a net of conformist arguments woven out of the latest conformist discourse in order to conceal their own reality until it gets exposed by some incident of poetic justice such as the present one.

So whether it is Rajendra or Rai, these are mere instances of names which, in different contexts, by acting as targets and inciting battle fervour, make feminist discourse (or any abstract discourse) concrete. In the heat and haste of the fray, some injustice may be done to individuals, but undoubtedly these are self-invited.

But a name is not just a name, and if a campaign is reduced to the demand for an apology from a particular person or his dismissal from his post, it may satisfy the thirst for personal revenge but cannot be considered a meaningful phase in the struggle. A struggle against the sensibility revealed in a name is a long, slow, painful process. The approval this sensibility receives in the name of tradition and convention can be combated in only one way – by maintaining an atmosphere of continual doubt and questioning within and around one, by not giving up a steadfastly prolonged anger, and by not becoming a compromiser even while making necessary compromises and keeping alive a collective understanding. Long struggles that continue over generations, struggles waged in one’s own home and backyard, long-drawn-out struggles waged with oneself, cannot be kept alive indefinitely without making necessary compromises in different phases and times, and cannot attain their goals without an awareness of constant transmission to the next generation.

A person who breaks away from this continuity at one stroke and exits its sphere may achieve individual empowerment but, as with this immediate episode, tradition keeps returning and encircling one. Increasing the numbers of such empowered persons, even at the individual level, and considering that continual increase one’s responsibility is a path of ‘gradual revolution’ and can be termed a new understanding of ‘the personal is political.’ And this is not something that can be accomplished at one stroke.

Faithful or Unfaithful? Autobiography has emerged as the literary genre of the discourse of selfhood. This discourse can be called the intellectual prelude to and literary expression of the politics of selfhood. Writing an autobiography is a special type of political act, a kind of disclosure that does not allow secrets to remain secret. Secrets are kept in cellars; they are the truths of society’s private parts, and are dangerous to reveal. Unfortunately, we tend to read autobiographies, especially women’s autobiographies, not as the disclosure of society’s hidden truths but as a dissection and evaluation of the writer’s personal character.

Certain centuries-old ready-made touchstones for character evaluation which have disappeared in much of the world, along with the era of chastity-belts and other such medieval instruments, are still used in Hindi-speaking society to evaluate women’s ‘good character’, a concept still synonymous with bodily purity, with the lessons of modesty and shame instilled in the cradle, with the vow of silence, and with keeping family matters within the family. These are the basic stipulations of the social contract that defines women’s lives. It is a woman’s responsibility to keep secret that which is secret. Her ‘honour’ is preserved therein and for honour her life is staked. This stake is her prison.

If it is woman’s honour that is at stake, why does masculinity feel threatened when a woman stops worrying about her ‘honour’ and steps out of prison? After all, it is her own story that she tells; it is she who risks everything and ‘loses’ her honour. Why then, even after unjustly punishing the woman, does man become obsessed with saving his own honour? Taslima Nasrin’s autobiography is an important example of the personal becoming the political, and the labelling of Hindi women writer’s autobiographies as ‘a grand celebration of infidelity’ is an example of the same phenomenon, albeit on a minor scale.

Actually, a story is never one person’s alone. Paradoxically, an autobiography is even less so: it is not just about the writer but about the writer’s contemporaries. Only after a couple of generations does it become a mere story.

Let us examine the real meaning of fidelity. In personal relations, a one-sided contract of fidelity produces a relation of master and dog: a relationship in which the one who surrenders only has permission to wag her/his tail. It is not as though without autobiographies there would be only fidelity in the world. Nor is it that there was no infidelity before society ‘provided more occasions for interaction among men and women because of urbanization, industrialization, increased access to education, and transforming values.’⁴ After all, since men have been writing stories of their sexual conquests for centuries, they must have had participating female and male partners.

Infidelity must indeed have commenced the very day when the spontaneous desire to couple was made permanent through the legal institution of marriage, and when an unreciprocal fidelity was demanded of women so as to guarantee the rights of progeny and property. Love and marriage and fidelity and infidelity – they all existed. Only women’s autobiographies did not exist. The woman’s perspective was missing.

The woman has now broken the social contract which ranged her against her own self in a conspiracy of silence forged in the name of modesty, propriety, and shame. So far, if that silence was broken, it was, on the one hand, through the unbridled amorous vitality of folk songs and, on the other, through the forbidden utterance of the names of her own body parts, of menstrual blood, of pregnancy and childbirth, of women’s diseases, undergarments, not to mention the names of injustices such as abuse and rape committed against her. When, in the span of a single generation, women began to discuss love affairs and infidelities in their autobiographies, they broke the contract of silence. This signifies the liberation of women’s consciousness, both from her own stranglehold and from male power.

The first step to empowerment is this liberation of consciousness – before even the liberation from social and familial security, economic dependence and other such fetters. This liberation means freeing oneself from man’s ability to ‘blackmail’. The one who reaches a decision to write her own story is not practising infidelity – she has, in fact, changed the recipient of her fidelity. The old definition of infidelity simply connotes an exchange between the lover and the husband. But now fidelity means fidelity to truth.

Man perhaps cannot even imagine the internal and external struggle a woman undergoes to achieve this courage to speak, this fearless expression not just of independent consciousness but also of commitment to truth. So I would say that however insufficient and weak our feminist discourse might be, and however few these autobiographies might be, the silences broken by them are certainly cause for our next grand celebration.

Slut – Not a Matter of One Word: There is no need to debate whether ‘slut’ means a prostitute or a debauched woman. It is clear that the word was used as an insult. The patriarchal mentality of Hindi-speaking society has only one measure for male-female relations: the bed. Though that is a fundamental material reality, the man-woman relation has now grown beyond the three by six, or even the six by six enclosure of the bed. Varied and multilayered partnerships and rivalries – intellectual, academic, professional, creative – have now become part of these relations. The sole meaning of emotional attachment is no longer physical attraction, nor is its sole destination the bed. The past hundred years of women’s liberation have brought about multifaceted developments in woman’s personalities. She now experiences the basic need for friendship, of multiple and diverse kinds. Professions are now as important for women as for men, not only for livelihood, but also for personal fulfilment. Writing is one such profession. In professional life, mutual dependence grows and camaraderie develops, ranging from the discussion of news and workplace headlines over cups of coffee, to ‘non-veg’ jokes, mutual teasing, laughter, even conversations about household problems.

Having spent two-thirds of my life as a teacher in a prominent women’s educational institution in the capital, I have seen this new woman from up close. Feminist discourse is the discourse of this woman. She finds the monogamy of love and marriage suffocating and its routine – including the bed – tiresome and boring. In this desert, the challenges, provocative intellectual exchanges and intimate jokes of the workplace revive her soul. For her, relations are governed not by monogamous desire but by companionship and friendship. But male mentality is still so limited that even the most open-minded man, the poet and writer who loudly curses the deformed thinking of other writers, cannot actually see past these limits. At most, instead of calling his friend a slut, he will magnanimously call her a girlfriend, ignoring the fact that in the Hindi world, a girlfriend is nothing but a slut.

In the world of writing, many generations are simultaneously active, and the difference of a few decades in age need not become a generational difference. Krishna Sobti, Manu Bhandari, Usha Priyamvada, Raji Seth, Jyotsana Milan, Mrinal Pande, Sudha Arora, Maitreyi Pushpa, Chitra Mudgal, Anamika, Jaya Jadwani, Pankhuri Rai, Pratyaksha, Kavita, Soni Singh are all contemporaries in a peculiar way. They may not all be feminists, but because of their independent personalities they embody a sharp attack on the roots of patriarchy and thus help us to realize the goals of feminism. If literature is a first-alert system for society, then Krishna Sobti may be considered a first-alert for Soni Singh.

Let me cite an observation made forty-five years ago by an old and now departed member of my family: ‘Only loose women have personalities.’ The context that provoked this comment was the following: his daughter-in-law, meeting her educated and talented sister-in-law (husband’s sister) some years after her marriage, sorrowfully remarked that the sister-in-law seemed to have lost her ‘personality’. In defence of his daughter, my relative questioned the very basis of a the woman’s personality. We don’t seem to have made much progress in forty-five years. It is still the case that the woman is idealized in her disempowerment. Adjectives such as ‘loose’ and ‘sluttish’ become means of disempowerment.

When the Red Fort was evacuated during the revolt of 1857, several women of the royal Mughal family were forced to adopt the oldest profession in the lanes of Chandni Chowk. They were called randi because at the time the word meant an upper class woman.⁵ The word that then signified class later came to signify a profession. It is not clear whether randi is identical with chhinal (slut) because randi definitely came to mean ‘whore’.

In this context, it makes sense to understand ‘slut’ or ‘whore’ as insults and to view the uproar of protest as a grand celebration, since the speaker’s aim was to insult. But let’s pause to consider. It may not be easy for us to swallow this, but after all prostitution too is a profession like any other. The illegal status of the slut keeps her oppressed, insecure and demeaned. Hers is the first stake in feminist discourse and in the struggle against oppression, and we must begin by transforming her name from a term of abuse to one of respect.

We know that such insults are the easiest and most effective weapons man uses to restrict and disempower woman. Even when equipped with the resolve of self-empowerment, engaged in breaking silences and challenging prohibitions through writing, still, somewhere in the depths of our subconscious, we measure ourselves by the touchstone of patriarchal sensibility. As though, obscurely, even today, modesty, propriety, silence, fidelity constitute a foundational social contract for woman, which man may invoke with a casual joke. There are times when it is essential to state that this is unbearable, especially when the speaker’s status renders his words authoritative.

But on the path to self-empowerment it is necessary to make one’s armour impermeable. Protest is essential. But even more essential is blunting such weapons. It is essential to restore to the whore, the slut, and the loose woman her dignity, because she is a courageous woman who has a right to respect. Also because we know that those who shake our inmost being by using such words against us may well tender an apology when it suits them, but they will not change. Even if they are silenced, they will continue in their way of thinking. Therefore, we ourselves must snatch from these abuses their abusive potential.

One day I will hear ‘loose woman’, ‘slut’, ‘whore’, or perhaps just ‘girlfriend’. They are all synonyms. In anger, I will say, ‘Are you thinking of your mother or of your sister?’ Then I will recognize the remnants of my own patriarchal sensibility. His mother or sister is also a woman. Better, I will laugh. Even better, I will turn and say, ‘Thanks for the compliment.’ One day. We await that day, which will inaugurate the third grand celebration of feminism.

Archana Varma

 

* Archana Varma is the author of several books, including Lauta Hai Vijeta, Kuchh Door Tak and Sthagit. She was Associate Editor of Hans and now works on the editorial board of Khandesh.

Footnotes:

1. The first half up to ‘This stake is her prison’ is translated by Vanita and the second half by Sawhney. Ruth Vanita is Professor, Liberal Studies, University of Montana; Simona Sawhney teaches Asian literature, intellectual history, and feminist thought at the University of Minnesota.

2. Translator’s note: Kathakram is a literary and cultural trimonthly, which also organizes an annual literary event.

3. Translator’s note: Rajendra Yadav, editor of the literary journal Hans, of which Archana Varma was associate editor for several decades.

4. Quoted from Rai’s interview.

5. Readers of late 18th and late 19th century Urdu/Hindi poetry are aware that randi was used in the sense of ‘woman’ at that time. Poets like Insha and Rangin use it to describe noblewomen who are friends of princesses. It acquired its modern meaning of ‘whore’ only in the later 19th century, when any woman who was not a wife and who interacted with men came to be viewed as a prostitute. (Ruth Vanita)