Seminar on
“Women’s
Voices in Indian Literature”
&
Launch
of
Silence
& Beyond: Shashi Deshpande’s Fiction
with a
Foreword by Professor Nibir K. Ghosh
ELSA: Celebrating 4th-Year Milestone
Saurabh Agarwal
“There is no insurmountable solitude. All
paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass
through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth
to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our
sorrowful song - but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most
ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of
believing in a common destiny.” – Pablo Neruda
It gives me great pleasure to highlight the
activities of English Literary Society of Agra known as ELSA which has become a
synonym for literary activity in the city of Agra. What ELSA has been trying to
do is bringing together the people who are connected to literature in one way
or the other, thus becoming a unique platform for the meeting of academicians
who have spent their considerable time imparting knowledge of literature and
readers in general. ELSA serves as immensely fertile place for the minds
willing to grow in each other’s company.
This journey of the discovery of the
pleasure associated with the written work began on 12th of March 2016 at Youth
Hostel, Agra. ELSA’s first meet was on the “Contemporary relevance of Rudyard
Kipling” whose 150th Birth Anniversary was celebrated under the banner of
English Literary Society of Agra. Since then
every month this group of literary enthusiasts has gathered under the banner of
ELSA and discussed the subjects of contemporary importance. Such discussions
have provided ample motivation for delving into the depths of literature and
explore multifarious terrains of experience. The meetings have also covered
something specific like “Women Empowerment,” “Literature and the Marginalised,”
“Literature and Literary Festivals: Issues and Concerns,” and as broad as
“Literature and Journalism.” ELSA members have discussed the revolutionary
texts when we took up “The Power of the Written Word." We have also explored the hilarious side of
literature with subject of Satire, Wit and Humour. It is when we discussed
“Literature as Resistance and Protest” we realised how all great Literature is
a means to challenge the status quo.
The discussions held here are packed with
quality for members give sufficient time and come prepared so make a meaningful
and diverse contribution. All this happens in a round-table format with the no hierarchies of any kind.
ELSA took a big leap when invitation of
presentation was extended to chosen people who are not resident of the city.
Several literary enthusiasts have made their contribution. Recently all the
activities along with the papers of the outstation participants are available
on the ELSA blog.
ELSA can take the credit of infusing the
desire in members to take up creative writing encouraging them to share their
writings on this platform. Consequently, members have written short stories and
poems.
Shashi Deshpande: Articulating Silence
Sanjay Kumar Misra
Shashi Deshpande is undoubtedly one of the most important
names in Indian English Writing. Although she resents being called a woman
novelist, the fact remains that she is one of the most eminent women writers from
India who have produced fiction in the contemporary times. Daughter of an
illustrious father, who was a writer, scholar and academic of Sanskrit and Kannada,
and spouse of a medical doctor, Deshpande took to writing when she became “restless
with being just a housewife and mother”. Fluent and proficient in several
languages like Sanskrit, Marathi and Kannada, she however, chose to write in
English.
Unlike most of the modern Indian English writers, she lives
and writes in India and her writing is not addressed to the audience in the
west. She is somewhat similar to R.K. Narayan in the simplicity and austerity
in her choice of subjects, portrayal of characters and narrative style. Her
narratives are woven around mundane life, daily human relations and most common
social and cultural structures women find themselves in. Her stories are
stories of middle and upper middle class well-educated women dueling with
orthodoxy and modernity in the urban ambience.
Let me here mention Deshpande’s two books of non-fiction to
lay focus on some of her thoughts which have obviously shaped and coloured her
fictional writing: 1. Writing from the Margin, published in 2003, contained her
essays and articles on various subjects; and 2. Listen to Me, published in
2018, is her autobiography in which she has candidly written about her identity
as a woman writer and the challenges of being a woman writer. The title of her
autobiography (‘Listen to me’) is significant because it overtly suggests that
she has probably failed to convey in her novels and stories what she attempted
to convey; hence, she is now writing in this non-fictional mode and she wants
everybody’s attention.
Deshpande
has never been comfortable with the tag of ‘women’s writer’. She writes in her
autobiography: “As with women, so with their writing. I consider it one of the
strange ironies of my writing life that, when I began writing, I wrote what was
in me, I wrote what came to me. And I did not think that I was writing about
women, that my writing came out of the lives of women. In time, however, I
became conscious that my writing was looked at in the same way that the women,
about whom I was writing, were. They, and their lives, were less important
because they were women. So, too, was my writing less important because of my
gender, and because of the gender of my main characters. I was not just a
writer, I was a woman writer, a woman writer who wrote about women.”
Like a
hardcore feminist, Deshpande recounts her experience of and motivation for
writing the story of Amba, Princess Kashi, which she modified and elaborated in
her own way under the influence of sociologist Irawati Karve’s interpretation
of the characters in The Mahabharata in her book Yuganta.
Deshpande writes: “ I remember my father often said there were only two heroes
in the Mahabharata: one, an old man, Bhishma, the patriarch of the Pandavas and
the Kauravas, and the other a boy, Abhimanyu, Arjuna’s young son. But Irawati
Karve read Bhishma’s character otherwise. To her, he was no hero, he was a man
who had been callous towards women. Not deliberately cruel, but worse –
indifferent to his own cruelty, almost unaware of it. Irawati lists the women
whose lives he ruined: Gandhari, Kunti, Madri and the princesses of Kashi –
Amba, Ambika and Ambalika.
After
reading Irawati Karve’s version of Bhishma, I wrote a story about Amba. A
spirited girl, Amba was in love with a prince, Salva, when she, with her two
sisters, was abducted by Bhishma to marry his sickly younger brother, King
Vichitravirya. When she told Bhishma about her love for Salva, he let her go.
But Salva refused to accept her. He had fought Bhishma after the abduction and
had been defeated by him. Amba, he said to her, now belonged to Bhishma. Hearing
of her love for Salva, Vichitravirya refused to marry her. In desperation, she
asked Bhishma to marry her. He refused, saying he had taken a vow of celibacy.
Three very honourable men indeed, but what about Amba? For her, there was
nothing left but disgrace. And so she killed herself.
In The
Mahabharata she was reborn as Shikhandi, the man/woman who was destined
to fatally injure Bhishma, because Bhishma would never fight with a woman, not
even a “half-woman”. This had no place in my story. In my story, Amba’s act of
killing herself was her final attempt to have some control over her own life. It
was with this story that I began to think of how words could mean entirely
different things to different people, how language had been shaped by men to
their needs, their ideas. It was a man’s idea of honour that made Bhishma
reject Amba when she asked him to marry her, and a man’s idea of honour that
made Salva reject her because he had been defeated by Bhishma.
When I
look back, I see that it has always been this concept of “honour” that led to
tragedies.
A man’s
idea of honour made King Dasharath give in to his wife Kaikeyi’s demand that
Rama be exiled, a man’s idea of honour that made Rama accept his father’s
diktat, a man’s idea of honour that made Yudhishtira agree to gambling with Shakuni,
which led to his losing himself, his brothers and his wife Draupadi in the
course of the game. The splendid resistance by Draupadi, which we girls had so
admired in school, was futile. A man had a right to do whatever he wanted with
his wife.”
Deshpande
also vents out her anger and absolute disregard for men’s biased and bigoted criticism
of women writers and their writing. She expresses her frustration and annoyance
in Listen to Me as follows: “I must have been naïve, indeed, not to
have expected this, not to understand that, since women were less important, so
was their writing, so was writing about them. From Dr Johnson, who compared a
woman’s preaching to a dog walking on its hind legs, to Nathaniel Hawthorne,
who spoke derisively of “a damned mob of scribbling women,” to Walter Scott,
who spoke slightingly, condescendingly, of the “calculating prudence” of
Austen’s heroines, and the Nobel Prize winner, Sir Vidia Naipaul, who spoke of
women’s sentimentality and narrow view of the world, there never has been a
shortage of males criticizing women’s writing.
And, of
course, there was the Donald Trump of American literature, Norman Mailer, who
said, “I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first
whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale.” (The implied comment, that the
only story written by women which he would find exciting was a story written
about women who provide men with sex, is very revealing!) He also said, “A good
novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls,” which a woman
critic called a “testicular definition of talent”! Enough women writers in the
USA took him on, but did it make any difference to the thinking, the attitudes,
I wonder. No, I am sure it didn’t.”
Almost
all her novels have been bold in choice of themes, situations and
characterization of women. Deshpande has given an interesting reason for her
choosing to write in English. She writes in one of the articles in Writing from
the Margin, “If there are problems about writing in English, there are plus
points as well. For women writers, specifically, writing in English gives an
element of freedom from taboos and conventions that bind women in their mother
tongue.”
Dr. Sanjay
Kumar Misra is Associate Professor in the Department of English at
RBS College, Agra
Women’s Voices in Indian Literature
Rajeev Khandelwal
From time immemorial India has
predominantly been a patriarchal society where a woman was considered good for
nothing when it came to doing something intellectual or artistic. No woman was
found worthy of education, thus going to school or reading and writing were not
something she was considered capable of. Her only work was to bring forth
children, rear them up and look after household work in silence and with
surrender. Operating with such background, it was inconceivable that women were
able to think, study or able to make decisions and thereby could express
themselves in the form of speech, poetry, story-telling, art etc.
In Modern India, reformers supported
female education, believing that social evils could be eliminated through the
education of the women. Literacy spread rapidly and women began to utilize the
power of the pen. It was important for the experiences of women under the
patriarchal influence to come out to the forefront and expose the undue cruelty
held on them by men. Indian women writers then gave a new dimension to Indian
literature, in that they vented their deep-seated feelings by way of art and
literature.
Now, coming to the topic in hand “Women’s
Voices in Indian Literature” – We must realize that the women had to break
through years of male dominance, taboos and beliefs that had heavily
impregnated the society. I can list at least 2 women writers who broke
their silence and wrote on subjects that were either considered bold or taboo
for their times. I’ll briefly refer to some prominent women writers in this
category.
Malati Bedekar (1905 – 2001)
was among the most prominent of feminist writers of her time in Marathi, who
also wrote under the pen name of Vibhavari Shirurkar. Her collection of short
stories (Kalyanche Nishwas) and a novel (Hindolyawar) written in the early 1930s
dealt with themes too bold for society of those times and created a huge storm
over the identity of the unknown author.
Ismat Chughtai (1915 – 1991)
was an Urdu writer who wrote both short stories and novels opting for literary
realism. She started writing in the 1930s, and her themes included middle-class
morality, female sexuality with a feminist perspective. Her short story
“Lihaaf” (“The Quilt”) was a pioneer in the theme of touching upon sexuality,
till then a tabooed subject in modern Indian literature. The story ventured
into the subject of female homosexuality, which attracted a court trial. The
author had to make an appearance and defend herself against charges of
“obscenity.” Ismat was a recipient of both literary and national awards and her
works were turned into well-known films too.
M.K. Indira (1917 – 1994)
was a distinguished Kannada writer whose education did not go beyond the
primary level. In her literary career of twenty-two years, she wrote
forty-eight novels, fifteen collections of short stories, one biography, a film
appreciation book, and an unfinished autobiography.
Amrita Pritam (1919 – 2005)
was the first eminent Punjabi writer, novelist and poet of twentieth-century
India. As a novelist, her most noted work was Pinjar (The Skeleton) (1950),
in which she created her memorable character, Puro, an epitome of violence
against women.
“It would be no exaggeration to say
that the best English fiction in the World is being written by the Indian women
writers or those of Indian origin”(1992:21-22).
Kamala Das (1934 – 2009)
was a leading Malayalam author as also an Indian English poet. She openly
introduced a generation to a subject that was taboo those days—she spoke on
topics like coming of age and sexual yearnings of a woman. Kamala’s writings
open a window into the intricacies of the female mind, thought process, her
tussles with the patriarchal setup to which she was bound, her quest for love,
and her acknowledgement of the body’s carnal desires.
Mahasweta Devi (1926 – 2016)
wrote in Bengali and became a voice of the downtrodden, dispossessed and
ignored population of India. Her seminal work, Hajar Churashir Maa,
became an acclaimed film, as did many of her other works.
I would like to state that Contemporary
women writers like, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra
Banerjee Divakaruni, Gita Mehta, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kamla Markandaya, Krishna
Udayasankar, Manju Kapur, Nayantara Sehgal, Ruth Prawar Jhabvala, Shashi
Deshpande, Shobha De, etc. have challenged the society via their writings for
metamorphosis of women’s status. They have made a distinct mark on the World
literary scene with their rich cultural heritage and skilled language control
and, as Anthony Spaeth has pointed out, they are making conscious efforts to
redefine English prose “with myths, humour or themes as vast as the
subcontinent.” Their work is marked by an impressive feel for language and
completely authentic presentation of contemporary India.
In the contemporary Indian Literary
scenario, Indian women writers have reflected the truth of Indian reality with
a high level of self-consciousness, and have written about the social,
philosophical and cultural issues of rape and sexual harassment of innocent
women in the contemporary Indian society. They have expressed the role and
position of woman through their writings and have enlightened literature with
its quality and vividness. They have excelled in the global literary standards
set by the post-colonial and postmodern writers and have drawn global attention
and have “come to stay as part of world literature.” All their major works have
enjoyed immense academic attention across the globe.
I Congratulate
ELSA for organizing this event to showcase women’s voices in the Indian
context. I also convey my heartiest felicitations to Dr. Santosh Kumar Singh
for his book, Silence and Beyond, that deals with the fiction of Shashi
Deshpande. I understand that in most of her novels she has document
the unspeakable horrors of women and how they are struggling to liberate
themselves from the fetters of patriarchy. She has depicted the anxiety,
loneliness and helplessness of women, the misery and distress of the
traditional Indian woman whose lot is mainly to suffer in silence while coming
to terms with domestic conflict, law and order situation, crime, violence and
plight of a successful educated woman and problems of being a woman. She has
portrayed in depth the meaning of being a woman in modern India. She speaks
of silence and surrender of women and would prefer women to break their
long silence.
Shri Rajeev Khandelwal is an entrepreneur and a noted Indian English poet with four major poetry collections to his credit.
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