Ms Militancy: Review in the Biblio

Ranjit Hoskote, reviewing Ms Militancy for Biblio writes:

In Meena Kandasamy’ s Ms Militancy, we encounter a series of self-dramatisations, each the result of an acute consciousness of having to address the pressures of perception that attend poets, women, and poets who happen to be women. Sometimes, this self-consciousness summons forth a generic response, cast in the approved form of resistance essayed by numerous women poets who draw on subversive mythic exemplars while affiliating themselves to heterodox woman saint-poets from the Bhakti teaching lineages.

In this spirit, Kandasamy writes ‘Should you take offence…’, which serves this collection as a Preface:

My Maariamma bays for blood.My Kali kills. My Draupadi strips. My Sita climbs on to a stranger’s lap. All my women militate. They brave bombs, they belittle kings…. Call me names if it comforts you. I no longer care. The scarlet letter is my monogram. (Ms Militancy, pp. 8-9)

Fortunately, there is a considerable current of surprise and elusiveness that does battle with the strain of predictability in Kandasamy’s poetry; even when she rehearses a well established choreography of feminist self-assertion, she does so with a sharp eye for detail, a grasp of worldly insight, and an appetite for phrasal shape-shifting. Her poetic personae— actors, commentators, drama queens, rebels—segue through history, cinema, television, myth and the venues of metropolitan culture.

Audio interview and poetry reading in OpenSpace

When I was in Montreal for the Blue Met Literary Festival, Veena Gokhale got talking to me about my writing and activism. This was one hell of an interview: we were recording it in my hotel room at 10 in the night, and then it went on till 11.30. I had not eaten anything, and was tired after two back-to-back readings in the evening. And yet, for all the fatigue, it was a great experience.

Listen to the three-part podcast on OpenSpaceIndia.

Special bits: I read Random Access Man (about the love triangle: Ram, Sita, Ravan), and Massacre of the Innocents (about the Gujarat genocide 2002).

This slut wants your silence broken

(This article of mine appeared in The Financial World, the Tehelka newspaper. Here’s the official link. It resulted in a lot of fanmail and Facebook-sharing, and of course, untrammelled rightwing rage on Twitter. Quite the expected response, but I am happy that I got people talking/thinking!)

Celebrating the loud, slutty sensibility
Or how, the militant assertion of female sexuality can change Indian men

A TORONTO police officer’s off-the-cuff misogynist remark – “Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised” – to York University students during a campus-safety briefing earlier this year triggered the first SlutWalk on April 3, and since then nearly 100 events have taken place, or, are being planned, globally to challenge the victim-blaming, sex-shaming attitude.

With slogans like “A dress is not a yes” and “We have had enough,” young women not only wear their riot-girl attitude in the open, they also go about reclaiming the word ‘slut’, declaring that irrespective of whether a woman enjoys sex for pleasure or work, it is never an invitation to violence. And since the corporate control over the mainstream media ensures that ‘sexy’ becomes visibile, SlutWalk is being heralded as the feminist revival of our times. Cheering the thousands of women who marched for the cause worldwide, feminist icon Germaine Greer spoke out in support of the defiant display of the right to be dirty, going so far as to suggest that “the rejection by women of compulsory cleansing of mind, body and soul is a necessary precondition of liberation”.

Women in the West are privileged enough to be loud and be heard, but the fight against street sexual harassment has been around for a long time in India. I can think of at least two young feminist initiatives – Blank Noise and Mend the Gap – that have campaigned against a prejudicial, protectionist mindset that provocative dressing leads to victimisation.

It is a known fact that beyond television and Twitter, laying claim to public spaces in central to every revolution. For instance, Brand MK Gandhi makes one immediately think of the Salt March to Dandi. A SlutWalk seamlessly fits into this fashion-forward formula. Given our inherent love of spectacle, how many Desi SlutWalks will have to be organised to break the shackles of silence around this everyday terror (that is ludicrously called ‘eve-teasing’ by the media and defined legally as ‘attempt to outrage a woman’s modesty’)?

In our context, merely fighting the manifestation of an evil will only provide a quick-fix reality-TV friendly solution that will not address, or attack, the disturbing root cause of the problem itself.

It is flawed logic to expect Indian men to not indulge in leching, leering, groping, harassing, molesting and raping women on the streets when they are seasoned wife-beaters at home. According to UN statistics, more than two-thirds of married Indian women have experienced domestic violence; when our homes are unsafe, it is impossible to imagine our streets will turn safe unless we address the fundamental assumption that men have a right to control women’s bodies.

While it is essential to foreground issues that require immediate attention, it is unwise to stick to a superficial approach that forgets the larger picture. I find that those who condemn honour killings and dowry deaths because it is the politically correct thing to do, rarely speak out against the system of arranged marriages that holds this nation to ransom through a preservation of caste and religious identities. They maintain a studied silence when it comes to the culture of impunity that gives caste-Hindu men the entitlement to rape and murder Dalit women at will.

SlutWalking might not save all or any of us. After all, the patterns of discrimination against women here is far more vicious, and is intricately entwined with the massive oppressive structure of caste. That is why,

in our country, when a man chooses to abuse a woman by calling her a whore or slut in any of the regional languages, he attaches a caste-epithet to the slur. Needless to say, such an epithet almost always carries a reference to one untouchable caste or another. We need a potent counter to this home-grown misogyny that we are warring against. We need to replace our meekness with some militancy, our servility with flamboyant or outrageous sexuality. We need to mix feminism with a message of caste annihilation.

Moreover, SlutWalkers are fighting against shame, because it is an oppressive tool in rape culture. But, here in India, a woman does not have to live long enough to be raped to learn its acid taste. It begins at birth when she is seen as the burden with a dowry tag. She does not have to wait to be shamed until she turns a slut. She does not have to wait until her endless sexual hunger sets the world on fire. She is shamed even before she has seen the light of day, when her sex is revealed in a shady scan, when she is not allowed to be born because she will grow up to be a woman. She is shamed when she joins a sisterhood of aborted girl children, 12 million in the past thirty years. She is shamed by deathly silence. She is shamed by us, the survivors who have not spoken out, either for her, or for ourselves.

Review of Ms Militancy in SAWNET by Champa Bilwakesh

Meena Kandasamy places gender and sexuality front and center in her collection of poems in the book Ms.Militancy. The title resonates with increasing volume as the work gradually, but surely, gets under the skin of the reader.

A set of poems in the collection draws a theme around the women saints of the Bhakti tradition, Karaikal Ammaiyar, Andal, and Mira. Separated by centuries, language, and geography, these women shared a common will. Evading marriage, they lived their lives outside the margins drawn for women. They roamed the streets, wrote poetry, sang and danced. Their lives and how they ended are not always clear to us but their poetry has become immortal. So erotic is the Nachiyar Thirumozhi that the fifteen year old Andal composed, that it has been suppressed in preference to the more acceptable, although still urgent in its appeal, the Thirupavai. Celebrated for their unwavering pursuit of the male gods, Shiva, Perumal, and Krishna, these women and their lives are still troubling enigmas today that deserve some unpacking.

And Kandasamy unpacks. In ways that are arresting and bold, she explodes the myths that have put the women saints, and thereby all women, in their place. With phrases that provoke she makes these saints merely human, who bleed and suffer and haunt. What drove these women to such sexual frenzy and the compulsion to scream it into their poetry?

Here is Andal sacrilegiously admiring herself in the garland meant for the deity, as retold by Kandasamy:

the guilt glazed love lay on Andal’s breasts.
thick and heavy as him.               

frightened with force
and locked away, she conjured him every night,
her empurumaan, her emperor-man.

recklessness on speed-dial, she became
a rape romantic. He, a bodice ripper.

Here is Karaikal Ammayar who went out naked in the world and walked on her hands all the way to the hills of Kailash. Blessed by Shiva she became a demon-goddess haunting cremation grounds.

i am a dead woman walking asylum corridors,
with faltering step, with felted, flying hair,
with hollowed cheeks that offset bulging eyes,
with welts on my wrists, with creasing skin,
with seizures of speech and song, with a single story
between my sobbing pendulous breasts.

And that story in her breast is the betrayal by her husband who, frightened by her “miracles,” abandons her stealthily and makes his life with another woman in another city.

Mira,
Lying on her back—waiting
To be full, filled and fulfilled—
Mira sings a siren-song
To summon Krishna.

The collection, Ms. Militancy, opens with the poem titled “A cunning stunt” played upon by the “man of words” who names her yoni and calls it the

“… seat,
abode, home, nest, lair, stable,
and he opens my legs wider
and shoves more and shoves
harder and I am torn apart
to contain the meanings of
family, race, stock, and caste
and form of existence
and station fixed by birth”

It is clear then that to combat this unseemly burden forced upon women, words need to be deployed by poets.

In her preface to the book, Meena Kandasamy finds catharsis in this act of retelling the myths in ways alternate to the traditional narrative Hindus have come to believe as the truth. It is a way to forgive, by “Twisting your story to the scariest extent allows me the liberty of trying to trust you.”

Here is Sita, “Princess-in-exile”:

“Scorned, she sought refuge in spirituality,
and was carried away by a new-age guru
with saffron clothes and caramel words.
Years later, her husband won her back
but by then, she was adept at walkouts,
she had perfected the vanishing act.”

One may wonder why resurrect these women from a dead past when we have other female role models, women so powerful they rock our world, our political destiny, commerce?

There are urgent and important reasons to question and destroy these myths that have grown around the women to silence their scream at the injustice of their condition and who went insane doing so. These myths cloak the horrible conditions that these ancient women endured in a gauzy and palatable saintliness, something to shape our sense of self around these idolized notions of womanhood that finally, and with certainty, cripple us. We still today murder girl babies and we prefer male fetuses; women bear their babies in unspeakable conditions, just like Sita did. India’s infant mortality rate is shameful.

This kind of alternate telling of myths has always been with us, transcending cultures and religions, and geography. In suffering we are all sisters. Every woman may need to make that journey by herself, if not to change the world, then to change her self. Kandasamy is only following on the conventions of marginalized women in rural India everywhere who have for a long time used Sita to voice their own sorrows and condition of powerlessness in poetry. Here is Nabaneeta Deb Sen in her essay in Manushi about the various alternate telling of the Ramayana:

“In the women’s retellings, the Brahminical Rama myth is blasted automatically though, probably, unwittingly. Here, Rama comes through as a harsh, uncaring and weak-willed husband, a far cry from the ideal man. The women do not mind calling him names such as pashanda or papisthi or directly attacking him by saying, “Rama, you’ve lost your mind” (“Ram, tomar buddhi hoilo nash“). This is possible because the women’s songs are outside the canon. Women’s Sita myth where Sita is a woman, flourishes only on the periphery. The male Sita myth where she is a devi, continues in the mainstream. In the women’s retelling, Sita is no rebel; she is still the yielding, suffering wife, but she speaks of her sufferings, of injustice, of loneliness and sorrow.”(from Lady Sings the Blues: When Women Retell the Ramayana, Manushi Issue 108)

But what is different in Kandasamy’s work is the way it hovers over the sexualization of spirituality in all these stories and episodes. While the other various subversive retelling are often hidden to us because of linguistic borders, this voice in English is confrontational and stark, and yet somehow speaks in all the languages of India.

There are other noteworthy poems in the collection that are political, that speak from a dalit stand and in solidarity with the struggles of the Sri Lankan Tamils. While these also stand out in the awesome beauty of their expression, the rhetoric is predictable in their thrust and lack the energy and spark in a deeply personal way that the feminist ones do. We can certainly look forward to more from Meena Kandasamy and to the way her writing matures.

More news

Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship: Right after the multi-sensory extravaganza that was Jaipur Literature Festival, I left to Canterbury, UK. So, since the 27th of January, I have been a writer-in-residence at the University of Kent. So far I have given a poetry reading, conducted a poetry workshop for the creative writing students, presented my paper on Iyothee Thassar, and also sat down to work on my novel. I’ll be here till mid-April.

Interview with The Wall Street Journal: Margherita Stancati of WSJ interviewed me when I was in Jaipur (asking me the kind of questions that is one cannot deal with auto-response) and here’s the link to the interview. She says of my work:

Ms Kandasamy’s woman, like female figures in a lot of feminist literature, makes unbridled sexuality the main weapon of her social militancy. One of Ms. Kandasamy’s top targets is Hindu society and in her poems she repeatedly goes back to Hindu and Tamil myths—which she seeks to debunk.

Sleeping Beauty on Indian Celluloid: Again, this has been a great year for my poetry. One of my new poems (and it is not in Ms Militancy) has just been published in the March issue of Caravan. This poem is a retelling of the classic fairy-tale, borrowing from Hindu mythology and Bollywood/Kollywood cinema narrative.

Don’t miss reading Caravan‘s Dalit-centric February issue with the lead story by S. Anand, Lighting Out for the Territory about Dalit literature in India today. He was kind enough to ask me for a little of my opinion, and generous enough to quote one of my poems in his piece. This poem Random Access Man, looks at the love-triangle involving Ram, Sita and Ravan and goes like this

His voice-balloons always came out
Empty as hiccups—He was not a husband
who shared his secrets. He was not a husband
who shared his spoonful either—on
cold nights he played Gandhi
to her waiting wife’s body.

Denial aroused desire and
lust rolled on her breasts,
lust rode her hips.

Read the rest in that article.

Speaking of poetry, for some reason One-eyed has become this favourite poem from Ms Militancy for a lot of people. For me, it was the only poem that totally drew from a real-life incident. It was excerpted in Mint Lounge.

Last but not the least, I did a really long and in-depth interview with the amazing Kavya Rajagopalan of Thamarai.com in which we spoke about the Hindu response to my poetry, the challenges one has to face as a woman writing about sexuality, my love affair with Tamil, and lot’s more.

Ms Militancy: Praise, Preface, and so on

PRAISE BY K. SATCHIDANANDAN

“Meena Kandasamy’s full-blooded and highly experimental poems challenge the dominant mode in contemporaray Indian poetry in English: status-quoist, de-politicised, neatly sterilized.These caustic poems with their black humour, sharp sarcasm, tart repartees, semantic puns and semiotic plays irritate, shock and  sting   the readers until they are provoked into rethinking the ‘time-honoured’ traditions and entrenched hierarchies at work in contemporary society.The poet stands myths and legends on their head to expose their regressive core. She  uses words, images and metaphors as tools of subversion, asserting, in the process, her caste, gender and regional identities while also transcending them through the shared spaces of her socio-aesthetic practice.She de-romanticises the world and de-mythifies religious and literary traditions by reappropriating the hegemonic language  in a heretical gesture of Promethean love for the dispossessed.The poet interrogates the tenets of a solipsistic modernism to create a counter-poetic community speech brimming with emancipatory energy.”

MY PREFACE

If you take offence . . .

You are the repressed Ram from whom I run away repeatedly. You are Indra busy causing bloodshed. You are Brahma fucking up my fates. You are Manu robbing me of my right to live and learn and choose. You are Sage Gautama turning your wife to stone. You are Adi Sankara driving me to death. You are all the men for whom I would never moan, never mourn. You are the conscience of this Hindu society.

Your myths put me in my place. Therefore, I take perverse pleasure in such deliberate paraphrase as these poems show.

I am no atheist—I allow everyone an existence. It is just that I struggle with any story that has stayed the same way for far too long. So, my Mahabharata moves to Las Vegas; my Ramayana is retold in three different ways. I am unconventional, but when I choose to, I can carry tradition. That is why I am Mira, Andal and Akka Mahadevi all at once, spreading myself out like a feast, inviting the gods to enter my womb. I am also Karaikkal Ammaiyar, suspected of infidelity for being ravishingly beautiful. Like each of these women, I have to write poetry to be heard, I have to turn insane to stay alive.

Telling my story another way lets me forgive you. Twisting your story to its scariest extent, allows me the liberty of trying to trust you. I work to not only get back at you, I actually fight to get back to myself. I do not write into patriarchy. My Maariamma bays for blood. My Kali kills. My Draupadi strips. My Sita climbs on to a stranger’s lap. All my women militate. They brave bombs, they belittle kings. They take on the sun, they take after me.

I choose my words, coarse as the conned Kannagi’s colourful curses, chaste as her breast that burnt down a capital city. This tongue allows me to resist rape, to rescue my dreams. My language is not man-made, it is beyond the white-hot seminal of your texts. My language is dark and dangerous and desperate in its eagerness to slaughter your myths. My lines are feverish with the heat of the bodies you banish in your Manusmriti and Kamasutra. Tamil woman that I am, I do not spare the ageist, classist, sexist Tholkappiyam either. The criticism that I embark on, like your codification and my cunt, is beyond all culture.

Call me names if it comforts you. I no longer care. The scarlet letter is my monogram. I sew it on everything I wear, I tattoo it into permanence. I strive to be a slut in a world where all sex is sinful. I strive to be a shrew in a society that believes in suffering in silence. I strive to be a sphinx: part-woman, part-lioness, armed with all the lethal riddles.

Come, unriddle me. But be warned: I never falter in a fight. And, far worse, I seduce shamelessly.

~~~~~

WHERE TO BUY THE BOOK ONLINE

Scholars Without Borders
It is INR 150, plus shipping.

I will upload a list of bookstores in Indian cities soon, I promise.
; )

Ms Militancy : My New Book

Second part of my interview in Thejas

Here is the second part of my interview (to M. Noushad) in the Malayalam fortnightly magazine THEJAS. A friend wrote in to say that the magazine has been published for the past 14 years, and that a majority of its readers are Dalits and Muslims. (-:

(I still haven’t read the first part, unable to find any Malayalam friends. Will read it soon. All that I can appreciate now is the layout and photographs based on which I have tagged this article)

My interview in the Malayalam fortnightly magazine Thejas

I cannot read Malayalam, but I am sure the thoughts in this interview are mine. All that I know is that the interviewer M Noushad asked me challenging questions that set me think, and it was not one of those run-of-the-mill how you started writing, who is your favourite author, what is your favourite colour kind of interviews. This one was different.

If you know Malayalam, click here to read the first part of my  interview in the Malayalam fortnightly magazine Thejas.

Handsome Men, Harems and Hate Propaganda: The Indian Imagination of Love Jihad

I was recently interviewed by Noushad, a journalist from Kerala and over the course of our conversation, he spoke to me about the creation of a clever propaganda around love jihad/ romeo jihad — accusations of Muslim men allegedly targeting Hindu / Christian women and converting them to Islam. He blamed both the media and the judiciary for creating this monster-myth. I would not go so far as to say that conversions take place to and from religious owing to marriages, but this particular instance clearly looked like Islamophobia to me.

After I was done talking to Noushad, and I heard about the various aspects of the case, I wondered, “Why is it that neither the Hindu-right, or the judiciary even address the question of men converting to Islam?” That must be happening too, wouldn’t it? If the conversion of women to Islam has “national ramifications” as the Karnataka High Court bench put it, doesn’t the conversion of men have the same ramifications? Why is there a silence when it comes to men, and why this gendered understanding of religion/ religious conversion? Or, does this arise from the idea that only women are to be controlled?

Another thing that perplexed me, was that the lobby which was talking about love jihad was being opposed and criticized mainly by Muslim organizations. As feminists, shouldn’t we be the first ones to take offence since such a campaign insults our intelligence, our ability to choose for ourselves? Doesn’t this interfere with our freedom and doesn’t this amount to state-control of sexuality (since these probes essentially look at inter-religious marriages), if not the state-control of a spiritual quest?

To cut a long story short, I wrote a few lines about it. Especially because I have this fear that after Kerala and Karnataka, Hindutva will talk about ‘love jihad’ in Tamil Nadu too.

~~~~ my article, first published in Offbeat, The Alternative ~~~~

To write about the religious identity of women, especially in the context of their apparent marginalisation within society, is an emotive issue. I could write about the burden of culture that is allocated to women, the moral policing that takes place in the name of tradition and God in order to control women’s choices, or the shoddy labeling and criticism that accompanies every instance of female empowerment. The patriarchal nature of religion has always turned away free-spirited women, so much so that it is automatically assumed that every feminist is anti-God. Breaking from convention, this article is about women who consciously choose to embrace a/another faith, adopt a different God, and the amusing reactions that follow. Since I am governed by word-counts, deadlines, and a tendency towards disturbing silenced spaces, this essay shall not touch upon anything other than “love jihad.”

Following habeas corpus petitions filed by their parents, two girls (Hindu, Christian) appeared before the High Court of Kerala in September 2009 along with their Muslim partners and declared that they had converted to Islam on their free will. Judge KT Shankaran—going against the tenets of the Indian Constitution which enshrines an individual’s freedom to practice religion- reverted the women (both of them majors) to the custody of their parents.

After three weeks, the same girls told the court that they had converted forcefully. Jacob Punnose, the Director General of Police filed an ambiguous report, which categorically denied the existence of love jihad, noting that no particular organisation “was actively involved in religious conversions” . The Union Home ministry’s report to the Kerala High Court also confirmed these findings. Justice Shankaran however was not convinced even then, and he suggested that the state government should consider framing special laws to counter romantic conversions. (another link)

Since paranoia never exists in singularity and bad examples are rigorously emulated, a Karnataka High Court Bench constituting Justice Sreedhar Rao and Justice Ravi Malimath followed in these footsteps when a distraught Selvaraj filed a petition seeking custody of his daughter Selja. She was made to stay with her parents and asked to prove that her conversion was voluntary and her marriage, a bonafide love-match. Although Selja Raj said in open court that she had chosen Islam out of her own choice and not out of any kind of coercion, the Karnataka HC Bench displayed its ability to think independently. The court raised “serious suspicion regarding the statements of the petitioner’s daughter” and observed that “the case has ramifications for national security.” The court ordered the police to investigate this since it believed that such religious conversions “raised questions of unlawful trafficking of girls and women in the state.”

Court-speak in India has come to resemble its monosyllable cousin, Hindutva hate-speech. Both of them fail to
respect women as rational beings capable of decision-making. Not only are women objectified as preys and victims in need of “saving”, but they are also infantilized. By linking religious identity with sexual politics, they succeed in making a strong argument against conversion.

Here are excerpts from two Hindutva websites:

The “Love Jihad” organisation provides their members with mobile phones, motor cycles, good clothing, etc. for more effective alluring of girls. This organisation makes use of boys belonging to a particular religious faith. They are taught how to lure girls coming from different religious persuasions. They have been ordered to leave those girls who do not fall into their “love trap” within two weeks. Further, the organisation orders their followers to marry within a short period of six months and have at least four children.

The same website links this with the pub attacks in Mangalore:

“Several Hindu “modern” college-going girls were found in a compromising position and dancing suggestively with Muslim boys. The Ram Sena people saved these stupid girls from becoming the breeding cows of Islam and joining some Muslim harem.”

Another excerpt from the Hindu Jagruti site:

Jihadi Romeos promise to marry unsuspecting young girls within 6 months if they convert to Islam and then dump these girls in conversion centers. These Romeos then go for their next prey. These girls are subject to various forms of torture for weeks in these centers. There is information that these girls are shipped to foreign countries after drugging them.

If the site is to be believed, not only the police but the CBI, RAW and Navy and Narcotics Bureau and every other department of the Indian Government must be working on this case. Within a single baseless paragraph, we see the disgraceful fall of the “unsuspecting” Hindu woman who has been loved, converted, dumped, tortured, drugged, shipped to Indian cities, shipped to foreign countries, and forced into prostitution.

Hindutva paranoia alone cannot be blamed—after all, such a demand does curry favour with sections who are wary of inter-religious unions because it prevents consolidation along caste and religious lines. The first organisations to launch a tirade against love jihad—Nair Service Society and Sri Narayana Dharmaparipalana Yogam—were caste-based in character. In November 2009, the Kerala Catholic Bishop Council’s Committee on Social Harmony and Vigilance also joined hands with Hindu extremist organizations to counter such an ‘Islamic threat.’ (another link) Its secretary Johny Kochuparambil, citing “reliable sources”, said that 4000 women had been converted in the last decade alone. This provided the necessary impetus for the Sree Ram Sena to launch a poster campaign against love jihad in Thiruvananthapuram.

Islamic organizations decry it as misinformation, but the long-term impact of such calculated propaganda could be disastrous. As a precursor to the genocidal, state sponsored pogroms in Gujarat 2002, Durga Vahini pamphlets detailed how “the Sita on the street was going to become an Ayesha or Fatima or Julia” and how she would be “seduced”, taken to “foreign nations and then killed.” Clearly, the purpose of such pamphlets goes beyond its brief. Durga Vahini, like most of religion forgets that irrespective of whether a woman chooses to call herself Sita or Ayesha or Fatima or Julia, she is at the receiving end of male domination.

Tamil investigative magazine Nakkheeran recently reported (4 May 2010) a story of two young Hindu women Satya and Sundari from the Chinna Avudayarkovil village converting to Islam. In spite of the girls’ version that they converted because they liked the religion, their Muslim employer Shiauddin was blamed for ‘brainwashing’ them. Though there is no love spin-off to the story, the local BJP leader blamed Muslim employers for systematically ‘targeting’ Hindu girls from economically weaker families. Expressing his ‘concern’ that such conversion logically leads to inter-religious marriages, he offers a simple solution – prevent Hindu girls from seeking employment and let them stay at home.

Women are the worst-hit in any case, having to endure greater repression, losing the right to earn, to make friends, to choose their life-partners. When they change their religion, they are perceived not merely as traitors to their families, but also terrorists to the nation.

As if the existing witch-hunting was not enough, this just adds another insensible, hate-filled dimension.

The Phoenixes of Banishment and Oppression (Article in The New Sunday Express, Feb.28)

Read the official, edited version here.

Recently I had the opportunity of reading Changiya Rukh : Against the Night, the first Punjabi Dalit autobiography that has been rendered into English. Changiya rukh means a chopped tree–a metaphor of mutilation and a symbolic image of enforced stunting–of something made small and inferior so that the others appear larger and superior—an excellent parallel to the position of the Dalits in this deeply divided society.

Balbir Madhopuri movingly describes rural poverty and the hunger in the dry, wintry months, the closely-knit relationships among the Ad Dharm community to which he belonged and the centrality of his 100-year-old grandmother in shaping the lives of not only her immediate family, but almost every women in that village. Burdened with the stigma of untouchability in the Jat heartland, he grows up to learn that tea is an inferior drink because only the lower castes drink it, whereas milk was the staple beverage of the upper-castes.

In Changiya Rukh, he documents the inner turmoil to which Dalits are reduced whenever they have to conceal their caste identity. We observe instances of how, sometimes, the Dalit people themselves internalize the view of caste-Hindu society and develop a feeling of inferiority. Simultaneously, Balbir reveals how he was so upset with his Hindu-sounding surname that he dropped it and instead took up the name of his birthplace Madhopur. By expunging one identity, and taking on another, he succeeds in rejecting an entire history of oppression.

He notes how neither the Communist movement, nor the movement for an independent Khalistan actually addressed the problems of the Dalits. The pleasures of discovering Communist  literature and writing revolutionary poems is short-lived since Balbir’s immediate task at hand is to take up a job and support his family. He moves to Delhi, and with his wife and children, struggles to even find a house since caste-Hindus are unwilling to rent their flats to a person whom they suspect is a Dalit. Modern literature is replete with instances of what it means to find ones home, and literary discussions are rife with the idea of returning home, but from a Dalit perspective, the stark reality associated with ‘home’ is managing to find accommodation.

Dalit autobiographies, since their first, stunning arrival on the literary terrain, address such divisive issues that refuse to go away.

Autobiographies are also the most prominent and marketable genre of Dalit literature today. The caste-Hindu elites’ interest in Dalit autobiographies spring not only from the fact that they satisfy the voyeuristic curiosity of the non-Dalits by documenting the lived experiences, but they also provide them the necessary guilt-trip. Om Prakash Valmiki’s Joothan dealt with the Bhangis in Uttar Pradesh, Sharankumar Limbale’s Akkarmashi portrayed life in rural Maharashtra, Vasant Moon’s Vasti (translated by Gail Omvedt as Growing Up Untouchable in India) spoke of life in an urban Dalit slum, and Kesharshivam’s Purnasatya highlighted the plight of Gujarati Dalits.

Narendra Jadhav’s memoir Outcaste probed what it meant to be an highly educated Dalit.The publication of Dalit autobiographies, coupled with their literary assertion has recast and revitalized the literatures of the regional languages.

Semi-fictional narratives like Bama’s Karukku and Sivakami’s Grip of Change recorded what it meant to be young Dalit women under the shadow of casteism. Urmila Pawar’s Aydaan (rendered into English as The Weave of My Life) is not merely testimony but also manifesto—seeking to locate the position of the Dalit woman within the stifling constructs of casteism and patriarchy without sensationalizing or romanticizing suffering.

Every narrative has unfailingly recorded how the rural structure is strict in its segregation: Dalit wadas/ cheris/ colonies/ bastis were all set away from the caste-Hindu village, a banishment that was brutal not only because of the geographic exclusion but also because of how easy it became for the oppressors to launch violent attacks on the Dalit people. These first-person life stories are a means of expressing angst and assertion, they reverberate with an experience of pain and discriminatory politics,  and they uniformly seek to exorcise the ghost of untouchability that has haunted their communities.

For a nation that loves to live in denial, such authentic narratives will hopefully lead to a greater engagement with understanding, and possibly, eradicating caste.

In today’s New Indian Express: my interview with Suniti Namjoshi

This is the unchopped longer version. Read the official interview on the paper’s website.

Famed for her subversive writing and outspokenness, poet and fabulist SUNITI NAMJOSHI took to writing prolifically for children a few years ago. During her recent visit to Chennai to launch the latest series of The Aditi Adventures, she spoke to MEENA KANDASAMY about fables and fairy tales, and the intricacies of writing for a young audience.

Q: Your book Feminist Fables is a classic because it retold and revised so many myths. What made you deal with myths?

A: The power of a myth is that it mutates—in the hand of a different poet, it is retold in a different form. Take the myth of Narcissus: for one poet it could be about the romanticism of falling in love with beauty, for another it could be Echo and her fate and her voicelessness. Since myths never mean one thing, all poets understand them and mutate them. Feminist Fables sought to question social assumptions and subvert the male-dominated literary tradition.

Q: Why do you choose to work with fables, given the fact that it is mostly a moralistic medium?

A: Yes, the fables are a didactic form. But more often than they preach something, they actually question something. Secondly, it can be a satirical form—satire doesn’t necessarily reinforce existing values—it can question social issues of a morality which can be damaging. Jonathan Swift was a satirist, but his savage and nasty satire was directed against the establishment. I think my choice of fables has to also do with the Indian tradition of story-telling.

Q:What made you take up writing for children, when the rest of your work is so politically charged? Isn’t writing for children a holy land where there are clear-cut definitions of right and wrong?

A: There are a lot of assumptions about what children’s books should be like. But, it is something that changes from age to age and society to society. There are people who believe that children should be protected. But take a look at the nursery rhymes—say, Ding dong bell, Pussy’s in the well—it is all about drowning a cat, it is so bloodthirsty. Or take a look at fairy-tales Little Red Riding Hood, there is so much of violence. Even the Grimm’s fairy-tales are no exception in that regard.

Q: How unique is the experience of writing for children? Are there any specific limits you set for yourself?

A: I have fallen into writing for children by accident. The first book I wrote was for my niece Aditi. Most of the children’s books at that time were certainly not Indian. Those stories did not make sense for our landscape, our tradition and our experience. My book was set in the countryside, and I put my own childhood into it. The book was not about a Jane or Jim or Lucy, it was about Aditi, it had her name on it.

The difference in my writing arises because I am much gentler when I write for children. My audience comprises of children under ten: not young adults or teenagers. I think writing can arm children with intellectual weapons—I want children to think for themselves and consider and reconsider what is being said. That’s why all the books are filled with speculations and questions which they can ask themselves.

Another difference between writing for children and writing for adults lies in the fact that grown-ups are expected to know several things—such as literary references or allusions—beforehand, but with children that’s not fair to have such an expectation. After all, children have less literary and life experience.

Q: In the Aditi series, the stories for children are set everywhere: in Prague and Hong Kong, in outer space, in cyberspace. How do you view the relationship between travel and writing?

A: Writing springs from experience. I have been to all the places, except of course the moons of Jupiter which figures in one of the stories. When you have been somewhere, there is something about that place which strikes your imagination. What helps with the writing is the right combination of intelligence and imagination.

Q; What’s your take on the standard “and they lived happily ever after” endings? Don’t you think it doesn’t prepare children for real life?

A: Children respond in several ways, and their only influence is not fairy tales where the good prosper and the wicked die. It is hard to say how much these fairy tales actually affect them.  Recently, I was addressing students of a popular school in Chennai, and I was telling them how I had to remove from one of my books an instance of an elephant stealing sugarcane because the publishers objected to it. But one boy in the audience told me, “But it happens in real life. So it can be there in the book.” That’s a major point he was making. In my opinion, children are really rooted in real life.

Interview with Hoshang Merchant: Published today in The Hindu’s Sunday Magazine

UNIVERSE OF VERSE
Read the official online version here.

One of the most daring and important voices of contemporary Indian poetry, Hoshang Merchant (b.1947) has published 20 books of poetry in 20 years from the Writer’s Workshop, Kolkota. Other notable books include Flower to Flame (Rupa, 1990), Yaraana: Gay Stories from India (Penguin, 1999), Forbidden Sex/Text (Routledge, 2009).

His translation of Jameela Nishat’s Urdu poems was published by Sahitya Akademi (2008). He is presently a Professor of Poetry and Gay Studies at the Hyderabad University where he has taught since 1987. He holds a Ph.D. (for his dissertation on Anais Nin) from Purdue University where he was one of the founders of Gay Liberation.

Travelling all over the world, he studied Buddhism at Dharmashala, and Sufism in Iran and Palestine. He was in Chennai recently to kick start the Poetry with Prakriti festival. Excerpts from an interview:

Can or should poets give interviews since the Buddha says there is no personality?

Yes, there is no personality. I’ll tell you my own example and of Miohaux (French). I thought to become a Buddhist; I danced instead but went back to poetry. Not Buddhist poetry, like the fourth Dalai Lama’s… I have few possessions, but I couldn’t be a Buddha because I thought too much to be some One.

Henri Michaux did not want his poetry canonised, he wouldn’t even allow himself to be photographed. He was happy the Dalai Lama saw his photo; “Now I am in the Dalai Lama’s mind.” As he lay dying, he talked to his nurse of travel. When she started to give him oxygen, “No! Let me keep travelling,” he said.

What is the aim of your poetry?

Even gay poetry’s aim is NOT to change legislation. “To come out into an objectless view/Which is the true aim of all poetry,” is a definition I use in my poems. “Objectless” does not mean “not objective,” because anyway the lyric is a subjective art.

It means that poets have no axes to grind. Their objective is the poem itself. However we poets have to ‘abstract’ our experience to fit it to the reader’s experience. We all share the same space/time. Some great poets make their own space and their times. It comes as a surprise to know Whitman, Melville and Dickinson were gay. We do not know them as gay poems but as Transcendentalists even after 150 years. This transcendence is a poem.

To paraphrase Dickinson “to make a prairie/It takes fancy, a clover and a bee/Fancy alone will do/If bees are few.”

Why do you equate Dalits with gays?

Because gays, like women, are gender-Dalits. Also, there are gay Dalits who refuse to be identified for social reasons. Both are oppressed groups. I understand forms of oppression differ. But oppression is oppression. For politics we need coalitions (not only LGBT but also women and Dalits). Gays have to stop oppressing women. Some women who oppress gays have to stop doing that. Ditto for Dalits. To divide minorities and prevent them from coming together in a common platform is just another male heterosexists’ ploy to preserve their power.

My struggle is unimportant unless it also opens up a possibility for generalised liberation and living.

Are you before your time for India?

No! The poet is always of his/her time. It is the others who are behind.

Is writing a political act?

No. But if you say you’re not political that means you side with the establishment. If you want to change your heart, mind and body then that’s politics.To say sex is a private matter is to pretend sex is about love only and not also an exploitative.

Why do you travel so much?

I travel to get new identities. And to write about them. It is how kids ‘enjoy getting lost’. It reminds me that personality is not solid. In a new land people don’t know you, you can become whatever you want!

What is the audience reaction to you? How does your audacity sit with them?

Mine is not a moral universe. But it is a formally beautiful universe of verse. If I affront them I also beg their indulgence. And, mostly, I get it!

Markers of Marriage (Cross-posted from Ultra Violet)

This is what happens when you are stuck with thesis-writing!
Articles that have been pending for ages write themselves..

RECENTLY, I PARTICIPATED in the launch function of a documentary film Pottu about the hardships and social humiliation faced by widows and deserted women in Tamil Nadu. Produced by the Kalangarai Trust which works among the widows in the southern district of Nagappattinam (particularly in Vedaranyam, Sirkaali and Poompuhaar), the 50-minute documentary attempts to describe the torture that widows are forced to undergo in the name of tradition. The documentary started off with a young girl’s story: the gaudy ceremony surrounding puberty, her early marriage (to prevent the chance of the family name getting “spoiled” if she were to be left “free”), the dowry that her parents are forced to pay, the hard work that she is forced to do in her husband’s home, his alcoholism and domestic violence, his death and finally, her enforced widowhood. Although Pottu seemed to make of every cinematic cliché, some issues highlighted by the documentary deserve to be taken up for debate.

Bangle-breaking ceremonies (where all the symbols of marriage: the red kumkum mark (pottu), the thaali (mangalsutra) are removed) are notoriously common in Tamil Nadu’s southern villages. In fact, these ceremonies are conducted before dawn, when even the gods are supposedly sleeping, because such a merciless sight is capable of disturbing even them.

Not only is a woman forced to undergo emotional agony because of her husband’s absence, but she is also forced to face social humiliation. The things that society puts forward as symbols of femininity and desirability are snatched away overnight. Widows are systematically kept out of social functions (celebration of menarche or marriage), they are stigmatized and heaped with abuse and they are denied all decision making at the family level. They are also denied civil rights–commonly-held beliefs discriminate widows by virtue of their being considered “inauspicious”. Tamil proverbs say that to see a widow early in the morning effectively ruins a day, and so on.

Yesterday, the women who were the driving force behind the documentary Pottu, got together and announced that soon they would be hosting the first international conference of widows, destitute and deserted women. They have two demands: laws to prosecute people who abuse widows in degrading terms and social, economic, legal rehabilitation for the widows.

There are several reasons why such a project has emerged from Tamil Nadu. According to a statistics by the Kalangarai Trust approximately 10% of the households in the state are headed by widows, and that 24% of the widows live alone. Majority of the widows are mothers of the head of the household. Their study also shows that the highest concentration of widows (8.06% of the general population) in Tamil Nadu arises from two categories of widows particular to the southern-coastal districts of the state: Tsunami widows and widows of men who have succumbed to HIV/AIDS. A large number of them work as daily wage labourers.

Tamil widows face a particular problem because of the manner in which their language subjugates them. The English word widow has an equivalent masculine form widower (which might carry fewer negative connotations may be, but at least a word exists). There’s no equivalent masculine form for the word vidhavai (widow) in Tamil. On the other hand, in popular practice, a just-widowed man is humorously referred to as the pudhu maapillai (new bridegroom)–perhaps enshrining the fact that he would soon be married to someone.

Widowhood is also becoming a problem that cuts across cultures. No longer are Hindu widows alone subjected to such torment. Even a religion like Islam, where there’s no bar on widow remarriage, is being influenced by local practices. At the documentary release function, a Muslim woman lamented how her own community was now following these meaningless practices which has historically plagued the Hindu religion.

The efforts of William Benetick and Raja Rammohun Roy put an end to the Sati system in 1829. The Widow Remarriage Act was passed in 1856. Another hundred years later, the Child Marriage Restraint Act came into place. Every reformer and every revolutionary on the Indian soil has voiced about the condition of widows: Phule opened a home for widows and abandoned children, Dr. Ambedkar traced the roots of the sati system in the necessity to maintain/preserve the endogamous caste structure, Periyar argued for widow remarriage. Even a middle-of-the-road traditionalist reformer like Gandhi condemned the practice of widowhood in no uncertain terms. Pandita Ramabai became an icon by speaking out against the heinous nature of imposed widowhood.

Today, as women fight against gender injustice and social indignity, they are forced to confront several challenges: how to oppose cultural facets that alienate widows, how to create alternative cultural symbols that don’t differentiate between women, how to develop a policy framework not only for widows but also for single women in India and especially how to fight against a hypocritical system where the oppressor is not someone from the outside, but one’s own blood, one’s own family? Perhaps this is one area where there is no dearth of Hindi/Tamil films that describe the plight, but there is a paucity of public debate and discussion.

(p.s.: Women members of this organization demanded (rightfully of course) that they should be allowed to wear bangles, wear flowers, and above all, wear the pottu. However, every ‘invited’ speaker pointed out that all women should unite to throw away the markers of marriage and/or femininity such as the bangles/flowers/pottu/thaali and so on? All of us might agree that these are decisions which women should take as individuals, and not just as a category, but then, what’s your take on this?)

The lunatic, the lover and the poet

I will not do a lot of theorizing, but instead just share an excerpt from a text which rankled me quite a bit. I was reading this journal article, it even had a good title (Every Poem Breaks a Silence That Had to be Overcome: The Therapeutic Power of Poetry Writing), but this particular idea was hard to handle. 

Poetry writing is particularly appropriate for the depressed, the anxious, or those suffering from certain illnesses, physical or psychological. [... in this she speaks about an anthology of poetry by people with psychiatric problems...] The poet-editors of this anthology refer to research which says that “poets are thirty times more likely to undergo a depressive illness than the rest of the population.” It is beyond the scope of this paper to address whether this means that poetry drives us insane or that a very large number of mentally ill people turn to poetry writing; but I would incline towards the latter. This is an under-researched area which deserves more scrutiny. 

Emphasis mine. I have nothing against mental illness, insanity, or madness. Personally. But if it is going to be associated with poetry, that sort of prolonged linking will certainly cause potentially damaging stereotypes. In the manner in which poets are viewed. Eccentric, alright. But, disturbed? May be. But research of this kind, which tries to bracket a profession/ artistic endeavour with insanity is quite over-the-top in my opinion. 

Next time, if somebody suggests that I have” bipolar disorder,” (or some other medical jargon that I often keep hearing) I am going to try and find out if they are aware of the fact that I am a poet! ; )

Despite all my cribbing, some part of me knows how easy, and how escapist madness is. Given the fact that we are living in such troubled times. . .  Last week, I was talking to a colleague and she quoted Shakespeare’s lines “The lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact” and I told her, “ma’am what happens if someone happens to be a lunatic and a lover and a poet–and far worse, that someone is me!” (I am pretty sure of the lover and the poet bits. Lunatic? Well, not yet, at least!!)

What else?

Hey, I am feeling a bit guilty about bloggin after so long. And there’s so much I want to write about: the BSP in Tamil Nadu, Antulay’s right to raise doubts, my visit to Hyderabad, and even my new year resolutions. I will save that up for a later post coz it’s 2 a.m. here.