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.
; )

Brave New Voices Poetry Slam at Madurai

The US Consulate General Chennai and Fatima College, Madurai organized a Brave New Voices of Madurai Poetry Slam on the 30th September. I was a featured poet, as well as a judge at the slam. What moved me was the quality of poems in Tamil, and how young people were using poetry essentially as a vehicle of protest and political expression. Monica, the girl who walked away with the first prize, performed her poem on the witch-hunt of adivasi people who were branded Maoists; Benjamin who won the Judge’s Special Mention had a poem on how religion divides people and Muthu, the guy who won the audience favourite prize read a poem on how everything is for sale in our world. I was really stunned and I just admired the students. There could be so much they can write about. But the fact that they choose to write about some of the ills that plague our society really sets them apart. The poems in English were a little bit disappointing, not in terms of presentation, but in terms of content (most of them were on mother/friendship/love).

The other featured poets were Thamilmuthalvan and Ranganayaki. For pictures of the event, view my facebook album.

Sorry for this post which sounds as if I was writing it in shorthand. I am travelling again tomorrow, and I don’t have a lot of time to wax eloquent.

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.

Interview with Leela Samson and review of her book on Rukmini Devi in today’s New Indian Express

PORTRAIT OF A REVOLUTIONARY (Read the official online version here)

Rukmini Devi always stood out: as a child who spoke up against corporal punishment, a large-eyed girl with a long line of admirers, and as somebody who silently def­ied social conventions. Leela Samson’s biography of the dancer and social activist brings out her radical side as well.

Rukmini’s childhood was shaped by her father who disapproved of crudity and lewdness, a Brahmin attracted to Buddhism, a traditionalist who sympathised with women who suffered from Hindu orthodoxy. He pledged his support to social reform and that led to his association with the Theosophical Society.

Samson revisits this period gracefully in Rukmini Devi: A Life, pointing out not just the highlights of the Society, but also telling the reader about the controversies that the fledging movement had to face on foreign soil. The social activism and intervention of the Theosophists — in diverse ways, such as taking up the cause of labour unions and textile workers or providing education to the depressed classes — is brought out diligently. Likewise, she takes pains to tell in parallel the story of J Krishnamurthy — his indoctrination, involvement and later estrangement from the Theosophists.

Her father’s deep connections with the Theosophical Society led to a love affair and, in a move that shocked traditionalists and scandalised liberals, 16-year-old Rukmini married 41-year-old George Sydney Arund­ale, an English aristocrat and vital figure among Theosophists. Severely critici­sed by the newspapers of the day, the storm over such a cross-cultural marriage subsi­ded over time, and Rukmini and Arundale soon went to work for Annie Besant at Adyar.

A European tour shortly thereafter altered their lives irrevocably. At 22, she accompanied her husband to Australia, where he was general secretary of its unit of the Theosophical Society. She travelled with him all over Europe and the United States. Back in India, she was consecrated as Rukmini Devi by Annie Besant.

Her long-term association with Anna Pavlova kindled her interest in dance. In 1932, for the first time, Rukmini watched the Pandanallur sisters perform. She fell in love with it, and she yearned to learn it too.

Refused the tutelage of the dance-doyen Meenakshisundaram Pillai at first, she began learning form from Gowri Ammal, a devadasi who served in the Kapaleshwar temple. Later, convinced of her genuine commitment, Meenakshisundaram came to Chennai to teach Rukmini. She became the first Brahmin woman to learn the Sadir, even as members of her community had signed and circulated a pledge never to witness a Sadir performance and also discourage others from doing so.

Rukmini Devi gave her first public performance in 1935, hardly two years after she had started learning. Two years later, she had established an academy to teach dance with just ‘one tree, one pupil and one tea­cher’, which is Kalakshetra, one of India’s premier dance-schools.

She was a revolutionary woman: in her first performance at the Natarajar temple in Chidambaram she chose to dance Varugalaamo ayya, a composition identifying with Dalit devotee-martyr Nandanar who was killed in his day for seeking entry into the portals of the same temple.

Samson’s devotion to history ensures that Chennai — with its political climate, cultural heritage and zeal for reform — comes across as another character in Rukmini Devi’s life. She tracks the story of how Rukmini Devi single-handedly strengthened Kalakshetra after a fallout with the Theosophical Society. These anecdotes of how she struggled through the litigation, or how she silently managed cancer, bring out her susceptible, human side.

~~~~

INTERVIEW WITH LEELA SAMSON

You outline hardly half-a-dozen insta­nces of having personally interacted with Rukmini Devi. Why did you push yourself into the shadows? Isn’t it unusual for a biography?

It is an obvious answer for anybody who knew Rukmini Devi. With a personality like her, you are in the shadows. She was a powerful individual, a complete person. There was a sizeable age difference between us; besides, she was a guru and I was a shishya, actually quite low in the hierarchy of shishyas. Writing about a guru is not easy, and when the guru is someone like Rukmini Devi, it becomes very difficult. When you write about a life that encompasses so many things, you really don’t have space for anybody else.

Rukmini Devi was a strong and radical woman; so, how difficult was it for you to also write about her vulnerability?

I think one has to face reality. She had her weak moments. All of us are human, nobody is a saint. She was not a good judge of people and often entrusted the wrong person with the job. On the other hand, for the kind of work she was doing, it was all right to have one or many faults, since the work was so much more important than anything else.

You don’t let the controversies between the Theosophical Society and Rukmini Devi turn into a mudslinging match. What helped you in this concise and eloquent choreography of the text?

I don’t think it was a mudslinging match, but there was a lot of bad blood over it. She wasn’t always right. You could even say she was legally wrong. This was her baby, she created it, she put down every stone — how could anybody come and take it away from her? That was the sentiment that guided her.

There was no guidance on what I chose to reveal, I went by instinct. I am not a confrontationist, but I say what has to be said even if it is not palatable. I spent a lot of time with both sides of the story and I feel that she should have been advi­sed correctly through that. After all, artists are vulnerable.

Rukmini Devi is this true renaissance woman, an activist who took up social concerns that lay outside of dance. As her disciple, and as director of Kala­kshetra, what do you think is the role that artists can play in today’s fragmented society?

The problem with being an artist is that you spend so much time correcting form, in becoming that perfect artist who can survive the market and say something with an element of truth. You don’t have time not just for society but also for yourself, for family, for a good marriage. Some people negotiate, but there’s an element of sacrifice. I know many artists who are activists inside. I think an artist can influence hugely. As an artist who has put her career on the backburner and made the institution my priority, I reach out to society. Making connections bet­ween all kinds of artists, bringing the sense of beauty of life into the lives of those who work and live on campus, these are things which ensure that art is taken to a larger spectrum.

You lament the fact that Rukmini Devi’s works haven’t been properly archived; what do you feel about the preservation of history?

We don’t have a sense of history in our country. Any other country would have written copious biographies. One of the things I have taken up very seriously is that we have to get the history of the institute and Rukmini Devi documented. We are about to start a museum — the history of Bharatanayam will run concurrently to her life because that century encompassed the struggle and the renaissance leading to the development of the dance form by Rukmini.

Everyone knows Rukmini Devi remo­ved the erotic in her effort to sanitise Bharatanatyam, but you speak of how she worked against narastuti (the deification of individual patrons). Your biography doesn’t quite sing her praises, right?

If I did that, it would belittle her a little. She was very private. She never praised us if we danced well. It was never her way.

Your experience with writing this book?

I would rather do a kutcheri. There, I at least know what I have to do.

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?)

Book Review: Family Values by Abha Dawesar

(Both this review, and the following interview with the author were first published in i.witness, The New Sunday Express last Sunday)

SOME HOME TRUTHS ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS

With a plucky, precocious little boy as its protagonist, Family Values delivers some home truths about the illnesses that pervade Indian society. Narrated from the point of view of a child living a queasy, claustrophobic existence in an one-room house where his doctor parents practice, it simultaneously exposes the feuds that run within an urban family, and fraudulence that runs through the country’s administrative machinery.

Even as the little boy strives hard to strike friends at school and struggles for space in his home, he finds himself lost in the large-scale drama that enters his lacklustre life. His parents plan to expand their practice by buying a new clinic, so they drag him along on their visits to bank managers, lawyers, policemen, architects and astrologers.

Soon, the boy (who has so far entertained others only by names-dropping clinical conditions and talking about female monthlies) starts coming up with some shrewd observations. Meanwhile, there’s plenty going on in their extended family: his paternal uncles Psoriasis, Paget, Sugar Mills, Six Fingers, Poop and aunts Self-Sacrificing Sister and Pariah set out to find a bridegroom for his cousin briefly setting aside their squabbles for a share in grandfather’s property.

The novelist has painted a doomed story of sons who turn against their own fathers and grandsons who go astray choosing guilty pleasures — Sugar Mills’ son Flunkie Junkie is on the road to ruin with his drug addiction, Six Fingers’ son is a local hoodlum. Interspersed with this narrative are disturbing stories of missing children and multiple organ-theft at the Milkwoman’s nearby slum, the kidnap of an industrialist’s kid at the boy’s school and several instances of the police brutalising the poor.

In the risky intersections where the individual-and-the-particular meets the universal, we learn of a model-bartender being shot to death in a shady pub owned by an arms-dealer who has links to the ruling family who use their influence with the police to get the children-eating cannibals of a Delhi suburb get away scot free.

The boy’s family can’t condone these clu­msy happenings not only because it is all over the papers, but also because this arms dealer in question is the illegitimate father of the boy’s female cousin who is getting married. It is a mean and miserable world alright, but Abha Dawesar shows us that it is a small world too.

Unlike the characters who bear weird nicknames, the capital city, its streets and its suburbs are left unnamed and the author succeeds in her refusal to be specific. However, the novel’s monotonous and sparse prose style is capable of eclipsing the meticulous effort that has gone into producing it. One has to acknowledge that the slack-and-straightforward storyline, and the many stylistic innovations, successfully serve to maintain a small boy’s point-of-view.

This novel may take a great deal of time to read but to the novelist’s credit, forgetting its insolent (or in other cases, innocent) character-cast will take even longer.

In a society where it’s taboo to talk ill of family and an act of transgression to question its role as an institution of economic and emotional exploitation, Dawesar has displayed enormous gumption in spilling the beans about this constantly glorified system. Her clear and compelling voice will provoke any reader to have a fresh look at the so-called “family values” that are zealously upheld, but never lived up to.

INTERVIEW WITH ABHA DAWESAR

Why are men, women and children in your novel identified only by their quirks, deformities or excesses? For a novel where everything has been penned down in microscopic detail, why this decision to name no names, but only stick to epithets?

The first few pages came out that way and it made intrinsic sense to me. The boy is exposed to the adult entourage of his parents but he doesn’t necessarily know a lot about the individuals who are familiar to him. At least not in the sense that adults know about one another; instead he has an impression of them based on a fact or a characteristic he’s heard of. Once I decided to name the characters this way, it would have been jarring to have the city or its streets named either. The other day one of my cousins told me that his son refers to me as Macy’s bua because the last time they were in NY we had been to the department store and that’s stuck with him. It’s the way one looks at the world at that age. The microscopic details goes with the book, I don’t think that the book could hang together without them.

The story is seen from the point of view of a small boy. It is written in the present tense (which is too tiring at times). It shies away from using quotation marks, or dates. Much of the story actually revolves around the use of the family toilet, and personal histories are often little more than medical conditions. Why did you choose to deliberately overthrow aesthetic considerations?

There is a rigorous anti-aesthetic that informs every page of the book. It is the only kind of style that makes sense for the book. In all my work, style and content have been very closely wrapped together because I don’t separate form and content. The humour in the book too is very measured. It would have been possible and even easy to write this same story with a splash of colour that made it all entertaining and palatable and let the reader and the writer glibly sidestep any inconvenient questions that arose about the nature of our complicity in this system. That’s not the kind of book I wanted to write. The exigencies of writing in the present tense were a challenge as were the lack of quotation marks. Since neither was intended to be confusing I had to work through several drafts of the book. I learned a lot more about writing from this book than from all my other novels put together though many readers who were attracted to the more classic style of That Summer in Paris might find Family Values distilled and stark in comparison. But the book, not just in its content but also through the way it is written demands pause.

Babyji, about a desi Lolita, was so different in tone and theme compared to‚ Family Values. Why did you choose such a conventional storyline for your fourth book?

I disagree. The other day one of my editors in Delhi said Family Values was more subversive than any of my other books and I think he is right. It is an unflattering portrait of ourselves and asks about what is broken in our world. On another note, I think Family Values is as visceral as Babyji was sensual; I am talking here about disease and health in which are metaphors for the illness and health of our society but which are treated close to the ground and pinned to the flesh.

Sometimes the family is portrayed as a bunch of scheming siblings, at other times, it is the only saving grace and support system. As a woman, and as a writer, what is your opinion on the institution of family?

I think we are in the habit of glorifying the institution all too easily and as a writer my job is to burrow underneath the convenient notions of family values we like to pay lip service to. Family can be claustrophobic and it can stifle the personal desires of its individuals. It can also step up to support an individual in times of distress. There is a constant tension between these roles and we see the boy’s parents, the doctors negotiating these tensions. There is also another consequence of family ties that is deeply buried in the book the love of one’s own has consequences for a nation and its health. It is the root of partiality and nepotism and therefore injustice; the boy’s mother tells him this. Both the other boys in the family, Flunkie Junkie and Cousin are protected by their parents when they do wrong things.

The large-scale effect of this sort of partiality is to promote injustice and contribute to the larger scale problems we see in the book.

The fictionalised accounts of the Nithari killings, the model-bartender being shot to death, the arms deal scandal: events that have rocked the national capital dictate the fate of the boy’s family. Why did you take the decision to play with history and therefore flatten out the timeline of these events to fit just a few years in the boy’s life?

To an extent these events have become types of events, events we probably have seen before the ones this particular book is echoing and some of which we might see again in some form. The corruption scandals, I think no one needs convincing, are repetitive though they may repeat on larger or smaller scales, in state capitals or the national one. The time scale is fictionalised because the book is a work of fiction and as a novelist I am not interested in writing a journalistic account of the events but rather hearkening to what is in our common national consciousness. All that said, the nature of the horror and the injustice in the book are real. That, much to our shame, is not fictional.

Menstruating Goddesses

Published on Ultra Violet

When it was announced recently that the first batch of non-Brahmin students were being ordained for priesthood in Tamil Nadu, it was a great reason to cheer and celebrate that priesthood has been “officially” thrown open to all the castes and that Brahmin exclusivism was set to break (at least theoretically). But, what is disappointing is that all women are denied this right and there is no talk in Tamil Nadu of any legislation, anywhere in the near future, to grant them the right to officiate as priests.

I could branch off into a tangent, right now, right here, and talk about how women are being systematically treated as a caste, and how that in turn leads them to being denied equal rights, being treated as untouchables, being discriminated against. And this, despite the obvious fact that women don’t form a homogenuous category except on the basis of their sex, and that not all women are equally disadvantaged. But I will refrain from my urge to track the caste-patriarchy nexus, not because it doesn’t exist, but because the phenomenon of depriving women the right to become priests is a disease that has infested most of the world’s religions.

Religions, whether Abrahamic  (Judaism, Islam, Christianity) or Eastern (such as Hinduism) consider a woman to be in a “fallen state” during her periods. Whereas, religions which grew as a response against caste—which encoded the concepts of purity and pollution—such as Buddhism and Sikhism condemn the practice of considering women as “impure” while they were menstruating.  

This ancient issue of impurity during menstruation has ensured that women in the reproductive age group are barred from the Ayyappa temple in Sabarimala in Kerala. The contentious reasons merit a monstrous tag: presence of fertile women causes trouble to Ayyappa’s volatile bachelorhood, and that sometimes, the menstrual odour would attract wild animals in the forests through which the pilgrims have to traverse. New age religious sects haven’t updated their views on menstruation either: Mata Amritanandamayi’s sect runs temples where two women are appointed as priests to a single temple “so that each can keep away for four days in a month, during their menstruation.”  (I am unaware of who the priest would be when the two women’s cycles begin to sync.)

Article 17 of the Constitution of India abolished caste-based untouchability, but perhaps we need another section/amendment to abolish menstrual taboos. Or, haven’t our religions heard of “seminal” fluids yet? What is their pollution quotient? Then, if pollution is any problem, will our holier-than-thou holy ones switch over to battery-powered priests? By the way, do these menstrual taboos apply to our goddesses? Are there days in every month when they too begin to pollute the temple?

While these logic-defying practices fall within the ambit of organized, mass religions, local practices fare no better either. The Times of India (June 8, 2008, Chennai edition) carried a report on how a Tamil Nadu state minister had on May 27 inaugrated an ‘isolation room’ for women during menstruation in the remote village of Thuvaar in Thirupattur. According to the ToI report, a soothsayer had predicted that rains failed because the village gods were antagonized over the fact that the ‘Muttukuruchi’ system had been discontinued for the past few years. In order to revive the system of isolating women and young girls on their attainment of puberty, the villagers had constructed the cramped eighty square foot isolation room were bleeding women would be banished.

Thousands of years ago, the Mayans believed that menstrual blood changed into snakes used in black magic. It appears that we hold on to such regressive beliefs, and haven’t really come of age yet.  

Dangerous Dalit Women and Witch-hunters

Published on Ultra Violet.

On March 28, 2008, Lalpari Devi, a 45-year-old Dalit woman was accused of being a witch by caste-Hindu, feudal villagers in Bihar who mercilessly beat her up, paraded her through the streets, tied her to a palm tree, cut her hair and smeared her face with limestone paste. She was saved from certain death by the timely arrival of the police. Lalpari somehow managed to survive the ordeal of social censure and hysteric, mob-driven humiliation. Many of her sisters have not been that lucky.

According to conservative (official, and outdated) estimates, 2,556 women were branded as witches and killed in India between 1987 and 2003. From 1991 to 2000, over 522 cases of witch-hunting have been registered in Bihar alone. In the same decade, about 300 people were done to death in the Telangana region in Andhra Pradesh on the suspicion that they were practising black magic. Bihar, for all its backwardness, was the first state in India to pass a law against witch-hunting in 1999. Jharkhand followed up with its anti-witch-hunt law in 2001, Chhattisgarh in 2005 and Rajasthan in 2006. An essential excerpt of the legalese: “a crime would be considered to have been committed when any person or community intentionally or inadvertently abets, conspires, aids and instigates the identification of a woman as a witch leading to her mental and physical torture and humiliation.” What is wonderful on paper rarely gets translated into something effective in practice. Besides, the threat of punishment and conviction hasn’t been a deterrent since the perpetrators of the crime (always male, almost always caste-Hindus who enjoy political clout) know that they will not be brought to book for what will be seen as an incidence of mob fury. Sometimes, it is the knowledge that the state will stand by them.

This free hand gives a free run to their imaginations, and witch-hunts have grown macabre by the day. The helpless “witches” are hounded and punished by being stripped naked, paraded around the villages, their hair is burnt off or their heads tonsured, their faces blackened, their noses cut off, their teeth pulled out (they are supposedly defanged) so that they can no longer curse, they are whipped, they are branded, sometimes, they are forced to eat human faeces and finally, they are put to death (here again the Indian imagination takes over: the victim is hanged, impaled, hacked, lynched or buried alive). And you have got it all wrong if you assumed that such stomach-churning, toe-curling torture is done in dingy, shadowy places: vast, open village lands come in particularly handy as favoured locations, and the cheering crowd can fill a modest stadium. Where these women are left to live, they are considered inauspicious and malevolent, socially ostracized and forced to forego their livelihood. Where they don’t end up losing their life, they are made to lose their mental balance.

It is no surprise that almost all the ‘witches’ have been Dalit or Adivasi women. Nowhere else in Indian history can we see such an explicit tie-up between patriarchal oppression and casteist subjugation. Witch-hunting is a powerful tool in the hands of caste-Hindu men who want to persecute assertive Dalit and Adivasi women who might directly challenge caste hegemony, or indirectly subvert local power equations.

Because names and places and stories speak stronger than statistics, here’s a sample: A Dalit woman, Badam Bai was beaten to death by four men at Bhunein village in Sultanpur in Kota district. Lajwanti Harijan of Kamolar village in the same district met with a similar fate. When a Dalit woman in Tarra village in Raipur district claimed rights to her dead husband’s land, she was killed after being branded a witch by her brother-in-law. Memki Bai Bhajaat of Varlipahada village and Sakri Bai Meena of Sailana village of Udaipur district were branded witches because of property disputes. Subhadra Basumatray, a 40-year-old Bodo woman in Tilapara village of Goalpara district in Assam, denounced rituals conducted by witch-doctors. Just as she started to voice her dissent, she ended with a fractured arm, broken ribs and bruised legs. Her own family members colluded with others to declare her a witch because she had demanded a share in her father’s property. An Adivasi woman panchayat president in Udaipur district in Rajasthan was declared a witch by caste-Hindu villagers who wanted to settle political scores. In neighbouring Nepal, a 52-year-old Dalit woman Dayawati Urab and her daughter Sunita Kumari Urab of Sunsari village were stripped naked, beaten, and forced to eat human faeces because villagers suspected them of indulging in sorcery.

Such humiliations, lynchings and killings, done with nauseous ingenuity haven’t spared old women either. In November 2004, Dhoopi Raigar, a 70-year-old Dalit woman from Jita Ka Dalda in Tonk district was forcibly dragged out of her son’s house by some villagers who cut off her hair and attempted to immolate her. Her son’s increasing prosperity infuriated the ‘upper’ castes who sought to prevent it by accusing Dhoopi of being a witch. A 65-year-old Dalit woman labourer Pochamma and her 70-year-old husband Sailu were burnt to death in Ulitimaipalli village near Hyderabad because they were suspected of using black magic to kill cattle. In Gaandi village in Angara Block in Ranchi, two old Dalit widows Jeetan Devi and Dubhan Devi were tortured and held responsible for the death (due to malaria) of two children. The women were tonsured, beaten, paraded and burnt to death. Before the final disgrace, earthern pitchers were broken on their heads. As recent as August 2007, Bali Bharu Doli, an 85-year-old Dalit woman in Rajasthan was mercilessly beaten and forced to keep a burning coal in her mouth on the suspicion that she was a witch. Barely a month later, on Sep 2, 2007, two elderly women in their 60s were murdered by their sons in Orissa’s Keonjhar district for allegedly practicing sorcery.

Where do these cruel and perverse caste-Hindu witch-hunters get the moral high-ground to condemn Dalit and Adivasi women? Revolutionary Dr. Ambedkar observed that the Atharva Veda itself as “nothing but a collection of sorcery, black-magic and medicine,” so witchery is not something new to the ‘upper’ castes. And shouldn’t the caste-Hindus be reminded of Joan Mencher’s sociological insight into sorcery in Travancore, that “some social control over the excesses of the high-caste landlords was exercised through the thread of Pulaya black magic” since Pulaya medicine men and witch doctors were believed to possess the “powers of bringing malaise and misfortune on wrongdoers, especially the cruel landlords and wicked bossmen.” Shouldn’t the oppressor caste-Hindus be ashamed that Dalits could have come up the idea of black magic and communion with the spirit world only in order to subvert the caste system where the priestly caste alone enjoyed the hotline to God?

It is true that lack of adequate health-care systems have spawned the growth of alternative beliefs and faith healing, and consequently witch-doctors. But that is not the reason why Dalit and Adivasi women have been singled out for public humiliation. By punishing those who are seen as vile and wild, oppressors want to send a not-so-subtle message to the women of their own castes: docility and domesticity gets rewarded, anything else gets punished. This has been the legacy of violence against women.

When sin meets superstition, as in witch-hunting, the victims are also single (read widowed/ deserted/ divorced) women of a certain age who are no longer burdened with reproductive duties. The word ‘witch’ is thrust on these ‘dangerous’ women who asserted their entitlement to rights and thus challenged patriarchal and caste supremacist diktats. Dalit or Adivasi women who dared to contest elections and directly challenged the political power of the landed caste-Hindus have been labeled hags. They have been accused of exercising black magic when in fact they have only been exercising their fundamental rights. Witchcraft, when used by brutal caste-Hindus in the modern context, has come to signify women’s resistance to oppression, and the price they have paid for it.