Jasbir Jain
Ladki Ki Jaat: Women, Theory and Culture
Sandra Gilbert once titled an essay "What do the feminist critics want?" Similarly one could ask the question: What is it that the Indian feminists want? The implication would also be: how does the movement in India distinguish itself from western movements in its challenges, goals and strategies? The challenges before Indian feminism are very different. Not only does it have to struggle with a multitude of patriarchal structures, but a heavy burden of living cultural beliefs and role models, the nationalist and the postcolonial constructions of femininity, the Gandhian ideal (which seeks to open out the religious base but is still essentially religious) and the grip of any essentialism, the 'bharatiya nari' for one, before it can move ahead meaningfully. Political and legal rights, though important enough in themselves, are not adequate in any totality. These are all externals. What is more important is the inner change in value structures and ways of thinking. This has not happened. The mindsets have not changed. Polarities and power struggles replicate themselves in different forms to affect human relationships. Feminism in India has sought (and worked for) more space, the rights of citizenship, the freedom to participate in decision making but has not consciously worked for adopting masculine values or postures. This has not been their agenda. There has been no bra-flinging stage. If some women in public positions have followed male patterns of behaviour it has been a personal move for personal goals and not of the movement. It is precisely because visible women have worked outside femininity that the movement/s do not own them. Whether we work through nineteenth century autobiographies, legal records or more contemporary struggles ranging from Chipko to the Right to Information and the literary formulations of women writers and thinkers, women do not treat personal freedom or citizenship rights of equality as incompatible with either marriage, family or motherhood. Even as they struggle to free the female body from male control, ask for equal space in democratic processes, seek to redefine the idea of a 'good' woman and liberate sexuality from coercion and compulsion, they recognize the woman's right to relationships. In fact, feminism is not gender war; it is gender equality. But what appears to be so logical and rational on paper is not so in real life because the flow of life is dynamic and at every moment there is a constant interaction between a variety of contradictory pulls.
The first major question is how is the self constructed and defined. When one begins from experience rather than cultural myths, there is greater scope for a woman to realize herself and her existence. Rural development programmes like IDARA (Information Development and Resource Agency) in Rajasthan focused on improving the self-image of women. Dr. Pritam Pal1 a medical doctor, who was one of the many committed workers engaged in this programme in the eighties, told us how she had made charts of female anatomy and educated rural women about their bodies. These women admitted that they had never even looked at their bodies, or ever thought of themselves as anything but sexual objects to be used in the dark. They had never even washed themselves carefully. The charts removed their ignorance and led them to think of themselves as persons in their own right. The improved self-image was the necessary first step for any kind of position to be adopted. The above experience also points toward the need of moving outside purely theoretical frameworks to take cognizance of the actual situation of ignorance and poverty which becomes a natural basis for gender discrimination. There is a need to look at feminist theory and methodology outside the middle-class/metro syndrome. Another underlying fact which surfaces at this point is the need for academics and activists to go together the whole way in order to fully comprehend and respond to the situation. Also, it comes through clearly that cultural, historical and economic differences render any application of western frameworks meaningless. Theory emerges from practice, from the ground realities and goes back into them to facilitate research. Spivak's query 'Can the subaltern speak?'' acquires a different context here. Is it possible for the struggling woman who copes with the daily demands on her to be conscious of or to desire a different world? Or is it that impositions from the outside are being imposed? The system with its stress on festivities and fairs, rituals and community get-togethers seeks to punctuate the rise of protest through consolatory means. Awareness strategies have to work through them as well. Shared experiences often reveal that even when awareness levels differ, there is a minimum level of self-consciousness which surfaces in the very act of growing-up, looking into the mirror, or dressing-up for an occasion and the natural inclination to resent curbs and checks. We have sufficient testimony to this in folk songs and stories and in other records such as autobiographies and personal accounts.2 Several dalit writers have now written about their childhood,3 the struggles of early stage and film artists (to mention a couple of these, Hansa Wadekar's autobiography Sangyte Aika on which Bhumika (1976 directed by Shyam Benegal) was based and Binodini Dasi's autobiographies My Story and My Life as an Actress. Pankhon ki Udaan, the recorded proceedings of a workshop organised by Sparrow and Dahleez ko Langhte Huye both edited by Sudha Arora provide valuable interactions with women artists, activists and writers. In Pankhon ki Udaan there is an imagined narrative through the voice of Savitribai Phule by Sushma which is a very powerful account of Savitribai’s childhood "Haan, mein Savitribai". Her mother tried to train her through her advice "Tum ladki ki jaat ho, tumhe to sab jhelna hi hai" (95). It was this advice which her bridegroom overheard and intervened "Don't scold her. What if she is a girl?" (96) and through this intervention built a bridge of understanding. The title of this paper "Ladki Ki Jaat" has been taken from there. Urmila Pawar talks about her childhood responses to the life around her in "Hum ne bhi itihaas racha hai" (we too have made history. In her book of the same title she has worked on the role of women in Dalit awakening. In the interview in Dahleez Ko Langhte huye, Pawar dwells on the discrimination in Dalit society against women as well as on the restrictions dalit critics wish to impose on women for writing about these discriminations.
The above two examples once again bring forth the need to discuss (a) writing done on behalf of the other and (b) writing by the person concerned. In the first empathy and imagination are foregrounded, in the second experience and memory. The reader/addressee then has to problematize these aspects. Mala Sen's biographical narrative of Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen, uses both together and thus works through both simultaneously while writers like Kaushalya Baisantri, Baby Kamble and Urmila Pawar use the second directly and often in a very detached and analytical manner without overburdening it with self-pity. Mahasweta Devi goes across by deciding to live with the tribals. In an interview with Gayatri Spivak "The Author in Conversation" Mahasweta Devi has stated that once she realised that "feeling for tribals and writing about them was not enough" she started living with them and worked at solving ` from their individual perspectives. She adds, "You have to go there, you have to love and trust them" (v-vii).
Tharu and Lalita attempt to identify some approaches to theory in their introduction to Women Writing in India. The first of these is to recognise the contribution of those women writers who experience the limitations and strengths of being women, i.e. they understand and experience feminism. The culture context is extremely relevant as it is also important to shake off the normative control of any one culture. They also examine the validity and otherwise of including popular literature and attach value to consciousness raising experiences and the feeling of a shared awareness of being women and solidarity it generates. It is important to recognise the subtle manner in which strategies of power are "written into the shaping and differentiation of the feminine in everyday practices of the family, of education, of the workplace, of the law, and of medicine and psychology" (33).
When Indian Journal of Gender Studies (1999) brought out a special issue of personal narratives spanning three generations, the idea was perhaps to trace matrilineal influences and genealogies and to place the feminist discourse in an evolutionary chronology, in order to free it from a frozen culture inheritance. The changes also identify little and big rebellions, domestic, religious and legal.
Methodologies in themselves are neither imported nor indigenous; when our strategies are culture and situation specific they become indigenous, rooted in our traditional constructs and address our own specific socio-economic issues. Often it comes through that policies which serve a purpose in one situation, fail to do so in another. In an issue of Subaltern Studies (Vol. IX), Tharu and Niranjana identify caste, religion, ideology as some of the problems which beset the gender issue in India. These divide women's loyalties, disrupt their sense of solidarity and send them to the streets as protestor or rioters forced into oppositional positions. Such events may bring about social or legal change, draw attention to oppression, add to general awareness, create sensitivity – but beyond that?
In the last couple of centuries, women have gradually and after a great deal of struggle found their way to the legitimacy of education for equailty,4 a fact still not widely recognised or accepted. When and how can change be effected in the way we think ? A popular song sung by women activists goes as follows:
Tu khud ko badal, tu khud ko badal
Tab hi to zamana badalega;
Chup kar ke jo saheti rahi
To kya yeh zamana badla tha?
Tu bolegi, moonh kholegi,
Tab hi to zamana badalega
(Transform yourself, only then will the world change,
When you bore it all in silence, did the world change?
If you open your mouth and assert yourself,
Only then will the world change)
In brief it means women need to rely on themselves and create their own epistemological frameworks and recognise the strength of their own experiences and responses. The body is not the beginning and the end. The idea of a 'good' woman needs to be disassociated from the body as moral values of good and bad, purity and impurity denote ethical qualities not physical. The idea of purity is not a natural opposite of pollution.5 Gender inequality has thrived on this association just as every form of female desire has been sacrificed to it. The guilt which the rape victim in made to feel is also the direct result of this. The freeing of the body from the contradictory position of a passive object and a moral agent, is the first step required to give the mind an equal place along with the body.
Literary theories are ways of reading and of conceptualising for writers are part of a society. Literature not only reflects social reality, it also reflects its subterranean levels and reveals the hidden structures which hold it together as well as those which disrupt it. It often goes a little ahead of reality when it uses myth and metaphor or sign to be radical. In this it impacts society. Writers have often used different strategies symbolised by gestures – like Mitro's allowing her dupatta to slide off her the head (Mitro Marjani), or as for instance Dopdi's refusal to cover her naked bleeding body after the police have raped her and chewed her breasts, in Mahasweta's story "Draupadi". Not only does it recall the 'chirharan' of the Mahabharata, it also reveals the moral bankruptcy and brutality of the system. Reversals and excavations of little known stories and myths often open up other dimensions. Vijayadan Detha's story (a folk narrative) "Kenchuli" juxtaposes masculine honour and female 'pativrata'. When the young beautiful wife is disillusioned by her husband's passive acceptance of the Thakur's claim on her, she rebels against the whole idea and naked she walks off to her death discarding all else: clothes, jewels and false morality.
But a literary text is very akin to a social text. How do we read it? Not descriptively but analytically, through crossing barriers and going across. The first relationship has to be hermeneutic : think as the other. The second stage needs to be a dialogic one : interact, interrogate, compare, contrast and elicit through argument with it.
Towards this end recovery of lost texts, reinterpretation of myths, imaginative reconstruction of the silences in histories confessional narratives and autobiographies, subaltern histories have served a very necessary purpose. They have opened out normative structures to close inquiry, drawn attention to the lesser known, the silences and the margins. From within these one needs to construct not merely historical accounts or trace the continuity of tradition but inquire into the manner how the 'self' has been constructed in a specific case, and how resistance has defined itself. Acts of courage and heroism too function individually, therefore individual differences and circumstances need to be foregrounded.
A practice which we often tend to ignore is the parallel method, the comparative one, not merely a linear or a chronological one. What really was happening at a particular point of time, for instance 1882 or 1965 or 1992 ? The various events happening in different geographical spaces at about the same time, different narratives being written at the same time - how do they reflect contemporary reality? What is the nature of the reality they reflect? How do men and women view them? Hindus and Muslims formulate them? Shashi Tharoor's Riot has failed to meet the approval of many a creative writer and perhaps critics but through its contrapuntal narrative, it performs the task which an average inquirer should be doing with different narratives. That is move outside closures to make interconnections. The preliminary hermeneutic crossing over needs to give place to a dialogic relationship. Edward de Bono in New Thinking for the New Millennium (1999), describes it as parallel thinking. Addressing the problem of changing the mindset, his opening remarks are : This book is written according to the mathematical theory of dispersed cross-sensitivity (in a self-organizing system). Roughly speaking this means that water flowing down a river does less for the land than rain falling widely over the area.
For my purposes, this would mean (a) discarding the sense of victimhood and helplessness, (b) dismantling polarities. Polarities are oppositional and show lack of individual differentiation. For instance the difference between man and woman has been characterised through a variety of concepts which have been traditionally accepted and which privilege one at the cost of the other by placing them within a developmental process as for instance chaos/order; emotion/ reason, nature/ culture, a historical / historical.6 Polarities have a tendency to become fixed and ignore the possibility of change. To that extent focus on women alone also fails to consider the continued impact of masculinity on feminine constructs and positions. In recent years ideological divisions in India are also being increasingly defined along similar values. Militancy, fundamentalism and other aggressive ideologies foreground the masculine pushing the feminist position towards human rights. People's movements like the Right to Information and Narmada Bachao Andolan have incorporated women and women's multi-dimensional roles and challenges, yet it is not very clear whether any submergence into the full citizenship struggle will shake up the patriarchal frameworks. Fear can be generated through several strategies and fear is a disabling emotion. Incidents of rape and callousness towards the female body call for a change in moral attitudes, a redefinition of 'guilt' and its location in the social body rather than the victim, a change of attitude towards the violated body, and a greater attention to the instinct for power which rape symbolises. The point is where do we go from here ?
Feminism, once it is firmly located in the cultural context, needs to shift gear where the mechanism of power is concerned. Words like empowerment still continue to play a major role where the expectations of women are concerned. Empowerment does not necessarily lie in being given power, but by creating power from one's inner being through one's own agency. The solution perhaps lies in solidarity. Gandhian strategy of 'satyagraha' was a useful strategy leading both to solidarity and self-awakening. The exercise of solidarity has now to acquire a social role, a horizontal sharing amongst women, across class, caste, region and religion and to make inroads into narrow family loyalties (specially where voting patterns and concepts like 'honour' and 'izzat' are involved). The dialogue has to begin between women from different backgrounds who seek to identify not merely similar experiences of vicitimhood but to identify experiences of positive change which they have been able to bring about through their familial and professional roles (as mothers, daughters and wives and as women teachers, researchers, administrators and other professionals). Power is never fixed, Foucault defined it as circulatory in nature. It has to be used and articulated in the movie Mirch Masala (1985 directed by Ketan Mehta), through the concerted action of women is an action of solidarity as is the feminine action in Rokeya Shekawat Hosain's 1905 story "Sultana's Dream" where women fight wars through their intelligence by harnessing wind and energy and not through armed warfare. Solidarity implies coming together for a particular cause as Chandra Talpade Mohanty has specified in Feminism Without Borders. It is not the racial and national borders alone but also the gender borders which need to be crossed. Masculinity and men need to be involved. It is as much an imperative necessity for men as for women, if the human is to survive. There is no frozen reality and no eternal truth.
Endnotes
1. She has worked as Project Director in the Women's Development
Programme and later with Unicef. Presently she is free lancing.
2. Indian Journal of Gender Studies had brought out an issue in 1999 (Vol.
6, No. 2) with the focus on women's personal narratives.
3.Refer my article "Dalit Women's Autobiographies," Writing Women
Across Cultures, Jaipur : Rawat Publication.
4. The New Education Policy (1986) was the first official document to state
that women need education for equality. Prior to this the emphasis has
always been on education for the family, for good motherhood, and then for employment.
5. Refer Irene Gedolof, Against Purity, 1999.
6. These concepts are traditionally prevalent. It may be worthwhile to refer
to Carolyn Merchant's Death of Nature, Vandana Shiva's Staying Alive and Donna Wilshire in "The Uses of Myth, Image and the Female Body in Revisioning Knowledge" Gender/Body/Knowledge. Eds. Alison E. Jagger and Susan R. Bordo. New Jersey : Rutger University. Press. 1959.
References
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