WRITING GENDER, WRITING NATION

This book explores the gendered contexts of the Indian nation through a rigorous
analysis of selected women’s fiction ranging from diverse linguistic, geographical,
caste, class, and regional contexts.
Indian women’s writing across languages, texts, and contexts constitutes a
unique narrative of the post-independence nation. This volume highlights the
ways in which women writers negotiate the patriarchal biases embedded in the
epistemological and institutional structures of the post-independence nation-
state. It discusses works of famous Indian authors like Amrita Pritam, Jyotirmoyee
Devi, Mannu Bhandari, Mahasweta Devi, Mridula Garg, Nayantara Sahgal,
Indira Goswami, and Alka Saraogi, to name a few, and facilitates a pan-Indian
understanding of the concerns taken up by these women writers. In doing so, it
shows how ideas travel across regions and contribute towards building a thematic
critique of the oppressive structures that breed the unequal relations between the
margins and the centre.
The volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers of gender studies,
women’s studies, South Asian literature, political sociology, and political studies.

Bharti Arora is a faculty member of the Department of English, Tagore

Government Arts and Science College, Pondicherry, India.
WRITING GENDER,
WRITING NATION
Women’s Fiction in Post-
Independence India

Bharti Arora
First published 2020
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Arora, Bharti, author.
Title: Writing gender, writing nation : women’s fiction in post-
independence India / Bharti Arora.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. |
Revision of author’s thesis (doctoral)—Jamia Millia Islamia (India),
2018, titled Writing gender, writing nation : a critical study of
select women’s fiction in post-independence India. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019016025 | ISBN 9780815396178 (hardback :
alk. paper) | ISBN 9780367280529 (paperback : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780429299421 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Indic fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. |
Indic fiction (English)—Women authors—History and criticism. |
Indic fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | Indic fiction—
21st century—History and criticism. | Indic fiction (English)—20th
century—History and criticism. | Indic fiction (English)—21st
century—History and criticism. | Women and literature—India—
History—20th century. | Women and literature—India—History—
21st century. | Women in literature.
Classification: LCC PK5423 .A76 2020 | DDC 891/.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019016025

ISBN: 978-0-8153-9617-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-28052-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-29942-1 (ebk)

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CONTENTS

Foreword vi
Acknowledgements viii

Introduction 1

1 Women as ‘citizens’: gendered violence in Partition

narratives by women 33

2 Feminist negotiation of autarchy: going beyond victimhood 68

3 Negotiating structural inequalities: marriage, domesticity,

divorce, and widowhood in post-independence India 98

4 Economic liberalisation, cultural Ghettoisation, and

their impact on the gendered contexts 133

5 Writings from the margins: Dalit and Muslim women’s

narratives 163

Conclusion 199

Appendix 208
FOREWORD

Discourses about nations, states, citizenship, etc. are mostly dogged by a national
patriarchy that assumes a certain level of gender-blindness. A structured exclu-
sion of women from nation and national politics is owed to a masculine focus on
the social and political analyses of modern states, citizenship, nationalism, revo-
lution, and democracy, which are usually deemed as masculinist projects. In the
process, women’s roles as citizens, as members of the nation, are either relegated
to symbolic status or embedded in the narratives inscribed by men. To retrieve
these roles mandates not only a focus on women’s lives, as many feminist projects
propose to do, but also a foregrounding of gendered perceptions of the nation.
Should women’s fiction be read differently from the rest? What strategies
should be deployed in reading women’s fiction? Is it appropriate to sideline it as
‘domestic fiction’ that impinges little if at all on the making of the nation, as sug-
gested by some critics? What relationship do the narratives of life experiences of
women have with national dynamics? Is the category of gender extraneous to the
idea of nation? Writing Gender, Writing Nation: Women’s Fiction in Post-independence
India comprehensively engages with these crucial questions and paves the way for
a gendered perspective of the nation.
This book, backed by an insightful introduction, is a close analysis of select
women’s fiction in post-independence India. Fundamental to this analysis is a
sociological reconstruction attempted through the use of women’s fiction. Here
fictional narratives are viewed not as mere aesthetic, mimetic entities but as
endowed with cognitive character. Unlike generalised knowledge systems like
science or history, this book assumes that fictional narratives open a window
onto a specific set of experiences of a specific set of people. They are thus dis-
tinguished by their preoccupation with localised knowledge. Moreover, since
fiction embodies cognition through telling, fiction writers make cognitive inter-
ventions in the reality around them by reconstructing it from their own specific
 Foreword vii

locations. This explains the cruciality of women writers’ fiction in any attempt
at understanding the category of nation. Following Partha Chatterjee’s argument
regarding the segregation between the home and the world, the private and the
public, and the material and the spiritual involved in the nation-making process
in India, most discussions about nation, nation-state, and citizenship have tended
to ignore women’s articulation and cognition of nation. Contesting such a view,
critics like Jessica Berman have posited that the domestic sphere is no less a politi-
cally charged space than the outside world and that women’s narratives make
interventions in the discourses about the nation, “These narratives suggest that
women need not leave the zenana to raise concerns of national import, and that
their emerging modernity develops by way of their participation in traditional
sites and rhetorical practices.”1
The book takes up an incisive analysis of women writers from a range of Indian
languages, like Amrita Pritam, Jyotirmoyee Devi, Mannu Bhandari, Mahasweta
Devi, Mridula Garg, Nayantara Sahgal, Indira Goswami, Alka Saraogi, Usha
K. R., Bama Faustina, and Salma. The selection exposes the range of women
writers’ engagement with the issues of nation, state, citizenship, etc. through the
unfolding of multiple histories. From the gendered violence often supported by
the newly carved nation-state in the post-Partition scenario, to women’s repro-
ductive health, marriage, widowhood, globalisation, and minority and Dalit
experience: all find expression in writings by these women.
The nuanced analysis in this important book stays clear of clichéd assump-
tions, like all women writing are feminists and so on. By reading the fictional
narratives alongside state policy documents, the book brings into sharp focus the
ambivalence between dominant discourses of the nation and the layered inter-
ventions made by women writers.
I am convinced that the book will not only open up new ways of looking at
writings by women but will also make us revisit state-sponsored dominant dis-
courses leading to a gendered perception of the nation.

Nishat Zaidi
New Delhi
January 2019

Note
1 Berman, Jessica. Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2011, p. 143.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A sense of happiness and achievement marks my engagement with this book.

I have held this project close to my heart. It is based on my Ph.D. dissertation
submitted to Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Though it began as a Ph.D. dis-
sertation, I did not want it to end at that. The suggestion of turning it into a book
came from my supervisor Dr. Nishat Zaidi-Professor, Department of English,
Jamia Millia Islamia – for the first time. She made me nurture this project as
a dream and trained me to be rigorous, perseverant, and consistent so that the
dream could turn into reality. However, I have also learnt something more, that
is, this project has been seminal to my commitment as a feminist. It is through
this project that I have learnt to question and unlearn the everyday gendered
contexts of my life as a woman.
Thus, my first and foremost thanks are due to Professor Nishat Zaidi. Thank
you for your patience, encouragement, and rigorous feedback on this work. I also
thank Dr. Simi Malhotra – Professor Department of English and Jamia Millia
Islamia – for her constant support, encouragement, love, and for just being there,
always.
I would also like to thank Dr. Uma Chakravarti, Professor (formerly) Depart-
ment of History, Miranda House, University of Delhi and Dr. Arindam Chakrab-
arti, Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Hawaii, who gave their
precious time, discussing so many aspects of this work and the ways in which I
could make it better.
The library sources at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, Janki
Devi Memorial College, Delhi University and the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi
have helped me immensely in undertaking this research. Thus, my thanks are
due to their respective librarians who have assisted me in finding relevant books,
resources, and research material.
Thanks Shrikanth for reading this work along with me and giving your valu-
able suggestions and feedback.
 Acknowledgements ix

Thanks Ma and Papa for everything!

I would like to thank the following publishers for kindly consenting to use
modified versions of my articles published in the respective journals:

1. Arora, B. “Negotiating structural inequalities: Marriage, sexuality, and

domesticity in Mridula Garg’s Chittacobra.” The Journal of Commonwealth
Literature, published Online First, pp. 1–18. Copyright © 2016 by the Author.
Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Ltd. <journals.sagepub.com/
doi/abs/10.1177/0021989416671172>
2. Arora, B. “Mapping the Gendered Contexts of the ‘Glocal’ Nation: A Criti-
cal Rereading of Alka Saraogi’s Kali-Katha: Via Bypass.” Indian Journal of
Gender Studies (Volume 23, No. 2) pp. 286–305. Centre for Women’s Devel-
opment Studies. Copyright © 2016 by the Author. Reprinted by permission
of Sage Publications.
3. Arora, B. “Negotiating Structural Inequalities in Post-independence India–
The Case of Deserted Women and Widowhood in Indira Goswami’s Neel
Kanthi Braja and A Saga of South Kamrup.” Society and Culture in South Asia
(Volume 3 Issue 1) pp. 1–23. South Asian University. Copyright © 2017 by
the Author. Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications. https://journals.
sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2393861716674546
4. Arora, B. “Democratising the Language of Feminist Expression: English
and Bhasha Contexts of Indian Women’s Writing.” In English Studies in
India: Contemporary and Evolving Paradigms, edited by Banibrata Mahanta and
Rajesh Babu Sharma. Singapore: Springer, 2019. pp. 109–120. Reprinted by
permission of Springer.
Bharti Arora
INTRODUCTION

Nations are often seen as masculine entities and nation subjects as homogeneous
collectivities established by the modern state apparatus of citizenship, law, gover-
nance, etc. In the process, most theoretical formulations of nation tend to ignore
or erase women’s experience of the nation. This book seeks to establish how
post-independence women’s writing has been geared towards interrogating the
category of nation and exposing various patriarchal alliances (and gender biases)
underlying its framework. In fact, gender is not merely a thematic concern in
the writings of women writers but a constitutive category. In the process of
writing about gender relations, these writers comment and ref lect on the larger
socio-political, economic concerns of society and the nation. As Elleke Boehmer
(2005) suggests:

Gender has been, to date, habitual and apparently intrinsic to national

imagining. . . . The production of a unified, homogeneous entity such as
[the nation] . . . hinges, to a large degree, on the determinate subject posi-
tion of ‘woman’ for its articulation. . . . In short, national difference . . . is
constituted through the medium of the sexual binary, using the figure of
the woman as a primary vehicle.
(5)

Thus, the asymmetrical power relations between men and women within the
family are a product of and inf luence on the patriarchal and homogeneous
nexus of the family, caste, community, and nation. Women’s negotiations with
the nation are located at the interstices of the structural inequities of wom-
en’s daily existence. Their existence contests and is also determined by the
dominant schema of nation-state manifested in terms of tradition, modernity,
cultural assimilation, and state control on the one hand and welfarist drives
2 Introduction

on the other. Thus, rather than focusing too much on the ‘women being vic-
tims’ syndrome, the book highlights the need to focus on how the nation gets
inscribed when women take to writing and to telling their stories. Writings by
the selected women writers, this book argues, discursively produce a narrative
of nation that exposes the schematic omission of gender from the dominant
discourses on nation or what Nira Yuval-Davis (1997 ) calls the “gender-blind
theorizations of nationalisms” (3). The book thus proposes a reconstitution of
the gendered habitus both at the level of micropolitics and macropolitics, inter-
rogating women’s marginalised status within the patriarchal epistemology of
the nation-state and its institutions.

Writing gender, writing nation

The ideological constructions of gender within the nationalist paradigms, in
both the colonial and post-independence period, have made it imperative to
engage with the gendered contexts of the Indian reality. What is at stake here is
the status of women as individual citizen subjects and how it is impinged upon
by a structure of masculinism extant in both the domestic and the public sphere.
Thus, it is significant to engage analytically with gender relations and the way
they are implicated by nation and nation-states1 within the metanarrative of
power relations, articulated subtly at the level of the family, kinship, sexuality,
and tradition. This section will theorise the terms gender, nation, and nation-
states, analysing how they affect the citizenship paradigm vis-à-vis women.
A consideration of the category of gender allows one to reconstitute tradi-
tional epistemological hierarchies in the fields of history, culture, and politics,
offering perceptive understandings of nation. Apart from reconstituting tradi-
tional epistemological hierarchies, it also foregrounds how differences are con-
structed between men and women. This entails ways in which sexual differences
between men and women are constructed. Simultaneously, the category of gen-
der allows one to re-engage with the procedures and functioning of the nation,
which are constructed along gendered lines. The nation is a patriarchal enter-
prise, which structurally privileges men belonging to a certain class, caste, and/
or religion, along with their interests, notions of manliness and power in matters
of family, state politics, war, and militarism. In fact, the language of patriarchal
nationalism is so conspicuous that it ends up affecting the early years of an infant
to a large extent.
Deniz Kandiyoti (1991) and Joane Nagel (1998) have asserted that the forma-
tive experiences of the infant play a fundamental role in shaping her national
identity and loyalty. In most cases, these formative experiences are contingent
on an assumed heterosexual parenting and women’s responsibility as “custodi-
ans of cultural particularisms” ( Kandiyoti 1991, 435). As against the dominant
ideology and discourses on childhood that perceive it as a universal and ahistori-
cal condition, Kandiyoti states that children acquire language, emotions, iden-
tities through their mother and by extension the overall domestic/communal
 Introduction 3

site which train them into acquiring the language of nationalist passions and
loyalties. Thus, domestic sites have a major role to play in the reproduction of
nationalisms.
Anne McClintock (1995) and Patricia Hill Collins (1998) have taken this argu-
ment further to explore how families function as sites of intersections between
gender, race, and nation. Families draw their legitimacy not only from assumed
notions of unity and solidarity but from what nations define as legitimate and
illegitimate, that is, a heterosexual marital union, children born within wedlock,
and contingent notions of inter-generational transfers, especially in the case of
India, which ensures that sons are preferred to daughters in matters of inheritance.
Within the said framework, the differential access to the resources of the nation-
state is legitimised in the guise of hierarchies (of age, wealth, sexuality, gender,
caste, and religion), which are nurtured within a familial setup. As McClintock
observes, “the family image came to figure hierarchy within unity as an organic
element of historical progress, and thus became indispensable for legitimating
exclusion and hierarchy within non-familial social forms such as nationalism,
liberal individualism and imperialism” (1995, 45).
The need to maintain this hierarchy involves actual or implicit use of force,
violence, and ideological conditioning both at the level of family and nation. It
is not surprising, then, that violence against women is rendered invisible in ways
similar to how oppression and/or violence against peasants, minorities, Dalits,
and tribals of the nation remain routinely overlooked. Thus, women’s location
within the hierarchical grids of society and contingent divisions of sexual/social
labour perform a major role in defining larger relationships among citizens of the
nation and allied caste, communal, and gendered structures. Yuval-Davis rightly
suggests that “gender relations are not to be reduced into being necessary effects
of biological sexual difference. . . . Women’s oppression is endemic and integral
to social relations with regard to the distribution of power and material resources
in the society” (1997, 7–8). The new paradigms of knowledge, thus produced,
contest the private-public dichotomy, which excludes women from the mascu-
linist discourse of nations and nationalism. Yuval-Davis further offers an insight-
ful analysis in this regard, “The dichotomy of the private-public domains is
fictional to a great extent as well as both gender and ethnic specific, and often
this division has been used to exclude women from freedom and rights” (1997,
5). In fact, any study that aims to highlight the gendered contexts of nation has
to renegotiate with the hegemonic narratives on nation.
In fact, many inf luential theorisations on nation are contingent on the idea of
collectivities, which betray exclusivist tendencies. For instance, Benedict Ander-
son’s (1983) classic construction of nation as an imagined community is based
on an understanding that, though technological innovations like print capital-
ism are seminal to building networks of national linguistic communities, one’s
membership in the nation is based on natural ties and not chosen ones, “Precisely
because such ties are not chosen, they have about them a halo of disinterested-
ness” (Anderson 1983, 143). Similarly, Ernest Gellner and Anthony Smith have
4 Introduction

also emphasised cultural homogeneity and ethnic originality as important char-

acteristics of nation making, “the ‘modern nation’ in practice incorporates sev-
eral features of pre-modern ethne and owes much to a general model of ethnicity
which has survived in many areas until the dawn of the ‘modern era’” (as quoted
in Yuval-Davis 1997, 18).
Alternatively, Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias (1989), Deniz Kandiyoti
(1991), and Joane Nagel (1998) underscore the pitfalls of identifying with collec-
tivities. The construction of collectivities could be contingent on historical speci-
ficities but it betrays an obsession with homogeneous ethnic/national projects.
This has also been responsible for affecting citizenship rights of women. Their
membership in ethnic and national collectivities is not only based on wom-
en’s structural locations within them, but it could also constitute what Amrita
Chhachhi terms “forced identity” (as quoted in Yuval-Davis 1997, 11). The prob-
lem gets intensified when the collectivities feel threatened by ‘others’/hegemonic
groups within a given space and time. Strict cultural codes are imposed on
women in order to sustain the gendered boundaries of the collectivities. These
ethnic boundaries often thrive on the myth of the other/stranger as a rapist. It is
with this myth that women of the community are kept under strict vigil. Any
deviation from the imagined norm of propriety, among women, is penalised.
They become victims of everyday violence within families and communities.
In fact, there is a need to focus on the idea of ‘common destiny,’ as proposed
by Otto Bauer, which seeks to build bridges of solidarity among the citizens
based on a vision for future:

It is oriented towards the future, rather than just the past, and can explain
more than individual and communal assimilations within particular nations.
At the same time it can also explain the dynamic nature of any national col-
lectivity and the perpetual processes of reconstruction of boundaries which
take place within them, via immigration, naturalization, conversion and
other similar social and political processes.
(as quoted in Yuval-Davis 1997, 19)

It could also lead to reconstituting the category of women as citizens, who are not
merely burdened to reproduce the atavistic identities of the national collectivi-
ties but actively participate in shaping the common destiny. One of the ways this
could happen is by taking cognisance of different social positionings of women,
as well as their power and interests within the family and nation. Such a position
perceives cultures as not fixed, ossified terrains but in the process of becoming,
“continuously changing, full of internal contradictions, which different social
and political agents, differently positioned, use in different ways” ( Yuval-Davis
1997, 67). This dynamic process also resists the tendency in nationalists to be
what Nagel (1996) calls “retraditionalisers” (193), who often rely on reproduc-
ing the ethnic boundaries of the national collective, within which women are
relegated to traditional roles of being symbolic border guards of the nation.
 Introduction 5

Furthermore, there are differences between the way men among men and
women among women, as well as men and women, relate to the multiplex pro-
cesses of power relations, both at the micro and macro levels. Connell (1987)
asserts that nations and nationalist states are perfect venues for ‘accomplishing’
masculinity. The hierarchical struts of authority, all major decision-making posi-
tions, that is, the legislative, executive, and the judiciary within a nation, are
often organised around notions of male domination and women’s subordination.
They regulate sexual and social division of labour, legal domination of wom-
en’s sexuality, rights, which relegate women to marginalised positions within
national culture. As Nagel asserts,

Terms like honour, patriotism, cowardice, bravery and duty are hard to
distinguish as either nationalistic or masculinist, since they seem so thor-
oughly tied both to the nation and to manliness. My point here is that the
‘microculture’ of masculinity in everyday life articulates very well with
the demands of nationalism, particularly its militaristic side.
(1998, 251–252)

Faced with such constraints, women often, to deploy Kandiyoti’s (1988) terms,
“bargain with patriarchy,” (283) assuming subordinate, traditional roles imposed
on them by nationalists. These women often aid the patriarchal politics of their
husbands/men of their communities, raising their children as per masculinist
standards and serving as symbols of national shame, honour, and purity. These
discourses on femininity cogently ref lect the masculinist notions of women’s
place within a nation.
In order to analyse the impact of these multilayered structures, Yuval- Davis
distinguishes nations from nation-states. She specifically cautions against the idea
of nation-state, which is based on the hegemony of a particular group/community
over all others, where the ideological apparatus of civil society and state are con-
trolled by a particular community. This vision comes closer to deploying exclu-
sionary tactics of racism, which construct “minorities into assumed deviants from
the normal” ( Yuval-Davis 1997, 11) and systemically excludes them from access-
ing resources of the state. In order to demystify such ideological and political
constructs, one must highlight the myriad networks of power, which manipulate
the differential access of differential collectivities to the nation-state. In so doing,
one could contest the marginalisation of women, religious, ethnic, and sexual
minorities who have been relegated to what Yuval-Davis terms “the marginal
matrix of citizenship” (1997, 85).
Pnina Werbner and Yuval-Davis (2005) define citizenship “as a more total
relationship, inf lected by identity, social positioning, cultural assumptions, insti-
tutional practices and a sense of belonging” (5). Citizenship, in this case, is not
simply restricted to an individual’s access to his/her fundamental rights, which are
granted by the state.2 For instance, the Constitution of India, apart from granting
individual citizens the rights to freedom and equality, also recognises the rights of
6 Introduction

religious and cultural communities “to administer themselves in civil matters by

their own ‘personal laws’” ( Roy 2005, 203). These rights of individual and com-
munities in the Constitution show its “simultaneous commitment to both com-
munityship and citizenship” ( Roy 2005, 204). Thus, any theory on citizenship
cannot overlook the importance of locating an individual’s autonomy and free-
dom within specific class-caste, community, and gender contexts, as well as civil
society and state structures. According to Yuval Davis, citizenship is a “multi-tier
construct” (1997, 68) wherein “people are not positioned equally within their col-
lectivities and states, collectivities are not positioned equally within the state and
internationally and states are not positioned equally to other states” (91). These
theorisations on the stratified structures of citizenship and nation-state perform
a major role in redefining citizenship, rendering suspect the widely held con-
sensus and UN affirmation that nations are majorly characterised by the right to
self-determination.
In fact, Yuval-Davis’ critique of the discursive constructions of community
identity and its impact on women’s rights is corroborated by Anupama Roy’s
(2005) thesis on national identity, according to which the construction of national
identity in India in the early 20thcentury has to be conceptualised in the context
of both “the hierarchically organised scheme of social relations marked by ascrip-
tive inequalities; and the dominance-subordination relationship between colo-
niser and the colonised” ( Roy 2005, 182–183). The nationalist leadership only
concerned itself with the aspect of self-determination, seeking political repre-
sentation and equality alongside the colonisers. They consistently betrayed what
Roy terms, “their Brahminical-feudal, sectarian character” (2005, 193) when it
came to representing the social and economic concerns of the vast majority of
social groupings (peasants, tribals, workers, communities, and women) in the
country.
In fact, social questions were seen as “divisive” ( Roy 2005, 193) and the
Indian National Movement’s (spearheaded by the Indian National Congress) pri-
mary objective was to attain political independence. The demands of peasant,
labour movements, communities, and women were subsumed within the larger
narrative of political sovereignty and self-determination.3 It is significant in this
light to re-engage with the naturalised assumptions about the sovereign nation
and its ideological boundaries. This would highlight some of the major lacunas
in citizenship theory that have restricted women from becoming full members
of the nation.
As research has shown, women have been deliberately excluded from the
construction of abstract universal egalitarianism, which entitles men to dem-
ocratic participation and citizenship rights in modern nation-states. The nor-
mative homogeneity, imposed in the name of building collectivity, suppresses
particularity and difference, foreclosing possibilities of forging what Werbner
and Yuval-Davis (2005) have called “a female emancipatory politics” (8). There-
fore, it is important to problematise citizenship as defined by Marshall (1950),
 Introduction 7

who focusses on the role of citizen as a member of a community. Marshall char-

acterises citizenship by a sense of belonging to the national community – a mark
of enduring attachment. It is a multi-dimensional concept, wherein full mem-
bership in community becomes the moral basis of citizenship. However, such
a conceptualisation of citizenship also operates in terms of a hegemonic system
based on exclusion and inclusion. Only certain kinds/groups of members can
become its full members. What happens to those who are outside the communi-
tarian ambit, especially those who are settlers, refugees, and belong to a minority
or indigenous group?
There is a tendency to view the community membership model as an ideo-
logically fixed and given natural unit. Any demand to retain collective cultural
rights is considered highly suspect. It forecloses possibilities of constant nego-
tiation and the struggle to widen the horizons of collectivities. This has severe
implications for women’s citizenship rights both within and without the com-
munity. States often tend to accept the narrow and limited definitions of what
constitutes a community and its patterns of membership, which conf late wom-
en’s needs with the cultural needs of the community. This goes on to curtail
women’s rights in matters of education, marriage, and divorce, as well as other
facilities for women.
The problems with the communitarian model of citizenship get intensified
when viewed through the prism of the private and the public sphere. A certain
sense of insularity is imposed on the communities, wherein any right to invoke
change/transformation of the statusquo rests exclusively with them. Therefore, it
is pertinent to abandon the private-public dichotomy. Instead, one should “dif-
ferentiate analytically between the state, the civil society and the family, treating
them as three separate spheres if inter-related social and political spheres” ( Yuval-
Davis 1997, 14). Each of these spheres could never be homogeneous, which alerts
us to their relative importance in the determination of socio-political and civil
rights of the citizens. What is most interesting is how they may act in contra-
dictory ways, affecting ethnic, class, gender, and other collectivities in society
in different ways. The fact that they are never static leaves enough scope for
negotiating citizenship rights. It would also resist the imposition of hegemonic
notions of universal (male) citizenship, opening up spaces for creating a gendered
epistemology of the nation-state.
In this regard, transversal politics also aims to be an alternative to the universalism/
relativism dichotomy. Nira Yuval-Davis calls for cooperation and solidarity among
feminists, who may be “positioned differently in different societies” (1997, 125)
but are willing to work towards achieving certain common goals. Here, dialogue
becomes significant. An empowered knowledge could be created when the dia-
logue is informed by differential experiences of women. An effective dialogue is
based on the principles of “rooting and shifting – that is being centred in one’s
own experiences while being empathetic to the differential positionings of the
partners in dialogue” ( Yuval-Davis 1997, 88).
8 Introduction

Gender politics and the woman question in colonial India

The institutional and ideological construction of colonial modernity in India led
to the recasting of gender relations in significant ways. It set up visible, rigid,
and hierarchical distinctions between the colonisers and the colonised, which
facilitated material and symbolic colonial authority over the subject people.
This included, as Mohanty, Russo, and Torres (1991) point out, “the ideologi-
cal construction and consolidation of white masculinity as normative, and the
corresponding racialization and sexualization of colonized peoples” (15). This
policy of the colonial regime, which was manifested in colonial institutions and
structures, led to what Mohanty, Russo, and Torres further call “transforming
indigenous patriarchies . . . and the rise of feminist politics and consciousness . . .
within and against the framework of national liberation movements” (1991, 15).
As a response to this interplay between coercion and consent unleashed by colo-
nial rule, the high nationalist historiography and the concomitant patriarchal
structures in the 19th century made ‘home’ the discursive site of nationalist vic-
tory and women as the reified keepers of the ‘spiritualised’ inner space, contest-
ing colonial hegemony.4
Critics like Sudhir Chandra (1992) and Meenakshi Mukherjee (1993) have
suggested that this cultural regeneration of home was, ironically, an offshoot
of pedagogic engagement with tradition. The tryst with colonial modernity
was accompanied by its inherent fears, which could only be assuaged by a con-
sciousness of an ahistorical past and a narrative of ‘glorious’ Indian antiquity.
The nation was narrated as a form of mythology. Thus, the emergent nationalist
movement, swaying between the poles of continuity and change, tradition and
modernity, was discursively aligned to an epistemological ideology of a new
familial-social design and moral imperative, demarcating the public sphere from
the private spaces (andarmahal ) for women. Himani Bannerji (2001) describes
in her work the process whereby women were implicated into the social moral
agenda of patriarchal nationalist ethics and aesthetics. They were attired in the
patriarchal folds of virtue and their sexuality tempered with “sweet sentimental-
ity and mothering” ( Bannerji 2001, 128). Thus, the nationalist discourse, since
its very inception, was a gendered one.
The nation in the making could not be conceived unless masculine and
feminine identities were reinscribed within specific symbolic roles. While men,
inf luenced by western epistemological constructs of progress, modernity, and
enlightenment, embarked on an outward journey in search of an alternative
political/nationalist history, women were led on a regressive inward journey,
geared at appropriating the atavistic origins of the nation. Thus, exiled from the
path of material history, women simultaneously became the spiritual guards/
goddesses and the victims of the nationalist negotiations of colonialism.
As historians like Tanika Sarkar (2003) and others have exposed, the nation-
alist iconography of Mother India gave further impetus to this perception. It
was possible for women to step out into the public sphere and attain economic
 Introduction 9

independence as long as they would not neglect their domestic duties. For
example, when these ‘recast’ bhadramahilas/upper caste, middle class women
formed their association, that is, the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC) in
1926, they inevitably became the spokespersons of the new ‘paternal’ nationalist
iconography. This is borne out by the Presidential address delivered by Maha-
rani Chimanbai Gaekwad of Baroda at the First session of the AIWC held in
Poona from 5–8 January 1927. In her speech she too reiterated the conception
of the Indian nation as Hindu and Indian womanhood being “as high as any
that exists or has existed in any race or clime” (as quoted in Chaudhuri 2004b,
119). Women leaders extolled the virtues of motherhood and religious purity,
emphasising women’s self-sacrificial virtues and traditional mythological ideal of
Indian womanhood.5
The new woman, who had been trained and educated to be a companionate
wife so far, was now entrusted with a novel responsibility of nurturing her chil-
dren into brave and productive citizens of the country. Like women as mothers
raised strong and able-bodied sons, mother India too was the ultimate benefactor
of her sons. She would arm them against the foreign enemy. “While home is
under the custodianship of the woman as mother, the nation as home is presided
over by her archetype, Mother India” ( Ramaswamy 2010, 113). Thus, the invo-
cation of women as the mothers of the nation was an offshoot of the political,
social, and economic crises spiralled by the colonial institutions in the country.
The emergent nationalist consciousness was suitably garbed in the revivalist/
traditional folds of the maternal in order to contest both the onslaught of colonial
modernity as well as the recasting of indigenous patriarchy.
Thus, women’s participation in politics remained contingent upon the needs
of the nationalist discourse and what it expected of women in the public sphere.6
Though, under the aegis of Gandhi, women were called upon to participate in
political campaigns like the Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience move-
ments and spread the message of satyagraha and non-violence, this newfound
liberation in the nationalist movement could not politically emancipate them.7
It delimited their engagement in the national cause within a particular idiom
of religiosity. Geraldine Forbes asserts that the “patriarchal nationalist efforts to
mobilize women in the name of dharma proved inadequate to the task of politi-
cizing women, ensuring continued participation, or acting as channels for the
expression of their own interests” (as quoted in Nijhawan 2012, 175).
An analysis of debates on and about women in social-reform and nationalist
movements in colonial India also reveals that there was a simultaneous pro-
liferation of discourses about women and their marginalisation in these same
discourses. The debates on women, whether in the context of sati, widow remar-
riage, or women’s education, clearly demonstrate that “women were neither sub-
jects nor objects of the socio-cultural reform movements but merely the sites on
which competing views of tradition and modernity were debated” (Mani 1989,
88). This ideological framework negated women’s negotiation of the new spaces
available to them. Thus, unlike what Partha Chatterjee (1989) has claimed, the
10 Introduction

nationalist politics did not lead to the resolution of the woman question in the
early 20thcentury. Instead, it fell severely short of proposing a critical paradigm
wherein women could be perceived as equal stakeholders in the nationalist
movement. In fact, the spatial configurations should have been devised in a man-
ner to call upon women to inhabit a new habitus from where they could engage
with the “challenges and contradictions of the transitional period” (Gopal 2005,
63). They should have been equipped to engage in a “dialogic reconstitution
of spaces and spatial divisions themselves” (Gopal 2005, 62), enabling them to
become equal participants in the socio-political and economic life of the nation.
However, the vision of a new gendered habitus, as we know, could never mate-
rialise. Instead, women were treated as passive recipients of reform, being moved
out from one place and benevolently situated at another, under the protection of
recast patriarchy. Women’s subaltern status could never become a grave concern
for the macropolitics of the nation.
We can also approach the inadequacy of the nationalist horizon by referring
to Nira Yuval-Davis’s (1998) useful analogy between nation and gender, high-
lighting the various dimensions of nationalist ideologies. It highlights the role of
the symbolic heritage of language, tradition, and culture in the formation of the
nation. Yuval-Davis argues, like Sudhir Chandra (1992), that the construction
of an imagined community was deeply implicated and dependent on traditional
social cohesive units. An individual’s loyalty to nation was assumed to be the
highest point in her/his life’s journey, beginning from her/his primary obliga-
tion towards her/his family, caste, and religion. Thus, nationalist consciousness
was a logical extension of one’s religious and social consciousness. Within this
logic, termed “Kulturnation” by Yuval-Davis (1998, 23), women became the
cultural reproducers of the nation. The evaluation of Indian culture was done
through the prism of woman’s status in the country. She was to be educated
enough to contribute to the nascent spirit of nationalist enterprise but also ‘mod-
est’ enough to be unassertive. All of this was done in the name of building up and
asserting a sense of cultural authenticity and integrity of the emergent nation.
Thus, both nation and nationalism are implicated in fostering disparate gender
relationships.
Further, an engaged study of these disparities would show how any discussion
of gender in the Indian context is fraught with the pressing issues of class, caste
differences, and religious practices extant in society. Thus, women’s oppression
comes across as a product of unequal patriarchies, which get articulated in the
form of dominant patriarchy and subaltern patriarchy, revealing how the for-
mer not only controls the caste-class dynamics in society but also affects sexual
politics. Here, it becomes pertinent to dwell on a parallel engagement with the
woman question in the form of the Self-Respect Movement, initiated by Peri-
yar E V Ramasamy in Tamil Nadu in 1926. It called for a complete overhaul-
ing of the structures of new patriarchy in the nationalist context. He identified
marriage, family and monogamous matrimonial arrangements, and investing
in women’s chastity as detrimental to women’s individual status in society. As
 Introduction 11

against the bhadramahila norm, which was entrusted with the task of uphold-
ing the spiritual integrity of the nation, Periyar exhorted women to give into
the “claims of a free, self-validating desire, take on lovers, choose a life of eco-
nomic self sufficiency, abjuring the responsibilities of motherhood” (as quoted
in Geetha 2008, 196).
The Self-Respect marriages were conducted with an express intention to not
only defy the brahminical rituals and Hindu codes of marriage but also to inspire
each other’s acceptance by the married couple as comrades and individuals rather
than husband and wife, terms which smacked of patriarchal oppression. It might
appear illusory to conceive of such roles for women in the late 19thcentury, but
they actually had a strong potential to make women and men rethink the gender
roles prescribed for them by society. Women could resist the nationalist efforts at
reification, experiencing freedom to think, act, believe in their visions as indi-
viduals and, more than anything else, “look on their bodies as their own, as part
of their being, so to speak” (Geetha 2008, 197).
Self-Respect activists like Minakshi and Neelavathi actively contributed to
the Self-Respect journals, exhorting upper caste women to interrogate their
subordinate existence under the aegis of new patriarchy and “be attentive to
questions of caste difference and consider the problems faced by devadasis and
adi dravida women as equally pertinent to the national struggle, as say the boy-
cott of liquor shops” (as quoted in Geetha 2008, 191). The awareness that caste
divided women, preventing them from coming together, could not be wished
away. “Women had to consciously work at coming together, rather than assum-
ing that they could, simply because they were sisters together in the nationalist
struggle” (Geetha 2008, 191). I would like to place the Self-Respect Movement
at the interstices of the new gendered habitus being forged in the late 19th and
early 20thcentury. In fact, the Movement made viable interventions in the gen-
der, class, and caste nexus of the nationalist patriarchy, preparing a terrain for
reformulating the gender roles post-independence.
This reformulation of gender roles is further tied up with the task of feminist
historiography, which labours to expose the different ways and forms in which
systematic marginalisation takes place not only of women but also of other sec-
tions of society. In this light, Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (1989) have
emphasised the need to problematise the grand construct of material and mas-
culinist history:

Feminist historiography rethinks historiography as a whole. . . . [It is] not

understood as one among competing perspectives but . . . a choice which
can’t but undergird any attempt at a historical reconstruction which under-
takes to demonstrate our society in a full sense (2).

The ‘choice’ offered by Sangari and Vaid does not provide any alternative method
of enquiry but a conceptualisation of reality that is gendered in all its aspects.
It is a constitutive tool, which must accompany any historical and political
12 Introduction

analysis of the ideological apparatuses of society and nation. The field of histori-
ography, as such, is made to acknowledge the viability of feminist intervention
at both micro-social and macropolitical scales. Sangari and Vaid put forward a
very strong claim that the feminist project cannot be considered complete or
even sufficient unless it takes on the project of “‘feminization’ of the total field
of historiography as such” (as quoted in Radhakrishnan 2001, 193).
This book will elaborate how Indian women writers appropriate the project of
writing a feminist historiography to negotiate the hegemonic intellectual institu-
tions of the nation. These histories from the gendered margins, including those
of the subalterns, make way for a viable feminist politics, encouraging women
to engage with the formation of a new gendered habitus, which would prepare
them for a dynamic and dialectical re-engagement with the world around them.

Women’s movement in post-independence India

The moment of independence witnessed the category of nation being a source
of trauma for women. The extent and nature of violence they were subjected to
in the wake of the Partition, reveals their asymmetrical relationship to nation
and citizenship. The multiple patriarchies of family, community, and nation col-
luded to treat women’s bodies as, in the words of Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin
(1998), “territories to be violated, conquered, and claimed by the assailant” (43).
The newly formed state was more interested in whetting the aggrandising appe-
tite of interested people and parties, exacerbating existing inequalities, leaving
women and other subjugated groups more marginalised than before. They were
once again treated as objects, this time to be exchanged between the two newly
formed nations. It was as if a homosocial pact was signed between the patriarchal
communities, husbands, fathers, and the paternal nation-state. The social pact
was in turn contingent on the sexual honour of women, who were perceived
as the reproductive beings of the new nation. As Yuval-Davis (1997) asserts,
“women’s positionings in and obligations to their ethnic and national collectivi-
ties, as well as in and to the states they reside in and/or are citizens of ” (26) often
circumscribe their role to being the reproducers of the nation-state.
If men could not be responsible for their women, it was assumed, how could
they become responsible citizens of the country? Thus, the sovereign nation-
state betrayed an inherent patriarchal bias towards reproducing the gendered
politics of nationalism. It continued to “draw life from the family” (V. Das 2007,
36). Thus, women were forcibly divided on the basis of their respective com-
munities and restored to their ‘original homes’ (Resolution passed by the AICC,
17 November 1947). They were rendered victims of the brutal Central Recov-
ery Operation initiated by the governments of India and Pakistan in November
1947. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin underscore the gross irregularities inherent
in the structure of this programme and its official adoption in Parliament:

The main objections related to . . . the virtually unlimited powers given
to the police with complete immunity from inquiry or action and no
 Introduction 13

accountability at all; the denial of any rights or legal recourse to the recov-
ered women; the question of children; the constitution of the tribunal;
camp conditions and confinements; forcible return of unwilling women;
unlimited duration for the Bill to remain in force.
(1998, 73)

As is evident, the displaced/refugee women were not recognised as individuals

in their own right, let alone citizens. Even though the nation-state chose demo-
cratic form of government where one vote had one value irrespective of gender/
caste/class difference, the rights of these women were rendered suspect. The
homogeneous/exclusionary vision of the nation was cemented by the genealogi-
cal dimension of the nationalist project, termed “Volknation” by Yuval-Davis
(1998, 23). The family, community, and state in India drew their life from each
other, reducing women to sites whereupon the exchange of power relations
thrives.
Here, I would contest Yuval-Davis’ proposal to view “state, civil society, and
family as three distinct spheres of analysis” (1997, 14). She asserts that each of
these spheres could never be homogeneous as they may act in contradictory
ways, affecting ethnic, class, gender, and other collectivities in society in differ-
ent ways. The fact that they are never static leaves enough scope for negotiat-
ing the citizenship rights. However, in the aftermath of Partition, women were
devoid of their right to self-determination as citizen-subjects. While some of
them were victimised by families and communities, which refused to take them
back, others were forcibly recovered by the nation-state despite their unwilling-
ness to get back. Therefore, the state, society, and family were linked together
in a sort of continuum of violence against women. They were not only closely
interrelated but also contingent on each other in the case of India.
Alternatively, the women who survived the Partition trauma had to take
up the responsibility of their broken and battered family members. They were
burdened with familial responsibilities and the opportunity thrown by the cir-
cumstances could not empower them, so to speak. As Menon and Bhasin sug-
gest, though, there was a significant rise in women-headed households and the
emergence of working women immediately post-independence, but this was not
liberating in any sense of the term (1998, 169). Nevertheless, these women and
others, belonging to upper and middle classes, were among the first-generation
beneficiaries of the newly found independent India. Their relatively easier access
to higher education facilitated their participation within the academic and medi-
cal professions. The new employment opportunities within the service sector
accommodated women heartily, strengthening what Mary E. John (2008) calls
“the illusion of a rapid improvement in women’s conditions and achievement of
equality by them” (25).
The real question was, however, how Indian women were to transform into
agents of their destiny, engaged in a dialectal relationship with contemporary
cultural and historical processes being written immediately post-independence.
Unfortunately, the role of women envisioned by the Karachi Resolution of the
14 Introduction

Congress in 1931(whereby they were considered citizens equal before law, irre-
spective of religion, caste and creed) could not materialise post-independence.8
On 16 June 1939, the National Planning Committee (NPC) under the chair-
manship of Jawaharlal Nehru appointed a subcommittee to look into women’s
role in the planned economy and also passed some resolutions regarding the
same,9 but the subcommittee’s report “remained largely unnoticed in the debates
in the post-independence period” ( Kasturi 2004, 137).
As the Towards Equality (1974) report describes, in the immediate post-
independence scenario, the “Women in Development” model was institution-
alised by the government, as it believed that the national growth models and
development process would inevitably contribute to the improvement in wom-
en’s status. However, women’s status was essentially perceived as a social and cul-
tural phenomenon. For instance, the First Five Year Plan particularly emphasised
that there was a need to promote “adequate services in order to fulfill women’s
legitimate role in the family and the community” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012 ,
224). Their problems were relegated to the Social Welfare Board, which identi-
fied women as “handicapped by social customs and values” (Sharma and Sujaya
2012 , 224) and therefore befitting recipients of welfare. The Board earmarked
only a few areas under which it paid special attention to women’s development,
that is, education, health, and family planning.
In fact, it was not before the Sixth Five Year Plan that a separate chapter was
included on women, titled “Women and Development.” Although it suggested a
subtle shift in the conceptualisation of women as participants in the development
process of the country rather than beneficiaries of it, things did not change at
the ground level. For instance, the Sixth Five Year Plan, like the previous Plans,
chose to focus on a family-centric poverty alleviation strategy. It suggested that
since women were the most vulnerable members of the family, the economic
emancipation of the family could only be possible if “women, education of chil-
dren and family planning constitute the three major operational aspects” of this
strategy (Sharma 2012, 23). Therefore, all other aspects of women’s identity were
erased, affecting their rights as individuals and citizens, independent of the larger
framework of family/community.10
The ideal of an egalitarian, just, and fair nation started to erode in the
late 1960s and early 1970s. The campaigns against the stagnation of econ-
omy, price rise of essential commodities, and agrarian unrest saw the end
of women’s acquiescence.11 Moreover, the increasingly deteriorating condi-
tion of women was perceived to be an offshoot of the materialist tendencies,
manifested in the form of dowry deaths, rape, social atrocities, and a relapse
of sati, so on and so forth. The new women’s movement not only resisted
state tyranny (the Emergency being one of its hideous facets) but also marked
a beginning of the contemporary phase of the women’s movement in India,
calling for women’s participation in the political mainstream. It was trig-
gered by the publication of Towards Equality: Report of the Committee on the
Status of Women in India in 1974. The report was one of the first attempts to
 Introduction 15

engender the process of enquiry, mapping the gender governance equation in

post-independence India. Vina Mazumdar (2008) rightly terms it a “founding
text” (27), which facilitated a dialectical engagement between the Indian state
and its women citizens.
The report exposed how the Indian Constitution, despite its many secu-
lar pronouncements of equality between the sexes, had fallen short of offer-
ing women even a respectable status within the nation. The statistical data and
figures outlined in the report showed how the condition of the vast majority of
Indian women had been deteriorating since the 1950s, with the exception of
upper middle class women’s entry into the academic and service sectors. More-
over, the institutional structures of the nation-state systematically sidelined
women from its policymaking and governance. The report arrives at this con-
clusion after a deeply engaged study and analysis of women’s status in society,
law, economy, their educational development, political representation and status,
and women’s welfare and development. The report was immensely successful in
clearing the smokescreen effect produced by constitutional measures claiming
socio-economic and political justice to women.
From declining sex ratio to lower literacy levels of women,12 the report
revealed how women were like Sisyphus, burdened by the weight of social struc-
tures, cultural norms, and value systems on the one hand and religion, family,
and kinship roles on the other. They not only delimited the scope of women’s
participation in society on equal terms but also affected the realisation of their
full potential as citizens of free nation. Although the first three and a half decades
witnessed growth and expansion of education, evident in an overall increase in
the enrolment of men and women, this fact could not capture the specific trends
in the increase of women’s education post-independence. In fact, the provision
of women’s education was an integral part of the post-independence planning
initiatives, but it could not do much to eradicate the disparities in the education
levels of men and women.13
The report further suggested that women largely opted for a career in
teaching at schools or colleges. There were two reasons behind it, as the Com-
mittee on the Status of Women in India (which prepared the Towards Equality
report) found out in their survey: firstly, in the prevailing social scenario,
long-term professional training was only accessible to a minority among the
upper middle class. Secondly, they felt teaching was accorded a high status in
India, despite its low salary structure (Sharma and Sujaya 2012 , 159). In fact,
the statistical indicators also reveal how the representation of women at the
university level is relatively lower than their proportion at the primary and
secondary levels. The Ministry of Education revealed in the year 1950–51 that
the percentage distribution of women at different stages of educational system
decreased from 82.4 per cent at the primary level to 12.7 and 0.6 per cent at
the secondary and university levels, respectively. Though a marginal increase
in the figures was witnessed for the latter stages in subsequent decades, by 1970–71
only 2.4 per cent of women could manage to get university education. This
16 Introduction

reveals how unsuitable infrastructure (parents were apprehensive of sending

their daughters to co-educational schools and colleges) and faulty curriculum
(the disciplines taught were not related to practical work experience of people
in villages) were some of the major causes that impacted women’s access to
education.
Next, within the economic sphere, the statistical data revealed that although
women had benefitted from the increased employment opportunity in the ser-
vice sector, their percentage in comparison to total women workers in India was
only 6 per cent. However, as the Directorate General of Employment and Train-
ing’s data revealed in 1970, teaching, medical and health, clerical, and telephone
operators were the major fields of work in the public and private (organised sec-
tor) that witnessed the largest concentration of women workers.14
However, the educational fields and employment opportunities expanded
since the mid-1970s to the 1990s, owing to the liberalisation phase of the econ-
omy. Now women began opting for engineering, computer sciences, business
administration, and management rather than being confined to courses in general
education (science and arts). There are indications all the same which suggest that
women graduates prefer marketing and human resource management as their
areas of specialisation over systems, finance, or sales fields. Thus, women’s profes-
sional aspirations are restricted by gendered assumptions in the corporate sector,
wherein they are considered more suitable for feminised fields like public rela-
tions, personnel management, advertising, telemarketing, and so on and so forth.
Alternatively, the Towards Equality report revealed that the rest of the 94 per
cent of women workers engaged in the unorganised sector of economy had no
access to laws that sought to protect their insecure work conditions. Moreover,
due to rapid development in the modern and organised sector of industry post-
independence, the share of unorganised, household industries declined. Women
were its greatest victims because the majority of them were illiterate and could
only gain employment, if any, as unskilled and/or semi-skilled workers with
no scope of further promotion. Many among them worked as unpaid family
labourers, indirectly contributing to family income as helpers of men. The vari-
ous rounds of the National Sample Survey (1958–62) revealed that unpaid fam-
ily workers constituted between 41 and 49 per cent of the female workforce as
against 15 to 17 per cent of the male labour force. It clearly reveals the unac-
knowledged status of women’s work in the economic and social sector.
Moreover, women workers could not bargain for better wages as compared
to male workers because the state had no concrete action plan on equal pay
for equal work until the completion of the Fourth Five Year Plan.15 Also, the
majority of the women who worked in factories, mines, and plantations were
deprived of their basic rights like maternity benefits even after the state had
passed the Maternity Benefit Act in 1961. It is evident from the small number of
women employees (495) who received this benefit during 1960–70. Their ben-
efits ranged from Rs. 46–117, which was low for the large majority among them
 Introduction 17

(Sharma and Sujaya 2012 , 147). All these grim issues were brought to the fore
by the Towards Equality report, including how the “unequal employment status
and opportunity for men and women were the direct result of a combination
of factors, that is, the educational system, training, job-orientation and cultural
conditioning” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012, 165).
More to the point, it was not until the Bodhgaya movement16 started in 1978
in the Gaya district of Bihar that women’s equal rights over land received explicit
attention. The women peasants actively fought for their independent rights over
land, registering land in their name and conjoining their demands with an asser-
tion of gender equality:

Equality can only strengthen, not weaken an organization, but if it does

weaken our unity, that will mean that our real commitment is not to
equality or justice but to the transfer of power, both economic and social,
from the hands of one set of men to the hands of another set of men.
(as quoted in Agarwal 2002, 9)

It was difficult to survive vis-à-vis the patriarchal structures of authority. These

women peasants asserted themselves not only against domestic violence but also
against the threats of beatings and rape by the hired ruffians of the math offi-
cials, who had allegedly controlled 9575 acres of land, violating the land ceiling
laws. Though the Chatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini fought their case, it too did not
pay any heed to women peasants’ exclusive land interests. The women peasants
agitated in favour of their land rights and finally the government was compelled
to undertake a redistribution of land in the name of women. The struggle also
conjoined with contemporary feminist endeavours, enabling the women’s move-
ment to realise how pertinent it was to build bridges of solidarity across the
class-caste differences.
However, the success of the Bodhgaya movement could not replicate itself in
terms of a larger political involvement by women across classes. Unfortunately,
as the Towards Equality report revealed, women’s political participation had con-
sistently declined since independence. One of the reasons behind this was that
the state’s proclaimed commitment to social justice and equality, Universal Adult
Suffrage, and the delayed but satisfactory implementation of the Hindu Code
Bill in 1955 led many among them, like their male counterparts, to put their
faith in the fulfilment of national dream. While the euphoria of the independent
nation-state and Constitutional promises of equality in opportunity encouraged
women to exercise their franchise during the initial years between 1962 and 1967
(it increased nearly by 9 per cent in this period), it witnessed a downfall of 6.33
per cent in 1971, revealing the gradual disenchantment with political processes
in the country. The equal status, political rights, and political equality promised
to women by the Constitution still proved to be a far-fetched dream, rendering
claims about women’s liberation suspect. “The overall statistics indicates that
18 Introduction

women’s participation, though improving, is still so small as to be discouraging,

particularly when compared with that of men” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012, 211).
Furthermore, the Towards Equality report revealed in its survey that women’s
contribution to decision-making in families on matters of expenditure, sharing
household work, educational career to be pursued, and marriage of children was
relatively lower than that of men. More than 60 per cent of women respondents
said that housework was primarily women’s responsibility and the “only deci-
sion where they take an active part is in buying food stuff for home” (Sharma
and Sujaya 2012, 289). Almost 70 per cent affirmed that parents should fix the
marriage of their daughter. However, an equal number of respondents also said
that the practice of dowry is undesirable and should be stopped, ref lecting a
considerable improvement in societal concern for women. Moreover, 80.06 per
cent of respondents agreed that “grounds for divorce should be the same for
both husband and wife and 73.10 per cent said that the divorced wife must be
supported by her former husband so long as she does not remarry” (Sharma and
Sujaya 2012, 302). When asked if daughters should be given rights in the parental
property, 68.16 per cent responded that girls could be given “some share along
with sons” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012 , 301). However, only “57.54 per cent felt
that the daughter should have an equal share in parental property” (Sharma and
Sujaya 2012, 301), that too in the southern states of Kerala, Pondicherry, Andhra
Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Assam. The respondents in Tripura, Manipur, and
Haryana registered a particularly lukewarm response, ranging from 35.14 per
cent to 44.44 and 44.97 per cent, respectively.
Though during its research on the issues of divorce, marriage, domestic
violence, and women’s right to property, the report dealt with women’s status
in terms of their caste and religious positionings in society, it did not engage in
any serious defiance of the brahminical rituals. Thus, the findings of the Com-
mittee on the Status of Women in India were partially blinkered in terms
of their discounting a nuanced analysis of the reasons that might have been
responsible for such disparate responses to gender patterns witnessed across the
country.
More to the point, the issue of women’s health was never taken up seriously
by the Social Welfare Board. Surprisingly, the CSWI also did not look into it
in detail.17 In fact, the Board performed a limited role in providing health care
to women, focussing only on one aspect of it, that is, reproductive health care.
However, reproductive health care is just a part of primary health care and han-
dling it in isolation not only reduces women’s lives to performing biological and
reproductive functions but also robs them of their dignity as individuals. In fact,
it is this lopsided perspective, which is evident in the state’s adoption of mea-
sures focussed on contraception only, without any investment in the health care
structure as a whole. For instance, Vineeta Bal, Vani Subramaniam, and Laxmi
Murthy (2008) highlight that the state machinery along with the international
funding agencies and drug companies have victimised lower caste/poor women
by performing various contraceptive trials (involving Net-en, Depo Provera) on
 Introduction 19

them as part of family planning programmes. Thus, the reproductive health care
has certainly not been pro-women.
Moreover, a study of mortality data from the Model Registration Scheme
of the government suggests how reproductive diseases are not the only health
problems women face. It says that over the period of 1982–93, “deaths due to
child births constitute 2.1 to 2.9 per cent of total female deaths” (as quoted
in Qadeer 2008, 384). In fact, women in the reproductive age group (15–44)
died mainly due to communicable diseases, anaemia, and malnutrition instead of
deaths caused by maternity. Other facts include lack of access to medical facili-
ties, especially in the case of poor or peasant women who approach the health
care system only as the last resort. A study conducted in 1987 reveals how “very
little has been done to understand the changes in women’s health over the years
and the complex manoeuvres that the health care system demands of users” (as
quoted in Tharu and Lalita 1993, 65). Thus, women’s health issues are to be
located within a broader spectrum of problems and deficiencies experienced by
them and not compartmentalised within the narrow framework of reproductive
healthcare and family planning measures.
The Committee on the Status of Women in India performed a commendable
job in exposing the gap between women’s roles as perceived and recognised by
society and those that they were actually capable of performing. However, the
report was ridden with f laws in its basic assumptions. It never questioned the
political dynamics of power and the patriarchal state that was responsible for
women’s deplorable status even after 25 years of independence. It did not criti-
cally engage with the Constitution. In fact, it was very idealistic in its emphasis
on the Constitution as the standard against which the realities of socio-cultural
setup and organisational structures were mapped.
More to the point, though the report strongly critiqued the asymmetrical
development process that had “reinforced patriarchal relations of inequality”
( John 1999, 111), it failed to recognise the incongruity inherent in its own con-
stitutional format. The authors who constituted the CSWI were upper caste,
middle class women, educated and among the first generation beneficiaries of
that very same unequal development process.18 They critiqued the incongruity of
policies and projects directed at rural/working class women, highlighting their
invisibility in the emergent project of nation building. However, the members
of the CSWI fell short of recognising the class, caste, and communal differences
between themselves and working class women. Their upper class feminist poli-
tics was hierarchised, grounded in the politics of privilege, which perceived only
poor, rural, and working class women as outside the ambit of Constitutional
guarantees. No wonder the Towards Equality report comes across as a site of blin-
kered perspectives. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (1999) rightly asserts:

Women are classed, caste and communal subjects, and both privilege and
oppression may be grounded in identity recognised in those terms . . . at
the same time in the interests of a transformative politics, difference must
20 Introduction

be managed, if not transcended.  .  . . Following from this, whether the

women’s movement can serve as a ‘secular space’ for women outside the
structures of their communities is a fraught question, even while feminists
may be in agreement on its desirability and even necessity.
(4)

The feminist agendas in the postcolonial nation-state are profoundly structured

by the global imbalances unleashed by the socio-economic capitalist forces. More-
over, within the contemporary processes of globalisation, culture too becomes a
contested terrain that is manipulated differently by collectivities of people who
are differently positioned within society. To begin with, the mainstream media
co-opts the language of radical feminism, equating modernity with conspicuous
patterns of consumption. More to the point, the New Indian woman is usually
portrayed as urban, middle class, and educated, which becomes, in Rajeswari
Sunder Rajan’s words, “a normative model of citizenship” (1993, 131). Unfortu-
nately, it not only leads to a systematic containing of Indian women within the
parameters of patriarchy but also prevents other versions of Indian womanhood
from gaining validation.
If on the one hand, the financial institutions such as the International Mon-
etary Fund and the World Bank have either directly or indirectly appropriated
women’s labour to feed the contemporary neo-colonial structures unleashed by
globalisation, on the other hand, the forces of liberalisation have contributed to
the restructuring of welfare states as well. The emergence of international bodies
which work alongside government’s welfare manifestoes have offered possibilities
of improvement in women’s health, their working conditions, and lives in gen-
eral. For instance, Nira Yuval-Davis (1997) talks about the need to club together
the concerns of international women’s activism and grass roots organisations/
NGOs, depending on allied contingencies. These organisations have actively
advocated for women’s rights at the 1993 Rio Conference on Environment and
1994 UN Cairo Conference. Yuval-Davis further gives examples of the “tribunals
organised in Vienna, Cairo, Beijing around the slogan of ‘Women’s rights are
human rights’ comprising various women’s organisations in the North and the
South” (1997, 121). Notable among them were the Peruvian Flora Tristan organ-
isations, the Algerian Association for the Promotion of Equality between Men
and Women, and the Shirkat Gah Centre in Lahore, Pakistan (1997, 121). But, at
the same time, the weakening of the welfare state has had a negative impact on
women’s negotiations with gender equality as well. As Yuval-Davis argues

many of women’s social rights which have been gained in earlier strug-
gles are being lost, whether child care facilities, social security benefits or
health care. . . . In practice, this means the exclusion of women from full
participation in the democracy.
(1997, 123)
 Introduction 21

The pursuit of free market within the context of globalisation has altered gen-
der relations, especially in the context of the middle class. With greater access to
opportunities of employment, especially in the private service sector, it becomes
imperative to analyse the way middle class women negotiate freedom, desire,
ambition, and cultural roles expected of them in the contemporary scenario.
Interestingly, there are two opposing tendencies perceived in this context: on the
one hand, the new employment prospects have had a significant impact on man-
woman relations within the home, with men contributing their bit to domestic-
ity in ways more than one. On the other hand, we need to analyse the way the
work place settings redefine the gendered relations for women. In fact, most of
the time, serious cases of sexual assault are either misconstrued as consensual or
as acts of “light hearted bantering.”19 This constant possibility of being unsafe
also impacts women’s negotiations with cityscapes and the resultant experiences
in their varied locations.
There has been a regressive move towards syndicated Hinduism, threaten-
ing to embalm the country with the hegemonic potion of ‘culture’ and ‘civili-
sation,’ suppressing alternative voices and any politics of subalternity. The late
1980s and early 1990s witnessed a revivalist nationalist politics which co-opted
women into the Hindutva fold. They donned the mantle of aggressive sadhvis,
neo-nationalist-communal bharatmatas, egging men on to the path of majority
fundamentalism. Can this illusion of agency and political subjecthood contrib-
ute to larger rights of women? How detrimental could it prove for the Indian
feminist movement, which is vigorously fighting for the liberal rights of an
individual as well as the idea of modern secularism? Tanika Sarkar rightly
asserts,

No feminist can possibly argue that the movement can contribute to the
broad rights of women for its uncompromising orthodox compulsions as
well as its decidedly fundamentalist tendencies. . . . It is no surprise that
these women do not join contemporary women’s agitations for gender
rights and justice.
(as quoted in Chaudhuri 2004c, xxiv)

Moreover, the sense of illusory power experienced by these women needs

to be problematised in the wake of altered socio-economic and political power
structures in India during the late 1980s and 1990s. The government’s decision
to implement the Mandal Commission Report in 1991 boomeranged as fault
lines of caste and class within the civil society became visible. The demolition
of the Babri Mosque in 1992 and the more recent communal carnage witnessed
in Gujarat (2002) were serious blows to the secular, democratic, and welfare
oriented aspects of the post-independence nation-state. Thus, it is within this
variegated terrain of the nation that contemporary gendered contexts are shaped
and negotiate the various formations of power.
22 Introduction

Towards a creative reforging of gendered habitus:

women writers’ vision
“The failure of the postcolonial nation-state can only be understood by look-
ing at class, region, gender and other social formations and tensions in once
colonized countries” (Guha, as quoted in Loomba 2005, 170). Taking cue from
this statement of Ranajit Guha, we can say that though women’s writing in
India has been generally understood within the limited and limiting param-
eters of personal space and domestic fiction, one must not overlook the fact that
within the larger schema of Indian nationalism, the personal has always been
deeply embroiled with the political. The inherent complexities of colonial, neo-
colonial, and nationalist structures have always had deep repercussions, often felt
at more personal levels. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita (1993) rightly point out how
the structures and institutions of power collaborate with global frameworks of
economic, technological, and strategic growth, which ultimately “exacerbate
existing inequalities and leave women and other subjugated groups more mar-
ginalized than before” ( Tharu and Lalita 1993, 59). Thus, the book aims to
explore women’s narratives in post-independence India to retrieve from these
narratives the embedded larger narrative of the nation, a narrative that has always
been overlooked and smothered in the cacophony of dominant historiographies.
It explores how writings by these women writers expose various patriarchal alli-
ances underlying the framework of nation and hence can be read as narratives of
alterity on the category of nation.
The feminist and aesthetic standpoints of these women writers interrogate the
dominant literary and aesthetic tradition, which has excluded, to use Kumkum
Sangari’s (1991) words, “the whole range of social subalternities of which women
are a part” (56) in the name of homogenising its abstract, universal assumptions
as normative. The universalist assumptions of this tradition, as Sangari further
asserts, “can scarcely be called an aesthetic” (1991, 56). Women’s writings contest
these exclusive tendencies, simultaneously exposing “the fiction of transgen-
dered universality that is nothing but a euphemism for a universal masculinity”
( Ray 2000, 4). In fact, the authorial concerns of male writers are often rooted
in a sense of latent masculinism, which can only view the nation through a
privileged, universalist, and psychologically-insular perspective. As Mee (2003)
asserts, the national imagination of male writers betrays the socio-political impli-
cations of generations of “privileges to which Indian women do not easily gain
access” (332). All this is rendered suspect in the select writings by women. Hav-
ing said this, the book has no aims of glossing over the varied nuances involved
in the writings of men and women authors, nor does it intend to build up a
dichotomy of any sort between the two outside their situational contexts.
This book aims to deploy a rigorous literary and critical analysis of select
Indian women writers’ fiction, both in English and in translation. The texts under
consideration are Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar (1950 Punjabi), Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Epar
Ganga Opar Ganga (The River Churning 1967 Bengali), Mannu Bhandari’s Aapka
 Introduction 23

Bunty (1971 Hindi), Mahasweta Devi’s Hazaar Churashir Ma (Mother of 1084

1974 Bengali), Mridula Garg’s Chittacobra (1979 Hindi), Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich
Like Us (1985 English), Indira Goswami’s Neel Kanthi Braja (Shadow of Dark God
1986 Assamese), Alka Saraogi’s Kali-Katha: Via Bypass (1998 Hindi), Usha K. R.’s
Monkey-Man (2010 English), Bama Faustina’s Sangati (1994 Tamil), and Salma’s
Irandaam Jaamangalin Kathai (The Hour Past Midnight 1995 Tamil).
In fact, the process of finalising the writers’ list was time-consuming. The
more I read, the more I realised that there are many evocative and powerful
women writers who do not write in English, yet their response to nation is as
consequential as the Indian English writers, even more so. However, the Indian
English and regional women authors have been rarely clubbed together for lit-
erary analysis. One of the major reasons behind this is that Indian English and
regional Indian literatures are considered two distinct disciplines. While one
is considered too parochial, the other is assumed to be occupied with an elite’s
point of view, going all the way ‘international’ by presenting an orientalist’s per-
spective on India and its so-called post-independence ‘muddle.’
In fact, as the choice of the women writers reveals, this book intends to delve
into an engaged reading of bhasha texts alongside Indian English texts so that
it may provide us with alternative visions, different voices of the nation, reori-
enting our critical responses to the same. Moreover, taking into account wom-
en’s writings across the Indian linguistic spectrum would not only break the
monotone and culture of ‘sacred English’ but may help to formulate an alter-
native strategy constituted by heteroglossia, pluralism, and cultural difference.
Makarand Paranjape (2010) rightly affirms:

India is best seen, understood and experienced in the bhasha texts and not
so much in Indian English texts. This becomes quite clear to us if we put
the two beside each other. . . . We at once begin to see how the vernacular
serves as the context for English. The English text is both underlined and
undermined in the process.
(99)

In fact, it calls for a process of dialogic coexistence, without forgoing one’s

distinctive culture. A cumulative reading of the right contexts may not only
help us deconstruct the narrower, exclusive, and ethnic renditions of the nation
but also enable us to reach out to the Other. More to the point, the book
also intends to establish that women’s fiction complements existing feminist
endeavours in India rather than simply being a cultural artefact. In fact, this link
has rarely been traced by critics dealing with the idea of gender and nation in
their writings. Thus, I would locate the gendered contexts of the nation within
the ambit of Indian women’s movement in the post-independence phase. It
would facilitate a pan-Indian understanding of the concerns taken up by the
women writers, showing how ideas travel across regions and contribute towards
building a thematic critique of the oppressive structures that breed the unequal
24 Introduction

relations between the margins and the centre. The book establishes how all
these concerns are embedded in Indian women’s writing, exposing the chinks
in the system and in the process staging a stiff resistance to the so-called pan-
Indian homogeneous institutions and epistemologies of nation-state. It can be
said that women’s literary works come across as postcolonial, post-independence
acts of resistance.
However, this book on post-independence women’s writing does not leave out
of its praxis an important fact that all texts written by women need not be femi-
nist. Sometimes, they are as much a product of ideological, social determinations,
and role models prescribed for them as any other text. It is significant to trace
the differences between diverse ideological strands witnessed in women’s writ-
ing because it is a product of, to borrow Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s (2015) words,
“changing historical conditions and [. . .] the divergent agendas of a non-unitary
constituency conceptualised under the rubric of ‘women’” (40). In fact, women’s
texts, both in their internalisation of patriarchal structures as well as in challeng-
ing and subverting these structures of power, offer us a site to study the gendered
patterns that construct and feed into the architectonicae of the nation-state.
More to the point, Jasbir Jain (2011) identifies Indian Feminism on the basis
of the difference between the feminist search for identity and self:

Identities can be dependent on men or on externals like class, status-both

economic and married-caste and culture, while self is an internal con-
sciousness of strength, awareness and ability. . . . It is a more significant
conduit connecting the inner being with the outer reality.
(283)

I could club this reading with one of the core ideas of my book, that is, transversal
politics. My contention is to show how the selected women writers are engaged
in a dialogue across difference. It is certainly different from identity politics,
accommodating difference in gaze, location, perspective in all their nuanced
intersections. However, I eschew here from deploying the term ‘sisterhood.’20 In
fact, an accommodative study of women writers belonging to different contexts,
social, economic backgrounds would not only enrich the gendered reconstruc-
tion of national history but also empower the disempowered to interrogate the
official, mainstream epistemology and institutions. This would also facilitate an
interrogation of the upper caste, middle class biases inherent in the standpoints
of Indian women writers.
As far as the varied locations and ground realities of these writers is concerned,
I understand them as contingent on the contemporary socio-political concerns,
a positivist idea that looks for a viable transversal politics among women writ-
ers across India. Moreover, this quest is supplemented by an informed under-
standing of the varied domains of the state, that is, family, civil society, the
welfare state, and the capitalist technocrat nation-scape that may or may not
function collaboratively but have diverse impact over the citizens of the nation,
 Introduction 25

particularly its women subjects. Since these spheres within the nation-state
could not be homogeneous, how can one assume that their effect on different
ethnic, religious, gender, class, and caste groups would not be conf licting? For
example, proposals of implementing a Uniform Civil Code have been consis-
tently challenged by numerous assertions in favour of the various personal laws
extant in the country.
Moreover, the choice of women writers is not to be misinterpreted as repre-
sentations of any group, class, caste, religious, and ethnic category. Here too, one
must acknowledge that the selections do not in any way capture or represent the
issues concerning women in India in their entirety as this is not even the objec-
tive of the present work. Alternatively, since the primary theme of this book is to
interrogate the gendered contexts of the nation, the selected texts act primarily
as entry points to arrive at an understanding of the contemporary patterns of
gender construction in socio-political, economic, legal, and cultural configura-
tions of the nation. It opens up channels of enquiry to probe further issues like
violence against women in states under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act
or the struggles of lesbian women within and against the nation-state and their
voices in the women’s movement.
I eschew from suggesting a contingent politics of geographical and ideological
location, supplementing Yuval-Davis’ (1997) argument that people who are sim-
ilarly rooted can and do occupy diverse positions and points of view. She rightly
suggests, “The transversal coming together should be not with the members of
the (same) or other group en bloc, but with those who, in their different rooting,
share values and goals compatible with one’s own” (1997, 130). In fact, the aim
is to study how different texts written by different writers can be perceived as
engaging in a dialogue. As Yuval-Davis further suggests, “Dialogue, rather than
fixity of location, becomes the basis of empowered knowledge” (1997, 129).
Thus one must be cautious of the lure of auto-identification and the debilitating
and destroying effect it can have. Ultimately, differences have to relate with each
other, otherwise it will lead to a kind of solipsism, discounting the possibility of
any political efficacy embedded in what Radhakrishnan (2001) calls “dialogic
relationship of mutual accountability” (191).
In fact, neither strategies of radical separateness imbued in a sense of auto-
identification nor those of hierarchical epistemological structures can claim to
present the critique of post-independence dream and/or nightmare in total-
ity. There has to be a solidarisation of various asymmetrical positions and their
respective contestations against the nation to facilitate political efficacy. It can be
achieved by reimagining one’s encounters with ‘others’ in ways that open chan-
nels of ethical representative strategies within the epistemological apparatuses of
the nation-state. As Yuval-Davis and Stoetzler (2002) assert, “experience, made
by the senses and mediated through the faculties of the intellect and the imagina-
tion, produces knowledge as well as imaginings. . . . Here lies rooted the possi-
bility and indeterminacy of (or else the ‘freedom’ to) social change” (320). These
alternative imaginings further facilitate “critical intimacy”21 with the other,
26 Introduction

which is central to evolving meaningful cultural exchange among communities

without seeking to assimilate or appropriate their extant differences.
We realise how women writers from diverse contexts make a dent in the
dominant discourse of the context to which they belong, thereby foreground-
ing an alternative vision of the gendered contexts of nation. Thus, the book
will establish how Indian women writers belonging to different communities,
economic-cultural, linguistic-social backgrounds, and identities can build coali-
tions across borders to foreground the failure of the nationalist dream and cri-
tique neo-colonial power structures created at the level of both state and nation.
I take the cue of this reading from Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s (2003) thesis,
“In knowing differences and particularities, we can better see the commonali-
ties because no border or boundary is ever complete or rigidly determining. The
challenge is to see how specifying difference allows us to theorize universal con-
cerns more fully” (Mohanty 2003, 226).
Thus, despite being determined by culture-specific parameters, women writ-
ers ensure that their subordinated subject-position would not necessarily imply
total subjugation at the altar of dominant social forces. They are not merely acted
upon but also act to offer viable alternatives to the statusquo. The revisionary
subject-positions endorsed by them contain the possibility of interrogating the
oppressive epistemological apparatuses in society. Thus, Indian women’s writing
is a reaction against a certain sense of betrayal, which impelled them to respond
and give their take on the nation.
Simultaneously, this book explores how literature could provide a transforma-
tive agency to feminism as a discourse of empowerment. Despite being fictional,
literary works have the potential to discursively grasp the relationship between
social history and cultural history. Just as the actual political/epistemic institu-
tions, literature is a product of extra-discursive social processes and ideologi-
cal power structures. Reading literature and political contexts together enables
an understanding of essential textuality of narratives. Though historical forces
play a deterministic role in the making of a literary text, they can certainly not
control how readers across racial, ethnic, gendered, caste, and religious differ-
ences seek to derive variegated meanings out of it. Literary works have a seminal
relationship with the dominant discourses of their time in highlighting multiple
and often contradictory subject positions and experiences. They innovate an
episteme, which resists the totalising impulses of political and historical forces.
These alternative paradigm(s) of knowledge facilitate our understanding of the
gendered contexts of society and/or nation along with the ways in which these
contexts are deeply implicated in patriarchal power politics. Literature, thus,
becomes instrumental in bringing about change and extends beyond anticipating
or mirroring social reality.
It is pertinent to engage with the socio-political-economic and legislative-
juridical discourses of the nation as they have actual consequences on the every-
day lives of people, particularly women. The parliamentary debates/reports
and political commentaries demonstrate the official consciousness of an epoch,
 Introduction 27

which both interacts with and impacts citizens’ everyday negotiations, modes
of conformity, struggles, and resistances within their disparate and/or culture
specific contexts. This book attempts to analyse women’s fiction in light of these
political commentaries, exploring the gendered facets of the nation-state. The
book highlights, through this, the patriarchal biases inherent in the conception
and construction of the official reports, political processes, and commentaries,
which aggravate the gendered contexts of women’s lives in myriad ways.

Notes
1 Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (2003) discusses the concept of nations and nation-state and
how both draw life from one another, “But since states are inevitably linked to and
inhere in geographical territories, it is also necessary to identify them in terms of nations
in our analyses. . . . The idea of the nation is also the powerful legitimization of the state
institution; and different ideologies of nationalism (anti-colonial, Nehruvian, and Hin-
dutva inspired) have determined the projects and trajectories of the postcolonial nation
state differently” (4–5).
2 Articles 14 to 24 within the chapter on Fundamental Rights ensure rights of freedom
and equality to citizens. Articles 25 to 30 in the same chapter, collectively termed ‘cul-
tural and educational rights,’ deal explicitly with the rights of religious and cultural com-
munities and minority groups.
3 Anupama Roy (2005) describes how Congress, in the process of representing the
masses, sought to regulate them within the nationalist ambit. Any voicing of dissent
or demands of freedom from ascriptive inequalities were silenced and obscured. For
instance, Congress ministries in the 1930s refused to recognise peasant activists as politi-
cal prisoners.“Peasant leaders such as Pandit Karynand Mishra, Anil Mishra, Jagannath
Prasad and Bramhachari Ramvrikasha went on hunger strikes for recognition as politi-
cal prisoners. They were released, when on the verge of death without fulfilling their
demands for political prisonerhood” (Roy 2005, 195).
4 Partha Chatterjee (1989) discusses this phenomenon in his essay “The Nationalist Resolu-
tion of the Woman Question.”He proposes that the nationalists could now afford to imitate
the West in the outer or material sphere while retaining the spiritual or the inner sphere as
an uncolonised space wherein the essence of Indianness could be preserved (233–253).
5 In the First AIWC session, Miss Baladurje proposed that an emphasis on teaching the
ideals of motherhood should underline the importance of teaching the ideals of father-
hood as well (as quoted in Chaudhuri 2004b, 119). In the second AIWC session on
Educational Reform (February 1928), Mrs. P. K. Sen emphasised the inclusion of
“mothercraft and child welfare” in the development of a comprehensive education plan
(as quoted in Chaudhuri 2004b, 120). In the post-independence phase, Indira Gandhi
highlighted the importance of women as homemakers and mothers. In an interview
with Meher Pestomji of Eve’s Weekly, she stated: “Her greatest fulfilment came from
motherhood” (as quoted in Forbes 1998, 233). Sushma Swaraj, External Affairs Minister
in the NDA government (2014–19), has also shared similar views about how she seeks
her professional fulfilment by striking a balance between filial/maternal and political
role. Raka Sinha Bal (1999) quotes her in a Life Review,“I always feel that if one is duti-
ful towards the family then they will also support you” (12–13).
6 The leading, elite women members of the AIWC like Shuda Mazumdar and Mrs. P. Sub-
barayan, among others, chose to ignore – overlook the internal fault line – demands for
communal award and separate electorate by Muslim women, arguing that “women were
all sisters under the sari”(as quoted in Chaudhuri 2004b, 130). They failed to perceive
that women’s identities are intrinsically class/caste based and rooted in respective com-
munity identities. It can be understood through Yuval-Davis’s notion of intersectionality
28 Introduction

(2011), which particularly engages with the way the “differential situatedness of differ-
ential social beings affects and/or is affected by any 1) politics of belonging and 2) social,
economic and political project” (4).
7 Radha Kumar (1993) relates how, according to Gandhi, the experience of pregnancy
and motherhood especially qualified women to spread the message of peace and non-
violence. Gandhi created the image of the mother as repository of spiritual and moral
values, as a preceptor for men (Kumar 1993, 82). More to the point, even though he had
called upon women to participate in the Civil Disobedience movement and satyagrah, he
restricted their activity to mass picketing of liquor shops, drug shops, as to him, women
were prime victims of their husbands’ endorsement of such shops. It was a matter of moral
purity in personal life. Salt, on the other hand, was an issue related to economic hardships
Indians endured under the British rule, so it was an issue relevant to public life and not
considered suitable for women (83).
8 The Karachi Congress Resolution, 1931, prepared a draft of Constitutional rights, defin-
ing the role of the Swaraj government. It inscribed the category of women workers,
emphasising “special protection of women workers as well as no disability in employ-
ment or trade or profession on account of religion, caste or sex” (as quoted in Chaudhuri
2004a, 134).
9 The Resolution reiterated the principle of women’s equality and recognised them as
individuals who had “equal right to develop themselves and to improve their unsatisfac-
tory economic status” (Kasturi 2004, 138).
10 Subsequently, the phrase ‘Gender and Development’ was deployed in the 1980s to fill up
the earlier lacunas in the state’s approach to women citizens. It highlighted a structural
concern with gender mainstreaming and sensitisation in the national policies. However,
this led to nothing more than domesticating the term ‘gender’ for state’s proposed poli-
cies on women. There was possibly an attempt at co-opting the women’s movement by
the state structure as well.
11 The feminist journal Manushi was started in 1979 to provide an effective voice to the
emerging movement of women, seeking not simply to describe the realities of women’s
lives but also to change them. Some of their activities involve discussing the ambiguities
and nuances involved in implementing 33 per cent reservation for women, proposing
a working out of ‘dowry boycott,’ and offering a discursive forum to women, enabling
them to communicate with each other in an effective manner.
12 While in 1901, there were 972 females for every 1000 males, the ratio declined to 930
females per 1000 males in 1971 (Sharma and Sujaya 2012, 12). The Census of 1971 also
revealed extremely low levels of literacy for women, that is, 18.7 per cent in comparison
to 39.5 per cent for males (Sharma and Sujaya 2012,20).
13 The Towards Equality report revealed that the total enrolment of girls remained relatively
lower in comparison to boys at the primary, secondary, and university stages of educa-
tion. During 1947, the “total number of boys enrolled at various levels of the educa-
tional system was 1,1,34,665 while the girls were only 35, 50, 503, indicating an excess
of 75, 84,162 boys over girls” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012, 183). Moreover, the situation
did not improve much between 1947 and 1957. The National Committee on Women’s
Education, 1959 said that only 36 girls were under instruction for every 100 boys at
school and the disparity tends to widen in rural areas, where “the education of women
had made very slow progress” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012,184). The extent of dropouts
was higher in the case of girls, leading to lesser number of women at the higher educa-
tion level. The Census of 1971 revealed that “there were 1342 illiterate women per 1000
males” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012, 20), especially in the cities with high proportion of
Muslims, or Scheduled Castes and Tribes.
14 According to the Census of 1971, “the number of women teachers was 6 lakhs, whereas
their numbers in other professions was negligible – physicians and surgeons 0.2 lakhs, nurs-
ing and other medical and health technicians 2,550, lawyers 1,700 and architects, engineers
and surveyors 700, accountants etc. 2,700” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012, 157) and so on.
 Introduction 29

15 It was in 1976 that The Equal Remuneration Act was passed, which ensured “payment
of equal remuneration to men and women workers and prevention of discrimination on
grounds of sex against women in the matter of employment” (Sharma 2012, 9).
16 The Bodhgaya movement was a struggle by landless labourers and sharecroppers to gain
rights in land, which they had cultivated for decades. The land, some 9, 575 acres spread over
138 villages, was apparently held by a Math (a monastery-cum-temple complex), much of
it in violation of land ceiling laws. The movement emerged under the leadership of Chatra
Yuva Sangharsh Vahini, a Gandhian-socialist youth organisation (Agarwal 2002, 8).
17 As Vina Mazumdar (2008) confesses in the essay, “We could not find adequate data. We
were not even asked to look into women’s health. It is not even mentioned in the terms
of reference. The word is missing. Consequently, no task force for health was set up” (29).
18 The members who constituted the Committee on the Status of Women in India were
Prof. Leela Dube, Dr. Sakina Hassan, Dr. Phulrenu Guha, Prof. Lotika Sarkar, and Dr.
Vina Mazumdar.
19 It is evident in a controversial case at the Tehelka office, involving Tarun Tejpal’s attempts
to sexually assault one of the staff reporters. According to PTI’s (2013) report “Tehelka
case: Prima Facie Evidence to Show Rape: Said Judge as She Rejected Tarun Tejpal’s
Bail Plea: Tejpal was sent to custody on 1 December 2013, based on an email correspon-
dence he had shared with the victim, terming the act ‘light hearted banter.’ The judge
specifically problematised this aspect of the case in her order: “the insinuations that the
victim was a consenting party or that the alleged act was only a light hearted bantering
cannot be accepted.”
20 Such broad democratic alliances, as Yuval-Davis (1997) argues, are not always emancipa-
tory. Moreover, it entails an innocuous belief in the “inherent reconcilability and limited
boundaries of interest and political difference among those who are disadvantaged and
discriminated against” (128).
21 I borrow this term from Gayatri Spivak (1999), who has deployed the concept of critical
intimacy to suggest what it means to ‘speak to’ rather than ‘listen to’ or ‘speak for’ the
subaltern.

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1
WOMEN AS ‘CITIZENS’
Gendered violence in Partition narratives
by women

The very first challenge that India as a newly born sovereign state had to con-
front was the challenge of Partition and its outcomes. The transfer of power
from colonial rule to national rule took place amidst resettled geographies and
violent displacements, which sealed the fate of millions of people who lost their
identity, homes, relations, and property in the collateral damage. It is no point
listing out the colossal human tragedy wrecked in the form of exodus of millions
of refugees, murders of thousands of innocents, rape, abduction, and atrocity.1
Jason Francisco terms the mass violence of 1947 as no less than “‘fratricide,’ a
word that concisely evokes both the intimacy of the Partition’s horrors, the kill-
ing of neighbour by neighbour, and the immense, epic scale of its tragedy” (as
quoted in Greenberg 2008, 258). Interestingly, however, the official inscriptions
of the incident have been selective, forgetful and at many instances, apathetic.
According to Gyanendra Pandey (1994), “The analytical move in Indian histo-
riography was to assimilate the Partition as an event in the intersecting histories
of the British Empire and Indian nation, which left little place for recounting the
experience of the event for ordinary people” (205). This makes it all the more
important to write an alternative narrative of Partition, which would assess its
implications for the everyday lives of people and by extension their negotiations
with the independent nation-state.
Several notable critics and sociologists have explored this aspect in their writ-
ings. For instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty (1996, 2002) highlights in his works the
narrative of memory and trauma, which performs a seminal role in theorising
notions of homelessness located at the root of people’s experiences of Partition.
He asserts, “A traumatised memory has a narrative structure which works on a
principle opposite to that of any historical narrative” (1996, 2143). Moreover, the
act of remembering/forgetting selectively has an embedded structure of politics
which, unlike the historical narrative, does not engage with an objective listing
of causes of Partition but, as Chakrabarty further suggests, “the life suddenly
34 Women as ‘citizens’

terminated there, the communities abruptly fractured, the villages/desh aban-

doned in an inexplicable hurry – all that the history of Partition cannot explain
otherwise” (1996, 2144). Such an engagement facilitates in reconstructing the
notions of home and/or homelessness, which have otherwise been relegated to
the marginalia by the dominant rhetoric of the independent nation-state.
Similarly, Dhooleka Sarhadi Raj (2000) engages with the tensions of remem-
brance, forgetting, and ignorance among the three generations of families in
Delhi. She examines “how inter-generational differences structure narratives of
displacement and outline the refugee families’ strategies for forging a cultural
identity that has changed as a result of the way different generations remember
partition” (Sarhadi Raj 2000, 30). Sarhadi Raj offers an interesting insight in this
regard by representing how “the refugee experience at first conf licted and now
coalesces with the collective memory of the nation-state” (2000, 30).
Vazira Fazila-Yocoobali Zamindar (2008) engages with the “bureaucratic
violence of drawing political boundaries and nationalizing identities” (2). Mov-
ing between memory and record, Zamindar illustrates it was through “the mak-
ing of refugees as a governmental category, through refugee habilitation as a tool
of planning, that new nations and the borders between them were made, and
people, including families, were divided” (3).
Devika Chawla’s (2014) book is based on interviews conducted with first, sec-
ond, and third generation Partition victims, exploring the myriad ways in which
they have constructed the meaning of home for themselves. She also dwells upon
the role women played in etching out their lives in the newly found home, as Parti-
tion “permitted a stepping out and away from the confines of feminine domestic-
ity” (Chawla 2014, 32). She further exposes how sometimes, women’s contributions
were deliberately sidelined and/or erased by their respective families in their anxiety
to participate in the newly forged identity of a citizen of the new nation.
The moment of independence was marked by a sense of betrayal, particularly
for women. Their bodies and sexualities were rendered vulnerable to the divi-
sions between communities and nations in the context of the Partition. They
were reduced to being symbols of male honour, which circumscribed women’s
identities within what Menon and Bhasin (1998) call the “shame-fear-dishonour
syndrome” (59). By undertaking a close reading of Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar (1950)
and Jyotirmoyee Devi’s The River Churning (1967), the present chapter attempts to
explore how post-independence women’s narratives inscribe the nation, offering
a strong narrative of resistance to the social/sexual contract concluded between
the multiple patriarchies of the family, community, and nation-state.

Life and works in perspective: Amrita Pritam

and Jyotirmoyee Devi
Amrita Pritam was born into an Arora-Khatri Sikh family in Gujranwala, present
day Pakistan, on 31 August 1919. Her father Kartar Singh Hitkari was a school-
teacher. Her mother died when she was 11. After this, she moved to Lahore with her
 Women as ‘citizens’ 35

father and remained there till she had to migrate to India in 1947 due to the Partition
of the country. She lived through the tumultuous years of the nationalist struggle,
witnessing a gradual decline of Lahore from being a place of composite ethos to a
hot furnace of divisive trends. After migrating to India, she worked in the Punjabi
service of All India Radio as an announcer for some time. She continued writing
till very late in her old age. Pritam invokes the pain of the Partition in her poem
“Ajj akhaan Waris Shah nu” (I ask Waris Shah Today), which poignantly records the
horrors of the gendered violence and general massacre in the wake of the division of
the country. Some of her notable works include poetry collections like Sanjh de laali
(Twilight’s Aura 1943) and Lok Peera (The People’s Anguish 1944). The latter speaks of
the war-torn economy of Bengal and its consequences on common masses, whose
lives were destroyed due to the Great Bengal famine of 1943. Sunehare (Messages
1955), for which she won the Sahitya Akademi Award, deals with the twin themes
of nature and romance.
Some of Amrita Pritam’s well-known novels include Doctor Dev (1949), Pinjar
(TheSkeleton 1950), Dharti Sagar aur Seepian (The Earth, Sea and Oysters 1965), Jilavatan
(The Exiled 1968), and Unchas Din (49 Days 1979). They are sensitive portrayals
of how women and men are circumscribed by patriarchal institutions and social
conventions. She has also published autobiographies titled Kala Gulab (Black Rose
1968), Rasidi Ticket (The Revenue Stamp 1976), and Aksharon kay Saayee (Shadows
of Words 2004).
Jyotirmoyee Devi was born in Jaipur in the year 1894. Her father, Abhinash
Chandra Sen, had migrated to Jaipur as a schoolteacher but was soon appointed
the Diwan in the royal court of Maharaja of Jaipur. Devi received little formal
education in her natal home and was married off to Kiran Chandra Sen at the
young age of ten. Her husband was a lawyer by profession. However, he soon
died, leaving Jyotirmoyee with six children at the young age of 25. Devi had
been an avid reader from the very beginning. Though she was victimised by
stringent rules and orthodox rituals associated with widowhood, she managed to
revive her love of reading. She soon returned to her natal family, where she had
access to her grandfather’s library. She read works like J. S. Mill’s On the Subjection
of Women (1869) and Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), which greatly
inf luenced her literary writings. She has written both fiction and non-fiction,
taking up the rights of women and Dalits. Devi’s Sona Rupa Noy (Neither Gold nor
Silver), a collection of short stories, won the Rabindra Purskar in 1973. She men-
tions in “Amar Lekhar Gorar Katha” (“The Development of my Writing”) how
some of her earlier poems were published in magazines like Bharatvarsh, Banga-
vani, and Satsangi. Interestingly, she often exchanged letters with Kantichandra
Ghosh (translator of FitzGerald’s edition (1859) of Omar Khayaam’s Rubaiyat),
who was her uncle’s friend, which led to the formation of an intellectual bond
for life. Ghosh would suggest ways to improve her writings and offer her all the
necessary support to study and write. He would send her essays, plays, and books
so that Devi could improve her knowledge and writing skills. Apart from that,
her uncles and brothers would get the plays of Bernard Shaw (Candida 1898, Man
36 Women as ‘citizens’

and Superman 1903), Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), Shakespeare’s

poems, plays, so on and so forth.
These reading exercises honed Devi’s skills as a writer, motivating her to
interrogate the patriarchal society’s strictures on women’s lives and mobility. For
instance, her essay “Narir Katha” (“A Woman’s Words”) published in Bharati in
1921 is a bold statement of protest against the way patriarchal strictures and regula-
tions objectify women. Jyotirmoyee Devi’s writings like “Shei Chheleta” (“That
Little Boy” 1961) and Epar Ganga Opar Ganga (The River Churning 1967) further
critique the assumed ‘frailty’ and ‘impurity’ of women, endorsed by uppercaste
Hindus even after the Partition. Mookerjea-Leonard (2004) aptly states, Devi’s
works “demand accountability for the tragic consequences of the Partition, inter-
rogate the meaning of independence and express scepticism about the gendered
nature and class character of its privileges” (33).
Set against the grand silhouette of Partition, Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar and Jyotir-
moyee Devi’s The River Churning expose how the shadow of women’s ‘abducted/
polluted bodies’ in the wake of the Partition looms large over their legitimate
demands to claim equal rights to the nation. By so doing, they underscore the
hollowness inherent in words like ‘honour’ and ‘rescue,’ propagated by the state
in order to demarcate women’s identity and existence. The authors specifically
critique the unholy trinity of family, community and the nation that manipulated
women, their bodies and sexualities to serve its own interests. For instance, the
state’s decision to restore women to their ‘original’ families and communities not
only established its role as the parens-patriae but also froze kinship relations and
communal/national boundaries in the process. This curtailed women’s rights to
gender equality, rendering them as ‘objects of exchange’ in the inter-communal
and patriarchal epistemology. As Menon and Bhasin assert, “In its articulation of
gender identity and public policy, the state underlined the primacy of religious
identity and implicitly and explicitly, departed from its neutrality in assigning
value to the ‘legitimate family and community honour’” (1998, 125).
Both Pritam and Jyotirmoyee Devi bring out these aspects cogently in their
novels, registering resistance against the dominant structures of patriarchy, state,
and the epistemological institutions that systemically muffle the voices of women.
Through the analysis of their novels, Pinjar and The River Churning, the present chap-
ter aims to explore women’s alternative reading of the role played by the nation-
state in the post-Partition scenario, decode its grand rhetorics, and expose its covert
patriarchal biases. Of the many tropes through which Partition narratives expose
the gender biases of the nation-state, such as the silence around stories of women’s
heroism in resettling in the new location, the redefinition of the idea of home, the
physical violence suffered by women as symbols of communal and national hon-
our, etc., this chapter focusses on one, that is, the figure of the abducted woman.
It attempts to expose, through a close reading of the two novels, how the sexual
contract among heads of communal families based on their women’s abduction
and exchange became a means of legitimising the social contract of the state. It
gave an opportunity to the newly independent state to establish its role of parens
 Women as ‘citizens’ 37

patriae vis-à-vis the women who were abducted. As Menon and Bhasin state, “It
was obliged as the ‘responsible and civilised’ government of a ‘civilised’ country to
rightfully claim its citizen-subjects, as it was morally bound to relocate and restore
these same objects within their families, communities and countries” (1998, 107).
To this effect, women writers construct a powerful critique of aggressive commu-
nal assertions and identity politics as the birth of the new nation-state is inscribed
on the battered and bruised bodies of women.
The choice of the novels in the chapter is also governed by a consideration of
the locations and contexts of the two writers, one who speaks of the Partition as
experienced in Punjab, the other who engages with the experience in the con-
text of Bengal.2

Patriarchal nation-state and women in the Partition

The crisis of Partition once again exposed the patriarchal rhetoric that under-
writes the notion of nation-state upheld by nationalist sentiments. The violence
and the miseries unleashed in the wake of the event were charged with gen-
der biases that had marked the patriarchal societies on both sides of the border.
Conf licts at all levels, communal, political, and cultural inscribed themselves
on women and their bodies. Even though women writers like Amrita Pritam,
Jyotirmoyee Devi, Qurratulain Hyder (River of Fire 1959), Anita Desai (Clear Light
of Day 1980), Bapsi Sidhwa (Cracking India 1991), and others have written vocally
about it, this gendered aspect of Partition was for long ignored by Partition his-
toriographers until feminist critics and sociologists like Veena Das (Critical Events
1995), Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin (Borders and Boundaries 1998), and Urvashi
Butalia (The Other Side of Silence 1998) etc. drew attention to it. They began to
problematise the figure of the abducted woman, notions of shame on the one
hand and family and community honour on the other, intersections of commu-
nity and state and their links to gender violence, so on and so forth.
In Pinjar, Pritam compares the anguish of an abducted woman to the erosion
of syncretic culture of Punjab caused by Partition, so that “it became a festered
wound in the bosom of history” (as quoted in Datta 2008, 10). The author delin-
eates her disenchantment with the nascent nation-state as it bore within its birth
the terror of communalism. She compares its destiny to the unwanted child that
grows in the belly of the abducted woman, becoming a symbolic reminder of
her trauma: “Puro would hate each and every part of her body. How she wished
to throw away the worm infesting her body, to not have anything to do with
it, as if one extracts a thorn stuck in the body by pressing it between the nails”
( Pritam 2003, 7).3 Thus, Pritam locates Pinjar within this context of a ‘storm of
hatred’ that swept through north India, especially Punjab after the horrific riots
of March–April 1947 in Lahore.
The novel opens in 1935 amidst Puro’s reminiscences of her family, her ‘bliss-
ful’ life before she was abducted by one of the Muslim villagers Rashid. Pritam
tenuously locates this abduction within the emergent divisive trends that had
38 Women as ‘citizens’

begun to assail the political and social topography of Punjab in the 1930s. For
instance, the Communal Award of 1930–32 granted the provision of separate
electorates to Muslims, Sikhs, and untouchables. This led to the construction of
new categories of “religious identification and enumeration” ( Datta 2008, 3),
homogenising them in the process. The colonial directive had severe implica-
tions for the rural landscape of Punjab. As Nonica Datta (2008) suggests, the
pluralist tradition of Punjab, notably, “the f luid identities, multiple vocabularies,
landscapes and inter-community solidarities were overshadowed by monolithic
religious blocs” (3).
Pritam deftly inscribes the deteriorating social and communal relations, which
eventually led to the Muslim demand for separate electorate. For instance, the
readers learn that Rashid has abducted Puro to avenge his community of Sheikh
cultivators who were once exploited by the Shah moneylenders. Rashid’s pater-
nal aunt is molested by Puro’s paternal uncle simply because his family fails to lay
off their debt. Thus, the author subtly hints at a very real fear of Hindu domi-
nance leading to economic exploitation of Muslims, which spirals this chain of
violent reprisals between the two communities. As Rashid tells Puro,

They (Puro’s parents) cried the way my grandfather, father and uncle had
cried when my aunt was abducted. Police took a bribe of Rs. 500. You
know very well that our inf luence is stronger these days. . . . No Hindu
can even raise his eyes against us.
(Pritam 2003, 21)

In fact, asymmetrical economic relations between the two communities aligned

with prejudice and deep-seated antagonism led to the unfurling of a brutal logic
of violent reprisal that marked the bodies of women during the Partition.
Rashid’s account corresponds with the various oral testimonies collected by
Devika Chawla (2014), who states that the nostalgia about the Hindu-Muslim
friendship is entwined in an ironical bind. For instance, in the oral histories
mentioned by the first generation refugees, the echoes of Hindu-Muslim unity
are constantly ruptured by references to Muslims as ‘them,’ ‘they,’ revealing that
both the communities were apart long before the Partition. “They are always
either employees, or helpers, or servants, or wet nurses-an underclass that no one
acknowledges as an underclass” (Chawla 2014, 46).
Thus, Rashid’s experience seeks to interrogate this nostalgia for community,
highlighting what Chawla further describes as “the emotional chasm that was
present long before the communities were politically partitioned” (2014, 46).
The reference to this chasm in the oral testimonies of Partition problematises the
recollections of a harmonious pre-Partition communal context. For instance, in
one of the interviews recorded by Menon and Bhasin (1998), a Hindu woman
says, “roti beti ka rishta nahin rakhte the, baki sab theek tha” (“We neither broke
bread with them, nor inter-married, but the rest was fine,” 12). This further
 Women as ‘citizens’ 39

reveals how the asymmetrical inter-communal relations are severely inscribed

on gendered terrains, impelling women to preserve the deeply seated prejudices
and taboos of the respective communities. Puro’s victimisation in the text is a
consequence of these factors. For instance, when she returns to her house after
escaping Rashid’s confinement, her parents ask her to go back as they don’t
want to maintain any filial ties with her, “Where shall we keep you? Who shall
marry you? Your religion has been destroyed, you no longer belong to us” ( Pri-
tam 2003, 23). Thus, the emotional violence inf licted on Puro by her parents’
rejection merges with her sexual violation by Rashid, which takes place later in
the narrative. Puro is simply perceived as a property, a signifier of ‘honour,’ a
pawn in the brutal logic of violent transactions in the name of religious identity.
Furthermore, the instance when Puro’s mother is apprehensive about the safety
of her husband and son, lest the Sheikhs might kill them if Puro does not go
back, is firmly located within real life incidents during the communal crisis. For
instance, Menon and Bhasin (1998) reveal that many families actually abandoned
and/or killed their daughters to negotiate the price of their own freedom at the
hands of the aggressor. They further suggest that women’s testimonies pertain-
ing to familial and communal violence highlight “how many of them had been
forced to die – at the hands of men in their own families, or by their own hands.
Poisoned, strangled or burnt to death, put to sword, drowned. It was made clear
to them that death was preferable to ‘dishonour’” (Menon and Bhasin 1998, 45).
Thus, Pritam blurs the difference between socially ‘sanctioned’ violence and
the ‘illegitimate’ communal violence directed against women, suggesting what
Menon and Bhasin call a “‘continuum of violence’ that began pre-Partition and
continued into the early Fifties” (1998, 40).
Jyotirmoyee Devi’s The River Churning further corroborates Pritam’s stance as
described previously. The novel unfolds in the backdrop of a blaze of communal
violence in the Noakhali and Comilla districts of East Bengal in August 1946.
Devi represents the plight of a young girl Sutara whose sexuality is made the site
at which negotiations of the communal and/or national borders are performed.
Like Pinjar, Devi’s novel also exposes how the body of the abducted woman,
once recovered from the ‘enemy’ nation, is subjected to taboos relating (im) pure
kinship norms and systematically rejected by her ‘original’ family and commu-
nity. As Jill Didur (2007) asserts, such a treatment makes it clear that

the abducted woman’s contact with the Muslim community . . . and her
survival in the absence of community protection threatens to make vis-
ible the gendered structure of the social contract and thus challenge the
legitimacy of the community and state’s claims to represent a homogenous
constituency(149).

The attack on Sutara, followed by her prolonged stay at Tamiz Sahib’s house,
brands her as ‘impure.’ She is termed a “low caste hadi or bagdi” ( Devi 1995, 36)
40 Women as ‘citizens’

by her extended family. Her presence is enough to ‘spoil’ and ‘pollute’ the cul-
tural practices and rituals endorsed by the family. As Boudi’s mother admonishes
her daughter,

Are you out of your mind? Her clothes have been polluted by the touch
of a Muslim household. Why did you have to go and take her into your
arms? . . . . How can you have her pollute everything?
( Devi 1995, 31–32)

Thus, as Debali Mookerjea-Leonard (2003) suggests, “Sutara’s integration in her

original community is almost impossible because her body carries an alternative
history, the imprint of another set of practices that constitute another everyday
life.”
The sheer investment in women’s chastity/purity evident in the acts of their
sexual violation and rejection by family reveals how difficult it was to reintegrate
women into the domestic sphere. Through Sutara’s betrayal at the hands of her
family after her return to the original ‘home’ and country, Devi critiques the
Hindu community’s obsession with women’s chastity and their abandonment
of women (recovered from Pakistan after the Partition) to maintain a semblance
of community identity and honour. Mookerjea-Leonard further asserts (2003),
“women’s bodies are made the preferred sites for the hieroglyphics of power dif-
fused throughout everyday domestic life” (Ibid.). Thus, from the beginning of
the novel, Devi sets out to reveal how women carried the burden of historical
dislocation.
This is evident in the last words of Sutara’s father before he leaves the house
and is killed by miscreants in the riots, “Get into the corner room and bolt it
from inside. . . . Don’t come out of the house even if someone calls or bangs on
the door” ( Devi 1995, 7). It identifies the burden placed upon women’s chas-
tity and the implications of the gendered nature of collective violence that pre-
cipitates their victimisation by the patriarchal consensus. While Sutara’s mother
jumps into a pond to save her honour, the elder sister of Sutara goes missing.
Sutara is found lying in a pool of blood by their Muslim neighbour Tamizuddin.
However, the norms of communal honour would define Sutara’s mother as a
martyr who encountered a ‘heroic’ death, upholding the patriarchal code during
times of crisis. She becomes, to deploy Urvashi Butalia’s words, “a consenting
victim of patriarchal consensus” (1998, 214) as she decodes the message implicit
in her husband’s warning to keep the door shut.
Butalia (1998) writes of women like Sutara’s mother as “acting upon a misper-
ceived notion of the good of the community. Their deaths corroborate the ide-
ology that the honour of the community lay in protecting its women from the
patriarchal violence of an alien community” ( Butalia 1998, 213). Sutara, being
too young to discern this warped logic of patriarchal honour, is unable to articu-
late “the tremendous shock she had received” ( Devi 1995, 16). Her inability to
remember what had happened to her marks the author’s defiance against the
 Women as ‘citizens’ 41

patriarchal logic that discursively constructs the norms of women’s purity and
defilement. The physical trauma and sexuality of Sutara are, as Jasodhara Bagchi
(1995) terms, the “great unspoken” (xxvii), revealing how women were turned
into permanent sufferers of the violence of the Partition.
The narratives of Pinjar and The River Churning make a larger statement on the
mundane quotidian violence that forms part of everyday experience of women.
The authors deploy what Veena Das and Ashis Nandy have called “the language
of feud” (as quoted in Menon and Bhasin 1998, 40) to locate Puro and Sutara’s
painful experience of abduction, wherein the exchange of violence between
social and communal groups reduces its victims to being “bearers of the status
of their group, the means through which the pact of violence continues to be
executed” (Menon and Bhasin 1998, 40).
Devi’s novel offers an astringent commentary on the gendered narrative of the
Partition. Published in 1967, when the nation was barely two decades young, The
River Churning represents the experience of women’s humiliation and consequent
silencing of women’s voices in large historical narratives written by patriarchal
structures of the independent nation-state. She begins her novel by referring to
the ‘Stree Parva’ in the Mahabharata, which, according to her, exemplifies patri-
archal manipulation,

The king gets back his kingdom. Heroes of war are honoured. The world
resounds in praise of male bravery, acts of heroism–but has nothing to say
about the eternal stree parva, the humiliation of women. . . . No history has
recorded that tragic chapter of shame and humiliation that which is forever
controlled by the husband, the son, the father and their race.
( Devi 1995, xxxv)

Thus, Devi critiques the nationalist historiography for its failure to record wom-
en’s struggles that encourages this willed amnesia towards women’s experiences of
the cataclysmic events in history. Drawing upon the ancient epic the Mahabharata,
Devi had originally titled the novel as Itihashe Stree Parva or The Woman Chapter in
History. “Stree Parva” refers to a chapter of the Mahabharata that illustrates Arjun’s
failure to defend women after the Yadu clan was massacred in the battle. Devi
writes, “Before his [Arjun’s] very eyes, women were insulted and humiliated,
some were forced to accompany bandits out of fear, perhaps some were killed – the
chronicler has not been able to give us a complete account” (1995, xxxiv). How-
ever, Devi indicates that the chapter, though having a strong potential “of cross-
cutting ‘myth’ with ‘history’” (as quoted in Bagchi 1995, xxvii) hardly deserves
the name. In fact, it was the “‘stree parva’ of humiliation by men, ‘stree parva’ of
all time” (as quoted in Bagchi 1995, xxviii), a saga of male aggression.
Even as Devi writes about the Partition, this historical context to her is not a
rupture of history but rather a continuum. She raises questions about the nature
of the modern nation-state which instead of endorsing modern secular ratio-
nalist democratic principles has inherited age-old culturally rooted class, caste,
42 Women as ‘citizens’

and gender hierarchies, as critics like G. Aloysius (1997) have argued. Aloysius
says that the principle of hegemony was not followed in the nationalism-based
nation-state in India because here the privileged refused to share any part of their
privileges with the marginalised; hence the old structures of hierarchy and sup-
pression were retained in different forms.
Devi further draws a parallel between the anarchy that prevailed in the absence
of men in the ‘Stree Parva’ of the Mahabharata and the apathy to the predicament
of the abducted and raped women in the master narrative of the Partition. She
negotiates this epistemic and material violence by equipping Sutara to express
her trauma through, what Veena Das and Ashis Nandy have termed a “word-
less telling” (as quoted in Menon and Bhasin 1998, 55). Women retained, as the
duo further suggest, the “memory of loot, rape and plunder” somewhere hid-
den inside their body, (as quoted in Menon and Bhasin 1998, 55), which could
only be articulated through a metaphoric expression of pain. For instance, Devi
writes of how Sutara “was only aware of something terrible having crushed her
existence out of shape” (1995, 16). However, this passivity is rendered a positive
outlook as it hits out at the very foundation of the gendered nation-state.
Sutara’s silence effectively exposes the sinister alliance between community
and nationhood that appropriated the national identity by laying claims over the
religious and reproductive identity of women. Thus, men emerged as heads of
family and autonomous citizens of the masculine nation at the cost of women.
The extended family’s rejection of Sutara reveals the impulse of the modern
narratives of nation-state to neglect the experiences of victims of the nation-state.
As Debali Mookerjea-Leonard states independence makes little sense in the lives
of migrant women like Sutara “for whom the freedom of the country is tethered
to betrayals by their families, by the nation, and more substantially, by the loss
of control over their bodies and the erosion of consent” (2003). Devi upturns the
patriarchal nationalist imaginings of women as goddess and their inscription into
the mould of the nation by foregrounding Sutara’s survival and return as a site
of mediation between her experiential reality and discursive domains of cultural
nationalism, communalism and patriarchy.
Devi links it up further with the systematic denial of women’s individuality
within the annals of history and statecraft. Mookerjea-Leonard further suggests that
“the Partition atrocities constitute the epic of the modern Indian nation” (2003).
Devi embarks upon the task of writing a feminist historiography of the Partition in
order to what Kelly describes as, “restore women to history and to restore our his-
tory to women” (as quoted in Menon and Bhasin 1998, 9). In the process, the read-
ers are also interpellated in the task of questioning the “justice of the treatment of
these women by the state and indigenous patriarchy and the implications this has for
an understanding of citizenship in India” ( Didur 2007, 54). No doubt, Devi’s novel-
istic endeavour was a radical step in the wake of the contemporary politics when the
emergent nation-state was still inebriated by the euphoria of independence.
Amrita Pritam also relates her experience of being a refugee in an interview
with Nonica Datta thus,
 Women as ‘citizens’ 43

What memories? I was overtaken by a storm of hatred. Nobody realised

that people would suffer so much – houses being burnt down, neighbours
killing each other, and women being abducted and raped. . . . How could
so many millions be dispossessed and displaced? This too will pass. It won’t
last. We will be able to come back.
(as quoted in Datta 2008, 18)

The distraught refugees who had lost their homes, families, and possessions in
the riots, having reached Delhi, were settled in temporary refugee camps there.
Pritam relates the travails of refugees sacrificed at the altar of prurient violence.
Her fictional representations resonate with the actual trajectory of Partition vio-
lence. As Menon and Bhasin suggest, “As the violence increased . . . the migra-
tions took on an urgent and treacherous character: convoys were ambushed,
families separated, children orphaned, women kidnapped – and whole trainloads
massacred” (1998, 35).
Having crossed the border, people were overwhelmed by their immense losses
and deemed appropriate “to address the leaders of independent India as appro-
priate recipients of their laments” ( Das 2007, 23). In this manner, the state was
forced to take cognisance of the abducted women, learning how it was one of
the primary ‘legitimate’ affairs of the state to claim entitlements over and recover
women of one’s own community. The governments of India and Pakistan arrived
at a mutual agreement, signing the Inter-Dominion Agreement of November
1947, to recover as many abducted women as could be found. It was called the
Central Recovery Operation. An official press release published in The States-
manon 4 November 1947 clearly stated, “forced conversions and forced marriages
will not be recognized and that women and girls who have been abducted must
be restored to their families” (as quoted in Das 2007, 24). This decision was, as has
been pointed out by Menon and Bhasin, a clear “violation of every principle of
citizenship, fundamental rights and access to justice” (1998, 125). In fact, women
were reduced to being members of their respective communities, having no sense
of freedom to pursue the life of their choice.
Pinjar subtly inscribes the problems inherent in the government’s efforts to
identify women as ‘Hindus’ or ‘Muslims’ based on the religion of their parental
homes and restore them to their ‘original homes’ (Resolution passed by the AICC,
17 November 1947). Puro’s chance encounter with the two abducted Hindu girls,
one of whom is her sister-in-law, and her concerted efforts to rescue them from
their aggressors, needs to be problematised in the wake of the Central Recovery
Operation initiated by both the Indian and Pakistani governments after the initial
‘euphoria’ of independence started to settle down. The fact that both the girls are
abducted from military camps, set for refugees to ensure a ‘safe’ passage to India,
exposes and attacks the self-assumed role of the state as the parent-protector of
its citizens.
Pritam highlights this phenomenon when Puro goes to Ratowal camp to meet
Ramchand one last time before he leaves for the country that lay across the border.
44 Women as ‘citizens’

Readers learn that the convoys did not ensure the safety of the distraught masses,
especially women. The refugees would have to sell their ornaments to the locals
to arrange food during the journey and, sometimes, even barter their women for
safety [Urvashi Butalia (1998) and Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin (1998)]. All
this happened right under the ‘supervision’ of the military that was otherwise
entrusted with the task of ensuring a safe passage across the border. Thus, Pritam
problematises the ‘earnest’ paternalism of state, emphasising again that a very thin
line distinguishes patriarchal violence from patriarchal protectionism.
Similarly, Devi also exposes the hollowness inherent in words like ‘honour’
and ‘rescue’ propagated by the state in order to demarcate women’s identity and
existence. By so doing, she asserts how the obsession with women’s chastity and
purity was bound up with the issue of national and communal identities. The
obsession with women’s honour reveals a strategic alliance between the commu-
nity and the state. In fact, as suggested by Debali Mookerjea-Leonard (2005), the
significance accorded to the recovery of these women by the protectionist state
is evident in the appeals made by Gandhi and Nehru to the immediate/extended
families to reclaim their women. The reference to Gandhi in The River Churning,
making rounds of Noakhali post-1946 violence and urging Hindu men to rein-
tegrate women abducted in the riots, is inspired by such incidents.
While the nation ‘recovered’ these women to restore its lost honour and legit-
imacy as a parent-protector state, worthy of its independent status, the dominant
Hindu community harped on the purity of its familial/communal genealogies
to construct the narrative of the pure nation. Urvashi Butalia talks about this
conf lict embedded in the narration of the nation,

For the community, it was the woman’s sexual purity that became impor-
tant, as also her community and/or religious identity. For the state, because
the women the state was rescuing were already in a state of sexual ‘impu-
rity’ having lived with their captors, this problem had to be pushed aside,
and their religious identity made paramount.
(as quoted in Didur 2007, 144)

In this way, the ‘modern’ nation articulated itself in the form of gender pathol-
ogy, which could be altered only when women’s rights and status within the
nation could be renegotiated vis-à-vis the decrepit structures of the family, com-
munity, and nation. Tamizuddin’s wife interrogates her community’s treatment
of Sutara and other Hindu women,

You want to partition the country, go ahead. . . . But why don’t you leave the
women alone? Does your religion allow you to dishonour women?. . . You
are the educated section of community-teachers, lawyers, mukhteers. . . .
Shame on you!
( Devi 1995, 13–14)
 Women as ‘citizens’ 45

This incident further suggests an affinity in the women of two antagonistic com-
munities and nations who see themselves as sufferers irrespective of which side
wins. Devika Chawla writes how women’s oral histories, sometimes, attempt
to reignite relationships with Muslims. They are invoked not as the ‘other’ but
as “persons, real, tangible, vulnerable human beings – a piece of and a bridge
to home” (Chawla 2014, 174). Tamizuddin wife’s empathetic attitude towards
Sutara shows how she makes “a visceral link with the other” (Chawla 2014, 175).
In fact, women’s negotiation of communal differences could also be located at
the interstices of gender solidarity. They represent, as Chawla describes, “cama-
raderie, a miniscule act of resistance that erodes, albeit marginally, the spaces in
between” (2014, 174). However, such instances of affinity have been severely
challenged by the rising inf luence of the Hindu Right and its women post-
independence. Feminist theorists like Tanika Sarkar (1991) and Susie Tharu
and Tejaswini Niranjana (1999) have pointed out how women’s militancy has
been detrimental to forging democratic alliances across the religious divide. The
women of the Hindu Right adorn the role of neo-nationalist bharatmatas, egging
the Hindu men on a communal warpath. As Tharu and Niranjana further assert,

riots now have a new profile.  .  . . News photographs showed a sizeable

number of women among those arriving for the 1992 Ayodhya kar seva.
Several papers carried reports of Sadhvi Rithambara and Uma Bharati
cheering on the crowd that tore down the Babri Masjid.
(1999, 512)

Thus, Devi’s evocation of women’s affinity during Partition violence appears in

sharp contrast to the role performed by right wing Hindu women in reinventing
the profile of the communal riots in independent India.
Furthermore, Devi exposes how the paternalism of a communal ideology
can turn in on itself, exposing the violence that is constitutive of it. The lack of
anxiety about Sutara, exhibited in the letters sent by her brothers, shows how the
continuum of violence that locates women’s existence at the interstices of inter-
communal rivalries, will “eventually and inevitably return to prey on itself . . .
one’s own body politic” (Gopal 2005, 112). Instead, the brothers’ apprehensions
about their own safe return to Calcutta is a larger comment on the self-devouring
tendencies of the Partition violence and its implications for the role and account-
ability of the masculine nation-state vis-à-vis women. Devi extends this critique
of the ‘protectionist’ men and nation-state when Sutara’s brothers specifically ask
Tamiz Sahib not to hand Sutara over to the State Recovery officers from India.
However, it is significant to observe that no such official programme of
recovery of the abducted women was launched in West Bengal after Partition.
The fact that Devi incorporates references to it in her narrative is not to be
termed a factual error. To borrow Menon and Bhasin’s words, it is a larger state-
ment on the failure of the ‘protectionist’ state as well as the fathers and brothers
46 Women as ‘citizens’

of abducted women to not consider them individuals but traitors who had “pol-
luted the biological national source of family” (1998, 44). As Anis Kidwai writes
in Azadi ki Chaon Mein 1974 (In Freedom’s Shade 2011), the agents of the state, that
is, inspectors and/or army men, entrusted with the task of recovering women
colluded with the abductors to foil any attempts at recovery. At other times,
there was no guarantee, even if a woman was ‘rescued,’ so to speak, she was once
again abducted and raped by her ‘rescuer,’ who had recovered her as a part of the
Central Recovery Operation.4 Thus, the bestiality wrecked on women could
neither be contained by affiliative ties of masculine honour nor the ‘benevolent’
structures of nation, suggests Devi.
Alternatively, it is pertinent to build structures of humane desire and empathy,
which could, as Valentine E. Daniel suggests, “transcend the narcissistic particu-
larities” (1996, 68) harboured by families, communities, and nations. To this end,
Devi implicitly opposes the communal and/or national grounds of the Recov-
ery Operation as the communal ‘other’ Tamizuddin Sahib takes upon himself to
safely escort Sutara across the border and restore her to her brothers. He knew
that Sutara’s “brothers were more concerned about their good name, the honour
of the family, than they were about Sutara” ( Devi 1995, 23).
More to the point, as Menon and Bhasin have pointed out, how many Hindu
and Muslim women returned and in what condition, became a matter of prestige
for both the countries (1998, 98). On the basis of this, one could say that material
and political significance that the abductions acquired post March 1947 was an
offshoot of the systemic communal discourse that had proliferated in Punjab from
the mid-19thcentury onwards. For instance, the inception and consolidation of
revivalist organisations like the Arya Samaj and the formation of Punjabi Hindu
consciousness betrayed their “anxieties regarding Muslim and Christian inroads
into Hinduness and the erosion of, [what they believed as] Hindu dharma, values
and lifestyle” (Menon and Bhasin 1998, 123). Women’s recovery was a symbolic
continuation of this idea in ways more than one, suggest Menon and Bhasin:

Earlier the Shuddhi programme of the Arya Samaj, if it resulted in bring-

ing only one convert back into the Hindu fold, served to remind the
Hindu community that losing its members to Islam or Christianity was
not irreversible. Recovering women, who had been abducted, moreover,
forcibly converted, restoring them to their own and the larger Hindu fam-
ily, and ensuring that a generation of new-born Hindu children was not
lost to Islam through their repatriation to Pakistan with their mothers, was
a part of this concern.
(1998, 123–24)

Thus, women’s legitimate membership in the family, community, and nation

was contingent on the nation-state’s constitution of women as sexual and repro-
ductive beings in the post-independence context. The ‘ideology of abductions,’
which was once, as Charu Gupta (2005) asserts, “conducive to justifications for
 Women as ‘citizens’ 47

Hindu male prowess” (256) now came to be hinged upon the nation’s honour
and virility, that it was strong enough to defend its women’s honour at the hands
of the ‘enemy’ nation. Thus,

The problem of the abducted women moved from the order of the fam-
ily to the order of the state by creating a new legal category of ‘abducted
person’(applicable only to women and children) who came within the regu-
latory power of the state. There was an alliance between patriarchy and the
state as parens patriae, which made the official kinship norms of purity and
honour much more rigid by transforming them into the law of the state.
( Das 2007, 25)

Gender relations and women’s sexuality act as the most visible of faultlines,
exposing the collusion between masculinity, patriarchy, and national identity.
Thus, the experience of abducted women like Sutara and Puro exposes the
Indian state’s accountability vis-à-vis its female citizens in general. The excesses
they were subjected to at the time of the Partition were a prelude to the contin-
ued violence, asymmetrical relations, discriminations they experienced at the
hands of gender-blind national policies, and planning documents of the patriar-
chal nation-state.

Women’s (dis)agency and gendered relations redefined

The assault and pain inscribed on women’s body within this patriarchal arrange-
ment of gender relations ensures that they are not considered individuals in their
own right. For example, in Pinjar, even before Puro is abducted and forcibly
given a new nomenclature Hamida, she is shown to lead a very limiting and con-
strained life in her maternal home. Puro’s father arranges her marriage the year
she turns 14. Her mother is fed up of giving birth to three daughters in a row,
year after year, and conceives once again, only to give birth to the much-awaited
son of the family. This is illustrated in the text through a consistent rupturing
of the prose narrative by lyrical moments. By so doing, Pritam not only repre-
sents the gender discrimination that is a norm in middle class families, but also
ironically inscribes the claustrophobic pedagogy offered to women. For instance,
“sons are given ancestral houses, huge inheritances . . . and daughters are given
nothing . . . tonight is the night of going away, leaving this house for another”
( Pritam 2003, 14).
In fact, as the Towards Equality report on the status of women in India (1974)
shows, women’s status within their family and socio-cultural set up hardly
underwent any radical transformation from the pre-independence to the post-
independence period. The report further highlights the faultlines of Indian patri-
archy by anchoring the marginalised status of women in society to the biased
socio-cultural context prevalent since the 19thcentury. Far from being consid-
ered individual units in society, girls are still perceived as the prime carriers of
48 Women as ‘citizens’

the burden of social structures, cultural norms, value systems on the one hand and
religion, family, and kinship roles on the other. Within this logic, the “arrival
of a son receives a warm welcome and it is no wonder that while striving to get
a son, a family may come to have a number of daughters” (Sharma and Sujaya
2012, 42).
Puro is one such girl who is brought up as a perfect pupil of gendered sociali-
sation. She is trained to inculcate cultural norms, which legitimise a differential
treatment between girls and boys. She perceives herself as the perfect daugh-
ter who falls in line, never interrogating such narrow roles prescribed by her
family and society. In fact, she conveniently settles herself into the role of her
future husband Ramchand’s wife, dreaming about her ‘idyllic’ marital life with
him. Pritam ref lects how this unawareness about one’s predicament as a woman
delimits the possibilities of renegotiating women’s roles vis-à-vis patriarchal
institutions and the allied structures of gendered hierarchy.
This critical insight offered by Pritam is important. It obliquely highlights
how the ground reality was in stark contrast to the role for women envisioned
by the policy documents of the emergent nation-state. The National Planning
Committee appointed by Nehru on 16 June 1939 asked the various subcommit-
tees to report back on the social, economic, political, and legal status of Indian
women along with suitable recommendations. The document was significant as
it envisioned women as equal citizen-subjects of the nation and individuals hav-
ing respectable rights within the family. It advocated for “women’s development
as individuals in a just society, relieving them of their great and unequal burden,
so that they might develop their fullest potential as individuals through equality,
education and opportunity in all spheres” (as quoted in Kasturi 2004, 138).
The references to other women in the narrative in the first half of Pritam’s
novel, namely Kammo, Taro, and Pagli (mad woman), offer extended arguments
on the kind of space women occupy at the margins of communities and nation.
These women are shown as belonging to the most deprived sections of society,
whose representation is significant for various reasons. Kammo is a low caste
Hindu girl who is an orphan. Puro shares an affectionate bond with her, provid-
ing Kammo with love and succour, which is otherwise conspicuously absent in
her life. We see how Pritam subtly juxtaposes the aggressive assertions of religious
identity with the alliances that women formulate with each other at an indi-
vidual level, suggesting how gender bonds have a capacity to overcome religious
and communitarian boundaries. Both Puro and Kammo transcend the barriers of
religion, class, and patriarchal restrictions to maintain their intimate relationship.
Similarly, Puro’s encounter with Taro also makes her deeply aware of patriar-
chal double standards and systematic marginalisation of women at the hands of
men. Taro is trapped in a failed marriage wherein her husband has rejected her
for another woman. Her trauma and grief at this unfulfilled and failed marital
union manifests itself in the form of epileptic attacks. Puro feels for her deeply.
It is in Taro’s condition that she perceives her own failure to confront the fact of
her abduction and forced marriage with Rashid. An incipient feminist gesture
 Women as ‘citizens’ 49

can now be perceived in her consciousness, which was missing earlier. Puro
perceives herself, her victimhood vis-à-vis Rashid. She registers her protest in a
self-annihilating manner wherein she reduces her intake of food and subsequent
involvement in the affairs of the family.5 Though Puro cannot protest in a radical
way, her consciousness responds to an intense desire to construct her individual
identity. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan asserts, in this regard,

a tenuous individualism shapes the female subject’s resistance. Ideally, this

self hood constitutes for the female subject existential freedom, space for
growth and change, a full inner life, and some access to power, even if it
ends as a costly or self-defeating venture.
(1993, 71)

This nascent resistant consciousness enables Puro to see through the deceptive
benevolence of patriarchal communities and allied structures of the state, which
victimise women in the guise of offering them succour. It is this knowledge,
which was absent earlier and now enables her to contest the communal mandate
by adopting Pagli’s child.
Pagli has no religious/communal identity. While her nakedness, as Datta
rightly points out, “becomes a metaphor for her non-sectarian identity” (2008,
18), her maniac laughter marks her rejection of the masculinised and commu-
nalised groups in the village that seek to regulate her.6 Alternatively, the aggressive,
communally-charged society can only deal with such non-sectarian identities by
marginalising them. Pagli is raped and she becomes pregnant, revealing the vicious
ways in which society treats aberrant women like her. Puro rightly affirms, Pagli
had “neither had beauty nor youth. She was merely a body, oblivious of herself, a
mere skeleton. An insane skeleton . . . brutal vultures ate her too” ( Pritam 2003,
52). Furthermore, Pagli is discarded and ousted from the village. The fact that she
dies while giving birth to a child highlights how such women are pushed to the
margins of society.
In fact, Pagli’s death calls into question the welfarist assumptions of the nation
in the making, which could not assure social security to vulnerable/destitute
women like Pagli. For instance, the report of the subcommittee on Women’s
Role in Planned Economy (1947) does not cogently address the problem of
women’s desertion and destitution. While marriage and family life constitute the
second section of the report, the subcommittee nowhere suggests that women’s
destitution is an important aspect and an offshoot of their oppression vis-à-vis
family, caste, and community groups. Moreover, there is no attempt to chal-
lenge tradition, which constructs these institutions as given in the first place. As
Anupama Roy (2005) states,

Even when it [the subcommittee] asked for ‘economic liberty’ and the
‘right to mould her social and economic life in any way she chooses,’ which
involved the ‘reorganisation of the functions which nature and society
50 Women as ‘citizens’

have imposed on her,’ the subcommittee declared it did not intend to enter
into a confrontation with ‘traditions,’ which in the past contributed to the
happiness and progress of the individual.
(220)

It is no surprise then that the issues of widowhood, unmarried mothers and

prostitutes were simply relegated to the miscellaneous section of the report. The
unwillingness to confront traditions was a consequence of the nationalist patriar-
chal training, which proposed how women as wives and mothers were seminal to
“the improvement of the life of the nation” ( Roy 2005, 221). By so doing, it not
simply termed destitute women/widows as unproductive but ousted them from
the ‘legitimate’ framework of family. Thus, Pritam has invested Pagli’s figure
with pathos to comment on the institutional appropriation of individual identity
and the systemic erasure of unproductive women from society.
As mentioned previously, Puro’s decision to adopt Pagli’s child is a testimony
to the assertion of her nascent feminist consciousness. However, it spirals a chain
of zealous reactions from the Hindu panchayat that firmly believes that since
Pagli was a Hindu, Muslims have no business to “convert a Hindu child into a
Muslim” ( Pritam 2003, 57). Pagli’s dead body is appropriated by the commu-
nalised structures, exposing the divisive trends that had assailed Punjab in the
1930s. The monolithic constructions of Hindu, Muslim, Sikh identities by colo-
nial government’s measures of demographic enumeration and revivalists’ harping
on an imaginary ‘pristine’ past had “f looded the urban and rural countryside
with shuddhi sangathan, gauraksha sabhas, tabligh and tanzim outfits” ( Datta 2008,
3). The child is snatched from Puro’s maternal succour, ‘purified,’ and given to a
Hindu water carrier’s wife, only to be returned to her when he is at the brink of
death. The incident marks a powerful indictment of the “dominance of aggres-
sive religious assertions and their impact on social relations before Partition”
( Datta 2008, 19).
In fact, the humane bond shared between Puro and the three women –
Kammo, Taro, and Pagli – suggests viable ways of recasting relationships among
women. Pritam suggests how such an attempt is not supposed to ignore and
overlook the fault lines regarding differing attitudes to extant hierarchies. The
authorial suggestion indirectly problematises the AIWC’s (the women’s wing
of the Congress) efforts to fight for women’s equality without recognising the
need to bridge differences among them. For instance, the AIWC had continued
to overlook the intensifying streak of communalism in politics and otherwise,
paying no attention to the demands for communal award and separate electorate
from Muslim women. They argued that women were a united forum of “sisters
under the sari” (as quoted in Chaudhuri 2004, 130). This made them blinkered
to the extant fissures, impacting the interrogation of the prescribed roles for
women in the wake of independence. Pritam makes her readers aware of these
pitfalls, suggesting how a pure engagement with equality may be detrimental to
the cause of diversity, justice, and equitable distribution of resources.
 Women as ‘citizens’ 51

Jyotirmoyee Devi takes this argument further as she foregrounds the way
asymmetrical gendered relations not only become a site of women’s oppression
but also create hierarchical divisions among them, based on caste stigmas attached
to notions such as (im)purity and chastity. She focusses on how Sutara’s rejection
is actually scripted by the women of the extended family, while men writhe in
the guilt of her mistreatment at the hands of family and the nation. In fact, the
women who escaped the Partition trauma were appropriated by the patriarchal
institutions to become what Yuval-Davis suggests, “the cultural reproducers of
the ethnic groups/nation, participating centrally in the ideological reproduction
of the collectivity and as transmitters of its culture; as signifiers of national differ-
ences” (1997, 7). For instance, Bibha’s mother and aunts endorse the patriarchal
injunctions on women who were abducted. They render Sutara an outcast in all
family gatherings, especially Subha’s wedding wherein she is not only insulted
but forced to leave early as well,

All eyes were now on Sutara. All sorts of questions, innuendos and oblique
remarks burst forth: ‘My God . . . You mean to say she really lived in a
Muslim family? . . . Since she lost her caste, her honour, everything, it was
wrong of Sanat to bring her back.’
(Devi 1995, 61)

Furthermore, Pritam and Devi’s engagement with the tenuously emergent aspect
of the female subject’s psyche in both the novels expands into a concern with
the dynamics of masculine subjectivity as well. They are concerned with the
reconstitution of what might be described as a gendered modern habitus. In fact,
Pritam and Devi are specifically interested in placing the burden of self-analysis/
critique on men who become “compliant agents of state” ( Bradbury 1992 , 158),
reproducing the asymmetry of gender relations at the most intimate and imme-
diate level. For example, in Pinjar, Rashid is Puro’s aggressor, yet he seems sensi-
tively inclined to confront the “meaning of violence for his existence as a man”
( Bradbury 1992 , 156). He is acutely aware of the fact that the sexual violence
and trauma he has wrecked on Puro is located at the interstices of the sexual
contract signed between multiple communal patriarchies. Puro’s disinterest in
her domesticity symbolises her refusal to cognitively register Rashid’s presence
as her husband. Thus, her silent resistance against Rashid not only destabilises
the claims of his masculinity over her but also leads him to rediscover his own
human capabilities.
Rashid writhes in a feverish state for innumerable days before getting better.
He repents his actions in a delirious state, “Puro, forgive me. Forgive my sins”
( Pritam 2003, 46). His delirium is a manifestation of his own burden of cognition
developed by working through self-contradictions, finally rendering him capable
of realising Puro’s trauma and his unjust treatment of her. It’s a cathartic process
for Rashid as he realises the magnitude of his actions, paving a way for his emo-
tional connection with Puro: “Rashid had got Puro’s body but he actually desired
52 Women as ‘citizens’

to get into her soul. He was immensely pained by her sadness” ( Pritam 2003, 48).
Herein lies the radical dynamics of the recast gender relations forged by a woman
author, wherein men have to confront the language of domination that they have
taken for granted so far. It will enable them to come to terms with the asymmetry
of gendered relations by developing a self-critique of their masculinity and the
licence that accompanies it. The events of Partition would seem to have driven
authors like Amrita Pritam to reassess the apparatus of masculinity, how it had to
be “reconstituted if there was to be any meaningful societal transformation and
certainly, if the horrors of 1947–48 were not to repeat themselves” (Gopal 2005,
105). It is significant then, how Rashid is rendered humane in terms of his gentle
feelings for Puro. It is evident when the first section concludes with Rashid’s
fields being set afire by Puro’s younger brother. He was young when Puro was
abducted but now, after 12years, he seeks to avenge the family honour ‘dese-
crated’ by Rashid. However, Rashid does not get into the vicious trap of violent
reprisal this time. He moves beyond, to borrow Valentine E. Daniel’s words, the
“narcissistic self regard” (1996, 68), perhaps realising the helpless subjectivity and
motivations of a brother who had lost his sister.
Moreover, this incident also prepares the readers for what is to follow in the
wake of the ‘cursed din of independence:’ “Puro’s village men, her community
men, except her own Rashid, but, all his relatives and family members were a
part of the present communal frenzy” ( Pritam 2003, 81). Later, Rashid facilitates
Lajo’s f light (Puro’s sister-in-law who is abducted during the Partition) beyond
the reach of her abductor. As theorists of masculinity studies like Sanjay Srivas-
tava have pointed out, the dominant male identities and masculinity are hierar-
chically produced across the patriarchal spectrum, that is, society, religion, caste,
class, ethnicity, sexuality, domesticity, and nationalism. It is pertinent, therefore,
to interrogate these structures of privileges, “engaging with the ideas of histori-
cally marginalised” (Srivastava 2015, 33). In fact, such an exercise becomes all
the more significant in the context of Partition violence, which was contingent
on ethno-religious rhetorics and warped notions of valour and masculine identi-
ties. In such a scenario, Rashid’s rediscovery of his humanity is an offshoot of
the reconstituted masculinity, which enables him to distance himself from the
patriarchal/communal depredation of Partition and the emergent nation-state. It
also opens up possibilities of self-ref lection to realise the import of being violent,
“and what that violence means for our existence as men” ( Bradbury 1992, 156).
This regenerative transformation of Rashid’s character is imperative at this stage
of the narrative as it entails “the emergence of a universal/communal being, [it]
is the mark of becoming truly human” ( Daniel 1996, 68).
Similarly, Jyotirmoyee Devi also exposes the guilt-ridden narrative of patri-
archy post Partition, which makes men aware of the serious implications of
the sexual/social contract signed with the state. However, she is not optimistic
about the radical reconstitution of such masculinities. For example, the head of
the family, Amulya Babu, sympathises with Sutara’s predicament. His random
acts of kindness to Sutara, like asking her to prepare tea for him, are merely a
 Women as ‘citizens’ 53

means to assuage his guilt on behalf of the women of the family. Nevertheless,
Devi critiques such attempts at forging reformed masculinities as they are not
aimed at becoming more humane: “To Amulaya Babu, Sutara seemed like the
bloody symbol of the mother figure we call our country” ( Devi 1995, 38). Thus,
beneath the facade of sympathy lay a sense of deeply engrained cultural conser-
vatism responsible for women’s plight in the wake of the Partition.
Devi intends to critique exactly this kind of cultural paternalism, which con-
ceives women as occupied territories. It is evident how, through the transitional
phase and post-independence, the right wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS) and its mouthpiece the Organiser accused the demands for Pakistan as
treacherous, a malicious move to violate the body of Bharatmata, “a metaphor
for the violation of the body of the pure Hindu woman” (as quoted in Butalia
1998, 183). Thus, Amulaya Babu’s kindness to Sutara perfectly dovetails with the
macro-sociological abstractions endorsed by communities and nations to curtail
the rights of the abducted women. In fact, his experience as a veteran deputy
magistrate enables him to conclude, “Individuals do not count before groups. . . .
One could not shoulder everyone’s responsibilities” ( Devi 1995, 49). The state-
ment tends to subtly justify the claims of groups and communities to be “recog-
nised as legitimate expressions of men and women’s collective existence” ( Das
1995, 89).
It is important to consider this dilemma between individual rights and col-
lectives, voiced here by Devi, against the backdrop of the demand for a Uniform
Civil Code by certain sections of the intelligentsia, which would apply to all citi-
zens irrespective of communal, regional and religious differences. More to the
point, post-independence, Article 44 of the Constitution (‘Directive Principles
of the State Policy’) proposed to “secure for the citizens a uniform civil code
throughout the territory of India” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012 , 108). However,
several debates ensued soon, expressing apprehensions about the abrogation of
the extant personal laws of the communities in consequence of the uniform civil
code implementation.7 Being a deputy magistrate, it is unlikely that Amulaya
Babu would be unaware of such arguments relating to the emergent legal frame-
work of the country. However, he expresses a sense of submission at the altar of
collectivities and their potential to delimit the individual’s tryst with self hood
within the tightly defined bounds of tradition. This inability to confront the
communal “life of passions” ( Das 1995, 93) exposes the tactical alliance between
the state and community in the wake of independence.
As Veena Das (2007) argues, the social contract of the newly emergent state
with its male citizen subjects was deeply enmeshed in the sexual contract as pre-
served within their respective families. Men were to become ‘reformed’ subjects
of the nation only if they could take upon themselves the responsibility of offer-
ing “protection to women defined as ‘their own women’ from men of the enemy
community and themselves agreed to forego violence against the women of the
other community” ( Das 2007, 38). This can be illustrated by dwelling on Pro-
mode’s (Amuluya Babu’s son) discussion with his friends regarding the problems
54 Women as ‘citizens’

facing the country and the plight of women refugees post-independence. It shows
how the male citizen subjects are overwhelmed by the task of reconstructing the
nation. Pramode’s deployment of the metaphor of Sita’s abduction and Ram’s
inability to prevent her exile not only refers to the abducted women’s plight in
independent nation but also implicates the community and the country for their
failure to sustain the “tryst with destiny.” He asks, “I wonder, what ideal would
this nation live by?” ( Devi 1995, 119). Interestingly, these ruminations resonate
with the Constituent Assembly Debates (1949) in Parliament. Menon and Bhasin
quote the statement of one of the members of Parliament in this regard,

We all know our history, of what happened in the time of Shri Ram when
Sita was abducted. Here, where thousands of girls are concerned, we can-
not forget this. . . . As descendants of Ram we have to bring back every
Sita that is alive.
(1998, 68)

Thus, it was not long before the modernity-centric nation-state betrayed its
engagements with mythic past to validate its patriarchal leanings. As Menon
and Bhasin further reveal, the nation-state projected an image of a ‘responsible’
and ‘civilised’ government vis-à-vis the abducted women. Since this rhetoric of
modernity could not have been abandoned, it was suitably tailored within the
extant mythic-moral vocabulary. Moreover, the fact that the Recovery Opera-
tion was primarily based on identifying women as either Muslim or Hindu even-
tually betrayed the ethnic and communal biases of the modern nation-state.
Consequently, women’s role as citizen-subjects was severally jeopardised in
the process.8 Menon and Bhasin corroborate this idea by highlighting that the
number of families which were either unwilling to accept their women back or
had abandoned them was not insignificant. The Ministry of Relief and Reha-
bilitation had a tough time convincing people to accept the abducted women
back into their lives and families. For instance, the Ministry was impelled to
print and distribute a pamphlet, quoting the Manusmriti, “just as a f lowing stream
purifies itself and is washed clean of all pollutants, so a menstruating woman is
purified after her periods” (Menon and Bhasin 1998, 100). Similarly, the Delhi
branch of the All India Women’s Conference “organized public meetings in dif-
ferent localities during Recovery week in February 1948 . . . and did propaganda
work in connection with the abducted women” (Menon and Bhasin 1998, 100).
In fact, the constitution of these organisations betrays how masculine identity
and everyday gender relations were entwined with the “national-level formula-
tions of gender politics” (Srivastava 2015, 35). Sanjay Srivastava rightly suggests,
“Gendered power is consolidated through civic associations such as clubs and
societies that, either implicitly or explicitly, base themselves upon masculinist
ideologies. [In fact], the conjoined contexts of patriarchal privilege and mascu-
linist ideals are normalised through associations” (2015, 35).
In this light, Pramode’s ruminations on rescuing the Sita(s) of India are meant
to discover ‘appropriate’ ways to rehabilitate and settle women in the domestic
 Women as ‘citizens’ 55

space of the new nation. Any space outside domesticity is not a viable place
for these women, as Pramode believes, “I am talking about a living hell into
which people are forced to descend to take to a profession, to keep body and
soul together. Those who can’t, die like Sita” ( Devi 1995, 118). His statement
expresses an inherent fear of the increased opportunities available to women to
move into the public sphere, post-Partition. These opportunities had the poten-
tial to create independent individuals out of women and once it happened, the
women could no longer be controlled by the codes of a patriarchal community.
Hence, the insistent desire to take charge of women, in this case Sutara. Thus,
Pramode’s desire to marry Sutara is not a product of genuine affections. It is an
offshoot of his ‘duty’ to abide by the social contract of the emergent nation-state,
a means to redeem himself of the guilt due to the exploitation of women at the
hands of both the community and the nation post-independence.
Moreover, the narrative reference to the fact that Aziz too shares a feeling of
sympathy for Sutara tends to def late the self-righteousness felt by Pramode at this
point. In fact, the discursive constructions of the reformed male citizen subject
are rendered suspect in the novel. Sutara realises that there are other women
inmates of the hostel who might never be ‘redeemed.’ They would continue
leading solitary and ‘illegitimate’ lives in the rehabilitation centres and shelters.
More to the point, ‘liberal ideals’ associated with the birth of both India and
Pakistan are permanently tarnished by the experiences of women like Sutara in
the wake of the collateral damage (Partition). Though Sutara feels like “a young
dreamy girl” ( Devi 1995, 133) at the prospect of getting settled in domestic-
ity, all is far from being resolved. The so-called domestic bliss with Pramode
has been achieved at the cost of severing all ties with her well-wishers and sole
supporters till date – the family of Tamiz Sahib. In rejecting Sakina and her
mother’s proposal to marry Aziz, Sutara also rejects all possibilities of redeeming
inter-communal relations, subtly implying how the nations of India and Pakistan
were achieved at the cost of trust and bonds of humanity, rendering both the
communities as worst victims of the dynamics of power politics. As Sakina says
about Sutara,

It’s not a question of being fond of a friend, that friend stands for a com-
munity, a community that humiliated her community, her kith and kin.
How could she identify herself with them, discarding her own religion,
beliefs and society?
( Devi 1995, 98)

Alternatively, Pritam highlights how men would come to terms with wom-
en’s agency acquired during the crisis. Ramchand, once betrothed to Puro, had
not even bothered to ask about her whereabouts after she was abducted. How-
ever, he arrives at an understanding of the trauma suffered by women when his
own sister is abducted during the riots. He comes to terms with his incapacity to
rescue her as he asks Puro to locate Lajo, “Try to locate her. We do not have any
idea whether she is alive or dead” ( Pritam 2003, 86). Thus, Pritam very subtly
56 Women as ‘citizens’

def lects the emphasis from family honour and sexual contract to the deep per-
sonal loss felt by Ramchand on account of Lajo’s abduction.
Apart from Puro’s experience of communalised masculinities, Pritam also
focusses on Lajo by placing her in the immediate context of abductions that took
place in the wake of the Partition. She is found in the custody of her abductor
Allahditta who has not only assaulted her but occupied her maternal home as
well. As Urvashi Butalia has highlighted, young girls, children, older women
were picked up by people from their villages. The aggressors, as highlighted pre-
viously, were not always outsiders, because they would know the circumstances
of the women they were picking up.9 Benedict Anderson has famously claimed
that “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail . . . the
nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (1991, 7). How-
ever, how could anyone justify the “willingness to prey on one’s own body poli-
tic [alongside] fraternal sentiments about comradeship, community and nation?”
(Gopal 2005, 112). Taking cue from this, I suggest that the idea of home and/or
nation gets defamiliarised for women in women’s writings. Lajo goes through
such emotions when her home becomes a source of trauma for her,

I have become an alien in my own home. This house gave birth to me, this
very house ensured my destruction as well. The walls of the house were
not ashamed when they witnessed my devastation, the desecration of my
honour.
(Pritam 2003, 96)

On the other hand, in Devi’s novel, the refusal of Sutara’s extended family to
recognise her presence renders her homeless. She is sent to a missionary boarding
school to complete her matriculation. “Everything was unfamiliar, the teachers
were European” ( Devi 1995, 51). “Most of the girls were orphans, having lost
their parents in the famine of 1942, others were victims of Partition, discarded by
society. These young girls had forgotten which tradition they belonged to” (52).
The research by Butalia, Menon and Bhasin reveals that the state was impelled
to take effective rehabilitative steps when the abducted women were denied
access to the domestic sphere of the extended family and community. Several ash-
rams, convents, and foundling hospitals were set up to provide shelter/training/
education to the abducted women in north Indian cities like Jalandhar (Gandhi
Vanita Asram), Amritsar, Karnal, and Delhi (Kasturba Niketan). These ashrams
eventually became permanent homes for the women where they forged new
bonds with fellow refugee women: “There they lived out their lives, with their
memories, some unspeakable, some which they were able to share with a similar
community of women” ( Butalia 1998, 163).
Clearly, the boarding school is one of the institutions of the state that acts as
what Veena Das calls a “surface of absorption” (1995, 57). By doing so, the state
absorbed “family undesirables through its institutions, helping families to pre-
serve its reputation and honour by the exclusion of undesirable relatives” (65).
 Women as ‘citizens’ 57

Thus, when Sutara mentions that “the boarding house had to be kept open for
some orphaned girls who were exiles, fugitives, with no place to go” ( Devi
1995, 56), we realise that they were not welcome in their ‘original’ homes just
like Sutara. These girls/women could not share any sense of belonging to the
domestic spaces of the community as it had manoeuvred their alienation in the
first place.
However, as Menon and Bhasin’s interviews of refugee women reveal, “Par-
tition narrowed the physical spaces available to them but enlarged their social
space, thereby affecting not only social seclusion and marriage practices but also
educational mobility and employment for girls and women” (1998, 206). Sutara
later pursues higher studies in the discipline of History and becomes a lecturer.
Thus, she was one among those women “who rehabilitated themselves, ventured
out . . . made a living” (Menon and Bhasin 1998, 205) as the traditional restraints
on women’s mobility broke down in the wake of the Partition. As Sutara says,
“Women these days were educated. Since there was nobody to support them,
these Yajnasenis were forced to fend for themselves” ( Devi 1995, 69). Jyotir-
moyee Devi incorporates here the changing dynamics of women’s education in
Delhi, aligning it with the amateur efforts of the Partition survivors to sustain
themselves amidst hardships. The Progressive Education Reports from 1937–47 and
1950–51 reveal a marked increase in the enrolment of women in schools and col-
leges. In Delhi itself, it had increased to 1,927 in 1950 from 580 in 1946–47. It
is a clear indicator of the transforming gender dynamics in society, the growing
need for educating girls in the aftermath of the Partition, so effectively inscribed
by Jyotirmoyee Devi in the novel.
In fact, as reported by the Towards Equality report, there was a considerable rise
in the number of uppermiddle class women who had joined the labour force in
the 1950s and 60s as teachers, doctors, and official workers in both the public and
private sector (158–159). A job in the education sector was a viable alternative for
women, particularly the Partition survivors, as it not only granted them financial
independence but also the much-coveted tag of ‘respectability’ that came along
with the profession. However, this newfound financial independence of women
is yet again problematised by Devi. In an ironic reference to Virginia Woolf ’s A
Room of One’s Own, Devi interrogates the premises of this independence and the
space accorded to the ‘new Indian woman’ within it,

It was a room, a room of her own, and hers through her hard-earned
money. Did that make it a home? She knew the bitter truth that she will
never have a home.  .  . . Did that mean she was now independent? Do
women ever become independent?
( Devi 1995, 69)

In the post-independence context, the new woman’s tryst with the public sphere
is ‘sanitised’ only when it is supplemented with an efficient performance of
domestic roles. It does not jeopardise the notion of tradition, which is preserved
58 Women as ‘citizens’

intact in the idealised conjugal and domestic sphere. However, in Sutara’s case,
the so-called conjugal bliss is not even considered a remote possibility.
Devi subtly alludes to how Sutara’s asymmetrical relations with patriarchy
could not accommodate her within the ‘liberal idea’ called India. Her negotiation
with the institutional spaces of the nation gets more nuanced when she comes
across female teachers and professors who had been through similar experiences
of being ostracised by family and community during and after the Partition of
Punjab, “It was as though she represented all women who had been insulted,
neglected, deserted, through history” ( Devi 1995, 69). There is a conscious effort
on the part of the author to seek bonds of solidarity among women based on
a common experience of suffering. They all were permanent witnesses to the
Partition trauma. It was writ large across their bodies. As Bagchi suggests, Sutara
begins to comprehend the sinister game, “it is bodies like hers that have to be
expunged in order that the community may nestle and breed in the bosom of the
nation state.” (2003, 24–25). She learns to interrogate the state’s claims to secure
a just social, political, and economic order, aimed at promoting the welfare of all
sections of society without any discrimination.10 Thus, Jyotirmoyee Devi locates
the gendered subject’s resistance within, to borrow Priyamvada Gopal’s words,
the “framework of dynamic and engaged transformation, wherein she critically
engages with historical circumstances, even as she is shaped by them” (2005, 64).
Both Pritam and Devi inscribe the gendered nature of trauma, the sense of
homelessness women felt within the newly independent nation-state, wherein
their chastity was crucial to the preservation of the honour of family, commu-
nity, and the nation. Menon and Bhasin highlight the warped logic of women’s
sexuality and its relation to the construction of national and communal honour,

The range of sexual violation . . . stripping . . . mutilating and disfigur-
ing . . . branding the breasts and genitalia with triumphal slogans . . . is
shocking not only for its savagery, but for what it tells us about women
as subjects in male constructions of their own honour. Women’s sexual-
ity symbolises ‘manhood’; its desecration is a matter of such shame and
dishonour that it has to be avenged.
(1998, 43)

According to this logic, the unchaste woman spirals the crisis of masculinity and,
by default, the nation. Thus, both the texts, like other works based on Partition,
expose “how women’s citizenship in the nation is contingent not only on resi-
dence in the right country, following the right religious faith, but also, on their
possessing the right (i.e. inviolate) body” (Mookerjea-Leonard 2005, 149).
Sutara exposes this checkered history of violence against women in the capac-
ity of an independent working woman, a lecturer in History at the Hastinapur
Yajnaseni College in Delhi. It is not for nothing that the all-women’s college is
named after one of the mythical names of Draupadi. Its location amidst the “red
brick ruins of old Delhi and residential localities, spacious complexes, shops,
schools and parks ( Devi 1995, 1) illuminates the developmental dynamics of the
 Women as ‘citizens’ 59

new nation-state. Sutara terms it “a combination of modern and mythical . . .

virtually an all-India assembly of young women” (1), revealing the Nehruvian
plans for the country’s development, which could materialise if men “put in their
best in the interest of higher standard for himself and increased prosperity for the
country” (GOI 1956, 22).
The emergent nation assumed the mantle of a technocrat and industrialist state,
retaining its welfarist paternalism ‘intact.’ The first three Five Year Plans made it
clear that the country had to construct a modern nation, contingent on economic
development, constitutional guarantees, citizenship rights, and social opportuni-
ties to safeguard its independence and future progress. However, in its blinkered
perspective, the state did not realise that the so-called welfarist regime had to
negotiate centuries of cultural conservatism, an atavistic body of national tradition
and the caste-class entente and gender discriminations, which were to take hideous
shapes post-independence. Devi exposes the state’s eagerness to hide these fissures
to construct relevant knowledge about national identity. As Sutara receives an offi-
cial circular “specifying the books and authors to be taught” ( Devi 1995, 1) in the
discipline of History, it becomes evident how official historiography foregrounds
the metanarratives of freedom and nationalism, suppressing the personal narrative
of disruptive memories, marginal voices, and signs of resistance.
The modern public sphere of the nation was adamant at forging disciplined
citizens who would abide by the protocols of the nation-state. However, the resis-
tant voices in Sutara’s classroom, representative of a conglomeration of women
students from across the country (Punjab, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Bengal, Poona),
reveal the failure of the official policy of writing a history of liberal nationalism
as endorsed by the dominant Congress party post-independence. It articulates a
difficult and often repressed truth that states and citizens of the modern nation
are still defined by their local or transnational identifications and communities.
Sutara tells her students, “Remember, history is not confined to the pages of a
book. Besides the victor is always prejudiced about the history of the vanquished,
he keeps things from coming to light, he prefers to conceal. Does history tell
you about the weak and the poor?” ( Devi 1995, 3). Devi’s novel comes across as,
to borrow Suvir Kaul’s (1995) words, “an archaeology of silences, a slow brush-
ing away of the cobwebs of modern Indian memory, a repeated return to those
absences and fissures, that mark the sites of personal and national trauma” (269).
This can be elaborated by highlighting how Amrita Pritam also writes about
the ‘cataclysmic dimensions’ of Independence. According to her, the dream of
independence was nipped in the bud as ‘helpless’ women were branded by the
Partition frenzy and the ‘helpless’ Punjab was communalised and divided. In her
poem “The Story of Punjab” Pritam “holds fate responsible for the shattering of
rhythms and dreams of everyday life” ( Datta 2008, 14):

The waters of the five rivers now ablaze with oil.

They fanned the f lames.
Look at the sport of destiny
While they were cutting furrows in the land,
60 Women as ‘citizens’

the seeds fell from their hands.

While they sat at spinning wheels,
their cotton f lew to the ground.
(as quoted in Datta 2008, 14)

This invoking of fate represents the authorial lament for the sufferings of women
in the wake of the continuum of sectarian violence.
Furthermore, Puro in the novel anticipates the disastrous consequences of the
tragedy. The vocabulary deployed is thick with feeling and manages to convey a
sense of extreme desolation,

One could not know if this earth . . . in whose fields, corpses are putrefy-
ing, will ever produce corn that would have endearing fragrance . . . will
the women ever produce children for men, who committed such atrocities
with the sisters of these women.
(Pritam 2003, 83–84)

Pritam ruefully exposes, in each of these instances, the savagery of unequal

gender relations in post-independence India. Thus, when Lajo expresses her
apprehensions about being accepted by Ramchand and her family members,
Puro categorically tells her that Ramchand will definitely come to take her
back. Although Puro refuses to return to India, she vicariously fulfils her desire
to be back amidst the safe confines of familiarity. She asserts, “In Lajo’s going
back, assume that Puro too has returned with her. . . whether one is a Hindu
girl or a Muslim one, whoever reaches her destination, she carries along my soul
too” ( Pritam 2003, 118). The fact that Pritam concludes her novel by these lines
shows her commitment to positivist concerns about, to borrow Gopal’s words,
“the shape of national culture and the form that the new nation-state will take
beyond its surreal and violent beginnings. What can be rescued out of the debris
and bloodshed of a death-dealing birth” (2005, 106).
Alternatively, Puro’s refusal to return to India at the end of the novel reveals
the patriarchal underpinnings of the Recovery Operation. When Rashid tells
her that the state has asked everyone to let the Hindu women go back and ‘con-
vinced’ the parents to accept their daughters back in familial space, she pain-
fully recollects her own condition when her parents had refused to accept her,
“When it was her turn, all the religions of the world obstructed her path with
thorns, now each one of them has lost its relevance” ( Pritam 2003, 92). Puro’s
response paves a way for an analysis of the Recovery Operation sponsored by
the post-independence nation. It is important to note that the Abducted Persons
(Recovery and Restoration) Bill, tabled in the Lok Sabha on 31 December 1949
had severe limitations inherent in its clauses, which were responsible for women’s
betrayals at the hands of the nation. It defined an abducted person as,

A male child under the age of sixteen years or a female of whatever age
who is or immediately before the first day of March 1947, was, a Muslim
 Women as ‘citizens’ 61

and who, on or after that day and before the 1st day of January 1949, has
become separated from his or her family as is found to be living with or
under the control of any other individual or family.
(Menon and Bhasin 1998, 261)

It is evident how the act denied any provision of choice to women. Their unwill-
ingness, if any, to return to their family was not taken into account. Moreover,
they had no recourse to legal rights and justice. Police too had no accountability,
given their unlimited powers and impunity from any inquiry or action. How-
ever, amidst severe cultural and communal regulations, there were women who
refused to return to their ‘original homes.’ They challenged the claims of the
state to intervene in their lives when it had failed miserably to “prevent the bru-
tality and displacement that accompanied Partition” (Menon and Bhasin 1998,
97) and affected women in the worst possible manner.
Puro’s refusal can be located at the interstices between numerous real women’s
assertions against the state and its consequences. Her story finds an echo in the
experience of a recovered girl who registered a strong dissent to the patriarchal
structures of state,

You say abduction is immoral and so you are trying to save us. Well . . . one
marries only once – willingly or by force. We are now married – what are
you going to do with us? Ask us to get married again? Is that not immoral?
What happened to our relatives when we were abducted? Where were they?
(as quoted in Menon and Bhasin 1998, 97)

Women’s perception of victimhood and their resistance to it is severely con-

strained by cultural constructions of morality and extant gendered patterns in
society. There is no interrogation of patriarchal oppression inherent in the struc-
tures of family and the institution of marriage. Thus, the sense of agency exer-
cised in refusing the state’s Recovery Operation is systematically undermined by
taking recourse to traditional structures of patriarchy.
As the state primarily perceived abducted women through the blinkered
prism of purity, morality, and legitimacy (of motherhood), they lost their claim
to gender equality, so passionately fought for and facilitated by women’s agitation
in political sphere during the nationalist struggle. They were coaxed as India’s
and Nehru’s daughters by the social workers to disguise the agenda of the state.
Many others were recovered against their wishes and later branded ‘impure’ and
disowned by their families/communities. Menon and Bhasin state that the situa-
tion became worse when the “government passed an ordinance (1948) that those
whose babies were born in Pakistan would have to leave them behind there”
(1998, 83). Those who were pregnant were taken to medical camps at Jalandhar
and forced to abort the foetus. The social contract of the nation could not afford
to sully itself by ‘nurturing’ the seed of the enemy.
Thus, women could claim their right as the citizen-subjects by bearing legit-
imate children for the community and the nation. It not only relied on the
62 Women as ‘citizens’

dominant social ideology of gender roles but also ignored critically significant
roles women could have played in the national economy after independence.
The resultant subordination not only crippled the possibilities of intellectual
growth and moral freedom for women but also reduced them to being depen-
dents on patriarchal mercy and state welfare. In fact, the Abducted Persons Act
was remarkable in the way it violated the suggestions of the sub-committee on
“Women’s Role in Planned Economy,” framed eight years back (1939). Thus, in
Puro’s refusal to return, Pritam interweaves her acute awareness of the multiple
patriarchies at work. Moreover, she deftly interrogates the benevolence of the
patriarchal protectionist state by suggesting that it cannot treat women simply as
goods of exchange to pander its nationalist obsessions. The state cannot take for
granted that every abducted woman, who was ‘conscientiously’ recovered by the
state, would like to return home.
In fact it might seem strange that Puro refuses to go back when she so vocif-
erously attempts to send Lajo back. Here, Pritam suggests, to borrow Gopal’s
words, that “any and all attempts at helping displaced persons are not misplaced”
(2005, 114). Simultaneously, Pritam foregrounds a possibility wherein one could
“question the singularity of the assumptions underlying institutional and com-
munitarian action” (Gopal 2005, 114).
Likewise, The River Churning takes a woman’s quest of identity in independent
India further, especially in the last section titled “Stree Parva: The Woman.” It
charts out Sutara’s status and the choices available to her vis-à-vis her identity
as an Indian woman. Her experiences, while on a pilgrimage to “Kedar-Badri,
Gangotri and Yamunotri” ( Devi 1995, 95), enable her to weave her personal
memories, experiences, and destiny with the political future of the nation. As
Elleke Boehmer suggests,

The contradictory legacies of nationalism which have often denied women

and other minorities a voice are to some extent addressed when these mar-
ginalised groups begin to claim access, even if circumspectly, to the public
sphere. They go against the hegemonic line when they tell their own his-
tories, re-place the unplaced space in the national drama with the concrete
figures, bodies and voices of ‘daughters.’
(2005, 35)

Sutara is neither the keeper of home nor are her loyalties torn between the home
and the world. Her banishment from the upper caste Hindu familial structure
ensures the betrayal of the nation as well. She cannot identify with the abstract
entity called “an all encompassing person, an Indian” ( Devi 1995, 79). “She was
trying to escape – a lonely soul trying to find companionship among strang-
ers. . . . She was gradually getting used to travelling incognito” (95, 112). The
statement poses significant questions like, what does the independent nation and
its institutions entail for women as citizen-subjects of the nation? Why is it com-
pelling to know about her engagements with these institutions? And how any
 Women as ‘citizens’ 63

knowledge of her negotiations is important to realise the exclusive tendencies of

the patriarchal nation-state.
Sutara’s visit to places of pilgrimage, however, is shorn of its particularly reli-
gious definitions and rendered more or less a secular character by Devi, “Sutara
had joined other women but not from any pious desire to attain salvation” ( Devi
1995, 95). In fact, the pilgrimage becomes a motif for not only the journey of
Sutara but also the tryst of nation with the fruits of its independence. It becomes
a kind of liberating moment for her against the rigidly normative physical and
intellectual spaces available to Sutara otherwise. Her travels in a third class rail-
way carriage make her realise the nexus between the hegemonic state appara-
tuses and the class-caste entente it endorses,

Sutara was amused .  .  . first class passengers have everything-money,

power; second class ones too, have their own resources. But the millions of
third class travellers are like Tagore’s lamp stand which throws the light up
but hides a region of darkness below – pitch dark.
(95)

Sutara realises that the pilgrimage, which was initially undertaken to escape
“those who did not want her and also those who did” (95) has equipped her with
courage to embark on the “slippery” (94) terrain of the emergent nation. She
has to confront an inegalitarian world order based on socio-economic, politi-
cal, and gender asymmetry. It is by engaging with these structures of inequality
that women like Sutara would be able to survive, creating alternative spaces for
themselves amidst the limiting gender ideologies endorsed by family, commu-
nity, and the nation.
Furthermore, the analogy of the class divisions in a railway compartment
indirectly suggests that the ‘pilgrimage’ of an independent nation has failed to
create equitable and empowering spaces for women and other marginalised sec-
tions of society. The author suggests that the Partition was not the only marker
of women’s victimisation in post-independence India. It was followed by inequi-
table provisions of women’s citizenship rights, especially in the case of marriage,
divorce, custody of children, and rights to inherit one’s legitimate claim within
a community and by extension the nation.
The novel leaves us with a pertinent question to ponder over: How the new
woman, ‘the daughter of independence,’ is supposed to dialectally engage with
the colonial legacies of institutional power structures when they are ruthlessly
“soldered onto the struts of [class-caste] gender hierarchies” ( Boehmer 2005,
30). However, Devi’s aesthetic vision also invests a sense of hope in the journey
of the nation. She seems to suggest that it is important to move on, “Like trees
laden with snow, people too survived, bearing hardship, misery and neglect,
with equanimity” ( Devi 1995, 114). As Sutara resolves to let go of her per-
sonal trauma, “the past – her workplace, Calcutta, Noakhali, Sakina, her own
brothers – everything was obliterated” (113), the nation too is placed within the
64 Women as ‘citizens’

narrative of emancipation and possibilities of constructing bonds of solidarities,

compassion, empathy, sympathy, and other humane values. Thus, the birth of
nation might be embroiled in a bloodbath yet one could invest an ideal of hope
within this new beginning. For Devi, social transformation can emerge out of a
dynamic and dialectical engagement of the personal with the political/cultural.
Thus, Jyotirmoyee Devi, like Pritam, negotiates the category of nation via an
overwhelming sense of surrender in the face of the grand chariot of history, which
damages everything “beyond repair, replacing one king with another, crush-
ing millions underfoot like insects” ( Devi 1995, 104). Both the writers eschew
playing the blame game, taking their narratives beyond and outside the narrow
confines of communal conf lict. Both deal with national casualties but from a mar-
ginal and gendered perspective. Thus, the women writers interrogate, cut across,
overturn, and refuse to submit to the dominant narrative of a newly independent
nation-state. Instead, they privilege their own subjectivities, private stories, per-
sonal memories, trauma, simultaneously exploring humane possibilities inherent
in masculinities (both of men and the institutions of the nation) to contest the
traditional narrative and the warped logic of the homogenised nation-state.

Notes
1 The Partition (1947) is characterised by the largest displacement of people in the Indian
sub-continent. Some 12 million people were displaced in the divided Punjab and 20 million
in the subcontinent as a whole.
2 Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta (2003) highlight the difference between
the implications of the geographical division of the territories for the eastern and the
western borders of India. It is interesting to observe that the Partition of Punjab was a
one-time event characterised by colossal violence, human tragedy, and forced migration,
which was restricted to the first three years between 1947 and 1950. However, the Parti-
tion of Bengal turned out to be a continuous process.
3 Translated by author. Pritam, Amrita. Pinjar. New Delhi: Hindi Pocket Books, 2003.
4 Anis Kidwai was involved in social work with Muslim refugees in India. She writes of
her experiences with Muslim women, “In all of this sometimes a girl would be killed or
she would be wounded. The ‘good stuff ’ would be shared among the police and army,
the ‘second rate stuff ’ would go to everyone else. And then these girls would go from
one hand to another and then another and after several would turn up in hotels to grace
their décor, or they would be handed over to police officers, in some places to please
them” (as quoted in Butalia 1998, 149).
5 In fact, self-annihilation and/or suicide have been majorly theorised as the only effec-
tive forms of protest women can resort to against patriarchal oppression. Rachel Giora
(1997) in an essay suggests that “suicide and killing mark two stages of emancipation in
the protest writings of women; they symbolize the way women deal with anger in the
process of their liberation” (77).
6 As Datta notes, Amrita Pritam had “captured the tone of her times, for during the
Partition violence the ‘rationale’ voice of a mad woman was reported in the Tribune”
(2008, 19). “In an atmosphere of choking communal madness in Multan” (2008, 19),” as
Datta further asserts, “the only person talking sense on the road was a mentally deranged
woman, who was shouting near District Police Head Quarters thus: ‘Oh God, What has
happened to these mad Hindus and Muslims! Why are they quarrelling and fighting like
dogs?’” (Datta 2008, 19).
 Women as ‘citizens’ 65

7 Flavia Agnes (1999) describes the process whereby personal laws were introduced by the
colonial legal system in India,
The Warren Hastings Plan of 1772, provided for the establishment of civil and
criminal courts in each district. The plan granted the Company jurisdiction right
over the natives. The plan explicitly protected the right of Hindus and Muslims to
apply their own personal laws in matters concerning inheritance, marriage, caste
etc. But the charters were not clear whether the native laws of Hindus and Mus-
lims referred to their religious laws or to the customary usages or to both. The
communities were categorized on the basis of their religion. The customs and
laws, which the English administrators had decided to save, were in turn deemed
to be religious. This created a legal fiction that the laws of Hindus and Muslims
are rooted in their respective scriptures and further that Hindus and Muslims are
homogeneous communities following uniform laws. Furthermore, this provided
no space for validating the role of customary law which has no scriptural basis and
is evolved at the local level, transgressing boundaries of religious identities (43).
8 This could be further explained by referring to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s thesis in “The
Difference-Deferral of (A) Colonial Modernity,” wherein he illustrates the socio-political
processes, which led to the subordination of women in transition to modernity. He sug-
gests that the institutionalisation of modern civil society in Bengal/India was accom-
panied by a distinction between the public and the private sphere. This distinction was
pertinent in defining the role of citizen-subject in the emergent nation-state. However,
in India, as Chakrabarty further reveals, “the project of creating citizen-subjects was/
is continually disrupted by other imaginations of family, personhood and the domestic”
(1994, 52). In fact, the civilising discourse, inspired by imperialist and later, national-
ist thought, evolved certain techniques of the self, proposing how the “domestic was
an inseparable part of the national” (Chakrabarty 1994, 58). Thus, women as mothers
and housewives acquired a central place within these discourses. They were entrusted
with the responsibility of reconstructing the private space so that citizenship in public/
national space could be erected. In fact, it could be suggested that the independent
nation-state sought to rely on these same distinctions, marginalising women within the
communal, ethnic, and national collectivities.
9 Butalia refers to A. J. Fletcher’s (Commissioner, Ambala and Jalandhar divisions, and
High Power Officer for Recovery of Abducted Women and Children, India) book
entitled List of Non Muslim Abducted Women and Children in Pakistan and Pakistan side of
Cease-Fire Line in Jammu and Kashmir State. The families had reported about their missing
women. The book was published to facilitate recovery of abducted persons.
10 Article 38 of the “Directive Principles of the State’s Policy” aims to perform the welfare
of citizen subjects.

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2
FEMINIST NEGOTIATION
OF AUTARCHY
Going beyond victimhood

The sense of disillusionment felt by many in the socio-political and economic

landscape of post-independence India is articulated by Mahasweta Devi thus,
“In these thirty years of independence I have not seen our people attaining true
independence in anything-in food, water, land, loan or bonded labour. . . . The
system . . . has made this independence impossible” (as quoted in Chakravarty
2008, 161). The failure of the state to satisfy aspirations of diverse marginal groups
and accommodate their interests resulted in oppositional movements of the late
1960s and early 1970s like the anti-price campaigns, peasant uprisings (Bodh-
gaya) and the Naxalite movement, which aimed at resisting state tyranny. All this
culminated in the imposition of Emergency in 1975, when the state asserted its
supremacy by curtailing the rights of individual citizens. Women writers in this
phase did not fail to register this unrest. In the process, these women writers also
reveal a sense of collective despair and rage against the insidious collusion of state
structures and patriarchal institutions.1
This chapter takes up a study of Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084 (1974) and
Nayantara’s Sahgal’s Rich Like Us (1985) to explore how the distortions in the sys-
tem and their consequences like naxalism, which ravaged the state of West Bengal
in 1967 (and continues to have its bastion in the states of southern India, Bihar,
Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh among others) or the Emergency in 1975, marked
real challenges to caste, class, and gender empowerment in post-independence
India. Both the texts highlight how the governmental calls to remove poverty
and inequality ended up being mere slogans as the so-called development process
bypassed the indigenous population of Dalits, tribals, and landless labourers.2
Alongside, an attempt will be made to trace the transformations, if any, in
gendered relationships over time. The 1970s and 1980s were significant decades
in the contemporary socio-political and gendered history of India and this chap-
ter primarily dwells on and seeks viable responses for questions like what has
 Feminist negotiation of autarchy 69

changed post-independence, especially for the disempowered, including women.

In fact, Mridula Garg (2007) rightly argues that women’s issues are not divorced
from social issues,

The inequality in the share of genders in the control of resources and power
structures was a part of the larger picture. Once this was understood, it was
easy to see that the so-called women’s issues were, in fact social issues.
(359)

In this light, both Devi and Sahgal propose a revisioning of the extant gen-
dered habitus post-independence, wherein men would re-engage with their
masculinity(ies), interrogating the dominant construction of allied gendered
contexts.

Writers and perspectives: Mahasweta Devi

and Nayantara Sahgal
Mahasweta Devi was born in 1926 in an eminent Bengali family in Calcutta.
Her father, Manish Chandra Ghatak, worked as an artist and her mother,
Dharitri Devi, was a committed social worker. Devi too has voiced her con-
cerns through her writings. The writings of Mahasweta Devi evoke the reality
of the oppressed sections of society, particularly women, Dalits, and tribals who
have been systematically ousted from the nation-making project. Devi relates
how nothing substantial has changed for them in post-independence India.
They could not inherit the Nehru-Gandhi legacy as they were not accommo-
dated within it in the first place. Their lands, resources, and homes were not
restored to them. Thus, Devi represents the struggles of oppressed communi-
ties to establish their rights as equal citizens of the nation-state. Moreover,
her engagements with the People’s Theatre Movement and Communist Party
have had significant inf luence on her writings. She contributed to various
grassroots tribal organisations like Palamau Bandhua Mukti Morcha (1981), Lodha
Shabar Kalyan Samiti (1982), and Kheria Shabar Kalyan Samiti (1983), which were
concerned with pressing issues like the liberation of bonded labourers, local
developmental concerns, and income generation among the tribals. As Malini
Bhattacharya (1997 ) states in an essay, Mahasweta Devi’s charisma as a writer
and activist has been instrumental in highlighting “the many disadvantages
from which the tribals, particularly the most deprived among them like the
Lodhas and the Kherias, suffer in our society” (1003).
Some of her prominent novels include Hazaar Churashir Ma (Mother of 1084
1974), Aranyer Adhikar (The Rights of the Forest 1978), Chhoti Munda ebang Tar Tir
(Chhoti Munda and His Arrow 1980), and Bashai Tudu (Bashai Tudu 1993). Her
short stories like “Draupadi” (1978), “Rudali” (1993), and the collection titled
Breast Stories (1997) constitute some of the most powerful works of her literary
oeuvre. Her works have been widely translated into English and other languages
70 Feminist negotiation of autarchy

of India by academicians and translators. Gayatri Spivak’s translations of Devi’s

works are significant among them. In Mother of 1084, Devi stresses the politi-
cal awakening of Sujata, a middle-aged bhadralok woman from Calcutta, as she
comes to terms with the sudden death of her youngest son Brati who had joined
the naxalite movement to fight for the rights of the oppressed. This awakening is
precious as Sujata has led a painfully traumatic life with her husband Dibyanath
Chatterjee, who has denied her the right to decide for herself. In fact, Sujata’s
four children with Dibyanath – Jyoti, Brati, Nipa, and Tuli – are a constant
reminder of her sexual oppression, forced pregnancies, and lost individuality at
the hands of Dibyanath. Ironically, it is after the death of Brati that Sujata’s iden-
tity as a mother is reinforced. As the title of Devi’s novel implies, Sujata’s identity as
the ‘mother of corpse number 1084’ becomes the ultimate source of her political
awakening.
Nayantara Sahgal was born to Vijaya Lakshmi Pundit in 1927. She is a journal-
ist, political commentator, essayist, biographer, and novelist. In fact, her familial
association with the Nehrus has been responsible for her love of politics and an
active engagement with the political life of the country. Ritu Menon (2014)
relates her conversation with Nayantara Sahgal in an essay thus,

I approach fiction that way. . . . To write a sort of apolitical novel wouldn’t

have come naturally to me. The thing is, whether I wrote fiction or non-
fiction, my connection with politics was my emotional mainspring, not an
event happening out there.

She spent her formative years in Anand Bhawan with her cousin Indira Gan-
dhi. She was inf luenced by her maternal uncle, Jawaharlal Nehru, and was
among the first generation of writers who invested a firm belief in his policies
for independent India. Her political columns, written after Nehru’s death dur-
ing the 1960s and 1970s, ref lect a sense of disappointment at the authoritarian
policies of Indira Gandhi. Evidently, she did not share a good relationship with
Indira Gandhi and was openly critical of her decision to declare the National
Emergency in 1975. Sahgal’s major works include Storm in Chandigarh (1969), A
Situation in New Delhi (1977), Rich Like Us (1985), and Plans for Departure (1986)
that deal with the changing face of politics in post-independence India. She was
awarded the Sahitya Akademi award for her novel Rich Like Us in 1986. How-
ever, she was one of the first few writers in India to return their awards to the
Sahitya Akademi in 2015 to protest the delay on the Akademi’s part to issue a
public statement condemning the killing of acclaimed Kannada professor and
author M. M. Kalburgi.
Her novel Rich Like Us is a fictional rendition of the four months after the
Emergency, which was clamped on the midnight of 25 June 1975. Sahgal illus-
trates how the Emergency was simply a travesty of the ideals upheld during the
anti-colonial nationalist movement, the dreams of freedom, and the secular cre-
dentials of the Constitution framed two decades back to ensure we remain, as a
 Feminist negotiation of autarchy 71

character in the novel says, “moderate, tolerant people, steeped in civilised ways”
(2010, 31). The novel traverses the colonial and the postcolonial Indian history,
cross-cultural links across religious, communal, and class differences in a series
of f lashbacks and inter-textual links. It is narrated through the two contiguous
narrative threads; of Rose, a cockney shop assistant in England who meets Ram
during one of his visits to London in 1930s, and Sonali, a bright Indian civil
servant who is sacked at the beginning of the text for interrogating the bureau-
cratic juggleries carried out in the guise of ‘disciplined democracy’ during the
Emergency. Through their different yet connected narrative perspectives, Sahgal
subtly comments on the metanarrative of power relations – state, family, kinship,
tradition, community – affecting women on the one hand and other margin-
alised sections of society on the other.
Both Devi and Sahgal, through their fictional representation of the naxalite
movement and the Emergency, reveal how the institutions of democracy are sys-
temically bent to the service of extant power dynamics. In fact, I would suggest
that the texts taken under consideration become a means to critically assess the
constraints of social structures. Thus, the contemporary endeavours by women
writers are enjoined to the task of developing a politically engaged consciousness
and revealing the inherent tensions in society.

Representing women’s voices in systemic crises

The warped logic of the homogenised nation-state is manifested in its unwilling-
ness to effectively implement land reform measures, alleviate poverty and socio-
economic and political discrimination that have led to extreme inequalities and
oppression of poor and landless peasants. Sudipta Kaviraj (2010) describes how
the bourgeoisie leadership, post-independence, did not adopt a radical strategy of
social change, leading the rural elite to bend the “institutions of formal democ-
racy to the service of existing power structures” (88). Thus, agrarian relations
remained hierarchical and unchallenged and the positive effects of democracy
could not percolate to the villages. For instance, in Rich Like Us, Sahgal’s rep-
resentation of the stunted beggar, in many ways, is a larger comment on the
stunted system and the political institutions of the country. The beggar, per-
ceived as “more insect than animal . . . a monster ant” (Sahgal 2010, 10), is the
only witness to Rose’s murder and he cannot dare to expose the culprits since he
has already suffered the consequences of exposing the manoeuvrings of the rich.
His hands were chopped off by the landlord as he had asked for his share in the
sharecropping once. The author suggests how the nation and its Constitutional
promises, democratic process, and assurances of egalitarianism too have become
mute and stunted spectators of the distortions of the nation-state.
Referring to the post-independence scenario, Kaviraj comments,

Life processes in a village are not altered fundamentally. Murders of recal-

citrant peasants, the burning down of lower caste dwellings, rapes, every
72 Feminist negotiation of autarchy

form of violation of humanity which is part of a feudal and not a bourgeois

political order, are all daily occurrences.
(2010, 89)

The beggar in Rich Like Us has also been a victim of such gruesome occurrences.
His wife was abducted, while five other women of the village were raped by
policemen during an incident of police repression. Here, Sahgal is inspired by an
actual incident of institutionalised state repression against a tribal movement to
reclaim land in Santhal Parganas, which happened in 1977. She fictionalises the
gruesome account of Kerwar, where a group of five women were caught while
running towards Bakhadda. Radha Kumar (1993) has mentioned the findings of
a report prepared by Stri Sangharsh, a women’s organisation, according to which
the Santhals were stopped from forcibly harvesting a land, which should have
legally been their own. It was followed by a large-scale, state-sponsored killing,
police plunder, rape, and burning of whatever little property was owned by the
tribals:

We heard that the CRP was coming so we ran. . . . But they caught up
with us –eight of them surrounded us. . . . They beat us with their lathis.
Two men held me down, and two raped me. They did it with all of us.
We went away and hid in the hills for three days. There was no food and
no water.
(as quoted in Kumar 1993, 141)

Thus, Sahgal reveals not only the inherent tensions of class/caste differences in
society but also the specific alienating nature of its political and institutional
structures that work against the poor and vulnerable sections.
However, Mahasweta Devi in Mother of 1084 proposes to overturn such
an aggressive arrangement of power relations shared by feudal society and the
nation-state. For instance, Brati’s girlfriend Nandini states, “All that you people
find normal, I find abnormal” ( Devi 2011, 87). It is precisely this (ab)normalcy
that exhorts people like Nandini, Brati, Somu, Laltu, and Partha to join the
naxalite movement, giving up everything, including their lives, to bring radi-
cal socio-political and economic change in the country. It is very early in the
text that readers get an answer to the question, what made Brati “into number
1084 in the decade that headed towards liberation?” ( Devi 2011, 15). It was the
spark of rebellion, whose only fuel was a “burning faith in the faithlessness of
everything that spelt Establishment” ( Devi 2011, 75). There were many bril-
liant and sensitive souls like Brati who believed in true liberation that was yet
to come. However, the nation-state refused to acknowledge their presence and
whosoever defied the territorial sovereignty and homogeneity of the nation was
termed a criminal.
The brightest minds lost their lives in the most wanton manner possible, and
this was not only scary but shameful as well. As Sujata ref lects, “the nation,
 Feminist negotiation of autarchy 73

the state, refused to acknowledge their existence, their passion . . . all that they
stood for. . . . Did it matter, after all, if a few thousands of young men were no
more?” ( Devi 2011, 60). In fact, time and again, the reports published by the
Home Ministry have refused to deal with naxal activity as something more
than a ‘menace’ and futile activity. It is interesting that one of the measures
to tackle this menace is, as the Ministry of Home Affairs’ report titled “Naxal
Management Division” (2013) reveals, “using mass media to highlight the futil-
ity of naxal violence and loss of life and property caused by it.” Devi success-
fully interweaves in her novel these propagandist aspects of the state and how it
deploys mass media to that effect.
Devi further suggests that repressive measures were adopted to not only
muzzle the voice of media during the decade of crisis (1970s) but also appropri-
ate it in order to betray the activities of the naxals. Since naxals were termed
seditious, the media could perform only one role, that is, to brand them as a
menace to be curbed at the earliest opportunity. Nandini tells Sujata how Nitu
and many of their other comrades lost lives just because “the newspapers were
also betraying us” ( Devi 2011, 74). While they would print any and all infor-
mation about the naxals, their hideouts and strategy, they would suppress facts
about police oppression and custodial deaths. Obviously, the state-controlled
media could not have done anything beyond its limits. However, what seems
puzzling to Nandini and her friends is the willed amnesia of the media, its
complacency in taking the state verdict as given, labelling naxals as criminals.
Nandini calls it a betrayal, “How is it that we . . . can’t print a single bulletin?
Why are we denied the simple facilities of a printing press and news print, while
innumerable journals come out” ( Devi 2011, 78). Thus, the power of the chan-
nels of communication is misused by the state to strategise the elimination of
naxalites in a systematic manner.
Furthermore, the commitment to implement developmental measures gets
overshadowed by listing the infrastructural losses, attacks on security men and
civilians, and extortion-related violence incurred by the naxals against the state.
The “Naxal Management Division” report further states,

The aim of the naxalites is to destroy the State legitimacy, and to create a
mass base, with certain degree of acceptability, with the ultimate object of
attaining political power by violent means. The naxalites predominantly
attack the police and the police establishments. They also attack certain
types of infrastructure, like rail and road transport and power transmis-
sion, and forcibly oppose execution of development works, like critical
road construction.

Mahasweta Devi, however, foregrounds another facet of the movement, the one
committed to the “personal loyalty pledge . . . to everything of everyday life”
( Devi 2011, 77). It aimed at sensitising society to the need of affirmative action,
legitimising the demands of the landless, under-privileged, and powerless. There
74 Feminist negotiation of autarchy

was a severe need to shake the Indian political scene out of its inertia. Nandini
tells Sujata, “Now, when I think back, how naively we had assumed that an era
was coming to an end. You are bringing in a new age” ( Devi 2011, 77). This
ideal was enough to ignite the fire of protest among the rural poor. Brati and
Nandini were about to leave for the base soon. Had they been able to protect
themselves from the police raid, they would have worked closely with the peas-
antry, encouraging them to take up arms against feudal oppression and the state
machinery, which protects the interests of the landlords. This was not mere
“lawlessness,” as the Home Minister Y.B. Chavan declared, addressing the Lok
Sabha on 13 June 1967. In fact, it was a “politics of socialist revolution” ( Banerjee
2002 , 2116), aimed at bringing a new order of social and political equality.
Here, the text opens up possibilities of critical ref lection on the viability of
armed retaliation. Could a radical socio-economic transformation at a systemic
level happen only through violent means? These disquieting trends need to be
analysed as the naxalite movement set the trend for political discourse and nego-
tiation between the Indian state and discontented segments of the population
through armed warfare only.3 In the novel, the “massive investigation, search
and punitive operation” ( Devi 2011, 28) conducted by police official Saroj Pal
to combat the Decade of Liberation is also motivated and driven by a thirst of
blood, “like a real leader, he sent out the orders – the cruel goddess, the dark
goddess asks for blood!” ( Devi 2011, 29). He is the representative of the state,
which perceives men like Brati as “cancerous growth on the body of democracy”
( Devi 2011, 29) and murders them brutally. Instead of addressing developmen-
tal concerns to eliminate feudal agrarian practices, the state preferred to frame
warped policies aimed at eliminating the naxalites who always, according to
the government, indulge in crime and violence. Critics like Sumanta Banerjee
(1984) and Manoranjan Mohanty (2006) have rightly observed that the retalia-
tory measures deployed by the Indian state against the naxalites have intensified
violence in society, making killing a norm,

The Indian state has failed to understand the nature of revolutionary vio-
lence. Why is it that hundreds of men and women have taken part in armed
attacks on . . . on paramilitary forces? How is it that they have been able
to move around in a large number of states, depending on the support of
adivasis and peasants? . . . The violent confrontation between the Naxalites
and the Indian state has affected the political fabric of society. The state
agencies have given up all procedures under the rule of law on the pretext
that forces of violence do not deserve it.
(Mohanty 2006, 3167)

In fact, Saroj Pal’s suave, sophisticated demeanour hides within it an extreme

commitment to violence and the rotten reality of the state and its institutions
(the bureaucracy, the police, and the judiciary) that are inclined to take deci-
sions heavily loaded in favour of the powerful forces. While swindlers, industrial
 Feminist negotiation of autarchy 75

opportunists, killers, “those who adulterated food, drugs and baby food” ( Devi
2011, 19) reap the profits of self-aggrandisement, Brati and his comrades are
termed criminals. Sujata rightly asks, “Did Brati die so that these corpses with
their putrefied lives could enjoy all the images of all the poetry of the world
[…]?” ( Devi 2011, 126).
Naxal rebellion came as writing on the wall for people like Dibyanath who
“ate, quarrelled and lived in a frenzy of lust and greed” ( Devi 2011, 107). Brati’s
fight was against these values of a class that gained immense aff luence, pushing
others to the realm of poverty, unemployment, and oppression. Corrupt indus-
trialists and rich men like Dibyanath exercised monopoly over the economic
sector, stultifying any policy attempts to democratise growth opportunities and
to share resources. Sumanta Banerjee, in his book India’s Simmering Revolution
(1984) records the CPI (M-L)’s party resolution of 1969, which cogently assesses
the structural inequalities that undergird the hierarchical structure of Indian
state and its economy,

Today .  .  . the contradictions between imperialism and the people,

between feudalism and peasants, between capital and labour, and between
different sections of the ruling classes are growing sharper and sharper
everyday . . . the working class, the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie
are victims of growing pauperization and unemployment  .  .  . and are
impatient for a fundamental change.

In this light, it can be said that for people like Brati, distrust began at home, lead-
ing to his betrayal at the hands of both his father and the nation.
The state’s obsession with violence is reproduced at the familial level when
Dibyanath forbids Sujata to take the car to Kantapukur to identify Brati’s body
as “anybody could identify the car” ( Devi 2011, 7). He chooses to place his posi-
tion, security, and status before the corpse of his youngest son and pulls the right
strings to ensure that Brati’s name does not appear in newspapers. Brati’s mem-
ory is systematically wiped out, the home sanitised, its neat orderliness restored,

There was nothing from the days when he had begun to change – they
had cleared away, without a trace, the books, papers, leaf lets, sheets with
revolutionary slogans, journals from that last one year. Sujata had been told
that all these were burnt as a rule.
( Devi 2011, 39)

On a similar note, Sahgal in Rich Like Us suggests how the suspension of

individual rights under the Emergency was inevitably linked to the distor-
tions of the Indian political scenario. Through the Happyola deal episode, she
exposes the collusion between the economically inf luential groups, including
the dominant castes/classes in India, and the officially important ones. Rich Like
Us begins at such a proposition when Neuman, a representative of the Happyola
76 Feminist negotiation of autarchy

fizz company, arrives to seal an agreement with Dev to this effect. The bribe
exchanged between Happyola and the Ministry of Industry officials, to facilitate
the corrupt proceedings, shows how the Indira Gandhi government and the suc-
cessive regimes abandoned the commitment to Nehruvian socialism, jeopardis-
ing the historical view of possibilities of social change. Sudipta Kaviraj (2010)
reveals how the extremely centralised regime of Indira Gandhi altered the nature
of investment. While the public sector was attacked on grounds of its insuffi-
ciency, the government systemically allowed for the implementation of policies
regarding privatisation of industry, paving way for greater foreign collaboration
in the decades to come. Kaviraj further states, “For them [Indira Gandhi and
her cabinet], the construction of a modern, relatively independent capitalism [no
longer] required a reformist and statist bourgeois programme” (2010, 137).
Dev’s interaction with Neuman is a case in point,

this Emergency is just what we needed. The trouble makers are in jail. . . .
The way the country’s being run now, with one person giving the orders,
and no one being allowed to make a fuss about it . . . in Parliament, means
things can go full steam ahead without delays.
(Sahgal 2010, 2)

In fact, the tainted association between the political establishment and the capi-
talist giants, which led to the signing of many corrupt pacts in the corridors of
legislative and executive power, is ref lected when the Minister of Industry deliv-
ers a speech, describing the Happyola foundation stone ceremony as an “augury
of the country’s bright future” (Sahgal 2010, 49). The Minister is apparently
a Gandhian and well-versed in the Vedas. But he also subscribes to a warped
value-system whenever it suits him. Sahgal shows how there has been a con-
sistent degrading of democratic ideals, so much so that “a humble follower of
Gandhi” (49) praises the Emergency for hailing an era of plenty and opportunity.
In fact, the declarations of plenty and stability signify “a collective will to cow-
ardice” (Sahgal 2010, 31).
The Minister’s speech can be reduced to sheer rhetoric, divorced from seri-
ous programmatic proposals. In fact, it is significantly inf luenced by the tenor
of Indira Gandhi’s foreword to the government’s Fifth Development Plan issued
during the Emergency: “The drive against economic offences and the general
atmosphere of discipline and efficiency which national emergency helped to fos-
ter led to a significant and all-round improvement in economic performance.”4
Thus, Indira Gandhi’s regime was characterised by, in Kaviraj’s words, “popu-
lism rather than resources, along with the tendency to substitute a programme
by a personality, leading to a systemic destruction of the party apparatus and
political institutions” (2010, 192).
Sahgal subtly suggests how the dark period of Indian democracy was syn-
onymous with a massive deterioration of political ideology. It not only led to
the devaluation of the welfare objectives of the state but a systemic distortion of
 Feminist negotiation of autarchy 77

the means and ends involved therein. Thus, the Gandhian values of self-reliance
and swaraj are distorted and appropriated to celebrate the arrival of a ‘foreign’
fizz company. Here, it is significant to realise how Gandhi’s morally active self-
reform was conveniently dovetailed with the multi-layered politics and material
interests endorsed by the bourgeoisie leadership of the Congress.
Furthermore, the dinner party at Kiran and Neel’s place is attended by the
so-called upper crust of society, including intellectuals, professors, judiciary,
journalists, bureaucrats, and doctors. Their response to the contemporary crisis
sounds stilted and confusing, with them mouthing praises of the Emergency and
the ‘Queen Protector,’ knowing well, if they failed to do so, they might end up
“fraternizing in jail” (Sahgal 2010, 104)with Hindus and Marxists. The din of
their voices and the endorsement of the banal establishment position are perfectly
in sync with the eerie silence Sonali could feel in the corridors of her office. As
she says, “We were a club, and we knew we could survive the blasts outside
only if we pretended they weren’t happening” (Sahgal 2010, 24). In an article
published in The Express Tribune on 28 June 2011, Kuldip Nayar talks about the
misuse of Indian Civil Services by Indira Gandhi during the Emergency, “Mrs.
Gandhi set many pernicious precedents, such as making the civil service servile
and the police obedient to the rulers’ whims.” Thus, it is clear how there was no
serious engagement with or discourse about the issues confronting the country
especially amidst interested groups, bound as they were in an immoral commit-
ment with the political leadership.
Alternatively, Mahasweta Devi reveals that one of the ways in which the
state tyranny could be interrogated lay in the intimate realm of the personal and
familial. For instance, in the novel, it is important for Sujata to comprehend the
circumstances that estrange Brati in the first place,

I set an apolitical mother’s quest to know her martyred Naxalite son, to

know what he stood for; for she had not known the true Brati ever, as long
as he had been alive. Death brings him closer to her through her quest.
(Devi, as quoted in S. Bandyopadhyay 2011, xii)

It enables Sujata to rationalise, for herself, the logic of naxalism, state repression,
and Brati’s sacrifice at their altar.
We also need to approach Sujata’s meeting with Somu’s mother in this con-
text. She realises that, somehow, Brati was closer to Somu’s family than to his
own. He has left memories to Somu’s mother too. He becomes a means, in his
death, to establish, howsoever tentative, a bond between two women belonging
to different classes. Is it a viable bond, the bond of pain and loss felt commonly
by both the mothers, having lost their sons? Perhaps, not. The families of Somu,
Laltu, and Partha could never recover from the loss of their sons’ lives and its
consequences for their respective fortunes. Somu’s sister loses her job because her
brother was a ‘naxal.’ The unwritten state policy on the treatment of the naxals’
families is spelt clearly by Devi. Sujata realises, much to her dismay, “But I’m
78 Feminist negotiation of autarchy

working still” ( Devi 2011, 61). Nobody asks her to leave her job. What does this
indicate? She cannot get away from the fact that her location in the upper caste,
middle class family of the Chatterjees has facilitated her access to “respectability,
comfort and security” ( Devi 2011, 15) in society. Sujata too has shared these ide-
als with Dibyanath and no bond of pain over the loss of sons can enable her to
breach the cocoon of class affiliation. Devi hints here at the failure of any attempt
to forge solidarity between Sujata and Somu’s mother, “But how could Sujata
find her liberation in the midst of all those people? She was rich and belonged
to another class. Why should they accept her as one of them?” ( Devi 2011, 58).
While doing so, the author opens up space to dwell on larger issues pertaining
to the revolutionary transformation of society. As Anshuman Mondal (2003)
describes, the modern articulations of national identity, post-independence,
could not be liberated from the spectral presence of pre-modern cultural tradi-
tions. This has further entrenched the patriarchal, upper class, upper caste, and
majoritarian inclinations of the nation-state, affecting the everyday experience
of citizenship rights in India.
More to the point, is it possible to integrate the interests of women belonging
to subordinate classes/castes with those of upper caste, middle class women? As
Radha Kumar (1993) relates, one of the significant questions that confronted the
feminist organisation of the 1970s was, “How women could be organised and
represented?” (110). Was it possible for urban and middle class women to organ-
ise and represent working class or peasant women? In fact, how could they even
claim the right to speak for the subaltern women, as there was “no uniform per-
spective on women’s oppression and liberation” ( Kumar 1993, 110)? They could
simply raise feminist issues and not assume any ideological homogeneity. Mother
of 1084 clearly brings home this argument. For instance, the concerns which
trouble Somu’s mother, that is, denial of a suitable job for her daughter, living
under constant threats issued by the local goons, and deprivations experienced in
a “ramshackle house, with moss on the roof ” ( Devi 2011, 35) are so much dif-
ferent from Sujata’s emotional loss, marital oppression, and unfulfilled desire to
carve out her individual space amidst familial obligations. As Rajeswari Sunder
Rajan (2015) states, “women are implicated with men in heterosexual relations
and in kinship structures and hence complicit with existing social arrangements”
(40). Thus, it is significant for upper caste women to renounce the benefits of
their privilege to understand the concerns of lower class/caste women.
Sahgal takes this proposition further as she subtly represents the concerns,
achievements, and challenges of the contemporary Indian women’s movement
in the 1970s and the ways in which it resisted the tyranny of the state in the late
1960s and early 1970s.5 While so doing, Sahgal reveals that this feminist con-
sciousness was a consequence of an exposure to the new wave of Marxism in the
West. However, in the novel, Sonali does not simply subscribe to this feminist
consciousness but also highlights an increased sense of betrayal felt by workers,
peasants, and other oppressed groups due to unequal distribution of resources in
post-independence India. Sonali further problematises the newfound urgency
 Feminist negotiation of autarchy 79

and confidence felt by the Indian communists under the impact of the commu-
nist spring in Europe. She eschews from tracing a simplistic trajectory of sorts
from the West to the East. In fact, Sonali is alert to the differences between the
socio-political and cultural ethos of India and the West,

I could see distinct images.  .  . . Gnarled old hands at work on ancient

occupations, epics handed on by word of mouth through social structures
still intact. Still intact too the child at the back of a mud-walled village
classroom. . . . Baby brides taking their dolls with them to their husbands’
homes.
(Sahgal 2010, 121)

Thus, we realise how Marxist affiliations of feminists led them to adopt a broader
materialist framework to analyse the differentiated structure of oppression extant
in society.
Radha Kumar observes how most of the members of the feminist movement
in the late 1970s and early 1980s were “drawn from the far left and belonged to
the urban educated middle class” (1993, 106). This made it imperative to ques-
tion one’s privileges with respect to the caste/class, communal, and gendered
oppression faced by women and other marginalised sections of society. Son-
ali too realises that feminism culled solely from her own privileged experience
would never be politically effective unless it recognises the deprivations and
discriminations operating within society. Moreover, the critical aspect of self-
reformation could only materialise when the oppressed groups and toiling masses
would express a political consciousness of their own oppression as a community.
Thus, Sonali, unlike her friend and colleague Kachru, does not get seduced by
the rhetoric and romance of Marxism, contesting regimentation as the official
party line.
In an interview with Jasbir Jain, Nayantara Shagal speaks about the all-
pervasive play of power politics, “I think of politics not as leading the country,
but politics as the use of power. And also the abuse of power – it happens at so
many levels” (as quoted in Nanda 1996, 183). Thus, it does not come as a surprise
when Sonali is suitably punished and shunted for refusing to recommend the
Happyola fizz factory deal because it is out of sync with the import regulations
of the country,

The logic of June 26th had simply caught up with me. The same soundless
nudge that landed me in the ditch had carted thousands off to jail, swept
hundreds more out of sight to distant ‘colonies’ to live, herded as many like
animals to sterilization centres.
(Sahgal 2010, 28)

In fact, Sonali’s ill health caused by the Hepatitis infection is not merely a
consequence of the polluted water supply of the city. It is also an indicator of
80 Feminist negotiation of autarchy

something being rotten in the state of Delhi. However, Sonali’s commitment to

simpler truths and personal and political freedom, acquired by years of struggle,
make her resign rather than give in to these subjugations.
For Sonali, regimentation has personal connotations, which Kachru, being
born and brought up according to the gospel of masculinity, could never under-
stand. As she rightly states, “He had never fought a battle for freedom, never
been patted down firmly when his sap was rising. . . . He had no idea what the
simplest subjugations were all about” (Sahgal 2010, 123–124). Therefore, Kachru
comes across as the perfect protégé of the Emergency in the novel. A Marxist
since his early days of education at Oxford University, Kachru suddenly changes
allegiances as he adorns the ‘steel frame’ of the ICS. As Indira Gandhi came to
control the bureaucratic apparatus of the country due to excessive centralisation
of politics, people like Kachru found it the most opportune moment to indulge
in self-aggrandisement. His dramatic slogans of victory/zindabad from the bon-
net of a taxi, announcing subsidised loan rates to taxi drivers and the nationalisa-
tion of the banks, ironically highlight the corroding reality of the ‘steel frame,’
now perfectly under the control of the ‘supremo.’
Thus, Kachru, who once hailed himself as a Marxist, falls in line to the party
dictates, indicating, to borrow Kaviraj’s words, “extreme bureaucratic devo-
tion to a personal leadership at the cost of social programmes on ideological
lines” (2010, 131). Centralisation, after all, is a natural correlate of regimentation.
However, Sonali refuses to give in to the echelons of power and regimentation,
thereby revealing how the personal is deeply entwined with the political. Her
belief in the values of freedom and sacrifice enables her to take a dignified stand
against the Emergency that destroys her career.
In Mother of 1084, Sujata’s visit to Nandini opens up layers of meanings inher-
ent in the gendered history of naxalism in India, particularly in light of the place
of women within the cadres of revolutionary communism. Devi does not inter-
rogate the aggressive masculinism drilled into the naxal cadres, romanticising
the armed revolution instead. In this light, Nandini’s belief in the communist
revolution raises certain disconcerting issues. Women’s participation in revo-
lutionary groups had been a norm since pre-independence years. They would
perform a number of tasks ranging from offering shelter to rebels, nursing them,
and other tasks of propaganda to engaging in direct action against the Britishers.6
Thus, the precedent has already been set for women like Nandini who want
to fight for a new socialist liberation in post-independence India. But herein lies
the caveat. The romantic zeal to give up one’s life for the country overwhelmed
any critical assessment of the movement. Though women’s militancy was a sig-
nificant conduit of the naxal movement, it was primarily meant to tow the party
line. No separate space was accorded to addressing questions of gender inequity
and women’s oppression as a sex. Thus, it becomes pertinent to question the
structures of liberation, which are raised against the exploitative regimes of the
nation-state. In fact, any attempt to dismantle extant hierarchies often falls into
the trap of reproducing the same structural inequities that it sought to replace in
 Feminist negotiation of autarchy 81

the first place. So, the activists in many left organisations could be heard saying,
“women will automatically become free when society is liberated” (as quoted in
K. Bandyopadhyay 2008, 53).
Significantly, Nandini’s love for Brati was an offshoot of the desire to change
the world, “Brati and I would walk all the way from Shyambazar to Bhowani-
pur. . . . Whatever we saw on the way spelt ecstasy. We couldn’t hold in the joy,
we felt explosive. We felt loyal to all and everything” ( Devi 2011, 77). What was
important for Nandini? Love for its own sake? Or love conjoined with grand
ambitions of revolution and sacrifice? Brati’s death, followed by her custodial
torture, arrives as a rude shock for Nandini, taking away all her confidence in
herself and the movement. The confidence drew its courage from the belief that
one could sacrifice everything for the dream of liberation. The fact that she loses
this confidence after Brati’s death exposes the patriarchal underpinnings of the
movement. Nandini had no idea how to continue being a part of the revolution.
Was she to inspire others as a martyr’s beloved or to act independently as a com-
rade? “I don’t know. I know that I must have my eyes treated. But I don’t know
what else I’ll do” ( Devi 2011, 86). The statement poses a larger question on the
way left politics dealt with its women comrades.
In fact, Nandini’s negotiations of party politics and gendered relations can be
understood in light of Krishna Bandyopadhyay’s experience of the naxal politics
in the 1970s. Offering a firsthand account of the gendered contexts as defined by
the CPI (M-L), she asserts,

A generation of young boys and girls had dedicated the most precious
years of their lives to this cause . . . But men, howsoever progressive they
had been, could never treat women equally. . . . Never in the party has a
woman received the same status and respect as a man.
(2008, 59)

Thus, women entered an altogether different realm of struggle, wherein gender

equality was perceived as tangential to social and political equality. It was never
considered an integral part of it, without which any struggle for liberation was
but emancipatory.
Moreover, since women never had an equal say in the decision-making, they
could not learn to assert themselves independently of the partyline. Perhaps this
is the reason why Nandini could never perceive Sujata except through Brati’s
perspective. She relates to her in a matter of fact way, “Brati used to say that his
father used you like a doormat” ( Devi 2011, 81). In fact, there is no attempt to
know Sujata for the individual she is. Alternatively, Sujata’s attempts to reach out
to Nandini fail, “she had a sudden feeling of irreparable loss, of a void. It grieved
her that she would never know the girl Brati loved, that Nandini’s mind would
remain unknown to her forever” ( Devi 2011, 76). Nevertheless, we witness in
Sujata a desire to move beyond her personal space and the way she perceives the
world. Nandini is an individual for Sujata and not just her son’s love interest.
82 Feminist negotiation of autarchy

Though differences in location, ideology, conditioning, and age mark them as

distinct from one other, they share something more than just Brati’s memories
between themselves. Nandini and Sujata share the pain of betrayal at the hands of
patriarchal ideology that undergirds the institutions of the nation-state.
Devi highlights how home becomes a laboratory in which such patriarchal
ideologies are played out in their diverse facets. Nandini does not realise that
Brati actually patronised Sujata by sympathising with her daily humiliation at
the hands of Dibyanath. According to Brati, Sujata was simply a victim, “thor-
oughly non-understanding” ( Devi 2011, 83) of what it takes to commit oneself
to a revolutionary ideology. It is ironical how he wanted to move out of his
home to motivate the poor peasants at a far away village, when he could not
help his mother live a dignified life. As Sujata recalls, Brati could only “treat her
like a child, would sound almost fatherly. Brati seemed to be pampering her”
( Devi 2011, 16). It is imperative to recall here Sikata Banerjee’s (2012) and Mal-
larika Sinha Roy’s (2011, 2016) articulation of the hyper-masculinised facets
of the naxalite movement. While naxalite men were motivated to denounce
their middle class identities by declassing themselves and developing an asso-
ciation with the exploited peasants and workers, women were still upheld as
chaste, pure feminine icons, as well as border guards of the nation. Women’s
attempts, in the movement, to politicise themselves outside these gendered ste-
reotypes were considered dangerous. They were seen as what Mallarika Sinha
Roy (2011) terms the “embodiment of temptation to carnal pleasures” (6). Thus,
one finds a close affinity between bhadralok and naxalite ideals of masculinity,
which led to a distorted understanding of revolutionary virtues. Thus, “cel-
ebration of male bravado as part of revolutionary virtue rendered all women
as possible victims of sexual violence and translated women’s existence to mere
physical bodies in need of protection” (Sinha Roy 2016, 6). In this light, Brati’s
attempts towards “becoming a naxalite” (Sinha Roy 2016, 6) seem to have
been coloured by the gendered anxieties embedded in the movement. Sujata’s
identification of this streak in Brati further intensifies her politicisation both as
a mother and woman.

Personal is political: viewing gender through the

lens of the political
The politics of the ‘welfare state’ has remained largely a male-dominated sec-
tor. Being burdened by centuries of patriarchal biases and traditional attitudes
towards women, the new leaders of the country could not “view the essential
unity of the women’s question in terms of the requirements of overall societal
change through both structural and attitudinal changes” (Sharma and Sujaya
2012, xxxi). It is evident in the way the logic of developmental politics has con-
veniently bypassed the existential reality of women and the marginalised groups
in the country. Thus, women writers suggest how, to borrow Michael Singer’s
(1992) words, “the dynamics of personal relationships – the way power gets used,
 Feminist negotiation of autarchy 83

the assumptions about roles, work and, sexuality – are a microcosm of the larger
social and political relations, in our society” (54).
The texts Mother of 1084 and Rich Like Us negotiate and challenge what Hena
Ahmad (2010) calls the

dual oppression of women-patriarchy that preceded and continues after

colonialism and that inscribes the concepts of womanhood, motherhood,
traditions such as dowry . . . polygamy, and a worsened predicament within
a capitalist economic system introduced by the colonisers.
(13)

The socially expected roles of women have been closely affected by methods
of development deployed by the state institutions in general and the privileges
enjoyed by these women’s respective class, caste, religious, and regional groups
in particular.
Though the practice of bigamy was legally abolished after the institutionalisa-
tion of the Hindu Code Bill7 in independent India, one realises how men over-
haul it with impunity. The orthodox Hindu groups felt that since the principal
function of a woman was to bear children for the continuation of the family,
having failed at this, she must relinquish her right to be the wife. In such cir-
cumstances, a husband must be entitled to a second wife.8 Surely, such discourses
smack of masculine licence, conveniently thrusting the idea of loyalty within
marriage onto women.
For men, polygamy is about exercising their licence of masculinity, which is,
for them, based on their virility. While women are forced to be the upholders
of family purity and reproducers of the legitimate progeny, men are conditioned
to endorse feudal theories of aggression and male supremacy. Thus, women are
simply reduced to being slaves for sexual pleasures, accentuating the asymmetri-
cal gender relations in society. The authors’ concerns with bigamy and denial
of women’s rights within marriage specifically tie up with the findings of the
Committee on the Status of Women in India during its tours in the states of
Manipur, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal.
They learnt that bigamy was still prevalent and many men commit bigamy and
go unpunished.9
In Mother of 1084, Dibyanth subscribes to the warped logic of female purity
and masculine virility when he has liaisons with women outside marriage. For
example, “Dibyanath knew that his children were aware of his infidelities. It
caused him no embarrassment. For he knew that his first three children would
never defy him and that they considered all his actions part of his virility” ( Devi
2011, 45–46). Alternatively, Sujata’s refusal to be a child-bearing machine for
Dibyanath marks a renegotiation of customary Hindu practices and orthodox
laws. It also puts the pativrata ideal in dock. Women are individual partners and
not simply domesticated wives and ideal mothers. Thus, marriage must cease to
exist if women are denied the right to dignity and equality within it.
84 Feminist negotiation of autarchy

Dibyanath rents an apartment for a woman outside marriage and spends time
with her every evening. This shows how men take advantage of the loopholes in
law. There is a very fine line of difference between bigamy and adultery and it
could be misused effectively to avoid legal punishment. The bigamy law requires
that the second marriage be legally valid and registered under law in order to
punish a man. Since men might perform the second marriage in customary ways,
which would be acceptable but legally invalid, it becomes difficult for the first
wife to produce relevant evidence in court. Moreover, such arrangements, where
cohabitation cannot be proved, also escape charges of adultery because “a hus-
band or wife can ask for divorce, only if, at the time of filing the suit, the other
party is living in adultery” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012 , 89). Since such offences
are not cognisable offences, only the wife or her close relatives can file the case
against the offender. This goes on to reveal that the patriarchal practices are too
closely interlinked with the political economy, cultural practices, and legal appa-
ratuses of the nation-state.
Likewise, Sahgal too perceives an integral link between the patriarchal ideolo-
gies, gender norms, and customary laws extant within the home and the nation-
state. In Rich Like Us, Mona and Rose share the house in Lahore by living on
separate f loors. Sahgal’s description of the house, “with its high ceilings, rooms
opening onto other rooms, acres of sparsely furnished space and no privacy at
all” (Sahgal 2010, 61) reveals how the oppression of women is structured into the
extant familial and political systems of the country. For instance, Ram’s brazen
indulgence in bigamy with Mona and Rose makes these women each other’s
rivals, constantly vying for Ram’s attention. While Rose felt “angry, bittered,
wrong” (65), Mona “wept with vigour” (62), trying to “reclaim her husband for
a few minutes, an hour or a night” (62). Though “Mona’s fasts and prayers, her
loud insistent tears” (45) reveal her lack of agency within the domestic realm,
she is clever enough to know that she can reclaim this agency and establish her
supremacy over Rose on account of her motherhood. It is one of the reasons why
Ram refuses to leave Mona and take another house in Lahore with Rose. Mona
becomes the mother of Ram’s ‘legitimate progeny’ Dev, while Rose remains a
childless wife forever. Ram affirms, “The Hindu Undivided Family was a legal
entity under law and laws apart, f lesh and blood bonds could not be broken . . .
whoever heard of a man moving away from his new-born son?” (62).
Interestingly, Rose too perceives her inadequacy to claim Ram for herself
on account of her childlessness. Motherhood, for her, grants a status of dignity,
without which “she would pass through this family . . . leaving not the shadowi-
est imprint of her own on it” (Sahgal 2010, 76). This can be corroborated by
Chitra Sinha’s statement, according to which

motherhood was central to the structural configuration of the family. The

social construction of Indian motherhood was inf luenced by customs and
practices in which motherhood was assigned a sacrosanct space as a crucial
determinant of the ultimate identity and worth of Indian women.
(2007, 49)
 Feminist negotiation of autarchy 85

Sahgal consciously explores these social constructions pertaining to women’s

sexuality and motherhood, highlighting the commonalities in women’s oppres-
sion. Thus, Mona and Rose, despite several differences, share a peculiar predica-
ment. They are perceived by Ram as means of amusement and of prospering
his claims to fatherhood. Madhu Kishwar (1979) highlights in the first editorial
essay of the women’s magazine Manushi,

There are a lot of factors dividing women from each other – class, caste,
religion, race, education (or the lack of it) and many other complex histori-
cal forces. Yet if we look at the nature and basis of women’s oppression,
we discover that our sex determines our common predicament in a very
fundamental way.

Moreover, Ram’s apathetic attitude towards both Mona and Rose betrays his
reluctance to question the patriarchal structures and their gendered contexts.
For Ram, to borrow Seidler’s (1992) words, “the personal realm is still women’s
realm and men are to be initiated into their masculinity through escaping into
the public world of men” (4). This can be further corroborated by Sanjay Srivas-
tava’s (2010) views on masculinity and its role in gender-based violence,

the dominant modes of being men could be said to be manufactured out of

discourses on sexual orientation (heteronormativity), class, race, conjugal-
ity, the ‘protective’ function of males and women as recipients of protec-
tion, and the place of emotions in the lives of men and women.
(Srivastava 2010, 1)

Thus, Sahgal draws readers’ attention to the social evils that are a consequence of
such asymmetrical gender relations in society.
Furthermore, like Devi, Sahgal also emphasises that the most important right
of a woman, which is often denied to her, is the right to exercise control over her
own body. As Radha Kumar asserts, it is “women’s right to be treated as useful
members of society . . . women should have the power to decide their own lives”
(1993, 3). In Rich Like Us, Sonali’s reaction to Bimmie’s wedding (she was 16 and
in tenth standard when she was forcibly married) becomes significant. Her wail-
ing protest at the sight of Bimmie, burdened under the weight of gold chains,
emerald, tent-like attire, and trumpet blast is a testimony to the systematic ossi-
fication of women’s status in patriarchal society. Though Bimmie is of ‘marriage-
able age’ according to the then Section 5(iii) of the Hindu Marriage Act (1955)
[which laid down the minimum age of bride as 15 years (Sharma and Sujaya
2012, 84)], Sahgal’s engagement with the woman question post-independence
ref lects a concern with the discriminatory attitude of society towards girls who
are considered a liability and married off at an early age.
In fact, a cursory look at the education of girls and women in the post-
independence period shows a consistent reduction in their number in different
stages of the educational system. In 1970–71, while 74.3 per cent girls received
86 Feminist negotiation of autarchy

primary education, only 19.5 percent could manage to reach the secondary level
(Sharma and Sujaya 2012 , 183). The reason behind such a vast gap in educational
levels and drop outs is attributed to the general perception that women’s educa-
tion is necessary only to the extent of making them familiar with problems of
home management. Thus, Bimmie’s marriage might be solemnised according
to the Hindu Marriage Act, but the fact that she has to drop out of her convent
school education to get married speaks volumes about the patriarchal apathy
towards women’s education and their status in society. Sonali’s assertion “this
was never Bimmie” (Sahgal 2010, 55) reveals how bright girls have to acquiesce
to familial pressure, something gravely observed by the Committee for the Status
of Women in India.10 Thus, Sahgal proposes that the transformation of society is
contingent on the improvement in the status of women.
Sonali goes on to be what Bimmie could never become, that is, an indepen-
dent woman, acutely conscious of the oppressive male-dominated structures of
society. A member of the Indian Civil Service, Sonali is among the few women
who could manage to break the bureaucratic ice. As the Towards Equality report
shows, only 41 women candidates were recommended for IAS, IFS, and IPS as
against 337 men in the year 1969 and 64 women candidates against 485 men in
1972. The vast difference between the recruitment of women and men within
the so-called prestigious administrative services of the country indicates, as the
report concludes, “unequal employment status and opportunity for men and
women which are the direct result of the combination of factors, that is, the
educational system, training, job-orientation and culture conditioning” (Sharma
and Sujaya 2012 , 165).
Given this asymmetrical context of rights and privileges, Sonali can obviously
not afford to overlook her upperclass context that has enabled her to come thus
far. When she leaves for Oxford in the late 1950s to pursue higher education,
she could feel a sense of euphoria, a blissful complacency with respect to a new
world of opportunities. “We would study forever and go home stuffed with use-
less knowledge, having sorted out if I don’t think, will I cease to be? . . . Inde-
pendence was twelve years old and we could bask in it” (Sahgal 2010, 120). Here,
Sahgal cogently brings out the euphoria experienced by the upper class, educated
women of the 1950s, who perceived their achievements in the light of the Con-
stitutional promises of equality and full citizenship. However, these women could
not discern how the gilt tinted policy directives disguised the barriers raised by
patriarchy, disabling women to gain parity with men and have equal access to
resources. As Nirmala Banerjee (1998) asserts, “Events in the subsequent years
(of independence) have shown . . . [that] the official policies vis-à-vis women in
India’s plan for development continued to regard them merely as targets for house-
hold and motherhood-oriented welfare services” (WS-2).
Moreover, Sonali’s act of revisiting her father’s documents and diary which
recount the horrific familial history of her great-grandmother (who was forced
to commit sati) marks an engagement with the patriarchal structures of both
the past and the present. Through the incident of sati, Sahgal assesses a long
 Feminist negotiation of autarchy 87

tradition of women’s oppression, which has its roots in patriarchal traditions

as well as the new agrarian, industrial, and social relations engendered by the
colonial government. It also becomes a nodal point in the narrative, exploring
the motivations of patriarchal forces behind the resurgence of this evil custom
in the 1980s.
Sahgal insists in an interview that the sati episode in the novel is inspired by
the fact that her own great-grandmother was a sati and it could have stayed in
her subconscious mind, “All these Satis hadn’t taken place when I wrote Rich
Like Us. . . . But afterwards I realised that what I had written about had actually
happened” (as quoted in Varalakshmi 1995, 15). But the tale betrays more than
its teller. According to the Mitakshara coparcenary system, only male members
of a family could be coparceners. Such a gendered arrangement of inheritance
laws played a crucial role in denying women the right to their deceased husband’s
property. In the novel, Sonali’s great-grandmother is also reduced to a position of
dependence vis-à-vis her affinal family after the death of her husband.
The fact that the great-grandmother is not entitled to inherit her deceased
husband’s property and it gets transferred to her brother-in-law (until her son
comes of age) illuminates how the Hindu patriarchy operated in a close conduit
with the British policy of non-intervention in matters concerning interper-
sonal relationships and religious sentiments. Janaki Nair (1996) elucidates upon
the property rights of widows after the passage of the Widows’ Remarriage
Act in 1856:

The widow only succeeded to her husband’s estate in the absence of a son,
son’s son, son’s son’s son of the deceased and the estate which she took
by succession to her husband was an estate which she held only for her
lifetime.
(64)

Widows had usufruct rights only and they could not alter, sell, or will away the
property to someone else. “At their death, the estate reverted to the nearest living
heir of her dead husband” ( Nair 1996, 64). In case of remarriage, widows could
not claim their right to this property.
Sahgal deploys this incident to highlight the issue of widows’ right to prop-
erty and inheritance in the wake of the socio-economic changes in the 20thcen-
tury. In fact, the familial and institutional apathy to widows was one of the
primary reasons behind the resurgence of sati in the 1950s and later in 1980s. As
Sudesh Vaid describes, the abolition of princely states, zamindari, and jagirdari
systems of land relations post-independence led to the loss of power and prestige
of the kshatriyas and baniyas to some extent. “Sati, then, became one of the
many measures deployed to reinstate and project the true Rajput identity” (as
quoted in Kumar 1993, 176). Moreover, in 1983, a campaign was launched in
Delhi to popularise the ideology of sati and to build yet another sati temple by
a Marwari-funded organisation called the Rani Sati Sarva Sangh. All this could
88 Feminist negotiation of autarchy

have formed the subtext of Sahgal’s narrative as she ostensibly comes to terms
with her own familial history.
More to the point, as she states in the “Acknowledgements” section of Rich
Like Us, Sahgal conducted research on the evil of sati from the original docu-
ments preserved in the National Archives of India. As Radha Kumar tells us, the
determination to research into the continuation of the sati, sati temples, and the
proponents of ‘sati-dharma’ in India and the need to find “non-confrontational
ways to undermine the ideology of sati” (1993, 174) also constituted the feminist
concerns of the day.
Sahgal likes to assert, however, that the motif of sati also ties up with the fact
that Rose too becomes a kind of sati. Dev, her stepson, finds her detrimental to
his rising fortunes in the wake of the Emergency and conveniently gets her mur-
dered by the goons of a youth camp. “The irony is that Ram is still lying help-
less in a coma. So, it is almost a worst form of ‘Sati’” (as quoted in Varalakshmi
1995, 16). However, I would suggest that Dev’s attempts to torture Rose and get
her murdered are no different from the domestic violence and abuse that she has
been subjected to at the hands of Ram within marriage. In fact, both Rose and
Mona are victims of an all-pervasive power structure that goes beyond patriar-
chy, joining hands with larger autocratic forces of the state. As Mona withers
away gradually under the assault of cancer, Ram is too preoccupied with “listen-
ing earnestly to the woes of the First Secretary to the Belgian embassy’s wife,
whose husband didn’t understand her” (Sahgal 2010, 209). Later, he decides to
leave Rose for a while, so that he could pursue his intellectual love with Mar-
cella. The “sheer male prerogative” (Sahgal 2010, 243), as Sonali puts it, makes
him return to Rose, after five years, suggesting they should get together again.
This streak of violence within marriage amounts to cruelty and is an offence
under Section 498 A (1983) of the IPC, as in the way Sahgal engages with the
idea of violence within a domestic situation and otherwise aptly brings out the
asymmetrical gender relations extant in society. Ram’s treatment of Mona and
Rose is not only reprehensible but it also amounts to mental cruelty, torture, and
humiliation. Moreover, Rose’s murder is conveniently disguised as suicide by
Dev, like Sonali’s great-grandmother’s murder was turned into sati by her rela-
tives. Thus, Sahgal aptly calls it a worst form of sati.
Sahgal interrogates the legal provisions for women that have been mainly
inf luenced by the institution of patriarchy, which takes for granted the hierarchi-
cal constructions of gender relations. She also problematises the idea of women’s
access to these legal provisions. Sonali’s plea to Neel’s lawyer friend on behalf
of Rose, to safeguard Rose’s share in the property, falls on deaf ears. She is told
that no sane person would mess with Dev as he is amongst the prominent ben-
eficiaries of the Emergency. Similarly, as Flavia Agnes (1997) tells in an essay, the
police often refused to register cases against culprits of domestic violence unless
specific allegations pertaining to dowry were made. Thus, the lawmakers and
judiciary could not ensure a steady implementation of the Act against domestic
violence.
 Feminist negotiation of autarchy 89

Sahgal further suggests how even the passage of the Hindu Succession Act
in 1956 could not ensure equal rights of succession for women. While the Act
recognises the right of women (widow, mother, and daughter) to inherit equally
with men and to have equal claims to familial property, many women, espe-
cially daughters, are conveniently ousted of its rubric. Moreover, the Mitakshara
coparcenary was retained when the Act was finalised by Parliament.11 Thus,
feminists agitated to expose the double standards of the state which sought to
retain the privileges of what Kaviraj calls “feudal elements in the superstruc-
tures” (2010, 90), thereby disinheriting female heirs.
The fact that Dev has the audacity to forge Ram’s signature to draw money
from Ram’s account proves the bias of inheritance systems like Mitakshara,
based on the principle of “right by birth of a male coparcener lead to unequal
rights between the female and male heirs”12 (Sharma and Sujaya 2012 , 103).
Dev says about Rose, “She was my father’s keep, so why shouldn’t I control
her account?”(Sahgal 2010, 275). Thus, Sahgal suggests how violence forms a
continuum. The fact that Rose dies a brutal death is deeply connected with the
intricate layers of mental violence and subjugation that she has suffered within
domesticity for the last 43 years.
Alternatively, Sujata’s assertion in Mother of 1084 is a culmination of a life-
time’s struggle and defiance against such patriarchal practices. To begin with,
though Brati’s sacrifice and Nandini’s commitment facilitate Sujata’s transforma-
tion into a thoroughly assertive being, it is not as if she has been apolitical and
non-engaging in the first place. For instance, she refuses to conceive for the fifth
time, after Brati is born. The decision is indeed an act of defiance, considering
Sujata’s torturous experience of pregnancy before Brati’s birth, “she had felt her-
self violated and defiled throughout the nine months” ( Devi 2011, 3). Dibyanath
had never cared for Sujata. She was simply a child-bearing machine for him, to
the extent that he would neither accompany her to hospital nor even care for
her post-delivery. However, he wanted Sujata to be fit so that she could bear yet
another fruit of his progeny. In fact, Dibyanath’s attitude throws light on how
men have continued to violate women’s bodies, irrespective of what women feel.
Thus, the control of women’s sexuality has formed the basis of women’s oppres-
sion at the hands of patriarchal institutions.
Devi suggests that the extant sexual/gendered roles have to be interrogated in
order to alleviate women’s predicament within marriage, Here, the issue of con-
sent and mutual responsibility in a sex act becomes important. Most of the men
within marriage deal with questions of fertility and child-bearing in a reckless
manner. There is no sense of accountability in sexual relations from their side
as there are very few men who would actually use any contraceptive method to
defer pregnancy. For instance, according to the National Family Health Survey
(NFHS) conducted in 1998, only 44.7 per cent men seem to use any method of
contraception ( Bagchi 2005, 34). The survey reveals the hierarchical and oppres-
sive power relations that operate between husband and wife, impelling the latter
to succumb to the whims and fancies of the former. In fact, a report titled The
90 Feminist negotiation of autarchy

Changing Status of Women in Bengal exposes how the entire responsibility for fam-
ily planning rests with women, often, and, in most circumstances, they have to
go in for sterilisation.13
Sujata suffers in the throes of labour in hospital when Brati is about to be
born. The fact that she makes all the preparations for delivery herself, while her
mother-in-law is least concerned, shows how antenatal care is not taken seri-
ously, thereby subjecting women to an unsafe maternal experience. The fact that
Sujata conceives four times in a short span of time also reveals that Dibyanath
never paid any heed to Sujata’s concern for maintaining enough space between
two successive pregnancies, which again raises a concern for safe motherhood.
This further reveals that women’s access to health services is contingent on the
husband’s/family’s permission to avail these services.
Similarly, Nishi’s character in Rich Like Us is represented as a victim of a very
rigid marital relationship with Dev, “it was so long in any case since she had
looked him in the face” (Sahgal 2010, 263). Sahgal cogently presents Nishi’s
silent rebellion against the burden of motherhood. She emphasises the madden-
ing pain and the loss of individual subjectivity and control over one’s body due
to conception,

Her selves lay torn in jagged halves on the delivery table, under the . . .
indifferent scrutiny of strangers and their implements. . . . Their announce-
ment of motherhood revived fresh raw protest. . . . A stranger laid the child
she had not wanted, and next year the second child she did not want.
(Sahgal 2010, 263–264)

Rama G. Padma (2005) asserts, “every time a woman is pregnant, she risks a
sudden and unpredictable complication that could result in her death or injury”
(446). Padma’s research further shows that “at least 40 per cent of all pregnant
women will experience some type of complication during their pregnancies”
(2005, 446). The levels of awareness about safe motherhood are to be raised so
that the gendered approach of state towards women’s health and family planning
could be rectified.14 Thus, we observe how women’s fiction registers a conscious
move away from the reproductive role of woman as a mother to recognising
her productive capacities as an individual. The right to self-determination fore-
grounded by the Indian women’s movement in the 1970s was based on women’s
defiance of their treatment as mere sites of debate between tradition and moder-
nity. Instead, the movement emphasised the importance of considering women
as useful members of society.
In the context of Mother of 1084, Sujata comes across as a nascent feminist
as she refuses to get sexually intimate with her husband after Brati’s birth. A
woman’s right to exercise control over her body could be sufficiently achieved
when she becomes economically independent. Thus, the Right to Equality – a
much sought after condition by feminists – would be partially achieved unless
supplemented by a series of rights in other spheres. Herein lies Sujata’s second
 Feminist negotiation of autarchy 91

act of defiance, that is, she refuses to leave her job even after Dibyanath success-
fully manages to assail the tide of financial crisis. As she tells Dibyanath, “The
household runs fine on its own. I don’t think it needs anything from me” ( Devi
2011, 46).
Sujata sees through the pretences of Dibyanath and her children, exposing
their real characters. Jyoti’s spinelessness, Tuli’s smug conscientiousness, Neepa’s
scandalous affairs, and Dibyanath’s crass commercialism conveniently refuse to
recognise a dead son/brother. Sujata knows them too well to give up and sur-
render, “The society that Brati and his comrades had tried to exterminate, kept
thousands starving in order to nourish and support these vermin” ( Devi 2011,
115). Thus, Devi does not subscribe to the mother-symbol that has been thor-
oughly manoeuvred by the nation-state in order to circumscribe women into the
roles of cultural and biological reproducers of the nation. She problematises the
social construction of motherhood as a glorified state. As the title of the novel
suggests, Sujata’s identity as a mother is contingent on the corpse of Brati. She is
the mother of corpse number 1084, which foregrounds how the author would
like to highlight Sujata’s renegotiations with the idea of motherhood.
Alternatively, Sahgal represents how Nishi suffers “the inevitable asymmetry
of the conjugal bond” (Singh and Uberoi 2008, 428) with Dev and gets co-opted
by the patriarchal structure. Dev, like his father Ram, is a classic case of gendered
upbringing, which makes men believe that they are superior to women in every
respect. Dev is indulged and spoilt by both Mona and Ram, instilling in him a
sense of aggressive masculinity,

But what troubled her [Rose] most was the sugar-coated glaze Ram had
dropped over Dev. ‘My Son’ had to be spoken in holy whisper. [. . .] And when
Dev and his . . . gang took to abducting girls from Miranda House . . . these
little escapades were part of growing up. . . . A man has to get his experience
somewhere.
(Sahgal 2010, 205–206)

Thus, Dev is trained to exercise wilful aggression and masculine power from the
beginning, which makes him indifferent to Nishi and her rights within mar-
riage. Moreover, the structural asymmetry of socio-economic status between
Dev and Nishi, combined with her lack of education, a career, and a desperate
need to get away from her childhood memories (of sharing bed and clothes with
four other siblings, of clustered surroundings of a house claimed by her father
post-Partition) impel Nishi to tolerate violence whenever a situation of conf lict
arises between them.
The economic, social, and political benefits that Dev derives from the Emer-
gency are manifestations of his violent assertions of masculine licence and patri-
archal power. It is significantly connected with the politics of the contemporary
crisis (Emergency) when the government accentuated an ideology of patriarchal
standards and practices by deploying a warped logic of discipline based on fear.
92 Feminist negotiation of autarchy

Sahgal stresses how the state totalitarianism is contingent on domestic tyranny.

This is evident in Nishi’s acquiescence to Dev. For instance, she chairs a meet-
ing at the Intercontinental Hotel, arranged by Kachru, with the wives of the
new entrepreneurs to discuss how they could ‘popularise’ the Emergency and
propagate Madam’s Twenty Point Programme. It is significant how the personal
gets embroiled with the political in the way these elite women, in “dyed hair,
imported skin fragrances . . . summer saris” (Sahgal 2010, 93) take up the task
of reproducing state repression in the realm of domesticity. These women talk
about the importance of birth control among the poorer sections of society, espe-
cially their servants, and how it could be forced upon them.
Sahgal represents these women as entrusted with the task of reproducing the
dominant political culture of the nation-state. In fact, the forced family planning
diktat was one of the most reprehensible measures followed by the government
during the Emergency. As Nishi indiscriminately pounces upon the stunted beg-
gar and Kumar, the eldest servant of the house, to shove them inside the vasec-
tomy van, she forgets that her enforced pregnancy was also yet another, but more
intimate, facet of “tendencies towards centralisation and personal concentration
of power, which grew unchecked” ( Kaviraj 2010, 197) during the Indira Gandhi
regime in general and the Emergency in particular.15
The Dev-Nishi relationship becomes a means for Nayantara Sahgal to offer a
larger comment on the contemporary institution of marriage and the inequali-
ties it propounds in everyday lives of men and women. As Promilla Kapur (1970)
states about middle class women and their marital adjustments,

Wherever there are disagreements between husband and wife, the wife
gave in two and a half times more frequently . . . to bring about harmony
in married life .  .  . a wife’s being too individualised proves particularly
detrimental to marital harmony because men still like to marry less indi-
vidualised women.
(419)

Though Sujata stands for her rights within marriage in Mother of 1084, she
is unable to leave Dibyanath; “but that was how she had been trained from her
childhood, to be eternally dutiful” ( Devi 2011, 103). She too has been a victim
of cultural conditioning. Moreover, as she confesses, she has been trained to take
“respectability, comfort and security” ( Devi 2011, 15), which comes along with
upper class status, for granted. Thus, she could never muster enough courage to
go against a socially conservative system, which tells a woman that Hindu mar-
riage was indissoluble. In fact, women are often reluctant to appear in court and
face social criticism. Justice Sachar focussed on this aspect, while delivering his
judgement in 1953,

We also cannot shut our eyes to the practical difficulties and problems
faced by an Indian girl. . . . Instances are numerous where Indian women
 Feminist negotiation of autarchy 93

have gone through a literal misery of marriage for years rather than go to
a court of law and expose themselves to public gaze.
(as quoted in Sharma and Sujaya 2012, 82)

Sujata has also been coping with her misery all this while. The pain of patri-
archal betrayal manifests itself in the form of her appendicitis pain. Her heart-
wrenching cry at the end of the novel expresses her bitter grief. It could be
suggested that a woman’s cry for identity and freedom is deeply entwined with
the public cry for redistributive justice and reform. Sujata fights a battle at an
individual level, which is significant in the light of initiating a long-term change
in the gendered contexts of society and/or nation. Thus, as Jasbir Jain (2011) sug-
gests, “real battles are carried on and fought at individual levels – bit by bit – until
a dent is made in the value structures around oneself ” (285). The small, everyday
resistances are more important than the final triumph. Sujata dies but not as a
defeated person. The text opens up possibilities of finding one’s own voice to
respond to a social field marked by structural inequalities, “Sujata’s long, drawn
out, heart rending, poignant cry . . . set oblivion itself, the present and the future
atremble, reeling under its impact. . . . It was a cry that smelt of blood, protest,
grief ” ( Devi 2011, 127). Meenakshi Thapan (1996) rightly argues,

the woman’s body is often the conf licting site of both giving into as well
as resisting, dominant construction. Conf lict, not passivity is central to
woman’s life whether or not she is able to give expression to her desires
and views.
(11)
*****************
A close reading of Mother of 1084 and Rich Like Us has revealed that the writers
have consciously taken up issues affecting the status of women in the country, as
identified by the Towards Equality report – subordination in the patriarchal fam-
ily, violence embedded in personal and communal relations, non-recognition of
women’s economic inputs and sexual oppression, and policies regarding women’s
health and their overall well-being. The woman question in the public sphere
of independent India has been constituted by debates on all these issues, which
foreground the distortions of governance and policymaking systems. In fact, the
institutional structures had to be reworked to fulfil women’s roles as citizens
and partners in the task of nation-building. This obviously created conf licts as
it involved a thorough interrogation of “established preserves of traditional male
privileges, such as right to property and the unchallenged dominance of the
husband in family life and the overall patriarchal system” (Sharma and Sujaya
2012, 11). Does this mean that attempts, if any, to reform the gendered habitus
post-independence have failed? How do women negotiate their constructions
based on class, caste, gender, and patriarchal epistemologies? Can it be proposed
that it is not always “possible [for women] to exercise their agency as an actively
94 Feminist negotiation of autarchy

knowing and therefore resisting subject” ( Thapan 1996, 11)? All these questions
shall be explored in the next chapter.

Notes
1 There were a few women writers who moved beyond their personal pain and predica-
ment to talk about the distortions in the system. Mannu Bhandari strongly asserts in the
preface to her novel Mahabhoj (1979), “At a time when your house is set on fire, to get
immersed in one’s inner world or to only publicise about that would seem divorced from
social reality, humorous and to an extent vulgar.”
2 For instance, the data on the socio-economic profile of adivasis/tribals in India shows
that “maternal mortality (between 8 and 25 per 1,000) among them is more than double
the rates in the advanced regions of the country. Similarly, the infant mortality rates are
between 120 and 150, which is more than double the all-India average of 55” (Sagar
2006, 3176–3177).
3 It is evident in the uprising in Punjab in the 1980s and Kashmir and the North East to date.
4 See Government of India. n.d. “The Fifth Five Year Plan.” Planning Commission. Accessed
12 June 2012. Planningcommission.gov.in. Also, the foreword to the Fifth Development
Plan mentioned previously makes more sense in the light of Indira Gandhi’s broadcast to
the nation on 26 June 1975.
I am sure you are conscious of the deep and widespread conspiracy, which has
been brewing ever since I began to introduce certain progressive measures of ben-
efit to the common man and woman of India. In the name of democracy it has
been sought to negate the very functioning of democracy .  .  . certain persons
have gone to the length of inciting our armed forces to mutiny and our police to
rebel. . . . The forces of disintegration are in full play and communal passions are
being aroused, threatening our unity. . . . Any situation which weakens the capacity
of the national government to act decisively inside the country is bound to encour-
age dangers from outside. It is our paramount duty to safeguard unity and stability.
The nation’s integrity demands firm action (as quoted in Tickell 1998, 220).
5 In fact, it was triggered by the publication of the Towards Equality: Report of the Com-
mittee on the Status of Women in India in 1974. As discussed in the “Introduction,” the
report exposed how the institutional structures of the nation had systematically side-
lined women from its policymaking and governance post-independence, affecting their
already vulnerable status within the immediate familial and patriarchal setup.
6 This was especially witnessed when a band of revolutionaries, on the 18th of April,
1920, set out to capture police and destroy the Telegraph office, performing exemplary
assassinations of Europeans by bombing their club. The romantic appeal of the club soon
attracted women “who from this time onwards, are found assisting the terrorists as house-
keepers, messengers, custodians of arms and sometimes as comrades” (Kumar 1993, 85).
7 In 1948, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru instituted a subcommittee of
the Assembly, entrusting it with the task of drafting the Hindu Code Bill. The first
Law Minister of India, Dr B. R. Ambedkar, was nominated as the head of this com-
mittee. The Bill was submitted to the Assembly on 17 September 1951. The provi-
sions of the Bill included “issues such as abolition of birth right to property, property
by survivorship, half share for daughters, conversion of women’s limited estate into an
absolute estate, abolition of caste in matters of marriage and adoption, and the principle
of monogamy and divorce” (Rege, as quoted in Sarkar 2016, 192).
8 As the debates on the institution of the Hindu Code Bill reveal, “The [members of ]
All-India Hindu Mahasabha was quite vocal in their dislike of monogamy imposed upon
the Hindu society as a law. Many of its members linked polygamy to the male issue by
the first wife, ‘a man should be able to take a second wife, unless he has a male issue by the
first wife. If he has a male issue, monogamy should be enforced’” (Sinha 2007, 55).
 Feminist negotiation of autarchy 95

9 According to Section 494 of the Indian Penal Code, a person guilty of bigamy shall be
punished with simple or rigorous imprisonment for a term up to seven years, and shall
also be liable to fine. But there are certain structural chinks in the law like bigamy being
a non-cognisable offence, which makes it difficult to implicate the aggressor.
10 The CSWI has rightly observed that “secondary education, even now, is largely con-
fined to the upper and the middle classes, in urban areas. However, some of the richer
and more aristocratic families remain aloof to women’s education even today” (Sharma
and Sujaya 2012, 182).
11 The Towards Equality report notes, “During the debate in the Lok Sabha, Mitakshara
coparcenery was described as a ‘tottering’ structure on account of the ‘shattering’ blows
delivered to it by enactments from time to time and no useful purpose will be served by
retaining it. The opposition argued that though ‘battered and bruised’ it could still play
a useful role” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012, 103, footnote 221).
12 An amendment proposed by the Government spelt out the details more clearly as it
suggested:
‘No Hindu shall have any right to or interest in
(a) Any property of an ancestor during his lifetime merely by reason of the
fact that he is born in the family of the ancestor, or (b) Any joint family
property which is founded on the rule of the survivorship.’
(Sharma and Sujaya 2012 , 103)
13 Post 1975, the onus of family planning has been on women. Out of every 100 women
following any so-called modern method, 75 have been sterilised. This also hints at the
systematic policy initiatives of the donor bodies, which sponsored research and develop-
ment, with the sole focus on making women responsible for family planning (Bagchi
2005, 34).
14 In fact, women are culturally trained to perceive certain conditions, like maternity,
backache, body ache as “a natural state of being rather than conditions requiring medical
attention and cure” (Padma 2005, 446). Thus, they tolerate suffering.
15 Kuldip Nayar (2011) recounts his experience of the Emergency in “Indira Gandhi’s
India”: “At the instance of Sanjay Gandhi, Indira Gandhi introduced forced sterilisation.
Many above the age of 65 were sterilised and even boys who had hardly entered puberty
became victims” The Express Tribune 28 June 2011.

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Set III: Volume 7, edited by R.K. Dhawan. 9–18. New Delhi: Prestige Books.
3
NEGOTIATING STRUCTURAL
INEQUALITIES
Marriage, domesticity, divorce, and
widowhood in post-independence India

The gendered contexts, post-independence, have continued to circumscribe the

possibilities of reconfiguring the institution of marriage, which (re)produces het-
eronormative power differentials. This affects an alternative conceptualisation of
sexual and emotional subjectivities within and without marriage. Therefore, it is
imperative to unravel the patriarchal underpinnings of such institutional struc-
tures that reduce women to being receptacles of the discontents of masculinity.
The present chapter focusses on the discourses on and around marriage,
sexuality, divorce, and widowhood in the light of structural and institutional
inequalities in post-independence India. It takes up a detailed study of Mannu
Bhandari’s Aapka Bunty (1971), Mridula Garg’s Chittacobra (1979), and Indira
Goswami’s Shadow of Dark God (1986), interpreting them in the light of a legisla-
tive and adjudicatory framework and how it approaches marriage, incidents of
extra marital affair, divorce, legitimate progeny, and varied property laws. Such
a reading exercise becomes particularly relevant in current times, when there is
an urgent need to interrogate the political apathy towards women’s status and
gender relations in the country, exemplified by the failure of the government to
comply with some of the significant suggestions of the Justice Verma Commit-
tee1 (2013) regarding legal responses to violence against women.

Authors and works in perspective: Mridula Garg, Mannu

Bhandari, and Indira Goswami
Mridula Garg was born in 1938 in Delhi. Her upbringing, in many ways, was
unconventional. Since her mother was invalid, Garg learnt soon in her life that a
mother is not always supposed to be a nurturer and caregiver. Instead, she learnt
the art of reading from her mother, who was a voracious reader herself. Garg
developed a ref lective and creative life, reading works of eminent authors like
 Negotiating structural inequalities 99

Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Henry James, Jainendra, Rabindranath Tagore,

and others. Her training in literary reading and writing enabled Garg to not
simply create unconventional characters but also confront the “tradition-bound
Hindi literary establishment” ( Jain and Paliwal 2010, xxi). She is also known as a
nonconformist writer precisely for this reason. Some of her major works include
Avkaash (A Few Hours 1972), Daffodils Jal Rahein Hain (Daffodils on Fire 1991), Uske
Hisse Ki Dhoop (A Touch of Sun 1975), Chittacobra (Chittacobra 1979), and Kath-
gulab (Country of Goodbyes 1996), which explore issues of women’s individuality,
their need and desire of love, extramarital alliances, marriage, and suspension of
female guilt. Her works juxtapose the personal and the political, interlinking the
personalised experiences of women to the larger question of equitable distribu-
tion of resources and gender equality in society. Garg’s novels Anitya (Anitya:
Halfway to Nowhere 2004) and Vasu Ka Kutumb (The Earth’s Family 2016) take
up themes like failure of the national ‘tryst with destiny’ and socio-political and
economic evils that have severely affected the globalised world order. Garg’s lat-
est novel The Last Email (2018), written in English, is a narrative of two estranged
lovers Kevin and Maya (inf luenced by the characters of Richard and Manu in
Garg’s Chittacobra), who reopen contact with each other, after 30 years, through
emails. Even as they continue in their respective marriages, Kevin and Maya seek
to reunite at the level of spirit, sharing their experiences and memories of love
and togetherness.
Mannu Bhandari was born on 3 April 1931 in Bhanpura, Madhya Pradesh.
She did her B.A. and M.A. at Calcutta University and Banaras Hindu Univer-
sity, respectively. She taught at Baliganj Shiksha Sadan and Rani Birla College
before finally joining the Miranda House College in 1964, which is a con-
stituent college of the University of Delhi. She also worked as the Director of
the Premchand Srijanpeeth (Ujjain) after her retirement in 1991. She married
famous Hindi writer and critic Rajendra Yadav. She has written some of the
most well-known novels of Hindi literature like Aapka Bunty (Bunty 1971) and
Mahabhoj (The Grand Feast 1979). In the latter work, she evocatively exposes the
self-aggrandising psyche of contemporary politicians in the form of Da Sahab for
whom Gandhian ideals are nothing but a matter of ritual and empty emulation.
Her major short story collections include Main Haar Gayi (I Failed 1947), Ek Plate
Sailab (Cyclone in a Plate 1962), Yeh Sach Hai Aur Anye Kahaniya (The Truth and
Other Stories 1966), Teen Nigahon Ki Ek Tasveer (A Portrait with Three Eyes 1969),
and Trishanku (Limbo 1999 ).
Indira Goswami was born to Umakanta Goswami and Ambika Devi on 14
November 1942 in Guwahati. She did her B.A. and M.A. in Assamese literature
from Guwahati University. Soon after, she married Madhaven Raisom Iyengar.
Her husband died after barely 18 months of marriage in a car crash. It was after
his death, in order to get out of depression, that she once again resumed her
higher studies, pursuing research in Ramayani literature in Vrindavan, Uttar
Pradesh. She later joined the Modern Indian Languages Department of the Delhi
University. Goswami has widely published in Assamese as well as the English
100 Negotiating structural inequalities

language. Dabbling in both fiction and non-fiction, Goswami is one of those

rare creative writers, whose literary talent and activism complement each other.
Some of her major works are Neel Kanthi Braja (Shadow of Dark God 1986), Daantal
Hatir Une Khowa Howdah (A Saga of South Kamprup 1993), Chinnamastar Manuhto
(The Man from Chinnamasta 2005). She won the Sahitya Akademi award for the
novel Mamore Dhara Tarowal (The Rusted Sword 1982) in 1983. Goswami has also
been awarded the eminent Jnanpith award in 2000 for her rich contribution to
the literary life of the nation.
A rigorous literary analysis of the select novels by Garg, Bhandari, and Gos-
wami highlights the authors’ insistence on rewriting the way gender relations
have been conceptualised by the nation-state. For instance, the patriarchal biases
inherent in the structures of the nation-state are not willing to reconsider mar-
riage and women’s negotiation of their sexuality out of the hegemonic frame-
work that naturalises consent. As far as granting of divorce is concerned, the legal
structures are so biased against women that they unjustifiably measure women’s
demands of maintenance and share in the matrimonial property through the
prism of sexual purity and morality.
The widows are the worst sufferers of patriarchy, as their labour is conve-
niently appropriated by the family without giving them a dignified right to
liberty, personal fulfilment, and material ownership of the deceased’s prop-
erty. They are always subjected to a moral gaze, ridden with punitive measures,
heightening their marginalisation. Also, the widows in the family are usually rel-
egated to mobile labour, employed as cooks, caretakers, and governesses at their
rich relatives’ homes, “which would leave them vulnerable to sexual threats and
temptations” (Gopal 2013, 92). Thus, their domestic situation as well as deploy-
ment of labour [generally] constitutes widows as, in Kumkum Sangari’s (1993)
words, “transgressive and therefore ‘bad,’ removing from their own control any
bargaining power over the value of their labour” (21).

The politics of marriage, sexuality, and domesticity

The patriarchal, virilocal, patrilineal family exploits upper caste/middle class
women’s claims to equality within marriage. They are rendered vulnerable by
migration into the marital family, more so when they are impelled to leave their
jobs, losing an independent source of income. However, women are expected
to take up domesticity as their full-time engagement, disregarding the fact that
it is just a part of woman’s life. The additional responsibilities of child bearing
and child rearing also fall into their share since “marriage continues to be an
unequal partnership with specifically assigned gendered roles” (Agnes 2009, 58).
Mridula Garg explores these issues in her seminal work Chittacobra. The novel
talks about Manu’s relationships with her husband Mahesh and lover Richard,
dealing with the themes of love and sexuality on the one hand and marriage on
the other. Driven by the norms of caste purity and patriliny, Hindu marriage
not only represses women’s sexuality but also denies them individuality. Manu’s
 Negotiating structural inequalities 101

extramarital relationship with Richard does not simply interrogate such oppres-
sive norms but gives Manu the cognitive freedom to discern the allied terrors
of domesticity as well. By so doing, the novel exposes the institutionalisation of
marriage, which thrives on the dissemination of asymmetrical gendered relations
between men and women.
The authorial stance could be supplemented by referring to the Parliamentary
debates (1941–56) which led to the institutionalisation of the Hindu Code Bill
in India. It apparently endorsed Hindu women’s claims to gender equality by
declaring bigamy punishable by law and giving them a right to institute divorce
proceedings. In addition to this, they were also given a right to inherit paternal
property.2 However, if one analyses the key Parliamentary debates pertaining to
its passage, the celebratory facade starts to veer off, revealing a deeply inherent
patriarchal bias. Chitra Sinha (2007) highlights how the Parliamentary debates
relating to the institution of the Hindu Code Bill ref lected the “incongruous
ideologies” of the time (50). While there was a liberal outlook towards facilitat-
ing women’s access to legal privileges, the religious orthodoxy contested it by
emphasising women’s centrality within the customary rituals of Hindu commu-
nity, “The ‘pativrata’ (domesticated ideal mother) dedicated to progeny became
the signifier for the immense virtues of Hindu religion” (Sinha 2007, 51). In fact,
Dr. B. Pattabhi Sitaramayya’s (n.d.) views, expressed during the debates held
among the Select Committee of Government (which was instituted to discuss
the Hindu Code Bill), reveal a serious patriarchal bias that men in such high-
powered decision-making bodies suffered from, foreclosing any possibility of
redefining gender relations,

But now it has become rather common [. . .] that educated girls have the
habit of picking readymade husbands who have already got a wife and five
or six children. It is not enough to make laws: but it is necessary to propa-
gate these laws and propagandise these laws in order to educate our young
girls in the direction of monogamy.

Such debates around sexuality wrecked havoc on women’s status as individuals.

Even the slightest of negotiation outside the mould of dedicated wife and mother
was denounced as an inf luence of western education.
In fact, this romanticisation of family and marriage works against the idea of
women as individuals who could experience their life and assert their sexual-
ity on their own terms. For instance, the figure of the educated young woman
has been invested with negative consequences of western modernity. The soci-
ety could accept women’s engagement with career as long as they contribute to
the finances of family and not breach the patriarchal heterosexual boundaries
of marriage and sexuality. As Mary John and Janaki Nair (1998) assert, “The
ideal Indian (Hindu) married ‘new woman’ [. . .] was still the ground on which
questions of modernity and tradition were framed, she was the embodiment of
boundaries between licit and illicit forms of sexuality, as well as the guardian
102 Negotiating structural inequalities

of the nation’s morality” (8). Such delimiting conceptualisations of women’s

sexuality call for a thorough re-engagement with what Seemanthini Niranjana
(2005) calls the “matrix of sexualisation” (481).3 In fact, it entails a delinking of
home from the cultural reproduction of women’s sexuality in order to expose the
political implications embedded in the domestic.
In the light of these arguments, the novel Chittacobra interrogates the analogy
among home, women, and sexuality, calling for a reconfiguration of the way
gender hierarchies have been perceived. As Manu asserts,

I don’t know what I would like to be. I have a lot of empty-hollow time.
Sometimes I think that I should be an actor . . . sometimes I feel like writ-
ing a PhD thesis . . . teach at a college or . . . supervise some ongoing work
at a factory. . . . I want to stand in fray for the Legislative Assembly elec-
tions . . . roam around the world, nurse the patients in hospital, and admit
into a mission . . . write poems.4
(Garg 2013a, 131)

However, the variety of interests inherent in such a pursuit does not necessar-
ily highlight her confused state of mind. On the contrary, Manu wants to delve
deeper into the recesses of her being and discover an aspect of her identity, which
is not limited to the role of an ideal wife and mother. These varied professions
reveal her love of creativity and freedom of expression. The ellipses, separat-
ing these professional choices, indicate Manu’s refusal to categorise them within
conventional societal assumptions of work and labour. She challenges ways in
which each of these professions are perceived within specific contexts of class,
caste, and gender differences on the one hand and notions of service, intellect,
and creativity on the other. Simultaneously, there is an attempt to enlist mul-
tiple forms of existence, which are located outside the institutions of family and
marriage but are equally relevant, even more so. Manu, thus, accords a valence
to different lifestyles and choices, which is otherwise absent within the limited
structure of home, comprising the husband, wife, mother, father, and children.
Furthermore, home acquires a new definition for Manu, who perceives it as,
in Rashmi Varma’s (2012) words, a viable “place where to speak from, a place of
women’s productive work and artistic and literary expressions and a place from
where to challenge the debilitating anomie” (28) of the asymmetrical relations
of gendered citizenship.
As home acquires a new definition in the narrative, marriage also breaks
its so-called bounds of sanctity. Marital relations are defamiliarised in the pro-
cess. For instance, unlike conventional literary narratives, Garg does not por-
tray Manu and her husband Mahesh as embroiled in marital discord per se. She
further suggests how there is no need to justify Manu’s extramarital affair with
Richard. It is rooted in desire that might be illegitimate but is based on voli-
tion and mutual reciprocity, something her so-called legitimate marriage could
not provide her with. It might transgress the juridico-legal mandate favouring
 Negotiating structural inequalities 103

monogamy within marriage but, for the author, it becomes a viable means to
reconceptualise the female body and her agency. This significantly involves inter-
rogating what Niranjana (2005) describes as the “high cultural value attached to
wifehood, morality, fidelity to husband, restraint, maintaining of family honour
and so on” (478).
The authorial critique problematises seemingly innocuous concepts like love
and intimacy within marriage, aligning them with the socio-political, economic,
and cultural structures of society and, by extension, the nation. For instance,
Mahesh highlights how the “institutionalisation of marital adjustments” ( Dha-
wan 2011, 160) has strengthened the very foundations of patrilineal, patriarchal,
and virilocal arrangement of familial and kinship norms in India:

If every husband would fall in love with his wife, and the wife too would
love her husband, who would care for the mundane but important matters
of society? . . . Business and Politics would come to a standstill.
(Garg 2013a, 92)

It is evident that the juridico-political discourses, defining conditions for entry

or exit into marriage, limit themselves to certain obvious facts, like attaining the
age of maturity, terms of marital cohabitation, and divorce.5 However, they do
not bother to acknowledge what Nandita Dhawan describes as the “ambiguity
in choice and petty coercions of family members” (2011, 153) that force men and
women to submit to the invisible abstractions of patriarchy.
The idea of adjustment, compromise within marriage is so deeply engrained
in societal norms that it is normalised as a socially legitimate act. Such compro-
mises are ref lected in the way the gendered asymmetry privileges a masculinist
regime in everyday marital life. For instance, the male desire within and without
marriage is naturalised to an extent that grave issues like marital rape are sys-
temically diluted in the name of preserving the so-called marital sanctity.6 These
are disturbing revelations that need to be focussed upon.
During the first few years, Manu and Mahesh live through the violence of
their loveless marriage, which has both legal and societal sanction attached to
it. In fact, Mahesh frankly confesses to Manu that since he does not “believe in
the institution of marriage” (Garg 2013a, 89), he has never considered the ties of
marriage binding. This confession, after ten years of cohabiting with Manu in
a conjugal bond, comes from the warped logic of patriarchal practices that take
the asymmetry of gender relations for granted. It does not even deter him from
enjoying the fruits of marriage, that is, sexual relations with Manu who then
gives birth to his legitimate progeny. Moreover, Mahesh could never under-
stand what marriage entails for women, how a new home structured by affinal
ties with strangers, a new set of rules, and authorities could spell out oppression
for women.7
On the contrary, Manu does not seem to have the courage to confront
Mahesh. Instead, she asks herself day in and day out, “Whether Mahesh loves
104 Negotiating structural inequalities

me or not? . . . What if he does not love me at all? Is it possible?”(Garg 2013a,

88). It reveals how women are forcibly trained from adolescence and socialised to
expect marriage as the be all and end all of their life. As Mahesh tells her, “When
we got married, you had loved me and wanted to do everything that you thought
an average Indian wife should do to make her husband happy” (Garg 2013a, 87).
Thus, women are often socialised to be self-effacing. In such cases, their sub-
jectivity becomes akin to a mirror, which ref lects the everyday preponderance
of masculinities within and without the home. Consequently, their potential to
forge an independent self is severely curtailed.
The majority of women, after having invested so much emotional energy, are
not left with an alternative but to stay on in such humiliating marriages. They
can opt for divorce but lack of familial support, societal biases, and absence of
financial freedom often discourage women from escaping an oppressive marital
relationship. Blaming Mahesh would have inevitably led to self-objectification,
that is, she as a wife could not even garner her husband’s love. The desire for
companionship often forces women to succumb to the power-ridden structure
of marriage, which technically has its roots in the patriarchal notions of property
ownership and rights over women rather than love.
In fact, prior to the codification of the Hindu Code Bill, marriage was con-
sidered too sacrosanct an institution to be interrogated. For example, the reli-
gious organisations like Sanatan Dharma Rakshini Sabha declared, “we would
not allow a woman to get divorce and marry again even if her first husband
became a lunatic or a convert” (as quoted in Sinha 2007, 55). The opposition
to divorce was a consequence of a complex network of beliefs, rituals, and cus-
tomary practices, which emphasised the need to protect and preserve the sexual
purity of women. While fathers were expected to give away virgin daughters
(kanyadan) in marriage, the husband was entitled to deploy his wife’s sexuality
within marriage to produce the correct progeny. In both cases, however, patriar-
chy betrayed an inherent fear regarding the virgin (pre-marriage) and non-virgin
(post-marriage/divorce) female sexuality, unleashed from the bonds of marriage.
As mentioned previously, the control and taming of women’s sexuality were the
means to maintain and ensure patrilineal succession. The right to divorce would
have turned such patriarchal arrangements on their head.
More to the point, the Towards Equality report records in a survey of views
on issues concerning marriage that 73.96 per cent of parents believe they should
have an exclusive right over fixing the marriage of their daughter (Sharma and
Sujaya 2012, 299). The figure reveals not simply an overwhelming concern with
daughters’ marital alliance but an inherent fear regarding women’s assertion and
individual decision-making against caste endogamy and patriarchal family’s pro-
tocols, perceived as natural and given. Manu’s extramarital relationship marks her
rebellion against such narrow beliefs. She values her relationship with Richard
because it gives Manu the space to be and experience her mind, body, and soul as
extensions of each other, facilitating a cognitive sense of being. Here, the author
ensures that the portrayal of extramarital relationship is not merely perceived as
 Negotiating structural inequalities 105

a means to escape from the deprivations of matrimony. On the contrary, it prob-

lematises the hegemonic constructions of patriarchal family as, what Samita Sen,
Ranjita Biswas, and Nandita Dhawan (2011) term, “the only legitimate structure
of the family, rather than one among many” (2). It also exposes the shortcom-
ings inherent in the dominant discourses on sexuality, which perceive women’s
experience of it only under the purview of violence.8
It was rarely acknowledged that sexuality is integrally related to women’s
expression of their self and identity and how it has been circumscribed by the
asymmetry of gender relations in the present context. Flavia Agnes (1997) in an
essay suggests that the earlier campaigns of the women’s movement that addressed
violence on women

seldom questioned conservative notions of women’s chastity, virgin-

ity, servility and the concept of the good and the bad woman in society.
[They didn’t] address the basic questions of power balance between men
and women, women’s economic rights within the family and their status
within society.
(522)

Moreover, the right of women to their own body, so popularised by the

women’s movement during this time, was also perceived in relation to sexual
violence within and without marriage. Though significant in many aspects, such
a theorisation of women’s sexuality only within the rubric of violence tended to
circumscribe any alternative construction of women’s sexuality.
The novel Chittacobra hints at the insecurity inherent in patriarchy regard-
ing women’s sexuality. The fact that sexual intimacies outside marriage might
lead to conception of children who could illegitimately inherit the family
name and property under coparcenary rights creates a sense of permanent
anxiety in patriarchy. The implications of concepts like fidelity and/or infi-
delity within marriage and the concomitant double standards of morality are
exposed when Manu asks Mahesh, what if she has an affair with someone? He
is rendered speechless at first and tells her meekly, “If possible, don’t tell about
it to me ever” (Garg 2013a , 90). The response betrays Mahesh’s anxiety about
determining his wife’s sexuality, implying how women’s identity is exclu-
sively perceived within a lateral paradigm of sexual excess rather than indi-
viduality. This connects to the larger argument that women’s concerns cannot
be understood only within the format of an individualistic engagement. In
fact, their issues, sexuality, and any theorisation of women’s agency cannot
be perceived as separate from social issues but integrally related to the meta-
narrative of power relations – state, family, kinship, tradition, community –
affecting women on the one hand and other marginalised sections of society
on the other.
The constructions of female body and sexuality are integral to the gendered
power relations in society. In fact, they are constantly measured on a scale of
106 Negotiating structural inequalities

morality, impinged by factors like shame and honour. Alternatively, female sexu-
ality must be conceived outside the strictures of marriage and not merely as a
site for contested expressions of both tradition and modernity. It further implies
that a woman’s sexuality is to be liberated from an always already guilt-ridden
state, which is constantly imposed on her by the patriarchal epistemology. For
instance, Garg (2013b) asserts in a conversation with Shoma Chaudhury (of the
Tehelaka magazine),

It is easy for a woman to commit herself to more than one relationship at

a time, without fragmenting her own self and consciousness. This thought
is different from the traditional mindset of Indian society that is why they
could not accept my novel.
(164) 9

Manu becomes an agent of her sexuality as she learns to perceive marital sex
as separate from patriarchal injunctions that legitimise it only in the context
of motherhood. She perceives herself not merely as a desirable object but as an
agent, well versed in the game of sexual intimacy, “To love is to play, it is an art,
a need, body’s requirement” (Garg 2013a, 98). She makes elaborate preparations
for the anticipated sexual encounter with Mahesh, experiencing her body in its
varied aspects; bathing, cleaning her feet, and so on with a clear set agenda in her
mind, that is, to prepare her body as a sexed body, proficient in the techniques
of love making. However, this preparation is supplemented by a discerning atti-
tude towards the sexual act, that it could be just a manifestation of bodily needs
and nothing else, “Mahesh has entered my body. This intercourse between man
and woman . . . is nothing . . . but an inherited intense longing in every man to
fill a hole” (Garg 2013a, 99). Thus, a woman’s body is not simply a receptacle
of cultural signifiers. It is a material body as well, which expresses its needs and
desires in varied facets.
However, the awareness of her femininity constituted through the body is not
an innocuous celebration of female desire and her sexuality. It is concomitant with
an insight into the violence inherent in this intimacy. Manu knows how intimacy
is achieved at a certain price, which includes compromise with patriarchy.

My eyes are closed . . . I could clearly hear . . . the tinkle of ankle bells. . . .
Whenever I am with Mahesh that sound holds me in thrall. Those women
are merely bodies. . . . Forgetting everything, they immerse themselves in
worship of f lesh once they have the money.
(Garg 2013a, 98)

Here, Manu’s cognitive self pierces through the facade of sexual intimacy in
marriage. She analogises the body in intimacy to the body in sex work, raising
questions like, can there be any genuine intimacy at all?
 Negotiating structural inequalities 107

The way sex workers are denigrated, criminalised by society and law, clearly
highlights the sexual perversity inherent in the patriarchal structures in India.
While home becomes a domain of good women because they are the reposito-
ries of family honour, ‘prostitute’ becomes a term of insult, suggesting someone
who is “merely a sex object that does not deserve society’s respect” (Menon
2012 , 132). The nuanced representation of marital sex between Manu and
Mahesh clearly hints at how no woman can afford to be innocent of the price
she pays in the name of intimacy, that is, how patriarchal institutions like mar-
riage operate with categories like good and bad women, constantly rendering
them f luid and temporal.
Moreover, Manu’s relationship with Richard foregrounds varied aspects of
her subjectivity. He is a Scot and Manu likes to spend time with him primarily
because she perceives this relationship as not based on any intention to claim
or possess the other person, “His name was his; mine remained mine. He did
not say you are mine. . . . I did not say, my owner (swami )” (Garg 2013a , 66).
Apparently, there is no trace of paternalism that usually accompanies mari-
tal ties, leading to an asymmetry of gender relations. Manu knows they can’t
be together, not simply because both of them are married but because they
know what marriage entails. She would like to carve an ideal space of mental
compatibility and companionship with Richard, having failed at it within the
dynamics of marriage.
In fact, one is impelled to reinvestigate the idea of intimacy in love now. Is it
possible to be really intimate with anyone, so as to achieve a sense of completeness
in it? Is it a viable idea to locate your completeness in someone else? Are romance
and intimacy not inspired by a heterosexual ideal, whereby mutuality evolves
within a larger structure of the pursuit of desire? There are instances in the novel,
wherein the charm of relationship for Manu lies in the thrill of chase, a masochist
pining for the absent lover and longing for the union. For instance, when Richard
wonders about the possibility of his marriage with Manu, she retorts,

you would have roamed around the world and I would have taken care of
your children back in England. . . . In fact, I would have fallen in love with
Mahesh then. I would have abandoned you for Mahesh.
(Garg 2013a, 129)

Manu’s response suggests how difficult it is for both men and women to escape
the narrative of romance, which anticipates and structures the levels of intimacy
shared between them. Thus, the ideas of sexual and romantic intimacies cease
to be significant in themselves, foregrounding the complex layers of emotional
violence and power ridden structures inherent in them.
Manu’s aspirations of uniting with Richard after 30 long years, when they are
old enough to be no longer constrained by societal injunctions, reveal her ways
of bargaining with the warped logic of such intimacies. An old woman is outside
108 Negotiating structural inequalities

the reproductive logic of patriarchy. She ceases to be a source of anxiety for her
immediate family, drowned in the concerns of gender and social disciplining.
The desire to have grey hair, a wrinkle-ridden body will also simultaneously
liberate her from objectification at the hands of the male gaze. It also highlights
how women are (de)valued on the basis of certain constructed notions of youth
and beauty. Such gender symbolism is authored by the institutions like family,
marriage, and state with the help of capitalist forces, which maintain and popu-
larise a specific ideal of woman to this effect. Manu rightly asserts, “My value is
derived from my beautiful body” (Garg 2013a, 102).
Manu becomes an object of envy and admiration for other women sharing
her social circle, who quickly pronounce that she is out there to entangle men in
the charm of her beauty, that she must have undergone a “cosmetic procedure
like face-lifting” (Garg 2013a, 106) to look this beautiful. More to the point, it
reveals how a woman’s body and sexuality are constantly mapped on the scale of
chastity. How, she is to look beautiful not for herself but for the legitimate owner
of her body, that is, the husband. By desiring to grow old, she suggests how there
is a need to reconceptualise the women’s body and liberate it from the shackles
of patriarchal and masculinist underpinnings – a body lived in everyday life in
order to arrive at a coherent understanding of the self.
The author also highlights the bitter truth of marriage, that is, a woman’s
value within marriage is calculated by her beautiful body and the domestic tasks
she performs are neither appreciated nor are they considered work. Their pro-
ductive labour in household is devalued and erased. This is evident in measures
adopted by the first few Five Year Plans initiated by the Planning Commission of
India, wherein women were not recognised as a category of workers. Instead, the
image of the “producer patriot” ( Deshpande 1993, 27) was propounded, which
was exclusively tied to an institutional reorganisation of the nation’s economic
capacities. This systemically excluded women from the rhetoric of production,
rendering their labour and work invisible.
However, Manu’s imaginative renditions lead her to turn this social invis-
ibility into an actual aspect of her life. She wants to be invisible, seemingly inert,
just like an insect. By so doing, she hopes to be spared of a thankless routine
of domestic chores. In fact, it is their extreme visibility on the domestic front,
which reduces women’s labour to being a given fact,

I would have laid in a dark corner of a room or under a sofa, outside peo-
ple’s gaze. No one would have looked at me even . . . I wish I would have
disgusted people in the first sight itself.
(Garg 2013a, 100)

Her musings interrogate the institutional structures of the state, which not only
maintain but also encourage the sexual division of labour. She also contests the
way women’s work and income is perceived within a limited framework only, as
mentioned previously.
 Negotiating structural inequalities 109

Patriarchal structures of law: the case of divorced

and deserted women
The Towards Equality report states that the number of women who had been
divorced and/or deserted had considerably increased between 1961 and 1971.10
Moreover, “the proportion of women who remain in this state continues to be
higher than that of men, both in the urban as well as rural areas” (Sharma and
Sujaya 2012, 88). The issue acquired such gravitas that it was classified as a “spe-
cial problem” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012 , 68) faced by society and institutional
structures. However, what are the common factors that led to the emergence
of such a problem in the first place? How are the two categories of women
(divorced and deserted) related to one another? Evidently, they are exclusively
defined in terms of the absence of men in women’s lives. It implies how the patri-
archal context delimits the choices and agency of women in a manner that their
existence is defined/determined by the presence or the absence of a “legitimate
sexual partner, most commonly, the husband being perceived as this qualified
partner” ( Pappu 2011, 371). One of the plausible reasons why the Towards Equal-
ity report classified such cases as special problems could include the structural
inability to recognise the intricacies of changing social patterns and provide for
a supportive institutional framework.
In this light, Mannu Bhandari’s Aapka Bunty exposes the failure of the state
to strengthen the institutional support networks for divorced and/or deserted
women. Aapka Bunty deals with the theme of divorce and how broken families
affect the psyche of women and children. The novel also interrogates the sancti-
monious facade of Hindu marriage which trains women into believing that their
“husband is their God and marriage is a sacred and holy union of the husband
and wife.”11 Shakun is an independent working woman who refuses to subscribe
to such warped ideas of marriage. Her marriage falls apart when Ajay, her hus-
band, gets into an extramarital affair with Mira. Shakun takes their son Bunty
along with her and walks out of Ajay’s house. The narrative highlights how
the mother-son duo perceives the reality of their broken family and eventually
comes to terms with it. While Shakun is torn between her choices as an indi-
vidual and her duties as a mother, Bunty finds himself abandoned and uncared
for in the absence of his father’s support and familial arrangement.

Negotiating patriarchal structures: life without

men and marriage
The sanctioned trajectory of womanhood in this country, that is, “progress from
being a virgin daughter to a chaste and dutiful wife, daughter-in-law and a mother
under the sanction of her father, husband and son, respectively” ( Kulkarni and
Bhat 2010, 60), is challenged in the absence of men in their lives. It not only puts
women’s identity and sexuality on the scrutinising radar of patriarchy but renders
them vulnerable in the absence of any support system either from the marital
110 Negotiating structural inequalities

family or the natal family. Thus, financial independence becomes important for
middle class women in such circumstances. Shakun in Aapka Bunty works as the
principal of a city college, which enables her to financially support herself and
her son Bunty after separating from Ajay.
In fact, there was a significant rise in female-headed households around the
1970s and 1980s, when women and children lived apart from the husband and
the father due to broken marriages, widowhood, desertion, and abandonment.
The Towards Equality report draws its inferences from the research on “male-
female disparity in regard to selected demographic characteristics in India in
1971” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012 , 24). A considerably higher proportion of wid-
owed, divorced, or separated women reveals the insecure and vulnerable status
of women in this country. While the number of widowed women was 2772
per 1000 males, divorced or separated women constituted 1630 per 1000 males,
exposing how the kinship norms and household structures perform a definite
role in the oppression of women. It also indicates how there was a greater accept-
ability of men in society who chose to remarry rather than divorced or widowed
women who did so. Such biased gender codes not only naturalise and obscure
the unequal power relations in family but also delimit women’s roles to being
self-sacrificing wives and mothers.
However, under such circumstances, women could come out as agents, chal-
lenging the “conception of the normative women, by taking charge of their own
lives” ( Kulkarni and Bhat 2010, 60). For instance, Mannu Bhandari writes in
the preface to Aapka Bunty, “Shakun is not self- sacrificial. She will not rout her
individuality, enriching her son’s life. Instead she has an independent personality,
is financially independent and lives life on her own terms” (2012, ix).12 Bhan-
dari represents through the character of Shakun the image of a modern woman,
aspiring to live on her own terms.
Shakun, being a principal, is respected for her academic engagements in
society. In fact, the teaching profession has been associated with respectability,
more so during the 1960s and 1970s, when only a minority of upper mid-
dle class women could access the professional training required for it. The
occupational pattern in India in 1968 reveals that only 4,206 women were
employed as teachers in the universities (Sharma and Sujaya 2012 , 158). Thus,
Shakun is the new woman of the newly independent nation-state, negotiating
her modernity vis-à-vis the institutional structures of the nation-state. Bhan-
dari captures the status of women as individuals in post-independence India,
which had mainly remained invisible to programme planners and administra-
tors due to the “established tendency to view women only through the screen
of families or households and not as individuals in their own right” (Sharma
and Sujaya 2012 , 16). Thus, it is imperative to perceive women not merely as
recipients of reform and welfare, but as productive beings who play viable eco-
nomic roles in society.
Radha Kumar (1993) also states how the feminist negotiation of the woman
question in post-independence India replaced the symbol of mother and/or wife
 Negotiating structural inequalities 111

with “two self-images . . . the woman as daughter and the working woman” (2).
She further asserts,

The former focussed on the formation of a woman rather than her role;
the latter looked at her productive rather than reproductive capacities. This
marked a sharp turn from the pre-independence movement, which was
almost exclusively concerned with women in relation to men.
(2)

As mentioned earlier, upper middle class women were the immediate ben-
eficiaries of the increasing rate of development and the consequent expansion of
employment opportunities in the tertiary sector enabled these women to become
productive citizens of the new nation. As the Towards Equality report states, “The
possibility of employment under Government provided the stimulus that wom-
en’s education had lacked so far, particularly in the field of higher education”
(Sharma and Sujaya 2012, 155).
The report further describes how an increasing number of women belong-
ing to urban middle classes took up wage employment in order to support their
families, both pre- and post-marriage. In this light, Bhandari also represents
how the cultural ascriptions and financial constraints faced by women affect
their attempts to forge an independent self. For instance, Shakun does not work
to improve her career prospects but to financially support herself and Bunty in
Ajay’s absence. Her professional persona is presented through Bunty’s perspec-
tive, as in, how his mother acquires a strict demeanour when she goes to college,
disabling him from connecting with Shakun’s softer side as his mother. Later in
the novel, Shakun also confesses that she never focussed on her career as a means
of self-improvement. Her professional independence was simply a means to make
her ex-husband feel jealous and inferior to her, “her promotions in the last seven
years, from being the head of the department to becoming the principal of her
college, were also motivated by a desire to diminish Ajay’s status rather than
improving her own professional calibre” ( Bhandari 2012 , 37–38). Thus, to bor-
row Sangeeta Ray’s (2000) words, “the bourgeois underpinnings of an Indian
nationalist ideology are so mythologised” (44) that Shakun is unable to negotiate
the new narrative of freedom for women after independence.
Although the new woman was liberated to seek professional independence,
she was still tied to the anchors of domesticity and motherhood. As Bhandari
too eschews from focussing on Shakun’s professional achievements, it becomes
clear that Shakun’s independence is rendered ineffective. She fails to become
the so-called lakshmi of the house, who could strike a perfect balance between
modernity and tradition. She is easily dispensed of by Ajay, who could not accept
her independence and domineering attitude. As Shakun relates, “Ajay was always
intent on proving her and her behaviour as wrong – ‘Shakun is too independent,
she is too dominating’ . . . she has suffered the guilt of being wrong for these
seven years in one way or another” ( Bhandari 2012 , 112).
112 Negotiating structural inequalities

Bhandari interrogates the unambiguous discourse of the patriarchal nation-

state that cultivated such gendered contexts post-independence wherein women
felt discouraged to achieve a just and equal position in society. For instance,
the socio-political and economic policies, which were implemented in post-
independence India, firmly ensconced women in the role of mother.13 They
were supposed to be good at running the home and nurturing their children,
which would eventually create a better society and better nation out of it.14
Shakun’s decision to remarry and link her life up with Dr. Joshi is a product
of this warped sense of role perception within the traditional ideology of sepa-
rate spheres (of men and women) and the allied patterns of division of labour.
She could not discern how Dr. Joshi’s ‘benevolent’ paternalism also seeks to
define her womanhood within a specified role of mother for his children Jyot
and Ami. Unlike Ajay, who was overtly critical of Shakun’s individuality, he is
clever enough to subtly mould it to his own needs. So, when Shakun starts to
feel obliged by Dr. Joshi’s large-heartedness for having accepted her, a divorcee,
one realises how deeply women’s role perception is rooted in their socialisation
and the expectations of society: “Nowadays, she feels so dependent on Dr. Joshi
that it seems she would not be able to take a single step without his assistance. A
woman could achieve what she wants, but a man’s support is necessary for her”
( Bhandari 2012 , 110).

Encoding masculinity and women’s subordination:

patriarchal biases of the nation-state
Since gender is in a state of becoming, it is imperative to see how the discourses
and practices of our cultural and political institutions encode men and women
within this continuous process of gendering and socialisation. Shakun’s griev-
ance is more against Ajay’s patriarchal licence to remarry and substitute her pres-
ence with Mira, rather than separation per se, “The fact that she is not living
together with Ajay does not bother her. However, what stings her is the fact that
someone else has replaced her in Ajay’s life and got everything, including that
which belonged to Shakun once” ( Bhandari 2012 , 38). Furthermore, Ajay has
been living in an adulterous relationship with Mira for the past one year despite
the fact that Shakun is his legally wedded wife. However, since Ajay wants to
settle with Mira this time, Shakun is left with no option but to sign the divorce
papers, “He [uncle] had come to get her signatures [on divorce papers]. . . . ‘Mira
is expecting’ – uncle’s words resurfaced in her mind. So, a trap was laid out for
her” ( Bhandari 2012 , 45).
Bhandari cleverly hints at these details to betray the double standards of laws
pertaining to adultery. The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, provides a provision for
divorce when either the husband or wife is “living in adultery (or) if the husband
has more than one wife living” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012, 89). However, women’s
negotiation of such legal provisions is delimited by the contradictory familial ide-
ology endorsed by the judicial structure of the country. For instance, though the
 Negotiating structural inequalities 113

Indian Divorce Act, 1869, provides the aggrieved spouse with adequate compen-
sation from the third party in adultery, “section 34 states that the right is available
only to the husband and not the wife”15 ( Kapur and Crossman 1996, 103). Thus,
women’s subordination and oppression is embedded in the patriarchal biases of the
institutional structures of nation. Lynne Segal (1993) rightly asserts,

The concept of ‘masculinity’ condenses, above all, the cultural reality of wom-
en’s subordination. This reality is embodied . . . in the daily functioning –
the routines and rituals – of the state, industry, and every other institution of
social, economic, and political power.
(629)

Since marriage is perceived to be a social institution, which legitimises a

husband’s exclusive right over his wife’s sexuality, the courts too seem to express
this opinion by institutionalising such judgements against women, whereby any
violation of the norm amounts to serious consequences for them.16 Shakun, being
a woman, has no right to her husband’s commitment and loyalty. The narrative
makes it clear how the warped politico-legal structures of the state encourage men
to take certain powers and privileges for granted by “obstructing women’s access
to power, choice, and control over their lives, while cementing men’s traditional
authority” (Segal 1993, 630).
It is this gendered asymmetry of power relations that further crystallises the
distinction between femininity and masculinity. As Lynne Segal further high-
lights, this asymmetry also constricts the “assertion of contrasting, if subor-
dinated, masculinities – whether anti-sexist, or in other ways more gentle or
aesthetic ethnic or cultural masculine identities” (1993, 629), which are at odds
with the regimented norms of masculine behaviour. In the novel, Bunty’s inter-
est in painting, reading, and gardening ref lects a very creative and aesthetic facet
of his personality. Bhandari provides a glimpse into an alternative approach to
masculinities, suggesting how it does not have an inner essence, nor is it static. It
is, as Lynne Segal calls “a set of fictions” (1993, 630), which acquires a palpable
quality with a series of investments in it.
However, both Ajay and later Dr. Joshi feel that Shakun’s upbringing has had
a negative inf luence on Bunty. They admonish Shakun for Bunty’s extreme love
of her, which he expresses by sleeping with her, hugging her, and touching her
face and shoulders whenever he wants to talk to her. Ajay constantly asserts how
such expressions have led to distorted and un-masculine interests in him, “He
should grow like a boy, like a man” ( Bhandari 2012, 40). His decision to send
Bunty to a hostel is driven by an urge to subscribe to the normative gender roles,

What has happened to the child? He looks afraid and nervous all the time.
Why should I not send him to a hostel? He will be normal only when he
stays away from all of us and among the children of his age.
(Bhandari 2012, 198)
114 Negotiating structural inequalities

More to the point, Ajay’s gift to Bunty, a toy gun, is symbolic of the initiation
into aggressive but ‘normal’ boyhood, negating possibilities, if any, of reformed
masculinity. Whenever Bunty wants to express his anger against Shakun and her
growing proximity with Dr. Joshi, he fires incessantly, drowning his anger in
the loud report of the toy gun. Thus, his initiation into boyhood and its contin-
gent aggression is constantly in the process of becoming. The author particularly
focusses on the performative nature of masculinities and femininities,17 suggest-
ing that they are performed in a particular context.18
Bunty is unable to cope with the altered contexts of his and Shakun’s life. In
fact, as Bhandari suggests, Bunty is rendered so lonely and depressed after his
parents’ divorce that he fails to relate to a cogent familial unit. Both Shakun
and Ajay, after their respective second marriages, have broken the familial logic
of unconditional solidarity. As Shakun says, “Both of us considered Bunty a
medium to avenge ourselves. We only thought in the context of our egos, ambi-
tions, and frustrations. We never thought about Bunty” ( Bhandari 2012 , 187).
Bunty is now a product of civil society that invests in individuality, producing
the logic of separation, in contrast to the logic of family. He finally lands in
a hostel that acts as a “surface of absorption” ( Das 1995, 57) by absorbing the
“family undesirables” (65).
Moreover, Bhandari also highlights how the provision of guardianship, in
the case of a minor child, is aligned to the ‘moral’ institutional regulation of the
extant gendered contexts of the nation-state. The Hindu Minority and Guard-
ianship Act, 1956, provides that the natural guardian for both boys and unmar-
ried girls is first the father and after him the mother. In the novel, Shakun loses
whatever right she has over Bunty’s custody after her marriage to Dr. Joshi.
Although the courts state that “the welfare of the child is the paramount consid-
eration . . . in respect of custody of a minor child” (Sharma 2012, 29), the autho-
rial contention is, who would decide the paramount interest of a child? Bunty
needs the love and nurture of both his parents and absence of either of them is
bound to affect him.
Bhandari further exposes and interrogates the structural nuances pertain-
ing to guardianship, given how Bunty is worst affected by his parents’ decision
to part ways. Bunty experiences a sense of loneliness, which soon turns into
unproductiveness. For instance, he is intrigued by the family planning logo and
its message, which are impressed outside Dr. Joshi’s clinic, “Listen to doctor’s
advice – have two, maximum three children, not more than that” ( Bhandari
2012, 143). Bhandari reveals how this state- sponsored norm of the small family
could indirectly affect children like Bunty, whose trauma is inextricably linked
with their parents’ decision to break the dynamics of familial love and solidarity.
Bereft of his parents’ love, Bunty feels like that ‘unnecessary, third’ child who
has no legitimate place within the Hum do Hamare do family norm (the norm of
the small family). Thus, Bunty fails to fit into the altered dynamics of his parents’
new domesticities. While his mother has become the mother of Dr. Joshi’s chil-
dren, his father has had a baby from his second marriage to Mira. Eventually, he
 Negotiating structural inequalities 115

is excluded from their respective lives. Here, Bhandari uses the public/political
events of the nation-state to talk about the personal trauma suffered by the child.
In doing so, she takes a dig at the state’s family planning initiative – Hum do
Humare do, which takes away the fundamental right of the child, that is, to live,
not merely within the sanitised limits of the Malthusian objectives of the state
but also to live a happy, fulfilled life, accompanied with parental affections.19
Thus, ‘home,’ like the nation, becomes a site that facilitates and naturalises the
asymmetry of power relations between men and women, women and women,
and between adults and children. This is further illustrated by Shakun’s relation-
ship with Phupi, the domestic help. The latter is an old woman, who handles all
the domestic work in Shakun’s home.20 Phupi is represented as any other family
member and her negotiations with Shakun, her personal life (even her decision
to get divorce), and Bunty reveal her efforts to ensure that the class consciousness
between them is neatly effaced and substituted by her experience and old age.
Phupi, being an old woman, represents the cultural inheritance of the social
and familial institutions. Bhandari subtly captures the extant structures of atti-
tude and references, which neither legitimise women’s individuality nor their
ability to decide for themselves. This is further aligned with a tacit understand-
ing about how the institutional and ideological structures of gender relations
are inf lected by what Mary John (1998) has termed, “unequal patriarchies and
disparate genders” (12):21

PHUPI: You suffered on account of what sahib did to you. Now, this child will
suffer on account of what you are doing to him.
SHAKUN: Phupi! I respect you more than I respect my mother. But I never even let my
mother intrude into what I wanted to do with my life.
(Bhandari 2012, 120 emphasis added)

Thus, relations between women are not always defined by commonality of

their oppression. Some women actively participate in determining gender rela-
tions, which foregrounds the deep ideological grounding of patriarchy. How-
ever, even as women like Phupi could actively participate in endorsing these
structures, their actual engagement with the nation remains peripheral. Their
lower caste/class status and marginalised position in society disables them from
negotiating their status and rights as workers and citizens, respectively. What
is even worse is that Phupi, though seemingly aware of her deprivations as
domestic help, is in no position to improve her status. Often, these depriva-
tions are either not addressed or are conveniently erased in the guise of con-
cocted relationship(s). Thus it is not surprising that we do not know Phupi’s
real name. Beneath the veneer of familial affection and loyalty, she is perceived
by Shakun as a mere servant, whose task is to look after Bunty and the house
in her (Shakun’s) absence. Phupi’s transgression beyond these prescribed roles
is not to be tolerated. The previous interface between the two women exposes
Phupi’s vulnerable position vis-à-vis Shakun, reducing the former with no
116 Negotiating structural inequalities

option but to leave her job and go to Haridwar, a place known to offer refuge
to homeless. Thus, it is imperative to arrive at an informed thesis of power and
inequality (not always between men and women) among women as well, not
only in terms of class difference but a variety of parameters like age, religion,
caste, rural, urban, level of education and/or its absence, status – married,
abandoned, divorced/widowed, and so on.

Vulnerable womanhood: the stigma of being a widow

This section takes up Indira Goswami’s Shadow of Dark God to explore widow-
hood as one of the most stigmatised aspects of women’s deprivation, focussing
on how the gendered modes of power structure render such women all the more
vulnerable. In the preface to the novel, Goswami(1986)makes a perceptive state-
ment about the warped structure of the homogenised nation-state that conspires
to marginalise and exclude certain sections of society out of its rubric, “I have
tried to show how the mental and physical state of a young widow takes a differ-
ent shape and how this change affects her life after her widowhood.”
However, it is pertinent to analyse the author’s illustration of widowhood in a
certain context, “When I stayed at Vrindaban in Uttar Pradesh, I saw the naked
side of this place, one of the holiest in India,” (Goswami 1986), especially when
we know that widowhood is allied with specific connotations, contingent on the
caste and class affiliations of women. Dalit writer Bama Faustina’s (2005) state-
ment is significant in this regard,

We don’t even use the word ‘widow.’ We are all the same, and live alike. . . .
We say there is nothing wrong [in women marrying again after their husbands
die]. It’s the upper castes who find it ugly.
(113)

In fact, women’s right to their bodies is extrinsic to the discursive social realm
of the upper caste/class context, which is focussed on men and masculinities.
Goswami works against this trajectory in Shadow of Dark God.

Institutionalised marginality, spatial erasure, and the

realms of embodied experiences of widows
In the late 19thcentury, as the nationalist patriarchy reformed itself, redefining
the site of ‘home’ in the process, it could only think of women either as moth-
ers and companionate wives. Widows, unfortunately, did not have any claim to
the recast patriarchal relations in the absence of their benefactor husband. Thus,
they were deemed unfit and ceased to exist within the reproductive schema of
upper caste Hindu families and, by extension, society. They were pushed into, as
termed by Uma Chakravarti (1995), the realm of “social death” (2248). In fact,
 Negotiating structural inequalities 117

“deporting them to a distant land was a convenient strategy to get rid of them.
And a pilgrim place served as the right choice” (Ghosh 2000, 1151).
Thus, Saudamini, the only daughter of Mr. Raichoudhury and his wife Anu-
pama, is also brought to Vrindavan when her husband dies soon after mar-
riage. Her parents hope that it would be “a welcome change in their daughter’s
attitude to life, and give her the strength to bear its ordeals” (Goswami 1986,
1–2). It is not as if Saudamini does not have other alternatives. She belongs to
the upper caste, is educated, and holds a graduate degree. She could have eas-
ily found a job and sustained herself. However, the status of a widow makes
things difficult for her and restricts her choices. Goswami ref lects how, in the
absence of any viable social existence outside marriage, widows are reduced to
“institutionalised marginality, a liminal state between being physically alive
and being socially dead”22 (Chakravarti 1995, 2248). Once the husband dies,
his wife becomes redundant to the reproductive logic of the Brahminical patri-
archy and has to face severe social, cultural, and economic deprivations, seeking
refuge in widow ashrams.
A widow’s desire has to be censured as the social death is inextricably linked to
sexual death within the logic of upper caste relations. Thus, the widow ceases to
be a person, a social entity and has no right to express herself. As Uma Chakravarti
(1995) states, “the stringiest control of female sexuality among non-labouring
castes, with permanent enforced widowhood at the apex of the cultural codes
becomes the index for establishing the highest rank in the caste system” (2249).
Alternatively, the narrative of Shadow of Dark God portrays widows as individu-
als, who have a right to express their bodily desires and sexuality without any
sense of guilt. In so doing, Goswami problematises the passive status assigned to
widows as either the subject or object of social reform.
Saudamini is represented as a young woman, completely in love with her
life. The fact that she transfers her emotions to a Christian man sensitises us
to her intense desire to defy the traditional injunctions imposed on a widow.
As she asserts, “I am not going to live all my life upon other people’s pity and
charity. . . . I declare myself free, unfettered. . . . I fear nobody. If you think
that I’ve changed, you’re mistaken” (Goswami 1986, 57). Here, Goswami
upturns the logic of pativrata (a woman who is deeply loyal to her husband) and
sumangali (a woman whose husband is alive) as Saudamini not only asserts her
desire to live but also expresses her unfulfilled sexual desires after her husband
Subrata’s death. Though she is required to restrict herself to a dark hovel in the
narrow lanes of Gopinath bazar, she refuses to submit herself to the “constant
surveillance of the patriarchal gaze” (Chakravarti 1995, 2248). Her gesture of
opening the window and locating a source of fresh air is the first step to defy
the injunction. She also roams around Braja, openly defying the proscriptions
of the elderly sadhus. Her insistence on meeting the radheshyami widows,
“every speck of dust of this sacred place is dear to me, and interests me. Let
me go and see” (Goswami 1986 , 15), can be linked to the authorial aim of
118 Negotiating structural inequalities

exposing the notions of family honour, which is inscribed into the gender and
caste codes.
Nevertheless, Saudamini’s unfortunate encounter with old radheshyamis,
who assault her, has violent undertones,

More widows came out of their hovels and began to feel the soft touch of
Saudamini’s body. Then they started pulling her limbs in great excitement
as if to dismember them. Her braided hair got loose and dishevelled, her
blouse was torn.
(Goswami 1986, 17)

The incident deeply ref lects the deprivation of widows and taking away of their
personhood in the event of widowhood. They have ceased to exist as women
and are reduced to being a source of, what Chakravarti calls “real moral panic”
(1995, 2249) for society. In fact, one could suggest that the source of violence
does not lie in them but in the community which formulates distinct cultural
codes to foreground an ideological and material arrangement of societal hierar-
chies. Thus, within the dominant schema widows are reduced to sites, ref lect-
ing the most repugnant and despicable core of the Brahminical patriarchy. The
fear and hatred of society is then conveniently transposed onto the vulner-
able widows, who are victims of dreadful diseases and confined to inaccessible
dark hovels.
However, Saudamini refuses to become a site of such dreadful power rela-
tions. She tells an agitated Sashiprabha what she wants from her life, “Follow the
truth, and annihilate yourself in the pursuit. And do not complain. This is the
story of my life – the story of utmost truth” (Goswami 1986, 50). The process
to arrive at the truth of her existence (as a woman and not as a widow) is ridden
with many difficulties. Malashri Lal (n.d.) suggests in an essay that Saudamini
“agitatedly probes and digs as deep as possible into the meaning of widowhood”
for a woman and finally rejects the social constructions associated with it.
In fact, Saudamini asserts her desires openly, “Believe me, I’m still very much
a woman of f lesh and blood, still greyed by mundane passions and desires. And
I don’t foresee any change of attitude even afterwards” (Goswami 1986, 83). It
is not something to be ashamed of or forcibly repressed as per the dictates of the
Manusmriti.23 For Saudamini, love and longing are natural expressions and are no
different from the “peculiar sensation in her heart and veins” (Goswami 1986,
19) that she experiences when she gazes at the idol of Krishna.
Significantly, Goswami does not suggest a convenient transposition of desire
onto the divine so as to sanitise it within the scriptural authority. What she sug-
gests is the impossibility of social obliteration and sexual death imposed on a
widow otherwise. The author attempts to circumvent what Lal further describes
as the “social attitudes and the inner consciousness of a woman who has been
brought up to believe that widowhood is somehow her fault or her destiny and
that she should undertake penance.” Moreover, there is no such emotion that
 Negotiating structural inequalities 119

becomes illegitimate when a woman loses her husband. In fact, Saudamini con-
stantly yearns for the solace that the Christian youth provides her with. This sol-
ace is no different from the solace felt by the old dancer of the Vraja, whose only
delight consists of dancing before Lord Ranganath in ecstatic abandon.
Similarly, the lower caste young widow (she works as a sweeper) whom Sau-
damini meets at artist Chandrabhan Rakesh’s place is well versed in dancing
the mudras. What does this signify? Is it only a representation of divine fervour
or something else? Though, the lower caste widow does not have a right to
enter the temple, she learns to dance herself. Herein lies the difference in the
status of a brahmin widow and a lower caste widow. Unlike the former, she is
not forced to adorn the shroud of social death and asexuality. In fact, the young
sweeper further states, the day her husband died, “she won the Lord of Vraja for
her master. . . . I am now possessed by the Lord of Gokula exactly as I was pos-
sessed by my husband” (Goswami 1986, 88–89). Her assertion offers a glimpse
into her state of exploitation. This love of the divine, expressed frantically in
dance, is possibly a manifestation of years of hard work and practice in order to
dance the mudras. Surely, the practice was specifically meant to earn a living
and in certain instances, conjoined to handling familial finances also. Thus in
the lower caste context, widowhood does not amount to social death. Lower
caste/class women are already incorporated within the socio-economic order
of the community, unlike upper caste widows who are placed along the axis of
reproduction. Thus, Goswami portrays the structural differences in the status
of widows, suggesting how the deprivations of widowhood are contingent on
societal constructions.24
Moreover, it is pertinent to analyse the way widows and destitute women
negotiate the structural inequalities in the post-independence context. Sau-
damini’s much awaited intimate union with the Christian man that precedes
her suicide also problematises the bourgeois dynamics of the 1970s and 1980s,
which sought to legitimise “an upper caste Hindu, masculinist centrality, aimed
at edging all other identities (women, poor, lower caste and minorities) to the
margins”25 ( Tharu and Lalita 1993, 77). A widow’s desire interrogates precisely
all of this as she asserts her claims to become the modern citizen subject, capable
of developing what Mytheli Sreenivas (2009) calls “an interiority that is rooted
in sexuality and expression of natural feelings” (116). However, this desire need
not necessarily culminate in remarriage as it would undercut their agency and
contain their self in the heterosexual, patrilineal, and privatised sentiments of
romance. The fact that Saudamini commits suicide, therefore, is a sad com-
ment on the resurgence of conservative, traditional forces that sought to under-
cut egalitarian currents that had “emerged from the women’s movement, from
peasant and working class struggles and from Dalit (and other lower caste) move-
ments” ( Tharu and Lalita 1993, 105).
Furthermore, Sashiprabha’s experiences are a case in point. They might
appear as more severe than that of Saudamini, but one realises that this poor,
lonely soul has been realistic enough to deal with the vagaries of life. Orphaned
120 Negotiating structural inequalities

at a young age, she had no option but to seek the security of an impotent priest
at Biharimohankunj. Many critics like Malashri Lal have termed it a “loveless
attachment” (n.d.). However, as the narrative unfolds, we realise that Saship-
rabha finds the arrangement somewhat useful. The priest offers her refuge
inside the temple without imposing much claim on her. Despite the miserable
life she leads, harbouring unrequited love for the young swami of Lord Vrin-
davannath temple and seeking comfort in Mrinalini and Saudamini’s company,
what is significant to realise is the way Sashiprabha negotiates the choices avail-
able to her.
Unfortunately, Sashiprabha is forced to abdicate her claim on Alamgadhi’s
money that he bequeaths to her. Her precarious status as a widow and kept
woman disables her from claiming a rightful share in his inheritance. As Alamga-
dhi’s sister proclaims after his death, “you know that my brother kept a girl to
look after him. Now ye be judge if she could have any claim to inherit his prop-
erty” (Goswami 1986, 99). Thus, even though Sashi shared a kind of domestic
intimacy with Alamgadhi, it was never recognised as the latter was impotent.
Moreover, she could never claim a wifely status as she was simply taken under
Alamgadhi’s protection and was never ritually married to him.
However, Goswami proposes a new theorisation of domesticity through the
Sashi-Alamgadhi relationship, “But the priest has done me no harm. There are
quite a few like me in Vraja who, ‘united in prayer’ as they say, live their woe-
ful existence” (Goswami 1986, 47). In so doing, she opposes the juridico-legal
structure of contemporary nation, which could only define Sashi as Alamgadhi’s
concubine. For instance, Mrinalini tells Sashi:

Irrespective of whether he helped you or harmed you, Alamgadhi was

giving you a kind of protection even from a distance. Now . . . the human
wolves of Vraja smelling about for young widows and harlots will think
they can give themselves a free hand with you.
(Goswami 1986, 108)

Sashiprabha’s relationship with Alamgadhi is not based on reproductive sexual-

ity and contingent organisation of power that characterise the institutions of
marriage and family. Her affection towards Mrinalini, Saudamini further opens
up possibilities of exploring lateral relationships, which are outside the dom-
inant framework of heteronormativity. Judith Butler (2002) rightly describes
such relationships as political non places that have a strong potential to critique
the normalising powers of the state, which seek their legitimacy by upholding
patriarchal and patrilineal cultures. Thus, it is important to recognise alterna-
tive modes of identifying emotional relationships that may rest on lived experi-
ence and individual subjectivities so pertinent to “constructing new modes of
politics and identity in post-independence India” (Sreenivas 2009, 128). It would
surely contest the banal conceptions of heteronormative, patrilineal, and virilo-
cal familial/national arrangements.
 Negotiating structural inequalities 121

Patriarchal structures and property rights of widows

and daughters
An analysis of gender, caste, and economy undertaken by critic Pauline Kolenda
foregrounds that “widowhood as well as the status of women in the high castes
is related, among other things, to control over property inherited by men, which
may foster the degradation of women to exclude them from a share in inheri-
tance” (as quoted in Chakravarti 1995, 2254). Though widows are full owners of
the share in their husband’s property under Section 14 of the Hindu Succession
Act (1956) and there is no provision that “on re-marriage, a widow is divested
of the estate inherited from her husband” ( Law Commission of India 1979, 4),

section 24 of the Act disqualifies the widow of a predeceased son or widow

of a predeceased son of a predeceased son or the widow of a brother, from
succeeding to the property of an intestate, if on the date the succession
opens, she has remarried.
(Law Commission of India 1979, 5)

More to the point, Bina Agarwal (1998) further highlights how customary prac-
tices play a significant role in determining the right of widows to inheritance,

In a rural Hindu household the extent and nature of rights that a widow
enjoys in her husband’s land are usually contingent in practice on a variety
of factors, such as whether or not she remains single and chaste; whether she
has sons, and her sons (if any) are minors or adults; whether the deceased
husband has partitioned from the family estate before his death; and so on.
(21)

Thus, despite legal measures in place, many women do not gain access to prop-
erty as individuals; rather, their ‘rights’ are subjected to the reproductive econ-
omy of the Hindu joint family and its allied cultural and material practices. 26
For instance, Saudamini’s marginalisation vis-à-vis property inheritance is
conspired on account of both her widowhood and childlessness (read sonless).
The fact that she returns to her natal home (and is brought to Vrindavan by her
parents) is a sufficient indicator to traumatic negotiations she might have had
to retain her place in the affinal home. It is likely that in the absence of an heir,
the affinal family would have rejected Saudamini’s claims to own her share in
either the joint property or the property of her dead husband. Here, Goswami
tacitly captures the contemporary trends leading to deprivation among Indian
widows. For example, in 1991–92, Marty Chen and Jean Dreze (1995) con-
ducted a survey of 562 widowed women in 14 villages, 27 highlighting that only
3 per cent of women continued to share a common hearth with their parents-
in-law after their husband’s death. As per the inheritance practices, though
there were widows (51 per cent) who were granted the right over a share of
122 Negotiating structural inequalities

their husband’s land in the form of usufruct, they were exploited and forced by
brothers-in-law to abandon their rightful share of the land (Chen and Dreze
1995, 2439). 28
More to the point, the Hindu Succession Act requires that the widow needs
to be chaste in order to inherit her deceased husband’s property. Saudamini’s
love interest, after her husband’s death, then, sullies the so-called sanctity of the
marital relationship. Thus, a widow’s assertion of her desire, rather than becom-
ing an agent of social change is (mis)construed as deviant sexual behaviour that
ought to be penalised. Thus, the post-independence dynamics of conjugality
did not alter the hierarchical gendered contexts, thereby naturalising women’s
legal inequality in the face of Constitutional promises of equality. The impact
of legal inequality on women is specifically evident as per the Census of 1971,
which records around 8 million widowers as against 23 million widows. The
main reason for this gender gap in the incidence of widowhood is a much higher
rate of remarriage among widowers as compared to widows. Moreover, among
the widows interviewed by Chen and Dreze for the survey as well as among
those who participated in the Bangalore workshop, 29 many stated that they
did not wish to remarry. The most common reasons listed for not wanting to
remarry included “absence of desire for more children, fear that a second hus-
band will not take good care of the children fathered by the first husband, and
wish to retain claim on the deceased husband’s land” (Chen and Dreze 1995,
2442), bearing in mind that actual inheritance practices discriminate against
widows who wish to remarry.30
Alternatively, the law discriminates against a daughter also from inheriting
her father’s property. Saudamini has nothing to bank upon when she gets back to
the natal home. Bina Agarwal (1998) discusses the widowed daughter’s vulner-
able situation, suggesting that the importance of having sons to establish their
claims in the husband’s property often leaves those with only daughters few
alternatives. Many among them end up returning to their natal homes. Since
they are denied their rightful share in the property, they often return to a situa-
tion of dependency. The fact that widowed daughters, “especially in north India,
are rarely welcome for extended or permanent stays” adds to these women’s vul-
nerability (Agarwal 1998, 36).
What is particularly disturbing in the case of Shadow of Dark God is that despite
the fact that Saudamini belongs to an aff luent parental/marital context, she is
rendered financially vulnerable. This is evident when she goes to the temple
office looking for a suitable job and is refused by the manager. “We don’t engage
a young woman for those jobs” (Goswami 1986, 59). In fact, she is advised to
stick to her father’s hospital and work as an attendant. It is interesting to observe
that at a time when educated women’s participation in the academic and medi-
cal sectors was increasing (they offered lucrative career options to women in the
organised government sector31) she refuses to work as a teacher in a girls’ college
or nurse the patients in her father’s hospital. “No, she was fed up with her new
vocation. She grew restless” (Goswami 1986, 56).
 Negotiating structural inequalities 123

Saudamini’s acceptance of either of these professions could have entailed a

return from social marginalisation to normal communal participation, thereby
equipping her to confront the social disfavour. However, the fact, that both teach-
ing and health sector are also vocations that demand self less service32 becomes
specifically problematic within the purview of Goswami’s text. Readers are given
an impression that Saudamini is adamant about rejecting the construction of the
widow stereotype. She rather wants to be treated as a woman and an individual.
Similarly, the unmarried daughter could also suffer on account of the biased
inheritance laws. Mrinalini is a case in point. Her father had squandered whatever
little he had in his youth and finally sells the Biharimohankunj haveli, reducing his
daughter and deranged wife to a state of penury. Since women could not be copar-
ceners in the Mitakshara joint family system,33 it is exclusively under the purview
of Mrinalini’s father, as an inheritor-coparcener of his father’s property, to use it as
he deems fit. Under the financial constraints, he is left with no option but to sell
the property to the temple trust. Mrinalini is shorn of her rightful share in inheri-
tance and doomed to suffer all her life, carrying the burden of her parents, sup-
pressing all her desires and ambitions. Thus, women are systemically oppressed by
the patriarchal ideology institutionalised by the class, caste, community differences
on the one hand and also age, educational levels, socio-economic independence,
marital status, and equity and citizenship rights on the other. Moreover, women
are not necessarily able to break themselves away from ties of family or matrimony
and, even if they do so, it is a grave task negotiating their personal aspiration with
the contemporary socio-political and cultural framework.
Mrinalini’s problem is an acute one, wherein she is saddled with responsibili-
ties without any sense of acknowledgement. In fact, women within marriage or
those who remain single are ideologically trained and expected to be eternally
dutiful to the patriarchal structures. Abha Bhaiya rightly suggests,

All single women face common problems, including not being recognised
as heads of their own households, being seen as available for domestic
labour in the household in which they live and having no social or cultural
occasions on which to come together.
(as quoted in Chen and Dreze 1995, 2448)

Thus, the author exposes the leverage granted to the upper caste patriarchy by
the state policy on inheritance rights, resulting in a systematic curtailing of wom-
en’s independent access to economic resources.

Towards equality: the unfinished agenda34

The authorial intention to reforge the extant gendered habitus has acquired a
renewed significance in contemporary times, wherein a large number of widows
and destitute women suffer throes of poverty and deprivation. It has also high-
lighted the urgency to locate the conservative cultural discourse on widowhood
124 Negotiating structural inequalities

at the intersections of gender, class/caste and religious identities. In this light, the
exploitation faced by poor radheshyamis in Vrindavan due to absence of suitable
structural measures cannot be disassociated from the way dominant religious
ideology functions in society at large, leading to women’s impoverishment. As
Goswami asserts,

For sing they [radheshyamis] must, even though they were perishing with
hunger. . . . Saudamini observed that the attention of the singers . . . was
now and then furtively directed towards the shanties of the green grocers,
who kept aside stale and rotten vegetables for radheshyamis.
(1986, 18)

This can be further understood in the light of Uma Chakravarti’s (1993) thesis
on how religious prescriptions and cultural norms about widowhood (in upper
caste Hindu society) enhance the power of families, communities, and nations to
“make minimum allocations to the widow” (Chakravarti 1993, 132),

The low entitlement of the widow is not merely culturally sanctioned

but also sanctified in spiritual terms since the widow is meant to fast
often, pursue the ascetic model and devote herself to the memory of
her dead husband. Notions of self-sacrifice and self-restraint . . . play a
crucial role in formulating an ideology of low or minimal entitlement
to the widow.
(Chakravarti 1993, 133)

More to the point, Goswami illustrates the repressive role played by religion
in endorsing the nexus of patriarchal and patrilineal familial arrangements that
relegate widows to institutions acting as “surface of absorption” ( Das 1995, 57).
As the Towards Equality report mentions, “Many of these widows had been sent
by their families. They had no one who would take care of them or nurse them
whenever they fell sick or otherwise” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012 , 59). In fact, it
would also entail that a majority of women who stayed in the ashram did not
inherit anything from either their natal or affinal families. The report further
states, “Allowances from the family were either negligible or non-existent. Some
joined ‘bhajan mandalis’ and earned about 37 paise in an evening and even that
was not a regular income” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012, 59).35
The widows’ misery is aggravated in the absence of sufficient resources
deployed for them by the state. For instance, there is little provision to provide
widows with social security in the form of adequate pension.36 The Towards
Equality report clearly mentions how only 10 per cent of the recommended cases
ever received pensions from the government authorities. Unfortunately, those
who did receive some money lacked control over it as the passbooks and accounts
were majorly managed by the ashrams where they resided, thereby heightening
possibilities of exploitation.
 Negotiating structural inequalities 125

Along with social ostracism, widows are subjected to physical violence and
emotional trauma. In the novel, Charanbehari recalls how he, in his youth, kept
frequent company with goons and swindlers, who would assault vulnerable
young widows like butchers slaughtering their animals. Saudamini is horrified
to realise that the destitute radheshyamis are not accorded dignity even in their
death. Their dead bodies are mutilated, ravaged just to snatch away even the last
penny saved by the radheshyamis for their final rites.37 All this clearly denotes
lack of sufficient security measures arranged for widows living in the Vrindavan
ashram. The severing of familial ties, uprooting of a familiar cultural context,
combined with restrictions on food habits, place of residence, lack of employ-
ment opportunities, and ill health impels them to lead alienated lives and die
degraded deaths.38
In fact, it is disturbing to realise that as many as 51.8 per cent of widows have
complained about adverse health conditions after the demise of their husband.39
A study of morbidity trends in widows has also revealed how they get used to
suffering minor ailments as a consequence of the “socio-psychological context
of denial and deprivation” ( Ranjan 2001, 4094). Moreover, “it is frightening to
realise that widow mortality rates are 85 per cent higher compared to married
women in the same age group – confirming that widows in India experience
particularly high rates of deprivation” ( Banerji 1998, 41). Goswami particularly
focusses on diseased radheshyamis suffering from leprosy to bring home this
argument. Thus, the state administration has failed in reaching out to one of the
most destitute sections of society. The ill health of widows signifies a certain
sense of familial, social, and administrative apathy towards them, revealing a
hideous alliance among the three. No doubt, it has not only affected their basic
survival rights but also the widows’ access to the various welfare schemes devised
to this effect.
*********************
By foregrounding issues concerning women’s desertion and widowhood, the
previously discussed women writers draw attention to the inherent contradic-
tions that exist between the ideas of equal citizenship offered by the modern
nation-state and the ossified social practices of patriarchal control and possession
of women as properties. Herein lies the significance of reading literary works
alongside socio-political contexts and legal procedures. Literature often plays
nonconformist roles by constantly rethinking and rejecting the traditional ste-
reotypes ascribed to men and women. This plays a vital role in the process of
social transformation as, in Mridula Garg’s (1992) words, “slowly, even imper-
ceptibly, it helps people to assimilate the greater awareness of the possibility of
change and come to terms with a change in the image they have of themselves
and their relationships with others” (96). These literary representations liber-
ate women from their stereotypical roles such as mother, wife, provider, and
beloved, highlighting them as women and individuals in their own right. It
further emphasises how literature is not simply a cultural artefact but plays a
126 Negotiating structural inequalities

significant role in altering the extant social structures. Garg (2007) rightly sug-
gests in one of her essays, “The real war is not between the sexes or genders but
between an oppressive value system and the forces demanding equality of oppor-
tunity” (359). Once this fact is acknowledged, it is easier to discern that women’s
issues are not divorced from larger social and political issues.

Notes
1 Justice Verma Committee was constituted on 23 December 2012. It was comprised of
retired Justice J.S. Verma, retired Justice Leila Seth, and Solicitor General Gopal Subra-
manian. The Committee suggested possible amendments in the criminal laws related to
sexual violence against women.
2 Women would still give away their rightful share in the property in favour of their broth-
ers. Srimati Basu states that “women’s decisions to give up their property rights implied
that they were locked in a patriarchal system where they ‘maximised their short-term
priorities at the cost of undermining their long-term material interests, and feelings of
love and loyalty toward parents and the natal family were enacted in ways that bolstered
male privilege’” (as quoted in Majumdar 2003, 2130).
3 Seemanthini Niranjana has termed the process of constructing female sexuality within
the hierarchical grids of gender roles as a ‘matrix of sexualisation’ in her essay “Bodily
Matrices” in Mala Khullar, ed. 2005. Writing the Women’s Movement: A Reader. New
Delhi: Zubaan.
4 Translated by author. Garg, Mridula. 2013. Chittacobra. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan.
5 As noted by the Towards Equality report in its analysis of the Hindu Marriage Act 1955,
“the various grounds on which a husband or a wife can obtain divorce are (a) living
in adultery (b) conversion to other religion (c) insanity (d) incurable form of leprosy
(e) venereal disease (f) renunciation, (g) where the respondent has not been heard of as
being alive for a period of seven years or more . . . (h) failure to resume cohabitation
for a period of two years after the decree of judicial separation” (Sharma and Sujaya
2012, 89).
6 On 30 April 2015, the then Minister of State for Home, Haribhai Parathibhai Chaudhary
said in response to a written question by DMK’s K Kanimozhi in Rajya Sabha that the
concept of marital rape does not apply in India. Press Trust of India reports Chaudhary’s
comments in this regard: “It is considered that the concept of marital rape, as understood
internationally, cannot be suitably applied in the Indian context due to various factors,
including level of education, illiteracy, poverty, myriad social customs and values, reli-
gious beliefs, mindset of society to treat marriage as a sacrament.” See for details – Press
Trust of India. “Marriage Sacred In India, So Marital Rape Does Not Apply: Gov-
ernment.” NDTV.com. Accessed 17 August 2015. https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/
marriage-sacred-in-india-so-marital-rape-does-not-apply-government-759219.
7 Virilocality is constructed as the norm, which necessitates women’s migration from one
family to another and demands utmost sexual purity, accountability, and loyalty from
women. “Constructed ‘feminine’ virtues are used to mask the politics of marital rela-
tionships, which are discriminatory and hierarchical” (Dhawan 2011, 159).
8 For instance, in the late 1970s and 1980s, most of the campaigns initiated by the Indian
women’s movement dwelt on issues of domestic violence, dowry, rape, sexual assault,
sex determination, female infanticide, so on and so forth, calling for suitable amend-
ments in laws against such violence. Their weakness was evident in the way they sought
solutions for such violence within the existing patriarchal framework, reducing wom-
en’s sexuality as an adjunct to major discussions on violence against women. It was
rarely acknowledged that sexuality is integrally related to women’s expression of their
self and identity.
9 Mridula Garg’s Chittacobra was banned in 1980 under charges of obscenity (Section 292
of the IPC). The novel was especially under the moral scanner of conservative section
 Negotiating structural inequalities 127

of the intelligentsia and writers as it was one of the foremost creative works, written by
a woman writer to talk about women’s sexuality in a frank and honest manner. Police
attempted to arrest her one Friday evening from her house. She was later granted bail.
10 “According to the Census of 1971, the total number of divorced or separated women
in the country is estimated to be 8,70,700; of which 7,43,200 are in the rural areas and
1,27,500 in urban areas” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012, 88).
11 According to Amit Anand Choudhary’s report in The Times of India (3 December 2015),
the Supreme Court has recently declined divorce by mutual consent to a couple who
decided to part ways because the wife had breast cancer. The court stated that the hus-
band is duty-bound to take care of his wife during difficult times. However, the court
also ruled that this moral duty of the husband towards the wife emerges from the fact
that marriage is a sacred institution. Choudhary relates, “To a Hindu wife her husband
is her God and her life becomes one of selfless service and profound dedication to her
husband. . . . Hindu marriage is a sacred and holy union of the husband and wife by
virtue of which the wife is completely transplanted in the household of her husband and
takes a new birth.” Thus, the institutions of the nation have not been able to deal with
the deeper disparities in gender relations, thereby displaying a paternalistic attitude.
12 Translated by author. Bhandari, Mannu. 2012. Aapka Bunty. New Delhi: Radhakrishna
Publications.
13 Nirmala Banerjee (1998) states in an essay that the official policies in independent India
showed no interest in women as workers. “Instead the first plan resolved to provide
women with adequate services necessary to fulfil what was called ‘a woman’s legitimate
role within the family’” (WS-4).
14 After Independence, Nehru, in capacity of the first PM of the country went to address a
girls’ college in New Delhi in 1950 and said in his speech, “Women are chiefly respon-
sible for running the home and should know how to do this in an orderly and aesthetic
way. Women’s education was important for making better homes, better family and bet-
ter society” (as quoted in Banerjee 1998, WS-6).
15 This provision has been abolished in a landmark judgement delivered by the Supreme
Court of India in September 2018. A five-judge Constitution bench upheld gender
justice, declaring that “Adultery cannot and should not be a crime. . . . It’s time to say
that husband is not the master of the woman” (NDTV 27 September 2018). www.ndtv.
com/india-news/adultery-law-is-arbitrary-says-chief-justice-dents-the-individuality-
of-women-1922922 (last accessed on 20 January 2019).
16 Women are often denied alimonies on grounds that they failed to be ‘good wives’ (read
loyal and self-sacrificing) and mothers. Section 10 of the Indian Divorce Act, 1869, pro-
vides that a husband may petition for divorce on the basis of his wife’s adultery alone, but
that a wife may only petition for divorce on the basis of her husband’s adultery coupled
with desertion, cruelty, rape, incest, or bigamy. The judicial interpretation of this law
reeks of its patriarchal bias and moral regulation of women’s sexuality (Kapur and Cross-
man 1996, 187).
17 Judith Butler (1990) highlights the performative aspect of gender thus: “The substantive
effect of gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of
gender coherence” (33).
18 The Towards Equality report also mentions this based on a survey conducted by the
Committee: “In the middle classes, distinction between femininity and masculinity gets
crystallized for the children in the pattern of domestic responsibilities, distribution of
financial resources and planning for the future. Domestic work is the domain of women
and in very few families, are boys asked to share it” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012, 64).
19 Nira Yuval-Davis (1997) offers a critique of the Malthusian discourse, which has not
just been an “ideological discourse but has become a cornerstone of population poli-
cies in many Third World countries themselves, as a major strategy to try and solve
those countries’ economic and social problems. There is a fear of destabilization of
the economic and political system if the balance between the supply and demand for
labour power is seriously threatened as a result of ‘uncontrollable’ growth in the popu-
lation” (33).
128 Negotiating structural inequalities

20 According to the Towards Equality report, “Amongst the well-to-do also, the spheres
of men and women are well-defined and separate. With domestic help, the burden of
drudgery does not fall on the woman, but she is still expected to run the home and bring
up the children” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012, 63). The report, surprisingly, does not take
up any detailed analysis of the conditions of women who work as domestic help in the
unorganised private sector of the economy.
21 Mary John (1998) proposes the idea of unequal patriarchies and disparate genders, sug-
gesting how gender asymmetry is inflected by caste, class, and religion.
22 In fact, as research reveals, “widows had little choice. They were easy victims and a social
eyesore – adultery, illicit relationships, increase in prostitution, abortion deaths were
often associated with young widows. . . . Thus, they were sent to places of pilgrimage
in Varanasi, Vrindavan, Mathura and Navadwip to live on small monthly allowances”
(Ghosh 2000, 1151).
23 Manusmriti advocated for perpetual and celibate widowhood,
Let her emaciate her body by living on pure f lowers roots and fruits: but she
must never even mention the name of another man after her husband has died.
Until her death let her be patient of hardships, self-controlled and chaste and
strive to fulfil that most excellent duty which is prescribed for wives who have
only one husband.
(as quoted in Chakravarti 1995, 2251)
24 It systematically trains women into believing that it’s somehow their fault and they
must punish themselves for having lost their husband. Uma Chakravarti (1995) states,
“The fate that befalls a widow is believed to be deserved. Expected to pray daily that
she should predecease her husband, a woman if widowed is considered to be at fault.
‘It ate up its husband’ is what people would say. A symbol of inauspiciousness, she can
no longer participate in the domestic ceremonies that form a part of women’s culture”
(2254).
25 The 1980s witnessed a rise of the extreme right that led to curbing the rights of women and
other minorities. Caste and communal identities were reinforced in the name of upholding
tradition. For example, the head priest of Hindu temples at Benaras and Puri issued state-
ments that Sati was one of the noblest elements of Hinduism (Kumar 1993, 174). Thus,
religious fundamentalists not only rationalised oppression of women but also mobilised oth-
ers in support of the oppression. The Marwari funded Rani Sati Organisation (mis)appro-
priated the feminist discourse to propagate a cult of widow immolation from 1982–83.
26 The contentious interpretations of the Widow Remarriage Act (1856) led to an
increase in the incidents of property retention. Prem Chowdhry (1989) explains this,
saying that the chadar chadana/kareva was practised among the Jat community to retain
the property within the family. Under the system of kareva, the brother-in-law/father-
in-law could marry the widow. Britishers endorsed such acts because Jats were among
the main communities of peasants who would deposit huge amounts of revenue. Inter-
estingly, widow remarriage was more or less allowed as per indigenous customs of such
communities.
27 The list of villages included two each in West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan,
Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala.
28 They would legitimise their stakes in the land under the Mitakshara coparcenary system
and/or by offering excuses like they spent money on the widow’s husband’s death cer-
emony or on her children’s maintenance (Chen and Dreze 1995, 2439).
29 The Widows in India conference was organised in Bangalore during March 1994.
30 As Marty Chen and Jean Dreze explain, “A comprehensive treatment of the inheritance
rights of widows would have to distinguish between statutory law, customary law, and
actual practice” (1995, 2439).
31 The Towards Equality report mentions that there were six lakh women teachers as indi-
cated by the Census of India, 1971. Nurses and midwives constituted to around 1.55
 Negotiating structural inequalities 129

lakh. Moreover, their ratio to men was the highest in this field, that is, 72.7 per cent.
Both these professions were accorded a high status in society and could elicit a greater
degree of public cooperation (Sharma and Sujaya 2012, 159).
32 One of the reasons why respectability is attached to women who are teachers, as the
TE report interestingly notes, “Middle class families prefer to see women in this pro-
fession more than any other. One of the reasons for this is perhaps, because it gives
women comparatively more time for her household duties, with more vacations and
limited hours of work” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012, 159). Alternatively, there are taboos
attached to nursing and it includes night work also, but the fact that it is considered a
noble profession, aimed at healing people, makes it not only acceptable but respectable
as well.
33 The amendment passed to the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, in 2005 has ensured that
daughters can also be coparceners and claim their right of inheritance in Hindu Undi-
vided Family’s (HUF) property. However, other women members like mothers and
daughters-in-law, who come into family by virtue of marriage, have no right to be
coparceners and cannot ask for the partition of HUF property.
34 I have borrowed this title from the sequel to the Towards Equality report, which was
published in 2001. It was authored by Sarala Gopalan.
35 According to Girija Vyas (2009–10), bhajan ashrams are a world unto themselves and
some say that they are simply an encouragement for more women to flock to the city
and for the management to convert their black money into white. The government
authorities have no control over the operation of these bhajan ashrams. However, the
government authorities have opened ration shops there as bhajan ashrams are key places
for reaching this (widows’) population. The women go to bhajan ashrams in shifts of
6–10 a.m., 10–3 p.m., 3–7 p.m. For each four hours shift they receive Rs. 3 at the
Bhagwan bhajan ashram and Rs. 3 plus 100 gm dal and rice at Balaji (Vyas 2010, 6).
Considering the fact that they received 37 paise in 1970s and 1980s, one can realise the
extreme levels of destitution faced by such women.
36 The amount of monthly pension received at present is Rs. 300. One could imagine how
much it would have been in the 1980s.
37 According to Aarti Dhar’s report in The Hindu on 8 January 2012, in a survey by the Dis-
trict Legal Services Authority (DLSA) on the “Plight of Forsaken/Forlorn Women – Old
and Widows Living in Vrindavan and Radius,” it was revealed how “the bodies of wid-
ows who died in government-run shelter homes in Vrindavan were being taken away by
sweepers at night, cut into pieces, put into jute bags and disposed off as the institutions do
not have any provision for a decent funeral. This, too, is done only after the inmates give
money to the sweeper!” It is horrifying to realise that the concerns about widows, raised
by Goswami in the novel, have not been sorted out till date and, in fact, have acquired
hideous proportions in reality.
38 After the news report, highlighting the miserable plight of Vrindavan widows,
was published in The Hindu, Justice Altamash Kabir, Executive Chairperson of the
National Legal Service Authority, asked the U.P. State Legal Services Authority
to survey the conditions of the women at Mathura, Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh.
Interestingly, the report Widows at Vrindavan published in 2009–10 focusses on the
same problems that were highlighted by the CSWI in 1974. Thus there has been no
major change in their deplorable circumstances. However, such an action, that is,
abandonment of the women by their families or children is now actionable under
Section 24 of the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act,
2007.
39 In addition to this, a study conducted by TN Kitchulu (1995) revealed that nearly 34.4 per
cent widows have been experiencing general weakness in their health. 12 per cent are
suffering from mental depression and 8.2 percent from mental tension. Many others
complained of frequent headaches, blood pressure, disturbed sleep, asthama, and heart
trouble, including fits (Ranjan 2001, 4091).
130 Negotiating structural inequalities

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4
ECONOMIC LIBERALISATION,
CULTURAL GHETTOISATION,
AND THEIR IMPACT ON THE
GENDERED CONTEXTS

The announcement of the new economic policy in 1991 pushed India into the
hitherto unchartered domains of liberalisation, globalisation and privatisation.
Many literary writings by Indian women published in the 1990s and 2000s
ref lect the rupture of Nehruvian model of development as India entered and
settled itself in the brave new world of globalisation. Reading Alka Saraogi’s
Kali-Katha: Via Bypass (1998) and Usha K. R.’s Monkey-Man (2010), this chapter
attempts to explore how women writers in the post-1991 era negotiate the cat-
egory of nation and its concomitant identity politics when it is impinged upon
by the looming spectre of liberalisation and globalisation.
The novels trace the kind of changes that have been taking place since the
onset of the 1990s. By so doing, they propose a rethinking of the very terms in
which the woman question has been framed in the post-independence years. In
fact, the woman question has been constitutive of numerous critical events and
frames of significations pertaining to the systemic hierarchies and grids of the
nation-state. When we place women’s writing at the interstices of gender, caste,
and class inequality alongside the syndicated structures of religion and globalisa-
tion, we find how deeply it engages with the fundamental asymmetry of power
relations in society. It is all the more significant to engage with them due to the
renewed strength that the cultural nationalism has recently gained, for it mani-
fests itself in the form of imposing cultural codes, among others, on the bodies
of women. This chapter calls for revising the way we have been constructing our
knowledge of the nation, especially its gendered contexts.

Authors and works in perspective: Alka Saraogi

and Usha K. R.
Alka Saraogi was born in 1960 in a Marwari family in Calcutta. She engages
with issues of migration, rootedness, displacement, history, and memory in her
134 Economic liberalisation

narratives. In fact, Saraogi’s novels sensitively portray the inequities and abuse
that the Marwari community has had to suffer in Kolkata due to being migrants/
settlers. In this regard, she also explores the larger processes that facilitate the
interlinking of an individual’s destiny with the destinies of society, community,
and the nation-state. Saraogi did her Ph.D. in Hindi literature on the works of
a renowned writer Raghuvir Sahay. Her first story, titled “Aap Ki Hasi” (“Your
Laughter” 1991), was published in Varataman Sahitya. Her first collection of short
stories titled Kahani ki Talash Mein (In Search of a Story) was published in 1996,
followed by her first novel Kali-Katha: Via Bypass in 1998. The novel was com-
mended as a strong postcolonial text by the academia and critics alike, bring-
ing her immense success and recognition as a woman writer. She received the
Shrikant Verma award in 1998 and the Sahitya Akademi award in 2001 for Kali-
Katha. Her other works include a collection of short stories called Doosri Kahani
(The Second Story 2000) and novels like Shesh Kadambari (Over to You, Kadamba ri
2001), Koi Baat Nahin (It Doesn’t Matter 2004), Ek Break ke Baad (Post-Break 2008),
Jankidas Tejpal Mansion ( Jankidas Tejpal Mansion 2015), and Ek Sacchi Jhoothi Gatha
(A True Tale With Lies 2018).
Saraogi’s novel Kali-Katha: Via Bypass straddles many generations to docu-
ment the Marwari history and its lineage in Calcutta. The protagonist Kishor
Babu experiences a significant change in his life and routine after he undergoes
a bypass surgery. While he insists on wandering through the by-lanes of Cal-
cutta post surgery, his family sniffs an air of madness in this habit. They fail to
understand why Kishor Babu, who was once a stern patriarch and clever busi-
nessman, has resorted to aimlessly roaming around the city. Alternatively, Kishor
Babu recollects his past and Marwari ancestry as he perambulates the city. In the
process, he evokes the portraits of his friends Amolak and Shantanu, who were
staunch supporters of Gandhian nationalism and Subhash Chandra Bose’s mili-
tant nationalism respectively. In so doing, he constantly judges the liberalised
present of the 1990s through the prism of colonial and nationalist past. Saraogi
paints an elaborate portrait of Marwaris across generations, trying to come to
terms with both their complicity in and resistance to the colonial networks of
exploitation.
Usha K. R. hails from Bangalore, Karnataka. Her fiction is woven around
the themes of history, economic development, liberalisation, globalisation, and
cityscapes. Her major works include Sojourn (1998), The Chosen (2003), A Girl
and A River (2007), and Monkey-Man (2010). She was awarded the Vodafone
Crossword Prize in 2007 for A Girl and A River. The novel Monkey-Man focusses
on the perennially transforming urban landscape of India, particularly Banga-
lore and how it affects the destinies of the common people. The novel revolves
around the lives, choices, and regrets of its characters like Shrinivas Moorty, a
senior professor who seeks comfort in the ideals of a welfare state, refusing to
change with the globalised times; Jairam, Shrinivas’ colleague, who has ‘pro-
gressed’ with the times and plans to ‘revolutionise’ the way higher education
has been imparted in his college and otherwise. There are women characters
like Neela, whose status as a permanent employee in a government institute
 Economic liberalisation 135

makes her conceited enough to misbehave with her subordinates, and Pushpa
who migrates to Bangalore from a nearby rural hinterland to support her poor
family. She eventually lands up in a call centre, rewriting her life story and its
assumed success. Though leading disparate lives in different locales of Bangalore,
these characters are brought together by destiny to confront the menacing truth
of contemporary times: monkey-man, “a creature of untamed instinct” ( Usha
2010, 251).

Nationalism to liberalisation: revisiting the past,

reclaiming the history
The authorial intentions problematise both the act of writing and narrating the
“deep nation” ( Bhabha 2006, 4), constructing an interruptive feminist perspec-
tive. They open up multiple conjunctures pertaining to the issues of tradition-
modernity, individual-society, and community-nation, deploying a feminist
praxis. This section explores the ways in which the protagonists in the two
selected novels revisit their pasts from the vantage point of their experiences in
the present, highlighting in the process the impact that government policies of
liberalisation in pursuit of economic prosperity have had on gender relations.

Puncturing the grand narrative of the nation-state

in Kali-Katha Via Bypass and Monkey-Man
The evolution of Kali-Katha: Via Bypass’ protagonist Kishor Babu paves the way
to discern the evolution of the nation, beginning with the varied facets of the
anti-colonial nationalist movement, that is, Gandhian nationalism, Subhash
Chandra Bose’s militant nationalism, the Right wing party Rashtriya Swayam-
sevak Sangh, and their respective contributions to the nation in the making. This
is followed by an exploration of the Nehruvian tryst with development until the
era of liberalisation and post-liberalisation. However, the story of the nation pri-
marily focusses on the nature of contemporary political-economic choices that
‘bypass’ the concerns of gender vis-à-vis the state apparatus. Saraogi’s narrative
exercise can be described as an effort in the direction of what Mary John (1996)
calls “rescuing the notion of gender from its ritualistic incantations and making
it really work for a more emancipatory and inclusive social order” (3071).
Young Kishor’s mother aptly brings out the importance of reframing our
relations to history and of discerning the role of the past in the making of the
contemporary nation. She refers to the way their Marwari ancestors had forged
connections with the British during the Raj to facilitate their own interests,
often at the cost of other sections of society. She says: “But why do we need to
hide or wipe out the past or to feel ashamed of it? If you don’t like anything, stay
away from it. But can you erase the past or that which has already happened?”
(Saraogi 1998, 26).1 Thus, the narrative consciously connects itself to the grand
narrative of state, scrutinising the exclusions, subjugations, and delegitimisations
that have occurred in the process of nation building.
136 Economic liberalisation

Kishor Babu’s wife might hide her husband’s critical musings, written out on
a piece of paper, within the folds of her sari, yet they peep through the folds.
Similarly Kishor Babu’s mental condition after the bypass surgery is a water-
shed moment in his life, letting him and the readers turn around, perceive, and
awaken themselves to alternative ways of existence, hitherto suppressed by a
regimented masculinist stance. His journey from being the “monarch of all I
survey” (Saraogi 1998, 10) to a tramp, gallivanting across streets is important
precisely because it opens up space for interrogating the teleological, linear, and
hegemonic narrative of the nation-state. It is at this time that Kishor Babu returns
to the histories of his family, ancestors, and other ancillary characters, “Accord-
ing to the author, this [Ramvilas’ story] is a marginal story. But surveying the
streets after the bypass surgery, Kishor Babu’s standards have changed” (Saraogi
1998, 27). He also surveys the diaries, memoirs of his great grandfather, to exca-
vate diverse identities and lived histories of his Marwari ancestors who had been
migrants into Calcutta. Thus, the minor stories of insignificant individuals are
equally important, even more so as they make visible the repressive strategies and
practices of the official history. Moreover, there is a need to foreground feminist
historiography as feminists have done by labouring to expose the different ways
and forms in which systematic marginalisation takes place not only of women
but of other sections of society.
Alternatively, Usha K. R. moves beyond Saraogi’s focus on an individual’s
tryst with the ‘liberalisation’ destiny. She takes upon herself a relatively bigger
project of illustrating Bangalore’s preparation to become a world-class city of
f lyovers, multinationals, IT companies, and “increasingly outlandish apartment
blocks” ( Urs and Whittell 2009, 4), leaving behind the “nostalgic cliché, Pen-
sioner’s Paradise” ( Urs and Whittell 2009, 13). By so doing, Usha seeks to evade
the act of categorising Bangalore, and the post- liberalisation cities of indepen-
dent India, into neat compartments. For instance, she states her motives behind
writing Monkey-Man in an interview with Sandhya Iyer thus,

Whether cities have their own destinies, whether sudden and uncontrolled
growth can spin off a miasma, a spectral presence. . . . I wondered over
the possibility of a completely random element that takes over our lives
and destinies. . . . Would it be emanation of wish-fulfilment, of desire or
disappointment or death or of change for the better or none of these things.
(Usha, April 2010)

Usha seems more interested in representing the monkey-man as a monster of

mind. By so doing, she emphasises how the monkey-man’s proportions are as
amorphous, wide reaching, and menacing as the neo-colonial regimes of liberali-
sation in India. Consequently, Shrinivas Moorty’s indulgence in the “hero’s sense
of alienation, his being completely out of step with the world in which he lived”
( Usha 2010, 124) suggests his private alienation with the contemporary struc-
tures of the globalised nation-state. His nostalgia for the lost realm of “leaders of
movements, purveyors of ideas” (Usha 2010, 172) highlights Moorty’s investment in
 Economic liberalisation 137

the fading world view of the Nehruvian model of development and its ‘welfare’
ideals. However, as Usha (April 2010) further suggests in the interview with Iyer,
this nostalgia for “the old economy” lacks the material power to engage with
the networks of corruption, exclusion, and marginalisation, which dominate the
“post-reform, globalising economy and society” (Usha, April 2010).
As a student, Shrinivas Moorty had been an ardent and diligent member of
his teacher SVK’s circle for the study of Dialectical Materialism. He had actively
participated in the Anti-Vietnam war protests and demonstrations, condemning
the “Western Imperialism and Capitalist hegemony” ( Usha 2010, 125) of Amer-
ica. However, after 20years, Moorty’s passion for socialist and egalitarian values
stands betrayed. He copes with forever dug up roads and an unending construc-
tion of f lyovers because they are apparently the signs of development and global
modernity. He does not realise that the so-called development agenda of the state
is deeply entwined with the goal of constructing what Rashmi Varma (2012)
calls “the masculinist . . . publics, reinforced by the asymmetrical and ahistorical
privileging of Enlightenment derived understandings of citizenship as a relation
of state and (male, propertied) individuals” (28). In his inability to comprehend
this fact, Moorty also fails to perceive the contemporary crisis as a cumulative
effect of patriarchal, capitalist, and neo-colonial forces, having serious implica-
tions both within and without the nation.
Similarly, the evolution of time post-independence in Kali-Katha: Via Bypass is
witnessed through Kishor Babu’s sojourns at his north and south Calcutta homes
respectively. Considering that the north of Calcutta is generally associated with
poverty and the south with prosperity, Kishor Babu’s relocation registers not
only the trends that led to the emergence of what John (2002) terms “patterns
of mobility across class fractions” (363) but also people’s efforts to gain prosper-
ity and retain their hold over financial stability, howsoever tenuous it might be.
However, the insistence to vaguely remember his stay at the north Calcutta home
as just “somewhere in the north” (Saraogi 1998, 8) indicates the colonial hang-
over that inevitably made south Calcutta the place of privilege and also indicts the
insidious workings of the liberalised economy that produce the category of the
upwardly mobile middle class consumer. The national imagination could now no
longer be restricted to what Satish Deshpande (1993) terms as “patriotic produc-
tion of Nehruvian socialism” (25). The focus on need-based planning is conve-
niently transposed to an era of economic f luctuations contingent on the world
market, declaring the painful death of the ‘inefficient’ public sector.
Kishor Babu’s wife laments the new discourse of material power,

is there only one reason for the son to get worried? Market has come up
with the latest and new models of cars. . . . How he wishes to get a big car
like Opel or Ford, only then one could live happily.
(Saraogi 1998, 111)

These words also indicate a growing trend of consumerism as a consequence of

the transformed economic ethos, characterised by the surge of the private sector
138 Economic liberalisation

and dominance of consumer goods. Moreover, they ref lect how the systemic
nodes of the contemporary economy are closely tied with the contingencies of
the world market as well as how such contingencies affect the everyday lives of
people.
Kishor Babu’s son finally decides to buy a brand new car following his wife’s
threat to commit suicide. This shows that along with newer choices offered by
liberalisation, frustrations have also increased. P. K. Vijayan (2004) aptly points
out that the reason for this scenario could be the rising expectations that have
come with the choices. Vijayan goes a step further and describes how this era of
private capital thrives on an “international as well as inter-class demonstration
effect” (2004, 375) to emphasise the exhibitionism attached to the choices of
certain classes.
Saraogi’s post-liberalisation text is particularly aware of these nuances and the
multiple layers of the historical narrative. However, it falls short of proposing a
pragmatic response to contemporary happenings. Consider the aesthetic licence
taken by Saraogi to propose a vision of the contemporary environmental destruc-
tion that suggests almost an apocalypse, “Whatever happened was unimagina-
ble. . . . Suddenly the balance between all the five elements was disturbed. . . . All
the plants and trees started to die . . . and it was impossible for people to breathe”
(Saraogi 1998, 214). This hyperbolic assessment of the situation, unfortunately,
does not help in proposing a realistic solution to the problem. This is immedi-
ately followed in the text by an idealistic vision of environmental regeneration
wherein production of all machines and gadgets ceases with immediate effect to
regenerate the environment.

Those who had abandoned the precious air-water of villages for the ter-
rible lifestyle of cities .  .  . were too happy to return to their respective
villages, realising that they could not buy anything useful by spending the
money they had earned in cities.
(Saraogi 1998, 215)

Thus, cities no longer remained centres of power.

Saraogi’s employment of the story of doom, immediately followed by utopian
restorative measures, suggests a sense of nostalgia for the state-centred welfarist
measures of the Nehruvian planning era. However, as one knows, such an invest-
ment could be impracticable for the complex and stratified juncture of the pres-
ent. Nevertheless, this engagement enables Saraogi to trace the inconsistencies
between the 1940s and 1990s. She calls into question the decentred, diffused,
and rhizomatic nature of globalisation, which claims to benefit every stratum of
society. The encounter of the local with the global might empower local com-
munities and marginalised interest groups in a token way, leading to a belief that
they have a choice in transforming the limiting conditions of life. However, the
marginalised groups, poor and women may not have the means and unmediated
access to this enabling side of globalisation in reality. “Grassroots globalization”
 Economic liberalisation 139

(16), as proposed by Arjun Appadurai (2001) and international NGOs operat-

ing in direct contact with the marginalised, might paint a rosy picture of every
section benefiting from globalisation. However, we cannot ignore the fact that
economic production in the South has a direct relationship to what is required by
the capitalist and neo-liberal structures in the North, which would always ensure
reducing the concerns of the local at the economic periphery. Thus, Saraogi’s
utopian solution does not go far in capturing the multiple marginalisations and
exclusions that are the products of globalisation.

Atavistic avatars of liberalised economy

The patriarchal structures and institutions of the nation have firmly endorsed a
capitalist and globalised world view since 1991. This world view manifests itself
in the form of multinational groupings on the one hand and cultural revivalist
tendencies on the other. In this light, the present section explores the convergen-
ces between liberalisation, nation, and Right wing fanaticism. It also interrogates
the skewed model of national development, which marginalises the interests of
the most vulnerable sections of society like women, poor, labourers, working
classes, lower castes, and tribals. In fact, this model of development has further suc-
cumbed to the compulsions of capitalist and neo-colonial structures, which force
nation-states to systemically abandon their role as welfare states. Evidently, there
has been a consistent reduction in the budget allocated for the improvement of
health and education sectors in India. This has further led to the corporatisation
and privatisation of these sectors, making them highly expensive and unafford-
able for the lowest of low.

Tracking the emergent monsters of economic liberalisation

In Kali-Katha Via Bypaas, Kishor Babu’s political consciousness after his bypass
surgery approximates, according to so-called normative standards, “political
madness” (Saraogi 1998, 110). People including his wife cannot understand why
he cuts particular news items from newspapers and categorises them under differ-
ent sections. However, this very attempt at categorisation suggests Kishor Babu’s
willingness to make sense of and confront the extant power structures or, to use
Kumkum Sangari’s (2002) words, “a new transnational regrouping of patriar-
chies” (154). These structures refer to a host of issues ranging from politics, cor-
ruption, war, hunger, poverty, nuclear weaponisation, popular culture, beauty
contests, and so on and so forth and instantiate the asymmetry of power rela-
tions that feeds into the evolution of masculinist hegemonies across the world.
This structural patriarchy embedded in politics and economics performs a dual
function as it not only dovetails the interests of multinational corporations but
also calls for the cultural and moral regeneration of the nation.
Saraogi exposes the cultural obsession with what Sudipta Kaviraj (2010) calls
“ideological indigenism” (268) beneath the veneer of development and progress
140 Economic liberalisation

through Amolak’s death that occurs during the Babri Masjid demolition drive at
Ayodhya on 6 December 1992. The death poignantly reveals the consequences
of religious fanaticism, which establishes its victory at the cost of the religious
symbol of a minority community. Moreover, the close-knit power structures of the
Right wing spatially align themselves with the logic of the nation and also invest
this spatiality with certain characteristics. To exemplify, Ayodhya becomes the
one and only birthplace of Lord Ram, the reclamation of which would ensure
that Muslims in contemporary India continue to find themselves in the position
of a disempowered minority. “They reached the Babri Masjid that day and a few
boys helped in demolishing the Masjid while the police looked on. They were
victorious as the mosque was demolished” (Saraogi 1998, 161).
In fact, it is not for nothing that the Sanskrit teacher had visited Kishor Babu a
few years back to ask for his contribution to the much politicised yajna that was
conducted by the VHP (Vishva Hindu Parishad) from 1983 onwards, as a prelude
to reclaiming control over the site of the Babri Masjid.2 This episode in the text
reiterates that such efforts constitute the nucleus of the Right wing imaginary,
wherein places of Hindu worship and allied rituals are constructed as essential
to establishing the internal consistency of the dominant religion’s majoritarian
identity politics. However, an insistence on such warped ideas of essence fails to
recognise what Deshpande (2000) calls the “continuities between the normal
and pathological” (199) versions of communalism and social exclusions, insidi-
ously hitting at the foundations of the independent nation-state.3
To give a further example, the Sanskrit teacher takes immense pride in show-
casing Swami Sahajanand’s photograph that was published in the Frontline maga-
zine soon after the Babri Masjid demolition drive. “A sanyasi stood on the ground
with a microphone, exhorting a group of young men” (Saraogi 1998, 160) to
demolish the Babri Masjid. However, both the teacher’s pride and the Swami’s
exhortation are actually symbolic of the Hindutva interpellation of an abstract,
universal Hindu citizen of India. The incident also problematises the dichoto-
mous constructions of the ‘naturalised’ Hindu citizen and the ‘outsider’ minority
community to underscore that essence-based identity could take us nowhere.
Amolak resists the demolition by calling on the mob to stop. Thus, Amolak’s
resistance against such aggression suggests an understanding of the embedded-
ness of communal concerns in the everyday life of the nation. It also exposes
the communal, caste-class, and gendered biases inherent in the construction of
the pristine borders of the nation-state, wherein “people’s commitment to one
inevitably translates into hatred for another” (Saraogi 1998, 164).
More to the point, the f lipside of such cultivations of territorial identity is
that they could be appropriated by the overall framework of globalisation. Media
and MNCs attempt to domesticate the extant spatial and symbolic constituen-
cies, serving them as exotica to both local and global consumers. Thus, concepts
like national freedom are dislodged from their grave political context and given
mythical implications. As freedom entails the newly acquired significance of
owning the key to a luxury car, Kishor Babu laments, “Can we get freedom
 Economic liberalisation 141

simply through a key? Had it been so, why did people have to sacrifice their
precious lives” (Saraogi 1998, 197)? He refuses to accept the reordering of per-
ceptions that is a consequence of the growth and spread of the media and the
market-oriented economy. What is particularly disturbing for him is that the
idea of citizenship is articulated within the new circuits of communication,
which deploy “spectacles of consumption” ( Rajagopal 2002, 66) to convey larger
narratives of political mobilisation. Thus, Kishor Babu’s smashing of the televi-
sion screen marks his resistance to the “vulgar” (Saraogi 1998, 205) appropria-
tion of the freedom ideal by a cold drink manufacturing company, “one of the
world’s largest cold drink company had advertised in Parliament by exhibiting a
50-foot long bottle made of brass. . . . the bottle shall be placed as a memorial,
commemorating the 50 years of Indian independence” (Saraogi 1998, 206). The
incident ref lects the convergence between economic liberalisation and edifices
of political power. Through the cold drink advertisement in Parliament as a
metaphor of this convergence, Saraogi also exposes the cultural, ethical, and
social costs the nation has to pay for the affected narrative of development, over
a period of time, across shifting political registers and historical transformations.
On a similar note, Usha K. R. suggests in Monkey-Man that the monster of
liberalisation is invading the spirit of the country, particularly Bangalore like
a cancerous tissue. Bangalore’s journey from being a pensioner’s paradise to the
“aspirational ‘Silicon Valley’” ( Usha 2010, 13) stands for, to borrow Sharmila
Rege’s (2007) words, “enhanced consumerism, cultural uprootment . . . and lack
of its dialogic engagement with the feminist discourse” (220). This ruthlessly
exposes the inability of the liberalised capitalist city to assimilate the humane and
egalitarian aspects of life. In fact, the rhizomatic structure of globalisation and
the concomitant violence on the vulnerable sections approximates to the violence
that had occurred when Bangalore’s founder Kempe Gowda had to sacrifice his
pregnant daughter-in-law to pacify the city deity and prevent destruction.4
The incident suggests that one cannot but remember that a woman’s sacri-
fice has underpinned the origins and sustainability of Bangalore and, now, its
frontier dream. This sensationalist fact concentrates within itself a great poten-
tial to destabilise the inscribed meaning of home as a site of refuge. Thus, the
terrors of domesticity cannot be delinked and dissociated from the public and
allied discourses of urbanity and capitalism, suggests Usha. In fact, such link-
ages also betray how the teleological narrative of homogenised development and
liberalisation compels millions to live under dehumanised circumstances within
the nation. It is then, especially pertinent to raise questions about the rights
of women, immigrants, workers, and the poor, even as they are repressed and
sometimes completely glossed over in the wake of “commodified celebration of
global cities” ( Varma 2012 , 7).
Bangalore turned into a world-class city of f lyovers, orange and blue coils
carrying fibre optic cable, fast food palaces, supermarkets, and IT companies
since the onset of the 1990s. It made a transition from being the city of elite,
retired government service babus to the city of IT boom and BPO sectors. By
142 Economic liberalisation

so doing, Bangalore ushered in an era of software revolution, “f lexitime .  .  .

free and easy contract, not to be shackled to your job” ( Usha 2010, 26), as one
of the characters, Neela, terms it. Usha K. R. captures the “stealthy, violent and
even sadistic” ( Usha 2010, 5) processes of the socio-economic changes, hitting
Bangalore like a rock. In fact, these changes are as inescapable and ubiquitous as
the monkey-man. The “Postscript” to the novel describes how the monkey-man
acquires global proportions:

After exhibiting itself first on Ammanagudi street the creature travelled to

the north of the city where it turned playful, even sadistic and then it broke
free of all bounds-of geography and biology . . . of form and structure and
DNA-shedding its anthropomorphic skin, and reaching for the sky in a
simpler, more atavistic avatar.
( Usha 2010, 255)

Ammanagudi street becomes a microcosm of Bangalore, highlighting the city’s

failure to complement its increasing urban structures with a corresponding rise
in social equity and infrastructural resources,

In the larger interests of the city, to accommodate the people and the vehi-
cles that swilled into it each day, Ammanagudi street had embraced it all-
the noise, the traffic, even the sludge of brown mud that f lowed in from
the excavations on the main road.
( Usha 2010, 13)

Surely, the city has lost its original character. As Kshithij Urs and Richard Whit-
tell suggest, Bangalore’s official population had increased to approximately eight
million by the year 2009,“as people from diverse social backgrounds [had]
come to work in the main industries of construction, textiles, biotechnology,
IT services and BPO units, providing services such as call centres” ( Urs and
Whittell 2009, 5).
There is a suggestion in the text that something went terribly wrong with
the ‘great’ Bangalore dream. For instance, Shrinivas Moorty’s scooter ride to
college is routinely hindered by dug up footpaths, traffic congestion, and an
ongoing construction of f lyovers across the city. These obstructions are no less
markers of political apathy and poor infrastructural investment, suggests the
text. Usha further heightens the irony embedded in the narrative of develop-
ment by exposing Moorty’s complacency with the changing face of the city.
He eschews from problematising the “brash face of the liberalized nineties”
( Usha 2010, 14) and, instead, objectively documents the socio-economic trans-
formations that have taken place in the context of the Ammanagudi street. For
instance, Moorty perceives the conversion of Bhimaiah’s cow pen into I-Soft
Global Technologies as a logical progression, embodying the spirit of the liber-
alised nineties, “when the doors of the economy had been opened to the private
 Economic liberalisation 143

sector and the foreign investor, when the old system of import restrictions,
quotas and licences and . . . shortages, was over” ( Usha 2010, 14). By so doing,
he is unable to place the articulations of the global city in a relational dynamic
and its consequences on the vulnerable sections of society. As R. Kalra (2006)
suggests in an essay:

The size of Indian economy increased from $62.9 billion in the year 1970
to $532.5 billion in the year 2002. So, as India deregulated its economy
and attracted foreign investment, it further spread inter regional disparities.
Two cities – Mumbai (in the western part) and Bangalore (in the southern
part) – have done much better than the eastern half in India.
(75–76)

The fact of the matter is that Bangalore has achieved its status as “a node in the
network of global capital” ( Varma 2012, 8) due to administrative and economic
investments in the creation of images like ‘Silicon Valley of India’ or ‘Informa-
tion City.’ As Carol Upadhya (2009) suggests, the political elite and business
groups are aggressively intent on “colonizing and utilizing urban space and for
making the city attractive to foreign investment” (264). However, these groups
don’t perceive issues like urban poverty, displacement of the marginalised, and
unequal access to resources as real problems of the city. As Upadhya further states,

In essence, they want to create a city within the city, a patchwork with
islands of global industry and residential areas for global workers, tied
together by a network of good roads that only the wealthy and the IT class
can afford to use.
(2009, 264)

Next, while Shrinivas Moorty in the novel winces at his friend Jairam’s
“US-returned affectation competing with Indian nouveau riche glory” ( Usha
2010, 52), his search for “agents of social change” ( Usha 2010, 172) appears
equally affected. It smacks of bourgeoisie leanings under the guise of socialist
ideals, making him complicit with the hegemonic narrative of development and
progress,

a f lyover was being constructed on the main road and all the traffic was
being rerouted through Ammanagudi street. The disruption was . . . tem-
porary and the f lyover was eventually supposed to ease the congestion.
( Usha 2010, 12)

The disruption is perceived as temporary and necessary to facilitate the vision of

a world-class Bangalore. However, such instances of capitalist development often
iron out the variegated hues of personal histories and individual struggles of peo-
ple to claim their rights against the excess of the nation-state. Urs and Whittell
144 Economic liberalisation

have quoted Solomon Benjamin to illustrate the effects of the f lyover that is
constructed over the KR market area in Bangalore:

The construction of the f lyover has reduced the effective hawking space
by more than half with access roads built over what had previously been
pavements. . . . The few hawkers who try to sell their wares in the morning
are beaten up despite paying the mamool to both the police and corporation
inspectors.
(2009, 17–18)

Thus, Moorty fails to gauge the dark underside of the modern urban lives, that
is, the displacement of poor, hawkers, women, and workers caused by the state’s
rhetoric of development.
Similarly, Neela, born of a Brahmin father and a Catholic mother, stands
for the cosmopolitan Bangalore in many ways. Her “ease in church and temple
alike” ( Usha 2010, 63) makes Neela the perfect source of a case study on the
“‘changing patterns of kinship in a dynamic society’” ( Usha 2010, 64). However,
she has no sympathy for the poor, as she would generally like to brand them
ungrateful and dishonest. The construction of the f lyover adds unnecessary mess
to her life, as she has to walk through a slum to reach the bus stop at the main
road. Her arrogance is further betrayed in her dealings with those below her in
the official hierarchy. For instance, Neela misbehaves with her colleagues Alka
and Pushpa just because they hold temporary positions in the office. As Usha
further reveals in her interview with Iyer, Neela’s arrogance and exclusionary
pride are linked with her dream of upward social mobility in an ‘exponentially
growing’ metropolis.

Since Bangalore is the pin-up city for new India, I have used Bangalore as
a template for [such] changes . . . [Though]Neela makes sense of this new
dispensation around herself, without the appropriate skills to deal with
them, she can only fall back on guile.
(Usha, April 2010)

Usha further states in the interview with Iyer that both Neela and Shrinivas
Moorty could be seen as her “old economy characters” (Usha, April 2010). But,
what does this old economy stand for? Does it stand for Shrinivas Moorty’s dis-
guised bourgeoisie temperament or Neela’s “instinctive authority” ( Usha 2010,
27)? In fact, as the novel suggests, both these responses could be perceived as
offshoots of the hegemonic constructions of developmental economics and allied
social processes. Also, the passage of the city from an old economy to a global
one is interesting to note. This global order envisages all promises of modernity.
This modernity is believed to be facilitating social mobility and empowerment,
easing the tensions of strict hierarchies in many ways. However, the characters of
Moorty and Neela exemplify the subtle passage of paradigms of an old order into
 Economic liberalisation 145

the new one, resulting in continuation of exclusion in myriad ways. The promise
of the new order seems to be selective just like the erstwhile economic system
and favours marginalisation in its own way.
Kali-katha Via Bypass takes this argument further in the way the post-bypass
surgery phase in Kishor Babu’s life links up the nationalist phase of his youth to
the modern, consumption-oriented era of liberalisation, enabling him to inter-
rogate the choices and the shortcuts chosen by the political and cultural economy
of the nation. He is also equipped with a critical self-ref lective stance, facilitating
his engagement with the implications of his merchant class choices vis-à-vis the
socio-political and economic processes in colonial and postcolonial India. Con-
sequently, it alerts the reader to the way in which differing layers of history could
be excavated. Therefore, when Kishor Babu decides to stay inside the home and
not use any product made of foreign origin or in collaboration with foreign
companies, he seems to be reverting to the swadeshi ideal propagated in the early
20thcentury to confront the colonial powers. However, can one find remnants
of viability in the swadeshi protest now? Perhaps, yes.
In his youth, Kishor had not paid heed to the call of swadeshi. In fact his uncle’s
firm had been instrumental in supplying army uniform, blankets, and other
provisions to the British during the Second World War (1939–45). What makes
him get back, years later, to the ideal of swadeshi ? Does it hold the same cultural
power and motivation it had earlier? Saraogi’s narrative goes beyond addressing
this concern merely in the light of the past. The so-called development rhetoric
deployed in the 1990s, the government’s efforts to project a highly modernised
image of the ruling party and the calls of ‘India Shining,’ are fundamentally and
ethically opposed to the ideal of swadeshi. In fact, Kishor Babu is appalled to
realise that the values upheld in contemporary public life run counter to the
ones held dear during the struggle against the British rule. His disappointment
plumbs new depths when he learns how Gandhi and his ideas on swadeshi, truth,
and passive resistance have been appropriated by the new vocabulary of cor-
ruption, “Everyone wants a solid bribe these days. The mills demand a fixed
percentage of money . . . they say it would not be less than twenty ‘Gandhi’”
(Saraogi 1998, 194).
Thus, Saraogi categorically condemns the workings of contemporary politi-
cal and economic processes, whose operational structures are as biased, exclu-
sive, and hierarchical as the Right wing ideology. This dovetails with the larger
critique of the patriarchal alliances that are complementary to the obscurantist
structures of the state – the Hindu Right on the one hand and capitalism and
globalisation on the other, constituting interlocking networks of power, oppres-
sion, and exploitation that mutually reinforce and assist each other.

Private education in the liberalised nation

One of the many ways in which Usha negotiates the transformed contexts of
the new economy is by foregrounding the debates on India’s higher education
146 Economic liberalisation

policy. She engages with Jairam’s “blueprint for making knowledge relevant
to our times” ( Usha 2010, 164) to illustrate the process whereby the doors of
national education policy were systematically opened to accommodate “high
end foreign institutions and their sophisticated pedagogies” (Altbach 2010, 13).
Rajan Gurukkal (2011) proposes how the Foreign Educational Institutions (Reg-
ulations of Entry and Operations) Bill 20105 is “only a legislative extension of
economic liberalisation to the educational sector” (41). Gurukkal further sug-
gests that though the Bill is purported “as a solution for various problems in the
higher education sector such as poor quality and shortage of educational insti-
tutions, low gross enrolment rate (GER)” (2011, 41), it is actually entwined with
“the agenda of opening the national higher education sector to world trade” (41).
In this light, the evolution of Jairam’s character is aligned with the transfor-
mational dynamics of what Usha calls (in her interview with Iyer) “the new
world economy” (April 2010) and its consequences on the Indian higher educa-
tion sector. An All India Students’ Federation member during his college days,
Jairam had participated in the Anti-Vietnam War demonstration and assisted his
teacher SVK during the Emergency by hiding his correspondence with the CPI
and the Centre for Civil Liberties. However, he is quick to recognise that the
“wheels of the economy were turning” ( Usha 2010, 52) and abandons his ethical
politics in the process. Thus, it does not come as a surprise when, after all these
years, he expresses his desire to set up a new centre in the college, aiming to
“teach the new disciplines of the new world” ( Usha 2010, 217) sponsored by the
funds released by BNS Trust (named after BN Swamy, a senior colleague who
was among the first wave of successful entrepreneurs to emerge from Silicon
Valley).
Jairam’s belief in a fair, equitable, and just world is transformed into an obsession
with a modernised world that could manage knowledge, codifying “the inter-
connection of human experience in all the relevant fields of study-economics,
society, politics, the sciences, the environment, business, the arts” ( Usha 2010,
164). His ambitions to set a world-class centre find parity in the aims of the
National Knowledge Commission, set up by the Government of India in 2006,
to formulate a plan of reform in higher education. The objective of the Com-
mission was “expansion, excellence and inclusion which would drive economic
development and social progress” ( Panikkar 2011, 41). However, what followed
this report was a legislative proposal for “centralisation, privatisation and entry
of foreign educational providers” ( Panikkar 2011, 41), leaving unexplained the
plausible consequences of such a move on socially and economically backward
sections of society.
Gurukkal’s research indicates that the opening of new colleges and centres
with foreign collaborative efforts might not improve the extant poor standards
of education in India. Instead, “the government needs to address the socio-
economic barriers that account for access disparity” (Gurukkal 2011, 42), since
the best of talent might not be able to enrol herself in colleges due to it. The
new courses also might not increase the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) since the
 Economic liberalisation 147

focus would be on attracting the brightest minds who could afford such kinds of
academic experiments both mentally and financially. Thus, Jairam’s impatience
with the “same old BA, MA that makes no sense now” ( Usha 2010, 165) and
the resultant insistence on changing the profile of students and selecting the best
talent possible have to be located in the liberalised educational dynamics of the
present century.
Furthermore, Gurukkal’s research reveals that “67 per cent of the Indian
population is deprived of opportunities for socio-economic mobility” (2011,
43). The situation could grow worse given the fact that India’s youth population
would be dominant in number by the next decade. In fact, Gurukkal asserts that
out of “66 per cent of total population belonging to the age group of 10–20,
the strength of girls comes to 53 per cent. It means that if issues of poverty,
gender equality and illiteracy are not addressed appropriately” (44), the socio-
economic differences could get intensified all the more. Thus, Usha deploys the
contemporary debates on privatisation of higher education to hint at how the
pro-liberalisation moves could play a negative role in this context.
This further ties up with the nation-state’s near abdication of its role as a wel-
fare state, which is otherwise responsible for extending benefits of social secu-
rity (including health care and education), equity, and opportunity to all. For
example, according to the data provided by the World Bank website, the total
expenditure by India (2011–2015) on health and education stands at 1.3 per cent
and 3.9 per cent of the GDP, respectively. Such measures have further accentu-
ated the gross inequalities in India. As Rajni Kothari (1995) asserts:

the overall result is that .  .  . globalisation and marginalisation are two

counter-images of the same phenomenon, marginalisation being a nec-
essary condition of globalisation while globalisation provides an existen-
tial framework in which millions are marginalised .  .  . and considered
dispensable.
(1599)

Therefore, the new world order ushered in by the socio-economic and political
processes of globalisation has collaborated with the homogenised narrative of the
nation-state to create an exclusive world.

Gendered nation: mapping the constitutive role of contexts

Indian women’s movement activists and feminists have drawn attention to the
problem of the invisibility of women’s work and also the working women. This
section aims to explore the asymmetry of gender relations within the micropoli-
tics and the ways in which it accentuates women’s disempowerment vis-à-vis the
structures of the nation-state. It further engages with the problem of contractu-
alisation and feminisation of labour and how it affects women’s status as workers
and/or labourers.
148 Economic liberalisation

Interrogating the gendered constructs of the nation-state

in Kali-Katha: Via Bypass
Saraogi’s narrative suggests that everyday preponderance of masculinities at the
level of micropolitics could enable a viable examination of women’s margin-
alised status within the patriarchal macropolitics of the state and its institutions.
She declares: “alongside the country getting its independence, Kishor Babu . . .
howsoever far it was possible, ruled over people’s life according to his whims and
fancies” (Saraogi 1998, 110). Saraogi’s statement subtly suggests the generation
of private masculinities to suit the “continued masculinisation of political power
on the one hand, and technological power on the other” ( Vijayan 2004, 373).
During this time, Kishor Babu also spends his resources to renovate the south
Calcutta home, giving it a modern facade, incorporating the latest designs, shut-
ter windows, and so on. Suitable measures are taken to insulate the home from
external inf luences so that “the poor Bengalis living close by could not even
have a glimpse into what was happening inside his home” (Saraogi 1998, 57).
The apparent insularity of the private sphere, emerging from the masculin-
ist tendency to retain power in one’s own hands, highlights the institutional
organisation of economic capacities, as well as an exclusive concern with the
patriarchal epistemology of the nation-state in the years immediately following
post-independence.
We realise how domestic labour becomes a site to exercise control over women’s
labour and bodies. Shanta’s status as a widow makes her vulnerable, as her labour
is conveniently deployed by the family, disabling her to “exercise any . . . bar-
gaining power over the value of her labour” (Gopal 2013, 92). Her education is
rendered useless, she is termed “outdated” (Saraogi 1998, 61) and Kishor Babu’s
masculinist pride does not let him acknowledge that his first encounter with
poetry and literature had happened when “she [Shanta] had chosen select poems
and given him to read” (Saraogi 1998, 60). Kishor Babu’s double standards come
out as he calls her shameless for wearing a bright-coloured sari during one of the
get-togethers with his friends at home. The gradual process whereby Shanta is
made to believe that she has lost her mind is very similar to how Kishor Babu’s
wife trains herself to remain quiet and not express her views in front of people,
“What could she say to others? She would immediately fall from grace if she
would say anything worthless. At first she stopped saying things out loud and
later she stopped even thinking anything worth saying” (Saraogi 1998, 58).
Mary John concisely captures the overlaps among the nation and its commit-
ments to development and gender issues in the following words:

the debates around sexual division of labour, the household, problems of

underestimation and criticisms of women’s work meshed directly with and
in fact actively reconstituted the prevailing conceptions of India’s national
identity and the primacy accorded to development.
(1996, 3074)
 Economic liberalisation 149

The ideas of progress, modernity, and development came to be qualified dur-

ing the first few years after independence. It was clear now that these ideas were
conceptualised within a patriarchal rubric and only a minority of upper caste/
middle class women had actually been able to place their vision on the table.
Unfortunately, their complacency post the passage of the Hindu Code Bill could
not awaken them to what John describes as the “systemic relations of inequality”
(1996, 3071) and patriarchal assumptions underlying the development rhetoric.
Amidst such a scenario, there could have been no scope for women like Kishor
Babu’s wife and Shanta to actually even conceive an intellectual and political
engagement with their subordination.
Saraogi deploys a feminist historical praxis to chart a subtle trajectory of sorts,
attempting to understand how issues pertaining to gender sensitization and gen-
der biases have unfolded and what could be their implications for the recon-
stitution of femininities and masculinities in the post-independence context.
However, what is important is how Kishor Babu negotiates this new phase in his
life wherein he learns to perceive alternative marginal realities. For example, he
wonders for the first time why Shiv Babu, working in his office for the past 20 years,
has had his lunch at one of the street food joints. Perhaps his wife had been ill.
But does he have a wife in the first place? To his dismay, Kishor Babu does not
know. We realise that he is gradually getting sensitised to the invisible productive
contribution(s) of women to maintain the well-being of the family. However,
their work is routinely rendered invisible and it is assumed that they have ‘noth-
ing to do.’ This post-surgery phase in Kishor Babu’s life enables him to confront
such assumptions he had hitherto taken for granted, given his masculinist pride.
The socio-reformist drive in the early 20thcentury had initially bound him to
a very peculiar tussle between tradition and modernity. He wanted to question
everything, so much so that at one point in time he even wanted to get Shanta
married off to someone else so that she would not suffer the low status of widow-
hood. Why did Kishor Babu eventually give in to the call of tradition? Why did
he turn into a stern patriarch who did not even let his daughters complete their
education and get them married?
There was a mismatch between the radical proposition of the 1940s, which
insisted that the nation could be independent only when its women were
empowered and the conservative attitude shown towards women in the post-
independence era. It was not for nothing that the shortcomings in the Women in
Development (WID) agenda became too apparent as the policymakers focussed
on speaking about women as a universal category and not understanding gen-
der relations within their religious, class, and caste context. In fact, the myopic
development vision of policymakers also fell short of recognising that the strati-
fied structures relegate women to the tender mercies of entrenched patriarchies.
Saraogi’s unnerving narrative exposes such institutional and ideological
biases, ref lecting the skewed choices made by both men and women in the con-
temporary expanding, competitive economic processes within the parallel finan-
cial constraints. One of the disturbing implications of such economic constraints
150 Economic liberalisation

coupled with desire for upward social mobility is the misuse of available tech-
nologies, suggesting a “spreading aversion to daughters” ( John et al. 2009, 17).
Though female foeticide is punishable under the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Tech-
niques Act 1994 (amended 2003), it has been manoeuvred to facilitate sex selec-
tive techniques, resulting in the worsening of female-male sex ratios.6
Kishor Babu’s eldest daughter aborts the female foetus because she and her
husband did not want yet another girl child after having two girls. The couple
had also opted for the use of technology for sex selection in order to give birth to
a boy child, “they had spent thousands of rupees, undergone regular sonography,
taken medicines and injections but couldn’t get any positive results” (Saraogi
1998, 180). In a society where preference for male child is rampant, “especially in
urban areas” ( John et al. 2009, 17), this episode suggests that the upward mobil-
ity that many families attained post-liberalisation has not discouraged them from
shedding the practice of female foeticide.7 It is particularly unsettling to realise
that women are equally responsible for creating the ‘ideal’ family. Kishor Babu is
told that since “it was the third abortion case, there was risk involved” (Saraogi
1998, 182), revealing how, for his daughter, abortion is seen as yet another mode
of contraception.
Even if a daughter is allowed to be born in rich families, discrimination in
terms of providing them with comparatively lower quality education appears as a
constant feature. Though Kishor Babu finds the social and educational status of
Marwari women to be quite dismal, he does not take any significant measure to
engage with the asymmetry of gender relations in his community. His response
is limited to displaying a patronising benevolence towards women, at most, dis-
couraging his wife from wearing heavy jewellery and embroidered veils or visit-
ing temples for long hours in a day. However, he is quite conservative when it
comes to actually empowering his daughters. The idea of mental freedom for
women is quite unacceptable to him, “Girls who were educated beyond limits
seemed masculine to him . . . their soft demeanour and polite conversation were
likely to be affected” (Saraogi 1998, 158). The reformist engagement with the
extant gendered habitus is limited to how one could ameliorate the perception of
the external appearance of conservatism of the community.
This could be further understood in light of the contemporary socio-economic
factors, especially the ones pertaining to the “inter-generational transfer of resources”
( John et al. 2009, 18).8 For instance, the societal perception of daughters being
temporary members of the family, along with caste-kinship laws, undisputed
patriliny, and inheritance norms have not undergone any significant change in
the post-independence context. Consequently, they have severely restricted the
diversity of options available to women, rendering their autonomy suspect.
Kishor Babu warns his youngest daughter who wanted to pursue higher edu-
cation in Law, “Don’t ever set your foot in my house if you take admission in Law
college” (Saraogi 1998, 158). The incident enables one to discern the hollowness
embedded in his desire, when young, to marry an educated woman wearing a
red-bordered sari and singing Vande Mataram. In fact, he has not been able to
 Economic liberalisation 151

break the linkages made during the nationalist period between the nation’s sov-
ereignty and women’s purity, which continue to determine his understanding
of women’s roles with respect to the nation. His refusal to facilitate the prospect
of higher education for his daughter is a consequence of “piece-meal reform
strategies” ( John et al. 2009, 18) which alone were acceptable to the reformers.
Perhaps this is the reason why women’s empowerment could not be perceived as
integral to the social transformation in the gendered contexts of the society and
the nation.
Kishor Babu relates that Amolak’s mother was called a prostitute when she
had participated in the Non-Cooperation Movement in the 1920s. The inci-
dent reveals that Gandhi’s insistence on giving agency to women was limited
to deploying their so-called feminine attributes of service, devotion, nurture,
and sacrifice. In fact, they were not equipped with the actual tools of confront-
ing the colonial and nationalist constructions of gender roles. Amolak’s mother
rightly says: “If women would want to do anything antithetical to the ossified
conceptions of society, they would inevitably be termed amoral” (Saraogi 1998,
71). This statement acquires gravity in the post-independence context, wherein a
nation of consumers has contributed to refashioning the idea of the new woman.
The onslaught of visual imagery, advertisements specifically centred on
“women’s bodies, offering corrective remedies to the issues pertaining to shape,
size, height, skin colour, and clothing-style go a long way in creating the concept
of an ideal Indian woman. These might have a long-term effect on women’s per-
ceptions of their own selves” (Thapan 2007, 42). For instance, the college-going
daughter of Kishor Babu’s factory supervisor is seen buying clothes from the
most expensive Mall of the city, with her boyfriend’s money. Kishor Babu won-
ders, “how will she compensate for this? What will she tell her father? . . . That
why did she buy such expensive clothes?” (Saraogi 1998, 141). His ruminations
hint at how the inf luences of peer group, culture, and global media often oper-
ate in opposition to the family preferences and social expectations of women,
leading to warped constructions of women’s identity, as mentioned previously.
Additionally, the f lourishing of ideas like lifestyle feminism has taken away
the intensity from the advocacy for women’s rights and equality in the con-
temporary scenario. In most cases, it leads to a limited conception of women’s
identity but in the garb of a “modern and liberated female identity” ( Thapan
2007, 43). Though women seek to reformulate their relations with men, their
efforts mainly subscribe to giving this impression of being liberated yet somehow
connected to the traditional norms and values. Thus, it is significant to reform
the gender relations between women and men, and between men and men, in
order to contest the patriarchal hegemony and its allied institutions of inequality.
Kishor Babu’s cousin Banwari is outcast from the Marwari community for mar-
rying a Bengali woman. He is excluded from the dominant order of the Marwari
patriarchy because he fails to live up to the communal norms of masculinity,
otherwise adhered to by someone like Kishor Babu, that is, the bread earning,
rigid patriarch, exercising sufficient hold over dependent women and men.
152 Economic liberalisation

The incident invites us to perceive gendered contexts in terms of the mascu-

linities circulating in such spaces as well. John captures this well by terming these
spaces as “relational wherein any form of exploitation or oppression suffered by
women within the strictures of society calls for taking an account of the experi-
ences of men as well” (1996, 3076). Moreover, any attempt to reformulate the
gendered habitus would necessarily call for reforming the caste-class and kinship
stratifications, which centre on and around the persisting structures of patriar-
chal, patrilineal, and virilocal patterns.
The argument is further developed by Saraogi as she underscores the need to
acknowledge the injustices of today’s times, which disable women and margin-
alised sections of society from having equal access to available resources. In fact,
gender hierarchies are an integral aspect of the structural hierarchies, which are
bred by the absolute regimes of the nation-state. They further tie up with glo-
balisation, which thrives on the logic of open markets, unmindful of inequali-
ties. Consequently, a deep chasm is created between those who could partake of
the most expensive commodity culture and the ones who suffer in the throes of
bone-grinding poverty. Kishor Babu is pained to realise that the nurse who had
cared for him in hospital is so poor that she does not even have enough clothes for
herself. Such narratives of poverty illustrate how socio-economic planning and
policy measures could only perceive poverty in terms of its tangible indicators,
oblivious to the gendered underpinning of the context that places the burden of
poverty on women.
The female-headed households are the worst hit due to such policies, which
are insufficiently sensitive to the genuine concerns involved. The exclusionary
tendencies of the emergent social order have hastened the need to strain hard to
listen to the multiple dimensions of poverty, which have affected women’s lives
immensely. It aptly ties up with the question that the beggar girl asks her father
years back during the famine of 1943, “I do not have any clothes to cover my
body. How could I go out and beg?” (Saraogi 1998, 143). The discovery of her
bloated dead body found f loating in the lake by Lake Street rattles the reader,
along with young Kishor and Amolak. This episode can be considered symp-
tomatic of the squalor that proliferated during the British rule in general and the
conscious siphoning off of resources from West Bengal to feed its troops dur-
ing the Second World War in particular. However, more peculiar and intrigu-
ing is Saraogi’s positioning of this episode at this juncture in the text. Having
built a backdrop of the disparate modes in which liberalisation affects lives,
Saraogi encourages the reader to connect the episode with today’s state of affairs
in a seamless narrative. The reader realises that the inequalities and injustices,
especially in the gendered contexts, continue unf linchingly. Clearly, the stakes
involved are too high. As Saraogi asserts:

Years later after the enemy exits, one realises that any renewed search for
him would inevitably end up in ref lecting our own selves in the mir-
ror. Our dreams have blurred, so much so, no dream has remained intact.
 Economic liberalisation 153

What is left is our hunger for increasing needs, desires and things, which
to our dismay can no longer satisfy us.
(Saraogi 1998, 19)

Patriarchy as a macroeconomic construct: the case

of ‘unhomely’ women in Monkey-Man
Research has shown that despite the high rates of growth in the Indian economy
over the past few years and a concomitant increase in the employment opportu-
nities, only 15 per cent of all women in India are engaged in paid work, whether
in the formal or informal sector. This implies that 85 per cent of women are
engaged in informal, unpaid forms of family labour or labour based from home,
which has situated them in relationships of dependency vis-à-vis the structures
of authority. Thus, there is not much of a change from 1974 when the Towards
Equality report revealed that though women had benefitted from the increased
employment opportunity in the service sector, their percentage to total women
workers in India was only 6 per cent. It is evident that the benefits of India’s
economic growth, if any, are so exclusive in their tenor that young women have
continued to receive an unfair and unequal deal within the parameters of gen-
dered development. Thus, Indian policy interventions are not convergent with
insights from research on women’s livelihoods, labour, skills, and employment.
Moreover, women’s marginalised location within the societal structure further
accentuates the patriarchal underpinnings of financial schema and gendered policy
measures. The biased policy measures discount the provision of creating employ-
ment opportunities for women who participate in the informal sector through
home-based labour. The provision of micro-finance is targeted at women, sug-
gesting that they “undertake their own economic empowerment” ( Dewan 2011,
20). While self-employment measures have benefitted them, women are merely
considered recipients of special concessions from the government rather than
as active agents in the processes of economy. Thus, “assisted self-employment”
( Dewan 2011, 20) is mistaken for economic and gender empowerment.
The professional choices available to educated women indicate that they have
still not succeeded in rupturing the gendered biases of the labour market. In fact,
there has not been any indication of diversification of economic opportunities
available to women. As Tanusree Paul and Saraswati Raju (2014) suggest:

Since 1993–94, certain specific industries and services are dominated by

women and with time, the diversification in the types of such industries
and services has declined especially in the urban areas. Thus, work has not
been able to provide women with expanding spaces and choices.
(205)

In such a scenario, how does the grand narrative of globalisation impact

the women’s workforce participation in the urban organised service sector?
154 Economic liberalisation

Though the educational opportunities and career choices available to women

have expanded owing to the liberalisation phase of economy in the 1990s, their
professional aspirations are restricted by gendered biases in the corporate sector,
wherein they are considered more suitable for feminised fields like teaching,
financial intermediation and computer-related activities, public relations, per-
sonnel management, human resource management, advertising, telemarketing,
and so on.
Usha foregrounds the systemic exploitation of women and their ambitions to
carve out a ‘room of their own’ by foregrounding the issue of contractualisation
of labour and how it impinges upon young urban women, especially in the con-
text of the ICT and business process outsourcing (BPO) sectors. Paul and Raju
further state that though

globalising India is experiencing an expanded labour market, the jobs that

are being created are mostly for lower level support services. Alternatively,
it could be suggested that a very small section of privileged workers are in
a position to appropriate the high-end employment opportunities.
(2014, 205)

This could be corroborated by the Census reports of 1981, 1991, 2001, and vari-
ous rounds of the NSS employment-unemployment survey, which reveal that
the output growth rate in the service sector, placed at above 8 per cent (1993–
2000) could not translate into generating employment growth opportunities.
The survey reports between the 50th and the 55th round also conclude that
though there has been an increase in regular employment for urban women in
the public administration, it is primarily limited to subsidiary activities, which
offer an extremely low remuneration.
In the novel, Pushpa is paid 50 rupees a day for typing reports at the centre,
“less than what a contract sweeper was paid” (77). The uncertainty of the con-
tract is heightened by Neela’s tactics, who would sometimes not give her any
work and at other times, ask Pushpa to type a 200 page document within two
hours. Research indicates that there has been a systematic decline in the organ-
ised public sector jobs post the liberalisation phase.9
Thus, it is pertinent to dwell on lacunas/mismatch between the research and
policy initiatives, and its consequences in terms of the uneven processes of eco-
nomic development, highlighting how feminisation of labour is an offshoot of
power inequalities. For instance, if Neela has been lucky to evade the oppressive
regime of contractual jobs, getting a permanent position at a government funded
research institute, there are people like Pushpa who have no choice but to work
amidst the changed dynamics of employment in global India.
As a young graduate, from the rural hinterland who comes to Bangalore to
alleviate her family from financial crisis, Pushpa indeed becomes the poster girl
of the Information Technology enabled Services (ITeS) in Bangalore. She feels
 Economic liberalisation 155

liberated and far more empowered with her monthly salary of 15000 rupees at
the Trix Solutions call centre since she believes that now she would not be ren-
dered vulnerable to the vagaries of her contractual job (of a typist) at the CSES.
Her sense of empowerment is complemented by several studies conducted in
the area, speculating about the “growth potential and its employment creating
capacities, especially for urban educated females” (Mitra 2006, 5005). However,
much of the ITeS look for English speaking graduates, which implies that a gross
class-divide plagues the pattern of employment. Due to high attrition rate, com-
panies are not willing to spend so much on the training of their workers, thereby
recruiting urban English educated middle class youth only. This also betrays the
upper caste/middle class underpinnings of the new generation jobs, especially
in case of women who are often the worst hit by the exclusive dynamics of the
structural adjustment plans.10
Pushpa is aware of the consequences of such structural hierarchies in the lives
of women, as evident in her interview with the prospective employers. When
asked if she could keep a cool head in a difficult situation and handle pressure,
she responds, “I am strong. I can lift my [bedridden] father off the bed and sit
him up all by myself, without my brother’s help” ( Usha 2010, 79). Thus, her
negotiation with the call centre job is located at the interstices of her everyday
struggles.
Moreover, what adds to the charm of working in a call centre are the perfor-
mance incentives given to employees, provided they master the process of “indi-
vidualisation in the workplace and among workers” ( Upadhya and Vasavi 2008,
24). It is based on cultivating values of “individual achievement, self-motivation
and competition” ( Upadhya and Vasavi 2008, 24), which enable an employee to
become loyal and professional to her assigned work and the company. Pushpa
relates how she managed to impress the employers with her “high score on
‘potential to be trained’” ( Usha 2010, 80). She was “willing, eager and capable”
(80) to learn ‘skills’ which promised to make her a “total professional” (83) and
that she “must be ready to push the limits of .  .  . performance” (83). This is
what a “global encounter” (78) entails, that is, working towards internalising
the management’s goals and controlling one’s behaviour accordingly. Termed
“a cultural turn in corporate management” by Carol Upadhya and A.R. Vasavi
(2008, 24), this process is contingent on the worker’s capacity to negotiate the
workplace demands on an individual basis rather than constituting any group/
collective identity.11
Thus, it is evident how the workers are given this illusory sense of empower-
ment, contingent on distorted notions of professionalism. In fact, one of the ways
in which this new ‘cultural turn’ is manifested in workplace is by an increasing
thrust on the feminisation of workforce. According to Cecilia Ng and Swasti
Mitter’s research on women workers in a Malaysian call centre, since the jobs
concerned (in fields like human resources, public relations, along with call
centres) require a proficiency in the “so-called soft-skills like communication,
156 Economic liberalisation

listening, and interpersonal skills,” they are (mis)perceived to be intrinsic to

women (2005, 229). Far from recognising the economic value of women’s skills,
they are relegated to a gendered realm of ‘care’ ethic. Women are trained to
believe in their potential to straddle the world and “reaching across oceans and
continents to another person . . . to help him, to make a difference to his life”
( Usha 2010, 91).
Nevertheless, unlike other employees, as Pushpa claims, she is willing to
invest her skills in ‘handling’ people, “now that she knew the power of com-
passion” ( Usha 2010, 197). Thus, she has been completely inducted into the
“corporate mission”12 ( Upadhya and Vasavi 2008, 25). However, what remains
intrinsic and therefore invisible to such attempts of self-assertion is the fact that
women’s labour and “their work experience continues to be deeply embodied
and is linked to their experience as gendered and culturally constituted beings”
( Upadhya and Vasavi 2008, 34). Critics like Patel and Parmentier assess the gen-
dered structure of the expanding IT industry thus:

not only does women’s participation fail to occur at the same speed as IT
expansion, but . . . their participation is based on a continuation of tradi-
tional gender roles [whereby] technology and its development . . . [adapt]
to the existing social structure.
(as quoted in Raju 2013, 17)

However, Pushpa fails to realise the consequences of the gendered appro-

priation of her labour. Moreover, the sense of professionalism, which she so
carefully cultivates, is based on warped notions of agency, self-motivation, and
goal-orientedness. Here, call centre and IT firms have a significant role to play
as they claim to provide a good work environment to their employees, facili-
tating the completion of their targets on time. Pushpa attends yoga and dance
classes to keep herself engaged. However, what are the actual implications of
such ‘benevolent’ worker-friendly measures? As evident, they seriously fall short
of fulfilling their ‘goal.’ For instance, the surfeit of chips, pizza, and biryani that
Pushpa experiences clearly hints at the possible health hazards which await her,
if she continues to indulge herself in such treats. Moreover, continuous night
shifts play havoc with her body clock, causing severe health issues like backache,
headache, and stress.
The pressure to fulfil the target calls also aggravates the stress levels of employ-
ees. Almost half of the respondents to the survey conducted by Preeti Singh
and Anu Pandey (2005) complained of headache, stress, and backache (686).
Therefore, even if Pushpa might not like her ‘inefficient’ colleague who kept her
“ear phones off her ears . . . there was a buzzing in her head” ( Usha 2010, 82)
and therefore was rightly “shunted off ” (82), the fact of the matter is that such
health issues are a common feature with the call centre employees and suggest
both the insensitivity of the management as well as the vagaries of the contrac-
tual appointment that are a norm with ITeS and BPO sectors.
 Economic liberalisation 157

Pushpa might be the new woman of the new economy, but the fact of the
matter is that the embeddedness of gender roles makes it difficult for women
to exercise their freedom outside the encoded space of domesticity. Despite
the glamour associated with a call centre job and an “invoked sense of articu-
lated modernity” ( Raju 2013, 17), Pushpa is burdened by her familial concerns,
father’s health, and younger brother’s education and employment, leaving very
little time for herself. Pushpa’s curt replies to her father “when he asked her why
she had stayed out all night without letting them know” ( Usha 2010, 196) and a
disoriented outlook towards things in general are a consequence of the gendered
contexts of society and/or nation-state, which continue to locate women within
the familial realm. In fact, Saraswati Raju rightly states,

women face conf licting demands between domestic responsibilities and the
pressure of social mores that unsocial working hours bring. The socially
constructed spaces create a mix of hi-tech operations and indigenous val-
ues, not the homogeneous spread of a work culture.
(2013, 17)

Pushpa might be a competent professional woman, ready to work during

night shifts, finishing her calls in less than average time and performing remark-
ably on the customer satisfaction charts, yet her middle class gendered sensibil-
ity circumscribes her agency because she “felt too much the burden and often
wished, much to her shame, that it would all end and she could be free” ( Usha
2010, 92). This also serves as an eye-opener to the fact that women are not able
to progress professionally and end up occupying mid-level, lower-level positions,
in comparison to men who move into higher positions.
The research conducted by Singh and Pandey also reveals that out of 100,
89 women worked at the lower level of management, whereas only 11 could
manage to progress to the levels of team leaders, assistant managers/managers
(2005, 686). The punitive regime of surveillance and peer pressure at office and
the domestic obligations at home often tend to marginalise women workers in
terms of delegating important projects. A senior manager in a software firm
acknowledged in an interview with Carol Upadhya (2005) that women workers
have to constantly struggle against the structural hierarchies and gender assump-
tions to retain their position in the workplace, “when there are constraints for
women, especially when they have small kids, managers hesitate to give diffi-
cult projects for them” (11). Thus, women tend to lose out on opportunities for
career advancement in the absence of adequate experience, which is inevitably
conceived within masculine terms.
I would like to conclude the chapter with an observation. One wonders how
a specific kind of women’s labour, that is, white collar, modern, technology-
oriented and their highly skilled engagement with the globalised structures of
the economy, has become a norm. However, Pushpa’s trysts with her new job
pattern and the resultant upward social mobility do not seem to take into account
158 Economic liberalisation

the labour and economic contribution of another important family member, that
is, her mother. Pushpa’s mother used to string f lowers to enable her family, espe-
cially her daughter, to experience a decent standard of living. However, Pushpa
discounts her mother’s investment in the invisible, unpaid family labour. She also
accuses her of treating the sick father pathetically. Thus, women’s relentless
efforts are often taken for granted. The situation is made worse when they face a
lack of access to resources both within and without the family, which has a bear-
ing on their decision-making powers. Usha suggests how the traditional cultural
biases against women may not be resolved on their own but are accentuated with
newer developments in the economy.
The various rounds of NSS data reveal how it was precisely due to a decline
in employment generation in the urban manufacturing and service sector that
women had to crowd into the (retail) trade sector.13 Thus, women’s concentra-
tion in home-based, contractual, informal sectors of the economy leads to an
underestimation of women’s work at the national level also. Moreover, poverty
is a significant factor, compelling women to work on such inequitable terms. For
instance, Sundaram and Tendulkar reveal that “in both rural and urban India,
on an average, the workforce participation rates (WFPRs) of women from poor
households are higher than those from households above the poverty line” (as
quoted in Sudarshan and Bhattacharya 2009, 60). The situation is compounded
when women are simply considered as appendages to male labourers, leading
to an assumption that their income is merely supplementary to the household
income, when in reality the very survival of the household is contingent on
women’s labour, both paid and unpaid.
Pushpa’s mother’s matter of fact approach towards her husband’s illness, “I
do my duty by him, by all of you. . . . You can’t shed tears over a person who
dies everyday” ( Usha 2010, 90) reveals how it is more important for her to be
vigilant about the material constraints affecting her and the family’s future. She
cannot afford to lose herself in sloppy sentimentalism, which delimits women
within patriarchal hierarchies and cultural sanctions, affecting their independent
access to work outside family. Thus, unlike Pushpa, her mother “unmoved by
anything, attaching herself only to the task on hand” ( Usha 2010, 92) defies the
norms of what Saraswati Raju calls “respectable femininity” (2013, 18). By so
doing, she liberates herself from the “structural encoding on gendered behav-
iour” ( Raju 2013, 18), which, as discussed earlier, her daughter fails to do. In
fact, such a move becomes important in light of women’s attempts to retain
their individuality amidst familial pressures. Also worth noting is the fact that
attempts to claim an individuality such as this and its assertions are not mere
narratives of individual triumph and agency. Rather, it is through such subject
positions that one can aspire to find an alternative space or location vis-à-vis
an imposing and monotonous discourse of gendered labour and compensation.
Thus, a subject position outside this imposing discourse, stemming either from a
conscious distancing or from indifference, as demonstrated by Pushpa’s mother,
offers one of the ways to interrogate the dichotomous split between productive
 Economic liberalisation 159

and reproductive spheres of labour, so endorsed by the gendered contexts of the

liberalised nation-state.
******************
A close reading of Alka Saraogi’s Kali-Katha:Via Bypass and Usha K.R.’s Monkey-
Man has revealed that the writers have explored the rise of Right wing funda-
mentalisms, myriad overlapping networks of global economic processes, and their
implications for the gendered contexts of the family and nation. In fact, it has
become all the more pertinent to address the concerns of the post-independence
nation as the elusive rhetoric of ‘beyond the nation’ falls short of accounting for
the actual deprivations experienced by women, minorities, and the marginalised
sections of society.

Notes
1 Translated by author. Saraogi, Alka. 1998. Kali-Katha: Via Bypass. Haryana: Aadhar
Prakashan.
2 “The ekatmata yajna organised by the Vishva Hindu Parishad in 1983 conducted 47 sub-
sidiary yatras and it is claimed that participants number 60 million in India.” There was also
international participation by Hindu communities in Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Bangladesh,
Pakistan, and Mauritius who sent ‘holy water’ from their local rivers (Deshpande 2000, 203).
3 The socio-political implications of the Mandal recommendations unfurled the exclu-
sionary biases inherent in the upper caste, middle class rung of society. Young women
were out on the streets protesting against reservation on caste basis but this time their
visibility signified a regimented, socially conservative engagement with the gendered
habitus. They said they didn’t want to marry unemployed bachelors. It was a very clear
stand for the endogamic stratification of society, exposing the caste-class biases that had
been accompanying the development model. Similarly, the Anti-Sikh riots in Delhi,
1984, too could not be taken simply as a retributive measure in response to the assassina-
tion of the former primeminister Indira Gandhi. It too was sutured to the new forms
of politicisation and regionalism in which autonomy and resistance towards being “sub-
sumed within the national frame” (John 1996, 3072) were implicit.
4 Usha K.R. mentions the popular belief in this regard: “It is believed that when Kempe
Gowda was building the city wall, he found that they kept falling down again and again.
The goddess, it was said, was displeased and would be pacified with nothing less than the
sacrifice of a pregnant woman. Kempe Gowda was in a fix, and so his elder daughter-
in-law Lakshamma offered to give herself and her unborn to the goddess. After that, the
walls stood firm” (Usha 2010, 31).
5 The aforesaid bill has lapsed. However, the Niti Ayog in a report (2016), submitted to
the Prime Minister Office, New Delhi, has advocated to permit the entry of foreign
education providers in India and suggested that a new law could be framed to regulate
the operations of such universities in the country. Thus, the objectives and the vision of
the lapsed bill and the newly proposed law appear to be similar in spirit.
6 “Despite the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act 1994, prohibiting sex determination
and sex selection, the use of ultrasound and sex selective abortion was pervasive, with
local doctors, gynaecologists, radiologists and obstetricians, nurses, auxiliary nurse mid-
wives and other medical personnel all benefiting monetarily” (John et al. 2009, 17).
7 One of such researches was conducted in the districts of Kangra (Himachal Pradesh),
Fatehgarh Saheb (Punjab), Rohtak (Haryana), Dhaulpur (Rajasthan), and Morena
(Madhaya Pradesh) in as late as 2003–05 by Mary E. John, Ravinder Kaur, Rajni Palri-
wala, and Saraswati Raju.
160 Economic liberalisation

8 Though the mean age of marriage has increased over the years, it also entails the sheer
lengthening of the period for which the natal family must support a daughter. “With
persisting structures of patrilineal descent, patrilineal inheritance and post-marital resi-
dence patterns, young couples got to live with the husband’s family; sons continue the
family line and inherit property. . . . Daughters are not expected to support their parents
materially, and certainly not married daughters” (John et al. 2009, 18).
9 According to Sona Mitra’s (2006) research on the pattern of women’s employment in
urban India,
The organised public sector employment growth rate dropped from 2.4 per cent
between 1981–90 and only 0.3 per cent in 1990–2000. While there were increases
in the rate of growth of employment in the private organised sector from about
0.3 per cent in 1981–90 to 1.3 per cent in 1990–2000, on the whole such increases
were not enough to compensate for the loss of public employment.
(5008)
10 Globalisation and SAP have brought in concerns about the feminisation of poverty,
threatening to create economic and social divisions among women. “The rounds of the
NSS done in the mid-1990s point to the growing disparities despite the high economic
growth. Since the majority of women are in the informal sector, they are excluded from
the new economic drive” (Ghadially 2007, 18–19).
11 A central feature of individualisation is the fact that employees do not have a collective
identity as workers or as employees, nor do they collectively negotiate with manage-
ment on common issues. The software engineers and IT workers can only deal with the
consequent job insecurity by becoming “‘entrepreneurial’ workers . . . who fashion their
own careers. . . . Under the new dispensation, workers are responsible for their own
economic security and careers by continually re-outfitting themselves with new skills in
order to be saleable in the job market” (Upadhya and Vasavi 2008, 24).
12 “To help them do this, most software companies offer ‘soft skills’ training programmes in
subjects such as time management, self-actualisation, personality development, assertive-
ness, emotional intelligence and communication skills” (Upadhya and Vasavi 2008, 25).
13 Estimates given by Sundaram (2001) reveal that the “overall share of retail trade in total
employment in the service sector increased from 20 per cent in 1993–94 to about 27 per
cent in 1999–2000 and the share of retail trade in women’s employment increased from
approximately 20 per cent in 1993–94 to 24 per cent in 1999–2000. It can therefore be
concluded that in the 1990s, the increased activities in the trade sector mainly revolved
around retail trade. More often, in the case of women, this kind of retailing boils down
to street vending and petty selling of a whole range of items from green vegetables to
‘paan,’ beedi and cigarette” (as quoted in Mitra 2006, 5007).

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5
WRITINGS FROM THE MARGINS
Dalit and Muslim women’s narratives

The Dalit and Adivasi speakers present at the first national Dalit and Adivasi
Women’s Congress held on 15–16 February 2013 in the Tata Institute of Social
Sciences, Mumbai, raised extremely pertinent issues regarding caste discrimina-
tion and structural hierarchies present in the epistemological and institutional
grids of the nation-state. Sujatha Surepally (2013) relates the assertive statements
of these speakers in her report “Dalit and Adivasi Women Warriors Question
Caste and Gender Oppression” thus:

Why are our bodies targeted? Why only we bloody clean other humans’
shit? Why in the forests, North eastern states and borders, paramilitary and
security troops play with our bodies, destroy our lives? Why our women
panchayat leaders get stripped and paraded naked even after being in the
political system? Why are the Gujarat massacres plotted to kill our brothers
and sisters by our own people?

These questions highlight not only Dalit and Adivasi women’s dissatisfaction
with the democratic assertions of the nation-state1 but also their efforts at for-
mulating a Dalit feminist standpoint against centuries of ill-treatment meted out
to them by the feudal channels of the state manifested in, as Surepally further
relates, “literature, educational institutions, media, policy implementation, leg-
islation and bureaucracy, perhaps even in the air and deep down in the layers of
earth under India.”
This chapter takes up a detailed analysis of Bama’s Sangati (2005) and Salma’s
The Hour Past Midnight (2009), foregrounding the authors’ assertion from the
margins of the nation that expose how the architechtonicae of the nation-state
is contingent upon the pillars of subaltern voices, impinging on the centre in
pertinent ways.
164 Writings from the margins

Authors and works in perspective: Bama and Salma

Bama is a significant presence among the Dalit women writers of Tamil Nadu.
She was born at Puthupatti, a village in Tamil Nadu. Some of her significant
works include an autobiography titled Karukku (Origin/Sanctum 1992), two col-
lections of short stories, Kusumbukkaran (The Mischievous One 1996) and Oru Tat-
tvum Erumaiyum (Grandfather and a Baffalo 2003), and novels like Sangati (Events
1994), Vanmam (Wrath 2002), and Manuci (Woman 2010). Sangati, meaning events,
talks about a community of Dalit women, their individual and collective suffer-
ing, the relationship they share with one another, their strength, and their struggles
as Dalit Christians and women. In this sense, Sangati is perhaps the autobiogra-
phy of a community” (Holmstrom 2012, xv).
Writing, for Bama, is a way of getting healed. She expresses the pain of social
exclusion and marginalisation, protesting against all those who refuse to recognise
Dalits as humans. For instance, Bama (2011a) asserted in a session (“Is Writing a
Healing”) at the Chennai Literature festival held in 2011 that “there is a need to
come out of victimhood in order to become a militant. I become a militant to
protest against the system.” Bama further states that this protest could take several
forms – it could be explosive and violent, it could be non-violent, a breaking of
social norms and taboos, a hilarious display of wit, rustic humour, expletives, so
on and so forth. Her witty language is close to proverbs, folk songs, and folklore,
which represent the rich cultural traditions of Dalit Christians and their vigorous
community life. Critics like Lakshmi Holmstrom (2012) and Pramod K. Nayar
(2011) assert that such an appropriation of varied linguistic forms and textual
strategies ref lects a radicalisation of the authorial consciousness. “Bama is among
the few who bridge autobiography, fiction, polemics, and also a call for action”
(Holmstrom 2012, xxi). Her work has challenged the polarisations between fic-
tion and poetry, autobiography and political/anthropological writing, redefining
the language of protest in the process. Thus, it is difficult to slot her writings like
Karukku and Sangati as personal narratives or autobiographies only.
Salma’s The Hour Past Midnight significantly contributes to a strong tradition of
Muslim women’s writing in India, offering resistance to the syndicated struc-
tures of community and the nation-state. She hails from a small town in Tamil
Nadu called Thuvarankurichi. Salma’s formal schooling was discontinued after
she attained puberty. She would get books issued from the village library and read
them. Most of them were Tamil translations of Russian writers like Dostoevsky
and others. She was forcibly married nine years later into a family that restricted
her access to reading and writing. Much in the tradition of self-educated women
writers, she would read and write after all her family members would be asleep.
She told in an interview conducted by Ramya Kannan for The Hindu that she
would hide her pen and papers in the toilet, the only place where she could access
her creativity without any hindrance.
Salma’s literary oeuvre mainly consists of poetry. Her anthologies are titled
“Oru Malaiyum, Innoru Malaiyum” (“One Evening and Another Evening”
2000), “Pachai Devadhai” (“The Green Goddess” 2003). Her first novel Irandaam
 Writings from the margins 165

Jaamangalin Kathai (The Hour Past Midnight) was published in 2004. Her latest novel,
Manaamiyangal (Dreams), was published in 2016. Salma’s writings register a strong
rebellion against the codified structures of patriarchy and violence that affect the
everyday lives of women. Subramaniam (2006) relates Salma’s words in a write-up
posted on the website called Poetry International Rotterdam, “this world is not a private
one. It is shared by millions of women in similar life situations. Neither my pain,
nor my feelings are solely that of an individual; they belong to all such women.”
Salma’s arrival on the literary scene in Tamil Nadu was termed a significant
development by critics. They particularly praised Salma for writing strong femi-
nist content, dealing with a candid expression of women’s sexuality. As Subra-
maniam further states,

Salma’s writings have broken a new ground in Tamil literature for its
articulation of an unapologetically subjective female worldview, its bold
examination of life in a traditionally restrictive patriarchal context, its
refusal to allow the erasure of personal memory.

Her writings evoke a woman’s world of love, betrayal, sexuality, motherhood,

and frustrations, which negotiates the everyday life of injustices within family,
community, and nation.
Both the narratives, Sangati and The Hour Past Midnight, underscore that mul-
tiple patriarchies articulate themselves in the form of dominant patriarchy and
subaltern patriarchy, revealing that the former not only controls the caste-class
and communal dynamics in society but also affects the sexual politics. Such a
reading, however, does not entail that the concerns of Dalit and Muslim women
are similar and could be diluted under a common rubric of ‘victimhood.’
Alternatively, this chapter seeks to illustrate that any discussion of gender is
fraught with pressing issues of class, caste, and religion in society. It systemati-
cally reveals what Mary John (1998) terms the “unequal patriarchies and dis-
parate genders” (207) that must be interrogated to offer a viable critique of the
nation-state. Such an exercise, one could say, also facilitates the bridging of gaps
between the upper caste, middle class woman and the subaltern woman. Thus,
the central agenda of the women’s movement is not confined to attacking patri-
archal oppression. Instead, it is to recognise, as Kumkum Sangari (2008) states,
“the way patriarchies are embedded in or articulate with class structures, caste-
class inequalities, religious practices, wider dialectics of social legitimation and
their political formations” (522). The novels seek both to contribute as well as
to problematise the possibility of locating the woman question in contemporary
India within the varied levels of the social formation.

A gendered perspective on the Dalit question

in Bama’s Sangati
Sangati is one of the seminal works of Dalit literature, which candidly deals with
the concerns of gender inequality, caste-class, and religious oppression within
166 Writings from the margins

and without the Dalit community. Bama’s representation of the hitherto sup-
pressed voices of the Dalit Christian community highlight that her writings are
not merely instances of literary merit but acts of courage. In fact, Sangati appeals
to, in Pramod Nayar’s words, “the moral imagination of the readers, creating
a viable ground for “insertion of new identities (victims), contexts (casteism,
racism), economies (suffering) into popular and public discourses of the nation –
India – to produce a rights imaginary and a rights literacy”(as quoted in Kothari
2013, 61).
Is Dalit identity marked by religion or not? Can Dalits be treated as reli-
gion neutral, monolith, or only a section of Hindu society? Bama takes up these
questions, illustrating how the community’s decision to convert to Christianity
could not emancipate them socially, politically, and economically. By so doing,
it negates Bhimrao Ambedkar’s observation that religious conversion could pave
the way for social mobility in case of Dalits. Ambedkar emphasised the impor-
tance of religious conversion thus: “to get human treatment, convert yourself,
convert for getting organised, convert for becoming strong, convert for securing
equality, convert for getting liberty, convert so that your domestic life could be
happy” (as quoted in Louis 2007b, 16). Instead, Bama highlights how religious
conversions could not equip the lower castes to negotiate the oppressive institu-
tions of communal and state power. She refers to the colonial roots of Christian-
ity in India, highlighting how the missionaries had served as yet another mask of
imperial conquest in India. They could not alter the hierarchical ascriptions of an
indigenous feudal and upper caste structure, which affected the evolution of an
equitable and just social order in post-independence India. Bama Faustina (2012)
wonders, “Why on earth paraiyas alone become Christians, I don’t know, but
because they did so at that time; now it works out that they get no concessions
from the government whatsoever” (5).
The upper caste Christians too reject the claims of Dalit Christians to have an
equal access to resources, resulting in the distortion of the Christian message of
love, service, charity, and brotherhood. Prakash Louis (2007a) rightly states, “the
prevalence of brahmin Christian, kamma or reddy Christian, syrian Christian,
caste Christian or dalit Christian itself is an indication of continuance of caste
even after a person has given up following Hinduism” (1405). Louis’ assertion can
be corroborated by the Mandal Commission report (1992), which also acknowl-
edged the presence and continuance of caste-based discrimination after religious
conversion. It made appropriate suggestions to extend the reservation privileges
(which are otherwise offered to Scheduled Castes) to Dalit Christians as well

The change of religion did not always succeed in eliminating castes. The
converts carried with them their castes and occupations to the new reli-
gions. The result has been that even among Sikhs, Muslims and Chris-
tians, casteism prevails in varying degrees in practice, their preaching
notwithstanding.
(as quoted in Louis 2007a, 1407)
 Writings from the margins 167

Even as Dalits had sought conversion to escape centuries of dehumanisation,

to secure socio-economic security and social justice, their dreams were soon
shattered as they found themselves at the cross roads of exploitative tendencies
inherent in the religious and caste divide. Bama further relates how there have
been evidences of caste discrimination and exploitation within the church as
well. She describes that it is mandatory for Dalit Christians to carry their offer-
ings to the parish priest during the pussai (Catholic mass). The fact that they
are poor and cannot afford to make such offerings every Sunday does not deter
the priest from claiming such gifts, who instead “threatens them with tales of
God, Heaven, and Hell” ( Faustina 2012 , 35). The quest for spiritual fulfilment is
inevitably betrayed amidst such inequalities.
The power structure in the Catholic Church is deeply hierarchical. As Louis
states, “even though Dalit Christians are about 65 per cent in the Catholic Church
in Tamil Nadu, only about 3.8 per cent among the priests and nuns are Dalits”
(2007a, 1405). Bama also poignantly documents in her autobiography Karukku
(2011b) how Dalits are forced to render menial service, shouted at, and branded
uncultured creatures, not amenable to improvement (21). She elaborates on this
aspect, relating how her seven-year stint as a kanyastree at Matam ends up in a
bitter fallout from the church because Dalit Christians could not acquire either
a status of equality, dignity, or social esteem within the Christian fold. Sangati
also offers a critique of institutionalised Christianity, which exploits and dis-
criminates against the converted Dalits. It calls into question not only the class
and caste distinctions practised by the upper castes but also the church, which
covertly and overtly practises caste discrimination.
Bama highlights the way Dalit Christian women negotiate the hierarchical
contexts of indigenous patriarchy and the church authority. For instance, the
women of her community express themselves through a thriving cultural tradi-
tion and community life. The coming of age and betrothal ceremony, where the
groom offers gifts to the bride rather than asking for dowry, instances of women
working together, singing, and sharing their happiness and woes illustrate that
Dalits have been maintaining strong communal ties and cultural values despite
structural oppression. Nevertheless, the bargaining potential of Dalit Christian
women has been systematically weakened because of their inferior social loca-
tion within the community, which endorses patriarchal values of ownership and
control of women.
Dalit Christian women cannot walk out of an oppressive marital condition
because Christianity has not authorised the concept of divorce.2 As Bama relates,
women of her community are rendered vulnerable in comparison to the mem-
bers of Chakkili and Pallar Dalit communities, who have the freedom to dissolve
their marriage by mutual consent. “It meant a woman need not spend her entire
life, burning and dying, with a man she dislikes, just because of this thing called
marriage. But I also felt sad that Christian women didn’t have this chance” (2012,
93). She subtly hints at how the community laws tend to circumscribe women’s
everyday lives, rendering their rights ambiguous. Thus, the Catholic Church, in
168 Writings from the margins

defining marriage as indissoluble and forbidding divorce, throws women at the

mercy of redundant patriarchal biases and communal practices.
When Bama raises such issues, she inevitably highlights the provisions of the
Indian Divorce Act 1869, which along with the Indian Christian Marriage Act
of 1872 came to regulate matrimonial relationships of Indian Christians during
colonial times.3 While in Britain, the laws pertaining to marriage and divorce
have been taken out of the ambit of ecclesiastical laws to civilian courts, they
remain within the purview of Christian personal laws in India. As Tasneem
Shahnaaz (2016) states “It was felt that the Indian Divorce Act of 1869 would
automatically absorb the reforms that took place in England and . . . there was no
need to bring about changes in the Act” (132).
In fact, the British laws on marriage were reformed and instituted by a Prot-
estant statute of the British Parliament and any subsequent changes made in
their statues after 1947 could not be transposed to Indian soil. As Flavia Agnes
(2000) highlights, “the laws concerned could not be transposed onto the gender
dynamics of native Christians. Their interests and aspirations came to be largely
represented by the Catholic Church as against the liberal Protestant ideology of
the British India” (2902).
Furthermore, Bama raises a very serious issue when she questions the Catho-
lic Church’s right to determine women’s lives. The parish priests are not only
callous towards the plight of women and their individual preferences regarding
marriage outside the caste norms, they also impel women to be “tied through
a matrimonial bond to a violent or absentee husband” (Agnes 2000, 2902). For
instance:

The priest says, ‘What God has put together . . . no law nor panchayat nor
courts of justice can separate a wedded couple.’ . . . It’s by calling on all this
stuff about God . . . the priests and nuns frighten the life out of us.
(Faustina 2012, 94–95)

Bama’s concerns could be further corroborated by Agnes’ interrogatory stance

over the issue, “Who can ensure that those who conciliate and mediate from
within authoritarian Church structures do so from the perspective of women’s
rights? Could women be browbeaten into accepting hostile or unfavourable prop-
ositions” (2000, 2901)? Often, such assumed procedures of mediation do more harm
than benefiting women’s demands of equality.

Negotiating the multiple patriarchies: the Dalit woman

question in Sangati
Why is there a need to adopt a subaltern feminist standpoint? How do we define
standpoint and how enabling is it for redefining the Dalit woman question?
Judith Grant (1993) asserts that “the failure of dominant groups to critically and
systematically interrogate their advantaged situation leaves their social situation
 Writings from the margins 169

scientifically and epistemologically a disadvantaged one for generating knowl-

edge” (as quoted in Rege 1998, WS-45). She further proposes that knowledge
from a standpoint involves an analysis and a realisation of the dispersal of power
and its differentials operating among different individuals, enabling the margin-
alised sections of society to redefine their place/position within the structures
of the nation.
The present book has significantly illustrated that the upper caste, middle
class women writers and feminists offer a materialist critique of the mainstream
socio-economic and political processes. They also highlight and problematise the
patriarchal biases and violence inherent in the conceptualisations of gender rela-
tions, capitalist structure of development, social reproduction, access to health
facilities and resources, legal and judicial framework, and property rights of
women. However, such efforts have been blinkered with, to borrow from Sandra
Harding (1995), the “add women and stir” approach (295).
The women’s movement could reach out to and link up with anti-caste, work-
ing class, and landless labourers’ movement only under the rubric of “common-
ality of women’s experience . . . [which was] stressed as a point at which political
differences could be transcended” ( Kumar 1993, 154). The concerns of the
women’s movement have largely remained within the purview of what Sharmila
Rege (1998) terms “experience and personal politics” (WS-42), severely marked
by an absence of analytical engagement with the woman question in light of
caste hierarchies and its links with dominant/brahminical patriarchies. While
the women’s organisations affiliated with the Left parties continued to subsume
the concerns of caste into class, the autonomous women’s movement assumed the
differentials of caste, class, and religion as secondary to a constructed unity in
the name of sisterhood.
It was due to such lacunas in the ‘mainstream’ women’s movement and writ-
ings that a need for a separate Dalit feminist assertion got crystallised. The Dalit
women’s writings in languages like Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Malay-
alam came out in the 1990s to register a strong dissent from the mainstream fem-
inist engagement and biased literary accounts of their struggle against patriarchy.
For instance, Vinodini, a Telugu Dalit feminist writer and critic rightly argues,

Feminism made me overlook the fact that there was a problem worse than
patriarchy: caste. Questions that were asked by feminists take on a radically
different form in the Dalit context: The issues here . . . are of hate, of being
detested, spat upon.
(as quoted in Tharu and Satyanarayana 2013, 38)

The conceptual frames deployed by Dalit women writers pertaining to issues

like domestic violence, sexuality, suicide, and body are radically different from
the way upper caste, middle class women writers approach them in their literary
writings. For instance, far from exploring questions of desire, sexuality, attrac-
tion, and violence within a personalised landscape, Dalit women writers focus on
170 Writings from the margins

how such issues are associated with the way society breeds multiple inequalities
in order to maintain the hierarchical grids of caste.
Bama’s Sangati engages with these issues, “contributing both to the Dalit
movement and to the women’s movement” (Holmstrom 2012, xvi). For instance,
Bama categorically asserts that Dalit women must take control over their lives as
any anticipation of uplift from external sources, especially upper caste women,
is doomed to fail:

upper-caste women show us no pity or kindness either, if only as women to

women, but treat us with contempt, as if we . . . have no sense of honour
or self-respect. . . . They’ll shout . . . making great claims. They’ll forbid
us to speak a word.
(2012, 66)

This clearly indicates the failure of the middle class women’s movement to bridge
the gap between their personalised feminist concerns and the revolutionary
struggle of the lower caste, marginalised, and working classes in society.
Bama takes up the issue of dowry to highlight the differential play of vio-
lence in the lives of upper caste women and pariah women, “They [upper caste
women] have to cover the girls’ necks with jewellery, give them cash in their
hands, and write off property and land in their names. . . . Their in-laws keep
on complaining .  .  . and they torment the girls” (2012, 112). While the Left
party-based women’s movements interpreted dowry violence as a trait of entre-
preneurial families, whose sons killed women so that they could remarry and
gather more wealth to negotiate the contemporary demands of a new capitalist
and liberal economy, the autonomous women’s organisations saw it as a part of
the larger dynamics of patriarchal violence. Even as they did so, both the organ-
isational movements could not get to the core issue of the problem. Dowry is an
essential ritual of the Brahma form of marriage, codified by the colonial law.4
Moreover, as Rege states, “the principle of endogamy and its coercive perpetua-
tion through collective violence against inter-caste alliances are all crucial to the
analysis of the dowry question” (1998, WS-43).
The women’s movement bypassed this perspective altogether, agitating for
legal reform instituted by the state in order to confront the social, cultural, and
capitalist practices of patriarchy. However, what about Dalit women who are not
troubled as such for dowry since “the groom’s family will see to all the wedding
expenses” (Faustina 2012, 112) but, as Bela Malik (2003) states, “given the divi-
sion of labour within the household, suffer from the lack of access to water, fuel
sources, and sanitation facilities, exposing themselves to humiliation and vio-
lence” (103)? In fact, the overall structures of violence (dowry is just one aspect of
it), which affect both the upper caste and Dalit women, are to be located specifi-
cally in the context of the intersections between caste and labour.
To this effect, Bama consistently highlights the permanent shadow of physi-
cal assault and violence, looming over Dalit women. The threat of rape and
 Writings from the margins 171

physical violence at the hands of the landlord and/or their (Dalit) men disables
Dalit women to claim any control over the value of their labour. Eleanor Zelliot
rightly (2003) asserts in this context, “hierarchy in a social system is ref lected
in hierarchy in the home. Rights and special privileges for one caste can be
translated into rights and special privileges for one gender” (215). However, the
interpretation of gender relations, sexuality, and devaluation of women’s labour
by the activists of the women’s movement have fallen short of forging significant
alliances across the graded caste structures.
The arduous day’s toil, unequal wages, and lack of access to resources in the
outside world accompanied by ill-treatment and sexual abuse at the hands of
landlord and their husband render Dalit women incapable of the right to self-
determination, so coveted by the upper caste, middle class women’s movement.
As Bama asserts, “it is the woman who looks after everything in the house . . . . On
the one side she is worn out with physical toil, on the other, she is beaten until
she is left with only a half or a quarter life” (2012, 67). Thus, they are socially,
economically, and politically marginalised not only due to external forces of
dominant patriarchy but also internal processes of Dalit patriarchy and com-
munity laws.
An underlying assumption that runs through major discourses on the Dalit
woman question is that their freedom is ruthlessly taken away in a bid for upward
social mobility by Dalit men, resulting in what Rege terms “masculinisation
of Dalithood” (1998, WS-42). She further suggests, though, the Dalit Panthers
Movement significantly contributed to the “cultural revolt of the 1970s, both in
its writings and programme, the Dalit women remained encapsulated firmly in
the roles of the mother and the victimized sexual being” ( Rege 1998, WS-42).
It subtly hints at the reconceptualisation of gender roles among Dalits, suggest-
ing that their socially upwardly mobile status has enabled Dalit men to adorn
the upper caste gender codes of masculinity, resulting in the oppression of their
women.
Nevertheless, this argument is based on a tenuous ground, as Sangati goes on
to reveal, “when I ref lect on how the men in our streets went about drinking and
beating their wives, I wonder whether all that violence was because there was
nowhere else for them to exert their male pride or . . . authority” ( Faustina 2012,
65). Since both men and women are “differently constituted within regionally
diverse patriarchal relations, cross-hatched by graded caste inequalities” (Rege
et al. 2013, 36), their experiences are also a product of the same, foreground-
ing what Anupama Rao (2003) asserts, “that one participates in, yet retains a
historical and political distance from the dominant structures whose discourses
attempt to stif le other ways of caste being” (280). Thus, Bama’s narrative suggests
that freedom from child marriage, dowry, enforced monogamy, and widowhood
constitute but a limited yardstick through which their freedom could be mapped.
Moreover, it does more damage than help to only conceive the Dalit woman’s
self either in terms of oppression or the romanticisation of her freedom and/or
resourcefulness.
172 Writings from the margins

Since Bama has located Dalit women at the interstices of the structural vio-
lence embedded in the ideas of caste and labour, the patriarchal control over
women cannot simply be reduced to the processes of imitation or upward social
mobility by Dalit men. This not only takes away the emancipatory potential of
the Dalit movement but also the viability of their everyday struggles against the
dominant caste structures.
To this effect, we also need to move beyond the additive approach, proposed
by Ruth Manorama (2008), of considering Dalit women as “‘Dalits among Dalits’
because they are thrice alienated on the basis of caste, class and gender” (450).
Instead, as Nira Yuval-Davis (2006) suggests one must “develop an analysis of the
intersectionality of various social divisions” (195) because:

Narratives [of social divisions] often ref lect hegemonic discourses of iden-
tity politics that render invisible experiences of the more marginal members
of that specific social category. . . . In such identity politics constructions,
what takes place is actually fragmentation and multiplication of the wider
categorical identities rather than more dynamic, shifting and multiplex
constructions of intersectionality.
(195)

However, this can be achieved by not insisting on, what Gopal Guru (2003) calls
“talking differently” (85) but by adopting “a Dalit feminist standpoint, which
is deeply aware of the histories, the preferred social relations and utopias and
the struggles of the marginalised” ( Rege 1998, WS-45). It is by interrogating
middle class biases, caste privileges, and the allied feminist standpoints that one
can arrive at a Dalit feminist standpoint,5 which would go a long way in consti-
tuting a collective feminist effort without running into the danger of subsuming
the other.
Bama invests hope precisely in this kind of transformation of subjectivities
that would no longer be contingent on the gendered matrix of caste differences,
enabling us to forge affiliations within and without the community:

We should educate boys and girls alike, showing no difference between

them as they grow into adults. We should give our girls the freedom we
give our boys. . . . Then there will come a day when men and women will
live as one, with no difference between them; with equal rights. Then
injustices, violence, and inequalities will come to an end.
(Faustina 2012, 123)

Bama’s suggestions to transform the caste-ridden gendered habitus might seem

too idealistic to be true but they make viable attempts at contesting the casteist
and communal structures of the nation-state that undergird the exploitation of
Dalits, especially Christian Dalits. As Sangati reveals, the casteist and communal
structures affect the citizenship rights of Dalits, their educational, employment
levels, and, most significantly, their access to health services and state resources.
 Writings from the margins 173

Differential access to resources: the case of Dalit

and Muslim women
The top-down model of the nation-state adopted in independent India where
centrally conceived policies are implemented through a strong network of bureau-
cracy has met with its own problems and gender is one such sensitive domain
where these policies exhibit an apathy and even ignorance of the ground realities.
Consequently, many of these policies often fail miserably when confronted with
diverse realities of the multi-lingual, multi-cultural, and multi-religious society.
I will now look at how the novels by Bama and Salma highlight the lacunas
embedded in the state policies, exposing that resources promised by the state to
all its citizens often do not reach them in equal measure. They get altered in the
wake of pre-existing caste and gender hierarchies.
Having said this, I would like to assert that the juxtaposition between the
literary and the historical may not be (mis)interpreted as an argument for Dalit
standpoint theory and/or identity politics. Both Bama and Salma deploy the
novel form to talk about their respective communities, cultures, rituals, food
habits, and religious norms, which have otherwise been silenced (and stereo-
typed) by the upper caste, majoritarian discourses of the nation-state. In doing
so, the authors focus on the everyday rebellions, opinions, and choices of their
characters, which facilitate their negotiation with the rigid caste, communal,
and institutional structures of the nation. Pramod K. Nayar (2011) describes this
phenomenon as the “radicalisation of common sense through the infusion of
the language and culture of human rights” (377). To further quote Nayar: “the
widespread dissemination and appropriation of the language of rights by those
subjects that have never spoken actually widens the ambit of rights. It . . . ener-
gises the very genre of Indian fiction within the culture of rights” (388).

Representation of the Dalit women and their access

to resources in Bama’s Sangati
Sangati charts the problems Dalit women encounter in their everyday life. In
dealing with the mundane aspects of the life of Dalit women, Bama wishes to
highlight that events in the lives of Dalit women do not imply any extraordinary
happening. On the contrary their mere struggle for survival on a daily basis is full
of events. She further suggests that women’s deprivation is mainly induced and
intensified by exclusion. For instance, strenuous hard work in the fields exposes
them to humiliation and violence at the hands of upper caste men and women.
Domestic violence manifested in the form of enforced sex and pregnancy is also
responsible for higher maternity and infant mortality rate among Dalit women
and children, respectively.
In this light, a working paper prepared by Vani K. Borooah, Nidhi Sadana
Sabharwal, and Sukhadeo Thorat (2012) under the aegis of the Indian Insti-
tute of Dalit Studies clearly reveals how the instances of poor health and mal-
nutrition are relatively higher in the case of Dalit women and children. “In
174 Writings from the margins

2001 while nationally (across rural India) about 40.5 per cent of all women were
underweight, the incidence of undernutrition was eight per cent higher for Dalit
women”( Borooah, Sabharwal and Thorat 2012, 5). Moreover, Dalit women suf-
fer from higher levels of “mortality inducing factors” (6) like limited access to
safe drinking water, public health care services, poor sanitation, and psychologi-
cal stress induced by greater burden of labour within the household and without.
These factors severely affect the overall physical and mental health of Dalit
women. Bama relates the case of Dalit women who “have died because they
have their babies at home, without proper care. But they don’t have the means to
pay for hospital care. And neither nurses nor doctors will come into our street as
willingly as they go to others” (2012, 90). This can be further corroborated by
the findings of the working paper,

while 15 per cent higher caste women did not receive prenatal care, such
care was not received by 26 per cent Dalit women. Similarly, as compared
to 27 per cent higher caste women who did not receive post natal care,
such care was not received by 37 per cent Dalit women.
(Borooah, Sabharwal and Thorat 2012, 15)

While Bama’s grandmother and community members are aware of the medi-
cal facilities available at the town hospital, the fact that the grandmother has to
take Mariamma to the city each time she falls ill reveals how the government has
not taken serious initiatives to ensure the accountability of primary health sys-
tem. For instance, medical health centres and trained medical staff are conspicu-
ous by their absence in Dalit villages. A report by the Central Bureau of Health
Intelligence (CBHI, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare) reveals the possible
reasons behind this absence and also the inadequate allocation of resources to
the public health care system. “Public spending on health in India has increased
from 0.22 per cent of GDP in 1950–51 to 1.05 percent of GDP during the mid
1980s, and stagnated at around 0.9 percent of the GDP during the later years”
(2). Moreover, the draft chapter on health for the Twelfth Five Year Plan further
reveals that the government have not only delegated an abysmally low “1.5 per
cent of GDP as the total public investment on health but also laid emphasis on
privatisation and corporatisation of health sector” ( Muttreja 2012, 10). Bama’s
Sangati documents the everyday travails of Dalit women, indirectly contesting
the Planning Commission’s insistence on such blinkered ideas that have grave
implications for women, poor, and marginalised sections of society.
It is significant to observe that the access to resources is primarily contingent
on the educational levels of the community. However, Bama raises some inter-
esting questions about the viability of education offered to her community by
both the church and the state, “Even though the white priests offered them a free
education, the small children refused to go to school. They all went off and took
up any small job they could get” ( Faustina 2012 , 5). S K Yadav (1991) rightly
suggests in Education for Scheduled Castes:
 Writings from the margins 175

Schooling represents an indirect cost to families where children are involved

in economic (including household) activities. . . . It has been observed that
at the time of harvesting crops, children of landless labourers are required
to assist their families in the field. This usually leads to non-enrolment,
irregular attendance or dropping out of school.
(as quoted in Nambissan 1996, 1019)

Thus, poor living conditions and disadvantages induced by lower caste status
impel the children to work in the fields and not go to school. They further tes-
tify to wastage of resources, practice of untouchability, and the consequent social
exclusion faced by Dalits in schools and colleges.6
Moreover, Dalit Christians continue to be discriminated against in the employ-
ment sector as well. What does this suggest? Bama hints at a possible nexus between
the elite institutional structures of the nation and the church to manipulate the
availability of resources to a particular community. This is corroborated by
Louis’ findings that “few Dalit Christians have secured any position in profes-
sional fields and in bureaucracy like caste Christians” (2007b, 21).
According to the Census of India 1991, about 54.7 per cent of Dalit Christians
continue to be agricultural labourers. Hardly about 3.5 per cent have managed
to reach the higher and lower administrative levels and about the same percent-
age has acquired teaching positions. The rest of them are still engaged in the
unorganised labour sector (72.41 per cent). Prakash Louis further suggests that
“11.48 per cent Dalit Christians are engaged in manual scavenging like their
caste persons following Hindu religion” (2007b, 22). Thus, Dalit Christians’
access to education has not empowered them as it should have.
Bama highlights how the educational policies framed by the government
have not been able to achieve equity in education and opportunity aimed at
social justice. She raises questions like, can education enable one to improve her
self-image and social status? “Even women teachers who are my colleagues find
my lifestyle unbearable. . . . Not only do I have to struggle against men, I have
to also bear the insults from women of other castes” ( Faustina 2012 , 121–122).
So, how far does Ambedkar’s slogan ‘Educate, Agitate and Organise’ hold rel-
evance in the present day context of India? Is it actually empowering for Dalit
women? Even though, Bama is among the first generation Dalits to acquire
school education in her community, we do not come across a sense of euphoria so
evident in the case of upper caste, middle class women who thought that access
to education was the key to their liberation. Bama sadly ref lects how access to
education might not translate into an actual realisation of liberty in the case of
Dalit women.
Contrary to the state of affairs, the Constitution has always read untouch-
ability as forbidden and thus abolished, which leaves it undefined within the
purview of extant socio-political and economic practices.7 It is this limited per-
spective that also propelled the Committee on the Status of Women in India
(CSWI) during the making of the Towards Equality report. The committee takes
176 Writings from the margins

up significant issues like the problems faced by workers in the unorganised

labour sector, poor working conditions in factories, health hazards faced by
women and children at work, but eschews from locating them within a possible
context of lower caste and/or the practice of untouchability. Thus, the institu-
tional structures, in turning a blind eye towards these nuances in law, aggravate
the passive exclusion of Dalits.8
Bama relates how her grandmother, in the absence of her own land, worked
as a kothachi, organising labour for the upper caste landowners. Despite the fact
that she was supposed to allocate work among villagers, collect the wages from
the landowners and distribute them accordingly, “they [upper caste landown-
ers] used to make her walk up and down ten times a day, like a dog” (Faustina
2012, 8). In fact, lack of education and skills, compounded by poverty, igno-
rance of law, limited opportunities of employment, seasonal contracts, vagaries
of contractual labour, and dependence on husband or family severely affect the
bargaining power of Dalit women labourers.
Bama highlights how inequality in wages gets compounded by lack of ade-
quate compensation and facilities for the workers. The employer and the con-
tractor take advantage of their privileged caste status, employing villagers on
contract, whose terms and conditions are not known to them in most cases.
When Mariamma slips into the well while carrying a basket of rubble out of it,
she is excessively injured, “from her neck to her feet she was covered in plaster”
(Faustina 2012, 18). The grandmother relates similar incidents when workers had
died or injured themselves during an accident on the construction site. However,
these injured workers or their family members are not paid adequate compensa-
tion in lieu of the losses incurred on the site.
The Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act of 1970 makes the prin-
cipal employer responsible for the provision of essential amenities and payment
of wages. Under this Act, the contractor is not supposed to deduct his own cut
from the wages fixed by the employer. He is supposed to pay the entire wage, as
decided by the employer. Moreover, he is bound to provide them with certain
basic amenities like clean drinking water, toilets, canteen, and first-aid. The con-
tractual labourer is also entitled to health insurance benefits under the Employees
State Insurance Scheme, but few employers are concerned about implementing
these regulations and providing their benefit to the contractual labourer (Sharma
and Sujaya 2012 , 131). However, none of these facilities are mentioned by Bama,
which establishes how there could have been no legal provision, binding on the
employers, to this effect. As previously mentioned, the narrative of silence on
such matters of socio-historical importance reveals the systematic silencing and
marginalising of lower caste voices and their rights.
This further reveals how laws are manipulated because of embedded loop-
holes. For example, even though Maikkanni experiences a severe stomach ache
while working in the matchbox factory, which hints at a possible health hazard
due to inhalation of too much chemical, there is no provision of medical care
 Writings from the margins 177

for her. Moreover, the fact that she is a child renders her more vulnerable to the
exploitation at the hands of the contractor. He hits her often on the pretext of
applying too much paste on the matchbox labels or shitting outside the factory
under a tree. Despite the presence of toilets, the workers are weary to use them
since they have never used them in their life. Though Maikkanni laughs at the
provision of a “shit- room” (73), buried deep below her laughter is her insecurity
to use anything new. No efforts are made by the employer/contractor to create
enabling conditions for the use of toilets, resorting to physical abuse instead.
Despite the fact that workers are given a few facilities, the employers f lout the
basic law, which advocates the abolition of child labour. The special chapter on
“Women and Development” included in the Sixth Five Year Plan acknowledges
this f louting of law, recognising women as the most vulnerable members of the
family. In fact, the Government of India (n.d.) proposes that a three-fold strategy
of “economic emancipation of the family with specific attention to women, edu-
cation of children and family planning will constitute the three major operational
aspects of the family centred poverty alleviation strategy.” However, the fact that
each time Maikkanni’s mother conceives, the girl child has to work both inside
and outside the home to earn suitable wages speaks volumes about the inability
of the institutional planning initiatives to reach the core of the problem.
Women’s vulnerability is deeply related to asymmetry of gender relations,
which has assumed, more or less, statusquoist dimensions in this country. More-
over, what kinds of scales are available to measure this vulnerability? Maikkanni’s
father has abandoned his wife but comes back only to physically exploit the wife,
“leaving her . . . with a child in her belly every time” (Faustina 2012, 69). No
measures of poverty-alleviation could help the likes of Maikkanni and her
mother unless and until their right to land ownership is endorsed by the state
structures and their daily struggles to sustain themselves are acknowledged. This
argument further opens up space to discuss the gender relations between Dalit
men and women, which are impinged upon by both caste and gender inequalities
and deprivation. In 1992, though 54.7 per cent Dalit Christians of Tamil Nadu
were agricultural labourers, only 7.2 per cent owned their own lands. In most
cases where Dalit Christians own lands, their women seem to have no ownership
rights over it.
The access to fundamental resources like firewood and water is also a mat-
ter of unequal contestation, which further increases the victimisation of Dalit
women. As Bama asserts, women are not allowed to go watch cinema or gather
firewood alone from fields because “if upper caste fellows clap eyes on you, you’re
finished. They’ll drag you off and rape you, that’s for sure” (Faustina 2012 , 8).
The upper caste landowner Kumarasami Ayya attempts to assault Mariamma
precisely on this account. He pushes her inside the pump-set shed, owned by him,
when she goes in to get water. Thus, the persecution of Dalit women is severely
orchestrated along the caste-labour axis and their unequal access to ownership
of resources. Their body is stigmatised despite their valuable contributions to
178 Writings from the margins

the economic processes of the family and community. As Meena Gopal (2013)
asserts,

To ensure this continued control, Dalit women’s sexuality is constructed as

transgressive, they are deemed promiscuous. . . . It is through the threat of
sexual violence, Dalit women’s socially reproductive labour for the com-
munity is ensured.
(92)

Even though Mariamma manages to escape from the landowner’s grip, he,
“afraid that his reputation might be in ruins” (Faustina 2012, 20), distorts the
details of the incident in his favour. He approaches the headmen of the pariah
community and tells them that he saw Mariamma and Manikkam “behaving in
a dirty way” (20) inside his pump-set shed. Bama highlights the men’s reaction
to this incident, critiquing how their inability to confront the landlord translates
into oppressing their own women. The village elders do not trust Mariamma’s
version when she denies the allegations made on her character by the mudallali
(landlord). The women present at the meeting are also abused and asked to leave.
Their testimonies in favour of Mariamma are not accepted. Susaiamma, one of
the women present there, asserts, “There is no way of convincing them of the
truth. . . . They never allow us to sit down at the village meetings. . . . It’s one
justice for men and quite another for women” (Faustina 2012 , 24).
The incident betrays how Dalit women operate within certain specific caste
and patriarchal contexts, which tend to determine these women. Furthermore,
the village headmen and community men impose a fine on both Mariamma and
Manikkam (Rs 200 and Rs 100 respectively) without even verifying mudalaali’s
version. There could be two reasons for it that are not unrelated. Firstly, they are
aware of the fact that they cannot raise their voice against the landlord as they
would be thrown at his mercy for the next day’s labour. It is a common practice
for landowners to not offer any employment opportunities to Dalits if they assert
their rights. There have been incidents of Dalit villages being set afire and/or
booked under false charges by police, precisely on such grounds of assertion. The
Dalit Christians, being the lowest among the low, could not have afforded to
pick an issue over Mariamma’s matter. “Even if the mudalaali was really at fault,
it is better to keep quiet. Once before there was a fight . . . and these upper caste
men set the police on us. We were beaten to a pulp” ( Faustina 2012, 25). Thus,
the upper caste punitive regime terrorises them into submission.
Secondly, as Gabriele Dietrich (2003) has suggested, Dalit leaders may have
their own patriarchal interests in using or suppressing a sexual assault on a
woman (58), subtly hinting at the issue of proxy Dalit consciousness, operating
in close nexus with upper caste patriarchy. Here, Bama interrogates the much-
romanticised notion that Dalit women experience relative sexual freedom over
upper caste women. She problematises this freedom by undergirding, what Diet-
rich calls
 Writings from the margins 179

the triple plight of Dalit women . . . under conditions of grinding poverty,
exploitation at work place, caste specific ban on water access and gang rape
from upper castes, while at the same time they may be beaten up in their
own houses as well.
(70)

The Dalit Christian women are not even entitled to invoke the Scheduled
Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of ) Atrocity Act, 1989, because their
conversion to Christianity disables them from claiming rights under the SC and
ST Atrocity Act. They are, at the most, considered OBCs in some parts of India,
who have no special provisions reserved for them by the state.
Is it possible for Dalit women to make themselves heard amidst such structural
hierarchies and institutional determinations? How do they fare in terms of com-
munity and political participation? Bama illustrates that the democratic promise
and state institutions have failed Dalits in more ways than one. The Right to
Vote and participation in elections do not necessarily guarantee an empowered
experience of citizenship to Dalits. In the novel, while Bama’s grandmother and
a few other women in the village are seemingly unaware of the correct proce-
dure to cast vote, it does not imply that they are equally unaware of the contem-
porary political processes,

So what do we lose if we don’t vote? Whether we vote or not, those who

drink kanji continue to drink kanji and those who eat rice continue to eat
rice. People talk as if it is only by voting that we fill our stomachs.
(Faustina 2012, 100)

Contrary to what the CSWI reported about the close relationship between
literacy and political awareness among people (Sharma and Sujaya 2012 , 210),
Bama suggests that political awareness is closely intertwined with an acute
realisation of one’s social location in society. Since, the “picture of the man
ploughing” ( Faustina 2012 , 99) is relatively closer to their everyday experi-
ence, they would vote for it, as Anthoni does. The kind of excuse Anthoni
gives may be divorced from a sound knowledge of actual political processes,
but it hints at a gradual building up of electoral autonomy among the rural and/
or Dalit voters.
The secrecy of the ballot gives women the confidence to vote for the candidate
they like, irrespective of their husband’s or family’s insistence on voting for a spe-
cific candidate. One could locate Anthoni’s reasoning in this structure of asser-
tion, which has eventually forced the political parties to no longer view women
as appendages to men and undertake, instead, suitable measures to improve the
political knowledge of women. It has been established that political participation
and voting turnout among women, especially in rural areas, depends on their
political mobilisation. The CSWI found out an increasing trend of political disil-
lusionment among women, which was primarily on “account of their feelings of
180 Writings from the margins

ineffectiveness in solving problems which affect their lives” (Sharma and Sujaya
2012, 213). The cynicism is heightened by the fact that despite casting an invalid
vote, the grandmother asserts, “O yes, as if my vote alone is going to make such
a difference! . . . All that happens is that we lose a day’s work because of this vot-
ing business” (Faustina 2012 , 98). Here, it is significant to note that the election
campaign of political parties, especially in rural areas, is limited to shouting party
slogans, passing through the villages, or, as Bama relates, forcibly taking people
away to the voting booth in cars and offering them bribes so that they vote for a
particular candidate. As Anandamma states,

I wouldn’t have even gone to cast my vote. It was only because of that
macchaan Malayandi that I went in the first place. He gave me a couple of
rupees and told me to put a stamp on some picture or the other.
(Faustina 2012, 99)

Moreover, political parties tend to use women as objects of both their elec-
tion campaign as well as welfare schemes, promising specific measures regarding
women’s safety, status, mobility, and equality. However, few among them can
actually perceive that women’s status and security are integral to the policy direc-
tives and structural reforms, which are instituted by the nation-state. Thus, Dalit
women’s bargaining and/or negotiating capacities are differently placed along
the axis of asymmetrical gender and power relations. The possibility of trans-
formation lies in confronting the “traditionally established principles of social
organisation” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012, 216). Bama rightly suggests: “given how
many women there are altogether, there is so much we could achieve. We could
demand the rights that are due to us. . . . We could . . . elect an MLA from our
own community” (2012, 103).
Nevertheless, once Dalit men and women have recognised that caste “is at the
centre of religion, politics, education and every other wretched thing” (Faustina
2012, 102), it does not always translate into the construction of an empowered
Dalit self. In this light, Bama also relates how the upper caste ‘Naidu’ landlords
have started a new party and the young Dalit boys are getting entangled into
“party-politics . . . these rich men use [them] as dice in their own games” ( Faus-
tina 2012, 102). This is further corroborated by a research conducted by the
Institute of Development Education, Action and Studies (IDEAS), which shows
that upper caste men dominate panchayat politics, often reducing Dalit men to
being proxy candidates (Mangubhai, Irudayam and Sydenham 2009, 3).
Bama finds it really disturbing when Dalit boys fight among themselves,
owing to their respective party affiliations. Such intra-caste rivalries keep them
away from discerning the real game of upper caste politics that relies on proxy
candidature to keep the caste hierarchies intact. This is achieved by exploit-
ing livelihood dependency among Dalits, taking advantage of Dalit women’s
caste, class, gender vulnerabilities, and, as the report by the IDEAS further sug-
gests, “exploiting and deepening intra-Dalit divisions through supporting one
 Writings from the margins 181

sub-caste against another, restraining a more assertive or vocal sub-caste member

from being elected” (Mangubhai, Irudayam and Sydenham 2009, 3) and so on.
Apart from this, financial obstructions are set in the path of Dalit presidents,
slowing down the overall process of development at the district level. The situa-
tion is rendered worse when it combines with the practice of social discrimination
and untouchability. However, Bama’s hope to “demonstrate our own strength
through political power” (Faustina 2012, 103) goes beyond these structural
obstructions and inequalities. She knows that the bargaining potential of Dalits
can be effectively articulated only within the institutional framework of the state
and not without it. Even though the dominant caste and gender structures remain
more or less intact, such political opportunities to Dalits at the Panchayat level
and/or Legislative Assembly could eventually open out a wider space for institu-
tional transformation. Bama’s optimism is to be located within Dalit community’s
efforts at “thinking for ourselves, taking decisions, and daring to act” (Faustina
2012, 104), which could facilitate the creation of an enabling Dalit self.

Muslim women and state apathy: Salma’s The Hour Past

Midnight
In The Hour Past Midnight, Salma represents the Tamil Muslim community and
personalised experiences of women within it, highlighting the way Muslim
women negotiate the communal patriarchy. By so doing, the novel also exposes
the institutions of the nation-state, which sustain the socio-political and cultural
marginalisation of the Muslim community, especially its women. For instance,
the CSWI betrayed its upper caste Hindu outlook by not acknowledging Muslim
women as equal partners and stakeholders in reimagining the gendered contexts
of the nation in 1970s. They did grave epistemic violence by relegating the sur-
vey of status of Muslim women to the “appendix” section of the Towards Equality
report. More to the point, their survey clearly betrayed a sense of superiority that
the upper caste, middle class women felt over their oppressed ‘Muslim sisters.’ It
can be suggested that the idea of purdah looms large over the minds of the CSWI
members as they discount the inherent heterogeneity of the Muslim community,
objectifying it in the process.
The Committee also indirectly proposes that since Muslim women derive
their legal status from the Shariat, they cannot hope for their emancipation,
“Majority would still rely on their families putting pressure on the husband and
his family for her rights” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012, 336). Moreover, given their
approach towards education as a key to emancipation, the CSWI concludes that
“once the Muslim woman becomes educated or starts working, she obviously
leaves the purdah” (Sharma and Sujaya 2012 , 336). They further define the type
of education which, according to them, is capable of enlightening Muslims,

The awareness of the comparative usefulness of Urdu and Arabic education

and Government school education which would bring their children into
182 Writings from the margins

line with other children is on the high side, and is a hopeful sign for future
generations.
(Sharma and Sujaya 2012, 331 emphasis added)

As evident, the conclusions of the survey are so biased that any claim of seek-
ing an egalitarian ground of solidarity among women of different communities
appears a far cry.
Salma’s novel is an exercise in defying such biased narratives of the nation-
state, which insist on portraying Muslim women as victims of the Muslim patri-
archy and religious orthodoxy only. The defiance is evident through the small
but significant rebellions of women characters in the novel. For example, though
the communal mandate maintains that girls could not go to school after they
attain puberty, Farida, Wahida, and other girls in the novel ensure that they get
books issued from the village library and read them. Apart from autobiographi-
cal references, which bring to light Salma’s own trysts with self-education, one
realises the tenacity inherent in the desire to enlighten one’s horizons. Thus, the
author arrives as a link in the rich tradition of women writers, highlighting how
reading and writing are still considered luxuries for women rather than their
fundamental right.
Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon (2004) illustrate this argument in their book
Unequal Citizens: “The educational backwardness of Muslim women is a matter
of particular concern, especially the high drop-out rate, resulting in substan-
tially fewer proportions of them managing to complete high school, and even
less availing of higher education” (47). The Muslim Women’s Survey (MWS)9
illustrates how there is a systematic decline in the percentage of Muslim women
attending higher educational institutions, especially in the rural and urban
South. In terms of communal disparities, the percentage of illiterate Muslim
women (75 per cent) is three times higher than that of the upper castes (26 per
cent) in the rural South. Alternatively, they show a marginal increase (22.14 per
cent) in the literacy rate than that of the Scheduled Castes (15.62 per cent) in the
urban South. The figures, though dismal in themselves, are comparatively better
than the North zone (rural), where 84 per cent of Muslim women are illiterate.
In the novel, while Farida is forced to leave school on attaining puberty,
Rabia and Madina (as young girls) are constantly reminded of the fact that edu-
cation will not take them far in life. Zohra reprimands Rabia, “So you can’t be
bothered to come home when we send for you! What rubbish were you learn-
ing, anyway?” (Salma 2009, 3). As Rabia approaches the age of puberty, she is
trained to take her focus off studies and concentrate more on washing her face,
powdering it each time when she visits relatives/friends. This instance from the
novel can be further corroborated by findings of the survey conducted by Hasan
and Menon. They argue that the parental commitment to girls’ education is
inadequate both in the context of Hindus as well as Muslims, but what makes
the situation worse for Muslim girls is the higher dropout rates and increasing
communal disparities especially at higher levels of education. The major rea-
sons cited by Muslim respondents for low enrolment and high dropout rate are
 Writings from the margins 183

“financial constraints, followed by familial objections, attainment of puberty

and marriage” (Hasan and Menon 2004, 69). Hasan and Menon further assert,
“as one climbs up the socio-economic ladder, the percentage of women who
face financial constraints declines, while those who report parental opposition
increases”(2004, 59), indicating that lower levels of education are the first obsta-
cle in the path of mitigating the impact of structural inequalities.
Next, does education have any connection with the way women negotiate
everyday experiences within and without domesticity? Does it empower them to
take their own decisions? For instance, what is their attitude towards their body
and sexuality? Can they take decisions relating to contraception on their own?
Since such attitudes constitute an integral part of women’s quotidian lives, how
are their negotiations and agency inferred? For instance, while Yasin Hazrat’s
wife Saithoon gives birth to seven children in the course of ten years because they
could not use contraception, going against the Shariat, Rahima avoids this fate
for herself by deciding for herself. She goes in for sterilisation on doctor’s advice
without seeking her husband Kader’s opinion in the matter. She does not seem to
be affected when the latter accuses her of going against the Shariat also, indicating
the changing dynamics of community/society, wherein women assert their rights,
depending on their, what Naila Kabeer terms, “consequential significance” (1999,
31) on women’s lives. Thus, so-called modern, institutionalised education is not
the only key to emancipation as the CSWI would have liked to believe.
Salma’s novel opens a window into the everyday, lived realities of Muslim
women, which may not necessarily be located at the interstices of a Uniform Civil
Code on the one hand and personal laws on the other. In fact, there could be no
specific parameter for mapping women’s agency. For instance, Rahima could not
exercise her agency when Kader arranges their daughter Wahida’s marriage with
his sister’s son Sikandar. He does not pay any heed to Rahima’s plea to reconsider
his decision regarding the unequal match, “It isn’t such a big thing if a man does
wrong things; once he is married, insha Allah, he’ll reform himself” (Salma 2009,
174). There are numerous incidents in the novel, when men exercise sole control
over choosing spouses for women. Be it Maimoon or Firdaus, both are expected
to submit to the decisions taken by the men in the family. Both refuse to compro-
mise and die a painful death, suggesting how family obligation, kinship ties, as
well as possibilities of retaining the property ownership rights within the family
act as determining factors in arranging marital ties.
Wahida too suffers when she fails to assert her rights within a claustrophobic
marriage with Sikander. She realises that her education has come to nought.
Years and years of gender disciplining make her incapable of perceiving what
marriage entails. After attaining puberty, she meekly subscribes to what Zohra
tells her, “Never ever come before men who are other than your family. If you
see their faces, or they see yours, your face will lose its light and go dark” (Salma
2009, 112). Thus, as Bina Agarwal asserts:

Social norms mediated by gender, age, and marital status exert a powerful
inf luence on women’s own self-perceptions regarding their role in decision
184 Writings from the margins

making – taking decisions that are likely to disturb the household’s eco-
nomic or emotional or . . . its gender relations is an option few women are
willing to exercise.
(as quoted in Hasan and Menon 2004, 149)

Wahida fails to decide for herself because she does not know what deciding for
oneself entails. While she submits to domestic violence and marital rape on a
daily basis, she still wonders why Sikander could not be as good and loving as a
cinema hero. The first sexual encounter with him leaves her weary with a sense
of being “trapped . . . in a net, struggling, something having been forcibly taken
away from her” (Salma 2009, 314). A concern for parental honour and commu-
nity pressure dissuades Wahida from sharing her plight with anyone. Eventually,
she trains herself in this oppressive culture of everyday reality, becoming tolerant
of violence as the only means of conf lict resolution.
Consequently, Wahida is filled with a desire to betray Firdaus after learning
about her affair with a Hindu man Shiva. Her insistent questionings directed at
Firdaus, “are you a woman at all?” (383) reveal how women tend to internalise
the hierarchy of gender relations, perpetuating the social sanction attached to vio-
lence as a means of disciplining women. No wonder, according to the National
Family and Health Survey (second round 1998–9), 56 per cent of women “justify
physical and/or verbal abuse by men in the family, on one ground or another” (as
quoted in Hasan and Menon 2004, 190). Hasan and Menon observe that the rea-
sons for such violence are embedded within the structural inequalities endorsed
by the nation-state, “In India, its endemic character is reinforced, structurally,
by persistent, prescriptive gender subordination and, institutionally, through a
range of highly discriminatory practices, policies, and prejudices that not only
disable, but disempower women” (2004, 190).
These structural inequalities are offshoots of the patriarchal biases embedded
in both the personal laws as well as the institutional structures of the nation-state
that perpetuate varied forms of marginalisation, discrimination, and disadvan-
tages for Muslim women. As already established through the course of this book,
the fictional representation of gender by women writers belonging to different
locations and linguistic and cultural contexts seem to consensually suggest that
any improvement in the status of women in the country can only happen if they
are granted equal opportunities and access to resources, facilitating their full-
f ledged involvement in the socio-political, legal, and economic life of the nation.

Religion, community, and the state: Muslim women and

multiple patriarchies in Salma’s The Hour Past Midnight
Salma’s novel foregrounds a women’s world; the choices, oppression, restrictions
imposed on them and their negotiations within a conservative Tamil Muslim
setup. The novel focusses on domesticity and how it curbs the spirit of women,
raising larger questions about community and nation, and women’s marginalised
 Writings from the margins 185

position within them. In such a scenario, how do women deal with the gendered
contexts in their everyday life? In an interview conducted by Safia Begum (2014)
and posted on the website of Cafe Dissensus Everyday, Salma asserts, “We are
also human. Why we should not get education when all the women are getting
education and all the rights? Here women are getting married without know-
ing anything.” Thus, the narrative raises serious questions about the position of
women within the Tamil Muslim community.
The novel depicts a close network of women from a village community and
how their destinies are embroiled within the patriarchal structures of the fam-
ily and community. However, Salma eschews from making a generalised state-
ment about the plight of Muslim women, implying her awareness of the diverse
and heterogeneous discourses that have gone into the making of the Muslim
community, their culture, and their social organisation in India.10 The Tamil
Muslims share a majority of rituals and customary norms with the Hindu com-
munity of the state (Tamil Nadu). It becomes imperative then to analyse the
geopolitical as well as the cultural conf luences that have impacted the specific
intersections of class, caste, and gender relations in the state.11 These conf luences
are presented through the prism of the private, domestic spaces, suggesting how
women’s negotiations vis-à-vis family and community are characterised by con-
tingencies rather than any deterministic model of personal laws.

Muslim personal laws and rights of women

Salma suggests how exceptionally talented women have to compromise due to
communal/personal laws and rituals. However, the oppression faced by Mus-
lim women, especially in the form of child marriage, polygamy, and oppressive
community rituals are not simply to be located within the controversial debate
between a Uniform Civil Code and personal laws. In fact, this book aims to
interrogate the extant discursive narratives and theoretical paradigms, which
perceive Hindu-Muslim relations through the biased prism of personal laws and
a Uniform Civil Code. It further highlights how the institutions of the state
and conservative factions within any religious community go hand in hand. All
this is done in the name of protecting the interests of the community. Vrinda
Narain (2001) rightly states: “The state’s reluctance to reform Muslim personal
law, along with the fundamental claim to personal law as a private sphere of
autonomy is a consequence of the sexist bias of privacy doctrine that perpetuates
Muslim women’s subordination” (107).
The Muslim claim to internal sovereignty is also a consequence of what Partha
Chatterjee (1997) terms “the system of dichotomies of inner/outer, home/world,
feminine/masculine, which are once again activated” (260). It is not very dif-
ferent from the nationalist resolution of the woman question in the late 19th
and early 20thcentury, which relied on a similar system of dichotomies vis-à-vis
the colonial state. The dichotomies have been further intensified owing to the
cultural and institutional exclusion of Muslims from the dominant discourses of
186 Writings from the margins

the independent nation-state. Thus, as Chatterjee suggests, “reforms that touch

upon what are considered the inner essence of the identity of the community can
only be legitimately carried out by the community itself, not by the state” (1997,
260). Alternatively, the present analysis takes off from these theoretical junctures,
proposing a feminist re-engagement with the spatial and metaphorical binaries of
the private and the public.
The Hour Past Midnight interrogates the “communitarian processes” (Hasan
1994, ix), which deliberately integrate women, foreclosing all possibilities of mobil-
ising them against the warped gendered structures endorsed by the state as well
as the communal forces. Maimoon and Firdaus die a mute, painful, and igno-
minious death because they dare to defy the communal sanctions. Their death
can be perceived as a marker of resistance to the communal norms and personal
laws in the context of marriage, divorce, maintenance, and inheritance. While
marriages become a means of consolidating kinship ties, divorce and widow-
hood enhance conditions of violence against women. Thus, as Denize Kandiyoti
points out,

women are considered to be custodians of cultural identity by virtue of

being less assimilated, both culturally and linguistically, into the wider soci-
ety . . . and this is particularly so for women of minority communities[who]
retain cultural separateness to a greater extent than men.
(as quoted in Hasan 1994, xiii)

However, what happens when assertive women like Maimoon and Firdaus
are denied the right to choose their husband according to their wishes? What
are the mechanisms recognised by the community and the state to redress the
cases of forced marriages? Unfortunately, the fate of these women, as depicted by
Salma, is contingent on the conservative interpretation of personal laws, limiting
the remedies available to them in case of divorce or annulment of marriage. As
Firdaus ruminates, “Hereafter, there was nothing left for her to hold on to. . . .
Everything was finished. . . . The whole town would jeer at her, speak ill of her,
treat her with contempt” (Salma 2009, 15).
It is noteworthy that unlike Hinduism and Christianity, which accord a divine
sanction to marriage, Islamic laws consider marriage as a dissoluble contract. It
entails that women too have the right to stipulate an agreement (kabein nama),
listing out the terms and conditions of the contract. However, women in the
novel seem to be devoid of such an empowering provision of marriage. In fact,
Firdaus’ right to claim divorce is completely legitimate under the Muslim Mar-
riage Dissolution Act passed in 1939. It was passed especially to enable Muslim
women to seek divorce without renouncing Islam. However, women are not
allowed to lay claim to the rights of mehr and alimony after seeking divorce
through the means of this Act. Such women, like Firdaus, are branded shameless
and are penalised by the community and society for being assertive.
 Writings from the margins 187

However, no one interrogates the men’s liberty to divorce women, which

deprives women of their right to a dignified life. Fatima, a lower class Muslim
woman, is abandoned by her husband, who sets up a house with another woman.
No one seems to even register the consequences of such a betrayal. She cannot
even seek redressal from the court of law as bigamy is not punishable by law
within the purview of Islamic personal laws. Her class status also renders her
incapable of accessing any legal advice or representation due to lack of financial
means. Though she is entitled to mehr in this case and monetary provision for, but
not exclusively limited to, the period of iddat (three menstrual cycles), the com-
munity leaders do not even bother to take her case up. Thus, class differences
and hierarchies within the community disable women from accessing their basic
right to a dignified life, which is upheld by the structural inequalities inherent in
the institutions of the nation-state.
To this effect, the case of abandoned and divorced Muslim women also needs
to be analysed through the prism of the Shah Bano case of the 1980s,12 which once
again brought to light the acrimonious debate between a Uniform Civil Code
and personal laws governing the rights of the Muslim community. The Supreme
Court judgement asserted that Section 125 of the Cr. P.C. transcends the barri-
ers of religion and personal laws of religious communities. It also “quoted verses
from the Koran, cited statements from Manu and concluded that both the Hindu
lawmaker and the Prophet have set examples of traditional injustice” ( Kumar
1993, 162). The apex court finally urged the government to frame a Uniform
Civil Code as suggested under the Directive Principles of State Policy after the
independence. The judgement was perceived as an attack on the autonomy of
Muslim community in India. This was followed by an immediate institution of
the Muslim Women’s (Right to Protection on Divorce) Bill in 1986, excluding
Muslim women from the purview of Section 125.
The Bill further seeks to limit the maintenance to the period of iddat, sug-
gesting that in the absence of the husband offering maintenance, the Waqf Board
would be solely responsible for ensuring that the woman gets access to fair and
hassle free provisions for her future livelihood. Nevertheless, the government’s
alacrity in constituting this Bill along with the express consent of the ulema is to
be problemaised. As critics have underscored,

interpretations by the ulema were neither final nor irrevocable, there were
other trends of thought, other interpretations which the government chose
to disregard. The government too shared the underlying assumption that
Muslims are a homogenous religious community and theologians are its
sole spokespersons.
( Hasan 1994, xiv)

No doubt, this incident arrived as a link in the chain of social, cultural, and
political processes, which foreground how the gendered constructs of the
188 Writings from the margins

family-community-nation continuum result in a systemic capitulation of wom-

en’s rights.13
A blanket demand for a Uniform Civil Code does not take into account the
varied differences among women along the axis of caste, class, and religion.14
Such agendas also smack of the way the patriarchal biases inherent in the nation-
state appropriate women’s rights. Many high-level committees and panels that
have been instated to review family laws in India as well as the Supreme Court
judgements15 have echoed such a narrow governmentalising perspective towards
personal laws. They betray a tendency to measure the impact of personal laws
against the so-called ‘secularised and pro-women’ Hindu family laws. This
reveals how personal laws, which were once a source of safeguarding women’s
rights, have become fodder to be fed into the minority-majority relations.

Community, identity anxiety, and the Muslim women

in The Hour Past Midnight
The fear of majoritarianism, triggered by political apathy, inter-community
conf licts, and escalation of religio-revivalism post-1990 has led to actual fears
regarding the effacing of Muslim identity within the homogenised narrative of
the nation-state. As Hasan suggests, “the opposition to reform then becomes a
‘defensive reaction’ to the scars and memories of communal violence, discrimi-
nation suffered at the hands of the government and the failure of society to pro-
vide Muslims with a sense of dignity” (1994, xxii).
In the novel, Fatima’s decision to elope with a Hindu man Murugan is consid-
ered an assault on the community honour. Fatima, a poor Muslim woman, who
has led an inconsequential life at the margins of the village, suddenly becomes
the enemy who fails to uphold the community honour, “Had they been able to
get hold of Fatima or Murugan . . . they would have torn them apart, limb from
limb. An upsurge of emotion seemed to unite them: a fierce need to safeguard
the honour of their religion and community” (Salma 2009, 251). This is followed
by a communal ban on women’s mobility outside home, “either in our streets
or to other towns elsewhere” (Salma 2009, 257). Suleiman believes that it is
the only way of disciplining women and safeguarding “the honour of the com-
munity” (286). Salma illustrates this by reversing Hindu men’s fears regarding
elopement (and conversion) of Hindu women with Muslim men, and transpos-
ing them onto Muslim patriarchal practices.16
The community identities seek their legitimisation on the ground of religion
and can be, to borrow Sangari’s (2008) words, “as much punitive as protective
on patriarchal and proprietorial assumptions” (518). While Fatima is untrace-
able, the religious leaders of the village excommunicate Fatima’s old mother
Nuramma from the village community as a suitable punitive measure. Thus,
women’s consent is considered as disruptive of a specific communitarian dis-
course. Uma Chakravarti (2004) rightly asserts,
 Writings from the margins 189

the concept of honour serves as a link between the behaviour of an indi-

vidual woman, and the idealised norms of the community. By constantly
evoking the twin notions of honour and dishonour, families either condi-
tion or shame women into appropriate and inappropriate behavior.
(261)

Born to a poor prostitute, Nuramma too had adopted this profession as her
destiny. Having no stakes in the rhetoric of honour, she had felt delighted in
prostitution and in f louting the allied constructs of good and bad women. How-
ever, the discovery of pregnancy with an unknown client’s child makes her inse-
cure to the extent of leading an austere life, imagining that the jinn would reward
her one day for all her sacrifices. Later, Nuramma’s attempts to sanitise her life’s
history by narrating about her dead (fictitious) husband’s immense wealth and
privileges hints towards giving into the same rhetoric of honour so that she
and her daughter are not tagged as bad women. However, such notions of hon-
our become the most guarded secrets of communities and nations, preventing
women from interrogating the exclusionary socio-political structures that are
responsible for their deprivations in the first place.
As mentioned in a previous chapter, the ageing and deserted women consti-
tute the bulk of the work force in the unorganised labour sector. No one can
account for the number of years Nuramma, and later Fatima, have worked for the
household of Rahima, Zohra, and others in the village. Their labour is taken for
granted not only by the village community but also the nation. The elderly and
single women are the worst sufferers of the gendering of welfare benefits, which
mainly concentrate on maternal and child-rearing roles of women workers in the
organised and/or unorganised sector. In fact, Nuramma’s vulnerability is height-
ened by the community laws, which do not simply excommunicate her and her
grandson Illiaz but also reduce them to being beggars. The domestic/communal
violence against women symbolises the structural violence committed by the
nation at a larger scale. Thus, the state-community nexus could be too strong to
be broken into, augmenting women’s destitution, as evident in Nuramma’s case.
Nevertheless, Salma’s narrative suggests that the fight for autonomy of one’s
rights and equality begins from home. To this effect, women must challenge the
traditional patriarchal structures, which curtail their freedom and individuality.
As Nuramma asserts,

You say it was a sin for my daughter to elope with a Kafir. Is there a sin-
gle man who hasn’t slept with one of our Hindu worker women? Speak
out . . . . Let just one of you stand up; I’ll agree my daughter did wrong.
(Salma 2009, 254)

Nuramma’s contestations are important because they foreground the double

standards of patriarchal morality as well as the complex structure of class and
190 Writings from the margins

communal dynamics vis-à-vis the Muslim community. She hits out at the hier-
archies of power, which work in favour of the privileged despite communal
differences.
Men from upper caste/class appropriate lower caste/class women’s (re)pro-
ductive labour, exploiting them further. For example, Kader and Karim belong
to the landowning and business class and harbour gendered ideas of labour vis-
à-vis their wives on the one hand and lower class/caste women like Fatima and
Mariyayi on the other. While Rahima and Zohra are subjected to domestic
incarceration and back-breaking drudgery, Mariyayi’s labour is appropriated in
the name of sexual exploitation. Moreover, to ensure that Mariyayi keeps to
her place, she is forced by Karim to undergo abortion, followed by sterilisation.
Thus, patriarchal practices, apart from sustaining class/caste differences, also
map the communal spectrum along the hierarchical nodes of power to organise
women’s sexuality.
Alternatively, how do women negotiate the gendered hierarchies and patriar-
chal injunctions on their assertions and mobility? Like Bama, Salma also suggests
that negotiating patriarchal oppression is not exclusively limited to sectarian
politics but, like any other struggle, is central to the agenda of social change. The
Hour Past Midnight undergirds the urgency to confront the specific heteronor-
mative, communal, and patriarchal regimes so endorsed by the institutional and
epistemological structures of the nation-state. To this effect, Salma’s representa-
tion of women like Rabia, Rahima, Maimoon, Firdaus, and Fatima is invested
with hope. Though their education is cut short and/or mobility restricted, one
does not get an impression that their potential to question the oppressive regimes
of authority could also be curtailed. They manage to find breathing space within
incarcerating domesticity by deploying, to use Naila Kabeer words, “bargaining
and negotiation, deception and manipulation, subversion and resistance as well
as more intangible, cognitive processes of ref lection and analysis” (1999, 3). The
oppressive familial and communal relations cannot possibly take away from these
women their desires, their everyday rebellions, and grit to struggle for what they
perceive as having “consequential significance” ( Kabeer 1999, 31) for their lives.
Even as Rabia and Zohra do not have any say in the decision-making pro-
cesses of their family, they enjoy a privileged status in the community because
their husbands belong to the upper class and own lands. Taking an advantage
of their social standing, they can deploy the labour of Nuramma, Fatima, and
Mariyayi and mitigate their domestic burden and drudgery. Rabia and Zohra
avail their class and communal privileges, knowing well that their positionality
in society, like all women, is inf lected by class/caste and communal hierarchies
on the one hand and status differentials on the other.
Firdaus knows that her affair with a Hindu man Shiva might land her up in
trouble, force her mother to die, yet she resolutely “pushed away that thought . . .
[since] it was her own happiness that mattered to her now” (Salma 2009, 185).
Her acknowledgement of bodily needs and desires empower her to refuse the
dictates of the community that expect her to be locked up inside home after her
 Writings from the margins 191

divorce. Thus, Salma democratises women’s sexuality and subjectivities outside

the parameters of marriage, interrogating the moral codes constructed by hostile
patriarchies.
It is interesting to realise how women negotiate the moral and sexual codes
imposed on them by these hostile patriarchies when men are absent from their
lives. We are told, in the novel, that most of the men characters are overseas,
either in Sri Lanka, Dubai/Gulf or Singapore, having set their businesses out-
side India. In fact, post-1970, migration to West Asia comes across as an excel-
lent source of earning money, as against the dissatisfactory employment scenario
in India. This is to be seen in light of the rise in urbanisation, the changing
contours of the economy, and the concomitant emphasis on export-oriented
business engagements. The emigration enables people to set their independent
business instead of being dependent on the private sector and non-agricultural or
contractual labour force.17 The skills that they acquire during their tenure abroad
as well as the remittances, which are sent back home, have significantly contrib-
uted in the rise of development programmes and infrastructural initiatives taken
up by the respective states.
However, such public and political engagements have a strong impact on the
domestic economy of the emigrants. As critics like Zoya Hasan (1994), Amrita
Chhachhi (1994), and Leela Gulati (1983) have highlighted, the phenomenon
has led to an increase in female-headed households. In the absence of men,
“women have taken on new roles of decision making regarding money, invest-
ment and education. These changes, have led to a questioning of traditional
patriarchal authority within the household” (Chhachhi 1994, 88). In the novel,
Sabia becomes an independent decision-maker in the absence of her husband.
Her complete control over domestic affairs is evident when she single-handedly
arranges for Sikander’s wedding with Wahida in Sayyed’s absence. In fact, Sayyed
is simply reduced to being a guest at the wedding of his son.
Certainly, preparations for marriage also include financial transactions, inter-
actions with men outside the family to manage ceremonies, and activities related
to marriage, especially catering, decorations, and so on. As Gulati states, “In
households with no close male relative, the women have to play a much more
active role in the management of family affairs” (1983, 2224). Even as Sayyed
accumulates immense wealth from his sojourn in Sri Lanka, his masculinity is
completely challenged within the domestic space. Sabia, who has cultivated and
nurtured her sense of independence in Sayyed’s absence, is not willing to give it
up after he returns home.
Sayyed’s claim to domestic authority is eventually rendered suspect when he
encounters failure in his business transactions during the Tamil-Sinahala riots
of 1980s in Sri Lanka.18 He fails to anticipate trouble at the right time and to
wisely use his resources, losing his claim to exercise authority within domestic
and community networks. Though these political engagements take place in the
background, Salma is discerning enough to portray their impact on the domestic
world, thereby blurring the dichotomy between gender roles and practices.
192 Writings from the margins

Alternatively, in the case of young men like Suleiman, the process of earn-
ing wealth is intimately connected with asserting their masculinity. His newly
earned wealth in Singapore enables him to manipulate the community practices
as per his will. He buys a car to facilitate the “tabligh’s business of reminding
Muslims of their obligations” (Salma 2009, 287) along with other allied tasks.
Such strategic investments in religious codes and ritualistic practices facilitate
him to take absolute control over the village affairs. Thus, physical dislocation
need not necessarily deracinate migrant men from the network of social and/or
communal relations and practices, suggests the text.
While older women like Sabia may reap the benefits of men’s absence, leading
to a reversal of gender roles, younger women suffer immensely on this account.
Sherifa’s life is an illustration of the consequences of the migration dream gone
terribly wrong. After her husband dies in an accident in Dubai, she recounts how
apart from the odd 40days she had lived with Abdul after their marriage, the rest
were spent at the mercy of her mother-in-law. Sherifa is harassed by her mother-
in-law when Abdul sends a sari for his wife instead of his mother, suggesting how
women’s vulnerability increases in the absence of their husband. In this light,
Gulati’s (1983) research represents how most young women experience the sti-
f ling effects of gendered morality in the absence of their husband. In most cases, it
is the incompatibility with their parents-in-law which leads many women to lead
traumatic lives. Young wives are expected to submit to the authority of mothers-
in-law, unlike older women who succeed in maintaining their autonomy.
On a similar note, Mumtaz’ mother-in-law constantly reminds her of her
inability to conceive years after marriage. Mumtaz’ worries regarding the same
are indirectly revealed in the form of sexual innuendoes, light-hearted banter,
which she shares with Nafisa and other women of the village. However, no one
is discerning enough to gauge that Suleiman’s long absences have possibly led
to her infertility. Women have to bear the stigma associated with infertility as
well as remind themselves of a possibility of divorce in extreme cases. Suleiman
categorically warns Mumtaz that their sexual intimacies must lead to her concep-
tion. Having failed to bear his seed, Mumtaz is branded a witch and is abandoned
by Suleiman. He then marries Sherifa despite her unwillingness to marry again.
Thus, the social injunctions and community laws are too stringent for women
to be confronted.
However, does it mean that women cannot hope for an equitable world order?
Would they always be persecuted on the pretext of being single, widows, and
witches by their respective communities? It is in this context that rebellions by
women like Maimoon, Firdaus, and Fatima become significant. Their rebellions
inhabit a potential of evolving into strong political confrontations against com-
munal and structural inequalities. In fact, a viable feminist politics would entail
privileging women’s voices from within the regimented structures of authority
so that they could be aligned with the wider processes of confrontation against
the warped logic of communalism.
****************
 Writings from the margins 193

The analysis of the two novels reveals that both Bama and Salma expose the lat-
eral connections and inf luences, which have kept women under aggressive, hos-
tile, and oppressive patriarchal regimes. In inscribing their rebellion against the
wider dialectics of political forces, these women writers demystify the dominant
patriarchal constructions of the nation-state, thereby paving the way for an egali-
tarian future. Their writings also underline the need for a feminist engagement
across religious, communal, and caste/class barriers. As Yuval-Davis (1997) sug-
gests, it calls for cooperation and solidarity among feminists, who may be “posi-
tioned differently in different societies” (125) but are willing to work towards
achieving certain common goals.

Notes
1 The term ‘Dalit,’ as defined by Lakshmi Holmstrom in the Introduction to Bama’s Sangati
(2012) “comes from Marathi and meaning ‘oppressed’ or ‘ground down’” (xii). Though
the term has its own issues, it has been appropriated for particular reasons: “it does away
with reference to caste, and points to a different kind of nation-wide constituency; spe-
cifically it signals the militancy of the Dalit Panthers, their broad definition of ‘Dalit’ and
their professed hope of solidarity with all oppressed groups” (xii). The 1972 manifesto
of the Dalit Panthers, quoted in Tamil by Gail Omvedt’s “Dalit Peenterkal, Tamil ilak-
kiyam, penkal” (“Dalit Panthers, Tamil Literature, women”), asserts: “ Who are Dalits?All
Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, neo-Buddhists, labourers, landless and destitute
peasants, women, and all those who have been exploited politically and economically and
in the name of religion are Dalits” (as quoted in Holmstrom 2012, xii).
2 However, according to the latest development on this issue, as reported by TheIndian
Express, dated 21 April 2015 in “Allow Christians to Divorce After 1-year Separation:
Supreme Court,” the Indian Parliament has created a provision for divorce in the Chris-
tian community “under Section 10 A (1) of the Divorce Act, which lays down that a
petition for dissolution of marriage by mutual consent can be presented before a court
only after a judicial separation of two years.” The Supreme Court, however, has stated in
a ruling recently that “since the corresponding period for other communities is just one
year, the Central government could consider bringing in necessary amendments” to this
effect in the context of the Christian community as well.
3 These two statutes regulated Christian law in colonial India. As Tasneem Shahnaaz
(2016) states, “The Indian Divorce Act recognised adultery as the only reason for dis-
solving or annulling a marriage and the second, the Indian Christian Marriage Act 1872
recognised and regulated marriages” (131).
4 Veena Talwar Oldenburg (2002) has argued that in the late 19th and early 20th centu-
ries, dowry was the only independent material resource over which women had partial,
if not total control. It was perceived as a means of providing recourse to any emergency,
besides securing the best possible match for the daughter. However, the voluntary aspect
of dowry was soon turned into a catalyst for marital conflict and violence owing to the
faulty colonial policy of privatising land ownership into exclusively male hands, thereby
exerting intense economic pressure on the indigenous elite. Eventually, dowry became
one of the core set of patriarchal arrangements, acceptable to all denominations among
the propertied classes.
5 According to Sharmila Rege, “a Dalit feminist standpoint is seen as emancipatory since
the subject of its knowledge is embodied and visible (i.e. the thought begins from the
lives of Dalit women and these lives are present and visible in the results of the thought)”
(1998, WS-45).
6 According to Nambissan, “Personal narratives of dalits educated just three decades ago
offer glimpses of untouchability blatantly practised in schools – SC students being asked
194 Writings from the margins

to sit separately from their classmates, refused drinking water or served in broken cups,
made to dine separately and so on” (1996, 1018). Moreover, their copies were not col-
lected and corrected due to fear of pollution.
7 Article 17 of the Indian Constitution reads, “‘Untouchability’ is abolished and its prac-
tise in any form is forbidden. The enforcement of any disability arising out of ‘untouch-
ability’ shall be an offence in accordance with the law.”
8 Amartya Sen has differentiated between the idea of active and passive exclusion, “When
exclusion is brought about through deliberate policy it is active and it is passive when it
is an unintended consequence of social processes. So, for example, the deliberate exclu-
sion of dalits and Muslims from good employment represents active exclusion, while
their exclusion from jobs which need better educational qualifications than they posses
represents passive exclusion” (as quoted in Borooah 2010, 34).
9 The Muslim Women’s Survey (MWS) was carried out in 12 states, spread over 40 dis-
tricts in India. Convened by Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon in the year 2000–01, it sur-
veyed 9,541 Muslim and Hindu women respondents – 80 per cent Muslim and 20 per
cent Hindu; and 60 per cent urban, 40 per cent rural.
10 Razia Patel (2009) quotes Winsinck’s (1927) Handbook of Mohammedan Traditions in this
regard: “In the course of time four schools of Sunnite law came into existence in Arabia
proper, Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’I and Hanbali” (45). As against the Hanafi school of Sun-
naite law followed by majority of Muslims in India, the South Indian Muslims followed
the school founded by Imam Shafi’l. She further adds: “Various countries have different
influences, and have modified these laws in their own way. All Islamic countries also do
not have uniform legal systems albeit claiming to be Islamic, and the local traditions and
influences have been incorporated, resulting in diversity” (45).
11 This is corroborated by a study from Dharwar, Karnataka, which concluded, “Muslim
family practices are quite similar to those of Hindus in everyday life . . . [Moreover] fam-
ily patterns are common among all elements of society in India, given similar education
and other social attributes” (as quoted in Hasan 1994, xi).
12 On 23 April 1985, a five member Constitution bench of the Supreme Court ruled
that a 75-year old woman Shah Bano was entitled to maintenance by her husband,
Mohammad Ahmad Khan, who had divorced her after around 50 years of marriage. In
1978, she had filed an application in the Indore Magistrate’s Court, under Section 125
of the Criminal Procedure Code (Cr. P.C.) asking that her husband should be ordered to
pay her maintenance. The Section 125 is especially meant for preventing vagrancy due
to destitution and includes destitute, deserted or divorced women, including old aged
parents. In the meantime, her husband decided to divorce Shah Bano, using the triple
talaq provision. He deposited Rs. 3000 in court, claiming he was returning the mehr
agreed upon at the time of marriage. The court, however, went ahead with the judge-
ment and fixed the maintenance amount at Rs 25 per month, which was subsequently
increased to Rs. 179.20 by the Madhya Pradesh High Court. Later, the case went to the
Supreme Court of India after Shah Bano’s husband objected to this provision, claiming
since he was a Muslim, the case should be decided upon by the All India Muslim Per-
sonal Law Board and not by any court of law.
13 The Hindu Right wing forces often deploy the Shah Bano case to intensify their com-
munal propaganda against Muslims, saying that the latter are against the idea of women’s
emancipation. The discourse of equality is selectively manipulated to not only project
Muslims as inward looking, conservative, and the ‘other’ but also to demand ‘legitimate’
rights of Muslim women who, like Hindu women, have the right to seek redressal
through Constitutional means.
14 The Shah Bano incident, therefore, arrived as a reality check for the ‘mainstream,’ upper
caste, middle class feminists against their efforts to bridge the gap among themselves and
the women belonging to different caste, class, and religious backgrounds. They realised
that it was difficult to work along similar ideological agendas as one could always fall
into an allied communal politics. Moreover the Committee for the Protection of the
Rights of Muslim women, which was formed to oppose the Muslim Women’s Bill did
 Writings from the margins 195

not let non-Muslim feminists join the agitation. This incident has proven fatal for sub-
sequent negotiations pertaining to Muslim women’s issues within a secular, egalitarian
framework.
15 The Supreme Court’s decision in Sarla Mudgal, president, Kalyani and Ors v. Union of
India and Ors is a case in point. The judge went on to state that “Article 44 is based on
the concept that there is no necessary connection between religion and personal law in a
civilised society. The Hindus along with Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains have forsaken their sen-
timents in the cause of the national unity and integration, some other communities would
not, though the Constitution of India enjoins the establishment of a ‘common civil code’
for the whole of India” (as quoted in Kapur and Crossman 1996, 259). The judgement sub-
tly alludes to how the Muslim community has been against the idea of national integration.
The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Ordinance 2019 was
repromulgated by President of India Ram Nath Kovind, on 12 January 2019, after it
was blocked in the Rajya Sabha twice. The Act declares pronouncement of triple-e-
biddat or instant triple talaq void and illegal. Any Muslim husband who does so shall
be imprisoned for upto three years, and is also liable to fine. In August 2017, the
Supreme Court had also declared the practice of triple talaq to be unconstitutional.
The irony of the procedure, whereby the Ordinance was made effective, is evident
as it seeks to make triple talaq a punishable offence, which has already been declared
unconstitutional by the apex court.
16 The Hindu communal politics, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, had led to
various campaigns in the form of writing of tracts expressing Hindu patriarchy’s fears
regarding catastrophic decline of their community. Charu Gupta (2009) quotes from
a tract titled Humara Bhishan Haas (1924), “a number of Aryan women were entering
the homes of yavanas and mlecchas (terms used for Muslims in such writings), reading
nikah with them, producing gaubhakshak (cow-killers) children, and increasing Muslim
numbers” (14). Moreover, in 2009 and as late as 2014, terms like ‘love jihad’ were popu-
larised to invoke fears of Hindu women’s elopement and conversion at the hands of
Muslims, leading to acrimonious debates on the responsibility of the Hindu community
in safeguarding their women’s honour. Interestingly, none of the Right wing discursive
engagements considered the possibility of women’s volition being involved in such cases.
17 A study conducted by the Centre for Development Studies, Kerala states, “Among the
return emigrants of 2008, the percentage [of] unemployed decreased from 11.8 in 2008
to 3.2 in 2009. This is a very important trend that needs to be noted by policy makers
in Kerala. Even in the absence of any rehabilitation programme on the part of the Gov-
ernment, most of the return emigrants who wanted a job were able to get one within a
period of one or two years” (Zachariah and Rajan 2011, 14).
18 The Tamil-Sinhala riots that took place in Sri Lanka, 1983 are described as the Black
July. The ethnic riots adversely affected the Tamil people’s businesses in Sri Lanka. The
riots arrived as a link in the antagonistic relations shared between the two groups in the
wake of a separate Tamil state in the northern part of Sri Lanka termed Eelam. A report
(“Anti Tamil Riots and the Political Crisis”), published in Economic and Political Weekly
states, “Within days rioting spread all over the island, a wave of mass murder, assault,
arson and looting directed against Tamils engulfing almost all the township in the coun-
try and the plantation areas. For nearly a week, mob rule held sway and undisciplined
violence against person and property was the order of the day” (1983, 1699). Around
1500 people were estimated to have been murdered and over 150,000 people were ren-
dered homeless (1699).

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CONCLUSION

This book has engaged with select women’s fiction in post-independence India
in light of socio-political, economic, and cultural processes which determine
women’s negotiations with the state. In doing so, it has highlighted the patri-
archal biases that undergird the epistemological and institutional structures of
the nation-state. The book has further exposed ways in which the nation-state
deploys procedures of gendering, described by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (2003)
as “the discrimination against, and the control, protection, regulation, and non-
recognition of the work of women” (24), and the ways in which they render
women as sexualised subjects only.
The book underscores the significance of women’s rights as individuals and
citizens with respect to institutions like family, community, and the state. Simul-
taneously, it also highlights the ways in which everyday experiences of women
are affected by the patriarchal discourses endorsed by the state. As Sunder Rajan
asserts:

[Women’s] concerns have been examined . . . primarily in relation to cul-

tural institutions in the realms of family and community. Not only does
this overlook the impact on women of political institutions of law and
citizenship, it also fails to acknowledge how closely these institutions are
regulated by state mechanisms.
(2003, 2)

Even as the book highlights this through fiction, it goes beyond a pure literary
engagement to evolve a theoretical apparatus centred around the history of the
Indian women’s movement, the institutional documents, and reports released
by the government from time to time, exposing the nation-state’s consistency
200 Conclusion

in governmentalising the term gender and limiting it to women’s issues from a

patriarchal perspective only.
I have further explored how the category of gender could lead to a reconsti-
tution of traditional epistemological hierarchies of history, culture, and politics,
negotiating the conventional boundaries of nation. This becomes possible when,
in Sunder Rajan’s words,

gender is recognized as being not a sole defining quality but one that exists
along with other constituents of identity that intersect with it, such as class,
race, sexuality, age, nationalism, and ethnicity, which constitute women as
social beings, equally with men.
(2003, 13)

The fact that these women writers belong to varied socio-linguistic and
regional backgrounds does not make this book a representative study in any
way. Instead my research has proven that such a diversity could enable us to
evolve a larger theoretical apparatus vis-à-vis Indian Literatures. Since there are
so many writers belonging to different linguistic traditions, their experience of
the nation is bound to be relative. Reading them together across linguistic, cul-
tural, regional, caste/class, communal lines allows us to dispel what Gopal Guru
and Sundar Sarukkai (2012) call in a different context, “deferential untouchabil-
ity” (202), whereby the narrative produced by the privileged male perspective is
deemed normative.
More to the point, the book illustrates that Indian women’s writing across
languages, texts, and contexts constitutes a traffic line in the gendered narratives
of post-independence nation. To this effect, I have analysed the various facets of
the women’s movement in India, which have exposed the nation-state’s unwill-
ingness to engage with alternative conceptions of the extant gendered habitus.
I have further shown how women’s fiction performs a concomitant role
with the actual existing feminist endeavours in India, rather than simply being
cultural artefacts. For instance, the setting up of Women’s Studies Centres across
the country from the Seventh Five Year Plan (1985–1990) onwards has illustrated
the need to evolve a “complex and multilayered understanding of the realities of
women’s lives” (Sharma 2012, 294). In fact, the reading lists and reference mate-
rial of women’s studies courses constantly harp on the need for translation of
women’s writings because they lead to conjoining theory with politics/activism.
As the book shows, this relationship among theory, activism, and women’s writ-
ings in India has rarely been traced by the majority of critics who have dealt
with the idea of gender and nation in their writings. In fact, some of the writers
who have done so subscribe to an upper caste idiom of gender in the name of
proposing an indigenous understanding of feminism.1 The book has critiqued
these blinkered propositions, establishing how there is a crucial link between the
subordination of women and the hierarchical social structure manifested in the
 Conclusion 201

cultural, linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences, privileging the upper caste,
majoritarian, and patriarchal perspectives of the nation-state.
Also, the book is more interested in exploring the tensions, conf licts, and
nuances inherent in discourses on and around gender, challenging the assumed
commonality of women’s experiences. The women writers from diverse loca-
tions make a dent in the dominant discourse of the context to which they belong,
thereby foregrounding an alternative vision of the gendered contexts of nation.
This approach further establishes that both nation and gender are constantly in the
process of becoming. After all, the idea of nation is also based on the way mascu-
linities, femininities, and varied trans-subjectivities are performed, contributing
to newer understandings of the nation-making project.
The moment of Indian Independence declared the birth of a modern nation-
state, inscribing full and equal membership of its citizens in the political com-
munity. However, this embodiment of modernity(ies) was also marked by
contradictions. As shown by Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar and Jyotirmoyee Devi’s The
River Churning, the newly independent Indian state was more concerned about
representing itself as a parens-patrie state, which proved detrimental to the rights of
abducted Hindu and Muslim women. Far from claiming equal membership in the
horizontal camaraderie of the nation-state, as proposed by the Karachi Resolu-
tion of the Congress (1931), women ended up becoming the objects of exchange
between the patriarchal owners of the nation-states of India and Pakistan.
Pritam and Jyotirmoyee Devi bring to crisis the celebratory account of the
nation, the modernist assumptions, and the universalising and hegemonic nar-
ratives of the state’s dominant archive. By doing so, these novels interrogate
the ‘earnest’ paternalism of the nation-state manifested in the Central Recovery
Operation, which violated every principle of citizenship, justice, and fundamen-
tal rights for women. My analysis has exposed the ambivalent vocabulary of
the Central Recovery Operation inherent in the usage of terms like honour,
rescue, recovery, rehabilitation, protector/abductor. It has further suggested that
the reconstitution of masculinities and femininities is an important aspect of
interrogating women’s status as ‘objects of exchange’ in the inter-communal and
patriarchal epistemology.
The Partition simply marked a beginning of subsequent betrayals by the state
with regard to provisions on women’s rights as citizens, their status within the
institutions of family and marriage, and their right to divorce and inheritance.
The novels, Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us and Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of
1084, critique the administrative and political apathy betrayed by the institutions
of the nation-state post-independence. The writers emphasise the urgency to
evolve what Rajeswari Sunder Rajan has termed “meaningful political equality”
(2003, 19) so that the hitherto marginalised sections of society could exercise
their rights as individual citizens.
It is interesting to observe how Sahgal and Mahasweta Devi negotiate the polit-
ical through the crisis of the personal. These authors interrogate the institutional,
202 Conclusion

epistemological structures of the nation, as well as the socio-cultural determina-

tions that tend to differentiate between the ideal woman, good mother/wife, and
the bad woman, so to speak. In doing so, they reassert the feminist enterprise.
They further explore the idea of women’s sexuality and pleasure, asserting wom-
en’s right to their body. Thereby, as argued in the book, they alter the conserva-
tive discourse around women’s body and sexuality as betrayed by the women’s
movement as well as the legal structures.
In the selected novels, the idea of home no longer acts as a haven/refuge from
the travails and traumas of public sphere. On the contrary, it is a site of newer
and further concentrated networks of power, violence, oppression, and exploita-
tion. To this effect, Mridula Garg, Mannu Bhandari, and Indira Goswami focus
on the discourses of sexuality, intimacy, divorce, and widowhood in light of the
structural and institutional inequalities in post-independence India. Their novels
like Chittacobra, Aapka Bunty, and Shadow of Dark God respectively interrogate
the patriarchal, virilocal, patrilineal family structures that not only exploit upper
caste/middle class women’s claims to equality within marriage but also impel
them to subscribe to the norms of monogamy and heterosexuality.
These literary works further reveal how the institutionalisation of the marital
relationship is geared towards protecting the homogenising and patriarchal inter-
ests of the nation-state. They look into the nation-state’s motives to administer
the Hindu Code Bill in post-independence India. Though proposed under the
“rhetoric of liberation of women” (Agnes 1999, 78), the Hindu Code Bill was
entwined with the idea of national (Hindu) integration. For instance, critics like
Archana Parashar (1992) and Flavia Agnes (1999) argue that the state’s motives to
legislate man-woman relationships were driven by the need to “integrate Hindus
from three different political regimes, that is, British India, the princely states and
the tribal regions into one nation” (Agnes 1999, 79). Parashar further argues that

the hidden agenda for Hindu law reform was unification of the nation
through uniformity in law. This could be best achieved by re-defining the
rights given to women. Through the re-orientation of female roles the state
could replace the claim of religion and religious institutions over people’s
lives.
(Parashar 1992, 40)

The Indian matrimonial statutes, which were subsequently institutionalised

have been so biased against women that they do not recognise their non-economic
contribution to the well-being of family. Mridula Garg’s Chittacobra highlights
that women’s work in the home is not accorded due significance because house
work is merely considered a ‘labour of love.’ Instead, the husband is recognised
as the primary breadwinner of the family. Moreover, the travails of women in
Aapka Bunty and Shadow of Dark God expose the biased structures of the nation-
state, which perceive divorced and/or abandoned women and widows as outside
the (re)productive logic of family and by extension the nation. Their right to
 Conclusion 203

financial security and property is curtailed through a blinkered insistence on

monogamous wifehood, sacrificial motherhood, and austere widowhood.
The legal structures unjustifiably measure women’s demands of maintenance
and share in the matrimonial property, after divorce, through the prism of sexual
purity and morality. Widows are the worst sufferers of patriarchal communities
and institutions of the state. They are subjected to patriarchal surveillance, which
reduces them to the status of, what Susie Tharu (1996) calls “an appendage in
a household organised around its active householder subjects” (1311). Alterna-
tively, a close reading of Goswami’s Shadow of Dark God highlights the potential
of widows to productively contribute to the development of the nation-state. I
suggest that a reconceptualisation of widows’ role is important because it could
systematically pull them out of the drudges of unrecognised labour, lending
meaning to their lives and enabling them to productively contribute to building
the socio-cultural and economic wealth of the nation-state. By reconceptualis-
ing the roles of women, especially wives and widows, the selected writings also
interrogate the private-public divide which seeks to determine women’s lives
within the all-subsuming cultural and religious ideologies.
The liberalisation of economy in the 1990s has affected the extant levels of
development and progress in the country. Accordingly, a close analysis of Alka
Saraogi’s Kali-Katha: Via Bypass and Usha K. R.’s Monkey-Man has illustrated
how the women writers retrace the nationalist and post-independence history
of the nation, arriving at the juncture of liberalisation, suggesting that there is
a need to rethink the very terms in which the nation and the woman question
have been framed so far. Saraogi’s text problematises the hegemonic and teleo-
logical narrative of the nation. It further questions the dominant perception of
the gendered contexts of the nation, underlining the need to engage with them
due to the renewed vigour with which the Right wing organisations have set
out to idolise the past.
Usha K. R.’s Monkey-Man reveals the impact of the grand narrative of glo-
balisation on women’s workforce participation in the urban organised service
sector. In fact, as the literary analysis of Usha’s text illustrates, women’s labour
is appropriated by financial institutions like the World Bank and other multina-
tional companies to feed the contemporary neo-colonial structures unleashed by
globalisation. The situation becomes grimmer because the majority of women
labourers in India work in the unorganised labour sector. In most cases, their
rights as workers are not protected by strong legislative measures. Usha brings
out all these concerns, highlighting the systemic exploitation of women, includ-
ing the contractualisation of labour and how it affects urban women workers.
Alternatively, as Sunder Rajan asserts, the category of women as workers
could also interrogate the state’s reluctance to acknowledge women’s productiv-
ity and labour in a variety of policymaking discourses. The idea of work could
further serve “as a possible locus of women’s collectivisation and identity, hence
an opening for them within civil society, an alternative to the private sphere
of the family and the (sole) public sphere of the religion based community to
204 Conclusion

which they are otherwise limited” (Sunder Rajan 2003, 171). In fact, howso-
ever exploitative and hierarchical the work conditions are, they at least provide
women with an opportunity to come together based on certain shared inter-
ests. As Sunder Rajan further suggests, it cannot be denied that workspaces are
inf lected by gender, caste, class, and religious differences. Nevertheless,

the work space enables first the identification and the furtherance of shared
interests.  .  . . They do provide the conditions of work related activism,
which call for a transcendence of internal differences. This, ultimately, is a
route to women’s participation in the political process.
(Sunder Rajan 2003, 171)

Such an approach plays a significant role in acknowledging the role of “all

women as always already contributors to production” (172), a recognition that
had hitherto been conspicuous by its absence in official discourses.
Feminism culled solely from the privileged experience of a certain class/caste
of women could never be politically effective. One has to recognise the depriva-
tions, discriminations, and differential politics operating within society. In fact,
the reformist vision of feminism could only materialise if the oppressed groups
would express a political consciousness of their own oppression as a community.
In this context, Bama’s Sangati and Salma’s The Hour Past Midnight foreground
a discussion of gender, which is fraught with pressing issues of class, caste, and
religion in society. These Dalit (Christian) and Muslim women writers offer a
non-brahmanical/upper caste/class reconceptualisations of the dominant order,
leading to a more nuanced and dialectical understanding of gender. In docu-
menting the everyday life patterns and incidents of Dalits and Muslim commu-
nities, both Sangati and The Hour Past Midnight emphasise privileging women’s
voices from within the regimented structures of such communities and other-
wise. This further facilitates the bridging of gaps amongst women belonging to
different caste, class, and communal contexts.
Having said that, Dalit and/or lower caste feminists have often asserted that
a call for feminist unity based on shared patriarchal oppression is an excuse
to assimilate the diverse and disparate concerns of Dalits into the upper caste,
Hindu majoritarian character of the women’s movement. In fact, Dalit women
activists believe that the upper caste/middle class women and their ‘intellectual’
feminism have taken away the Dalits’ right to speak for themselves. Lata Pratibha
Madhukar (2015)2 asserts in her review of Sharmila Rege’s last book Against
the Madness of Manu (2013) that Rege hardly engages with the Dalit Bahujan
feminist articulations in her writings. Though she has articulated the crucial
nexus between caste and feminism, Rege’s work falls short of acknowledging
the efforts of the feminists from Marathwada and Vidharba in the Dalit Bahujan
struggles. Madhukar states, “Dalit-Bahujan women like us who were involved
with such protests do not find any mention in the ‘official’ histories of women’s
movement. We do not find a mention in Sharmila’s book too.”
 Conclusion 205

Dalit and other minority women’s writings suffer a major setback because the
majority of them still remain inaccessible to people outside their particular ambit
of class, caste, regional and linguistic structure. Madhukar further asserts,

Today many Dalit Bahujan activists like me understand how historians

and researchers can murder our works by not mentioning them. It then
becomes our responsibility to write down our autobiographies, experi-
ences and oral histories. We will have to write our own histories.
(2015)

This need to write one’s history and articulate one’s rights becomes signifi-
cant because Dalits and minority populations in India today still suffer the throes
of limited access to state resources. It is not simply a consequence of low levels of
education but also the entrenched brahminism and communal politics which has
ensured that the poor and minority communities continue to live under deplor-
able circumstances. This has adversely affected the women who are burdened
with extreme physical labour as well as the practices of gender-blind policies and
pacts shared between the communal and state patriarchies.
Salma’s The Hour Past Midnight calls for a need to interrogate the extant dis-
cursive narratives and theoretical paradigms, which perceive the Islamic rituals
and community relations through the biased prism of personal laws only. Such
an approach plays a pivotal role in preventing women and gender relations from
getting appropriated by patriarchal and communal structures. The novel further
asserts that conservative factions within a minority group defend its interests and/
or freedom against the aggressive demeanour of the majoritarian state. The state
panders to such constructions by endorsing the private-public dichotomy. Under
this dichotomy, the personal laws are relegated to an ossified essentialised terrain,
beyond all negotiations. All this is done in the name of protecting the interests
of the minority community. Alternatively, the present analysis of Salma’s novel
takes off from these theoretical junctures, proposing a feminist re-engagement
with the spatial and metaphorical binaries of the private and the public. I have
subscribed to Nivedita Menon’s idea of legal plurality, defined as “reforms from
within communities as well as legislation on areas outside the personal laws” (as
quoted in Sunder Rajan 2003, 157), thereby contesting the idea of blanket impo-
sition of a Uniform Civil Code. The idea of legal plurality is further tied up with
gender justice, which is “best achieved by reform from within communities, by
piecemeal legislation, and/or an optional civil code” (Sunder Rajan 2003, 159).
More to the point, the novel raises serious questions about the position of
women within minority communities. By so doing, it poses an important issue
in the light of these ruptures, that is, “whether gender unity can withstand com-
munal hostility” (Sangari 2008, 522)? However, the question is how this unity
could be achieved, when women too are divided along the lines of caste, class,
and religion. How are these differences to be managed? Is it possible for the
‘mainstream’ middle class women’s movement to reach out to Dalit and Muslim
206 Conclusion

women? Finally, how could the feminist politics in India be aligned with the
wider processes of confrontation against communalism, which is embedded in
the structures of the nation-state?
The book firmly suggests that women’s resistance and rebellions have a
potential of evolving into strong political confrontations against communal and
structural inequalities. In fact, a viable feminist politics would entail privileging
women’s voices from within the regimented structures of patriarchal and com-
munal authority. An attempt could be made to highlight the lateral connections
and inf luences, which have kept women under oppressive regimes, howsoever
unequal, aggressive, and defensive they might be in their distinct facets. A femi-
nist engagement across religious, communal, and caste/class barriers could be a
viable idea in this regard. Thus, it is significant for women to register their rebel-
lion against wider dialectics of political forces to constantly struggle towards an
egalitarian future.
Such an engagement could interrogate the gendered contexts of the nation-
state as well as its differential patriarchal grids. It would surely facilitate the
reimagining as well as reconstitution of the gendered habitus both at the level of
micropolitics and macropolitics.

Notes
1 I refer here to Jasbir Jain’s Indigenous Roots of Feminism (2011). She draws on several indig-
enous resources to prove that Indian feminism(s) is not an idea imported from the West.
However, in doing so, she betrays her upper caste, middle class biases. Jain exclusively
singles out the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, Patanjali’s Yog Sutra,and Samkhya philosophy
to suggest how the Indian philosophical tradition has emphasised an archetypal image of
subordinate women through the ages, depriving Indian women of any sense of agency.
It appears a very deliberate construction of Hinduised history, falling short of offering a
holistic analysis of the woman question in post-independence India.
2 Lata Pratibha Madhukar is a Dalit-Bahujan feminist writer, social activist, and researcher.
She has published three books and several short stories, poems, and articles in Marathi,
Hindi, and English periodicals. She has been active in various social movements for the
past 35 years. These include the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini, Stree Katha, Narmada
Bachao Andolan, among many others. She is currently doing her Ph.D. on ‘Bahujan
Women’s Role in OBC Movement.’

References
Agnes, Flavia. 1999. Law and Gender Inequality: The Politics of Women’s Rights in India. New
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Guru, Gopal, and Sundar Sarukkai. 2012. The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experi-
ence and Theory. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Jain, Jasbir. 2011. Indigenous Roots of Feminism: Culture, Subjectivity and Agency. New Delhi:
Sage Publications.
Madhukar, Lata Pratibha. 2015. “Silenced by Manu and ‘Mainstream’ Feminism: Dalit-
Bahujan Women and Their History.” Translated by Meenakshee Rode and Nidhin
Shobhana. Accessed June 14 2015. https://www.dalitweb.org/?p=2805
 Conclusion 207

Parashar, Archana. 1992. Women and Family Law Reform in India . New Delhi: Sage
Publications.
Sangari, Kumkum. 2008. “Politics of Diversity: Religious Communities and Multiple
Patriarchies.” In Women’s Studies in India: A Reader, edited by Mary E. John. 515–522.
New Delhi: Penguin Books.
Sharma, Kumud, ed. 2012. Changing the Terms of the Discourse: Gender, Equality and the
Indian State. New Delhi: Pearson.
Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari. 2003. The Scandal of the State: Women, Law, and Citizenship in
Postcolonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Tharu, Susie. 1996. “The Impossible Subject: Cast and the Gendered Body.” Economic and
Political Weekly 31(22): 1311–1315.
APPENDIX
Women’s writing in post-independence India

A broad overview
In a linguistically, socially, culturally diverse country like India any attempt
to speak of a homogeneous tradition of women’s writing may sound like a
farce. Nonetheless, given the multiple levels at which patriarchy has been active
through its various nexuses and alliances to marginalise women across these
diversities, the need to inscribe it can also not be denied. In fact, a survey of
the major women writers in languages like English (including Diaspora women
writers), Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Oriya, Tamil, Kan-
nada, Telugu, Malayalam, and the northeastern region of the country reveals
how despite linguistic differences, these writers share a complex literary and
thematic experience vis-à-vis the disparate grids of class, caste, regional, and
religious hierarchies, as well as gendered power relations. It goes on to expose
that the discursive production of gender relations is closely interlinked to the
patriarchal practices of political economy, religion, law, and culture. In this light,
the appendix attempts to present a very broad overview of the range of writings
undertaken by women in post-independence India. It is in no way a historical
account or catalogue of women’s writings in various Indian languages in post-
independence India. Rather, by highlighting the major writers and writings, it
seeks to establish the urgency to construe and construct the nation as inscribed in
their writings instead of only treating their voices as dealing with one marginal
aspect of national life, that is, women.
The colonial and reformist investment in women’s education opened up
vistas of women’s writing in India. Born and f lourished amidst the fears that
women might misuse their writing skills to write love letters and have illicit
liaisons beyond the sanctimonious matrimony, writing by women soon provided
them with a platform to voice their perceptions through narratives, periodicals,
 Appendix 209

autobiographies, and fiction.1 Women’s contributions to these genres of writing

reveal how many of them incorporated the frames of mind and structures of feel-
ing geared towards resisting the dominant schema of imperialist ambitions and
later the emergent nation-state.
They were instrumental in redefining gender roles within the domestic and
public spheres. They also articulated women’s new roles as political subjects of
the nation to be. The writings by women def lect from the nationalist resolu-
tion of the woman question, demonstrating women as inhabiting a liminal space
where the private and the public sphere collide against each other. Moreover,
the women writers claim for themselves the right to write about the needs of a
woman’s body and her claim to pleasure and fulfilment, thereby problematising
the heteronormative gender structures.2
The trajectory of women’s writing evolved further after independence when
women realised that the fruits of national liberation were unevenly distributed,
leading to a complete effacement of their concerns from the political scene.
Women’s writings have delved into varied strands of thought, ranging from
women’s position in society and the nation, issues of caste and social system, and
politics, including the perennial debate between tradition and modernity. Critics
like Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (1993), Radha Chakravarty (2008), and Jasbir Jain
(2011) have engaged with diverse facets of women’s writing, both as literary and
social practice. In so doing, they highlight how the aesthetic and the political
are contingent on each other, privileging women’s everyday negotiations, modes
of conformity, struggles, and resistances within their contexts over an abstract
idea of autonomy and/or individuality. As Radha Chakravarty asserts, novels of
women writers gesture at

[a] . . . re-imagined subject . . . poised between submission and resistance,
passivity and action, potentially imbued with the power to speak and act
in transformative ways, and located in culture-specific contexts. The very
instability of this subject contains within it the possibility of initiating
change.
(2008, 20)

In light of the previous argument, one could say that women’s lives are “placed
in varying relational frameworks” (Chakravarty 2008, 18), which both empower
and inhibit their negotiations of the dominant ideologies of gender, family, class/
caste, community, and nation. For instance, writers in English like Anita Desai
(1937–) raise relevant questions pertaining to history, which have hitherto been
determined by the patriarchal processes of the nation-state. Her works like Clear
Light of Day (1980) chart out a relation between personal memory and public his-
tory, commenting on the cataclysmic events in the life of the nation. She further
explores how the political and ideological structures of the country are deeply
rooted in the patriarchal biases against women. Her characters are introspective,
foregrounding the psychological state of women. For example, in Where Shall We
210 Appendix

Go This Summer (1986), Desai validates a woman’s refusal to give in to the pres-
sures of maternity, foregrounding how she can contribute productively to society
rather than simply being an inanimate appliance, which would reproduce the
correct progeny for patriarchal lineage. Shashi Deshpande (1938–), on the other
hand, focusses more on relationships. She has explored relationships between
men and women, mothers and daughters in her novels The Dark Holds No Terror
(1980), The Binding Wine (1993), and A Matter of Time (1996), liberating them
from the burden of traditional mythologies of glorified motherhood. This inter-
rogates the patriarchal investment in the woman question post-independence,
which continued to perceive them as sources of familial and communal honour
that could only be guarded by men of the family-community-nation continuum.
Alternatively, Namita Gokhale (1956–) eschews from representing women as
the sole victims of oppression in societal institutions like marriage and family.
In her novel A Himalayan Love Story (1996), Gokhale critiques these institutions,
which are primarily centred on the figure of a heterosexual male patriarchal fig-
ure. In so doing, she brings out the traumas embedded in the dominant construc-
tion and performance of masculinity. In the novel, as Lalit struggles to disguise
his alternative sexual orientations behind the facade of marriage, it highlights,
to borrow Sanjay Srivastava’s (2015) words, how men are impelled to constantly
strive towards proving their manhood in “various social spheres including their
sexual lives” (35). Thus, an engagement with the “making of maleness” (Sriv-
astava 2015, 35) could help us negotiate the power-politics inherent in gender
relationships as well as the heteronormative proscriptions of society. Srivastava
further asserts: “One aspect of masculine performance concerns the concurrent
suppression of non-heteronormative histories, through which these histories are
effaced and incorporated into a monolithic nationalist myth of heteronormativ-
ity” (35).
Furthermore, writers like Githa Hariharan (1954–) dwell on the gendered
power relationships by taking recourse to oral narratives, myths, fantasy, and
magic realism in novels like The Thousand Faces of Night (1992), The Ghosts of Vasu
Master (1994), and When Dreams Travel (1999). Apart from this, Hariharan deals
with overtly political themes in her later novels like In Times of Siege (2003), Fugi-
tive Histories (2009), and I Have Become the Tide (2019). She condemns the patriar-
chal alliances that are complementary to the obscurantist structures of state – the
Hindu Right and pseudo-secularism on the one hand and neo-colonialism, capi-
talism, and globalisation on the other. Arundhati Roy’s (1961–) fictional and non-
fictional writings seek to interrogate the marginal spaces accorded to Dalits and
tribals from the feminist perspective and reconceptualise the nation. They incor-
porate a critique of the larger forces of terrorism, globalisation, corruption, and
neo-imperialism, underwriting an analysis of the crosscurrents and contradictions
of the nation. Meena Kandasamy (1984–) is also one of the young emerging writ-
ers in Indian English. Her novel The Gypsy Goddess (2014) foregrounds the theme
of violence in an asymmetrical caste, class, and political context of rural India.
When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017) inscribes themes
 Appendix 211

such as women’s desire, trauma, and abuse within the institution of marriage
and otherwise. Kandasamy experiments with form, technique, and the narrative
structure of her novels, offering a strong critique of the networks of power and
caste tyranny.
Eunice de Souza’s (1940–2017) writings have also made valuable contribu-
tions in the field of Indian women’s writing. She has published various antholo-
gies of poetry. Prominent among them are Nine Indian Women Poets (1997),
Women’s Voices: Selections from Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Indian Writ-
ing in English (2002), and Both Sides of the Sky: Post-independence Poetry in English
(2008). Her novels are titled Dangerlok: A Novella (2001) and Dev and Simran
(2003). In a write-up on Eunice de Souza, posted on the website of Poetry Inter-
national Rotterdam, Arundhati Subramaniam (2010) remarks that de Souza’s early
collections of poetry emerged out of, what the poet calls “a slow burning fuse
about my community (Catholic-Goan community).”
Moreover, Meena Alexander (1951–), Chitra Banerjee Devakaruni (1956–),
Suniti Namjoshi (1941–), Jhumpa Lahiri (1967–), and Kiran Desai (1971–) are
among the major Diaspora women writers. Alexander is acclaimed for her novel
Nampally Road (1991) and a memoir titled Faultlines (2003). She has explored
themes like trauma, memory, and migration in her works. In fact, the forma-
tion of consciousness, memory, remembering, dismembering becomes a viable
means of conceptualising one’s identity. Though identity is articulated in frac-
tured patches, it raises important questions like how cultural exchanges influence
someone when she crosses cultural boundaries. Devakaruni lives in Houston,
Texas at present and has been particularly writing about immigrants and women,
dwelling on the abuse, victimisation, and social isolation that these women have
to face in an alien country, without familial support. She has written The Mistress
of Spices (1998), Neela: Victory Song (2002), The Conch Bearer (2003), and Before
We Visit the Goddess (2017), among other significant works. Her latest novel is
The Forest of Enchantments (2019), wherein she retells the Ramayana from Sita’s
perspective. Suniti Namjoshi has published Aditi and the One-eyed Monkey (1986),
The Mothers of Maya Diip (1989), Feminist Fables: Saint Suniti and the Dragon (1995),
Suki (2013), etc. She deploys her subversive imagination to rework the ‘magic’
of myths and wonder tales from a feminist perspective, dialogically engaging
with both the folk literary and gendered traditions. In fact, Namjoshi’s fantastic
and mythic model arrives as a link within the feminist reworkings of traditional
myths, exposing the tyranny of categories and asymmetrical relations of power
pervading the society.
Jhumpa Lahiri (1967–) and Kiran Desai (1971–) belong to the second genera-
tion of diaspora women writers, exploring themes like cultural displacement,
dislocation, hybrid identities, and the issues of cultural assimilation vis-à-vis land
of birth and/or adoption. Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003) significantly explores
the patterns of gender construction and cultural behaviour evident in Indian
immigrants to the West. In fact, there seems to be an insistence on keeping vital
ties with their cultural heritage. Desai also takes up the issue of insurgency in
212 Appendix

the Northeastern part of India, especially Kalimpong in The Inheritance of Loss

(2006), exploring how the political violence has severe implications for the day-
to-day lives of individuals. Paradoxically, the move to economic liberalisation
has led to ossifying of boundaries within and without the nation. Thus, the
feminist reconstruction of the nation and its cultural f lows call into question the
decentred, diffused, and rhizomatic nature of globalisation.
In Hindi literature too, women writers have explored the ideas of marriage,
sexuality, family, domesticity, and politics, looking for ways to align themselves
with socio-political processes on the one hand and juridico-patriarchal discourses
of the nation on the other. As Mridula Garg (1938–) suggests, the women writ-
ers in Hindi have had to carve out an independent literary space for themselves
amidst a strong tradition of male writing. The ‘anxiety of inf luence’ was one of
the major obstacles in their self-expression. Moreover, they had to contest the
overbearing prejudices and stereotypes concerning women’s portrayal in litera-
ture whose “seeds were there in the image proclaimed by the epics and the oral
literature” (Garg 1991, 411). She further suggests how the real woman “came to
be relegated to the position of an inadequate provider and a weak being in need
of masculine protection” (411).
Krishna Sobti (1925–2019) is one of the prominent writers in Hindi whose
writings have contested the male literary tradition. She has experimented with
the expressions – linguistic and narrative – and introduced new styles and tech-
niques of writing. Her literary oeuvre covers a vast range of issues including
the Partition, social upheaval and historical turmoil, excesses of feudalism in
the country, and dissolution of human values. Apart from this, her narratives
have also dwelt on women’s sexuality and their perception of the body and the
interpersonal relationships shared between men and women. Some of her novels
include Daar se Bichhuri (1958)/Memory’s Daughter (2007), Mitro Marjani (1967)/To
Hell With You Mitro (2007), Surajmukhi Andhere Ke (1972)/Sunflowers of Dark
(2010), Zindaginama/A Saga of Life (1979), Ai Ladki (1991)/Listen, Girl (2002),
and Dil-o-Danish/The Heart Has its Reasons (2006), among others. Mitro Marjani
occupies a prominent place among them as it raises the bold themes of a woman’s
bodily requirements and her right to satisfaction within marriage or otherwise.
The text also explores the tensions inherent in a so-called normal heterosexual
marriage wherein a woman’s body, her desires, and sexuality are negated, impel-
ling her to lead a constrained existence. Mitro, however, refuses to settle down
in such a conventional marital arrangement. Instead, she revels in her own sen-
suality, affirming the significance of bodily needs for women, “Have you ever
seen such breasts . . .” (Sobti and Behl 1992 , 167). Thus, Sobti is credited with
illustrating how a woman’s body is not simply a site of cultural signifiers but also
a corporeal/material body. It is both constructed by and responds to what Grosz
describes as “the sensations provided by a purely anatomical body” (as quoted in
Rajendran 2015, 34).
Mannu Bhandari (1931–), Maitreyi Pushpa (1944–), and Geetanjali Shree
(1957–) are a few other such writers whose literary works explore how the category
 Appendix 213

of nation impinges on the lives of women. If Maitreyi Pushpa (Idannamam/This

is Not for Me 1994, Alma Kabutari/Alma Kabutari 2000, Chaak/The Wheel 2009)
focusses on rural India, exploring the role of decentralised political institutions
like panchayats and how they impact the lives of poor, especially women, then
Mannu Bhandari (Mahabhoj/Grand Feast 1979) interrogates the exclusivist and
feudalist stance of the newly formed nation as well as national identity, which
refused to accommodate the identity of women, Dalits, tribals, and other com-
munities within its ambit. Gitanjali Shree (Hamara Shahar Us Baras/Our Town that
Year 1998, Khali Jagah/Empty Space 2006) shifts the focus to the women’s voices in
the context of transnational movements against terrorism, fundamentalism, and
environmental degradation.
Women’s writing in Urdu has also made its mark on the literary scene post-
independence. Carrying forward the strong legacy of Ismat Chughtai (1911–1991)
(“Lihaaf ” 1942 – translated as “The Quilt” 1993, Terhi Lakir 1942 – translated
as The Crooked Line 1995), and Qurratulain Hyder (1927–2007) (Mere Bhi Sanam
Khane/My Temples Too 1949), Aag Ka Darya (River of Fire 1959), Aakhir-i-Shab-ke
Humsafar (Fellow Wayfarers of the Last Night 1979), among others, Urdu women
writers like Sughra Mehdi (1937–2014) (Pa Ba Jaulan/Shackles 1972, Dhund/Fog
1974, Purvai/East Wind 1978, Raag Bhopali/Raag Bhopali 1983), Jeelani Bano
(1936–) (a short story collection Roshni ke Minar/Luminous Minarets 1958 and
three novels Nirvan/Enlightenment 1963, Jugnu aur Sitare/Firefly and Stars 1965,
Naghme ka Safar/Journey of a Song 1977), Wajida Tabassum (1935–2011) (three
short story collections Utran/Discraded 1977, Kaise Samjhaoon/How do I Convince
1977, Zakhme-e-Dil Aur Mahak, Aur Mehak/Wounds of Heart and Fragrance 1978,
and a novel Phul Khilne Do/Let Flowers Bloom 1977), and Tarannum Riaz (1963–)
(three short story collections Yeh Tang Zameen/This Narrow Land 1998, Ababee-
lain Laut Aayengi/Ababeelain Will Return 2000, and Yambarzal/Yambarzal 2004
and a novel Moorti/Idol 2004 ) have made significant contributions to voicing the
concerns of women, minority rights, and how they have been affected by the
majoritarian politics of the nation. Their writings have significantly dealt with
social and cultural oppression and issue of hierarchies of power embedded in the
structural and epistemological institutions of society.
Amrita Pritam (1919–2005) and Dalip Kaur Tiwana (1935–) are the major
writers of Punjabi language. Tiwana’s major works include Eho Hamara Jeewana
(Such is Her Fate 1968), Vat Hamari (Our Path 1970), Teeli da Nishan (Mark of
Nose Pin 1971, Doosri Sita/Second Sita 1975), and Katha Kaho Urvashi (Tell the
Tale/Urshavi 1999), among others. They explore how women are impelled to
live under constraining circumstances. Tiwana’s works are further marked by a
quest for women’s self, which is lost under the burden of centuries of domina-
tion at the hands of patriarchal structures. What impact do these structures have
on women’s negotiations vis-à-vis their relationships with men, women, and so
on? Why do relationships fail? “Is it an inability to comprehend the existential
loneliness and failure to accept it,” as Jasbir Jain (2001, 90) puts it, or the fact that
women’s subjectivities are socialised to subscribe to the gendered hierarchies and
214 Appendix

inequitable power relationships as propounded by the institutional structures and

patriarchal discourses of the nation?
In Gujarati and Marathi literature too, women writers have offered an alterna-
tive perspective of the nation by their vociferous condemnation of the exploitation
of women in society. For example, Gujarati women’s writings like Kundanika
Kapadia’s (1927–) Sat Paglan Aakashamn (Seven Steps in the Sky 1984) and Ila Arab
Mehta’s (1938–) Batris Putli-ni Vedana (Woes of Women 1982) portray women as
offering a strong resistance to the injustice meted to them by patriarchal struc-
tures. The women protagonists seem to be very conscious of their individuality
and are particularly grieved by the compromising tenor of their life. Another
novel titled Vaad (2011, translated as Fence) by Mehta is based on the theme
of identity politics and how a young woman negotiates her dreams in a world
aff licted with communal violence. The authorial concern in Gujarati literature,
like the Indian English novelists, has also been centred on exploring the nuanced
and multiple paradigms of individual psyche. This has been largely triggered by
their exposure to modernist writings of western literature. Writers like Saroj
Pathak (1929–1989) (two novels Nishesh (Withholding Nothing 1978) and Priya
Punam (Priya and Punam 1980), and collected short stories Saroj Pathak Shreshta
Varta (Saroj Pathak’s Best Stories 1981), Dhiruben Patel (1926–) (Vadvanal/Elderly
1983), and Varsha Adalja (1940–) (Mare Pan Ek Ghar Hoy/I Also Have a Home
1971) poignantly reveal the mental isolation and agony experienced by women
characters. Adalja is a stage actor and well known for her spirited lectures at
public gatherings. She has also worked among the prisoners and adivasis, repre-
senting a nuanced perspective on the sufferings, choices (lack of ), and survival
strategies of the vulnerable sections of society.
The oeuvre of Marathi writings is primarily concerned with themes ranging
from regionalism, rural-urban divide, tradition, and modernity, including an
attempt at perceiving contradictory processes of development embedded in the
socio-political and economic institutions. Moreover, what is their impact on the
disadvantaged sections of society? Gauri Deshpande’s (1942–2003) works (a col-
lection of stories Eka Paan Galavaya/The Shedding of a Leaf 1980, and novels like
Teruo Ani Kahi Door Paryant/Teruo and Somewhere in the Distance 1985, Ahe He Asa
Ahe/Things Are What They Are 1986, and Nirgaati and Saarike Ga, Chandrike Ga/
Bonds and Saarika, My Girl, Chandrika, My Girl 1987) sensitively portray urban
women’s efforts at making sense of modernity and its implications for their lives
and equations with people.
More to the point, the arrival of Dalit women writers on the Marathi liter-
ary canvas has led to a nuanced perception of structural inequalities. Urmila
Pawar (1945–) (two collections of short stories titled Sahav Bot (Sixth Finger 1988)
and Chauthi Bhint (Fourth Wall 1990)) and Pradnya Lokhande (1966–) (a short
story collection Afawa Khari Tharawi Mhanun/So That The Rumour Proves to be
True 2010) are among the foremost Dalit women writers belonging to Marathi
literature. Jyoti Lanjewar (1950–) is a Dalit woman poet and critic, who has
extensively contributed to framing the contemporary Dalit theoretical discourse,
 Appendix 215

bringing out the significance of B.R. Ambedkar and Jyotirao Phule in fighting
for an egalitarian world order.
Bengali and Oriya women writers constitute a significant part of the literary
chain, connecting women writers across the country. The literary works by Asha-
purna Devi (1909–1995), Mahasweta Devi (1926–2016), and Bani Basu (1939–)
are noteworthy. Ashapurna Devi has intimately ref lected on the plight of women
within a close-knit patriarchal family, representing the gendered hierarchies of
power embedded in the “narrow domestic scene” (Sen 2007, 10). She deftly
highlights the interpersonal rivalries among women, their cruelty towards one
another, accompanied with the power to subvert the given norms of segregated
gendered spaces. Thus, she highlights the attitudinal differences and hierarchies,
which train women’s subjectivities into becoming perfect pupils of patriarchies,
rendering ideas like female solidarity suspect. Her major works include Pratham
Pratisruti (The First Promise 1964), Subarnalata/Subarnalata (1967), and Bakul-Katha
(The Saga of Bakul 1974).
On the other hand, Mahasweta Devi has extensively worked on the issues of
the tribals of Bengal and Bihar. They present an alternative but viable reality of
the nation, that is, how its developmental vision is as exclusive as it was during the
colonial times. Aranyer Adhikar (The Rights of the Forest 1978) and Chhoti Munda
ebang Tar Tir (Chhoti Munda and His Arrow 1980) foreground how the tribals are
exploited in their own forest land. The forest resources are sacrificed at the altar of
the aggrandising appetite of the administrative machinery. The tribals are victim-
ised and are either appropriated by the naxalite forces for purposes of violence or
devoid of their basic Constitutional rights. Other major works include “Rudali”
(“Woman Weeper” 1979), “Stanadayani” (“Breast-Giver” 1980), highlighting
how the resources of southern nations like India have been misused, appropriated,
and brought close to exhaustion due to their exploitation by the First world. Bani
Basu has also written prolifically and Janmabhumi Matribhumi (Land of Birth, Moth-
erland 1987) is one of her major works.
Pratibha Ray (1943–) and Binapani Mohanty (1936–) are considered important
writers of Oriya. Ray has published several short stories, novels, and a travelogue.
Her major works include Yajnaseni/The Story of Draupadi (1984), Aadibhoomi/Primal
Land (1993), Mahamoha/The Great Attachment (1998), and Magnamati/After the Del-
uge (2004). She has taken up the concerns of gender, environmental destruction,
exploring the inequalities inherent in the structures of society. Her research work
amidst the Bonda tribe in Orissa contributes much to her fictional writing. She
has focussed on the issue of child marriage in case of young boys and how it leads
to warped perceptions of masculinity. She has received numerous awards and
accolades like the Orissa Sahitya Akademi Award (1985) and the Biswv Award
(1995) for her contribution to Oriya literature. Binapani Mohanty is regarded as
one of the foremost Oriya short story writers. Most of her stories are set in rural
locations. She entered the Oriya literary scene with her book of short stories titled
Naba Taranga (New Wave 1973). In 1990, she received the Sahitya Akademy award
for her volume of short stories titled Pata Dei/Pata Dei (1987). It is a remarkable
216 Appendix

story of a woman’s assertion, transforming the way rape, victimhood, honour, and
women’s dignity are perceived by the patriarchal society.
A survey of Telugu and Kannada women’s writing reveals a similar engage-
ment with social issues. Vasireddy Seeta Devi’s (1933–2007) writings have a pro-
gressive tenor, depicting a strong sense of accountability as a writer. One of the
major writers of Telugu literature, her writing has mainly dealt with highlight-
ing the political economy of daily life. She was accused of having naxalite con-
nections, which led to the banning of her writings, especially Marichika (Mirage
1979). Another novel Matti Manishi (Man of the Soil 2000) portrays the conf licting
value structures of society, bound between ossified feudal values on one hand and
trysts with capitalist enterprises on the other. She has received many accolades
and awards from the Sahitya Akademi of Letters. Volga (1950–), another major
woman writer in Telugu, is also known for voicing the problems of the under-
privileged and socially deprived people. In fact, the Zubaan website describes her
literary achievements thus: “she is generally acknowledged to have introduced a
feminist perspective into the literary and political discourse of Andhra Pradesh”
(Volga n.d.). Her novel Sveccha (Freewill 1987) marks a landmark in contempo-
rary Telugu feminist writing, contesting the power and privileges enjoyed by
the patriarchal institutions of the country. Other titles constituting her literary
oeuvre include Manavi (Request 1989), Sahaja (Natural 1986), Akasham lo Sagam
(A Bit of Sky 1990), Gulabilu (Roses 1993), and so on. Similarly, Jupaka Sub-
hadra (1962–) has published numerous poems and short stories in the Telengana
Weekly. One of her short stories tilted “Badilo Mitrulu, Palilo Kaadu” (“Friends
in School, Not in the Village”) has been published by the Anveshi Research
Centre for Women’s Studies. It talks about an inter-caste friendship between two
girls, Suvarna and Sreelatha, and how it is affected by the oppressive network
of caste, poverty, and discrimination in a rural context. Being from a family of
Dalit agricultural labourers, Subhadra’s writing mainly draws on her experience
in rural Telengana, the collieries in Singreni, student revolutionary movements,
Dalit movements, and the Telengana movement.
Vaidehi (1947–) (real name Janaki Srinivasa Murthy) is one of the most promi-
nent writers in Kannada. Her writings are entwined to the larger project of social
transformation. The rebellious tone of her writings is geared towards searching
for an independent self. For instance, the South Asian Literary Recordings Proj-
ect (n.d.) website mentions about Vaidehi:

daring to sit on a chair was . . . one of the heroic feats she accomplished
in her childhood, in defiance of the social injunction that girls should not
sit on chairs in presence of the male members of the family, let alone male
members from outside.

Some of her works include a short story collection titled Antarangada Putagalu
(Pages of the Inner Self 1984). A translation of her short story “Gulabi Talkies,”
among others, has been published by Penguin India as Gulabi Talkies and Other
 Appendix 217

Stories (2006). Vaidehi has received many prestigious literary awards, like the
Karnataka Sahitya Akademi award, the M.K. Indira award, and the Katha award.
Other important women writers are S. Usha (1954–) (Ee Nelada Hadu/Songs of
this Earth 1990), Pratibha Nandakumar (1955–) (two short fictions Yaana/Travel
(1997), Akramana/Intrusion (1997)), and Vina Shanteshwar (1945–). Shanteshwar’s
women characters assert their freedom of choice, foregrounding the importance
of earning one’s own living. Her “Higondu Kathe” (A Tale As Such) takes up
the right of women to their bodies, emphasising how giving birth to a child can
also constitute a viable part of it. Anasuya Shankar (pen name Triveni 1928–63)
(Apasvara/Wrong Note (1953), Avala Mane/Her House (1959)), M. K. Indira (1917–
1994) (Tungabhadra 1963, Sadananda 1965, Navaratna 1967), and Anupama Niran-
jana (1934–1991) (Madhavi 1976, Ele/Thread 1980, and Ghosha/Rallying Cry 1985)
have foregrounded the constitution of female subjectivity in the conjugal space,
offering new definitions of terms like grihini (the woman of the home) and the
dharama/(un)ethics of domesticity.
The creative space carved out by women writers in Tamil and Malayalam
literatures has been well acclaimed. Writers like C. S. Lakshmi (1944–), Rajam
Krishnan (1925–2014), Sivasankari (1942–), Indhumathi (1952–), Bama (1958–),
and P. Sivakami (1957–) hold a major position in contemporary Tamil women’s
writing. C. S. Lakshmi (pen name Ambai)’s writings are rooted in Tamil liter-
ary conventions. She is further engaged in pushing the boundaries of her narra-
tive by deploying postmodern, fragmented and interspersed narrative techniques
in her works, especially the short stories. Here, “Squirrel” (1986) and “Yellow
Fish” (1992) are cases in point. Her writings are an exercise in recovering wom-
en’s history, their supposedly insignificant lives, and their writings. The Zubaan
website introduces Lakshmi thus:

She founded and is presently the trustee and director of SPARROW

(Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women), which is involved
in building a women’s archives with oral history, visual and print material
on women’s history and lives.

Krishnan’s novels are titled Verukku Neer/Water for the Root (1972), Karippu
Manikal/Salty Pearls (1979), Mannakattu Puntulikal/Tender Buds of the Earth (1988),
Cattiya Velvi/Flames of Truth (1999), etc. Many of her characters belong to the
subaltern sections of society, like labourers, farmers, workers, prisoners, petty
criminals, hinting at the author’s own experience of marginality and neglect
as a consequence of living in an old age home. Sivasankari (1942–) (Poi 1985 –
translated as Deception 2007, Palangal 2007, and a collection of short stories
translated from Tamil called The Betrayal and Other Stories 2002), Vidhya Sub-
ramaniam (1957–) (Uppu Kanakku/ Salt Count 2009), and Indumathi (Tharayil
Irungam Vimanangal 1977– translated as Surrendered Dreams 2007) highlight per-
tinent social issues in their works. Their novels have a strong feminist and social
consciousness, sometimes geared at activism.
218 Appendix

P. Sivakami is a Dalit activist who resigned from her post as an Indian Admin-
istrative Service officer to fight for the rights of her community in an effective
manner. Her major works are Pazhaiyana Kazhithalum (Grip of Change 1989),
Asiriyar Kurippu (Author’s Notes: Gowri 1999), Anandayee (The Taming of Women
1999), and Kurukku Vettu (Cross Section 2014). She runs a journal called Pudhiya
Kodangi/The New Soothsayer, where she gives opportunities to minorities to raise
their voice. She believes that one cannot serve the interests of the community as
long as one continues to hold a position of power.
Malayalam women’s writing, or ‘Pennezhuthu’ as it is called in Kerala, has
a rich literary history. In fact, as Jancy James (1995) asserts, women in Kerala
have had a long tradition of enlightenment, “Art and Literature were significant
components in the formulation of the female mind in Kerala” (98). Lalithambika
Antherjanam (1909–1989) (short stories titled “Itu Ashasyamano” (Is This Reliev-
ing? 1935), “Pancharayumma (Sweet 1947), “Ormayute Appurattu” (Kiss, Beyond
Memories 1960), “Nakshatram” (Star 1969),and a novel Agnisakshi (Witness by Fire
1980)) was one of the major women writers who straddled the literary path of tran-
sition to political independence. She wrote in order to register her protest against
the ossified norms of society, especially the humiliating customs and taboos for
women, as endorsed by her upper caste Brahmin/Nambootiri patriarchy.
There were others like Madhavikutty/Kamala Das (1934–2009), who began
publishing in the mid-1960s. She was received as “one of the key figures in the
‘ultramodern’ (postmodern) literary movement” ( Palakeel 1996, 198). A bilin-
gual writer, Kamala Das wrote in both Malayalam and English. Her most sig-
nificant work is Ente Katha (My Story 1973), followed by Balyakala Smarankal
(Childhood Memories 1987) and Nirmathalam Poothakalam (When Nirmathalam/Fruit
Bloomed 1994), tracing a kind of trajectory of the construction(s) of a feminist
self. She discusses the implications of colonial and social modernity on the lives
of women, who have hitherto remained confined within the inner quarters of
home. In fact, the confessional self of the woman author was introduced for
the first time on the Malayalam literary canvas by her. She wrote openly about
women’s sexuality, body, and man-woman relationships.
Kamala Das (“Chandanamarangal” (“The Sandal Trees”1988)), P. Vatsala
(1938–) (“Dhushyanthannum Bheemannummillatha Lokam” (“A World with-
out Bheema or Dushyanth” 1995)), and K. R. Meera (1970–) (“Coming Out”
(“Coming Out” 2004)) have offered a strong resistance to the heteronormative
paradigms of desire. In so doing, they have not only defamiliarised the idea of
woman’s desire, but also dealt with what Aneeta Rajendran calls “subjects which
are imbricated in a variety of other sexual and affectional economies” (2015, 7).
The stories delve into women’s worlds, underscoring their latent potential to
redefine the dichotomous spheres of the private and public, imbuing them with
alternative meanings. Rajendran further asserts:

Homoerotic desire re-draws some of these lines: making women available

to one another when they are forbidden to men of corresponding com-
munities, or transforming notions of purity, inviolateness and chastity by
 Appendix 219

revealing them to be always already under siege within the very homes that
are supposed to keep them safe. Space thus may be sexualized differently
from how it is gendered.
(2015, 12)

At the same time, many of these narratives reveal the tensions inherent in
women’s embodied experiences. Lesbian/same-sex desire does not have a linear,
progressive, and teleological trajectory. It often lurks in what Rajendran calls
“the heart-breaking distortions heteronormativity produces on its craven adher-
ents” (2015, 210). While the alternative spectrum of such a desire could chal-
lenge heterodominance, it may not always be possible for women to overhaul
the proscribing boundaries of heteronormativity. For instance Das’ “The Sandal
Trees” deploys the metaphor of sandalwood to not simply hint at Sheela’s inti-
mate remembrances of her female lover Kalyani but also the silence that has
almost anaesthetised her relationship with her husband. “No relief was possible. I
wandered in search of myself. At last, with drooping soldiers, I turned back and
walked towards others” (K. Das 1995, 16).
Sara Joseph (1946–) (a collection of short stories Paapathara/A Stream of Sin
1990 and a novel Alahayude Penmakkal/Aalaha’s Daughters 1999), Gracy (1951–)
(Randu Swapna Darsikal/Two Dreamers 1999, Kaveriyude Neru/The Truth of Kaveri
2000, Panikkannu/Fever(ish) Eye 2002), and Ashita (Vismaya Chhihnangal/Signs of
Wonder 1986, Thathagatha/Father’s Saga 2000) are also among the major contem-
porary writers of Malayalam. Sara Joseph’s subversive reworking of the Rama-
yana myth titled Ramayana Kathakal (2005) has earned much critical acclaim. She
is also an active member of the Kerala feminist movement. The most important
aspect of the work of these writers, as Jancy James asserts, “is their use of a lan-
guage which makes irreverence an art. . . . Their writing gives violent hurt to all
citadels of patriarchy, including literature, religion, education, marriage and the
value system” (1995, 109–110).
As far as the Northeastern women’s writings are concerned, the works of
Mamag Dai (1957–) (The Legends of Pensam 2006, The Black Hill 2014), Uddipana
Goswami (1978–) No Ghosts in This City (2014), Temsula Aao (1945–) (These Hills
Called Home 2006, Laburnum for My Head 2009, Aosenla’s Story 2018), Easterine
Kire Iralu (1959–) (A Naga Village Remembered 2003, Mari 2010, Bitter Wormwood
2011, When the River Sleeps 2014, Son of the Thundercloud 2016, and A Respectable
Woman 2019), and Anjum Hasan (Lunatic in My Head 2007, Neti Neti 2009, Dif-
ficult Pleasures 2012, The Cosmopolitans 2015, and A Day in the Life 2018) have
registered a significant presence on the Indian English literary scene. Apart from
them, there are numerous regional writers like Khawlkungi (1927–) who is a
short story writer, essayist, and journalist writing in Mizo. She also received the
prestigious Padma Shri award in 1987 for her contribution to Mizo literature.
Kekhrievou Yhomo (1970–) belongs to a poor farming family in Kohima and
has been writing novels and short stories in her native tongue Tunyidie, a lan-
guage of Nagaland. Her first novel Azo Kekhrie Menguyalie (1999) was translated
into English as Longing for My Mother’s Love.
220 Appendix

One of the major thrusts of these writings is to contest the stereotypical

images of Northeastern India as either a colourful contact zone of varied tribes,
natural resources, or a hotbed of insurgent and/or terror activities. It is evident
that these discourses are a product of mainstream media representations, which
are intent on depicting India’s Northeastern region as a lucrative destination for
tourism. The writings have been tirelessly contesting the homogenised narrative
of nation, its rigid institutional structures, and the impact of their exclusionary
politics of development on this region. Here, the ruthless implementation of
the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in 1958 is a case in point. Irom Sharmila
Chanu (1972–) has fought for the restitution of civil rights in the region and
written poems that interrogate the abuse of authority, protesting the exploitation
of the oppressed sections of society.
Apart from these, there are various women-centric anthologies that have
come out in the recent past. They span across various languages and include
short story and poetry collections by women. They represent the nuanced and
multilayered cultures of the country, highlighting the subtle literary transforma-
tions that have taken place in the genre of women’s writing over time. Some of
the noted anthologies by women include Katha (2007), edited by Urvashi Buta-
lia, Five Novellas by Women Writers (2008), edited by Mini Krishnan, Ten Women
Writers of Kerala: Short Stories and Interviews (2012), edited by Sreedevi K. Nair
and Mary Nirmala, and Unbound: 2,000 Years of Indian Women’s Writing (2015),
edited by Annie Zaidi.

Notes
1 Women writers like Rassundari Devi, Savithribai Phule (1831–1897), Tarabai Shinde
(1850–1910), Swarnakumari Devi (1855–1932), Pandita Ramabai Saraswati (1858–1922),
Lakshmibai Tilak (1868–1936), Ramabai Ranade (1863–1924), Rokeya Sakhawat Hos-
sain (1880–1932), Lalithambika Antherjanam (1909–1987), and others reveal how they
subvert the conventionally regressive representations of women in reformist literature and
conduct books of the time.
2 Razia Sajjad Zaheer (1917–1979), Rashid Jahan (1905–1952), and Ismat Chughtai
(1911–1991) were some of the prominent Urdu women writers of the Progressive Writ-
ers Association (1936). Despite inhabiting the margins of the nation-state during the
period of transition to independence, they managed to make pioneering inroads into the
literary sphere by claiming for themselves and for other women the authority to speak
about women’s productive role in society and the nation to be.

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