Gender in The Final Solution

It is not quite often that we come across stories like “The Final Solution” which not only highlights
the struggle of gendered violence in a catastrophic world like that of the Partition of the Indian
Subcontinent, but also question the very essence of stereotypical behaviours and roles within the
setting of a violent world. The politics of the land is laid down in terms of an anti-essentialist ‘act,
’ that does more than just subverting identities, it relocates history and helps the ‘woman’ reclaim
her ‘self’ and dignity in a scenario where the ‘motherland’ is violated. Bandhopadhyay and his
characters do not only defy the stereotypical notions of ‘performativity’ but also that of ‘gender’
and ‘identity’ itself, and thus it can be said that Bandhopadhyay is both contesting and creating, “a
subject of feminism”.
In her essay “Transcending the Gendering of Partition: An Analysis of Manik Bandhopadhyay’s
Short Story ‘The Final Solution’, ” Sukannya Choudhury focuses on telling or re-telling the
narrative of partition through the lens of ‘gender, ’ she sees Mallika as a breadwinner in a world
where ‘women’ are subjected to “wilful amnesia” and says that her paper focuses on a “compulsive
recovery”. Her aim, primarily is to bring about the struggle and violence that ‘women’ had to go
through, and particularly ‘subaltern’ ‘women. ’ The positioning of Mallika, a refugee on the
railway platform of Calcutta seems to be very contradictory at first. But it is as Choudhury says in
her essay, “women when questioned their concepts on nationality and statehood remain in a
dilemma as to their role in it”. Mallika’s character can be seen as an epitome of this statement, not
only the protagonist who stands as the ‘mother-nation’ allows herself to be violated but also takes
part in the body-politics and violates Pramatha’s physical and conceptual entity. Mallika finds a
solution, which is a rather roaring resistance to “masculine supremacy”, she ends up strangling
Pramatha, after “Pramatha went limp” as she hits him with a whiskey bottle.
The ‘act’ of murder can be seen as a reversal of roles, if we look at murder and rape as destruction
of the human ‘body’ and psyche, then it becomes evident that when Mallika, “couldn’t tolerate the
idea that he had planned to enjoy her before introducing her to the profession”, she disrupts her
‘performance’ as the placid ‘woman’ and the helpless ‘mother. ’ She takes control of the body-
politics in the story and regains her ‘power. ’ “Mallika in the story is shown in a different light as
she steps out of the ingrained conception of women to be docile and submissive and men providing
protection for the same”. Mallika thus, creates a separate, if not new or in the least, a disrupted
‘category’ within the narrative and the narrative thus serves to highlight an anti-essentialist
viewpoint of violence during the partition of the Indian Subcontinent. “Manik Bandhopadhyay’s
purpose thus, lies to derive that the non-bhadrolok’s gender, class, caste experiences need to be
archived to welcome multi-dimensional viewpoint of Partition. ”
Bandhopadhyay highlights the difference in the subjective choices that Mallika and other ‘women’
make in the face of the very need for survival, the story thus considers, “the pervasive cultural
conditions” along with social, historical and even economical while setting ‘subjects’ of patriarchy
and even feminist discourse, and each female character has its own sets of “the final solution”.
When the story begins, Pramatha, Bhushan and the reader alike expect Mallika to behave in a set
manner, and one can see other ‘women’ in the story doing the very thing, what they seem to be
doing is enacting, a ‘performance. ’ Mallika is forced down the profession of prostitution because
she is a ‘mother, ’ “Mallika glanced at her skeleton like child.” Her ‘body’ is to debased and her
‘sexuality’ to be manipulated, and yet she must allow for it to happen, for “she knew her death
wouldn’t keep the child alive and had therefore opted to give in to Pramatha’s machinations”, she
has to allow her peripheral world to make her a puppet of social conditions. “Mallika’s agency to
choose prostitution as a means to feed her little son highlights her maternal instincts”, and what
becomes extensively essential to be noticed as we question the framework of gendered thought
and behaviours, is that in choosing prostitution, not only is Mallika fulfilling her role as a ‘mother,
’ but also regaining claim over her “culturally constructed body”, it is as Choudhury says, it is her
“agency” that she lays down. The Central argument here is that prostitution is a shackle that the
structure of ‘power’ bounds Mallika within, her decision and choice to render her ‘sexuality’ as a
means of survival is her limited emancipation and finally, the ‘act’ of murder is her questioning
the “categories of identity that contemporary juridical structures engender, naturalise and
immobilize”.
It is when she realises the limits that Pramatha and by extension the hostile world of “gendered
subaltern” is willing to reach, in order to inflict extensive torture and torment on the ‘woman, ’
that she ‘subverts’ her ‘position’ within the ‘grand-narrative, ’ she answers the question, “…what
it is to be constructed, to live that construction, to be a part of an ongoing process of constructing?
What is done to me, and what is it I do with what is done to me?” If we look at all the other
‘women’ in the story, we realise that there is a predictability, when it comes to their actions. Asha,
when asked by her sister -in- law to let her ‘body’ become the means of their survival, “shivered.
‘I can’t- not even if I have to die. ’”. What Asha seems to be doing here, is looking at her ‘body’
in a stereotypical way. There is another ‘woman’ that lies in the same ‘category, ’ the girl that
refuses to be a part of flesh trade when her brother fails to pay rent, “‘No, no, no. I’m not going
with anyone!”.However, what’s interesting here is the fact that Mallika sees this girl to be
privileged, for she can save herself because she “doesn’t have a husband or a child", and what
becomes clear here is that there is no “universal basis for feminism” and that, their ‘performance’
of their ‘gender’ is based on ‘context’ entirely, “the presumed universality and unity of the subject
of feminism is effectively undermined by the constraints of the representational discourse in which
it functions”.
The story takes a new and interesting stand when Asha tries to defy her expected ‘performance’
and offers to take Mallika’s place, but even then “she felt pulled in both directions. Her nerves
were on edge. ”. Evidently, Bandhopadhyay thus sets Asha as a character that makes an attempt to
‘subvert’ her ‘category, ’ even before Mallika does so. Asha’s ‘act’ can be seen as a claim on her
own ‘sexuality’ and ‘body, ’ but her “gender choices are limited” and she does not go ahead to
become the protagonist or the one that actually takes ‘power’ in her own hands. Imminently, “it
was Mallika Pramatha had send for. There was no choice for her, go she must. ”.
There is yet another ‘category’ of ‘women’ however within the story, “the married woman….
Mallika could sense where the woman was being taken” and, the “woman clutching a few coins in
her wrists, filled with impotent rage”. These ‘women’ create, and retell, and validate a ‘category’
that not only allow the “things that come… to us from the outside that we do not choose” to
segregate them but also punish them and take control of their bodies, “Social conditions that
determine us absolutely, restrict us absolutely, and actually produce victims of all of us”. These
‘women’ are treated as objects, and occupy a luminal space where at one side of the divide are
men like Pramatha and Ramlochan who “felt happy to kill two birds with one stone” and on the
other side are men like Bhushan and “the man who had taken the effort to look respectable, was
dying to be out of the house”. The several intersectional categories of ‘women’ serves to mock the
misapprehension of a singular ‘gender identity’ in a ‘post-feminist’ debate, these categories thus,
as Butler says, “contradict one another and so displace the entire enactment of gender significations
from the discourse of truth and falsity”.