Storylines: Conversations With Women Writers
Women’s World India/ Asmita
Rs 250, 312 pages
ISBN not given
In the lexicon of literary criticism, there is no such thing as a Male Writer. Men Writers don’t get together for conferences; Male Writers don’t find the diversity of their work undercut by critics who lump them together, willy nilly, under the amorphous heading of gender; Writers (Masculine) rarely have their concerns dismissed as boy’s stuff.
Perhaps it’s because the forcible gendering of literature has always worked only one way that there is so much discomfort with the phrase Women Writers. Like the word “feminist”, it’s loaded: women who also happen to write either squirm away from it, protesting that the mere fact of their gender is not the most significant thing about their writing, or embrace the term in full awareness, accepting the term and vowing to use it to empower themselves.
For the editors of this book, Storylines is a project made necessary by the walls of indifference and ignorance that surround much of women’s writing in India. For a lay reader, the existence of a volume like this forces you to riffle through your bookshelves in search of other volumes of interviews and criticism, and to begin to notice the absences. The Paris Review series of interviews, justly praised the world over, still tends to include three male writers to every one woman writer.
Mainstream books on Indian writing—with the caveat, in English, or not—tend to marginalise women writers, dumping them in the footnotes, or focus on one or two women who are usually too well-known to be ignored, or to create what I secretly think of as the Zenana section, a chapter often decorously written, linking the stories of three or four women together as a sort of gesture of token appeasement. The only exceptions are always volumes from the women’s presses, which sets up its own echoes of unease. It’s as though mainstream publishing has washed its hands of this work, setting it down as yet another chore for women to carry out. Nor is the mainstream media much more sensitive. A case in point is this book itself, which has been available in Delhi bookshops for over a month now, and does not appear to have been reviewed seriously in any mainstream newspaper yet, though several of them found space to review self-help books (Paulo Coelho, Arindam Chaudhuri).
There are several themes this set of conversations attempts to address. The first is the question of space. In some cases, this is directly, bluntly physical, as when Volga speaks of the difficulty of finding a table to work on: “When the table is free, I am not; when I am free, the table is being used by the children or other adults.” Jameela Nishat is one of the few exceptions when she says that domestic issues don’t interfere with her writing; Mangala Godbole voices the feelings of a great many women when she refers to creativity as a “raincoat”, to be removed and placed on a peg outside the door before she enters the house. There is also the wider sense of space, as in the spaces women manage to occupy in the mainstream. Some writers find their work dismissed as a “hobby”, as though writing was needlework, only less useful; some, like Dhiruben Patel, have actually had their work taken over and appropriated.
Patel wrote Bhavni Bhavai
and discovered, a while after the English translation had come out, that her name had disappeared from the script—it was presented as the work of Ketan Mehta, who had directed the film. She demanded justice; when Mehta said that the film-script was his creation, she suggested that in that case he might have published his instructions and descriptions, but omitted the dialogues and lyrics that she had written. Her struggle to be named the author evoked telling responses: I could not imagine a male writer caught in a similar bind being told that at his age, this controversy was not appropriate, and that he should be worshipping god instead.
Space, or the lack of it, has a direct impact on form. “The interrupted nature of women’s lives often makes for ruptured writing…” the editors comment in the Introduction. “So writers move from modifying the content of their work to modifying its form…. Epics are replaced by novels; novels are placed on the back-burner and they settle for short stories instead; short stories are frequently abbreviated into columns. Creative effort is thus pruned to dimensions that do not pretend to grandeur—there are few magnum opuses in women’s writing.”
Everything about women’s writing, then, seems to be about shrinking, about fitting in. This also contributes to one of the greatest stereotypes about women’s writing, that it is often tediously domestic, and like all stereotypes, this has a small kernel of truth to it. There is a certain kind of “women’s novel”—not produced by most of the practitioners of the craft included here—that anyone who has apprenticed in a publishing house can recognise immediately: often touching, but often also deeply circumscribed, often written jerkily (you can almost see the interruptions of the average day taking their toll), and in some cases, eerily isolated, as though the woman who stumblingly writes of an old, hackneyed story has discovered it for the first time, and does not know that others have worn it to death. These poignant but sometimes deeply flawed specimens of writing express a different kind of urgency, a need to be heard and to have their stories told, but they don’t always make for good writing.
On the other hand, the struggle for several of the most skilled women writers is to have the domestic space accorded the importance it deserves. (This goes back to an old, old argument—was Charles Dickens superior to Jane Austen because he had a wider canvas, or would you place Austen over him on the ground that she was by far the more perceptive writer?) To belittle the novel set in the private spaces of the kitchen or the bedroom is to give your assent to the argument that only the masculine (read public) world counts, that the feminine (read private) world is of no importance, or at any rate, of importance only to women readers. And conversely, when women tackle larger themes—politics in particular—they risk greater disparagement than men. Mridula Garg captures the subtle shift in argument perfectly: “Earlier it used to be: what do they know about war, what do they know about history, about politics—all those were taboo subjects. But now we’re in every field so they don’t say that any more….So now it’s how you treat it—are you totally shameless, or totally without values, or are you anti-Indian, westernised…”
One of the many ideas discussed here is Rukmini Bhaya Nair’s idea of the “genderlect”: “In her view, while the linear narrative mode of story-telling with a strong pull towards closure is the preferred male-masculine form of expression and communication, the alternative conversational mode that follows a more open-ended and ‘interruptive’ structure, is more female/ feminine.” The best of the interviews here follow the “alternative conversational mode”: there is no sense of the interviewer following a rigid agenda, or of the interviewer as interrogator. Instead, there are moments when all three—interviewer, author and reader—appear to have found their way into a private, comfortable space where anything can be discussed and nothing is off limits. This is conversation, and what Storylines
does best is to keep the conversation going long after you’ve turned the last page.
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