The Books Column: A charpai of her own-Ismat Chughtai

(Published in the Business Standard, April 2012.)


What would you do if you were a young Indian woman reader looking for inspiration in the lives of other writers? Would you look to Jane Austen, trapped in a tiny corner of the English countryside, using her wit to create epics on two inches of ivory? To Annie Proulx, who only began writing once she had hacked her way through journalism, domesticity, the baggage of two marriages?
Saadat Hasan Manto’s tribute to his fellow Urdu writer and old friend Ismat Chughtai, offered a glimpse of a third way. This is Manto’s description of Ismat at work:

“Ismat had this habit of chewing ice. She would hold a piece in her hand and crunch on it noisily. She would be lying down on the charpai supported by her elbow, with her notebook open before her on the pillow. She would hold a fountain pen in one hand and a chunk of ice in the other. The radio would go on blaring, but Ismat’s pen would race along on the paper with a gentle rustle as her teeth smashed the ice to pieces.”

Over time, the “gentle rustle” of the pen on the paper would give way to a steady flow—Ismat would write “not caring about her spelling or the use of diacritical marks”, or anything except the need to capture the quicksilver images in her mind. But what struck me was the space that Ismat occupied—small but absolute, a charpai of her own, in answer to Virginia Woolf’s dictum that a woman writer must have a room of her own.

The 14 chapters collected in Ismat’s memoirs Kaghazi hai Pairahan span several decades of her life, but were published between 1979 to 1980. In his introduction to this first translation of her memoirs into English, A Life in Words (Penguin Classics), M Asaduddin quotes Chughtai’s note to her editor: “I will send you whatever gets written at any point of time… The sequence might be worked out while editing them.”

This is so different from the way Mulk Raj Anand or Harivansh Rai Bachchan, for instance, wrote their memoirs—Ismat had her charpoy and her ice, but she also had a household, a husband, a baby daughter, visitors, the ring of the doorbell, to answer to.
In these memoirs, she pins down her recollections at speed, writing extensively about her childhood, her memories of Aligarh and her student years, but leaves large, apparently inexplicable omissions.

There is little mention of her marriage, for example, except a brief aside to record her husband’s disapproval when Chughtai faced an obscenity trial over her celebrated short story, Lihaaf. Nor is there—in these memoirs—much of an account of her literary friendship with Manto, though the two writers had overlapping lives. Perhaps this was reticence; or perhaps Chughtai was driven by the necessity of capturing what was distanced or lost—her childhood, old familial relationships—rather than the warp and weft of her everyday life.

But despite the omissions, these fragmentary chapters add up to a powerful narrative. Chughtai, among the most feminist of contemporary writers, belonged to the broad church of feminism whose members were driven by an intolerance of any kind of injustice. Why, she asks after the recitation of a marsiya at the masjid, did the protagonist have to shoot an arrow into a baby’s throat? Why the throat, why not the arm? The violence, the unfairness of it, nags at her; the question will not leave her alone.

Chughtai had no tolerance for inequality in any area of her life. Her family paid lip service to the idea of equality: “But in practice,” Chughtai observes, the acid sharp in her voice, “girls and boys were equal in the same way as Hindus and Muslims were brothers.” Later, she writes: “Purdah had already been imposed upon me, but my tongue was an unsheathed sword.” She claimed all spaces for herself in her writings, reveling in her descriptions of the domestic world even as she fought for the right to be educated, telling her family that she would run away to the mission school and become a Christian if they couldn’t support her ambitions.

And always, she retained the capacity to surprise, as she reminds us on every page of this memoir. “Whenever I entered the library, I would feel intoxicated,” she writes. “For hours together I would turn the pages of books and inhale their odour.” This is the kind of tribute you expect a writer to pay to the idea of books and reading, but Chughtai continues: “Chinese and Russian books used a kind of glue that smelt like stale meat, which was nauseating.”

This is what reading Ismat Chughtai’s memoirs—and her fiction—is like. The starting point is reassuringly familiar, and then comes the unexpected swerve, the push into completely alien territory. Nothing in her world is entirely safe, especially on close examination, which is probably why we still read her.

The BS column: The Brothers (and Sisters) Grimm

(Published in the Business Standard, March 2012.)

They were the best of stories, they were the scariest of stories, told in an age of wisdom, forgotten in an age of foolishness, collected in an epoch of belief, rewritten in an epoch of incredulity.

2012 may be Charles Dickens’ bicentenary, but it also marks another great storytelling anniversary—it was 200 years ago that the Brothers Grimm brought out their fairy tales. In the two centuries since the publication of Tales for the Nursery and the Household, Rapunzel, Briar Rose, the Frog Prince and a score of other characters have become so firmly ensconced in reader’s minds that it’s easy to forget how young they are—much younger than Sinbad the Sailor, for instance, or the Baba Yaga of Russian nightmare.

The brothers Grimm were also the first bowdlerisers of the fairy tales, setting off a process of sanitizing these dark materials that continues today in Disney’s prettily bland retellings. “We like them,” Wilhelm Grimm wrote of fairy tales, “without reflecting why.”

The versions he and his brother Johann set down were drawn direct from the deep well of folklore. In the first edition, for instance, the story of the frog prince is frankly carnal—the princess flings the frog from her in disgust, he lands on the bed and transforms into a handsome prince. She joins him—but by the second edition, their meeting is much more chaste.

The scholar Maria Tatar chronicles the true nature of the fairy tales in detail. In the original, Rumpelstiltskin tears himself in two, ripping his body apart; Briar Rose’s unsuccessful suitors, trying to break into the castle where the princess lies sleeping, are caught by the thorny hands of the briar bushes and torn to bits. Rapunzel’s dalliance with the prince is discovered when her belly swells; fathers try to marry their daughters, the violence of the world is unmasked.

Perhaps the most representative was a chatty disquisition, excised from future editions of Grimm’s tales. It was about a group of children who, playing a game in imitation of the village butcher, end by butchering their playmates. The original fairy tales were guides to a bloody, brutal and bestial world, as most stories that start with “once upon a time” and end with “happily ever after” usually are at their core.

This may have been because few of the tales were conceived by the brothers Grimm, or indeed told by men at all. The genius of the brothers Grimm, who were later to make their reputations with a path-breaking grammar and dictionary, lay in their ability to locate and listen to the women who were carriers of the tales.

“Women teach babies and children to speak, which is the same as teaching them to think,” writes Germaine Greer. The women who shared their stories with the Brothers Grimm were an extraordinary bunch, acknowledged by most scholars as the true storytellers—even if their names don’t appear on the green and black covers of the original Grimm’s fairy tales.

Frau Dorothea Viehmann was a peasant woman in her fifties, who contributed many of the tales in the second volume of Grimm’s fairy tales, which came out in 1815. In their preface to the second edition, the brothers Grimm wrote of her with palpable admiration: “Her large eyes saw sharply and clearly. She preserved the old legends in her memory ... Her manner of storytelling was deliberate, confident, and uncommonly lively – she clearly took pleasure in it.”

She could tell her tales twice over, first as a storyteller, and then again slowly, so that the Grimm brothers could transcribe them. The 40 tales she added to the collection may have come from her memories of growing up in her father’s inn; the Grimm brothers saw her as a natural storyteller.

Wilhelm Grimm was married to another wonderful storyteller—Dorothea Wild, the apothecary’s daughter, told him stories around “the stove in the summer-house” when they were children. She and her five sisters lived in the house next door; the Grimm brothers added many of Dorothea’s stories to their collection.

There were many other sources, but most of them were women—Friedericke Mannel, a country girl with a sharp memory for the old winter tales, Jeanette and Marie Hassenpflug, who told the Grimm brothers different versions of Red Riding Hood, the lively sisters Anne and Ludowine Haxthausen, who copied their stories into “an album embroidered with pearls” for the brothers Grimm.

But the strangest story, told by Donald Hettinga in his life of the Brothers Grimm, concerns Frau Creuzer. Like a character in a fairy tale, the old woman denied knowing any folk tales at all when Wilhelm Grimm asked, perhaps because she thought she might be ridiculed. Frau Creuzer lived in a hospital; Wilhelm managed to persuade the superintendent to visit her with his children, for she never refused to tell children her stories. She told her tales to the children, and they passed the stories on to Wilhelm, and so this story found its happy ending.

Rants and nymphomaniac kutiyas

I'm reading university vice-chancellor Vibhuti Narain Rai's deeply sexist comments on women writers: "There is a race among women writers to demonstrate who is the greatest prostitute", "feminist discourse has reduced to a grand celebration of infidelity". (More here: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Textual-violence/654764)

He's under pressure to resign now, with women writers (including the redoubtable Krishna Sobti) and womens' rights activists demanding that he be sacked.

It's the language Narain Rai uses that interests me: he calls a character in a book by a Hindi woman writer a "nymphomaniac kutiya", quips that another writer's autobiography should have been called How Many Times in How Many Beds. Behind the classic, well-worn terms of abuse--prostitute, nymphomaniac--are the equally classic male, misogynist fears, of women going out of control, owning their sexuality, stepping out of line. All of his criticism, so to speak, is focused on sexual politics and freedoms. I'm not sure he would have made his remarks if he'd realised how glaringly it displays the anxieties and the fears of men like him: how do we handle these women who refuse to know their place?

In 1979, the writer Mridula Garg was charged for "obscene writing", because her protagonist in Chit Cobra was a self-aware woman who explored her various freedoms, including sexual freedom, with an absolute lack of guilt. It was the absence of guilt that was offensive; what was telling was that for decades afterwards, Hindi male writers often spoke of Garg disparagingly, as the woman who "writes about sex", even though her work covered far wider feminist terrain.

Ritu Menon and others explored the persistence of censorship--informal, but powerful--when it came to womens' writing in The Guarded Tongue: "What is it that women can't write about? There is a pause... Religion, politics, sex. You then wonder: what is there left to write about?"

One way of dismissing a woman writer is to say that her only subject is sex; she is twice-damned, for being a "loose woman", and for having such a narrow mind. I love the way Ismat Chughtai fought back when she was on trial for writing about a lesbian affair in her famous short story, The Quilt. Here's her account of the trial:
"There was a big crowd in the court. Several people had advised us to offer our apologies to the judge, even offering to pay the fines on our behalf. The proceedings had lost some of their verve, the witnesses who were called in to prove that “Lihaf” was obscene were beginning to lose their nerve in the face of our lawyer’s cross-examination. No word capable of inviting condemnation could be found. After a great deal of searching a gentleman said, “The sentence ‘she was collecting ‘ashiqs ’ (lovers) is obscene.”
“Which word is obscene,” the lawyer asked. “‘Collecting,’ or ‘‘ashiqs’?”
“The word ‘‘ashiqs,’” the witness replied, somewhat hesitantly.
“My Lord, the word ‘‘≥shiqs’ has been used by the greatest poets and has also been used in na‘ts. This word has been given a sacred place by the devout.”
“But it is highly improper for girls to collect ‘‘ashiqs,’” the witness proclaimed.
“Why?”
“Because ... because ... this is improper for respectable girls.”
“But not improper for girls who are not respectable?”
“Uh ... uh ... no.”
“My client has mentioned girls who are perhaps not respectable. And as you say, sir, non-respectable girls may collect ‘ashiqs."
“Yes. It’s not obscene to mention them, but for an educated woman
from a respectable family to write about these girls merits condemnation!”
The witness thundered.
“So go right ahead and condemn as much as you like, but does it merit legal action?”
The case crumbled."

In 'The Past Is Another Country', Taslima Nasreen speaks of her belief that Islam is anti-women, of her brushes with the fundamentalists, and of the importance of being a "fallen woman". The easiest way to discredit a woman writer, or womens' writing in general, is to call it obscene, to set yourself up as Narain Rai did, as a morality cop.

Ismat Chugtai had the right answer so many decades ago. Some of us are girls who are not respectable, who are in many ways, out of place, out of control. And much as we make men like Narain Rai, who is, incidentally, a former IPS officer, uneasy, even angry, we aren't that easily brought back into line.

The BS Column: The Orange, juiced

(Published in the Business Standard, May 19, 2009)

Hiroshima, Alzheimer’s, a racist 1931 rape trial, an inventor on the verge of a love affair, a pastor on the verge of death. Nothing in these themes or these characters indicates the gender of the author of the novels in which they appear, and this is where the conundrum of the Orange Prize lies.

The winner of the “Bessie” will be announced in a few weeks time, marking the 13th year of the world’s only major prize for women. In its first few years, the Orange Prize generated more heat than light, with many arguing that a prize exclusively for women writers was discriminatory at worst, unnecessary at the very least, in this century.

Over time, the Orange proved its worth to thousands of readers, though, not by creating space for women’s writing as much by redressing the invisibility of women writers. A S Byatt called it a “sexist” prize, refusing to allow her publishers to enter her books for the Orange; other women writers, from Chimamanda Adichie to Ann Patchett, had a more nuanced view, celebrating the fact that the prize gave them a virtual room of their own.

If you go through the shortlists for every year, it becomes harder to argue that the Orange doesn’t serve a purpose. A certain kind of writer—talented, but not glamorous, intensely engaged, but not always fashionable—shows up in these shortlists, writers who would have been lost or overlooked without the Orange. And over its 13-year life span, the Orange may actually have begun redefining what we think of as “women’s writing”.

It’s a shift that publishers like Urvashi Butalia know well, as women’s publishing houses witness and encourage writing by women to grow beyond the fascinating but narrow confines of writing on gender. The more popular view of women’s writing is far more of a ghetto: yesterday’s Mills & Boons, today’s chicklit and arranged marriage bestsellers.

This year’s shortlist includes: Burnt Shadows (Kamila Shamsie), Scottsboro (Ellen Feldman), The Wilderness (Samantha Harvey), The Invention of Everything Else (Samantha Hunt), Molly Fox’s Birthday (Deirdre Madden) and Home (Marilynne Robinson). The range of themes, and the historical periods, explored in these novels is broad—and it is this breadth that really defines writing by women today.

Burnt Shadows finds a narrative arc between Hiroshima and Guantanamo Bay, and among its principal characters are a Japanese woman who survives Hiroshima, and a young Pakistani whose path leads him to prison in the US. Scottsboro examines the infamous 1931 rape trial in the Deep South, where the testimony of two white women put nine black men behind bars for several years on rape charges.

The Wilderness explores the confounding, unmoored, intense world of Alzheimer’s from the perspective of a male protagonist struggling to understand his life from a few scattered clues. The Invention of Everything Else is about the growing (and imagined) friendship between the exuberant scientist Nikola Tesla and a chambermaid at the Hotel New Yorker. Marilynne Robinson’s eloquent, moving Home follows the stories of those we met in her previous novel, Gilead. Glory Boughton returns to look after her father, the pastor; the return of her brother Jack forces many questions for the two as they face the imminent death of their father. I haven’t read Molly Fox’s Birthday, but the blurb indicates that it’s about an Irish actress, as seen by the Shakespearean actor who borrows her house briefly.

If you read only these descriptions, you would have no way of knowing whether the authors of these books were male or female, and that is a tribute to the broader, limitless world of women’s writing today. Some critics of the Orange take this further, arguing that if the books are relatively genderless, there should be no need of a special prize for women.

The raison d’etre of the Orange Prize, however, was not to address an inequity of voice—from the earliest, most pioneering women writers onwards, women have often demanded the right to write about what pleases them. The founders of the Prize saw and addressed an essential inequity in the space that women writers were allocated—fewer column inches, fewer reviews, fewer soundbytes on TV shows, and most crucially, less space in the public memory.

Each year, the shortlist does what it did for me this year, and what it has for 13 years running—underlines the presence of one or two well-known women writers, and introduces us to several more who would otherwise have slipped through the cracks. Take women’s writing from the margins to the centre, says the Orange, and until women find themselves at the centre without need for special pleading, there will always, sadly, be a need for the prize.