Saying The F-Word

Contemporary feminism tends to look back to the seventies as a time ofvitality. But nostalgia for seventies-style feminism obscures the fact that theextremity of its positions against men and the institution of family may havehad something to do with its subsequent discrediting. A new kind of feminismwanted coexistence, if not harmony; it sought equality with men, notextermination of them.

For some Indian feminists, the struggle between the sexes is still raging andno gains have been made in the battle. This viewpoint ignores the presence ofpowerful women CEOs because the "time-honored division of labour ensuresthat women’s roles are generally seen as subordinate." It ignores writerswho are among the country’s and the world’s best selling authors because"[t]he general truth that women’s writing is, by and large, given asubordinate status to men’s writing still holds across the world."

I am quoting from the introduction to Inner Lines: The Zubaan Anthology ofStories by Indian Women, which uses radical feminism as a template. Thevolume includes Anjana Appachana, a writer who lives in the US, but not otherssuch as Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Divakaruni, or Kiran Desai. Itignores a vast number of younger voices. Its choice of material is driven byideology, by the old stereotypes of seventies-style feminism in which women mustchoose between beauty and intelligence, family and career, men and themselves.

Thus, patriarchy is the enemy, and on this slender plotline hangs thenarrative. In Mahasweta Devi’s The Wet-Nurse, motherhood is an addictionand "once you are hooked it is difficult to withdraw even after the milkhas run dry." In Appachana’s Incantations, a woman who is raped byher brother in law comes to see her husband’s lovemaking as rape. But she doesnothing to save herself. Ambai’s story presents the kitchen as a prison aswell as a queendom. When a matriarch dies the language collapses into brokenlines that never quite become poetry: "How could you think that/yourstrength came/from food that was given in the appropriate measure…"Indira Goswami’s The Offspring is defeated by language. In its lastclimactic lines, a villager speaks these implausible words: "He was thescion of my lineage, a part of my flesh and blood! I will touch him!"

In a collection such as this, a contemporary sensibility is a rare andbeautiful thing. In Manjula Padmanabhan’s Stains, language and narrativecome together in a sly parable that hinges on the notion of menstruation asecstasy. The story is told from the point of view of an American woman, and itembodies ideas of race as well as gender. The enemy here is an Indian man, butthe real villain may be his hidebound, prejudiced mother. Best of all, the storyshows, it does not tell. And it points the way toward a different kind ofanthology, an inclusive volume that will embody the extraordinary quality andrange of stories by Indian women.

A shorter version of this appeared in the print magazine.