THE STRAY GOATS OF THE BAZAAR

THE STRAY GOATS OF THE BAZAAR:
A SURVEY OF AUTOBIOGRAPHIES IN MALAYALAM BY WOMEN

HEMALATHA DEVI.G

ABSTRACT---Hemalatha Devi G. takes an unusual but poignant peep into the as-yet unexplored realm of Malayalee women autobiography in her "The Stray Goats of the Bazaar: A Survey of Autobiographies in Malayalam by Women" (translated by Bini B. S.) After ascertaining how woman finds it hard to find a place for herself to produce an autobiography about her life, and not vis-à-vis a man's life, she appraises and appreciates the various autobiographies by Malayalee women writers beginning with that of B. Kalyani Amma (published in 1916). Through the analysis of the famous and the not-so-famous autobiographies (ranging from that of Balamani Amma, Annie Thayyil, Ajitha and Madhavikkutty), she points out that it is time for Malayalee women to stop eulogizing the patriarchal society, and to break -free from its shackles to present the vivid truth.

An autobiography is an artistic piece where the charm of imagination characteristic of a story merges with the honesty of self expression. When one writes the story of one’s own life, there will be an intrinsic sincerity. The individual has a confined existence within the lakshmanarekha created by a particular milieu and society. The interference of these factors in one’s status as a human being is inevitable. Thus the autobiography mirrors all the circumstances that have moulded an individual. An autobiographer, by portraying a whole universe of formative experiences is not merely narrating the saga of his survival and existence. His work reflects the social, political and communal atmosphere in which he had existed and survived.

A man’s individuality develops through the circumstances of his life. The favourable situations and profound opportunities given to him by the society leads him up the stairs of success. It is considered that in an autobiography, he is portraying the interrelation between the individual and the society through his real experiences. It is a historical fact that this relationship is often considered exemplary. He being an inseparable element of society, the views formed and observations made by him gain authenticity. His evaluations of the society are made from an elevated pedestal. Precisely, autobiography of a man becomes a medium of interaction between the society and the individual.

Any Tom, Dick and Harry can write an autobiography. But the reader is dogged by doubts regarding the purpose of reading an autobiographical work. He does not normally except pleasure of reading or identification with the author’s personality. If the autobiography is of an individual who transcends the populace humanity, whose is a unique visage and voice in the vast crowd, the reader will be eager to make it a mine of knowledge for self-realization and analysis; inspiration to overcome impediments and struggles of life. It leads him further to understand the author’s standpoint and ideas.

Unfortunately, a woman usually does not get a chance to ascend a high pedestal to have an overall perspective of life, to taste the rare and queer experiences, to become a role model, to form an opinion of her own by evaluating the various situations of life she has faced and experienced. But it is a grave mistake to assume that such a situation arises from the scarcity of women occupying high positions in life and the lack of skill for self expression. ‘Her’ life is ‘his ‘life also, ‘Her’ experiences, ‘his’ too. The life of a woman is not a phenomenon that can be severed from ‘his’ life. She has no existence apart from his. So when she starts writing her story, it becomes his story. Ivan ente priya C.J. (He, my dear C.J) by Rosy Thomas, Chettante Nizhalil (In the shadow of the husband) by Leela Damodara Menon, Kesavadev, ente nithya kamukan (Kesavadev, my eternal lover) by Seethalekshmi Dev : these titles point to the statement made above. If a woman has recognized the freedom to write, she certainly might have had independent experiences also. But her sense of freedom has not become ripe enough to nourish the courage for self expression; or do they assume that their own experiences and individuality are nothing compared to the grandeur of the husband’s personality and the memories of a life with him? From a preparatory childhood, leading to marriage and motherhood, her life moves forward and terminates in emptiness. The autobiography of a woman is thus the story of a mere woman. None of the above mentioned autobiographies are insignificant or unknown. Though the writers had made an identity of their own, they preferred to hide themselves behind the immaculate image of the husband’s personality. Their state is like the weeds of the garden, somewhat visible but mostly hidden. Nothing much to read about. How efficient she was as ‘the woman’ behind the successful husband, the fond memories she has of his love and concern, how much she has been neglected by the busy schedule of her husband – their autobiographies hover in this realm. They never explore into the new terrains of analysis of the various shades of psychological, personal and emotional situations. One is tempted to doubt the credibility of the life described. Was their married life merely idealistic ? “Two individuals moulded by different circumstances – how can they adjust perfectly ? Suppose both parties do not agree to an absolute submission? Disharmonies, conflicts and outbursts are very natural— bear with a tight upper lip, move forward hand in hand, that’s all”. Is there any woman who can evaluate her married life like this as Smt.Annie Thayyil did in her autobiography ? Women have a tendency to suppress the lamentations about the snares of intimacy into which she has fallen through the marital vows. She keeps dumb with the fear of revealing her unfavourable circumstances. Her silence itself, like that of a scapegoat’s, is very eloquent.

The status of woman indicates society’s cultural aptitudes. Women who have lost their voice symbolize the negative attitude of the society. In the beginning of the 19 th century, Chandu Menon has, through Indulekha given us an idea of the heights a woman could reach; but he was not blind towards the pathetic state of Kalyanikkutty. As Kalyanikkutty, like a puss tied in an old sack, woman was always destined to be thrown into the dark interiors of her husband’s home . She does not possess anything, not even a ‘self’ to be revealed or asserted. Man possed of money and power. The patriarchal system of hiding the world of knowledge from slaves, was maintained in the case of women as well. In the beginning of the 19 th century, the society of Kerala discussed the issue of education that a woman deserves, and reached the conclusion that she should only be taught enough things to enable herself to be a chaste and devoted wife. Needle work, elementary mathematics, enough language to read religious texts and nothing more ? This was the general attitude. As witnessed by history, in spite of fee concession for women desiring higher education, and immediate job opportunities for the educated women, hardly any came forward. In such a social set up, it is only natural that no woman was courageous enough to express herself through an autobiography. By the end of the 18 th century and the beginning of the 19 th , we find many significant women writers who dared into every branch of literature except one – Autobiography. Rousseau said, “Oh! Thou Eternal Light, I have expressed myself as you have envisaged me.” – we don’t expect any autobiography from women to claim so much. A woman has an inherent hesitation to reveal the truth of her circumstances. It is an aftermath of the centuries of oppression. She is threatened by the fear that her daring revelations will smear dirt on many countenances that surround her or at worst her words may unmask them.

It is impossible to give a comprehensive picture of an individual’s life through the limited scope of an autobiography. An aesthetic re-analysis of the past as exhaustively as possible is the thing to be done. An autobiography should possess a sensitive line of narrative. B.Kalyani Amma published her autobiography Oru Vyazhavatta Smaranakal (Memories of twelve years) in 1916. It is a book of memories – memories of a married life that lasted a short span of twelve years. The life of a devoted wife with a considerate, adventurous, broad minded and pious husband blessed by fame; his love and concern, personal relationships, experiences in the field of politics, opinions, sense of justice and uncompromising righteousness, how he faced unfavourable political situations, severe illness, of course with her ceaseless support – this is what Kalyanikkutty Amma has to tell. This work was the offspring of a promise between the husband and wife that in one’s lonely days of bereavement, the other will immortalize the memories of their life together;

The memories of a crucial period fill the pages of Mrs. Damayanthi Nath’s Oru Sthreeyude Mayatha Smaranakal (The unfading memories of a woman). It was published in 1956. She tries to unfold the dark days from December 1941 to June 1945, spent in Borneo, during the second world war. Three and a half years of unforeseen bitterness and suffering. This work, like Oru Vyazhavatta Smaranakal is a portrait of a small period of life. The name Sthreeyude Mayatha Smaranakal points to a new realm of hope. These experiences are not purely of a ‘woman’ or women in general. As the writer admits, her book reveals the tale of suffering of the innocent humanity during the world war period. She feels the ferocity of the war with her soul and wishes that the world may continue to exist in peaceful co-operation. It is not just an autobiographical work. It throws light into the destructive aspects of war; we feel the motherly anxieties of the writer about the survival of humanity in a war-torn world. Her mindset and broad cultural vision are indeed appreciable.

In Balamani Amma’s Jeevithathilloode (Through life, 1969) we get some scattered images of life, reflections and retrospectives rooted in the soil of her life. Some concepts about literature are revealed through the interviews, memories of her childhood, circumstances that have moulded her personality – it will be an exaggeration to call it an autobiography. Hers is purely insights and thoughts, which may be termed autobiographical.

Smt. Akkamma Varkey wrote 1114 nte Katha (The story of 1114) in 1977, keeping a brief history of her life in the background. It is the history of a successful political career over a decade from 1938 onwards. That too is a small piece out of the big loaf of life. Her courage left its mark on the history of Travancore, a modern Joan of Arc, the 12 th president of the Travancore State Congress – Akkamma Cherian of Kanjirappilly alias Akkamma Varkey. The childhood in which she imbibed the spirit of freedom, the convent where she stayed for her education, history – the subject she selected for study , all these filled her with a deep rooted fascination for her mother land’s struggle for Independence. Her work reveals these stages credibly, “an atmosphere encouraging devotion and loyalty to the British rule prevailed in the convent. The teachers of History hardly ever mentioned the French Revolution, Indian National Congress or the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh. So I had to explore new terrains of experience by reading books on such controversial and sensitive issues.” The contemporary society is also made an interesting object for her analytical observation : “During my school days, I never came across lady lawyers, judges, doctors or engineers. Mrs. Punnan Lukose was the only lady doctor in those days. No one was aware of the need for educating women. Men, especially the Syrian Catholic youth refused to marry the educated girls. Maybe they were obsessed with the fear of the loss of a dominant status. The concept of equality of the sexes was not even there in the wildest dreams of the society. Women were supposed to be imprisoned in their homes, her duties were just maintaining the family affairs intact and bringing forth the next generation. It was the freedom struggle as well as the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi that created an awareness that women should have a role to perform in the national struggle as the citizens of this nation.” That moment when she stood as the leader and swam ecstatically in the surges of the People’s Movement which was organized in the capital city of Trivandrum, on the 7 th of Thulam 1114 (Malayalam era) is regarded by her as a happy and proud occasion in her social life. She writes, “my political baptism occurred on that day.” About her political career which spanned over ten years, she remarks, “there were certain undercurrents which could have demolished or at least totally altered my life - no one was aware of that – my political life had indeed been a period of ceaseless struggle and ultimate success. I hope by revealing that past of trials and tribulations, I may provide an inspiring model for posterity.” She was convinced that an autobiography is not merely a record of gains and painful losses ; it is a story of an individual’s struggle against hostile society and a lesson in the art of overcoming all that. She thought that it should give a real model for the readers to copy into their own lives.

Unlike the above mentioned works, C.K.Revathy Amma’s Sahasrapoornima (completing thousands full moons) (1977), is a complete autobiography. She belonged to a famous Thiyya family of Malabar. Hers was a presence very much stamped on the political, social and communal spheres of Mayyazhi and Malabar. This itself is her claim to be the writer of an autobiography. Thiyyas were usually considered untouchable and downtrodden. But the thiyyas of Malabar were an exception. They occupied core positions in the society. They were rich and learned and held high administrative offices. Revathy Amma, the daughter of Karayi Damayanthi was the grand daughter of the eminent merchant Karayi Bappu, who is said to have maintained trade relations with England. In the latter half of the 20 th century, Karayi Damayanthi organized a union for women aiming at the prosperity of the society by the spread of education. Women were given training in tailoring, and lady doctors gave them ample instructions about child care. A lending library which supplied books for women in their own homes was also established. Revathy Amma was the daughter of such an enlightened mother with progressive ideas and no wonder she herself had been a prominent figure in the fields of social and political activities for more than six decades. Revathy Amma’s uncle, Karayi Krishnan Gurukal adorns a place in the Bhashacharitram by P.Govinda Pillai. Before succumbing to a premature death at the age of 33, he had written seven scholarly books.

Among the Thiyyas of Malabar, there were eminent Sanskrit scholars and talented poets in abundance. The caste Hindus, dignitaries and the rulers sought the elementary schools which belonged to the Thiyya community. Revathy Amma’s husband was the police commissioner of Mayyazhi and his uncle was the Mayor. From this it is evident that in spite of being a backward community, Thiyyas enjoyed a high social status. The members of Revathi amma’s husband’s family believed firmly in the principles of Narayana guru and gave full support to his ideas about social reformation. They vehemently opposed the custom of thalikettu (tying the thali, a small heart-shaped locket symbolizing wed lock) as was practised in those days. The prevalent practice was to make the kavuthiya (the barber) tie the thali before marriage while the bridegroom was not allowed to do so. Her husband’s people from Tellicherry held fast to the idea that the commissioner himself should tie the thali and not the kavuthiya. Revathy Amma’s uprooting from Tellicherry to Mayyazhi thus caused a little upheaval as she herself says,which by God’s grace, was put down, without much ado and with least harm to either side.

Revathy Amma had the example of her own mother before her eyes. She started her public life attempting to emancipate the women in Mayyazhi. Her previous experiences as a social worker are often portrayed beautifully. She and her daughter contributed their ornaments to Gandhiji’s Harijan Welfare Fund and he blessed them by placing his palm on their heads. “The bliss of his blessing lasted throughout my public life, even now I can feel that unique grace dwelling in me”. She welcomed Panditji with a garland, Swami Chinmayanandaji accepted her as his mother. In fact, positions and fame sought after her as a social worker but she was mockingly nick-named as the ‘stray goat of the bazar’ by her own kith and kin. Thus she had to overcome so many severe tests of her times. “I immersed myself in my duties pacifying the troubled heart by assuring it constantly that such situations are to be faced and overcome by every woman desiring to serve the society. In the background of an Anglo-French culture, she gained the status of a social worker and her life is amply revealed through her autobiography. The portrayal of herself as a daughter, wife, mother, and also as a social worker is done with much ease and grace. She pours into the readers the sweetness and bitterness of these real life roles. Her autobiography is an arduous outcome of twelve years’ labour and she has an extraordinary view about its purpose – “People usually struggle for fame and publicity. My pen moved with the same end in mind .”— A portrayal of the life of the Thiyyas of Malabar, sincere analysis of history, and an eventful life story, finally like the setting sun shrinking into a self-imposed anonymity, concealing her luminous being, the shocking realization that social work has ultimately launched her in decay and degeneration – these aspects are unfolded in the course of writing. Moorkoth Kunjappa in his introduction writes, “We can consider this work a socio-cultural portrait of the first half of the 20 th century.”

Smt. Annie Thayyil’s Idangazhiyile Kurisu (Cross within a bushel) (1998) is a notable autobiography. Like Revathy Amma, she too analyses her life in totality. How an inhabitant of the ivory tower, a proud aristocrat, a sworn theist was metamorphosed into a daring, independent being is justified through the glimpses of her childhood. In words and deeds, Annie, stood apart from the crowd. When Annie was born, her ancestral home was already mortgaged. She considers it a blessing in disguise; otherwise the desire of being educated would not have entered her wildest dreams. As a convent student, she was brave enough to oppose and question the existing religious superstitions. When her mother narrated the bliss of heaven, she asked whether her favourite sugar candy was available there. Such a situation is narrated in one of her short stories which had to face violent protests from the congregation. Poverty led her to creative writing and the instructive spirit of independence linked her to the field of political activity. She tells us frankly how she aided her siblings to be something in life, struggled against and overcame utter poverty, tasted the bitterness of betrayal, rejection and venomous insults and finally was appreciated by persons like Indira Gandhi. We are often struck by the candour and ease of describing her own life experiences. She not only gives us an involved analysis of the personal experiences in the fields of religion, politics and social life, contacts with eminent individuals but also draws conclusions out of them. But she does not stop here. Her liberal heart sees into the necessity of a formula for the peaceful co-existence. With motherly affection, she opens before us the path for future good.

What makes this work truly alive and honest is the individuality of the author that has interacted with and developed by the circumstances. The broad selfish face behind every event was recognized and revealed by her. She openly tells us about the obscure pasts of many famous people, their cunning beginnings and deplorable pressure tactics. Her memory touches the overt and hidden opposition she had to face and the denial of a seat in the parliamentary election even after a devoted service of 43 years ! She makes a special mention of her pious and devout nature that aided her in overcoming these difficulties. “To err is human, if possible correct it, admit it, the divine punishment is so crushing, His calculations never go wrong.” Witnessing the pathetic state of her political opponent, she prays to the Lord, “God, I have forgiven him, please do the same. Your Mercy is infinite, like your wrath.” Though she possessed such a deep faith, it was never blind or fanatic. She took her stand against the church over certain issues. As a writer she was aware of the limitations enforced over her by the church. In this aspect, the faith was a cross to her. The mentality of the congregation towards persons like M.P.Paul and Mundassery, the shame of presenting Sir C.P.Ramaswamy Iyer a mangalapatra on a gold plate by Mar Ivanios Metropolit while several Roman Catholics were fighting against him, all this roused her anger. The firm conviction that one can understand Christ completely only by seeing that he is not just a spiritual instructor but a social reformer and a committed revolutionary, all these made Annie Thayyil stand uniquely apart from other women.

The influence of childhood in character formation of an individual has to be recognized. The honestly narrated childhood experiences and the family background are as relevant as the environment of a sprouting plant. (Behind every successful man there is a woman— it might be his wife. Similarly Akkamma Cherian, Annie Thayyil, RevathyAmma and Ajitha who have written honest and comprehensive autobiographies were all led and controlled by their fathers – this is an interesting fact indeed). Great presence of mind, the unrelenting self esteem in desperate hours of loss and betrayal, a disinterested attitude to joys and sorrows, a talent to convert every suffering, pain and treachery into useful lessons in life, a healthy practical view of life, make Annie Thayyil’s autobiography very readable. She has inherited from her mother the idangazhi (vessel used to measure rice) and the family cross, symbolizing material and spiritual achievements of her life. All these events which constitute her life story provide an unforgettable experience to the readers.

Let us go to two special autobiographies— a famous husband and his insignificant wife. This defines the relationship between the great poet Changampuzha and his wife Sreedevi Changampuzha. Sreedevi was victimized for the daring portrayal of her own experiences as the wife and widow of Changampuzha. One should speak well of the dead; however honest your words may be, one should not smear dirt on the famous – these are unwritten laws, made by man for his own selfish ends. When she tells her own story and her experiences, she becomes the ‘object’ and man, the doer, becomes the ‘subject’.

If her experiences had been of suffering, the tormentors are none but the man and the society. When she attempts to open her heart before the world, naturally the intolerant society is bewildered. Changampuzha, the poet who possessed a perverted and unpredictable personality created a hell for his wife. When she laments, the core of the patriarchy is hurt. Society is intolerant towards a woman’s autobiographical expressions. Only a few women like Annie Thayyil possess enough courage to reveal the betrayals of her own colleagues in the field of politics.

For Ajitha, things were not very different. She stresses on her own life in Ormmakkurippukal (Memories) (1982). Ajitha talks about her life before getting married, during the transitional stage from adolescence to adulthood, the hardships she had undergone, her adventurous life. Luckily she had no husband while writing; it does not mean that her story would have been different if she were married. Her personality defies categorization. This is not a complete autobiography. Hers is a work about a certain period of her life. Cruel and unbearable situations she had undergone do not infest her with regret. It was a self-chosen path; from the far end, she heard the clarion call of spring, a red star led the way, she took everything with a smiling face. At such a tender age, no other woman must have had such a vast and harrowing experience. The path she tread with an end in mind, the ideas that lost luster and relevance as time passed– she analyses all these. She owns the responsibility of jumping into the fire of Naxalism impulsively. Hers was a social revolution.

Madhavikkutty’s My story (1973) reveals a revolution at the personal level. “let my blood drip into this paper, I will write with it, like a person bereft of the burden of the future, I use each word as a reconciliation. I love to call it poetry. While waiting for the caresses and consolation of death, the oft misunderstood writer with an incessant craving for love reveals everything with an ultimate daring and numbness of a confession. As a daughter, wife, mother, and writer and primarily as a woman – she subjects herself to self-analysis and finds the hidden self. Is it a story or life itself ? It possesses the charm of a story, like every other work of Madhavikkutty. Fact is stranger than fiction. So we need not evaluate the authenticity of her autobiography. It may be true or it may not be – it is her story – but is evident that after so many years intervals, she published many memories of her life, which must be considered as extensions of My Story! We are persuaded to appreciate the mischievous daring that prompted her to call the truths of her life as ‘Story’, under the changed circumstances of her personal life.

The story may pacify some or make some others restless. Translated she was from content Malayalam in both ways. The veil of regret and pain that she managed to spread over her story gives the writer a sense of fulfilment. Hers is a never ending tale. From Balyakalasmaranakal (Memories of childhood) to the widowhood of Ottayadippathakal (Narrow paths where only one person can tread), her lonely existence is crammed with events. It will continue so. Stealing the peace of many minds, she smiles triumphantly, immensely pleased by the naughtiness of writing such an autobiography.

The self of a woman is multifaceted – daughter, sister, wife, mother– behind these identities, her essential womanhood gets suppressed; she becomes de-visualized through her autobiography. A woman is not supposed to reveal her experiences as a woman. She is conditioned traditionally to hide and repress her own emotions and desires. Even though it hurts the souls of the people around her, she can reveal the experiences from any other point of view; as a writer, or a socio-political figure she can question the male dominance. The masculine world has tough hide; so it will bear it with the slightest protest or ignore it altogether. But from the stand point of a sheer female, only Madhavikkutty has dared to analyze and question her experiences objectively.

By explicitly stating the woman’s thoughts and feelings, experiences and desires, she sensibly recognizes the penetrating bloody nails of cruelty, injustice and offences against her. What is being unfolded is the cruelty and dominance of man, the wicked patriarchal face of society. By rejecting the society, she rejects the man and the result is undesirable. So only a few women are brave enough to unravel their personal life. She can talk in volumes about her husband, family, social and political activities but not about herself. She does not possess the right or authority to do it. That is why men get nervous when she really starts talking. What do the females have worth mentioning ? How much have they experienced having been confined within the domestic walls for long ?

There are only a few who recognized the untold miseries and suffocation of the feminine self within the prison house of inescapable daily chores. Hers is a self, dimmed by the smoky domestic duties. Women doubt the authenticity of their own experiences. If a woman is honest, she will not give us a rosy picture of society. Her frightened femininity never dares into the turbulent streams of self expression, she lingers on the harmless shores of obscurity.

This is not an exhaustive study of the autobiographies written in Malayalam by women. Only a few significant works have been mentioned – a casual peep into a hardly explored terrain which can be rightly labelled barren.

Translated from Malayalam by B.S.Bini.

Contributor
HEMALATHA DEVI. G. Teaches at University College, Thiruvananthapuram. Her doctoral work was on the Women Novelists of Malayalam. Has published articles on issues related to women.

Translator
BINI B.S. Planning to work for her doctoral degree in English Language
and Literature. Interested in creative writing. Writes genuinely inspired poetry.

From philomela to the nightingale

FROM PHILOMELA
TO THE NIGHTINGALE : THE
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SONG
OF MAYA ANGELOU

Hema R Nair

ABSTRACT---"From Philomela to the Nightingale: The Autobiographical Song of Maya Angelou" by Hema Nair R. gives an in-depth analysis of the five-volume autobiography of Maya Angelou, and captures effectively the significance and exquisiteness of language as used in the work. Nair unravels the close-knitted and multi-stranded structure of the bird-imagery (that of the nightingale), Philomel, song, voice, language and silence to explicate how they support mutually and in unison, Angelou's efforts to break the cultural silencing of women.

I am the history of rape
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of myself
- June Jordan 1

Though men have been writing autobiographies shaped by the contemplation of singularity, from the time of St. Augustine, women, until recently, lived in such a pre-autobiographical era that singularity was hardly ever spoken of. The difficulty of the woman to articulate herself was perhaps because women were “selves in hiding” and were bound by shackles of convention. The difficulties of a black woman writing herself is further problemmatized because of centuries of silence imposed on her as a black, as a woman and as the colonized. With the redefinition of the autobiography as “an aspect of memory work, part of the spectrum of life histories and oral histories” , the autobiographical genre has become mere democratic.

Maya Angelou's autobiographical writings can be understood only in relation to the Black autobiographical tradition. That Black autobiography has great variety, can be borne out by the fact that the virtual library in internet offers more than 2500 hits when confronted with the word. From the Autobiography of Omar Ibn Seid, Slave in North Carolina (1831) and Booker. T.Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901) to James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son and The Autobiography of Malcolm black autobiography is a formidable body of work.Like the thousands of slave narratives, written by fugitive and freed slaves who sought to awaken the consciousness of a nation, Maya Angelou’s “song of myself” is a celebration of the freedom of speech - of words bursting like water from a breached dam.

From the image of the muzzled mouth of the African, enslaved in the new world, popuarized by the proto image evoked by the narrative of Oloudah Equiano, the black people have struggled for a new image. They struggled for literacy and self determination. They fought their way back to speech, “the desire articulated by the mother voice of African American autobiographical literature modulated in narratives of emanicipated men and women of that descent.” The voice that articulated the national desire to explore the limits of civil and personal freedom speaks in Angelou’s narrative too. Dramatic individualization blends smoothly in Angelou’s work with social and moral protest, forging and justifying the connection between the individual present and the collective past. “Women’s history itself has the most commitment to autobiography out of the feminist belief in the movement from silence to speech - retrieving silenced voices of the past .....”

Angelou’s autobiography invites comparison with other outstanding black women autobiographies, especially, Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks On a Road (1940) , Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968) and Mary Mebane’s Mary . Like Zora Neale Hurston who recreates the world of a black child in Eaton Ville, Florida, Maya Angelou brings to life the world she knew in Stamps, Arkansas. The events in the autobiography are shaped, like Hurston, by a command of language, a level of articulation that employs both the linguistic rituals of the dominant culture and those of the Black vernacular tradition. For Angelou, more than for Hurston, the mission of autobiography is linked to the spoken word and the oral tradition. Unlike the embittered pessimism of Anne Moody which enjoins her to doubt the support of the poor Mississippi Blacks whose struggle she had taken up, Angelou is full of optimism. Each bitter or bitter sweet experience serves only to renew her innocence. At the end of Gather Together in My Name , (Henceforth parenthetically referred to as Gather Together) Angelou is able to say after being sucked into the murky world of prostitution and narcotics and after being enmeshed in the dark, shifty quagmire of unstable, poorly paid jobs, "I had no idea what I was going to make of my life, but I had given a promise and found my innocence. I swore I’d never lose it again" (Gather Together, 214). Unlike Mary Mebane who speaks in terms of a nightmarish personal relationship which “created a giant rawscar across (her) life", Angelou speaks of the remarkable influence of her grandmother, an upright matriarch and of her glamorous, worldly wise mother and numerous caring and supportive friends. Unlike both Moody and Mebane, Angelou’s autobiography affirms and celebrates life.

No other American writer has decided to make her “major, cultural and literary contribution so predominantly in autobiographical form”. Like the complementary counterpart of the female bildungsroman that celebrates “the voyage in” Angelou’s autobiography in five volumes is “an outgrowth of Piestistic confessional fervour.” Angelou celebrates the vital richness of Southern Black life, its pains and prjeudices and explores the joy and the bewilderment it posed to a black child in Stamps, Arkansas in the 1930s in the first volume, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. (Henceforth parenthetically referred to as The Caged Bird) The second volume presents a young girl struggling to carve a niche for herself and her small son in postSecond World War America. Titled Gather Together in My Name, this volume is an attempt to capture “the episodic, erratic nature of adolescence” . The third volume of Angelou’s autobiography, Singin’ and Swingin' and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas presents Angelou as a young married adult in the 1950s seeking a career in show business and experiencing her first amiable contact with writers. The fourth volume, The Heart of a Woman finds Maya Angelou immersed in the world of Black writers and artists in Harlem and working for civil rights movement with Martin Luther King. It presents a wiser and more mature woman examining the roles of being a woman and a mother. In the last volume, All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes, (Henceforth parenthetically referred to as All God’s Children) Maya emigrates to Ghana only to discover that she could not go home again. She achieves a new awareness of love and friendship, civil rights and slavery and the myth of mother Africa. It is about seeing and understanding the world from another’s vantage point. Together, the five volumes emphasize a movement towards the interior self, a movement that encompasses also the effect of the community on the individual’s achievement and retention of an integrated, acceptable self that is however possible only after fragmentation and pain.

The Caged Bird, the first volume of autobiography, published when Angelou was forty one , is a careful record of a young black girl’s initiation and self discovery. The book is dedicated to her son, Guy Johnson and “all the strong black birds of promise who defy the odds and gods and sing their songs .....” (Frontpiece of The Caged Bird).

The defiance thrown at odds and the God of white racism, discrimination and injustice is further compounded by Angelou’s particular positioning as a woman - a woman who as a helpless child is violated by the father figure - a person she trusted. Like the tale of the violated Philomela, the archetypal rape victim, who changes into the nightingale, Angelou sings the song of herself, which, in addition to the psychotherapeutic solace it provides, is a lucid account of the black female experience. Shorn of the masks of fiction, the words issue forth in spontaneous, full-throated ease. If Philomela’s tongue is cut off by Tereus, her brother - in law, the King of Thrace, to prevent her from voicing the rape she was subjected to, Mr Freeman, Angelou’s violator, threatens to kill her brother and thus, psychologically decapitates her. “If you scream, I’m gonna kill you. And if you tell, I’m gonna kill Bailey....” (The Caged Bird 65). His final injunction, “... don’t you tell ... Remember don’t you tell a soul ...” elicits the only possible response, “No sir, Mr.Freeman, I won’t tell ...” (The Caged Bird 66). Silence was fast creeping apace for the initiation was proving to be too costly. Physically and mentally traumatized, Maya finds herself unable to cope with the pain and to concentrate. In one of the most painful passages of the book, Angelou states:

After two blocks, I know I’d never make it. Not unless I counted
every step and stepped on every crack. I had started to burn between
mylegs more than the time I’d wasted Sloane’s Liniment on myself.
My legs throbbed or rather the inside of my thighs throbbed with the
same force that Mr Freeman’s heart had beaten. Thrum ... step ...
thrum ... step ... STEPON THE CRACK ... thrum ... step. I went up
the stains one at a, one at a, one at a time ...( The Caged Bird (66).

Like Tereus, Mr Freeman silences Maya - Ritie as he calls her. Like Philomela, unable to articulate her pain, Angelou is entombed in silence - a silence that her mother took to be a sign of illness. When she learns that Mr Freeman has gone, she wonders:

Could I tell her now? The terrible pain assured me that I couldn’t.
What he did to me and what I allowed must have been very bad if
already God let me hurt so much. If Mr Freeman was gone, did that
mean that Bailey was out of danger? And if so, if I told him, would he
still love me?
(The Caged Bird- 68).

The cage of guilt and silence effectively entraps Maya. It even appears to be the safer place to be in. It’s only after Bailey’s assurance that no one could hurt or kill him that Maya speaks about her experience. The traumatic experience at the court and Mr Freeman’s subsequent death caused Maya to realize that:

The only thing I could do was to stop talking to people other than
Bailey. Instinctively, or someheow I knew that because I loved him so
much I’d never hurt him, but if I talked to anyone else that person
might die too. Just my breath, carrying my words out might poison
people and they’d curl up and die like the black fat slugs that only
pretended. I had to stop talking ... (The Caged Bird73).

Everyone soon caught on that Maya wouldn’t speak to anyone else but Bailey. The family initially accepted the behaviour as post- rape, post - hospital affliction. However their patience ran out and often Maya was punished for sulleness and impertinence of which her muteness was the outward sign. Soon Maya and her brother found themselves back in Stamps, Arkansas.

Maya lives in perfect personal silence for nearly a year:
... all I had to do was to attach myself leech like to sound. I began to
listen to everything. I probably hoped that after I had heard all the
sounds, really heard them and packed them down, deep in my ears, the
world would be quiet around me. I walked into rooms where people
were laughing, their voices hitting the walls like stones and I simply
stood still in the midst of the riot of sound. After a minute or two,
silence would rush into the room from its hiding place because I had eaten
up all the sounds (The Caged Bird 73).

Her silence is brought into sharp contrast to St. Louis with “its noise and activity, its trucks and its buses” (The Caged Bird- 74). Her silence is however in tune with Stamps, with its obscure lanes and lonely bungalows - a place where nothing ever happened. Silence is the cocoon into which she crept.

Sounds came to me dully as if people were speaking through their
handkerchiefs or with their hands over their mouth ... (The Caged Bird (77).

Unlike Maya’s experience in St. Louis, she is understood in Stamps for people equated her unwillingness to talk to her reluctant return to the south. Maya’s silence and her trauma crystallises implicitly in the tale of the brown/ black plumed bird - the nightingale.

The bird image is both a symbol of aspiration and defeat. Centuries of racial prejudice that is the heritage of the black woman is essentially a pigeon house/aviary that seeks to confine her. The implicit cage/aviary/pigeon house image speaks of the paradoxical dichotomy of female experience - the conflicting desire for boundless freedom and the safety of the enclosure. Bird imagery abound in the narrative spanning Mommas depiction as mother bird and Bailey. Johnson Senior as the bird who flies the nest (The Caged Bird 46) to the depiction of the black people themselves as “black birds”. (Front piece of The Caged Bird). Momma, according to Angelou, is akin to a hen and Vivian Baxter appears to be “a blithe chick nuzzling around the large, solid, dark hen. The sounds they made had a rich inner harmony. Momma’s deep slow voice lay under my mother’s rapid peeps and chirps like stones under rushing water.” (The Caged Bird 171). The bird image is carried over to other volumes too - the Bird’s solo outfit Angelou acquires for the dance with the R.L. has shiny black feathers ( Gather Together 119). Nor does the image stop there. An unnamed black man desirous of migrating is described by Angelou as a “large exotic bird” (All God’s Children 39). Angelou is described by the beautician to whom she goes in a bid to fix her hair in the Ghanian fashion as “... not a chicken, you know sistah ... not to say you are too old to lay eggs ... “( All God’s Children 37). In a critical article on Maya Angelou, she and Simone de Beauvoir are described as “birds of a feather.”

The bird imagery which hints at chirps and rushing water and hence signifies sound is related to silence that is Angelou’s response to myriad situations. The response of two of Angelou’s ex-school mates to the news of the birth of her son characteristically evokes the image of birds. Lily and an un named ex class mate are cruel and hurtful on seeing Maya’s beautiful baby. They say “A crow gives birth to a dove. The bird kingdom must be petrified ...” (Gather Together 17) Maya’s response to the jibe is perfect silence. The only reaction is that she leaves without saying goodbye. “There is a point in fury when one becomes abject. Motionless, I froze, as Lot’s wife must have done, having caught a last glimpse of concentrated evil ...” (Gather Together 17).

Petrified silence is Maya’s response to a wide range of situations ranging from love, surprise and shock to unwillingness to reply, down right disagreement, response to fear and ultimately as a method of survival. Maya is “struck dumb” at the sight of her beautiful mother (The Caged Bird 49). She is silent when surprised (The Caged Bird 195) and registers her unwillingness to reply to her father’s querry whether she’d like to go to California by observing silence (The Caged Bird 46). When Momma wants Maya and Bailey to be grateful to their parents who’d sent them Xmas gifts, Maya does not agree. “I wanted to scream, “Yes. Tell him to take them back. But I didn’t move...” (The Caged Bird 44). Maya employs silence as retreat and as means of survival when she decides to stop talking (The Caged Bird 68).

The retreat to silence is not a technique that Maya alone perfects. Other people in the text echo Maya’s silence. Bailey, in refusing to make a sound when he is thrashed mimes Maya’s reaction. (The Caged Bird 98). Dolores, the girl friend of Bailey Johnson Senior shares Maya’s shocked silence when her father speaks of an intended trip to Mexico with Maya. However her silence unlike that of Maya's is a jealous reaction (The Caged Bird 195). Maya’s Grandmother Baxter, “would stop speaking... when she was angry”. (The Caged Bird 70). Silence as a weapon is employed by the black people as a whole in Angelou’s narrative especially in Book 4 of her work, The Heart of a Woman. The leaders planned a silent protest, “We had expected to stand, veiled and mournful in dramatic but silent protest...” (The Heart of a Woman 158). However angry screams broke the dark quiet auditorium of the United Nations building. This vocal response of the black people is something Angelou considers symptomatic of the black people themselves,

We are a tongued folk. A race of singers. Our lips shape words and
rhythms which elevate our spirits and quicken our blood ...I have spent
over fifty years listening to my people.

Like Philomela, who in her re-incarnation as a nightingale sings her song of woe, Angelou articulates the quintessential black female experience. The autobiography as a genre, of historiography, of writing oneself, provides the writer with a history and a cultural identity It goes a step further too. For the oppressed, the colonized and the exploited, the movement from silence to speech is not merely an attempt to insert a selfhood into history. It is part of a political strategy for liberation. Angelou taps the potential of the autobiography as the text of the oppressed and the culturally displaced, forging a right to speak both for and beyond the individual. People in a position of powerlessness-women, black people, working class people have more than begun to insert themselves into the culture via autobiography - via the assertion of a personal voice which speaks beyond itself. Autobiography emerges as the most discreet and accessible way of countering silence and misrepresentation.

Angelou breaks the taboo on the publicly heard power of women’s voices. “Public writing and public speech, closely allied, were both real and symbolic acts of self determination for women...” In breaking the taboo on the publicly heard female voice, in finding the silenced cultural voice, in trying to appropriate a space for herself in the identity of an Afro-American and in communicating the gaps and the silences, Angelou is breaking new grounds in literature.

Angelou’s awareness of the need for a language, the hostile adult world did not understand, is apparent early enough in The Caged Bird, when Maya attempts to communicate with her brother in Pig Latin, which she thought her brother and his friends had created. She is shocked when she hears her father reply to her very private question to Bailey, “Ooday, Ooyay inkthay ishthay is our atherfay or ooday ooyay inkthay atthay away are eingbay idkay appednay?” which means - Do you think this is our father or do you think that we are being kidnapped? (The Caged Bird 49). The ability of her father to reply, is, according to her, an example of the perfidy of the adult world which sought to entrap children. In p.120 of The Caged Bird, Angelou speaks of a new language that Maya and her friend Louise tried to develop - a language, they named Tut language:

Since all the other children spoke Pig Latin, we were superior because
Tut was hard to speak and even harder to understand...Louise would
rattle off a few sentences to me in unintelligible Tut language and
would laugh. Naturally I laughed too. Snickered really, understanding
nothing... (The Caged Bird 120).

Maya is aware also of the jargon of the finishing school for black girls. Miss. Viola’s kitchen. Though mute, Maya immerses herself in the newly acquired jargon (The Caged Bird 89).

Awareness of special language registers are carried to Gather Together when Maya speaks of her inability to communicate with the regulars in the restaurant where she worked as a waitress for she hadn’t learned their language. In The Heart of a Woman, Maya speaks of the language of etiquette among Southern Blacks which is:

as severe and distinct as a seventeenth century minuet or an African
initiation ritual. There is a moment to speak, a tone of voice to be
used, words to be chosen, a time to drop one’s eyes and a split second
when a stranger can be touched...without conveying anything other
than respectful friendliness... (The Heart of a Woman 99).

This places language as just an element of communication. The inability to communicate and the reversal to being mute plagued Maya once more in Egypt, where she stays for a time with Vus. At a reception she attends with Vus, she realizes that:

Vus was successfully teaching me that there was a particular and
absolute way for a woman to approach an African man. I only knew
how a wife addressed an African husband. I didn’t know how to start
a conversation with a male stranger...( The Heart of a Woman 201).

Maya makes the important discovery that she doesn’t speak the same language as Vus for she is unable to condone his infidelity - something he lightly dismisses, for he is an “African man” (The Heart of a Woman 245). The African group stage a hearing of their marital disagreement in the Liberian Residency. Maya is initially nervous and apprehensive of the “secret ritual or a dangerous kangaroo court” (The Heart of a Woman 249). Yet the group speaks her language for they understand and support her cause blaming Vus for the failed marriage. The voice Maya finds to combat the African group at the Liberian Residency was the voice of silence and absence - a voice that only a woman of her AfroAmerican descent could find - a voice that was engaged in a mortal combat with the theory of the subservience of the female. Far from being satisfied with voicing the marginal, Angelou tries to appropriate the cultural centre and attempts to tap a “wide, wild and varied voice” .

In finding this wild voice, Angelou has perhaps done a lot for the genre of women’s autobiography. The wild voice of the black woman is however not only the voice of bitterness. “We must give voice to centuries not only of bitteress and hate but also of neighbourly kindness and sustaining love”.

Maya’s muteness is first breached by the love and kindness of Mrs Flowers. It is she who first teaches Maya that:

Words mean something other than what is set down on paper. It takes
the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning
(The Caged Bird 82).

Her practical demonstration of this theory in the reading aloud of the opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities is an eye opener to Maya

She was nearly singing. I wanted to look at the pages. Were they the
same that I had read? Or were there notes, music lined on the pages as
in a hymn book? Her sound began to cascade gently. I knew from
listening to a thousand preachers that she was nearing the end of her
reading and I hadn’t really heard, heard to understand, a single word...
(The Caged Bird 84).

Speaking of the importance of language in her development as a writer, Angelou takes into consideration the importance to her, of the Bible and her appreciation of the “Word”.

I decided when I was very young to read the whole Bible and I did so
twice. I loved its cadence. And in church when the minister would
make the Bible come alive... I could see it. And the tonality and the
music and the old people...all that. For me, it was going to the opera.

Gifted with an undeniably exceptional ear to pick out the rich, deep cadences and in her use of precise and vivid words and phrases to describe voices, Maya Angelou treats us to a description of voices like this passage from The Heart of a Woman:

The voice of an adult American black man has undeniable structures.
It has the quality of gloss, slithery as polished onyx or it can be nubby
and notched with harshness. The voice can be sonorous as a brass solo
or light and lyrical as a flute (The Heart of a Woman 217, 218).

The Afro-American ear was accustomed to the call and response in jazz, in the blues and in the prose of black preachers. Repetition was important in blues and hence two-time talk was inevitable. The black response to the blues, long on moaning and deep on content was more fulsome for the blues encoded the race memory. When she sings an African song in Swahili called “Freedom”,

U hu uhuru oh yea freedom
U hu uhuru oh yea freedom, (The Heart of a Woman 48)

with its repetitive, rhythmic words, the entire audience responded. Repetitions that were used in other kinds of music were easily picked up by the blacks.

The same ear that distinguished the texture of sounds could easily pick up the relationship between religious music/preaching and the blues. Angelou records the joining of blues and religious tradition. The agony in the barrelhouse blues and the agony in religion have a connecting point.

A stranger to the music could not have made a distinction between the
songs sung a few minutes before (in church) and those being danced to in
the gay house by the rail road tracks. All asked the same questions. How
long,oh God? How long? (The Caged Bird111).

Angelou manipulates all the techniques of the Blues numbers - of the repetition, of the whoop (the slave holler used to uplift the spirit of the slaves) of the changes of rhythm and of the dropping of the oppositional mode of address in her autobiographical narrative in five volumes. This is especially significant, for Angelou’s autobiograhy, like the blues, is the result of an impulse to keep painful details and episodes alive 32 . Like the traditional blues, the black autobiography expands the solo-the voice of a single, individual singer, yet retains the tone of the tribe. The blues autobiographer, by articulating absorbed experiences of the narrator makes it universal. Likewise Angelou’s narrative affirms the difference of the woman-text and implicitly states that it is not the corpse of the mummified woman nor a fantasy of woman’s decapitation, but something different, a step forward, an adventure, an exploration of woman’s powers-of her power, her potency, her ever dreaded strength, of the regions of her femininity

From the sense that “Words are useless” (Gather Together 35) the author proceeds to a fluid narrative that encompass tales of white prejudice and black resistance to white domination. It touches on sensitive issues like naming, ranging from the writer’s own change of name to Maya from the earlier Marguerite, and that of her son from Clyde to Guy (Singin and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas) Marguerite is aware all along of nuances of names. In Caged Bird, the child Marguerite is variously called Rita, Ritie and Marguerite by her mother. She is able to distinguish between the meanings encoded in names-

Uh- huh. It was bad all right. Not “Ritie” or “Maya” or “Baby”.
“Marguerite”... “Ritie, go get me that big, Webster’s... suddenly it wasnt
all that serious. I was Ritie again... (The Caged Bird 235).

In Gather Together, Marguerite is called “Sugar” by LD. L.D is a man of many personas and has a name for each persona. As lover boy, he is called LD, as exploiter he answers to “daddy” and as husband, he is called Lou. The hellish horror of negroes of being called out of their names is depicted in detail in the episode where Marguerite, out of protest at being called Margaret and then Mary, breaks Mrs.Cullinan’s green glass cups (The Caged Bird 93). Angelou provides a reason for the self conscious activity that naming is for the negro. “It was a dangerous practice to call a negro anything that could be loosely construed as insulting because of the centuries of their having been called niggers, jigs, dinges, black birds, crows, boots and spooks...” (The Caged Bird 91).

Naming becomes important to the reader too. The critique of autobiography as a transgressive genre, emerges as the truth for though it is a particularly valuable resource in a variety of argumentative strategies in relation to topics such as subject/ object, self/identity, private/public, fact/fiction, there is clearly an instability in terms of the postulated opposites. Autobiography appears to be a dangerous double agent moving between these oppositions. The disjunct between the private and public persona becomes visible, when the reader caught up in the trauma of the narrative persona unconsciously thinks about “Maya’s” experience which “Angelou” recounts. The face of the narrator is akin to that of a fictional character while the reader is aware at the same time of being “under” 34 the skin of the author.

The skin tones of negroes from rich black (The Caged Bird 78) and “blue black, smooth as glass skin" (The Heart of a Woman 134) to “the reddish tan colour which southern blacks call mariney” (The Heart of a Woman 100) and the “high yellow” colour of Guy’s skin (The Heart of a woman 132) are detailed to explode the single blanket term “black” to cover the variations of colour. The tales that the Africans sustained themselves on, ranging from “tales of queens and princesses and young girls and market women who had outwitted the British or French or Boers” (The Heart of a Woman 137) to the history of Harriet Tubman called Moses and Sojourner Truth are sources of never failing inspiration to the black struggle-something that Angelou, the black activist does not lose sight of. The fable of Brer Rabbit that glorified the black cunning which would finally win over white brutality, also undercuts the narrative.

The rhythms underlying the life of the Afro-American that manifest itself in the felicitous use of language is recreated in the dialogue and voices that Angelou presents. Perhaps there is no better way of putting it than in the citation presented to Maya Angelou by the Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina in May 1977:

There in Stamps, Arkansas, she heard the talk that became the music of her life.
And whether it was soft grandmother talk or the rich metaphorical
language of the Bible or the throbbing spirituals, or the rhythms, speech
patterns and imagery of the Black preacher or the multi layered talk between
the Blacks and the whites, she captured all the sound...

Theme, form and the underlying rhythms build to a full throated song of herself that enthralls the reader - a celebration of survival, of the forging of identity, of courage, of persistence and of the renewal of innocence against overwhelming odds. Gendered black resistance, both in its language and in its musicality is created in the narrative. Angelou proves conclusively that “cultural silencing” of the woman can be countered by encoding forbidden stories into literary history. Silence itself can be a source of strength and inspiration to tap the power of language to cure. The “most interesting, exciting and important conversation that has ever been heard” is possible when, breaking the silence, Angelou begins the transformative dialogue between herself and the world and creates for woman a place in literary tradition.

REFERENCES
1. June Jordan, Poem About My Rights, Lyrical Campaigns: Selected Poems (London: Virago, 1986) 66-7.
2. Patricia Spacks, Imagining a Self (Cambridge, Massachussets: Harvard U P, 1976)59.
3. Laura Marcus, “The Face of Autobiography”, The Uses of Autobiography ed. Julia Swindells (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995) 13
4. Omar Ibn Seid, Autobiography of Omar Ibn Seid, Slave in North Carolina (1831, qtd in Black Americans in Autobiography: An Annotated Bibliography of Autobiographies and Autobiographical Works (New York: MLA, 1984).
5. Booker.T.Washington, Up From Slavery (1901; rpt. Oxford: OUP, 1995).
6. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (London: Michael Joseph 1964).
7. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (rpt; New York: Pathfinder, 1994).
8. Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Leaves of Grass (New York: Mentor Books, 1954).
9. Oloudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Life of Oloudah Equiano (London: Heinman, 1995)
10. Eleanor.W.Traylor, “Foreword” to Dolly A.McPherson, Order Out of Chaos: The Autobiographical Works of Maya Angelou (New York: Peter Lang, 1990) xii, xiii.
11. Julia Swindells, “Introduction”, The Uses of Autobiography. ed.Julia Swindells. (London:Taylor and Francis, 1995) 9.
12. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942, rpt London: Harper Collins 1991).
13. Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: The Dial Press, 1968)
14. Mary Mebane, Mary (New York: The Viking Press, 1981).
15. Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name (1974; rpt. London: Virago, 1993). Henceforth paranthetically documented.
16. Mary Mebane, Mary (New York: The Viking Press, 1981) 28.
17. Dolly.A. McPherson, Order Out of Chaos: The Autobiographical Works of Maya Angelou. (New York: Peter Lang, 1990) 5.
18. Elizabeth Abel, ed. The Voyage In: Fictons of Female Development. (Dartmouth: University Press of New England, 1983).
19. Sandra Friedan, “Shadowing/Surfacing/Shedding: German Writers in Search of a Female Bildungsroman", The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. Ed. Elizabeth Abel (Dartmouth: University Press of New England, 1983) 304.
20. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings( 1969; rpt. New York: Bantam Books, 1993). Henceforth paranthetically documented.
21. Wayne Warga, “Maya Angelou: One Woman Creativity Cult”, Los Angeles Times. California Section. Jan.9, 1972.
22. Maya Angelou, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1978; rpt London: Virago, 1991). Henceforth paranthetically documented.
23. Maya Angelou, The Heart of Woman (1981; rpt. London: Virago, 1991). Henceforth paranthetically documented.
24. Maya Angelou, All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes. (1986; rpt London: Virago, 1991). Henceforth paranthetically documented.
25. Joanne Megna-Wallace, “Simon de Beauvoir and Maya Angelou: Birds of a Feather”, Simone de Beauvoir Studies 6. 1989: 49-55.
26. Maya Angelou, Personal Interview, qtd in Dolly A.Mcpherson, Order Out of Chaos: The Autobiographical Works of Maya Angelou (New York: Peter Lang, 1990) 21.
27. Idea borrowed from Bell Hooks, Talking Back, Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (London: Sheba, 1989).
28. Cora Kaplan, Introduction to Aurora Leigh and Other Poems (London: The Women’s Press, 1978) 10.
29. Michelene Wandor, “Voices are Wild”, Women’s Writing: A Challenge to Theory ed. Moira Montieth (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1986) 86.
30. Alice Walker, “The Black Woman and the Southern Experience”, Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (London: Womanist Press, 1984) 21.
31. Maya Angelou, Personal Interview to Dolly A.Mcpherson, July 30 1981, Dolly.A.Mcpherson Order Out of Choos: The Autobiographical Works of Maya Angelou 10.
32. Idea borrowed from Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Signet Books, 1966) 23.
33. Helene Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation? Feminist Literary Thought: A Reader ed. Mary Eagleton (Massachussets: Blackwell, 1996) 324.
34. Doris Lessing, Under My skin (London: Flamingo, 1995)
35. Qtd in Dolly.A.McPherson, Order out of Chaos: The Autobiographical Works of Maya Angelou 10.
36. Christine Froula, “The Daughter’s Seduction: Sexual Violence and Literary History”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 11.4 1986: 621-644.
37. Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters: The Novel Essay Portion of “The Year”, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (New York: Harcourt Brace Jouanovich, 1978) xxxviii - xxxix.

Contributor
HEMA NAIR. Teaches English at the N.S.S. College for Women, Neeramankara, Thiruvananthapuram. Her doctoral work was on Doris Lessing. Is a regular contributor to research journals. Interested in Women’s Studies.

Trading the common ground

TREADING THE COMMON
GROUND : COLLECTIVE
CONSCIOUSNESS
IN WOMEN’S
AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Lalitha Ramamoorthy

ABSTRACT---The introductory article by Lalitha Ramamoorty about "Treading the Common Ground: Collective Consciousness in Women's Autobiography" sets the mood and theme of this issue of Samyukta. It defines autobiography both as a work of art and as a genre. After tracing the emergence of autobiography as a form of creative writing, she skilfully juxtaposes the traditional autobiographies in both the East and the West, and male and female autobiographical writing. She then analyses the various perspectives involved in women's autobiography, including the continuous shifting of "feminist consciousness", modes of self-expression, and the political agenda, which she hopes will "pave the way for the politics of women's liberation".

Autobiography as the attempt to write the self or give the self a narrative is deeply bound with questions of identity. Variously described as “ that mixed and transgressive genre” by Mary Jacobs, and as “the monstrosity of autobiographical writing” by Barbara Johnson, the genre saw its expansion with the proliferation of women’s writing the world over especially after the 70s. Feminism and feminist thought have enhanced women’s consciousness and heightened their sense of awareness.

Traditional western constructions of the autobiography have been maleoriented and have served to fashion a composite face of European culture. “Academically autobiography has been a male creation. Riding the tide of New Criticism, … Autobiography became the story of the male-self constructed by himself and recreating the metaphors of his life” (Huff: 1991). The autobiographies in which eminent men articulated their testimonies were held up as the model relationship between the individual and the social world. By conceding an authoritative position to the autobiographer, this analysis failed to accommodate any sense of tension, struggle or contestation between consciousness and environment, between people and their surrounding ideological world. The autobiographies of great men became the authentic data which established cultural certainties and provided points linking which the map of western civilization was drawn. This interpretation viewed autobiography as something more than a simple presentation of individual existence.

Recent works on autobiography as a genre contest the generally held view that autobiography is a naked and transparent presentation of an individual life. It is now increasingly realized that all autobiographical statements engage in some process of mediation between the subject and the author and the ideological environment they inhabit. The social being is surrounded by ideological phenomena and by object signs of various types such as words, statements, religious symbols, beliefs, works of art etc. All these constitute the ideological environment in which an individual’s consciousness lives and develops. The autobiography, far from being a transparent outpouring of an individual, becomes a site where the writer sets out to “reassemble the scattered elements of his individual life and to regroup them in a comprehensive sketch” (Gusdorf). Hence the notion that the autobiographical art stands alone as a testimony to individuals, removed from their relationship to the social world, needs to be revised.

The emergence of modern autobiographical criticism runs parallel to the formation of different disciplines. In the context of theorizing women’s autobiography, the insights of Freud’s psychoanalysis probing into the unconscious offered interesting points of reference. However recent feminist critics have used them with great theoretical sophistication to turn the major assumption of autobiography back on itself.

Freud in his seminal work entitled Preliminary Communication wrote that “hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences”. The reminiscences are not conscious but repressed and are displaced across the body as symptom or illness. He theorized a way of opening up repressed memory through the mediation of psychoanalytic interpretation. Freud affirmed that memories were not in fact actual events but fantasies constructed out of wishes and their repression. The neurotic was one who could not tell his or her own story. The story did not exist. It had to be constructed. The neurotic, according to him, experienced the present in terms of a repetition of the past. Freud later related hysteria to sexuality. All hysterical symptoms, according to him, stemmed from a conflict between instinctual impulses and their repressed forms. Hysterical attacks, like hysteria, revive in women sexual activity which existed during their childhood. The hysteric is one in whom the Oedipal complex and the acquisition of sexual difference have been imperfectly resolved. Freud’s analysis helps us to get an insight into the problem of femininity which is that women do not move simply into a female identity and role; nor is that identity natural or pre-given. The woman in the course of normal development represses her pre-Oedipal attachment to her mother. In taking on a feminine identity she abandons her mother, seeking to replace her in relation to her father. For Freud therefore a woman’s identification with and desire for the mother cannot exist in the same place.

The contestation of these ideas comes from various angles. Linda Anderson (1996) sees the woman’s self within a different paradigm as both self and other, as both subject and object of desire. The process of becoming a subject carries within itself a return to maternal origins. The return can never be completed. However, recognizing within herself the process of return, her own interiority, she can constitute herself within the symbolic. Modifying Freud, it might be said that the hysterical woman, instead of suffering from reminiscences, lives the necessity of remembering, of gesturing towards her own origins in order not to forget. This identification characterizes a movement which is simultaneously outwards and inwards and is suggestive of the way memory can become self-creation.

A collection of essays entitled “Female Sexualisation” (Haug 1987) of the Socialist Collective, Hamburg and West Berlin, too counters the generally held view of the autobiography that childhood and adolescence are part of a logical sequence of cause and effect culminating in the adult personality. The German School argues that past experience such as moments of resistance to male authority are obtainable through memory once they have overcome the obstacles of patriarchal culture, which causes these experiences to be forgotten. Hence memory is an active process only in terms of the blocks placed in front of the recollection of past experiences. Ironically the ways of remembering provided by the dominant culture work only by repression or by transporting alien qualities into their selves. To have access to the omitted experiences, critical theorizing of autobiographical remembering should combine emotions and self-reflexive theorizing. The memory after all may not reconstruct all the experiences, for critically informed remembering frees memory from the biases of dominant culture, thereby allowing us to see “events in the past in new and more or less unprejudiced ways (Haug 1987).

The autobiographies are creative writings emerging as products of history and culture and perhaps with ideological significance. Women traditionally conceived as passive are breaking the cultural code by choosing to reveal themselves. They have to posit a self that existed before writing. Since this self was and still is socially conditioned, the self that narrates and the self that is projected are not unified and continuous. In fact the autobiography may provide her with an alternative site of identification created with formal awareness. This site of dynamics is situated between her past identity, marred by loss and absence, and a constructed one of what might be. Autobiography which marks the presence of a woman in effect encircles an absence, referring back constantly in its efforts to define itself. Her story, therefore, becomes an expression of the dynamics of self-becoming. The output is set in the ‘here and now ‘and ends in the figure of the subject who produces a sense of the self by telling her story in her own time. If the historical narrative allows her to give a complexity to her childhood, the childhood she recounts becomes the childhood of her imagination. “I could write it backwards indeed and you would still know it happened forward” (Steedman 1992).

Debates in current autobiographical theory suggest that new forms of autobiography are not merely a question of replacing one face with another. The constructions with mediation and obliqueness built into them are often imaged as a face through the surface of the text. These, in the postcolonial context, present the complexity of mirroring imagery - distorted mirrors, the anamorphic vision, the uneasy mirrors of race and identity and their disturbing reflections as in Patricia Williams’ The Alchemy of Race and Rights - Diary of a Law Professor.

Women’s autobiographical writing differs from male writing essentially in its approach to the subject in question. Male writing focuses on a well-formed, well-integrated, fully developed self. An autobiography is expected to reveal the “hidden forms of inwardness”. Hence the question that crops up is whether a woman who is marginalised and is taught from her birth to be controlled and self-effacing can be expected to indulge in the luxury of self-exploration. In the words of Freidman, “A man has the luxury of forgetting his sex. He can think of himself as an individual. Women are reminded at every turn in the great cultural hall of mirrors of their sex”

A woman’s life, in both the East and the West, is made up of multiple selves that not only overlap but also override and contradict each other. She occupies a number of positions and enters into various relations from which she has to gather bits and pieces of her own self. There is a continuously shifting feminist consciousness. The outward structure of this may have the semblance of a unified whole but it contains gaps and blanks like the unresolved mysteries of an incomplete story. The subject of a feminist autobiography is ever in the making and is marked by a continued deferral of any final identity. A woman in her autobiography tries to define herself from the positions which are relevant to her existence:

a) The social self or the external self through which she relates herself to the society at large, and as an individual working in a certain capacity or for a certain social cause. It affords her a public image and occupies the visible, peripheral fringe of her existence.
b) The familial self in which she is inextricably bound to her parents. siblings, husband, children and other relatives. She looks at herself from an outsider’s point of view. This self occupies a major part of her life.
c) The private self forms the centre of her individual existence. At times she even fails to recognize, face and explore this self. To recognize this self is to arrive at self-realization. Grasping this self, understanding it and evaluating it is the most important but the most difficult outcome of an autobiographical writing.

In contrast, a man’s autobiography is mainly concerned with his success story, his life achievements. Very rarely does it touch upon his private life consisting of his wife and children. “ Masculine mind is characterized by the predominance of the intellect, and the feminine by the predominance of the emotions ... Woman by her greater affectionateness, her greater range and depth of emotional experience, is well-fitted to give expression to the emotional facts of life” (Lewes,1971).

Whether this difference is reflected in the form of women’s autobiography is debatable. The femininity of writing associated with disorder and looseness, instead of the order and tightness in men’s mode of writing, may be indicative of the informal approach set in motion by the constant exposure of women to homely chats and grandmother’s tales. The form the early women writers chose to write in was the diary. Historically it offered her an avenue for self expression without going public. It allowed the woman to remain hidden while providing her with a place to actualize her interiority, create for her an ‘other’ even if the other happened to be herself. The diary’s formlessness, its lack of continuity and its joining up of various areas of experience became the most appropriate form for a shifting, questioning subjectivity. Alice James began to keep her diary in 1889 at the age of forty and it was not published during her life time. Jean Strouse, her biographer, comments on how from her position as invalid, she cultivated a detachment which “enabled her to submit and resist at the same time.” Interestingly, she herself writes :

“ My circumstances allowing nothing but the ejaculation of
one- syllabled reflections, a written monologue by that
most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be
discovered consolations. I shall at least have it all my own
way and it may bring relief as an outlet to that geyser of
emotions, sensations, speculations and reflections which
ferments perpetually within my poor old carcass for its
sins; so here goes my first journal !

The same pattern of introspection, memory, breaking the surface in what is seen as a movement of recovery in the work of Kate Millet. However Kate’s situation is different in many ways. It was in fact her success after the publication of Sexual Politics that made autobiography an imperative for her. What she experienced was an inability to reconcile inner and outer experience. In Flying and Sita she produces narratives which in their disjointedness are like a diary. In a sense woman’s autobiography is both a reaching towards the possibility of saying “I” and towards the form in which to say “it”. Writing in this sense becomes a quest and a process. Christa Wolf in her 'Interview with Myself 'writes into the space of what she has called “remembered future” and ends with the difficulty of saying “I”.

Another favoured mode of self expression in the present era is testimony as part of ‘speaking out’. As Shoshana Felman writes ‘Testimony has become a crucial mode of our relation to events of our times…” In the US Alice Keller’s An Unknown Woman (1982) ; in France, Marie Cardinal’s The Words to Say It (1975); In England, Ann Oakley’s Taking it Like a Woman (1984); in Bangladesh, Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja and in India Kamala Das’ My Story are examples of women’s confessional narratives. This shift from the self-consciousness of autobiography to testify details of one’s life has important implications for conceptions of the status and value of self writings. This leads one to the personal criticism in which an explicitly autobiographical performance is made central to the activity of criticism. This foregrounds the identity of the critic in recaptualizing the nature of criticism itself. Felman argues that “we need to understand women’s autobiography, at this point in history, as missing.” She claims that unlike men who write autobiography from memory, women’s autobiography is what their memory cannot contain or hold together. She argues that telling the story of the self may be a way of killing aspects of that self or part selves rather than preserving them. Further, woman’s alienation from a totalized life-story means that their autobiography is to be found in other’s stories. This kind of autobiography therefore is mediated and displaced because they narrate a story which they do not know or cannot speak out. It makes a detour through theory, through fiction and through literature. Women’s autobiography may be marked as much by a resistance to the autobiographical as by an embracing of it.

Women’s autobiography in India is largely defined with reference to the traditional patriarchal set up in which it grew. However the consciousness enshrined therein often strikes a familiar chord among women elsewhere occupied with the definition of the “ I”. Far from being a well defined, isolated “I”, women’s autobiography springs from an awareness of a collective identity. A woman does not write her autobiography as an isolated being, but carries a whole tradition of women’s writing within her. She sees herself as an extension of the collective consciousness of women’s subculture. It is noted that women’s identity is relational and their identity boundaries are very fluid compared to men’s. These facts of their gender identity influence the genre a great deal, in both form and content, making women’s autobiography discontinuous in form and personal in content. A deep sense of being discriminated against looms large over most of these autobiographies. The very first autobiography written by an Indian woman is that of the Marathi saint-poet Bahina Bai. Originally written around 1700, it gives expression to her sense of sorrow :

“Possessing a woman’s body, and myself being subjected to others, I was not able to carry out my desire to discard all worldly things …The Vedas cry aloud, and the Puranas shout that no good comes of a woman… I wonder what sin I committed in a former birth that in this birth I should be so separated from God. I am born with a human body , but in the form of a woman” (Ranjana, 4).

Indian women’s autobiographies are filled with real life incidents which may be true of any Indian woman’s life. Many narrate the unpleasant way they were received into the world. Writing in the early 1900s, Dhanvanti Rama Rau in An Inheritance (1978) tells us of how the dai assisting in the delivery used to charge less for a girl child’s birth, while Urmila Haksar in The Future that Was ( 1972) tells us how her nani “never could forgive me for my sex”. The birth of Indira Gandhi too was no exception as it is reported in The Scope of Happiness (1979) by Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit : “Mother had not said a son is born but ‘it’ has been born. In the traditional way she could not bring herself to announce the birth of a daughter” (Ranjana, 6).

Ushered into an unwelcome world the women had a childhood which lacked growing space. The familial and cognitive map of the traditional family did not provide them scope for healthy development. Savithri Devi’s The City of Two Gateways : The Autobiography of an Indian Girl (1950) and Sharan Jeet Shan’s In My Own Name : An Autobiography (1985) tell us how they were constantly reminded of their temporary status in their parents’ family. They were born parai and hence discriminated against. Sharan’s mother would tell her son not to spoil his sister by sharing his food. “She is parai. She must learn to suppress her temptations.” The women writing autobiographies reveal the discrimination, deprivation and marginality of existence coupled with training to cultivate tolerance, meekness and suppression of self to please others. Maharani Brinda’s The Story of an Indian Princess (1953) gives vent to the frustration and claustrophobia of woman’s existence. However Durgabai Deshmukh’s Chintaman and I (1980) and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s Inner Recesses and Outer Spaces (1986) testify the influence of their mothers and grandmothers who were the early feminists. Other women writers like Nayantara Sahgal (1962), Tara Ali Baig (1988) and Renuka Ray (1982) record their happy childhoods and Yamini Krishnamurthi speaks of her life’s passion in Passion for Dance (1986).

The typical Indian autobiographies are often traditional as they depict only the surface level of experience and find fulfilment in projecting a socially acceptable image of the self. Only rarely writers like Kamala Das (1976) dare go beyond the pre-determined life patterns. Such bold writings defy all conventional models to retaliate against the worn-out social values and traditions which hinder and hamper the progress of women. They also have a cathartic value as asserted by Kamala herself. “I have written several books in my life, but none of them provided the pleasure the writing of My Story has given me” (Ranjana 8).

Women’s autobiography has an important political agenda too. Each such work registers an opposition and is radical in some way. The impact such works has made has opened up a whole new area for research. In this male-dominated genre, Simone de Beauvoir has received the critical acclaim rarely given to women. Her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1963) is a landmark in women’s autobiography. Till then, the outpourings, however powerful, remained as the life story of an individual. Life As We Have known It (1977) was another early text to draw attention to the relationship between the autobiographical statement, political movement and the process of collection of testimonials. This pioneering work put in motion a process which developed into a commitment within women’s movement and came to be described as the retrieval of absent and silent women’s voices.

1970 saw the publication of Dutiful Daughters edited by McCrindle and Sheila Rowbotham and continued the initiative of Beauvoir into a statement about the collective as well as the individual experience. If Beauvoir traced the process of rebellion in one life, that of a resisting middle class daughter, Dutiful Daughters implied that the resistance was by no means unique to one woman. The familial and logical pressures experienced might well be that of many others. It tried to show that shared individual experience is an important part of the social discovery of a common condition. Once we perceive what is common to women, change and transformation become possible and the cycle of guilt and personal recrimination can be broken. This initiates a political strategy in which writing and reading of the autobiography becomes part of conscience raising. This perception constitutes a common condition which forms a precondition for social and political change. Voicing her own experience of motherhood which turned out to be different from its idealized projection, Linda Peffer (MCcrindle1977) initially wondered “Oh what is wrong with me?”. Later during her interaction with people who opened up, she realized that “ a hell lot of women have felt exactly the same as you, only they’ve just been so scared to say it…”. Once the recognition of shared experience is made, the possibility of freedom from guilt and liberation through social and political change seems possible. As she succinctly puts it, “ The discovery was that the situation might be wrong rather than the person.” These key ideas have been subsequently used to arrive at a sense of shared experience and a common condition from out of a position of isolation, difference and alienation.

Truth, Dare and Promise published in mid 80s was by a committed group consisting of twelve women who grew up into feminism in 1970s. However it started showing cracks soon, the reason being that they did not share the common condition of oppression. Three years later Very Heaven - Looking Back at the 1960s by Sara Maitland set up, in terms of nostalgia, a golden age of political action and liberation. She justifies her venture thus : “I wanted to edit it rather than write it, because one of the most important things of the time was the liberating of individual voices into defining collective experience”. What is interesting here is the reference to a phenomenon of a perceived historical insignificance experienced by the contributors. The reason for this could be that the experiences recalled were in some sense “pre-feminist” and therefore did not carry with them an explicit feminist collective commitment. This collective identity, in spite of its negative consciousness, is progressive in the sense of a continuum of ‘herstory’ - progressive from Pre-feminist to feminist alongside a visible political movement. Surviving the Blues Growing up in the Thatcher Decade (1988) is another recent autobiographical collection edited by Joan Scanlon concentrating on contemporary political culture of the 1980s. It looks at the women’s movement in terms of the present reality of Thatcher’s Britain with a particular commitment to change, unclouded by false hopes and unrealistic expectations. Many of the autobiographers capture the tension in their testimonies.

The entry of feminism into the academy, however, registers an inability to bridge practice and theory as it is bound by the context of its practitioners. It is very difficult to communicate across differences. However, optimism regarding academic feminism lies with its ability to ask better questions. It recognizes and acknowledges the differences between women not in terms of fragmentation and weakness of feminism but as parts of a great strength. Out of the recognition and understanding of the differences among universal sisterhood, must come a strategy for political change which embraces diverse categories such as Blackwomen, working-class women, lesbians and others, conscious of the difference in their oppression as women. These women show an acute awareness of both what is specific to their individual circumstances and what is specific to them as members of a larger group including their gender group - women.

Such arguments inform and bolster up the project of using autobiography politically. In the ongoing analysis, two salient facts emerge. First, to activate any kind of political change, articulation of oppression is a precondition. Secondly, a collective testimony is one of the best means of achieving this. The autobiographical project therefore is not an individual one. If what is personal remains individual and does not lead to a collective, not much gain is to be expected. On the other hand, if the political agenda becomes inclusive and brings under its umbrage not only the full-fledged feminists but also the younger and different women’s perspectives, it will then pave the way for the politics of women’s liberation.

REFERENCES
1. Moira Montieth ed. Women’s Writing - A challenge to Theory. Sussex: The Harvester Press Ltd., 1986.
2. Theorizing Culture ed. Barbara Adam and Stuart Allan. London: UCL Press, 1995.
3. Ranjana Harish. Indian Women’s Autobiographies. New Delhi: Arnold Publishers 1993.
4. Julia Swindells, ed. Women and Autobiography. Lonodon : Taylor & Francis, 1995.
5. “Studies on Hysteria” in The Complete works of Freud, Vol.II, London: Hogarth Press, 1955, p7.
6. Georges Gusdorf. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography” in Autobiography : Essays - Theoretical and Critical ed. James Olney, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p 60.
7. Simone de Beauvoir. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
8. Cooperative Working Women, Life as We Have Known It, London: Virago, 1977.
9. Jean McCrindle and Sheila Rowbotham ed. Dutiful Daughters : Women Talk About Their Lives, Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1977.
10. Linda Peffer in McCrindle and Rowbotham, 1977, p 359-96.
11. Sara Maitland ed. Very Heaven : Looking Back at the 1960s. London: Virago, 1988.
12. Liz Heron, ed. Truth, Dare or Promise; Girls Growing up in the Fifties. London: Virago, 1985.
13. Joan Scanlon ed. Surviving the Blues: Growing up in the Thatcher Decade. London: Virago,1988.
14. The Diary of Alice James ed. Leon Edel. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1982. 15. Christa Woolf, “Interview with Myself 1966” in The Reader and the Writer. Berlin: Seven Seas Books,1977.
16. L. Marcus “Brothers in their Anecdotage” in M. Pointon ed. Pre-Raphaelites Reviewed, Manchester : University of Manchester Press, 1989.
17. Linda Anderson .” At the threshold of the Self - Women and Autobiography” in Women’s Writing - a Challenge to Theory ed. Moira Monteith, 1986.
18. Huff, Cynthia.Delivery: “The cultural Representation of Childbirth” in Autobiography and Questions of
Gender ed. Shirley Neuman. London : Frank Cass & Co., 1991.
19. Lewes George H. “ The Lady Novelists” in Women’s Liberation and Literature ed.Elaine Showalter. New York: Harcourt Brace 1971.
20. Kamala Das. My Story. Delhi: Sterling, 1991.

Contributor
LALITHA RAMAMOORTHI. Teaches at All Saints’ College, Thiruvanathapuram. Basically an ELT specialist, her areas of interest include literary criticism,women’s autobiography and translation. Recipient of the Best Teacher Award, she has a number of publications and two books to her credit.

Politics of knowledge and Women

POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE
AND WOMEN

Lalitha Lenin

ABSTRACT--- "Politics of Knowledge and Woman" by Lalitha Lenin talks about the possibility of woman's empowerment through progressive ideas. In simple terms, she discusses lucidly the artefacts and structure of knowledge, and the hierarchy of power which results in the subaltern status of woman. She underscores the importance of women's access to reading and writing because only then can they assert themselves in the politics of knowledge.

There is no cultural or social sphere of discourse where contemplation or commentary on the woman, who is condemned to be exalted and all enduring is not taking place. Efforts at effecting empowerment of the woman is unfolding before us as a mockery of life and a challenge of the times. Even progressive movements cannot escape, but face this dilemma.

Woman’s empowerment is possible only through development based on progressive ideas. It is now widely recognised that knowledge/information is the master-resource essential for spiritual as well as material evolution. This is because, in the absence of knowledge, there is no means of discerning between right and wrong or applying it in practical life.

We must examine how the hegemonic systems distance woman from knowledge even while proclaiming the necessity of a sagacious and rational woman. This will help us to realise the impact the politics of knowledge exerts on the female psyche and the consequent hardships woman has to face throughout life.

When the feminist movements that germinated in western societies sought space in the tradition bound culture and ethos of Kerala, even visionaries were not able to foresee that it would develop into a question as complex as the present one. There were thousands of people who could identify with the dialectics of capitalist proletariat class relations as their individual experience and strive hard to restructure society for liberating humanity. But, when it comes to the woman’s cause, such a splendid humane concern and yearning for emancipation is totally absent. This is true not only in the context of Kerala, but of all the world. It is hard to comprehend and to come to terms with, but a fact all the same, that even the masters of progressive cause have been compelled into seeing woman as subaltern everywhere. It is true that in some developed countries, revolutionary movements have succeeded in helping women exorcise specters of the past and attain new realms of knowledge and self confidence. But they failed in maintaining the tempo. The fundamental reason behind the attitude to the woman as subaltern, lies in the politics of knowledge. Here, what has to be examined is the ethics of conveniently forgetting who is responsible for the entity of the uninformed woman. This inquiry will give us an insight into the structure of knowledge and the essence of power.

Artefacts and the structure of knowledge

Society is not just a collective of individuals; it is also the mutuality of knowledge. The grand structure of knowledge that has evolved out of the integration of complex personal experience is still unknown to the human mind and science. That is the reason why sensibility requires convenient structures of human creation. It is these contrived artefacts that influence man’s actions and activities. Whether it be art or literature, science or history, man’s progress is perceived through artefacts. Artefacts are systems formed out of signs and related rules. All in all, it is true there can be no artefact without structure and no sensibility without artefacts.

Hierarchy of Power

Each structure is an order in itself. It is this diversity of orders that construes the basis of man’s diversity in thought. Not merely man’s logic and imagination, but also his ego come to roost in these structures. That is why when orders evolve, authority becomes integral to it. This authority places itself against the path of progress by opposing change even when there is a shift in the context. Thus the basic characteristic of structures assume the hierarchy of power. Even the most objective scientific knowledge cannot free itself from this limitation.

The first step that all social reformation movements has to take is to distinguish the prominent traits of domination that are present in artefacts because all worldly knowledge is organised in terms of structures of power which can be discerned only by means of artefacts. It is the awareness that the constituent elements of these structures rest on a hierarchy and that they are intrinsically related to male dominance that has paved the way for women’s liberation movements. The source of this enlightenment is progressive ideology itself.

The subaltern status of woman

It is a fact that woman is denigrated as second rate in the structure of society and in the culture that vitalises it. It is time to conduct a bonafide investigation into the actual reasons for this continuing subjugation, though of course, woman is not the only subaltern. It is amazing that though women make up more than half the population, no proper attempt has been made to unravel the complex skeins of her subjugation. Why is it that even before her personality has evolved, woman is put down to a secondary position, as if her status was determined by her birth itself? Why is she excluded from power struggles ? Why are the most important social obligations as pregnancy, delivery, motherhood, home making, nursing etc., considered marginal ? For what reason is second class citizenship forced on her? Why are her rights on wealth and government ignored? Why is she denied freedom over her own body and gestures ? Why are woman’s grievances and agitations deliberately repressed in history ? Why do the sharp ends of her arguments get blunted? Why are her words subverted to mere witticisms? Why is she being instilled with the false belief that the very things she hates are the correct ones and thus made a betrayer of progress? What is the politics behind making her more and more subaltern within the subaltern itself and determining her status per se?

The Politics of Knowledge

The answers to all these questions and many more generally lie in the politics of distancing woman from self realisation, social awareness, knowledge and power. It is when we visualise the inseparable nexus between knowledge and power that it becomes clear how the woman kept away from the realm of knowledge is distanced from the mainstream of culture and hence from the structures of power.

The politics of knowledge has been in vogue from time immemorial. It came into play whenever those who understood the potential value of knowledge tried to possess it and use it for their own purposes. That is what happened in ancient India when those of lower castes and the women were kept outside the purview of knowledge. The politics involved in declaring knowledge divine and sacrosanct, keeping out of bound for those of lower birth, can be understood easily enough now. Even as we agree that knowledge has to be used and nourished for and by the common populace, there are people who tend to possess it privately and try to dominate it and exclude others from it. There is nothing wrong in imagining that if seeds had been sown in time into the fertile minds of India, we could have reaped the benefits a hundred fold by now and occupied the forefront of knowledge. Western civilziations, astute enough to realise that knowledge is not something to be preserved intact but is a fundamental right of the people, universalised it through print. In course of time they came to gain supremacy of knowledge. The right to define goes hand in hand with absolute control over knowledge and so, the West earned the right to define the East, and the male, to define the female.

Even during those periods in history when monarchy and religious authority functioned hand in glove, petty rivalries between them were common. But never was it decided as to which had greater potency. To this day the inner structures of religion and administration are throbbing with the pressures of this power politics. Religion constructs power structures under cover of virtuous spirituality whereas government does it directly. Therefore we give religion a halo of divinity and government an unholy connotation of political foul play. The common people and women, who do not realise the truth behind these tactics, move closer to religion and keep aloof from politics. They are incapable of recognising that religious dominations grow and gain strength inside veiled structures challenging secular political approaches. These secretive games of politics, as a whole, have been successful in keeping women away from the mainstream of action and decision making.

Womens’s Writing and Reading

When we classify human activities according to their gravity, reading and writing occupy the pride of place due to their intellectual nature. Men, who had the privilege to deal with serious matters, had positions of dominance in these lofty provinces of thought. But it is the emotional aspect that gets highlighted when woman trespasses into this holy precinct. More often than not women’s works are whetted facetiously. When more and more women entered the literary field with courage and commitment, ‘women’s writing’ became a controversial issue. Following this, the politics of viewing women’s work from an erotic angle and the right of defining women’s writing surfaced. This is not surprising considering that there is political discrimination in gender bias also

Definitions are essential for transactions to be transparent. But something that defies definition has unlimited possibilities. When something abstract is brought under a definition with selfish intent and limited experience, its expression of identity becomes distorted. That is exactly what happened in woman’s case, leading to a crisis of identity. When a woman tries to express what her essential selfhood is, the prevalent right of definition stands challenged. These ripples now visible in literature definitely indicate the dawn of a new era. Here we see the woman making inroads into man’s monopoly over the politics of knowledge. But the term man does not imply the biological class based on sexual distinction. He should be recognised as a diabolical force in the social consciousness that tries to keep absolute power and the right to define within himself.

It is not possible to access knowledge just by learning the alphabet or by mechanical reading. As long as language remains a mere blotting paper and is not wielded as a weapon, langauge itself turns to be a fertile field for consumerist culture. India is proving this phenomenon aptly enough. Woman’s role in this market economy is increasing day by day, because she is kept at a distance from reading and thereby true learning.

From the time when books became generally accessible, women have been present in those societies which appropriated the increasing knowledge for their own development. But they never scaled the heights of reading nor attained the opportunities of mental development that men had. So women neglected reading and this adversely affected their knowledge. And, in course of time, women pushed out of the continuous stream of knowledge found it almost impossible to catch up with it. The ever-expanding horizons of knowledge unfolding via the electronic media and print, not only confuse and frighten woman, but also renders her helpless. At the same time man continues to reign supreme over this world of knowledge enjoying its fruits to the maximum. The gap between man and woman in the matter of reading experience is this distance of knowledge itself. The novel challenges in the field of information technology only widens this gap. This happens precisely because woman is still unable to involve herself in the politics of knowledge.

Intervention

When all power structures place woman in a subordinate position, she can develop the will power to get involved in the politics of knowledge only by reinforcing her right for equal opportunities as a human being. Ours is a society wherein almost everyone privately wishes to protect the traditional family structure and the related cultural and social ethos without the smallest fissure in its facade. We have to realise the fact that preserving this facade at the cost of sacrificing woman’s rights is not just man’s desire but that of patriarchy. It is in this mode of thought that the woman has to intervene and act. For this woman requires the realisation of her right in the power of knowledge, organised activity and hardwork. And ultimately, this has to be constituted within the framework of the noble ideal of human emancipation, using the weapon of knowledge.

Translated from Malayalam by Sulochana Rammohan

Contributor

LALITHA LENIN. Well known poet in Malayalam; Lalitha Lenin teaches at the Department of Library and Information Science, University of Kerala. Has made significant contributions to feminist studies

Translator

SULOCHANA RAM MOHAN. Promising short story writer and poet. Has published critical studies of the stories of Chandramathi and Ashitha.

Women and autobiography

WOMEN AND
AUTOBIOGRAPHY:MARIA
CAMPBELL'S HALF BREED IN
RETROSPECT

Maya Dutt

ABSTRACT---After the English and the Black women autobiographies, Maya Dutt brings in the Canadian indigenous women's autobiography as the focus of her "Woman and Autobiography: Maria Campbell's Halfbreed in Retrospect". Dutt highlights the resistance offered by Campbell through her language and her characters, against the violent manifestation of colonisation resulting in the internalisation of colonialism by the indigenous people. She establishes Campbell to be "one of the first indigenous women daring to break the silence" and her Halfbreed "as an important legacy for indigenous women because it represents them".

Shamans had prophesied the coming of the white man and the near destruction of the red man. They had also foretold the resurrection of the Native peoples of Canada seven lifetimes after Columbus. Now, at the close of the 20 th century, at the dawn of the 21 st century, the prophecy seems to be coming true. Contrary to the expectations of white Canada, the Natives have not become extinct. Perhaps much of their religions, languages and entire tribal cultures have been forgotten in the 19 th century attempt to “Christianize” and “civilize” them and assimilate them with the white mainstream. In 1805, Red Jacket, a celebrated Seneca orator, had rejected the missionaries’ overtures with the following words: “Kitchi-Manitou has given us a different understanding” (Ross vii). Red Jacket’s words made it quite clear even then that the notions, ideas, values, perceptions, beliefs, institutions, concepts, customs, habits, practices, conventions, outlooks – the entire tradition and way of life – that the Natives embraced were different from those held by the missionaries/newcomers. The implication, however, was not that the Natives’ understanding was superior to that of the missionaries, but rather that the missionaries had not proved their beliefs and conduct to be superior to the knowledge and learning that KitchiManitou had bestowed on the Natives.

Obviously, the colonizer believed that the Natives’ adherence to their traditional values, customs and languages, would adversely affect the country’s government, and undermine national and provincial dreams and plans. The missionaries firmly believed that what the Natives needed was the Bible and education to draw them away from the path of error and set them on the path of truth. And thus was born the Residential School System which bore testimony to a shameful epoch in Canadian history.

However, history has proved the falsehood of the doomed culture theory. Canada’s Natives, instead of conveniently disappearing, are now increasing at a faster rate than the general population. There is also strong indication that the Native Peoples’ innumerable and distinct cultures have continued to survive and that the erstwhile oral tradition of Native literature has steadily emerged into a highly articulate and formal literature. Transmitted through languages, songs, dances, traditional economic practices and governing structures, these specific indigenous ways have continued to provide spiritual, political and economic succour to these people and have contributed to the formulation of the self.

Survival has been the focus of their energies as Indigenous peoples, since first contact with the European colonizer. Although many writers and scholars have attempted to articulate the complex relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples, few non-indigenous writers possess the extensive firsthand knowledge of the Native peoples’ ways to correctly represent their distinct ways of life. Some of these writers have even misrepresented indigenous peoples by imposing their own Eurocentric world view, while others have fragmented the Natives’ ways by writing about only one aspect of a specific indigenous culture.

Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1973) emerged into a Canadian literary tradition that had hitherto constructed images of indigenous women that were contrary to real-life experiences. Campbell’s work seems to challenge many existing stereotypes and images of indigenous women by providing a vivid spiritual, social, political and economic context of her own “halfbreed” (Metis) way of life. As one of the first indigenous women daring to break the silence, by writing her way out of the assumptions that women are submerged under, Campbell begins to realise how her identity has been constructed for her. The act of writing enables the author to explore her past for evidence of her authentic self, and in so doing, she helps other indigenous women to effect a similar reclamation and re-connection of their selves. In this sense, Campbell’s somewhat fictional autobiography is extremely significant because it becomes a role-model for indigenous women in their attempt to achieve wholeness and connectedness. Furthermore, Campbell’s text is an important legacy for indigenous women because it represents them, through the personae of Cheechum, Grannie Campbell, Qua Chich and Granny Dubuque, as survivors of an oppressive colonial regime, and of abusive relationships, including systemic racism and sexism.

Maria Campbells’s Halfbreed intervened in a literary tradition that had hitherto constructed indigenous women’s lives within the framework of “WhiteEuro- Canadian-Christian” patriarchy. Her text, although written in the English colonizer’s language and thus seemingly privileging patriarchal hierarchy, constitutes a series of resistances against Christian patriarchy. The very construction of her text is in itself a prime act of resistance. As many previous colonized writers maintain, the act of writing is a deeply political one that encourages de-colonization. In this context, Campbell is one of the first indigenous women who have appropriated the colonizer’s language to name her oppressors, identify these oppressors’ unjust systems, laws and processes, and subsequently work towards de-colonization. In an interview Campbell has referred to her grandfather’s words: “… why you have trouble with the English language, it’s because the language has no Mother…. And what you have to do is, put the Mother back in the language” (Lutz 49). For Maria, inspiration struck when the Muses (rather, the Grandmothers) came. Campbell has inspired many Native writers to get involved in the project of putting the Mother back in the language, not only as missing character or subject position, but as nurturing environment, as articulated recognized place. Campbell’s text seeks a reconnection with the past, with her grandmothers and her “mothers” – her motherland, her mother culture, her mother tongue.

Campbell’s language, which shifts repeatedly from English to Mitchif to Cree, is an important area of resistance. Even Campbell’s names for her female relatives constitute instances of this resistance. Her greatest influence and confidant, whose name and term of reference within English-Canadian patriarchy is great-grandmother Campbell, is fondly referred to in Mitchif as Cheechum. Another maternal relative (the author’s great-aunt) is simply referred to as Qua Chich.

In the preface to her work, Campbell defiantly addresses members of the colonial world: “I write this for all of you, to tell you what it is like to be a Halfbreed woman in our country. I want to tell you about the joys and sorrows, the oppressing poverty, the frustrations and the dreams” (2). Campbell’s reference to herself as a Halfbreed has disturbed many liberal White-Euro-Canadians who consider the term derogatory and are thus puzzled by her continued use of it. Maria Campbell and many other contemporary people still use the term Halfbreed: some refer to themselves as Halfbreeds with a strong nationalistic pride, while others perhaps use the term as a kind of blatant reminder of White Canada’s racist policies.

Campbell’s text also seems to resist conformity to the Euro-Canadian patriarchy by glancing back at her life with a re-awakened self. In doing so, she challenges the racist as well as sexist White-Christian-patriarchal constructs of indigenous women, by firmly contextualising her book as proceeding from a Halfbreed-Indigenous ideology. This is embodied in the author’s very strong sense of community and family, or as Thomas King describes it in the preface to All My Relations, the web of “kinship that radiates from a Native sense of family” (xiii). Campbell challenges the various stereotyped images of the squaw drudge, the Indian princess and the suffering victim by firmly rooting her text in her Halfbreed-Indigenous ideology because she remembers the women in her family as resourceful, dynamic women who were vital elements in their community.

Campbell strongly affirms that her Cheechum has been her greatest source of inspiration, strength and love. She remembers Cheechum as a small woman who clung tenaciously to her own way of life despite numerous and powerful threats from the agents of colonisation. Campbell writes:

Cheechum hated to see the settlers come, and as they settled on what she believed was our land, she ignored them and refused to acknowledge them even when passing on the road. She would not become a Christian, saying firmly that she had married a Christian and if there was such a thing as hell then she had lived there; nothing after death could be worse! (11).

That Christian-from-hell is the author’s great-grandfather Campbell, whom the old people called “Chee-pie-hoos” or “evil-spirit-jumping-up-anddown” (10). Maria Campbell implies that Chee-pie-hoos who came from Edinburgh, Scotland and ran a Hudson’s Bay store, regarded Cheechum as a loose woman in accordance with the stereotype of indigenous women as whores. In fact, old man Campbell’s White-Euro-Christian patriarchal influence encouraged him to think that “his wife was having affairs with all the Halfbreeds in the area” (10). Although Cheechum married the Scottish immigrant, Maria Campbell insists that the old lady defiantly resisted any kind of domination.

Campbell believes that, during the 1885 Resistance at Batoche, while great-grandfather Campbell worked with the North West Mounted Police, Cheechum collected information, ammunition and supplies to give to the “rebels”. When the old man found it out, he punished his wife: “he stripped the clothes from her back and beat her so cruelly that she was scarred for life” (10). Not long afterwards, he died mysteriously, and Cheechum went to live with her mother’s people in the area now known as Prince Albert National Park. Even though Cheechum’s “mother’s people were Indians, they were never part of a reserve, as they weren’t present when the treaty-makers came” (10). Campbell recalls with a great deal of pride that Cheechum scorned offers of so-called “help” in the form of welfare and old-age pension. Instead, she remained completely self-sufficient, hunting, trapping and planting a garden:

She built a cabin beside Maria Lake and raised her son. Years later when the area was designated for the Park, the government asked her to leave. She refused, and when all peaceful methods failed the RCMP were sent. She locked her door, loaded her rifle and when they arrived she fired shots over their heads, threatening to hit them if they came any closer. They left her alone and she was never disturbed again. (10).

Later on, the marriage of her son (Grandpa Campbell) to a “Vandal” woman whose family had been involved in the 1885 Resistance, marks a continuation of the pattern of resistance set by Cheechum.

Campbell describes Grandmother Campbell as fiercely strong woman who, after her husband’s death, “went to a white community. . . to cut bush for seventy-five cents an acre” (12). Grannie Campbell kept her children warm while they worked by wisely wrapping their feet in the indigenous way with rabbit skins and mocassins, supplementing it with materials (old papers) from the White culture. Maria sees her grannie’s adaptive powers as vitally important, in that she conformed to the pattern of powerful, dynamic, resourceful women that the author subsequently adheres to. Grannie Campbell, Maria remembers, was also physically very strong: “Because they only had one team of horses and Dad used these to work for other people, Grannie on many occasions pulled the plough herself” (12). Grannie Campbell, like Cheechum, was totally selfsufficient; in fact when Maria’s dad suggested that he could take care of her “she became quite angry and said he had a family to worry about and what she did was none of his business” (13). Until she was quite old, she “brushed and cleared the settlers’ land, picked their stones, delivered their babies, and looked after them when they were sick” (13).

The representation of Grannie Campbell’s older sister Qua Chich is also another site of resistance against the stereotypical image of indigenous women because she survives the government’s treaty-making interventions, relocation to an Indian reserve, a marriage which left her widowed, and destitution and poverty which hounded her brothers and sisters. Campbell remembers Qua Chich as a peculiar old lady who cussed at her dog in Cree. Qua Chich was also considered quite wealthy because “she owned many cows and horses as well as a big two-storey house full of gloomy black furniture” (20). Campbell recalls that Qua Chich “was stingy with money, and if someone was desperate enough to ask for help she would draw up formal papers and demand a signature” (20). Qua Chich’s business skills thus exemplify another aspect of the strong and resourceful women who pattern the author’s family.

The variety of female personae that Campbell presents in the book resists the highly limiting, confining, stereotypical images that imprison indigenous women. Campbell’s mother, described as “quiet and gentle, never outgoing and noisy like the other women,” also challenges the very restricting stereotype of princess/squaw (13). While Campbell admits that her mother, like so many others, “was always busy cooking,” she recognizes that her mother was quite unlike the other Metis women because “she loved books and music and spent many hours reading to us….” (14).

Campbell’s maternal grandmother Grannie Dubuque also resists, albeit in a different way, the stereotypical confines that non-indigenous people seem to construct for indigenous women. Campbell describes her as “a treaty Indian woman, different from Grannie Campbell because she was raised in a convent” (15). Grannie Dubuque had married Pierre Dubuque, a French immigrant who “arranged his marriage through the nuns at the convent” (15). During her early childhood Maria Campbell could not quite comprehend the devastating damage Christianity had inflicted on her culture. However, as a young writer in the process of being decolonized, looking back upon her life with fresh eyes, she begins to understand the Christian-patriarchal constructs that have defined her character. Indeed, she realizes that Christianity is a powerful agent of colonization, constantly attempting to impose controls. The author’s mother and Grannie Dubuque, as mentioned earlier, were both raised in convents and the colonizers’ religion severely eroded any connection they may have had to their original way of life.

Campbell remembers that her people never talked “against the church or the priest regardless of how bad they were” (32). Recalling her mother’s undaunting and unquestioning faith in God, even when the fat priest eats what little food they have, Campbell observes that her mother “accepted it all as she did so many things because it was sacred and of God “ (32). The priest by comparison showed no respect for what was sacred to them. Campbell bitterly remembers that he took things “from the Indians’ Sundance Pole, . . . [things] that belonged to the Great Spirit” (29). Unlike her mother, Cheechum clearly understood the power politics manifested in the priest’s actions and thus thoroughly and defiantly resisted domination: “Cheechum would often say scornfully of this God that he took more money from us than the Hudson’s Bay Store” (32).

Cheechum’s knowledge, values and belief system, unlike Christian dogmatism were derived from a closeness to the land, which had also provided her with a tremendous insight into human relations as well as a rich understanding of plants and animals. Having lived through many changes, she was extremely opinionated about the politics of war, the church, the roles of men and women, and the government. At Campbell’s mother’s death, she derives comfort from Cheechum’s words:

I have never found peace in a church or in prayer. Perhaps Cheechum had a lot to do with that. Her philosophy was much more practical, soothing and exciting, and in her way I found comfort. She told me not to worry about the Devil, or where God lived, or what would happen after death. . . . She taught me to see beauty in all things around me, that inside each thing a spirit lived, that it was vital too . . . . and by recognizing its life and beauty I was accepting God. She said that . . . . heaven and hell were man-made and here on earth, there was no death; . . . that when my body became old my spirit would leave and I’d come back and live again. She said God lives in you and looks like you; . . . that the Devil lives in you and all things and that he looks like you and not like a cow. . . . Her explanation made much more sense than anything Christianity had ever taught me. (81-82).

Cheechum’s simple ways were often contradicted by Campbell’s maternal relatives who were, strangely enough, simultaneously strict Catholics and superstitious Indians. Contrary to Cheechum’s subtle teachings about striving for spiritual and cultural riches, Grannie Dubuque often implicitly encouraged Campbell and her siblings to seek material wealth. Grannie Dubuque’s idealization of white culture however, only reminded Maria’s family of unattainable goals.

However, a closer scrutiny of the text reveals that Campbell’s language sometimes reflects her subtle conformity to White-Euro-Christian patriarchy when she begins to fragment her images of indigenous peoples. Referring to the differences between “Treaty Indian” and “halfbreed” women, she makes broad generalizations that are more stereotypical than factual: “Treaty Indian women don’t express their opinions, Halfbreed women do” (26). These differences, according to Campbell, represent part of a pattern between “Indian” and “Metis” people.

In later years, wisely reviewing her life, Campbell insists, during a conversation with Hartmut Lutz, that “when it comes to Aboriginal people in Canada, we have the church to ‘thank’ in all areas, whether we are Metis, nonstatus or whatever, for the dilemma that we are in now! Certainly the church has always been the ‘man coming in front of’ the oppressor, the colonizer” (Lutz 47). A more articulate and mature Campbell points out that the Church, for fear of losing control, is now incorporating indigenous ceremonies and rituals: “But that’s the history of Christianity. When you can’t completely oppress people, if you are losing them, then you incorporate their spiritual beliefs. And that’s even uglier than the other way . . .” (Lutz 47). If her comments sound bitter, they need to be understood from the perspective of her own cultural context. As a young girl her dreams, hopes and ambitions were shattered by Christian patriarchal intrusions, her mother’s death, extreme poverty, racism and sexism. Her story, written when she was thirty-three years old, grew out of her anger and frustrations. To Hartmut Lutz, she confesses about the situation which had led to the writing of Halfbreed.

I was on the verge of being kicked out of my house, had no food, and I decided to go back out in the street and work. I went out one night and sat in a bar. And I just couldn’t because I knew that if I went back to that, I’d be back on drugs again.

I always carry paper in my bag, and I started writing a letter, because I had to have somebody to talk to, and there was nobody to talk to. And that was how I wrote Halfbreed. (Lutz 53).

Halfbreed thus enshrines an act of resistance. Through the construction of her text, Campbell looks back upon her life with a renewed vision and a stronger connection to those powerful, resourceful and dynamic women who were her predecessors and prime motivators of her life. What she has written in Halfbreed has rarely been expressed by indigenous women in North America. The exploitation, racism and sexism that she has suffered are what too many indigenous women have suffered. Her voice has allowed this suffering to be heard. Campbell’s first-hand knowledge of this suffering has reinforced her refusal to let her ancestors’ sufferings be white-washed by liberal do-gooders:

Canada’s history . . . is that they are killing us with their liberal gentleness . . . . It’s okay to report the atrocities of other countries . . . but heaven forbid that Canadians would ever do something like that!.

We were busy in the 1940s hearing about the horrible things Germany was doing. Nobody ever would believe that in Saskatchewan at the same time people were loaded into cattle cars, . . . and were . . . hauled some place, and dumped off in the snow – and some of those people dying. We never hear about things like that because Canada doesn’t do things like that. We need to write those stories ourselves. (Lutz 58-59)

Although Campbell fiercely refuses to let white Canada erase what has been done to her people, she also addresses the way indigenous people have internalized colonialism. She recalls Cheechum’s words: Many years ago . . . the Halfbreeds came west . . . in their search for a place where they could live as they wished . . . . but they lost their dream . . . . They fought each other just as you are fighting your mother and father today. The white man saw that it was a more powerful weapon than anything else with which to beat the Halfbreeds, and he used it and still does today. Already they are using it on you. They try to make you hate your people (50-51).

Here Campbell highlights some of the manifest symptoms of colonialism internalized and manifested in family violence, with Metis privileging the white ideal. Campbell’s family had lived through extreme poverty but they were able to stay together and help one another. Campbell maintains that when her people lost their collective dreams and their hopes, they lost their self-respect. Her father lost his self respect when his own people turned on him, when the men who had come to organize and lead her people were seduced by offers of government jobs: colonized people betraying their own for material gain, is symptomatic of the colonial disease. The most prominent symbol of the government’s co-opting is embodied in the “Indian-in-the-suit”. During her reawakening (recounted towards the end of the narrative), she meets many indigenous people who have sold their dreams. Campbell is devastated by the way the oppressors use indigenous neo-colonial puppet-rulers to further their goals.

Campbell, however, refuses to admit defeat. Like the very strong, vital and resourceful women within her family, she manages to survive colonial rule in its absolutely oppressive states – abusive men, systemic racism and sexism, alcohol and drug addiction. She does not die a victim of racism and sexism, or a hopeless whore with neither the strength nor the determination to liberate herself. She is a survivor and as such she leaves an important legacy for all indigenous women. More significantly, her courage in speaking out, in naming her oppressors, in reclaiming her self, helps to lift the cloak of silence from other women similarly situated. As Campbell’s Cheechum wisely foretold, she has found her self and discovered many more sisters and brothers.

Campbell’s journey from a healthy and wholesome child to an unhealthy and unwholesome woman, and finally to a recovered and reclaimed woman – is in many ways reminiscent of the traditional Trickster culture-hero who survives great odds and incredibly challenges experiences only to live and begin again. Campbell leads contemporary indigenous writers in writing their cultures back into stability, thereby assuring survival. Her story, albeit woven with tremendous pain and suffering, is one of survival and subsequent liberation. She is a true follower of Louis Riel who prophesied at the time of his execution in 1885 that one hundred years later his people would rise up, and the artists, musicians and visionaries would lead the way.

REFERENCES
1. Campbell, Maria. Halfbreed. McClelland and Stewart, 1973; Halifax: Goodread
Biographies, 1983. Page references are from the Goodread edition.
2. King, Thomas, ed. All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian
Fiction. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990.
3. Lutz, Hartmut. Contemporary Challenges: Conversations with Canadian Native
Authors. Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1991.
4. Ross, Rupert. Dancing with a Ghost: Exploring Indian Reality. Markham, Ont.:
Reed Books, 1992.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The research on which this article is based was funded with the assistance of the
Government of Canada through the Canadian Studies Programme of the Shastri Indo-Canadian
Institute (SICI). Neither the Government of Canada nor SICI necessarily endorses the views herein
expressed.

Contributor

MAYA DUTT. Professor, Institute of English, University of Kerala, is the author of several articles published in scholarly journals on subjects ranging from Linguistics and ELT to British and Canadian Literature. She is the recipient of two international awards - the Key English Language Teaching Award of the British Government (1989-90) and the Faculty Research Fellowship of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, to pursue post-doctoral research on Native Studies in Canada (1994). She is the joint editor of two books – one on South Asian Canadiana, and the other a collection of short stories.

The punnapra-vayalar revolt and freedom movement

THE PUNNAPRA – VAYALAR
REVOLT AND THE FREEDOM
MOVEMENT

N. Sasidharan

ABSTRACT---N. Sasidharan's "The Punnapra-Vayalar Revolt and the Freedom Movement" is a comprehensive article about the events that lead to the famous Punnapra-Vayalar Revolt. He quotes extensively from the official records, and declares that the Revolt "was the outcome of the general strike of 1938". It places the general strike, the Revolt and the leaders of the time in an unusual perspective, and depicts this illustrious chapter in the history of Kerala as a sort of well-scripted drama that deserves closer scrutiny.

The revolt which erupted during the ten days (22 Oct 1946 to 31 Oct. 1946) that shook the political history of Travancore through a general strike by the A.T.T.U.C. (All Travancore Trade Union Congress) is called the ‘PunnapraVayalar Revolt. There a spontaneous unrest of the agro-labourers and industrial workers was sponsored by the local Communist Party which culminated into the revolt. About it Robin Jeffrey writes:

Indian working classes, to be sure have conducted long bitter strikes,
and peasants have sustained revolts in the countryside. But only once,
it appears, have workers in an industry, fashioned weapons, set up
armed enclaves and fought the military in pitched, if one sided, battles.
The event, named for two of the places involved, was led by the C.P.I.
in October 1946 in the princely state of Travancore, southern part of
what is today the state of Kerala.
Two views prevail about the ‘Punnapra-Vayalar Revolt’ and the ‘Freedom Movement’ – the communist view and the non-communist view. To the communists, it was the finest flowering of the working class against the exploitative forces of the establishment. It is regarded as part of the freedom movement in the sense that it was against the Dewan rule (despotism, and for the establishment of responsible government, based on adult suffrage). There was a move on the part of Dewan Sir C.P. Ramaswami Iyer – here after Sir C.P. to declare the state of Travancore a sovereign despotic state after the British departure. The anti-communists think that the ignorant and innocent workers involved in the revolt were misled by the C.P.I. in directing the workers to use arecanut staves against machine guns, culminating in massacre. Since the revolt was never endorsed by the ‘Travancore State Congress’, they refuse to regard it as part of the freedom movement.

This article looks at the Punnapra-Vayalar revolt from a different angle, based on the primary data connected to the evolution of social and political radicalism in Travancore from 1921. The primary sources used are confidential files of the Home Department of the Government of Travancore. Based on them, it can be established that the workers of Ambalapuzha-Sherthala taluks were already politicised and radical in their views. For strikes and other organised actions, they never waited for direction from the leadership. Even before 1946, back in 1938 they had used arecanut staves as a weapon and confronted Police and military.

The main organisation which radically politicised the working class of Ambalapuzha-Sherthallai taluks was the Coir Factory -- Worker’s Association that later changed its name to the ‘Coir Factory Workers’ Union’. The government of Travancore was always conscious of the sensitive issues prevailing in this troubled spot. Inside the factory the leaders were activists of the trade union, outside it, they were in the fore front of socio-political movements. The dedicated work of the trade union, Coir Factory Workers’ Association, had taken the workers of Alleppey to the top of literacy, which could produce from among them trade union leaders, political leaders, speakers, writers and even editors of newspapers. To Robin Jeffery; “Travancore was the most literate area of India (68% male literacy in 1941), and one estimate puts the literacy rate of the coir factory workers at 75% in 1930s.

The trade union of the coir factory workers was the first melting pot of secular politics in Travancore. The welding of workers from most castes and religions into militant union was the evidence of growing class awareness. Ezhavas formed 80% of the work force, Christians 8%, Muslims 1%, Nayars 1% and the remaining 1% was formed by other non-caste Hindus 4 . The founding secretary of the C.P.I. in Kerala, P. Krishna Pillai, was a coir factory worker. The coir factory was the meeting ground of workers of all castes and religions and these streams merged to form a single class.

The secret police reports down from 1921 reveal that the workers of the Ambalapuzha-Sherthalla taluks were deeply influenced by social and political radicalism. The D.S.P. of Kottayam reported to the Commissioner of Police on 24-5-1921 that very serious disturbances to public peace existed in the taluks of Vaikom and Sherthallai. In the same year the government was very much worried of the Civil Equality movement in Travancore and the ‘Non Cooperation Movement in Cochin and Malabar. The British Resident wanted troop movement to be done to Sherthallai as a precautionary measure . In 1929 the Devaswom Commissioner of Ambalapuzha taluk was very much afraid of the temple entry volunteers forcibly entering temples, as the people of the locality were campaigning against temples. Hence he sought police protection.

In 1930 the government of Travancore sent a detailed report on political activities in the state to the British government . An analysis of the report reveals that 95% of political activists were rooted in social reform movement, and they follow political radicalism and they were from the Ambalapuzha-Sherthallai taluks. 64% of the members of trade union movements believed in class wars and were active in radical politics existed in those taluks. In 1938 the workers of Sherthalla were bold enough to attack a police party consisting of two magistrates. The police fled and were hiding till the arrival of the military rescue party. The military fired at the workers. The leader of the riot (‘ the Kanichukulangara riot’) was A.K.Padmanabhan, the secretary of the Kalavancode branch of the labour union.

The coir factory workers took active interest in every progressive political movement of the time. In 1924 when the annual conference of the Association was in session, a message was received of the arrest of the leaders of the Vaikom Sathyagraha. At once the Association dispatched fifty volunteers across the back waters to assist the movement of the Indian Nation congress. When the Temple Entry Movement was taking place, Sahithya Panchananan P.K. Narayana Pillai, a native of Ambalappuzha, at the request of T.K. Madhavan, wrote a book on the temple rituals. It established that every Hindu must have the right of performing every ritual which a brahmin could perform. The Temple Entry League declared forceful entry into all temples managed by the Government. When the Salt Sathyagraha volunteers under the leadership of Ponnara G. Sreedhar went to Payyannur through Alleppey, K.C. Govindan, secretary of the Association welcomed them on behalf of the workers. He even said that if necessity arises, the Association would supply volunteers and money for the Salt Sathyagraha campaign.

In Travancore, the 1932-’36 period witnessed the Abstention Movement. The coir workers too actively participated in it. Their favourite leader was C. C.Kesavan. In the United Political Congress, there were moderates and radicals. C. Kesavan was the leader of the radicals. The support base of radicalism was the west-coastland. In 1933 he said, “Workers are 80% of the society. To improve their condition, leaders must arise from among them. Specific group of workers should have their own trade unions”. He was arrested on June 7, 1935 at Alleppey. There he gave the call, “My colleagues are to realise their birth rights through steady and fearless efforts, not through conciliation ”. On September 25, 1937 Kesavan was released from jail. He was given a heroic reception by the Young Men’s Association of Sherthalla. There, a printed felicitation was presented to him which was drafted by the then Secretary of the Coir Factory Worker’s Association, R. Sugathan. It reads, “We started our life under the egalitarian flag of Sree Narayana Guru. We grew in proximity of the great poet Kumaran Asan, we studied agitational politics from T.K. Madhavan. We are taught humanism by K. Ayyappan, we want to transform Kerala into a land of justice. For that we have rallied on the battlefield, unarmed and impartial. Here the majority are workers, they work hard to make the country prosperous. Still out of starvation they sob. The workers who build multi-storied buildings sleep in dirty slums and under the shades of trees. They too wish to live like human beings. You are like Napoleon Bonaparte returned from Elba, your leadership will take us to the destination”. The revolutionary leaders like C.G. Sadasivan, K.C. Kumara Panikkar, Cheerappanchira Karunakara Panikkar etc., were ardent admirers of C. Kesavan. In 1946 C. Kesavan strongly supported the necessity of the general strike, and was even prepared to take up its leadership which culminated in the Punnapra – Vayalar revolt .

On March 31, 1922 the coir workers of Alleppey were organised by the head worker ,Moopan, in the Empire Coir Works, Vadappuram P.K. Bava (1885– 1969) . Bava summoned the first meeting of the coir workers on March 31, 1922 on the open ground of Aalummottil Channar. The meeting was presided over by P.S. Muhammed. The organisation was named, ‘Labour Union’. It elected Dr. Antony as its President and Palpu Asan as its Secretary. Its second meeting was held in April; there the by-law of the organisation was made. In its third meeting in July, the name of the union was changed to ‘The Travancore Coir Factory Labour Association’. The first strike of the Association was in 1922 for ; (1) To reduce the working time from 12 hours to 10 hours and, (2) Payment of wages at every week end. The four hundred strong workers under the leadership of P.K. Bava conducted picketing in front of the Derasmail factory. When the European factory owner was blocked entry, he threatened Bava with his gun. With no fear Bava asked him to fire. There was a steady increase in the number of factories. In 1941 the number of coir factory workers was 32000 while that of cottage industry rose to 1,33,000. The coir industry of AlleppeySherthallai extending from Aroor to Vandanam had a distinct role of spreading the proletarian culture in the society, during the 1920s and 1930s. As small factories spread, a larger number of people were exposed to proletarian life of factory conditions. Men drifted into Alleppey for a few months or years, then drifted back to their villages and were displaced by others. To Robin Jeffrey:

The coir industry was thus distinct; large factories shading off into
rudimentary country workshops and finally into the huts of thousands
of people which produced coir Yarns.

In fact the coir factory workers were moving back and forth between their villages and factories. Thus larger sections of people were exposed to the ideas of class struggle. By carrying the idea of class wars into the countryside, the coir workers created around themselves a sympathetic rural buffer which could become a source of support at all times of crisis. The Coir Worker’s Association was instrumental in organising the rural poor, who were still living under feudal suppression, into various class based unions such as, Agro Labourers’ Union, Fishermen’s Union, Coconut Tree Climbers’ Union, Boat Rowers’ Union, Plantation Workers’ Union’ etc. The official newspaper of Workers’ Association, ‘Thozhilali’ had wide circulation among the working class.

The agro-labourers of Kuttanad learned the primary lessons of agitational politics from T.K. Madhavan, the General Secretary of the S.N.D.P. Yogam in 1929. Under his direction the agro-labourers of Kainakari launched an indefinite strike, when a landlord named Kalapurakkal Kochuthomman manhandled forty women workers. In the same year the Lime shell workers of Kumarakom and Kuttamangalam were organised to form co-operative societies of the workers by T.K.Madhavan, to terminate the exploitative monopoly of one P.Kuncheria of Pulinkunnu. Since 1938 the S.N.D.P. Yogam withdrew from active politics and became less interested in the problems of labour. The gap created was filled by C.S.P. leadership from Malabar. In 1939 A.K. Gopalan and A.V. Kunjambu directed the leaders of the Coir Factory Workers Union, V.S. Achuthanandan, S.K. Das, M.T. Chandrasenan, N.S.P. Panikkar, C.K. Kesavan and R.Thankappan, to organise the agro-labourers of Kuttanad. Even then V.S.Achuthanandan was noted for his simplicity, dedication and deep reading. The first meeting was held at Pallathuruthi on 8 th December 1939. The 1939– ’45 period witnessed widespread famine and epidemics throughout Kuttanad. There was scarcity of food, hence the landlords stopped payment in paddy. The starving women agitated for : wages in paddy, rise of wage and noon interval. The agitations spread throughout Kuttanad. Violence of landlords was retaliated in the same coin. Though the government and the police adopted suppressive measures, most of the agitations ended in victory of the agro-labourers. From 1920’s the awakening of women can be seen in the west-coastland. Narayana Guru was giving special attention to the education of women. With the Brotherhood Movement of Sahodaran Ayyappan, women together with men, actively participated in its programmes like ‘inter-dining’. Coir factory workers had a women wing. Gomathy Dev was one of its leaders. In the later thirties, when labour got representation in the Legislative Assembly, the two representatives were, P.N. Krishna Pillai and Smt. K.Ponnamma. The present founder leader of the J.S.S. Party K.R. Gouri Amma hails from Sherthalla with the tradition of awakened womanhood. During the course of the 1946 revolt, the women marched against the ration shops with brooms in their raised hands, when low quality rice was distributed. There were incidents of starving women protecting the underground political leaders.

In January 1934, the second labour strike broke out in Alleppey. After striking work, the workers conducted a procession through the streets. In 1935 the association decided to conduct a march upto Trivandrum to represent their long standing grievances to the Maharaja. The government issued prohibitive orders and arrested the trade union leaders. Without any call from the leaders; the entire workers struck work and conducted demonstration. The 12 th annual meeting of the Association was held on May 22, 1938. There the Association adopted red flag with sickle and hammer as emblem. The red flag was hoisted for the first time, by V.K. Velayudhan otherwise called ‘Stalin of Alleppey’. He was then the General Secretary of the S.N.D.P. Yogam. On July 24, 1938 the Association was renamed, ‘The Travancore Coir Factory Workers’ Union.

The Coir Factory Workers’ Association (Union) was generating a new culture in the ‘Ambalapuzha – Sherthalla – Vaikom’ taluks. At first, it was essentially based on the philosophy of humanism of Sree Narayana Guru. Hence it had a social reform background which radically reacted against feudal traditions. Secondly, it vitally reacted to the political developments at national and regional levels ie., the politics of the Indian National Congress and the Travancore State Congress. Thirdly, it developed a strong trade union sense throughout the west-coastland from Cochin to Kollam. Fourthly, from 1938, since the withdrawal of the S.N.D.P. Yogam from active politics, the vaccum was filled by the C.S.P. and later the C.P.I leadership.

The year 1938 was crucial in the agitational politics of Travancore – both for the State Congress and for the coir workers of Alleppey. On August 26, 1938 the Congress decided to start agitation against the government for responsible government based on adult suffrage and freedom of press. As part of the August agitation, the Congress decided that the labour leaders V.K. Velayudhan and R. Sugathan should violate prohibition and lead the State Congress agitation in Alleppey. The agitators shouted, “We will secure responsible government by force”, “State Congress zindabad”, “Inquilab zindabad”. They also declared:

Even if all our economic demands are sanctioned, we will not stop the strike if responsible government based on adult suffrage is not given.

At the same time, when the Congress leader Akkamma Cherian marched against the state military at Trivandrum, 25 red volunteers were despatched from Alleppey by the Coir Workers’ Association as her vanguard. When the labour leaders were arrested on October 7, with the coir factory workers numbering 50,000, the motorboat workers numbering 2000 and the country boat workers numbering 5000 also struck work. On October 19, the coir workers decided to strike work from October 23, onwards, presenting 30 demands. Apart from trade union interests it included the demands of the State Congress also. Accordingly, 50,000 coir factory workers in the 30 mile long coir belt from Aroor to Vandanam struck work on October 23, 1938. The striking workers in procession met at the beach. At the head of the procession marched 5000 strong red volunteers. By the time, there were unauthorised transport of goods from some factories. When the picketing started police lathi charge and subsequently military firing took place. Two men were killed and many were wounded. On the next day demonstrations and picketing continued. The red volunteers armed with arecanut staves confronted the military. In the firing five workers were killed and several wounded. Military destroyed the red volunteer camp at Sherthalla. At Kalavancode, the local people joined with the workers and demolished a culvert and erected barricade on the high way.

The C.S.P. Central Committee met at Trichur and decided to take control of the strike. The C.P.I. Central Committee member S.V. Ghate was specially invited to give guidance to the political strike. Disguised as a vegetable seller, P. Krishna Pillai worked as the mastermind of the strike. Other C.S.P. leaders A.K. Gopalan, K.K. Warrier and others were also present. From Malabar, A.K.G. led to Alleppey a march of supporters. From Trivandrum, 250 Youth Leaguers reached Alleppey to support the strike. Thus Alleppey became the ‘melting pot’ of the revolutionaries from north and south.

The strike lasted for 25 days. It resulted in the complete paralysis of water transport, commerce and industry. Though the government adopted severe oppressive measures to suppress the strike, it came out with a package of long standing benefits to the workers. V.K. Velayudhan and R. Sugathan took initiative for a negotiated settlement which the majority of the striking workers disliked. They assembled in front of the house of V.K. Velayudhan and ridiculed him and R. Sugathan. The settlement promised 6.25% of wage rise and a promise not to cutdown wages in future. The government agreed to constitute a high level committee, the George Committee, to enquire into the conditions of coir industry and its workers. Of the five member committee, two were to be labour representatives. As agreed, the government enacted Factories Act, The Trade Union Act, and The Dispute Act. in Alleppey an Industrial Relations committee was constituted. The long standing demands of the workers to abolish arbitrary fines, uniform wage and modern labour laws were realised. Wage was to be paid weekly and the account regarding it was to be shown to the worker.

During the strike for three weeks there was reign of terror by police and military in Alleppey. The coir factory workers who strongly supported the political agitations of the Congress, naturally expected help and support from the Congress. But its leaders like Pattom Thanu Pillai and T.M. Varghese helped only to create dissension among the workers. To mobilize State Congress forces against the workers, the government unconditionally released all Congressmen in jails. In 1946, when the workers decided to agitate against the ‘American Model’ reform of Sir C.P., the very same process of 1938 was repeated, which culminated in the ‘Punnapra-Vayalar revolt’. Analysing the 1938 strike, Robin Jeffrey observes:

The strike challenged a system not just an employer. Further the strike
brought home to all of Kerala that the coir workers were a force in
future to be recknoed with.

The Punnapra – Vayalar revolt of 1946 is taken to be a continuation of the strike of 1938. Except a few factors, almost all factors responsible for the 1938 agitation existed in 1946 which culminated in the Punnapra – Vayalar revolt. The new factors which existed in 1946 also that precipitated the revolt an be grouped into four – (1) post-war poverty, (2) formation of armed camps, (3) confused and inactive C.P.I. leadership at the regional and national level compared to the 1938 leadership and, (4) the American model constitution reform of Dewan Sir C.P. Ramaswamy Iyer.

At first, the post-Second World War condition brought about large scale starvation, epidemics and deaths in the Sherthalla taluk. It was mainly due to the prevalence of feudal land holding in a socially changed system. While in other parts of Travancore, 2/3 of land belonged to the state and settlement was done directly with tenants, Sherthalla taluk was a gift of the Raja of Cochin to the Maharaja of Travancore and its feudal holdings remained undisturbed. Landlords believed that the body of the tenant was their property. There was no minimum wage nor minimum hours of work, the landlords even enjoyed the first night right. While landlords were sticking to old beliefs, the outlook of the farmers had fundamentally changed due to the clarion call of the social reform movement and due to the growth of trade unionism. With the emergence of proletarian culture, the worker became bold enough to resist the landlord. It was under this condition that starvation deaths happened in 1942– 43. In the Sherthalla taluk alone 20,000 people died of starvation. In 1946 again, when there was inflation and scarcity of getting rice, the trade unions struck work for 3 days from August 7, 1946. The strike was a success, the government assured standard meals at low price. Through the Coir Factory Workers Union, 5000 such meals were distributed.

In the Punnapra village, apart from a few land owning families, church was also a landlord. They owned fishing boats and nets. If eleven workers went for fishing in a boat, of the total fish catch, half had to be given to the land lord. From the other half, a portion had be given to the soul of the dead landlord, to the church and the temple. The rest was to be equally shared among the eleven workers. The fish catch had to be sold to the landlord at his price. Starvation and slavery formed part of the life of the workers. Under this condition, workers were taught the lessons of self respect by the trade union movement, organised by V.I. Simon and V.K. Karunakaran at the direction of the Coir Factory Workers’ Union in 1942. It brought under control the entire fishermen of the Ambalapuzha taluk. The Agro-Labour Union, Toddy Tappers’ Union, Coconut Tree Climbers Union etc. had also spread to Punnapra. Against the trade unions, the landlords maintained rowdies with the support of police. In 1946, when a worker, Kuttappan demanded the price of his fish catch, the landlord filed a false case against him and he was arrested. The Fishermen Workers’ Union with the support of the Coir Workers Union, conducted an armed march to the police station and got the arrested men released. The jubilant workers set fire to the godowns of the landlord. On October 17, against the organised might of the workers, a police camp was opened at Punnapra in the house of Aplon Arouge. Since police suppression against the workers to satisfy the landlords was sure, the workers left their houses and started living in camps at Paravur, Vadakkal, Vattayal, Punnapra, Vandanam and Kalarkode, south of Alleppey. In the camp volunteers were given military trainning and political education.

The newly formed agro-labour unions demanded wages in kind, since there was steep rise of food price. For wage rise and the issue of wage in kind, strikes broke out. False cases were registered against members of the unions. Some landlords refused to give the traditional practice of theerpukatta. Dispute on it was wide spread in the Kuttanad region. Such an incident took place at Kanjikuzhi near Sherthalla. There, workers forcibly entered into the house of the landlord and took the kattas. Against them false cases were framed of stealing and looting. There were complaints of distribution of low quality rice containing stones and worms through ration shops. Infuriated women led by R. Sugathan marched to ration shops with brooms in their hands. On seeing the march, the shop owner ran away.

The organised strength of the workers infuriated the landlords. Paid rowdies were let loose on the workers. Instead of taking action against the law breakers, the police aided the criminals to suppress the workers. The poor worker could not move alone. Hence they started moving in groups. The workers organised themselves and prepared to pay back in the same coin. There were frequent clashes between workers and the rowdies of landlords. Raman, the notorious gang leader of Sivarama Panikkar was beaten by the workers and, on the third day he died. On October 15 more than 70 military men camped at Ponnamveli. The District Superintendent of Police, Vaidyanatha Iyer, presided over a meeting of landlords. As decided, at 7o’clock, 600 paid rowdies conducted a violent march. On the 16 th seven truck full of soldiers reached the place. The landlords with their rowdies moved in a procession and at the front and rear moved military trucks with soldiers carrying pointed guns. With the support of police and military, the landlords and their rowdies were establishing a reign of terror in Sherthalla. Three military camps were set up. In these camps workers were kidnapped and tortured. To quote K.C. George:

The camps which were formed by the people were systematised by the party expecting confrontation with the government. Necessary organisational and political activities were arranged. The control of the camp was with the trade council. The trade councils were controlled by the action committee. Besides the six camps in Punnapra there were nine camps in Sherthalla, Olathala, Vayalar, Vayalar north, Varakkad, Kalavankodam, Menasseri, Muhamma, Mararikulam and Kattoor. There were a total of 2378 volunteers in all the camps. The inflow was restricted due to lack of food”.

The general strike which was scheduled to be held on October 22, ultimately led to the Punnapra – Vayalar revolt. Preparations for the strike started two months earlier. Volunteers were given training by ex-service men. Camps were organised at several places. Since workers were getting food and protection, the entire working class of the locality with their family lived day and night within the camps. For protection they made arecanut staves. In the 1938 strike also, this weapon was used. It was sharpened at the house of ‘Kummadi Madhavan’. It was eighteen feet long so that it could be used effectively against bayonet charge.

The general strike on October 22 (Thulam 5), was to the police and military, the occasion to suppress the workers. The workers expected it and decided to retaliate. The tense situation in the ‘Ambalapuzha – Sherthallai’ taluks was deeply influenced by the general political condition of Travancore. About it ,the radical state congress leader C.Kesavan states:

“In my view, our country has never witnessed in her history, such an epoch making time , though full of sufferings. Everywhere, dark images of starvation exist. Cry for rice, cloth, kerosene and sugar can be heard all over. The government is employing its machinery to meet it. The ban on processions has been extended throughout Travancore. Meetings and strikes are prohibited. The army and reserve police are alerted. If we want the freedom struggle for which we have fought since 1938 to reach the final goal, we should not keep silent now. All prohibitive orders should be withdrawn and all political prisoners should be called back. The army that patrol the streets of our towns should be called back. We should get all the freedom of a free people. All parties, all patriots and freedom lovers should unite and agitate. It is my humble request to my fellow workers and countrymen”.

Dewan Sir C.P. Ramaswamy Iyer wanted Travancore to remain a sovereign state after the departure of the English. To materialise it, he drafted an American model constitution and announced it in January 1946. The Congress leader Pattom was willing to try the new proposal of Sir C.P., but the radical leaders, C. Kesavan, Kumbalam and the left parties, C.P.I. and K.S.P. totally rejected it. In August 1946, the Alleppey workers struck work against inflation and scarcity. The government declared the strike as a national threat. The All Travancore Trade Union Congress (A.T.T.U.C.) met on September 4 at Kollam and sent a deputation of N. Sreekantan Nayar, T.V. Thomas and Kannamthodathu Janardhanan Nayar, to request the government to stop suppression of labourers. On September 9, the A.T.T.U.C met in Alleppey and decided to confront the aggressive move of the government by a general strike on September 15, which was a complete success. On September 24, 85 delegates of 55 trade unions met at Alleppey. The special invitees were P.T. Punnoose, the Secretary of the Travancore Communist Party and C. Kesavan, the radical leader of the State Congress. On 7 and 8 October 1946 the government summoned a tripartriti conference of workers, capitalists and the government. The Dewan presided over the meeting. There he announced 4% bonus to workers as deferred wage and other benefits. On the next day, 9 October, T.V. Thomas and N. Sreekantan Nayar met the Devan at his residence. There he wanted to know the response of the leaders about the American model constitution reform. When they said that the working class stood for responsible democratic government, the displeased Dewan threatened them by stating that, they must understand that they were speaking to a person commanding a police force of 8000 and an army of 4000 The meeting was a failure.

The next day C. Kesavan was arrested. The A.T.T.U.C met on October 9 at Alleppey, formed an Action Council to decide the date of the strike and elected T.V. Thomas as its convener. On 19, the date of the general strike was announced, as October 22. The strike projected 28 demands, which included political demands like; responsible government based on adult suffrage, withdrawal of the American model constitution, abolition of monarchy and the Dewan rule’.

The Punnapra – Vayalar revolt was the out come of the general strike declared by the A.T.T.U.C. To conduct it, there was an Action Council. It consisted of the activists of the Communist Party. To get the support of the top level leaders of the Party, K.V. Pathrose rushed to Calicut. On October 11 discussion were held with E.M.S. Namboodiripad, P. Krishna Pillai and K.C.George. George was sent to Bombay to consult the party General Secretary P.C.Joshi, but Joshi was in Calcutta. By telephone, he directed George to consult Dr. Adhikari. About it George writes:

“...the issue involving an inevitable confrontation with military, put
Dr.Adhikari in a difficult position, still he had to accept the decision of
the party committee of Travancore”.

On October 17 George arrived back at Calicut. He was assigned the
duty of going to Alleppey as the representative of the Party Committee
of Travancore. About the revolt the top C.P.I. leader of the time,
M.N. Govindan Nayar writes: “... with leaders of the agitation, I had
no contact. I did not know where they were... only later I got contact
with S. Kumaran, C.G.Sadasivan and S. Damodaran... . ”

About the Punnapra-Vayalar revolt, E.M.S. Namboodiripad the then Central Committee member of the C.P.I. writes:

“The most mass based anti – independent Travancore movement’ was
given leadership by the trade unions of the Party. The share of
political leadership the Party had till then, within the left movement, it
lost due to its approach to the ‘August agitation’ and to the divisive
activities of the Muslim League. But with the origin of the ‘anti-
independent Travancore movement’, the party got the opportunity to
recapture it”.

On 23 rd the Action Council met and decided to attack the Police Camp at Punnapra and to confiscate rifles. In the confrontation, about 30 workers were killed. Four policemen were also killed. Nine rifles were captured. On 25 October at Mararikulam, Muhamma and Sherthalla mobs blocked roads, cut culverts and bridges and telephone lines. The bridge at Mararikulam on the high way was brought down. On October 26, nine people were killed there. On 25 th martial law was declared. On 27 th at noon time, the military attacked the Vayalar camp and fifty men were killed. On the same day, the Menassery camp was attacked 120 people were killed there. In the Olathala camp, eight volunteers were killed. On October 28, at 11 O’clock at night, the Action Council decided to disband all camps and instructed every activist to go underground. On 31 st the general strike was withdrawn by the A.T.T.U.C. On November 12, the martial law was withdrawn.

Regarding the role of the C.P.I. in the Punnapra – Vayalar revolt, E.M.S. Namboodiripad has stated that it was given leadership by the trade union. And that the C.P.I. has greatly benefited from of it. It gave a chance to the C.P.I. to regain its leadership lost due to the August resolution and the support the party gave to the two-nation theory of the Muslim League. Serious students of the working class movement in Alleppey are confused as to why P. Krishna Pillai, A.K.Gopalan and K.K.Warrier who were actively involved in giving leadership to the 1938 agitation took no significant role in leading the Punnapra – Vayalar revolt. He has to search out the answer.

REFERENCES
1. Robin Jeffrey, “India’s Working class Revolt : Punnapra – Vayalar and the Communist Conspiracy of 1946”., Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. XVIII, No.2. 1981, p.99.

2. M.T. Chandrasenan, Punnapra – Vayalar, Glowing Chapters, Kottayam : D.C. Books, 1991, p.113.

3.Robin Jeffrey, “Class status and Growth of Radical Politics”. 1978, p.138.

4. Nilkam Perumal, The Truth About Travancore, p.54

5. Robin Jeffrey, “Destroy Capitalism, Growing Solidarity of Alleppey’s Coir Factory Workers”, E.P.W., 21 July 1984, pp.1160-61

6. File No. 551, C.S., Govt of Travancore, 1921

7. File No. 772, 1929.

8. File No. 746, 1930

9. File No. 195-44, 1938

10.File No. 746 11. K. Sreenivasan, C. Kesavan

12. P.K.K. Menon, The History of Freedom Movement in Kerala, pp. 369-76.

13. File No. 1643,1937

14. K.C. George, Punnapra-Vayalar, Trivandrum : Prabhath, 1990, pp.49-52.

15. Remesh Babu, “The First Clarion Call of the Working class”, Kalakaumudi, March2, 1997, pp. 19-21

16. ibid.

17. Census of India, Part I & II, Vol.XXV, 1941

18. Robin Jeffrey, ibid.; p. 1160

19. Interview with S.K.Das.

20. Interview with Kunjappi Kochappan, founder member of the Kumarakam Lime Shell Workers’ Cooperative Society’ No.1782

21. M.T. Chandrasenan, op.cit., p. 130

22. N.K. Kamalasanan, The Agro-LabourMovement in Kuttanad, pp. 58-128

23. Puthuppally Raghavan, Comrade Sugathan,p. 258

24. Thomas Isacc, “The Proletarian Supremacy and the Working Class Party: Practical Lessons from Alleppey.”, 1984, p.167

25. Puthppally Raghavan, op.cit., pp.78, 83.

26. C. Narayana Pillai,The Freedom Movement in Travancore, pp. 595-96

27. In 1936 the first unit of the C.S.P. in Travancore was formed in Alleppey, K.N. Datt was its secretary.
Puthupally Raghavan, p. 258

28. On October 15, 1938 in the Alleppey town,the southern regional cell of the C.P.I. was organised by P.KrishnaPillai.
M.T. Chandrasenan, p.23

29. ibid., p.157

30. Travancore Coir Factory Workers’ Union, 8 th Annual report, p.10

31. Puthupally, p.94

32. R.Jeffrey, p.1162

33. M.N.Govindan Nayar, Autobiography, p.207

34. Ibid., pp. 207 –208

35. K.C. George, p.23.

36. Ibid., pp. 104-106.

37. M.T. Chandrasenan, p. 113

38. C. Kesavan, statement, leaflet, “Lovers of Freedom Unite”,16-9-1946

39. K.C. George, pp. 106-107.

40. M.N. Govindan Nayar, pp. 211-12

41. E.M. Sankaran Namboodiripad, The Communist Party in Kerala, Vol.I,p.164.

Contributor
N. SASIDHARAN. Is Director (Hon.) of Research, Post-Graduate Department and Research Centre of Political Science, Sree Narayana College, Kollam, Kerala. He was the Head of the Post graduate department and Research Centre of Political Science, S.N.college, Kollam from 1993 to 1998.

The quest for the womans self

THE QUEST FOR
THE WOMAN’S SELF :
VIRGINIA WOOLF AND
THE LIVES
OF THE OBSCURE

Evangeline Shanti Roy

ABSTRACT---In "The Quest for the Woman's Self: Virginia Woolf and the Lives of the Obscure" Evangeline Shanti Roy reasons out why Virginia Woolf had a fascination for the unorthodox writing by little-known women, and how Woolf strived to resurrect them through her essays. Roy's own discerning and insightful critical appreciation of Woolf's critical analysis of such writers as Margaret Paston, Dorothy Osborne and Madame de Sevigne, etches out the sensitive self of Woolf in her quest to re-discover the women forgotten by history.

Feminism in Britain originated with the women’s suffrage movement of the late nineteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, feminists began to concern themselves with other things besides the vote. Virginia Woolf was one of the pioneering feminist theorists who attempted to define the female self. This quest for identity was part of her personal struggle to break out of the role prescribed by the British upper middle class patriarchal society to which she belonged by birth. She was interested in women’s social, economic and political emancipation only in so far as it contributed to the emancipation of the woman artist.

Woolf had spent her childhood and adolescence in one of the foremost literary families of Victorian England and was herself a victim of the silent but oppressive discrimination that was the lot of women of her class. Her eminent writer-father did not deny her wish to become a writer, but nevertheless the domestic environment that he headed was one that would stifle any genuine creativity in any but the most determined woman. The disparity between the rights and privileges of the sons and daughters of the family instilled a righteous indignation against the entire patriarchal system in the young Woolf. The fact that her beloved mother was an anti-suffragette who firmly upheld patriarchal values only further confused and frustrated the young girl’s quest for self-identity.

Having gained almost her entire education from the books in her father’s library, it was only natural that she should turn to literature in her quest for a female identity, hoping to get some valuable insights into the nature of womanhood from those who had skillfully probed the intricate depths of the human psyche. But she found to her dismay that almost all the books had been written by men and they revealed little about women. Her disillusionment at being let down by the source she had trusted comes out in her caustic comment that “It has been common knowledge for ages that women exist, bear children, have no beards, and seldom go bald; but save in these respects, and in others where they are said to be identical with men, we know little of them and have little sound evidence upon which to base our conclusions” (Books and Portraits 28).

Literary production has always been to a great extent controlled by social environment. As Virginia Woolf remarks, works of the imagination “are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things” (Room 43). Living in a patriarchal set up which deemed them to be frivolous creatures fit only for managing a household and participating in an endless round of social and charitable activities, was not likely to encourage creativity. The irony of it was that the majority of women too subscribed to this view of themselves. Moreover women were denied a proper education and there was the prevalent prejudice against learned women who were considered to be somehow ‘unfeminine’. In these circumstances it is surprising that women wrote at all.

This was the reason why even an eminent writer like Virginia Woolf should suffer from a lack of self esteem and try to bolster her sense of identity by exploring women’s writing through the ages in order to find parallels for her own situation. As Phyllis Rose points out, “Her concern with the position of women, intertwined as it is with her sense of herself, informs the novels, which tend to state contrasting impulses toward the issues of selfhood” (Rose xiii). The resolution of the psychological tensions and conflicts within herself was a vital first step to the creation of literature.

Her critical essays constitute an exhaustive survey of women’s writing and they focus attention on the problems faced by the women writer at various times. She elaborates in her essay “Women and Fiction” that “in dealing with women as writers, as much elasticity as possible is desirable; it is necessary to leave oneself room to deal with other things besides their work, so much has that work been influenced by conditions that have nothing whatever to do with art.” She continues to state that the answers to the questions we may ask about the nature of women’s writing are “ to be found in the lives of the obscure” (CE II 142). Talent was subdued, distorted and sometimes even totally annihilated by social pressures. She hoped to unearth the factors that they fought against and overcame, or which overcame them. The young novelist Terence Hewet in her first novel The Voyage Out is Woolf’s mouthpiece as he tells Rachel, ”Just consider . . . until a few years ago no woman had ever come out by herself and said things at all. There it was going on in the background, for all those thousands of years, this curious unrepresented life” (258).

It was her desire to resurrect forgotten women of literary ability who ‘wrote’ nothing in the conventional sense, but whose talent nevertheless manifested itself in letters, diaries and memoirs which made Woolf delve deep into piles of obscure volumes. While attempting to trace the feminine literary tradition from its very origin, Woolf found that “strange spaces of silence seem to separate one period of activity from another” (CE II 142). In fact it is a “perennial puzzle” (Room 43) why no woman wrote a word of the prolific Elizabethan literature. The clue to the patchy nature of the feminine literary tradition, as contrasted with the male, lies in social history. But the information is hard to get at because history is the story of the male line and it tells us little about the position of women through the ages. To understand the reasons underlying the literary activity or silence of women in a particular period we should “ turn history wrong side out and so construct a faithful picture of the daily life of the ordinary woman” (CE II 142). Even biography fails us as a source because it dealt only with the lives of men before the eighteenth century.

The only reliable source material that she could find was in the writing traditionally done by women, namely letters, diaries, journals and memoirs. These were considered to be non-literary in nature and hence permissible. She cites the example of Dorothy Osborne who exclaimed “Sure the poor woman is a little distracted, she could never be so ridiculous else as to venture writing books” when the Duchess of Newcastle published a volume of verse, and continued, “If I could not sleep this fortnight I should not come to that” (CE III 60). Yet her voluminous letter writing bears ample evidence of her literary talent. It was her unquestioning acceptance of what society decreed to be proper for a woman which stood in her way.

Throughout her career Virginia Woolf continued to be fascinated with the unorthodox writing done by obscure women. This interest foreshadows that of recent feminist critics who have been searching similar sources in their attempt to discover a female literary tradition that parallels the male one. The use made by Woolf of these are two-fold. First, she uses them as source material for gaining knowledge of the background against which other more famous literary works were produced. Second, she scans them painstakingly, searching for the literary nuggets that lie hidden amidst mundane everyday trivia.

The essay entitled “The Pastons and Chaucer” which is the opening one in the first collection of essays published by her, namely The Common Reader, is a good illustration of the first category. Woolf uses the four-volume collection of The Paston Letters as a valuable means of understanding the fifteenth century background against which Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales. The Paston family had risen in life from being peasants to landowners. They now owned land and the huge Caister Castle and John Paston had to spend a lot of time at court in order to get his rights recognized by the king. On these occasions Mrs Paston used to write long letters to her husband informing him about the state of affairs back home, “explaining, asking advice, giving news, rendering accounts” but there was no room in these “elaborate communications” for the “prattle of children, the lore of the nursery or schoolroom.” Woolf concludes that these letters were “for the most part . . . the letters of an honest bailiff to his master” (CE III 4) as all personal details were totally excluded. But, following the death of John Paston, priorities seem to have changed. His son Sir John spent more time and money on the pleasures of life. He cracked jokes in his letters, bought books and “sometimes, instead of riding off on his horse to inspect his crops or bargain with his tenants, Sir John would sit, in broad daylight, reading. There . . . he would sit reading Chaucer, wasting his time, dreaming” (CE III 7). These changes bewildered and saddened his mother who recorded her displeasure in her subsequent letters. This passage is a good example of the way in which Woolf skillfully links Chaucer and the Pastons, and proceeds to set his work against the background of the England revealed in the Paston Letters, because, as she explains, “The state of the country, considering how poets go to Nature . . . is a matter of some importance” (CE III 8-9). She concludes her essay by saying, “it is easy to see, from the Paston letters, why Chaucer wrote not Lear or Romeo and Juliet, but the Canterbury Tales (CE III 17). Thus we see the consummate skill with which Woolf uses the letters to piece together details of the daily life of women like Margaret Paston and further use these findings to see Chaucer in the proper perspective.

Turning to the Letters of another forgotten obscure figure, Dorothy Osborne, Woolf remarks, “The art of letter-writing is often the art of essaywriting in disguise. But . . . it was an art that a writer could practise without unsexing herself” (CE III 60). Osborne, in her letters to her lover, “gave a record of life, gravely yet playfully, formally yet with intimacy, to a public of one, but to a fastidious public” (CE III 61). Her letters give us a vivid picture of the society to which she belonged and also bring the character of her lover clearly before us. Thus we find that the very woman who was so critical of the Duchess of Newcastle for publishing her writing, was possessed of a very high degree of creative ability, though she wrote nothing but letters. They project a clear picture of her vivacious and shrewd personality that enabled her to become the highly respected wife of an ambassador.

Madame de Sevigne whose fourteen volumes of letters span twenty years, is introduced by Woolf as “This great lady, this robust and fertile letter-writer, who in our age would probably have been one of the great novelists” (CE III 66). On reading her letters we find that “she seems like a living person, inexhaustible,” and elaborates that because of this quality we seem to know her better than “the brilliant Walpole . . . or the reserved and self-conscious Gray” (66). Woolf, the writer-critic, curiously asks, “ how does she achieve this order, this perfection of composition?” as there is “no record of any painstaking effort”(68). She concludes that she must have been so imbued with good sense . . . that, when she took up her pen, it followed unconsciously the laws she had learnt by heart. . . . She was born a critic, and a critic whose judgements were inborn, unhesitating. She is always referring her impressions to a standard . . . She sums up; she judges. But, it is done effortlessly. . . . She is heir to a tradition, which stands guardian and gives proportion (CE III 68-69).

This summing up of the untrained Madame de Sevigne’s critical acumen reminds us of the usual assessment of Woolf’s own criticism as being instinctive but infallible. Woolf, in her characteristic way, has discovered a ‘mother’ in the tradition of feminist criticism.

Thus when we examine the conclusions drawn by Woolf from the letters of Margaret Paston, Dorothy Osborne, and Madame de Sevigne, we find that while the Paston letters were used to fill in the background of ‘great’ literature, the others were treated as literature in their own right.

The three-volume Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington is another forgotten book, in another genre, that Woolf uncovers as part of her probe into the lives of the obscure. She was a very extraordinary cross between a rolling and rollicking woman of the town and a lady of breeding and refinement . . . shady, shifty, adventurous, and yet . . . so imbued with the old traditions of her sex that she wrote, as ladies talk, to give pleasure (CE III 129).

Woolf finds that “Throughout her Memoirs, we can never forget that it is her wish to entertain, her unhappy fate to sob” (129). She knew that a lady was expected to hide her sufferings and she strove to do so to the best of her ability despite “the suffering of a lifetime” (129). While in desperate straits, she earned money by writing letters for others, and also “ransacked her brains for anecdotes, memories, scandals, views about . . . anything that would fill a page and earn her a guinea” (133). Despite the shortness of her adventurous life and the impromptu nature of her writings, Woolf places her “in the great tradition of English women of letters”(130) and thus discovers yet another literary ‘mother’ for herself.

Virginia Woolf herself was a compulsive letter writer and diarist. Her collected letters run into six volumes and her diaries into five volumes. Both her letters and her diaries testify to her constant endeavour to evolve her own identity. Whether she is addressing her intimate friends and dear ones, as in her letters, or indulging in self-analysis, as in her diaries, the picture that emerges is that of a person obsessed with self-discovery. Despite her fame and public stature as a critic and novelist, it is indeed remarkable that throughout her life she continued to use the genres chosen by obscure women of the past to record her tireless self-probing. Apart from detailed accounts of the creative process underlying the stages in the creation of each of her works, these also reveal the stages of her voyage of self-discovery. In addition to these, a collection of autobiographical sketches written by her at various times has also been published. All these help us to understand the psyche of one of the greatest woman artists of Britain, but even more, lays bare the naked, sensitive self, seeking a tradition to belong to and discovering kindred spirits among the forgotten women of the past.

REFERENCES

1. Rose, Phyllis. Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf. New York: OUP, 1978.

2. Woolf, Virginia. The Voyage Out. 1915. London: Hogarth, 1965.

3. A Room of One’s Own. 1928. Middlesex: Penguin, 1972.

4. Collected Essays.4 vols. ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Chatto & Windus, 1966-67. (referred to in the body of the paper as CE).

5. Books and Portraits. ed. Mary Lyon. London: Hogarth, 1977.

6. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. ed. Nigel Nicolson. 6 vols. London: Hogarth,1975-80.

7. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. ed. Anne Olivier Bell. 5 vols. London:Hogarth, 1977-84.

8. Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. ed. Jeanne Schulkind. 2 nd ed. 1985. London: Grafton Books, 1989

Contributor
EVANGELINE SHANTI ROY. Teaches at the Institute of English, University of Kerala. Awareded doctoral degree for her work on Virginia Woolf. Has published articles in various scholarly journals. Particular fields of interest are British and Canadian fiction.

Womens histography

WOMENS
HISTOGRAPHY

Author:T.K Anandi

ABSTRACT--- "Women's Historiography", T. K. Anandi assures, is not "history written by women", but "history about women". In a very interesting and rather "New-Historisque" reading of certain historical events in Kerala such as the widow remarriage, she ascertains how history views the historical incidents as authored by men to change the lives of women. She exhorts the women's historiography to "establish equality in historical enterprises".

Women’s historiography does not imply history written by women. It is the history about women. It is not the life history of the acclaimed. The intention of this historiography is to reveal the extent of participation of women in the fights for reforms in life. It is evident that those who frowned at women’s writing cannot tolerate these enterprises as well. Nevertheless only healthy iscussions and criticisms can bring such studies to the mainstream.

In the social science discipline, there is no division of opinion regarding the fact that society is subject to change. People themselves are the creators of the change. Women are not included in this term “people”. Historical studies do not heed their activities to bring about this change. Therefore what is usually seen is a tendency to hide women from history.

The recognition of feminist studies as a part of social sciences is a change that has come about in the course of the last two or three decades. Subjects like Economics and Anthropology do conduct studies about the low wages of women, sexual division of labour, the beginning of division of labour, and the social involvemnent of women in the days of yore. However, here too women shrink to a stature of statistical aggregates. While speaking about labour conflicts, social science studies display a tendency to connect them only to labour and wages and neglect factors like standard of living, productivity and sexual status in the productivity process. All these have a methodology which condone the patriarchal system. (It is not overlooked that people like E.P.Thompson are exceptions to this).

Social historiography is an area which can assist in women’s historiography. Social history possesses the implements that help in studying socialization of men and women, how division in terms of sex come about, the changes that occur in day-to-day life, the family structure, marriage, health, culture and leisure. But it can be said that women’s social history has not been written. Man had already established supremacy in the government, the landlord tradition, war, trade, centers of authority, religion and growth of technology. Women had not taken leadership in any of these sections. Woman, poised in a passive position, came to be made invisible from history. The life of a common man / woman and their contribution to economic— social development have never enjoyed a pivotal position in historical studies. Traditional historic studies use birth-death statistics, assembly records and details from the archives as sources. These again are preserved in centers of authority. The “yesterdays” of history are reduced to records stored in these centers. The statistical details needed to
create woman’s history are not available here today. Proofs and records of their areas of activity, their common areas, family systems and such other aspects have not been collected or compiled. Efforts to find them are also insufficient.
There are a few rare women who have been recorded in history. These are the ones who have forced themselves into social spaces using their name and authority. They have not succeeded in creating a common sphere for women—
that is why the majority of women had to stand outside history.

The methodology of traditional historiography itself does not facilitate the study of women’s spaces in society. According to that methodology man stands in the active position, the position of the doer in history. Women are mere subjects in a patriarchal society. Their problems are only light matters in this total canvas. Conquering the public front, the patriarchs indulge in a wild dance which would undoubtedly wipe out the subjects. Or else they will remain inactive. This precisely is the position of women in the patriarchal historiography.Even in the areas where their social status is evidently seen, they are either studied in comparison with men or portrayed as images of men— this is the tendency seen in patriarchal historiography.

We have been acquainted with numerous historical men via the history of the national movement. History teaches us the life stories of cultural activists, working in relation to the reform movements, who have set apart their lives for solving the problems of women. Those who fought against Sati and child
marriage, those who endeavoured to change the miserable position of women, were all men. Interestingly, the lessons of Jhansi Rani and Joan of Arc seem to send out the message that to fight for one’s country, one should wear men’s clothes. Gandhiji, Ambedkar, and Jyothibaphule were the ones who brought women to the national protest movement. Such contributions made by men for the nation are not belittled. Neither is it suggested that these should be neglected. However, the tendency of establishing the symbols of strong men throughout history and putting across the message that the shortcut to freedom for women is through men and by effectively imitating men, is wrong.

The situation in Kerala is not different. Recently our media are in the effort to make V.T.Bhattathirippad – who tried to comprehend the problems of widows and give them another lease of life, who tirelessly worked to ‘make their lives blossom’— superhuman. His effort to help and change, especially to eradicate the hellish pain experienced behind the marakkuta – the palm-leaf umbrella carried by namboothiri women— is not forgotten. On the other hand, the fact that he personally never made such claims, reveals his grace. In his autobiography Karmavipakam, the chapter ‘A widow’s life blossoms’ has to be subjected to a re-reading. His wife’s sister’s willingness to marry M.R.B. is decided in the conversation between Sridevi and Nangema

. “The depression of the mind will shatter health. That depression has to be necessarily levelled through new experience. A painting is never complete without drawing and erasing. Nangema should prepare for a new step after comprehending the consequences. When I say this, I do not imply re-marriage.” (pp 246-247.)

It is a historical truth that though V.T. has told thus clearly and forcefully , widow re-marriage has been effected through V.T. That Sridevi and Nangema were instrumental in sowing the seeds for this idea, is another truth. But what traditional historiography does is, neglect the idea of widow remarriage, neglect the mental strength of the namboothiri woman Nangema, and make the performer of the marriage its hero. Therefore it does not become the remarriage of Nangema, but a widow remarriage that is conducted by the good-will of M.R.B.

Studies about all social activities discuss the changes brought about in the mental attitudes of women. These studies do not examine the extent to which the changes that have come in the mental attitude of women have influenced social activity. The miserable state of woman as visualized by man is that which appears in history. That the activities carried out by men has brought about changes in women, can be seen as Appendix. But what makes women partners in the efforts to change is woman’s own awareness of her state. It is not that men are lifting them up and leading them. An essential aspect of historiography, namely the consideration that partners in a common enterprise have to be given equal status, is very often forgotten. The primary aim of woman’s historiography is to establish equality in historical enterprises.

The historical research prevalent today is centred in statistical data. A historical fact is proved by the number of documentary evidence on which it is based. Besides, observations and premises on the basis of statistical details is quite common. The material proofs for these are day-to-day newspaper reports, assembly records, diary notes, police records, autobiographies, family history and so on. The nature of these records is to display solely the ultimate performers of any occurrence. In a police record about a strike, details regarding the people arrested in the strike,those who were partners in decision-making, those who were leaders and such other information can be seen. However, no information can be obtained regarding those who had been partners in organizing the strike or those who had given necessary assistance to help maintain it. Women do appear in these situations. The weaver women who worked in the province of Fauborg Saint Antoin played the most important part in the People’s Front which was part of the French Revolution. They were the ones who gave leadership to the food riots responsible for the revolution. The February Revolution of Russia was initiated by the strike of the women labourers. But history has not even recorded who they were.

In the Salt Satyagraha held at Kozhikode, seven or eight dictators were women. Among them, leaving aside A.V.Kuttimalu Amma, none became leaders and therefore went unnoticed. Moreover women who enter the public sector ought to have more awareness and put in more toil than men who are engaged in it. Quality wise therefore, partnership of women is more exalted than that of men. History often neglects this.

Since women very rarely obtain position and honour, the official records show a lesser number of women. But the welcome change that occurs in a woman newly acquiring power and honour is greater than that occurring in men who constantly achieve these. In the patriarchal system, even those who gain power and position are silenced. So their voice is not heard. Their role in opinionformation also does not come out. The duty of newspapers then and now has not changed very much and so they also maintain silence regarding the role played by women. Autobiographies of women are very limited in number. Even the few written have been done with extreme care, without causing pain or displeasure to husband, father, siblings and other family members. Due to women’s lack of time, discipline in life and the aura society has given them, diary notes made by women never came out. Therefore woman is invisible in the history written using traditional documentary details.

But today the manner of historiography is changing. The numerous documentary material which were considered irrelevant before, are being popularly used now. For instance, the utilization of the diary notes written by Kulin Brahmin girls turned prostitutes and those by women belonging to the Dasi tradition in the Bengal Renaissance as against the patriarchal interpretations— interpretations centred on Rajaram Mohan Roy and Vidya Sagar – can be taken as an example. Nowadays re-readings of traditional historiography are quite common. Tanika Sarkar, Kumkum Samkari, Uma Chakravorthy, Kumkum Roy, Lathamony and S.Anandi have revealed the unscientific nature of patriarchal methods of conventional historiography through such re readings. The writings of these women historians introduce a new methodology for women’s historiography

The tremendous upheavals appearing in different corners of history are not the sole reason for social change. The fact that the oppressed populace are engaged in constant wars with the oppressors, forms the foundation stone of this methodology. The weaker sections do not always wield weapons. They reveal their existence through fruitful rebellions. Records of these protests lie spread out from the landlord’s threshing floor and the factories to the inner yards of the kitchen. These need not necessarily appear in the official records. These lie scattered in proverbs, legends, songs, hearsay, old stories, grandma’s stpries and traditions. The documentary methods of comprehensive historiography are of little assistance to them. Only the methodology of local historiography can be of any assistance here. For example the smarthavicaram (religious trial of namboothiri woman suspected of adultery) of Kuriyedath Thathri is well known. The question whether her revelations formed part of a kind of protest has not yet died down. The change that had come about in the mentality of Namboodiri women of this period is what is suggested through this smarthavicaram. An exact history can be obtained only by recording the oral narration of the namboothiri women who still carry those memories. Oral history is a mode of historiography which is yet not popular in India and Kerala.

“The usage ‘I’ is comparatively less in narratives by women. Personal activities are very often viewed as inferior. Discourses will be self-criticizing. Personal authority is never eulogized.’ – G.Etter Louis remarks while speaking about the methodology of oral history. (Ref:- Black Women’s Life Stories – Reclaiming Self in Narrative Texts.) Similarly the French oral historiographer Paul Thomson remarks that in his study, while men used “I” women used “we”.
Such a response is a consequence of identifying themselves with their families, as the historiographer Geiger S. observes. (Life Histories : Signs : 1986. p 398.) Women usually respond, linking social incidents with family areas. Such an incident has occurred in the experience of this writer too. When the husband says that it was after the wedding that she first started wearing a blouse, the responses “it was Unni’s first birthday” or “that was the day when Ittannuli delivered,” seem to lead women from “I” to “We, our family.”

Agricultural revolts, with the partnership of women is seen from the medieval period itself. Vanjeri Granthavari refers to Sitamma, a woman who burnt down the landlord’s haystack. Those who write the history of Kayyur revolt support the revolutionaries and forget Kamala, the woman who stood as their inspiration. Memories of women who voluntarily participated in protests like Paliyam satyagraha and such others are also important. Memories are a historical construct. These are created by factors such as the circumstances of growing up, political ideology, cultural standing and so on. Historiography succeeds because it can visualize the religious, caste, race, gender variants. The following aspects should be included in the methodology using memories, oral statements, folk tales, legends and fictitious stories:

1) A feminist re- reading of traditional historical material.
2) Historical study of the given statistics and inclusion of narratives
showing quality changes.
3) Local collection of data regarding invisible women.
4) Discovering and studying forms which may be used as weapons
of the weak.
5) A comprehensive study of oral narratives and ceremonial
traditions.

These are only the beginnings of the new efforts to promote women’s historiography. Feminist reading / writing implies narratives showing how women as spectators and partners view each historical incident and change. This does not intend to insist that “this is how to view it “or interpret it according to prevalent political philosophy. New methods and implements are to be utilized to find out the mental occupation and activities of women.

Contributor

T.K.ANANDI. Is a social scientist and she has done pioneering work on “Women freedom fighters of Kerala” - she is a regular contributor of scholarly articles to periodicals and research journals.

Political reservation and empowerment of women

POLITICAL RESERVATION
AND EMPOWERMENT
OF WOMEN

Usha K.B.

ABSTRACT---Usha K. B., in her "Political Reservation and Empowerment of Women" discusses the participation of women in Politics, the gender-bias of Political Science, and how the caste system and patriarchy has successfully managed to marginalise women in Indian society. After examining the relevance political reservation has in relation to the empowerment of women, she concludes that what is needed now is a policy that takes into consideration the prevailing situation in India.

The new millennium has ushered in an era of empowerment of women of different cultures, nationalities and religions across the world. In India also, the last one and a half decade witnessed serious debates and public discussions on the idea of empowerment. The concept appeared as an end, a process and a strategy for the development of the backward, the disadvantaged and women in various spheres of life— social, economic, political and cultural. The attainment of powerful political positions by women and expansion of their political rights are perceived as important factors for gaining empowerment in other areas of social life, especially after the Beijing World Conference of Women in 1994. Besides, the access to and / or control over political power are / is realized as pre-condition /s for challenging the unequal power relations— based on social, political and economic dimensions— that cause women’s marginality, and also for transforming the unequal, unjust and highly stratified, hierarchical and patriarchal social order. The Beijing Declaration emphasized that women’s empowerment and their fuller participation on the basis of equality in all spheres of society, including participation in the decision-making processes and in power, are fundamental for the achievement of equality, development and peace. Political participation of women is thus seen as a vital link in the total empowerment of women. This makes the debate on the proposed 81 st Constitution Amendment Bill that provides 33 per cent reservation for women in Parliament and the State Assemblies all the more important.

The historic 73 rd and 74 th Constitution Amendment Acts (1993) that provided for reservation of one third seats for women in the local bodies (Panchayats and Municipalities) broke the tradition of women’s weaker political representation, and enhanced women’s participation in the decision-making bodies at local self-government levels. The debate on the 81 st Amendment Bill for extending the political reservation for women at the state and national levels unfolded the real nature of the Indian democratic polity premised by its social structure and gender relations. The interrelationships between the institutions of caste and patriarchy became a crucial question on the way of women’s political empowerment. Significantly, caste / social justice has also become a new challenge before the movement for gender justice, while dealing with forces of patriarchy and inequality in their effort to bring a meaningful representation of women in a polity where political parties organized around the issue of gender relations are absent. This article tries to examine the context, strategies, systemic complexities and impediments in the way of women’s political empowerment.

Women’s Political Participation

There is a general consensus on the perception that Indian women had actively participated in the national movement for independence. But this trend in the same intent or in greater proportion could not continue after independence. Though Indian women actively participated shoulder to shoulder with men in the freedom struggle, after independence women could not win a fair deal in the arena of power politics. Thus, the area of power politics has practically been conditioned as a male domain. The traditional patriarchal stereotypes about the nature and role of women still have great influence, and this is maintained and perpetuated by the male political order through traditional norms, values, beliefs, institutions, education and social conditioning which form the basis of patriarchy and casteism.

Moreover, gender bias in the discipline of Political Science is also partly responsible for this situation. The conventional paradigms and theoretical perceptions of political scientists regarding women from a male perspective labelled women as apolitical. Though conventional political scientists have not totally ignored women’s issues, women are perceived as part of the social structure rather than as part of the structure of power. Roles of women were confined to household responsibilities of homemaking, bearing and rearing of children. When they were burdened with household duties, their activities in the public sphere outside home became limited. In Universities, considered centers of research and academic excellence, women as academicians doing research and teaching were more or less absent. Even today, when time has come to widen the scope of Political Science by incorporating the perception of the empowerment of women in the study of politics, women are not adequately represented in these institutions. This necessitates the breaking up of the prevailing power structure based on class, caste and gender inequalities and biases, in order to make women visible, their voices to be heard in history and society, and highlight their contributions to society .

Over fifty years of constitutional guarantees for equality and legislation in favour of women could bring in no change in the prevailing ideologies and power structure within family, society and state. The essential assumption that the woman’s role is primarily to serve the husband and bear and rear his children and not to take up any leadership role outside the family remained practically unchanged. The male-centred political structure could not change the disadvantages of women, and there still exists in India a wide gap between the goals enumerated in the constitution, and the various legislations and policies enacted under the framework of democratic polity on the one hand and the situational reality of women on the other. Though India had a woman Prime Minister for quite a number of years, gender disparities persisted in all walks of life and women’s status did not change for the better. The male reluctance to power sharing made women politically insignificant. Even after 13 general elections, the ordinary women masses have gained nothing more to feel that their life is being enhanced as a result. Women from their experiences now realized that the patriarchal social order cannot be transformed through merely having regular elections with flowery promises, good legislation, policies and programmes. They find the strategy of empowerment to this end. Significantly, for the overall empowerment of women, their political empowerment is much warranted.

Caste and Patriarchy in Indian Society

The discourse on the 81 st Amendment Bill exposed the importance of an interrelationship between the categories of caste and gender in the Indian sociopolitical context. It made it clear that by dismissing the issue of caste, it is difficult to advance a political strategy for gender politics in India. The authors like Sonalkar (1999) and Rege(1998) emphasise the need for simultaneously addressing the issues of caste, class and gender in the contemporary political set up. Though the Indian Constitution is claimed to be democratic, society still remains conservative and traditional in many respects, particularly on gender relations. Caste and undemocratic institutions rule the roost.

Despite various reforms and movements against caste, this institution is well preserved and perpetuated, and is a significant factor in socio-political interaction. The preservation and perpetuation of caste hierarchy is the basis of the functioning of Indian patriarchy. At the top of the hierarchy exists the dominant upper castes, and the lower castes are at the bottom level. Women of the lower castes remain at the bottom level and are practically deprived of human rights. The experience is that through the women’s movement and NGOs, the interests of the urban elite women, or upper caste women are highlighted and promoted. And the lower caste women’s interests remain at a low priority. The common factor is that the social structure functions as per masculine and caste norms. Women and lower castes, particularly the women of the lower castes, fare as lesser beings in our democracy. And thus, and to that extent, the practice is less democratic and more patriarchal and casteist.

There exists a contrast between society and polity, or to be precise, between civil society and state in India, as far as the caste of women are concerned. Though the policy level attitude of the state is more inclined in favour of women, the social level practices cannot be said to have changed. This is because of the fact that it is difficult to have social change than to effect a political change. The former is a question of base where real changes take place only in the long run. The latter is the arena of superstructure where changes are relatively less difficult when compared to changes in the social structure. Due to the structurally inherent backwardness in the society, the progressive and revolutionary initiatives in the political sphere instituted through the constitutional machinery do not get materialized. Then came the strategy of reservation as a last resort. Now the question is whether reservation, without a serious discussion of the underlying caste issues, really empower women in their socio-political initiative against patriarchy in India.

The Indian democracy keeps women on the sidelines due to the patriarchal mentality of the society. Apart from that, politics is controlled by money, feudalism and muscle power. As vehicles of political power, social and political institutions such as family, bureaucracy and political parties are built on patriarchal structure, and operate through male dominant principles. Therefore, along with reservation in politics, there should be adequate reforms in the family, and sufficient reservation in the bureaucracy and political parties. Reservation without support systems will be meaningless.

The social intricacies force the Indian woman to experience individual patriarchy and social patriarchy, i.e., women with upper caste identity face individual as well as social patriarchy. As the existing power structure is well in favour of the former, while bringing women into power politics, emphasis should be given not only to change the power equation or distribution of power on the question of gender but also to change the power structure itself. Any attempt which does not change the power structure will not bring the expected result. Luce Irigaray (1985:81) aptly warns of the economic and political empowerment claims which “aim simply for a change in the distribution of power, leaving in tact the power structure itself.” Her reading sounds that, “If women do not challenge the very terms of economic and political discourse, which is only possible if they remain wary of the rhetoric of inclusion, women will ‘re-subject themselves, deliberately or not, to a phallocratic structure’ (Fermon, 1998 :128-129).

On the question of political representation for women through reservation, the major opinions that came up are : (1) only elite and upper caste women will enter the quota; (2) proxy women will be chosen as candidates; and (3) the women of lower and deprived castes will not get opportunities. These opinions can be valid only if we take both individual patriarchy and social patriarchy into consideration. As political scientists would agree, post-independent political experience also shows that only the interests of the propertied classes are protected. Favouring separate quota for women, (1999:29) argues that the concern against quota within quota is to contest the backward caste assertion. She relates the issue to the women’s participation in anti-Mandal agitation and says (1999:501-20) “In the anti- Mandal protests women often appear not as sexed beings but as free and equal citizens, as partners of rioting men, jointly protesting the erosion of ‘their’ rights ……….. In many cities, hitherto ‘apolitical’women students participated enthusiastically in demonstrations and blockades, mourning the ‘death of merit’ and arguing the need to save the nation.” As she further observed (1999:503), “anti-Mandal women had learned to claim deprivation and injustice, now not as women, but as citizens, for to ground the claim in gender would pit them against middleclass men. The claiming of citizenship rather than sisterhood now not only to set them against lower caste / class women

.” In today’s situation though nobody wants to openly defend caste hierarchy, both the claims based on merit (efficiency) and caste (justice) bear the caste imprint. Gail Omvedt (2000) opines that Muslims and OBCs would not need any quota, and so also the women. Though one and each express their fear and concerns in their own way, the prominent reality is that the caste question should be comprehensively dealt with. The life experience of women from all social identities should be brought in the open, in the effort to find an answer to the problems faced by Indian women.

The implementation of 73 rd and 74 th amendments revealed that most of the women represenatives were proxy ones. Women representatives had to face a lot of difficulties from the bureaucracy, from the party and the society. Caution should be taken to see to it that, after a certain period, it should not become a rule that women represent and act only within the reserved quota. Since the identity politics does not allow women to act beyond the agenda of the party they represent, the political hypocrisy and male dominance in the political parties should also be fought against.

To sum up, the operation of caste, both at the systemic level and also as a foundation of the functioning of patriarchy, warrants a broader and multidimensional approach in dealing with gender politics. An approach that takes into consideration the factors of class, caste and patriarchy is needed. Instead of transporting Western feminist principles to our socio-political milieu, the Indian feminists should lead the discourse on gender politics in view of things which prevail here and aim at what we need in our environment. When we assess the costs and benefits of political empowerment, our experiment should not lead us to the kind of tragic result as that which happened in Russia, for instance.

Notes :
1) Eminent political scientists have emphasised that popular participation, circulation
of power and effectiveopposition are essential characteristics of a true democracy. Also,
a democratic society is based on the recognition of equal rights of all the individuals in it.
2) This article was written before the Vajpayee Government withdrew the Womens’ Bill.

REFERENCES
1. Fermon, Nicole (1998): “Women on the Global Market:Irigaray and the Democratic State,” Diacritics, Vol.28, No.1,Spring, pp120-137.

2. Irigaray, Luce.(1985): This Sex which is Not One, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.

3. Menon, Nivedita (1999): Gender and Politics in India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

4. Omvedt, Gail (2000): “Women and PR” The Hindu (Thiruvananthapuram), 12 September.

5. Rege, Sharmila (1998) : “Dalit Women Talk Differently: A Critique of ‘Difference’and Towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint Position”, Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay) October 31, pp.WS 39— 46.

6. Sonalkar, Wandana (1999) : “An Agenda for Gender Politics.” Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay), January 9, pp.24-29.

Contributor
K.B. USHA. U.G.C. Research associate at the Department of Politics, University of Kerala. She has taken her Ph.D on Soviet Studies from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Currently working on the topic “Political Empowerment of Women – A Critical Study of the Indian Experience.”

Mahatma Gandhi

MAHATMA GANDHI

Author: Usha Menon

ABSTRACT---Usha Menon, in her article on "Mahatma Gandhi" gives a crisp and innovative re-rendering of The Story of My Experiments with Truth to shed new light on the greatness of Kasturba, who never got the richly deserved recognition from her husband or history. The re-analysis of some of Gandhiji's famous statements, Menon says, proves that he was "the typical Indian male of the early twentieth century", who refused to understand or sympathise with his wife's needs, and instead, forced her into the role of the silent "monument of patience".

As we approach yet another celebration of India’s Republic Day memory wafts back . Once more we see and think of the bygone era, of Mahatma Gandhi the Father of our Nation who regarded truth as the greatest guide on earth.Once he was dubbed “Mahatma” (the great soul) by Tagore. How do we see him today? Our first president, Rajendra Prasad has stated that “Mahatma Gandhi did not set out to evolve a philosophy of life or formulate a system of beliefs and ideals... his actions and actual teachings were always influenced by considerations at once moral and eminently practical...” (from Homage in Collected Works Of Mahatma Gandhi, (1884-1886) The Publications Division, Minisry Of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. Of India). This assessment of the Mahatma sets one thinking, particularly when we see that he had touched every aspect of India’s life, be it food, clothing, occupaton or social set up. He spiritualised politics as no one had been able to do before. He said “I count no sacrifice too great for the sake of seeing God face to face...” and added that “ the seeker after truth should be humbler than dust ...I am devoted to none but truth and I owe no discipline to anybody but truth.” The Mahatma’s words quoted from his autobigraphy (The Story Of My Experiments With Truth, translated from the original in Gujarati by Mahadev Desai, Navjivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, 1927), impress us with their simplicity and sincerity. One could not but hail the man who stood before hide-bound tradition and had the strength to proclaim “I do not advocate the surrender of God-given reasoning faculty in the face of ancient tradition (The Story Of My Experiments With Truth). Gandhi knew that he was hailed as the father of our nation, that he was looked upon as the mahatma of the masses. He was aware that every word and deed of his was looked up to and imitated without question. It is the consideration of this fact that makes the image of this great leader lose lustre when he declares “ I have never made a fetish of consistency. I am a votary of truth and I must say what I think and feel at a given moment on the question without regard to what I may have said before on it” (The Story Of My Experiments With Truth). Rajendra Prasad has remarked in his Homage (in the Collected Works Of Mahatma Gandhi 1, 1884-1896, Publication Division, Ministry Of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. Of India) - “his opponents and sometimes even his followers saw apparent contradiction in some of Gandhi’s actions .... his actions and actual teachings were always influenced by considerations at once moral and eminently practical” Francis Watson and Hallam Tennyson in their publication Talking Of Gandhi , (Orient Longman Ltd.Bombay1969) present snippets of dialogue from a variety of people, where a slightly different picture of Gandhi emerges. Mrs. Polak speaks of a worried Kasthurba Gandhi thus: I think the great thing that disturbed her was the education - or lack of education - of her three children.” Charity evidently did not begin at home for the great leader ! In the same work Susheela Nayyar remarks “in Gandhi’s time we all lived in an atmosphere of unadulterated idealism...” She speaks of the dream they had of free India “and this dream was very beautiful .... Gandhi spiritualised politics.” Today, suddenly it is as though the bubble has burst and the dream shattered.We have to look with fresh eyes and new reasoning at the past. The halo recedes and the starkness of reality emerges.

Even now on the threshold of the twenty-first century when I read certain lines in Gandhi’s autobiography, I am jolted. I know that the male population of India , at least a good section of it, would question such statements .Gandhi the name was a synonym for saint, specially for those of us who were brought up in post Independent India. But strangely enough it is only now at this stage of adulthood that I took up afresh The Story Of My Experiments With Truth The snippets that I had gathered so far had painted a picture of a saintly man who sacrificed everything, Christ like, for the sake of fellow men. The child at Rajkot who grew into the advocate in Africa and the Mahatma in India -- they were all different facets of his amazing personality. But alas, the saintly aura dulled and a mere mortal emerged. The Mahatma turned into irate husband and domineering father, in fact, into the typical Indian male of the early twentieth century. A man willing to clutch at tradition, physical force, or anything else to gain his point. Will someone explain the justification of Gandhi’s aphorisms when his actions belie his words? Indeed I saw the greatness of Kasthurba ,a woman brought up in the heart of tradition thrown willy-nilly into her husband’s experiments. She was asked to fling away without question all that she was taught to uphold as sacred. Her husband would brook no opposition. He reserved for himself the right to commit blunders, to change his mind when he thought it fit. She was but a puppet who must move in the direction he chose. Lesser women would have strived to escape from life itself rather than stay on and endure the ordeal of living with such an experimenter.I salute you, Kasthurba.

I read again the autobiography where Gandhi says “My Himalayan blunders have seemed trifling to me because I have kept strictly to this path I have gone forward according to my light .” Where in this scheme of things was Kasthurba ? Did she have to bear the burden of his mistakes ? Gandhi has stated: “my ambition was to make her life a pure life, learn what I learnt and identify her life and thought with mine.” With this noble resolve in mind he adds that instructing her was impossible because : “when I woke up from the sleep of lust I had already launched forth into public life which did not leave me much spare time. I failed likewise to instruct her through private tutors,” and they say, charity begins at home ! Gandhi evolved through his politics, his mistakes were overcome or silently put aside. Kasthurba, did you ever want to read, to teach, to have your voice heard ?

Gandhi spoke with disarming honesty of the lust which overcame him at the time of his father’s death. Ashamed of himself he feels that it was just punishment that he was not by his father’s side during the last moments of his life. He dismisses in a line what Kasthurba as wife and mother would not be able to forget in a lifetime. The line reads: “the poor mite that was born to my wife scarcely breathed for more than three or four days . Nothing else could be expected,” Not a word of her physical pain and heart ache! His return from England did not improve matters, for he says “even my stay in England had not cured me of jealousy.” Kasthurba took it all in her stride , yet no one thought it fit to speak of her , not even Gandhi himself .

“I could not devote to the children all the time I had wanted to give them”-- understandable under the circumstances. Most political figures have the same thing to say. But unforgivable is the line “my inability to give them enough attention and other unavoidable causes prevented me from providing them with the literary education I had desired …” Lust prevented his wife gaining literacy, was it ego that prevented the children being educated? He tells us that his eldest son broke away and went to Ahemdabad to continue his higher education. Gandhi was obviously not too happy about it

“The husband’s earnings are the joint property of husband and wife , as he makes money by her assistance “if only as a cook …” What happened to this thought when Gandhi wrote in the autobiography “one of the gifts was a gold necklace worth fifty guineas , meant for my wife. But even that gift was given because of my public work and so it could not be separated from the rest”(p.165).Think of Kasthurba’s reply “I agree but service rendered by you is as good as service rendered by me . I have toiled and moiled for you day and night . Is that no service?You forced all and sundry on me making me weep bitter tears , and I slaved for them” Gandhi’s words follow : “but Iwas determined to return the ornaments.” (p166). And Gandhi grew into a Mahatma while Kasthurba’s scars remained noticed by none.

When leaving home and kith and kin, a woman of Kasthurba’s times would have to place her security in the hands of her husband. One wonders what her feelings were when in Durban, Gandhi decided to act the harsh master .In the autobiography, Gandhi says with some touch of pride or was it arrogance: “my wife managed the pots of others but to clean those used by one who had been a panchama seemed to her to be the limit and we fell out …but I was a cruelly kind husband . I regarded myself as her teacher, and so harassed her out of my blind love for her …. so I said raising my voice “I will not stand this nonsense in my house;” the words pierced her like an arrow and she shouted back ‘ keep your house to yourself and let me go.’ I forgot myself . The spring of compassion dried up in me . I caught her by the hand and dragged the helpless woman to the gate … and proceeded to open it with the intention of pushing her out … she cried :“ Have you no sense of shame ? Must you so far forget yourself ? Where am I to go? I have no friends or parents here to harbor me . Being your wife you think I must put up with your cuffs and kicks?” (p207-8). This was the punishment for the woman who dared to defy her husband. The same man who had once said “I do not advocate the surrender of God - given reasoning faculty in the face of ancient tradition.” The same man had also said on another occasion “Hindu culture has erred on the side of excessive subordination of the wife to the husband. This has resulted in the husband sometimes usurping and exercising authority that reduces him to the level of the brute.” Ironic a comment like this from a man who had no qualms about using force where his own wife was concerned . Like Ruth amid the alien corn, Kasthurba could only swallow bitter tears and accept her lot . Her “teacher” never really taught her . She was not literate , had no chance to think for herself, every decision was Gandhi’s and she was forced to accept it.The man who said that “all restraints to be beneficial must be voluntary” seems to have forgotten the truism when dealing with his own household. Gandhi admits with a rather tongue in the cheek attitude “it is likely that many of my doings do not have her approval even today. We never discuss them.” He also admits that the one great quality she has, which he obviously approves of, is that she “shares with most Hindu wives the feeling that she considered herself blessed in following my footsteps and has never stood in the way of my endeavor to lead a life of restraint. Though, therefore there is a whole lot of difference between us intellectually , I have always had the feeling that ours is a life of contentment, happiness and progress.”( Autobiography, p208-9). Did you forget Mr. Gandhi, “blind adoration in the age of action is perfectly valueless?” Isn’t this all you wanted out of her? Absolute compliance , no questions asked, this was contentment!

Kasthurba was a woman, a monument of patience; she who swallowed all her bewilderment and pain, she who followed you through thick and thin what did you leave her Mr. Gandhi? What but memories of hidden tears, harsh words and painful actions. You who are called the apostle of peace , did you forget to bring it home to her, or did you think a forced acquiescence was harmony?

Dear Mahatma, you were aware from the early days of your wedded life that “only a Hindu wife would tolerate these hardships … a servant wrongly suspected may throw up his job, a son in the same case may leave his father’s roof and a friend may put an end to the relation. The wife, if she suspects her husband will keep quiet , but if her husband suspects her, she is ruined … where is she to go? …Law has no remedy for her “Perhaps that was why you were always victorious in the domestic battles. That was why Kasthurba never spoke out her differences to the world .

As N.Krishnaswamy had said in Talking Of Gandhi : “Gandhi is presented to the modern generation by the old Gandhians as someone who was in tune with the ancient traditions of India and things like that , almost as though he were someone to be deified , not someone to be followed.” From today’s point of view nothing could be more true. In the age that understands the need for women’s empowerment as a necessity for the progress of humanity , it is impossible to accept Kasturba’s role of forced acquiescence. It is true that Gandhi has pointed out instances of domestic discord but never once has he mentioned Kasturba’s views being accepted. It was at the end, her absolute compliance or nothing. The ideals of Gandhi we must cherish. His dreams we must pursue. But his methods and attitudes to his wife they require a rethinking.

Contributor
USHA MENON. Teaches at the All Saints’ College, Thiruvananthapuram. Her doctoral work was on Sri Aurobindo. Interested in women support activities.