Mistress of Pious Effusions

By Amitava Kumar

The courage of brave women, as well as the challenge of their work, is made invisible by the pious effusions of any one of us who opts to remain in this country a mere mistress of spices.

I got a call from an editor of a literary journal a few months ago. His question was direct and unanswerable. "Why is it that Indian writers are so good?"

The journal was a well-known East Coast publication; a couple of my friends and I have long aspired to publish in it. But, I didn’t have a quick answer for my caller. The editor gave me a chance to make incoherent sounds on the phone, and then he went on. "Even when you don’t agree with such writers — Pico Iyer, for example — it’s impossible not to like their style."

Several weeks after that call, I still didn’t have an answer. But, now, I have at least found evidence against what that editor was saying about Indian writing.

Among the newly-released paperbacks at my local Barnes and Nobles, I recently found Dinesh D’Souza’s book, Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader. In the past, D’Souza has authored Illiberal Education and The End of Racism — books that, in their virulent attacks on the gains of civil rights struggles, easily rivaled the backwardness of books like the Bell Curve which, a friend remarked, "tried to prove that Dan Quayle is smarter than Toni Morrison." D’Souza’s latest tome, produced a while ago, has now been released in paper. One could be forgiven for thinking that this might make it easier to change it into pulp, but Rush Limbaugh thinks otherwise. On the book’s dust-jacket, he calls it "the book we have been waiting for."

Seized by a perverse impulse, I bought the book. Don’t ask me why. Some people go bungee jumping; others climb down into pits to step among snakes that hiss and unsheath their fangs; I bought Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.

And I found instant proof against the editor’s declaration on the phone that all Indian writing comes with top-quality guarantee.

I failed dismally at the task of reading D’Souza’s homage to the Teflon President. I had to stop many times, and I was determined to start again, but after page 40 I could not go on. On that fateful page, where my adventure with the book ended forever, D’Souza cited a poem by Reagan to illustrate his "gift for hope":

I wonder what it’s all about, and why

We suffer so, when little things go wrong?

We make our life a struggle

When life should be a song.

Believe me, dear reader, I would not have inflicted this jaunty ditty on you if I didn’t have a moral: Bad writing, like good writing, is not limited to any nation alone. It is not a national trait. If it were, I would have asked Dinesh D’Souza to wear a large sign around his neck saying: "I’m Indian, and I write in English, but I’m not talented."

This doesn’t seem a wrong time to insist on the moral I have just unveiled. Newspapers have begun warning us of an outbreak of a "titanic struggle" between Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth when their books are released in the near future. A recent issue of India Abroad leads off with a cover story entitled "An Indian summer for the English novel." A whole spate of novels by Indian writers are about to descend on our heads. Far be it from me to indulge in Malthusian fantasies, but I am wary of this scenario where we are expected to crowdedly rub shoulders with Indian talent. Let me explain my position by using a small, unscientific sample.

Among the new releases is a novel by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni entitled Sister of My Heart. From a press release, I learned that the novel is based on a short story "The Ultrasound," a part of Divakaruni’s earlier collection Arranged Marriage. I want to recount the details of that story because it is one of the reasons why I’m not going to be party to the hype. No more bungee jumping, no hissing snakes. No way.

The female narrator of "The Ultrasound" is in California. She is thinking of her cousin in Calcutta. Both women are pregnant. The narrator’s cousin has found out the sex of the fetus; it’s a girl and the mother-in-law wants an abortion. In the story, we read: "But already I know — how could I not have guessed earlier— what Runu is about to say. I remember the show some time back on 60 Minutes about the increasing popularity of amniocenteses in India."

There is something peculiar, even discomforting, about discovering one’s homeland through the kind offices of the U.S. television empires. That feeling of displacement is doubled when, in the pages of an N.R.I. writer, one hears the echo of what in its inaugural moment had been no less troubling. What makes it worse is that in this later encounter, the short-story writer seems to have monumentalized the show. There is no gap for her— no other questions that appear - between one set of representations and another.

The 60 Minutes report on CBS that Divakaruni’s narrator remembers was broadcast more than a decade ago under the title "Till Death ‘s Do Part." It was a searing account of dowry deaths in Delhi where, as the commentator said, "a woman is burnt every twelve hours." There can be very little to argue about the brutality and greed of patriarchy in such cases. But, in the same way as the CBS commentator remained doubtful of the sincerity of the tears shed by the murderous mother-in-law, I want to remain sceptical of the emotions displayed both by the television commentator and the short story writer. Sahibs and begums, here are my grim reasons:

The 60 Minutes show ended with the words that India stands with "one foot in the space age, [and] with one foot in the middle age." What goes unremarked here is the complicity between the two — and I’m not commenting here simply on the ways in which we might easily see the BJP government’s use of nuclear power to mobilize medieval passions. Instead, I’m referring to the U.S. media’s complete and arrogant separation of India from the West as a place where women are mistreated. Among a host of other things, what I find appalling is the repression of the complicity between oppressive, dominant forces in India and America. Let’s ask, for example, how U.S. multinationals like General Electric, with their marketing of ultrasound devices, profited from the heinous social practices in India. But, in the pious head-shaking by the CBS commentator, such complexities are simply brushed aside.

The narrator in Divakaruni’s story, wittingly or unwittingly, repeats this flawed separation between India and the United States. She recalls her cousin’s interest in becoming a traditional housewife and then begins to question the way in which she has now planted the seeds of opposition in the latter’s mind. Thinking of her cousin’s childhood images of red-bordered saris and red marriage bindis, the narrator asks: "Had I taken all of that away from her by my misplaced American notions of feminism and justice?"

Is feminism American? Did the narrator in Divakaruni’s story, even if her knowledge of women in India was to be limited to the 60 Minutes segment, have no knowledge of Indian feminists? Could she not have noticed the outspoken activism of Brinda Karat, the charismatic, communist leader of the women’s organization, Janwadi Mahila Samiti? On that very show! What did Karat’s brand of oppositional social consciousness mean to Divakaruni’s narrator - or, for that matter, the American audience? Didn’t it challenge not only their notions of Indian femininity but also their assumptions about what constituted the right social response?

Let me pitch crassness against crassness: To make the connections I am seeking would jeopardize GE’s advertising on future CBS shows, and, as far as our narrator is concerned, it’d rob her of the sentimental dream of having done the right thing. It would throw into crisis her own privilege in a society that rewards her precisely for not being a Brinda Karat. Divakaruni’s narrator is not aware — perhaps she cannot be aware — that a group of five women made a film to protest the death, on September 4, 1987, of an 18-year-old woman, Roop Kanwar, on her dead husband’s funeral pyre. I mention here the work of this group, Mediastorm, because their film From the Burning Embers does not share Divakaruni’s dream of a single woman’s rescue by getting her a plane ticket to the United States.

Against such a solution marked by deep class privilege and abject individualism, at the end of the Mediastorm film we are motivated by the words of Safdar Hashmi to think of a genuine alternative: "Aao ab milkar badhe, adhikar apne cheen lain,/ Kafila ab chal pada hai, ab na roka jayega" (Come let’s advance together, let’s take back our rights,/ The procession is now afoot, now it cannot be stopped).

The horrifying "social murder" of Roop Kanwar was also, as Anand Patwardhan rightly points out in his own 1995 documentary Father, Son, and Holy War, connected in a straighforward way to the demolition, only a few years later, of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. This is because what we witnessed in the right-wing mobilization around Roop Kanwar’s death was the emergence of a nationalist-masculinist ideology which demonized the Muslim minority and turned women into submissive bearers of tradition.

These are precisely the difficult connections missing from CBS’s 60 Minutes and the pages of the prize-winning fiction celebrated in the West.

In closing,let me add that it is certainly worth recalling that From the Burning Embers was made by the members of Mediastorm, Ranjani Mazumdar, Shikha Jhingan, Charu Gargi, Sabeena Gadhihoke, and Sabina Kidwai, under severe conditions, including the threat of violence. It is the courage of such women, as well as the challenge of their work, that is made invisible by the pious effusions of any one of us who opts to remain in this country a mere mistress of spices.

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