Women and Violence

Sudeshna Chakravarti

raditionally, the female body has been a target for violence. Private and domestic violence, rape, molestation, murder, etc, all are common enough, as we know by our recent experiences. As Susan Brownmiller points out in her seminal work on rape, Against Our Will, rape is less an outburst of perverted lust than a collective male attempt to keep women in their place. Though women seldom play an active role in unleashing wars, they are the greatest victims of war. In ancient times when a city state or clan was conquered, all the adult men were killed and women and children sold into slavery. We nd examples of this as far back as Homer and Euripides. Even today the custom continues despite the Geneva Conventions. On a small scale it is commonplace to take revenge on an enemy or a whole community by humiliating his/their womenfolk. The bloody tale of the Partition of India was written on female bodies. In short, violence against women is often the dening line of a community. The author poses such questions:
(I)s community without violence at its origin possible? Is an anti-heteronormative, anticolonial and anti-imperialist community that follows its own laws of non-violence ontologically possible? It is only in the literary imaginary that such a focus is possible, and imaginary that is at once idea and practice. What I seek is not only liminal and heterodox, but a community that is inspired from the women who have suffered its greatest loss, from the people who have paid with their lives, in fact and imagined community that cuts across the worlds of the living and the dead (from the Introduction, p xiv).

book reviewS
Women Writing Violence: The Novel and Radical Feminist Imaginaries by Shreerekha Subramanian (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage), 2013; pp 312, Rs 750.

Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The other six novels are south Asian, belonging to various parts and the diaspora, divided between Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali and English. All except one are by women writers. This is a ne study of ecriture feminine, ranging over time and space. The author is less at ease with a single novel by a male writer. Founding of a Community Paradise begins so to speak with a quest and the founding of a community. A group of Afro-Americans, led by Big Papa, sets out to nd a place where they might establish an ideal community. This quest is akin to the traditional American westward expansion in quest of virgin land, as well as the Biblical exodus of the chosen people, for the promised land. Big Papa is compared to Moses. Racial solidarity is not evident. Other Afro-American communities on the way reject the people of Big Papa, because they are too black or too poor. However, the band nally sets up a communal oven in a place they have named Haven and nearby Ruby. A group of women occupy an abandoned convent outside Ruby and start an allfemale community. They do not obey the patriarchal rules of Ruby, now ruled by the descendants of Big Papa. The leaders of Ruby see the neighbouring community as a source of evil, a virus that if not destroyed will affect Ruby. The women there are Eves, with no touch of Virgin Mary. In the Christian Catholic tradition, Eve and Mary are symbols of bad and good, respectively. The people of Ruby kill the women of the convent. But, the women return and continue their work of paradise building their happiness.

Can this be considered an example of the much-touted magic realism or plain supernatural? Or, is it a part of African or Afro-American cosmogony, where dead or living are not irrevocably separated, where the dead return to give counsel and help? We are reminded of another novel by Toni Morrison, Beloved, where a black baby killed by her own mother to save her from the horrors of slavery, returns as a young girl. Subramanian points out, the imagined community with the dead also strengthens the community with the living. Dead and the Living The Farming of Bones is another novel of survival and memory. This time it is a tale of historical massacre. In 1937, president Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominian Republic, ordered the massacre of thousands of dark-skinned Haitians. The survivors escape to Haiti, the other half of the island crossing a river which is named Massacre, after the terrible event. Amabelle Desir, a young woman who worked in a Dominican plantation, marries to escape. But her parents die desperately when they are trying to cross the river in spate. Amabelle builds a new life and interacts with the community on the other side of the island. Part of her life is spent in mourning and remembering. Many years later, after the dictator is dead, Amabelle returns to the plantation of her youth and nally chooses death on the same river which had taken her parents. Here too, the link between the dead and living is closed. Amabelle constantly sees her parents in dream or waking fantasy. This is not morbidity, for community with the dead helps cement community with the living. Even Amabelles voluntary death is a victory rather than despair, a return to Sebastians cave, her fathers laughter her mothers eternity. Death indeed can be happier than life. Amabelles mother, who apparently never smiles in life, smiles in death. The historical background is also clear and powerful. Haiti, the rst independent state in the western hemisphere, was identied with bloody slave insurrection,
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It is this community which is sought to be built by women one way or another, in the eight novels discussed here. Paradise by Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize winning Afro-American writer, is set in the southern and south-western part of the United States. The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat is set in the Caribbean on an island which is divided between
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violence and chaos in the eyes of the whole American continent. For the neighbouring Dominican Republic it was little short of a nightmare. Hence fear causes the extreme violence. Partition Novels Of the south Asian novels two might be classied as Partition novels. The trauma of the Partition, particularly for women, has been recorded by numerous ction writers such as Kishan Chand, Manto and Bhishma Sahani. Bapsi Sidhwa, a Pakistani Canadian writer, paints such a picture in Cracking India. The setting in Lahore at that time and the action is seen through the eyes of Lennie, or rather through her later memories. Lennie is an exceptional child in many respects. She is crippled by polio and thus cut off from the external world. Also she is a Parsee not belonging to either of the warring communities. Her world is centred on her beloved ayah, a woman whose name is mentioned only once and who is known by her position in the household. Lennie unwittingly betrays the ayah, revealing her whereabouts to the ice candy man who is supposed to be an admirer of ayah, but turns out to be a rapist. For years, Lennie feels guilty for her betrayal of her ayah. We are shown the plight of touched women who are thereafter refused and rejected by their own community and families. Sparrows, we are reminded, peck to death their own chicks if these are touched by human beings. The human is reduced to the non-human. On other hand, the mother and godmother of Lennie helps the victims to escape thus showing both feminine and human solidarity. Cracking India is an account of the creation to independent states written in blood on the bodies of helpless women who as usual pay for the decisions of their menfolk. The second Partition novel review discussed here is Pinjar by Amrita Pritam (the word pinjar means both cage and skeleton). The story actually begins about a decade before the partition. Purro is a 15-year-old Hindu girl, promised in marriage. She is abducted by Rasid, a young Muslim. He is in love with her and there is also the motive of revenge. A girl from his family had been abducted by a
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man from her family years ago. We see how women are used as pawns in the masculine game of honour and revenge. Purro escapes and goes back home but her parents refuse to accept her. Purro returns to Rasid and marries him, starting a new life as Hamida. She loves her husband and son, even while harbouring bitter memories in her heart. When the holocaust of the Partition breaks out Purro saves the sister of the Hindu boy to whom she had been betrothed and sends her home. Again we see feminine solidarity and the building of a new community on the ruins of the old one. Subramanian quotes the well-known book by Urvashi Butalia The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, which presents among other things womens narrations in the context of the Punjab Partition (Jasodhara Bagchi and Subharajan Dasgupta had edited a similar book in the context of divided Bengal). Butalia showed how India and Pakistan united to rescue abducted women even when they had accepted their new homes and situations for whatever reasons. The state was to decide the fate of women whom earlier they had failed to protect. Power and Tyranny Tehmina Durrani, the author of Kufr (blasphemy), was a woman who made as well as recorded history to some extent. She was the wife of Mustafa Khar, a signicant politician, the governor of Punjab, once known as the Lion of the Punjab. Subramanian declares that Durrani is well known for her beauty and wordless endurance of her husbands abuse. But actually Durrani was an active ghter, not simply a passive victim. She campaigned against the military government of Pakistan and was known as the lioness. As a political militant in her own right, she shared her husbands long political exile and helped obtain his release from prison. Yet, ironically she was forced to divorce him. Her autobiography My Feudal Lord makes for a fascinating reading. So does her novel Kufr mentioned here. The novel is allegedly based on actual events in southern Punjab. Heer, a pretty
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happy teenager, is married off to a saint thrice her age. The saint Pir Sai is a monster of tyranny, lust and perversion. Heer remains in painful bondage to her husband for a quarter of a century, doubling as veiled wife and porn star, according to his whim. The pir is eventually killed by one of the women of the household but even this does not give Heer freedom. Her surviving son (the other had succumbed to the cruelty of the father) blocks her way as the new pir. It is not clear how she exactly escapes. Does she simply die or does she stage her own death somehow and return to the lover of her youth Ranjha? (Heer and Ranjha are the legendary lovers of Punjabi folklore.) Here too there might be an element of magic realism. But what is the signicance of blasphemy? Is the account given by Heer a piece of blasphemy or can the kind of life the pir leads be considered blasphemous? Are those rebelling against him jehadis (holy warriors)? What is to be noted in My Feudal Lord and Kufr is the perfect union between state power and personal tyranny. Mustafa remains the feudal lord, even when in his political exile or in prison. The pir is a petty sovereign wielding complete power over his immediate circle, religious power extending to political power. State violence and domestic violence mingled. It is a gendered state that we confront. Yet the real release of Durrani and magical conclusion of Heer end both books on a positive note. Lack of Empathy The public and private spheres likewise mingled in Hajar Churashir Maa (The mother of thousand and eighty four). Mahashweta Devi is not only one of the greatest ction writers of Bengali language, but a radical social and political activist. The reviewed novel is in Bengali though Subramanian has obviously read it in Hindi translation. The heroine Sujata, a housewife in a wealthy family, is not subject to physical abuse. But her husband is unfaithful to her and neglects her. Three of her four children side with their father. Broti, her younger son, is the only member of the family to whom Sujata is emotionally close. He joined
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the revolutionary Naxalite movement, which spread like wildre through West Bengal and some other parts in India in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Subramanian is mistaken in calling it merely a student movement. Actually students and other middle class young people went among the peasants and tried to organise an agrarian revolution. Broti is killed in the process. The rest of the family cares little, except for the blow to the prestige, but Sujatas world becomes dark. While the family is giving a luxurious party, oblivious of the fact that it is Brotis birthday, Sujata collapses and dies. The theme of memory and mourning which we have seen elsewhere in the book is apparent here. Sujata is attacked on two levels; domestic callousness, lack of empathy and indirectly through the state violence inicted on her beloved son. There is another aspect of the novel which Subramanian perhaps ignores. Sujata tries to establish rapport with the mother of a friend of Broti who had died at the same time. But the two bereaved mothers despite their common

grief cannot come together. The difference in their class backgrounds overshadows feminine and maternal solidarity. However, we do see violence through the eyes of women, particularly mothers. They recall Mothers of the Disappeared, from Kashmir to Latin America. Mridula Gargs Kathgulab (Woodrose) deals with multiple characters and coalition building. The novel is related through the voices of ve characters: Smita, Marianne, Narmada, Aseem and Vipin. Smita, herself a victim of familial abuse, becomes a counsellor in a shelter in Chicago for women suffering from domestic violence. Another counsellor, Marianne, the American woman, narrates the story. Her husband has stolen her ideas but ironically she gains fame superior to his. Smita connects with Narmada, a domestic worker of her sister. Narmada, the victim of poverty, abuse and forced marriage to her brother-in-law, becomes a student of Darjan Bibi, who runs a tailoring establishment. Subramanian compares these efforts to the building of a feminine community in Paradise. In

both cases the gender bonds cut across nations and communities. Bazari Women Prostitutes are perhaps the greatest and most visible victims of patriarchy and class system. Literature in almost all south Asian languages is rich in this theme. There are high-end courtesans, skilled in poetry, music and dancing with a wealthy and cultural clientele. Umrao Jan Ada, an Urdu novel and its lm adaptation, are about such a real life character. On the other hand, there are the more common denizens from this world exploited and victimised. The state criminalises their profession, without offering them an alternative. An example of such a picture is Mohandas Nemishrais Aaj Bazar Band Hai (the market is closed today). Women are wares of this market. The hero, Sumeet, is a journalist in a dalit newspaper, though his own caste is unclear. Indeed, the novel follows the pattern of dalit resistance ction. Sumeet befriends a group of prostitutes, reorients

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their lives and eventually marries one of them. There is a long tradition of male feminists from John Stuart Mill to Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Vidyasagar, even to some extent, Gandhiji. Yet, Subramanian seems to feel the masculine role of the hero lessens the feminine discourse.

Moreover, as she points out correctly, there is an element of wish fullment about the ending. The women are rescued without being offered any economic alternative. Subramanian has offered a brilliant analysis of eight novels, cutting across culture and history backed by a wealth

of illustrations and references from various disciplines. It is a good way to ght guerrilla war from what she calls the trenches of patriarchy.
Sudeshna Chakravarti (sceng@caluniv.ac.in) is with the Department of English, Calcutta University, Kolkata.

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