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Literary Review
Gendered space
C.S. LAKSHMI
V.S. Naipaul at Neemrana flanked by Vikram Seth (Left) and Amitav Ghosh.
IN the 1980s, whenever we had a meeting or a seminar or a conference to discuss literature, media or anything else and raised gender issues, there would inevitably be an old man in the audience who would sit throughout with an I-am-not-convinced expression. At the end of it, he would proceed to "admonish" us saying that we knew nothing about what we were talking and that certain issues were best left to men. After two decades, it looks like nothing has changed. We still have old men telling us to cut short a paper being presented and saying gender issues are banal to talk about. Some men seem to grow only older and nastier and not wiser. What a banal existence!
Naipaul's comments on banality bring to mind similar incidents in some of which I have been a participant. One such incident happened in Chennai, in the mid-1980s. Many organisations had come together to discuss at length the commercialisation of women in the media. For some reason, the core-organising group had invited a panel which was all male but for one or two women. A film producer and a self-proclaimed supporter of the causes of women, told the women audience assembled there that they should just bother about widow remarriage and inter-caste marriage and things similar; more complicated matters like economic exploitation and commercialisation, must be left to men to ponder about. He said in Tamil, "These things are beyond you. Stick to what you can easily understand." Maybe out of a sense of politeness which Tamil women must observe, the audience did not get angry.
The meeting was about to proceed with some male writers who had excelled in writing sex into everything they wrote except articles on religion which they wrote under a different name, trying to tell us what commercialisation was all about. A few of us intervened and succeeded in stopping some of them from talking. Some of us who stood up holding posters expressing our protest were told that this was not a political meeting and that we should behave ourselves. A woman came up to me and told me that I should understand why men write in a particular way. Mentioning the particular writer against whom I was holding up a poster, she told me, "He can't help writing that way. He has five sisters to be married." So the fate of five unmarried sisters had driven a man to write gutter literature, which he really did not want to write. May be to atone for this sin, he was writing articles on religion under another name. It was a very complicated logic and no wonder the film-producer was telling us that people like us who recognised exploitation and wanted to combat it directly, did not quite belong.
Recently, Selvy Thiruchandran from the Women's Education and Research Centre at Colombo has brought out a slim volume entitled, Subjectivities and Historicism, which is about women's writing in Sri Lanka. She presents in her introduction a letter written by a man in the Ceylon Daily News of April 10, 1999. The author of the letter, S. Marimuthu, talks about several book-releasing ceremonies he has attended and he proceeds to make a few comments and observations. He says that the authors of the books, who were all men unfailingly spoke about the support given by their wives. In fact, one of the speakers was talking about women's contribution to literature in terms of the support given by them to their husbands. Another speaker said that the mere fact that women do not make themselves a nuisance is also a positive contribution. According to Marimuthu, he did not define the term nuisance.
After attending some such book-release functions, Marimuthu wanted to find out about women writers. A well-known writer told him that women hardly write after marriage. He spoke with some women writers, who told him that it is extremely difficult to write after marriage, the main reason being lack of support from the husbands. With no help in the household work from the husbands, many women, if they are also working women, give up creative work altogether. At the one book release function which Marimuthu attended of a woman writer, the writer did not turn up because her child was ill. Also, she had written the book before marriage, when she was a student.
For Tamil male writers who give interviews saying that their wives not only prepare tea for them and keep it in a flask but get up in the night to pour out the tea in a cup and give it to them (and probably wash the cup and keep it ready for the next round of tea-drinking) all this must seem like unnecessary details but these details are important not to judge literature but to understand its history. How a woman creates the space for her writing in her life and creates a space for her writing in the literary world is a history that has to be recorded not in order to be able to appreciate literature but in order to understand the act of creativity.
There is still a general misconception that when women write, they write about their narrow world and that when men write they write about the world in general. A good friend of mine who was also my publisher at one time, wrote on the blurb of my book that my stories were about women's lives. There were many stories in the collection which did not quite fit into this description. He called them experimental stories. When this was pointed out, he made amends in the next edition but some interesting discussions took place meanwhile. I explained that stories by men where the protagonists were only male were not considered stories about men's lives; nor were the stories they wrote with women protagonists considered stories about women's lives. What men wrote was of universal nature and women could only deal with the particular.
It is possible that those who have no need for such reflections will consider elaborating on the act of writing banal. Maybe it is not enough if such men wrote about a thousand mutinies; they need to face a thousand mutinies.
C.S. Lakshmi is an independent researcher and a writer. She writes in Tamil under the pseudonym Ambai. She is the founder-trustee and director of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Researches on Women).
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