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Literary Review
Not just documentaries
ANYONE interested in history, anthologies, prose styles, ideal introductions, and how to write about women's issues without sounding as if they were running a 100 metre race in ill-fitting gum boots through a field of treacle should read Women's Voices.
Anthologies are like retaining walls in the mountains, full of colour and life at a glance, rewarding on close inspection. Dosebai Jessawalla writes of her first assent (sic) in a balloon (1905), Maharani Chimanbai Gaekwad of Baroda advises women on careers that range from lecturing on hygiene to the illiterate poor to copywriting (1911), Ela Sen reports on the Bengal famine (1944), Vijayalakshmi Pandit recalls the first time she became a minister (1993), and Sucheta Kripalani records her first meeting with Langston Hughes when blacks were still called negroes (1993). Also present here are Pandita Ramabai, Toru Dutt, Anapurna Turkbad, F.K. Patuck, Kitty Shiva Rao, Ruttie Jinnah, Cornelia Sorabji, and many others, some of note, all interesting.
Passionately fond of anthologies myself, I realise that they may be seen as that half-full or half-empty glass supposed to separate optimists from pessimists. The complaining ("yeh kya amputated maal hai") academic looking for complete texts of this and that is bound to be dissatisfied. On the other hand, good anthologies like Women's Voices make available more material than you are likely to find in your local market-driven, full-yet-starved bookshop, a taste of what you could read if it were readily to hand. (The Introduction tells us how difficult it was to find many of these pieces.) A lot of current academic study is based on available data but the database is rarely extended. Consequently, theories feed on previous theories, wearing themselves and our nerves thin. Anthologies have recently become a growing source of new data. The better ones, such as the several representing the work of that part of the early 19th Century known as the Romantic period, are re-shaping academic discipline. One hopes that the de Souza-Pereira effort will be in that class.
Women's Voices can be read for pleasure alone, or for considering the wide range of women's writings (personal letters, letters to editors, letters to friends in jail, reminiscences, columns in newspapers, fiction, exhortations). Some of it, such as F.K. Patuck's account of the Parsi women's association (Re.1 for active members, Rs.2 for those who supported it but could not contribute their labour), is informative, and one sees here room for further research. For instance, was the YWCA the prototype of the Parsi association? Could this line of questioning contribute towards widening the scope of the largely binary post-colonial studies?
I thoroughly enjoyed the contrasting styles that the arrangement enhances. Gaekwad's brisk tight prose is at one extreme, at the other are Vijayalakshmi Pandit's memories of her first day as a minister in 1937. Ms. Pandit seems to have been preoccupied with flower vases and curtains. Dr. S. Muthulakshmi Reddy on her experience as a legislator (1926-1930) is far more interesting because she talks about her work, but then she is not looking back over half a century, and her account is unblurred by age and time.
Sarojini Naidu's letter of May11, 1925, to Jawaharlal Nehru, then in prison, is yet another contrast. On her first holiday since 1921, she rejoices that "every snake (is) shut out from the paradise in the guise of outside cares, responsibilities and duties. Basely but bravely have I deserted my post for a few weeks because my soul needed and cried out for an atmosphere of beauty, burgeoning trees, nesting birds, lyric poets, the children and dogs and old friends and a little leisure from the constructive programme and the self-destructive programme of our so-called politics. I need the change of environment and occupation mentally even more than physically" (pp. 57-58). I have quoted this at length because when a passage refuses to leave my mind, I assume that it is significant. Naidu is not merely exhausted, she is almost envious of Nehru's withdrawal from the world, albeit a forced one, and she seems desperate for a similar retreat from the freedom movement. Could this be a window upon the leadership of the time, bewitched by politics but bothered enough to want to drop it? Politics seems a necessary duty but the ideal is a retreat into luxury. Fatigue and illness caused Naidu's mood, but behind it there seems to lie an odd sense of history as not merely linear — I have no quarrel with that at all — but with a goal which, when achieved, would lead to rest rather than to constant change and adjustment to new goals. It reminds me of our public buildings that are often spectacular engineering feats but which quickly become contemporary ruins since maintenance is not built into the plan.
And so one could expand upon any of these pieces. (There is speculation that Women's Voices was meant as a companion volume to Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's recently published Illustrated History of Indian Literature, which would add another dimension to a study of this collection.
The lucid and informed Introduction, a good reason to own the book, places the individual pieces as well as the collection in historical context. Among the reasons Eunice de Souza gives for the anthology are that it is time to re-assess well-known writers like Toru Dutt and to acknowledge the wide range of attitudes concerning women with regard to education, professions, marriage, franchise, and nationalism. I especially liked the emphasis she gives at the outset to the prose style of the writers:
What this anthology hopes to demonstrate is that in almost every case, these women writers took more than documentary interest in the subject of their writing. The writing is alive. It is observant, sharp. It has an urgency that speaks to the reader very directly (p.xx).
As often, we could learn from the past.
Women's Voices: Selections from Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Indian Writing in English, with an introduction by Eunice de Souza and biographical notes by Lindsay Pereira, OUP, 2002, hardback, p.xii +451, Rs.595.
SHOBHANA BHATTACHARJI
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