Setting Traps for Light is a debut collection of poems by Giti Chandra which is illuminated and irradiated by her unique and multifaceted artistry. She is a writer, poet, painter and musician. She is also an academic– in all quite a tall order. As is to be expected given her remarkable gifts, her writing is both luminous and beautiful.
In literary interviews hosted by cultural platforms like Platform Magazine, Chandra shared that the title originated from her hobby of using her mobile phone camera to capture how light hitting ordinary everyday objects completely transforms them. The title — Setting Traps for Light — acts as a luminous metaphor for discovering and working towardscourage, hope, and resilience in the middle of personal grief, political trauma, and climate anxieties.
Many of these anxieties, of migration and change — climate and otherwise — are refracted obliquely through her poetry. Events that have been relegated to the background of consciousness, surface suddenly, often unexpectedly. Chandra’s verses often act as a prism, refracting the everyday, the mundane to bursts of sudden illumination. For instance, in ‘Ode to the Ordinary’, she celebrates the “unwashed beauty of the Ordinary day, the unnoticed, unapplauded/ Transcience of the repetitively mundane/The ubiquitously profane/Say it now in romantic rhyme/The ordinary is the Skylark of our time.”
Here is an instance of turning the everyday into the sublime, elevating the quotidian, the seemingly trivial into a polished gem. In a beautiful illustration of the individual talent constructing and honing a poetic tradition, she expresses her gratitude to her poetic predecessors, interlacing their phrases into the fabric, the warp and the weft of her own poetry:
A month of poems ends With a day dedicated to labour. A month that began With a day dedicated to Fools. Therein lies, perhaps, a metaphor Requiring another set of tools.
References to Yeats, T.S.Eliot, Shakespeare are strewn across the poem. Similarly, she alludes to Ghalib and Faiz, Ludhianvi and Mira who “solder and weld the self and creation.” She continues:
But of all the names and works of hands Those of you, all banded here Are closest to the bone. You stand Together and walk the way From All Fools to Labour Day.
Replete with scriptural echoes, the poem becomes a poetic manifesto of sorts attesting to the hard work, the perspiration that is welded in the smithy of the poet’s soul and is then acknowledged and recognised as genius. By bringing in references to Yeats’s hammer and Eliot’s chisel, poetry is apprehended as something material that brings together both inspiration and perspiration. Fleeting moments are honed to enduring monuments alchemising the transcient and the evanescent into something more lasting and profound, something rich and strange.
The fact that Chandra is an artist par excellence is evident in the strong visual imagery and metaphors that inform her poetry. The fact that she is a trained musician is also expressed in the mellifluous cadences of her verse, in the rise and fall of words, in the rhythms and segues of free and blank verse. The fact that she is an brilliant scholar /student with a keen and perceptive eye, is attested to by the evocative title of her first poetry collection, which has been a while in the making.
Even though she understands the temptations and potential risk of resorting to Romantic conceit, Chandra soldiers on to write her experiences of climate change and crisis, the unimaginable misery of the long walk home that characterised the movement of migrant labour in India in 2020 when the Covid crisis unfolded. The poet here becomes a witness, a chronicler of critical events as she poignantly narrates the death of a twelve-year-old boy. Elsewhere, she writes of the paradox and the “irony that we /Fight for air.” There is a reference to George Floyd who had a “knee on neck, face down/Grit on cheek, no breath to speak,/No bed to sleep on, etherised/In our castles, safe in locked/Towns.” The use of the word “etherised” had been immortalised by T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Chandra has used it to suggest the numbness of contemporary civilisation in a state of crisis.
Chandra’s poetry opens up vast vistas and redefines the poet’s function-of playing witness, of chronicling change, treading oft-trod paths anew. Some poems also offer social commentary like ‘Simple Rhymes for Difficult Times’. In a series of apparently innocuous lines, the poet writes:
“Peace be in your streets/ Let no neighbour inspect/Your larder for its meats./Let no man suspect/Your daughter of eyeing/Mates of other castes./Peace be in your markets/As people shop between fasts”. The reference leads inescapably to the current trends of food vigilantism. It evocatively explores loosening and binding, movement and migration, loss and desolation. A running theme is that of courage[1] , on which there are thematic and tonal variations.
In the poem ‘Love in the Time of Climate Change’, there are not only a Arnold’s poignant lines from Dover Beach: “Ah love,let us be true /To one another,” but also echoes and resonances from Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’. Contemporary anxieties and concerns meld with eternal verities and create a delectable smorgasbord of emotions: ‘‘Our love shall be a raft, fuelled /By no heat, in a world bent on burning. /Deserts and dry continents are no grounds/ For deserting. We shall find our feet/To a love of no returning.” The brilliance of these lines lie not just in the skillful use of enjambment and caesura, but the deft summing of the lyrical tradition.
The central metaphor of “setting traps for light” acts as an active, deliberate pursuit of hope, beauty, and clarity. Instead of waiting for illumination to arrive passively, the poet argues that one must construct “traps”—through memory, art, and close observation—to capture fleeting moments of joy and truth. With her transnational themes and multiple and extended locations, Chandra’s poetry truly seems to inhabit a borderless world.
The collection ends with a reminder that poetry is a commitment and an act of faith. In the penultimate poem, ‘When You Run Out of Words’: “Poets/ have said that you should speak/Because your lips, your tongue/Are free and the truth lives still.” Further, she insists that “all/Shall not be well/Till you are well.”
The brave new world of Chandra’s poetry involves integrity and truth telling. While musings on death and mutability are profoundly present in her debut collection of poems, the tone is not necessarily despairing. Somber and meditative, lyrical and reflective, the poems make us think, even as they transport us into a delightful realm and an enchanted forest of words.
Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory. Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.
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In Conversation with Teresa Rehman about Bulletproof : A Journalist’s Notebook on Reporting Conflict(Penguin Random House)and a bit about the book…
Teresa Rehman
Bulletproof: A Journalist’s Notebook on Reporting Conflict by Teresa Rehman is not a new book but it’s a unique one. It is an evergreen narrative of a woman’s journey to empower herself given a wholistic family set up. Set in the northeast of India, it’s a chronicle of people who were willing to die for their beliefs. Many were young men, university students and yet they picked up guns. They just seemed to be on the wrong side of events. It makes you wonder what made them into who they were?
Rehman covers stories of women and children impacted by the conflict, the border politics with neighbouring countries, the lack of sanitation in these regions and the lack of safety and security. And perhaps, given the times, we need to read her story to figure out how history treats those that do not comply with governance for her book largely covers the ULFA (United Liberation Front of Asom) separatist movement that started in 1979. It had been dubbed an insurgent organisation in the 1990s, and then the ULFA softened its stance in the 2000s. In a way their suffering humanises militants as people who just happen to be on the wrong side of governance. She also covers stories of poachers and environmental issues. The pathos of their condition and stories are heart wrenching. What does come across is that the northeast was and continues a neglected region that cries out for funds and development, while retaining the colours of its own culture and values.
Bulletproof continues relevant raising not just issues in the northeast regions of India but also asks you to rethink many concepts … including media reporting, what can lead to PTSD and what is acceptable. It reverberates with questions that were raised later by Afsar Mohammed’s Remaking History:1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad. Can one person’s dream be another’s nightmare? It has ideas that echo concerns thrown up in Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. Did all of the people living within the borders drawn by the colonials want to integrate under a single government? Was that their dream? Is the idea of a single polity inclusive and tolerant of diversities and differences? And much more… So, who is this Teresa Rehman who wrote this evergreen classic?
Teresa Rehman is an award-winning journalist based in North-east India, known for her quiet grit and matter-of-fact approach to stories. She has worked for years toward bringing the different facets of the region, its diversity and distinct ethos to mainstream media. Teresa’s work in journalism spans through India Today, Telegraph and Tehelka before she decided to put in all her resources into launching The Thumb Print e-magazine that she edits currently. She has managed to bring in the gender perspective to her stories. A recipient of the WASH Media Awards 2009-2010, Teresa also won the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award for two consecutive years – 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 for the category: Reporting on J&K and the North-east. Her keen eye for the gender angle showed through stories. And she bagged honours such as Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitivity 2011, Sanskriti Award 2009 for Excellence in Journalism and the Seventh Sarojini Naidu Prize 2007 for Best Reporting on Panchayati Raj by Hunger Project. She is known for her unassuming persistence on getting the details, and sensitivity. She was featured in the Power List of Femina magazine in 2012. She has written a clutch of books, The Mothers of Manipur (Zubaan Books) and Bulletproof (Penguin Random House India) are among them. She is the Treasurer of the Editors Guild of India.
These are Rehman’s achievements, but who is she really? What made her turn to reporting insurgency, an unusual choice for a woman journalist in the 1990 and early 2000s? Rehman has stepped beyond the pages of the book to share a bit about herself in this exclusive online interview.
Why did you opt to become a journalist? Tell us a bit about Teresa, the young girl.
I often tell people that I did not choose journalism but journalism chose me. With infectious enthusiasm, my mother carefully collected an array of books, magazines, coins, stamps – neatly packed and stored in old tin boxes of chocolates and cookies. As a child, my aunt recalls that I was quiet, courteous and a well-behaved girl. I used to immerse myself in my mother’s erratic accumulation of books, journals and magazines. I used to sit in a corner and browse through them though I couldn’t wrap my head around most of it. It was the pre-internet era in the 1980s and my parents encouraged us to read and write. I am a first-generation journalist and that makes me the only black sheep of the family. I did not have too many friends and was rather awkward in social gatherings. I would rather sit in a quiet corner and simply browse through old issues of the Illustrated Weekly of India, Reader’s Digest, Femina, Women’s Era, Savvy, Target (a magazine for young adults), Wisdom etc. My mother used to subscribe to these magazines. This curiosity and the childhood fantasy of imagining myself in those bylines gradually made me write for the children’s pages in the local newspapers. I remember writing in longhand, going to the post-office, and posting my articles to the editors of the local newspapers. And I used to be elated when they were published. It had almost turned me into a child celebrity. And this recognition thrilled me.
And this childhood zeal unknowingly turned into a passion for journalism. After my graduation in English Literature from Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi, it almost seemed natural for me to enrol for a course in journalism. And I picked up the basics of journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC)in Delhi. Thereafter, there was no looking back. Starting my career as a trainee journalist with the India Today magazine in Delhi, I got an opportunity to work with some of the best editors of the country . However, I found that desk job was too tedious. I longed to be on the field and report from the ground. Thereafter, I had to shift base from Delhi to Guwahati due to my mother’s ill-health. Back in Guwahati, I joined the northeast bureau of The Telegraph newspaper and handled the Features desk. Thereafter, I joined as the Principal Correspondent for Tehelka magazine where I got an opportunity to travel to nook and corner of the region and report hardcore conflict.
You were in the middle of gunfights in Bulletproof. Why did you call your book as such when it shared much about gun violence?
The title of the book, ‘Bulletproof’ has an interesting story. At a conference of women journalists from South Asia, I was at a session on reporting conflict. As the discussion flowed, the moderator asked me, ‘Do you wear a bulletproof jacket when you go reporting?’ This simple question rattled me. I had been reporting hardcore conflict from one of the most insurgency ravaged regions of the world. It was a region that had witnessed several decades of violence and bloodshed. Reporting from such a region has a fear factor that is real. There were occasions when I was nearly ambushed while I was on the ground reporting. I was unaware that bulletproof jackets existed for journalists reporting from a conflict zone. I got to know about a drill called the Hostile Environment and First Aid Training (HEFAT), a training programme for journalists working for international media outlets. So, when I had decided to write a memoir about my reporting experiences, I decided to call it ‘Bulletproof’ in the sense that we journalists reporting from northeast India are bulletproof. We go to the field with just a pen, notebook, mobile phone (now) and our intuition to guide us. We go unprepared for all the physical as well as psychological hazards that journalists have to face while reporting conflict. As I was one of the few women journalists reporting hardcore conflict and a low-intensity war, Bulletproof is a first-of-its-kind account and a story of a female combat journalist and her encounters with insurgency from northeast India.
What pushed you into reporting about communities living in the margins, even militants?
Most people who live in mainland India know very little about the northeast, beyond maybe a handful of facts, stereotypes or broad generalisations.The region is often ghettoised as a monolith. When you report from a conflict zone like Northeast India, it is imperative that you report on conflict and its various implications. Reporting from the periphery has its pitfalls. It was not a choice but a compulsion. An editor of a national media outlet had, in fact, even told me that conflict sells though northeast India does not sell. Once I got into reporting hardcore conflict and could meet several militant leaders, I got an opportunity to understand the nuances of conflict from close quarters. I tried to comprehend what made a boy barely out of his teens to grab the AK 47. I could drift into the lives of women and children who are the collateral victims in any kind of conflict situation. Going beyond mere statistics, of deaths and arms recovered, and other documentary evidence, it shows us how conflict impacts women, children, health, environment, sanitation, wildlife and society. This book is a collection of rare human stories from one of the most under-reported regions in the world.
Your book demystified militants. Did you feel scared meeting them? What was your reaction? Why did they never attack you?
A chapter in my book is titled ‘Militants turned Mediapersons’. The publicity wing of any militant group is one of the most important wings. Therefore, they would welcome journalists visiting them. They understood the power of the media therefore they were willing to provide any kind of information and guidance to a journalist eager to report on them. Though most of them were awkward while meeting a female journalist like me. Conflict reporting seems very masculine – full of stories of artillery, statistics, guns, weapons, soldiers, militants, peace talks, and often dry press releases. The sub-plots, the stories of the common people, especially of women and children, are often unaccounted for. More so, a woman consistently reporting hardcore conflict from the region is unheard of. I was young and restless to get my story. Therefore, I persisted.
What makes militants different from the mainstream? How and why did such people resort to violence?
The people who took up arms for a ‘cause’ did it for various reasons – ideological, social, cultural. They are also termed as non-state actors who sometimes run a parallel administration along with the state government. Some people may resent their presence but for many of their own community, they are also local heroes. It’s just a matter of what lens you use to look at them.
You sometimes took your children along for the interviews. Were you not apprehensive of how they would impact your children? Did they ever harm you, your children or your family? Elaborate on why.
My children were part of my life. I remember my elder daughter accompanying me when I had gone to meet the poachers. She quietly sat with me. On one occasion she was engrossed playing with the children of the village. In fact, after I had reported on the fake encounter in Manipur, I was grilled by various investigating agencies including the CBI, SIT and the Judicial Commission. I was expecting my second child then. I had difficulty walking up the stairs when I had gone to the CBI office in Guwahati. I had sought recuse from being called to Imphal, the capital of Manipur because I was getting veiled threats from various quarters. My girls grew up seeing their absent-minded mother who had at times forgotten to change their diapers as she was busy filing a story from her laptop.
How are people living in the margins different from mainstream?
People are the same everywhere. It’s just the difference in resources and basic amenities, roads, communication etc that makes it difficult for them. For instance, many parts of the northeast are still inaccessible because of the difficult geographical terrain. Most parts are still pristine, untouched by the ugly face of development. However, the prolonged conflict and the low-intensity war has taken a toll in the minds and hearts of the people.
Can the marginalised be integrated into the mainstream? Explain your stance.
It depends on what you perceive as the mainstream and what is the margin. And is integration even needed? Connectivity and linkages are important in terms of basic amenities and resources, while preserving diversity. But I would prefer inclusive development over forced integration. Unity in diversity is an ideal situation.
Were you scared or apprehensive while reporting on them?
Reporting from a conflict zone has a fear factor that is real. I would be lying if I said that I did not get scared while I was on the field. I was aware of the risks I was taking on. But I never went prepared. I was armed only with my pen, notebook and my intuition. I simply assumed that I would be safe and if anything went wrong, I might have to think of ways to wriggle my way out. A safety gear or bulletproof jacket did not exist for me. It’s not that I was oblivious to the fact that all over the world female journalists are killed, assaulted, threatened and defamed. In fact, it was much later that I learnt that, in order to help women journalists stay safe in unsafe regions, International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) provides the much-needed Hostile Environment and First-Aid Training (HEFAT). In HEFAT courses, journalists participate in both classroom-based learning and real-life scenarios that simulate situations that journalists may encounter in the field. I had personally encountered some of these situations like emergency first-aid, digital security, personal security, civil unrest, emotional care, and checkpoint navigation. But I went without any training or briefing. And I was oblivious of my own safety — both physical and mental. I was young and passionate. And getting the story right was all that mattered.
What was your most memorable experience?
In a positive sense, I have had the opportunity to travel to remote parts of Northeast India and report on the lives of common men, women and children. I was pained by how the long-pronged conflict impacted lives. However, the stories of conflict that I had tried to report with empathy and a deeper understanding that, in turn, showed me the humane side of hostility.
Did this reporting have an impact on you? On your family? How did you tackle it?
Yes, as every other human being,I was affected by the trauma caused by reporting conflict. In fact, I had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after all that I had to go through after my reportage on the fake encounter in Manipur. I had become irritable and angry on witnessing the aftermath that led to a civil uprising in the state. It was a lonely battle for me. This is why I have been advocating for the physical and mental safety of journalists.
Did your being a woman make a difference?
I often tell people that you can either be a good journalist or a bad journalist. But, in reality your gender does come into play, especially when you are reporting from the margins, a conflict zone and a difficult geographical terrain. Being a woman in a conflict zone is fraught with dangers and that includes sexual assault. I often carried pepper spray (which I never had to use), in my grab bag. Moreover, there are practical problems like lack of toilets for women on the field and even in the workplace. Most media houses that survive on contractual workers do not have provisions of maternity leave for their female employees. There are many women who have to drop-out midway at the peak of their career as they have to engage themselves in childbearing and rearing. There is a need for a support system like a creche, for instance for working journalists, both men and women.
What would be your advice for young journalists?
I believe that journalists will come and journalists will go. More so, the mediums of delivering news are changing with the fast-evolving technology. The newsrooms have evolved from being confined to a structured building to the knapsack of a journalist who is now equipped with a mobile phone, popularly known as a mojo. With the rise of digital tools, almost everyone is transformed into a content communicator or a publisher now. This has blurred the lines between personal interaction and public content creation.
However, the cardinal principles of truth and objectivity of an upright shoe-leather journalist will stand the test of time. The fundamental values and ethics of storytelling remain timeless, acting as a crucial, enduring, and non-negotiable tool for human connection, empathy, and truth-telling, even as mediums adapt to the digital age.
Teresa Rehman
(This review and online interview by email is by Mitali Chakravarty)
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“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” blared from the speakers of the Museum precinct. Two sanitation workers, minding their own business, walked down the hallway. In front of them, stood a giant plasma screen. Flashing dots of electronic lights, with the label under it curiously marked as ‘Humans, Earth-616’.
The Ancient Antiquities of Maldamore was winding down for the evening, its holographic exhibits dimming as the automated systems prepared for closure. The older sanitation worker glanced at the young recruit, curiosity softening her weathered features. “How will you get home on your first day?” she asked. The younger worker replied with a confident smile, “I’ll catch the inverted monorail at six.” After a brief, awkward pause, she extended her hand and added, “I’m Zendo. How long have you been here?” Renda chuckled softly, her eyes reflecting years of memories etched into the museum’s hallways. “Thirty Maldamorian years,” she said, her face tinted with a bit of pride and weariness.
Both of them chit-chatted for a while before wrapping up. The twin suns of Glasterboros crept above the horizon, painting the cityscape of Maldamore in shades of lilac crimson and molten gold. Towers of crystallised ferroglass caught the light, scattering brilliant rainbows that danced across the airways. The High Council in a rare moment of unity had passed bill on universal healthcare six Maldamorian years ago. Since then, Maldamorians live up to 250 years of age, an extension of average lifespan by at least a hundred years. However, beneath such reforms the Maldamorians were stuck in a never-ending cycle of consumption and labour.
The colossal plasma display pulsed with unending streams of shifting dots—two distinct panels, one radiating red light, the other one radiating blue. The lights seemed busy – lost in their own dance, sometimes, drawing closer as if attracted to each other, only to repel because of an inherent tension. The museum had witnessed generations of visitors, young awestruck schoolchildren, astronauts delivering keynote addresses, and on non-busy days, couples strolling hand in hand lost in their own orbits.
Once while working, Zendo asked Renda, “What are these dots of lights flashing? Who were these aliens called hoomans?”
Renda burst out laughing and corrected her, “Humans! Those were humans, you didn’t hear stories about their extinction?”
A quite frightened Zendo shook her head. “Let’s head over to the canteen in break time.” Both of them sipped their herbal syrups.
Renda began her tale, her voice laced with a mix of fascination and disbelief. “There was once a planet called Earth—now designated Earth-616. Life once thrived there, or so the archives claim. It existed in a galaxy far removed from ours and was home to a species known as humans. Unlike our unified society, their planet was fractured—divided into countless races and ethnicities, perpetually at odds with one another. Greed consumed them,” she continued, her tone growing somber. “Can you imagine? Those so-called doctors of science say they exploited their own mother planet to the brink of ruin. They tore apart the very world that gave them life.”
“And…. what about those lights? What exactly do they mean?” a visibly shook Zendo asked. “Well, legend has it,” continued Renda, who felt like an academic don now, “that our astronauts reached about a Maldamorian millennia later after the Earth-616 had perished. The astronauts only found a couple of capsules with recordings in the dead parched lands which looked like as if it had bled a thousand times. Though I must admit, they found escape launch-sites too, so maybe some of those humans might have survived. Who knows?”
Zendo, shifting uneasily, asked, “So… what are those lights?”
Renda, her voice tinged with a mixture of pride and reverence, replied, “We couldn’t decipher their language, couldn’t comprehend their words. So, our scientists transmuted their essence into electronic lights, hoping that someday we might finally understand their message. Those lights are, in essence, the ‘After-Lives’ of those aliens—every memory, every fragment of pain, suffering, and joy, preserved and immortalised. They’ve achieved a kind of eternity, encoded in light. How many of us can claim to be that fortunate, don’t you think?”
The bell signaled the end of their break, and they returned to the endless cycle of what is often called ‘life.’
Abhik Ganguly is a poet, writer, and scholar-practitioner. He’s from Santiniketan, Bengal. Currently, he’s a Junior Research Fellow pursuing his PhD at the University of Delhi.
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Radha Chakravarty is a writer, critic and translator and has now added poetry to her already considerable oeuvre. Her achievements as an academic are impressive. She has co-edited The Essential Tagore and edited Shades of Difference: Selected Writings of Rabindranath Tagore (Social Science Press, 2015). She is the author of Feminism and Contemporary Women Writers (Routledge, 2008) and Novelist Tagore: Gender and Modernity in Selected Texts (Routledge, 2013). She has translated a wide range of literary works by Rabindranath Tagore and works by Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Mahasweta Devi. She has edited Bodymaps: Stories by South Asian Women and co-edited Writing Feminism: South Asian Voices and Writing Freedom: South Asian Voices. She has published poetry widely online and in print.
Professor Chakravarty’s second book of poems, In Your Eyes A River, brings together poems which evoke both real, travelled to and imagined worlds, aiming to bracket and highlight traces of the extraordinary within the ordinary aspects of human experience. They demonstrate a keen and keenly documented awareness of the profound realities that lie beneath the fabric of our daily lives.
The poems in In Your Eyes A River are replete with memories and infused with traces of nostalgia. Particularly moving is the seemingly autobiographical poem about her father, the titular poem: You never left Shyamsiddhi./In your heart you carried a home, / in your eyes a river, in the soles of your feet,/ the swing and shift of a bamboo sanko,/ narrow bridge of precarious crossings/…..the lost ground of your birth,/forsaken foundations of your fast-transforming self, the absent source of mine.”The poem moves towards a sense of closure as she writes: “I stand face to face with your impossible story,/ and find at last the missing opening lines of mine.” The poem is suffused by a sense of nostalgia for a place hardly visited except through the act of imaginative recreation, the mind’s eye.
Some of the poems in this collection demonstrate the poet’s experimentation with some short haiku-like forms and even single-word lines occasionally to create a sharper focus and emphasis. A lot of poems are ample evidence of her meticulous attention to details of the art and craft of poetry. Thus her poem, ‘Blue Gold’ on indigo not only unfolds not only contrapuntally[1] but also encapsulates within itself the dark history of colonialism, slave labour and human suffering.
One poem which particularly resonated with me is about the slowing down of the frenetic pace of life, presumably after years of active service: “no setting the alarm for crack of dawn/no scanning the TV for breaking news /no boiling water for morning tea/ no opening curtains, shaking out sheets/no tidying, dusting, cleaning up/no ironing creases, putting out trash/no catching the train, no rushing to work,/no chasing the tight deadline/no putting on a public mask/to face the measuring gaze.” By the next stanza, the idea of change between two different phases of life acquires an existential dimension. In a changed routine, the poetic persona finds herself moulting and changing, facing and acknowledging her ever changing, unpredictable self, “the mutating stranger that is me.”
In yet another poem, the poetic persona assumes the voice of a renowned female scholar from ancient India, Gargi ,who “thirsts to know” about the “weave of life and the warp that holds all forms of being,/ from the remotest realms of abstract divinity to the limit of human knowing ” muses about posing “the impossible question.”
The figure of the transgressive, rebellious and recalcitrant woman who breaks the mould re-appears in the next poem as well. It draws from a women’s retelling of the Ramayana, that poses a counter narrative to dominant narratives of the epic. In this powerfully and poignantly reimagined poem, ‘Another Story’, the poet draws on the narrative of the 16th century poet Chandrabati, who “questions the unquestionable”, thereby interrogating the hegemonic narrative of Valmiki and the Tulsidas Ramayana. The story narrated by Chandrabati centres around the figure of Sita, telling the reader about Sita’s miraculous birth and later story, instead. Sita’s story is not for “the men in royal courts” “but a “folk song for women in six brief parts.” a song which “shuns the epic scale.” In this version of the epic, Rama is not a divine hero, but a fallible man and a “jealous husband.” Chandrabati’s narrative questions where heroism really lies, whether in warfare and violence or the sustenance of everyday life. Moreover, even if women’s voices have been erased from history, there are women’s songs where “my version of Sita’s story lives on.” Chandrabati’s “unfinished song” also arouses the “critics’ ire” who dismiss it as a fragment, since the male critics police the boundaries of the literary establishment and often become (self-appointed) custodians of it.
Additionally, there are poems of tourism and travel, some of them set in Italy. Tourist spots are visited and reflected on, often providing fuel to fire the imagination. From sunrise in the hills of Kanchenjunga to her visit to Darjeeling, to the volcanoes of Etna and Vesuvius, are all skilfully assimilated into Chakravarty’s poetry.
Chakravarty’s poetic persona is also a witness to history and its outrages. In the poem ‘Wounded Walls’, “scarred walls remember the shots/that brought down the dead.” Yet, it does not “quite go as planned” since a the past resurfaces as a commemorative “unwelcome ghost” who rises from the dead to “haunt the present with/undead questions.” Elsewhere, the poetic persona , battle scarred but resilient, documents “lingering inscriptions/on memory’s skin”, of “battles fought/wounds that healed.” Questions pertinent to the present time are raised as in the poem ‘Ceasefire’: “If captives walk free, will our hearts still/hold us hostage in wild tunnels of hate? If bombs stop dropping, will the shrapnel/of memory vanish, from festering wounds? If the bloodbath halts, will it staunch the grief/that oozes from hearts lately bereaved?”
Sensitively written and meticulously crafted, Radha Chakravarty’s collection of poems is sure to resonate with all those who have struggled, suffered loss and displacement. Her poems help define that which is essentially and indubitably human, in the middle of climate chaos and war, tumult and change. Attentive to history and mindful of its excesses, the poems assert a vision of sanity and of shared humanity, much needed at this point when the global order has descended into chaos and seems to be teetering on the verge of immeasurable destruction.
[1] A contrapuntal poem is one which can be read individually and together, vertically or horizontally simultaneously as a single harmonious or dissonant piece.
Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory. Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.
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Whose story are we recounting when we attempt to narrate history? An unexamined acceptance of anthropocentric biases have placed man at the centre of historical narratives and historical accounts. The time has come when this assumption of man’s centrality is being challenged and overturned. Both posthumanism, a concept that directly challenges man’s centrality and planetarism[1], which sees the interconnectedness of the natural, animal and human, have displaced the human entity from its position of unquestioned and unquestionable centrality.
Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel, Ghost Eye(2025), made one go back to the earlier novels in the series with a similar cast of characters, Gun Island (2029) and The Hungry Tide (2004). Like many of his other novels, these works also encapsulate the themes that Ghosh communicates with increasing urgency in successive novels-climate change and man’s hubris which has catapulted mankind into an increasing tailspin hurtling towards ecological disaster.
In Gun Island, Ghosh asks a whole series of questions which make us look at history differently. What if history is understood through the lens of migrations and mass movement or natural disasters, through unexpected bird migrations, beaching of dolphins and the shifting movement of oceanic boundaries? Is there a pattern to extraordinary events, coincidences or are they a matter of pure chance? Is time always linear? What if temporality works in loops? What happens when we are faced by recurrences and presentiments?
What if we review and revisualise history not as bounded by national boundaries but a more fluid and flowing substance — water, seas and water bodies? Some contemporary books like Oceanic Histories (2017)offers the first comprehensive account of world history focused not on the land but viewed through the seventy per cent of the Earth’s surface covered by water. Tracing the histories and the historiographies of the various oceanic regions, the book highlights the links between human and non-human history and the connections and comparisons between parts of the World Ocean. If history is a set of geo-political narratives centred around land and its acquisition, why can’t we have histories of waterways? As a life-giving but also potentially destructive substance, water occupies a prominent place in the imagination. At the same time, water issues are among the most troubling ecological and social concerns of our time.
Water is often studied only as a “resource,” a quantifiable and instrumentalised substance. Thinking with Water instead invites readers to consider how water — with its potent symbolic power, its familiarity, and its unique physical and chemical properties — is a lively collaborator in our ways of knowing and acting. What emerges is both a rich opportunity to encourage more thoughtful environmental engagement and a challenge to common oppositions between nature and culture.
Thinking about history brings me to women’s history and the issue of international women’s day, which falls on March 8th. While the question of women’s day maybe a matter of individual opinion, the question maybe rephrased as “do we need a woman’s day” or “why do we need a woman’s day”at all?
Do we need it as a kind of affirmative action? Given the historic lack of a level playing field, it is perhaps a reparative action? Or is it a needed inclusive action, that reflects changes in social policy? Much as we would like to think along positive lines about women’s development and empowerment, the picture across the world is a grim one.
For those who feel that everyday is women’s day, we could perhaps recall the broader historical context. The IWD originated from early 20th-century labour and suffrage movements in North America and Europe, demanding better pay, shorter working hours and better working conditions.
Ideally , women and girls should have equal rights under the law, rendering them safe from violence, with rights to access education, livelihoods, resources, and justice on equal terms. When these rights are realised, the impact extends far beyond individual women and girls to their families, communities, and society as a whole. Research shows that gender equality delivers better outcomes across economies, health systems, peace processes, and democratic resilience. In this context, 8th March provides an occasion to recall how far we have come. It is also a necessary reminder of how far we still have to travel in order to ensure that women and other oppressed minorities get their fair share on earth, rather than direct their eyes to heaven.
It may seem a form of tokenism to earmark one day out of 365 days in the calendar as women’s day, but at least it’s a beginning where we could begin to reassess how much we take women’s roles as caregivers and nurturers for granted. Many descriptions of women are couched in a familiar vocabulary which views women as daughters ,wives and mothers, who are the backbone of the family, pillars of society, the glue that binds communities to each other and models of resilience and endurance. Yet this idioms of approbation do not protect women from harassment, abuse and gendered violence of many kinds; in Catherine McKinnon’s words, they are rendered less than human. When we begin to recognise women as human beings with agency, legitimate claimants of human rights and deserving gender parity and justice, we will probably not need International Women’s Day.
In 1906…Current day Afghanistan From Public Domain
[1] A new subject that deals with the health of the planet
Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory. Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.
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Title: The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta
Author: Anuradha Marwah
Publisher: Rupa Publications
Anuradha Marwah’s debut novel, The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta, republished by more than thirty years after its original publication, is a delightful read. It is a trailblazer and a pioneer in more ways than one-an Indian campus novel before the campus novel became identified as a genre; and a frank exploration of female sexuality without the usual humbug and euphemisms associated with the treatment of sex in many 20th century novels.
It scores in other respects as well-its recreation of small-town ennui before the internet took over our lives, in the middle of a hot summer is a feeling we recognise well. Time moved slowly, people still read books and families still conversed with each other, albeit in the most cliched terms. However, the novel’s tone is not nostalgic, and does not “invite readers into a sepia-tinted past.” (Authors Note)
When the novel opens, we see Geetika whose outlook and family context is quite at variance with the majority of people around her. We cannot imagine her settling into middle-class bourgeois domesticity with her ‘boyfriend’ or otherwise. The slow pace of life and limited options available in Desertwadi make it a claustrophobic trap for someone like Geetika, who is ready to embark on her adventures, both intellectual and sexual. Her experiments in both directions is a sort of liminal phase before she embarks upon the next stage of her life.
The author has hit the right mixture of irony, tongue-in-cheek humour and social satire. Her social satire pierces particularly deep, albeit at the risk of occasionally falling back on stereotypes. This is strongest in the case of the typical small-town aunty, Andy’s mother. Andy, her son, who is attempting to court Geetika, can barely get anything said (or done!) without his mother butting into the conversation or walking into his room. Dalpat Singh is another such character, a corrupt small town sports official who has considerable clout and fully exploits his position in whatever way possible. Geetika realises that “Dalpatji was a reality I could not accept. He did not care if the Indian team won or lost; he only cared about the requisite number of scotch bottles that had to be presented to a journalist in order to get good coverage in the papers.”
Drawing on an undertow of real events like the mega sports hosted by India, ASIAD in 1982, the novel stays moored to recognisable places and times. Sometimes, it almost seems like a ‘roman a clef,’ a novel where real events and people appear with fictitious and invented names. The author has explored the nooks and crannies of the two cities, Delhi (Lutyenabad) and Ajmer (Desertwadi) in intimate detail, the claustrophobia of small town existence and the fraught ‘freedoms’ of the big city which breeds its own threats and insecurities. Double standards of morality and the double binds of gender are both in evidence in the novel. Geeti’s friend, Vinita, gets married to a NRI who while being sexually experienced himself, wants a ‘pure’ Indian wife. Vinita is comfortable with her new husband’s sexual exploits before marriage: she did not mind as it was “all before marriage and men will be men-if girls were game, one couldn’t expect them to be saints.” The double bind of gender is evident in Geetika’s careworn mother. A working woman who is also engaged in social work, Geetika also observes how she has to do the heavy lifting when the domestic help is on leave.
Many aspects this coming of age story seems particularly prescient for a novel that was first published in 1993. Its primary concerns — the stifling and limited choices of life particularly for girls in small-town India, its frank and unabashed exploration of sexuality, narrated in a sassy and unapologetic way make it seem like a fitting story of twenty-first century India. The book accurately captures the inner conflicts of a young woman caught between a society where even progressive parents are limited by the paucity of available options and the narrowness of societal expectations. Geetika inhabits a society that veers between conservatism and a kind of progressive hypocrisy. On a quest to expand the contours of her world, she learns that there are no easy choices and the seemingly viable options of settling into bourgeois domesticity, albeit self-chosen, would clip her wings and disable her from self-realisation. This realisation hits her when she is already into the relationship. Some of the fault lines in the relationship between Geetika and her boyfriend, Ratish, are evident from the beginning. From his conservative perspective, feminism is a problematic term. On being asked about his mother, he declares that she is not a hysterical feminist. For him, a woman’s primary duty is to make herself available and agreeable and be a good mother and wife, and any other aspiration is dismissed as a feminist excess.
Geetika realises that her curiosity and quest for freedom have led her up a slippery slope and this book is about the incremental costs of chasing one’s dreams. The book ends on a somewhat sombre notes with Geetika giving up on dreams of middle class marriage which would severely limit her choices. The unconventional and difficult choices she makes also demonstrate the influence of feminist staff rooms where many women– colleagues and associates — have made difficult and unconventional choices. In their company, Geetika realises that she has let herself drift into a relationship which would negate any exercise of agency on her part. It is in part, her recovery of her intellectual freedom to think and write authentically that constitutes her higher education.
The novel also offers us a social satire of ‘higher education’ in the premier institutions of Lutyenabad, replete with references to Capital University and Jana University. This is an insider joke with barely veiled references to actual universities in Delhi. Further, the academic pretensions of many academics who unleash fancy theories, which they have barely grasp themselves, on their hapless research students, are called out. Literary references pepper the text where Roland Barthes’s essay “Striptease”, a masterpiece of structuralist criticism, actually refers to a stripping of Geetika’s professor of her pretensions of having been at Sorbonne .
The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta is a sharp, accurate, searing and witty coming of age story, a bildungsroman, which is unabashed in its honesty about an ambitious young woman’s journey to self-realisation. To quote from the Author’s Note, “Geetika, my outspoken protagonist, questioned and challenged, and the issues she grappled with are by no means resolved till date.” She continues, “Young people continue to face similar dilemmas: career or family, feminism or femininity, love or rebellion.” Geetika’s story is still relevant and contemporaneous, ”adding the heft of history to present-day conversations on marriage and partnership.” It’s a coming of age story that resonates far and wide into the twenty-first century.
Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory. Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.
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About the Book: “The deafening silence of a loved one’s absence turns the poet into the eternal Ma enduring separation. Swati Pal’s poetry also straddles the particular to the universal theme of grief and loss and symbolically suggests compassionate ways of healing the pain … Swati Pal’s Forever Yours and Other Poems holds ajar that mysterious door to the panorama of a mother’s love, loss, grief and hope. Her poems will resonate beyond her individual story.” — Prof. Malashri Lal (Former Head, Dept of English, University of Delhi)
About the Author: Swati Pal, Professor and Principal, Janki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi, is a Fulbright-Nehru fellowship scholar, a Charles Wallace scholar and the first Asian scholar to receive the John McGrath Theatre Studies Scholarship at Edinburgh University. Author of several books on theatre, creative and academic writing, her newspaper articles articulate her views on education. Her areas of research interest include performance studies and cultural history. She translates from Hindi to English and several of her translations have been published. She writes poetry and her poems appear in several anthologies; she also has two collections entitled In Absentia and Forever yours and a curated collection called Living On. She is the Vice Chair of the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies and has been the recipient of several national and international awards, both as a teacher as well as an administrator.
Contours of Him: Poems has been edited and introduced by Malachi Edwin Vethamani, a Malyasian academic of repute. The book has a rich assemblage of poetical voices — from both men and women — representing the contours and nuances of the many aspects and shades of masculinity. The poems explore the male body as a symbol of identity, art, and humanity, delving into themes of masculinity, strength, vulnerability, and beauty. It also examines the male body and psyche as the site of hurt and wounding. The book features poems that scrutinise the male form revealing or concealing it to explore these themes.
The focus on corporeality or the somatic coexists with the psychological in many poems in the anthology. Childhood innocence and curiosity coexist and yield to what could be viewed as growing pains or the challenges of maturation and understanding. There are several poems on the father-son theme, with poems that express homage to the father. Christina Yin’s prose poem ‘To My Father’ and Gopal Lahiri’s ‘My Ideal Man’ are cases in point. Sudeep Sen in the poem, ‘Baba/Father’, captures the enormous vacuum left by the loss of the father as Sen completes the elaborate death rituals as the eldest son of his dead father, performed as per brahminical prescriptions. In a gnomic and nuanced vein, Vethamani , the editor of the anthology, gives his take on father-son intimacies.
This book examines the contours of the male body and psyche at different stages of life and could be viewed as a psycho-somatic exploration of masculinity across diverse cultures. It also explores the strength and fragility of the male physique, occasionally dipping into cultural repertoires of male archetypes, human and divine. At the same time, it acknowledges societal expectations from men and their concomitant cultural insecurities, particularly regarding their identity and the search for acceptance.
A common motif in many of the poems is about the unwitting and unwillingly borne burden and baggage of masculinity. The protagonists/personae of many of these poems seem to be conscious that masculinity is but a performance, involving the display of muscles and embodying a certain swag. Yet this definition of and expectation from men within patriarchies, can be a cage and straitjacket which binds, restricts and confines the human being. If patriarchies bind women, men are not exempt from it either. It is this theme that resonates(among others) in Angshuman Kar’s poem called ‘Tears’: “When mountains cry, rivers are born/From a woman’s tears, pearls have always been born/And when mothers cry, dormant volcanoes awaken…No one in the world knows/why a strong man cries/or why, when he does/he looks so sacred and beautiful.”
The predominant focus, however, is on corporeality that has led to the exploration of its many aspects of the body in the poems. The many facets locates the male body along a spectrum of materiality, vulnerability, relationality and the transcendental possibilities of the body. In recent years, there have been a plethora of poems by women discussing corporeality in multiple registers, exploring female subjectivity, desire and sexuality. Focus on the psychosomatic aspects of the gendered body has led to numerous explorations and analyses of femininity, on being/becoming women, on trans-identities. Many poems have been written on the human-divine aspect of the female body. Kamala Das and others (including Pakistani women poets) have written evocatively about the transgressive desires and the many hungers of the female body .
Voices from the global south recording the voices of men was perhaps the need of the moment. The anthology includes a few poems on masculinity as a construct, especially focusing on the male body through various lenses — vulnerability, performance, shame, violence, and transformation. These poems offer a critical lens rather than idealising masculinity, exposing its social constructions and internal contradictions. They also highlight the relational nature of masculinity which are often traditionally embedded within family structures in South Asia. There are glimpses of guilt in Arthur Neong’s poem, “At this juncture of age, I feel like a teenager again,” where the persona/speaker seems keen to shed and slough off the burdens of masculinity and be in an escapist mode. He writes “At times I go to my wife for a little reprieve/Yet eyes open, think of ways to cheat”. Some of the poems read like love poems, like David C.E. Tneh’s poem, ‘Crossings’, that memorialises his dead friend. Tneh writes: “between the shared spaces and/ private moments come a synergy of collective memories/that I have of you.”
A writer writing on the female body once referred to it as a story discussed by men. Similarly, the anthology at hand discusses the contours of male corporeality and affect. The anxieties of masculinity, of literally not measuring up, pepper these poems and forms one of the vital themes of this anthology. Occasionally, a kind of narcissism creeps in, often giving way to musing or self-introspection. After voicing the common masculine concerns(and anxieties) of corporeal self-consciousness, the poet Kiriti Sengupta declares:
“I don’t look at veiled people anymore. It is either my age or my hormones. I now look beyond the flesh, bone and keratin.”
In the last revelatory line, there is a movement towards transcendence: “I have been told /the finer body dwells undressed.”
In a different context but similar vein, Sandeep Kumar Mishra in ‘The Canvas of Form’ writes, “The naked body, stripped of all pretence,/Breathes honesty, raw beauty, fragile strength.” The profundity of the closing lines is inescapable: “The body, bared, is neither shame nor pride/But speaks of histories, of fears ,of love. It tells of burdens carried, joys embraced/And in its stillness, whispers human truth.”
Much canonical poetry, including that of the famed icon of modernist poetry, T.S.Eliot, writing a century ago, display a preoccupation with masculine anxieties in his iconic ‘The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock’. The effete personae/protagonist , immortalised in the eponymous poem, Felix Cheong writes of ‘Middling Age’ that it’s “So unbecoming to have become so old? You’d sooner wear the ends of your frailty rolled”, lines echoing T.S.Eliot’s The Love Song of Alfred J Prufock, “I will wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”
From Justin Baldoni’s Man Enough to Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, there are many coming of age stories in our cultural landscape-on book lists and bestseller lists. While the sociology of sex and gender has long been a part of sociology and social psychology, the growth and development of a field of knowledge –gender studies– in the last four decades or so, has thrown into relief the fact that if femininity is a construct, so is masculinity.
Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory. Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.
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The translation published by Shambhabi The Third Eye in 2022
Published in 1868, Manottoma: Dukkhini Sati Charit (Manottama: Narrative of a Sorrowful Wife) the first novel written by an unnamed Bengali woman identifying herself as ‘A Woman belonging to the Hindu Lineage’, which is technically not a pseudonym, has been translated by Professor Somdatta Mandal and published recently in 2022. Somehow evading the attention of literary historians, the text, or any detailed information about it was unavailable for a long time till it was unearthed by a researcher in London only in 2010. In the foreword to the translated novel, Prof Rosinka Chaudhuri points out that the year 1868 was only a decade after the introduction of the main genres of modern Bengali literature: the modern novel, poetry and drama. This was a time of revision and reinvention, of recasting selves and literary forms and genres.
Manottama narrates the sufferings of a educated and long-suffering wife who labours under the petty punishments meted out to her by her uneducated husband, depicting the conflict between patriarchal expectations and prescriptions and women’s education and presumably, agency. The eponymous novel depicts a situation where Manottama, an educated woman, is married to an uneducated husband. Because of the latter’s profligate ways, she is subjected to penury and untold hardships, which she seems to accept without demur.
The narrator of Manottama claims it’s a ‘history’. Cast in a dialogic format as a conversation between two friends, Jadhav and Madhav, (a common format in its time) the novel, in one interpretation, tells us about the pitfalls of female education in the nineteenth century, a period that also saw the emancipation of Bengali women through education in a significant way. Written in the traditional Indian Puranic style of narration, with plenty of sub-plots and digressions and without conforming to the western dictates of unity of time, place, and action, it provides a domestic picture where an educated wife has to compromise with the activities and worldview of an uneducated husband. At one level of interpretation, it seems to be an attack on patriarchy. As an early narrative by an anonymous woman, the work needs — and in a way, demands — greater attention now after more than a century of neglect in order to reinterpret and reconfigure its didacticism and question its meek acceptance of status quo.
Can we accord this work the status of a novel? Also is there a way in which we can unpack the didacticism of the text and pave the way to a subversive reading of patriarchies?
In showcasing a woman who seems to meekly accept her lot in life without complaint, the intention purportedly was to show the benefits of education and how an educated woman navigates her destiny. There are many instances of rampant social injustices in the text. The husband’s profligacy, his marrying a second time and frittering away family fortunes — all these are accepted by the protagonist, Manottama, in a spirit of apparent equanimity. She seems to accept the social injustices meted out to her meekly, without demur or protest. She obeys and serves her father during his visit and continues to perform her conjugal and domestic duties vis-a-vis her undeserving husband. If anything, she continues in her endeavour to instruct her children and the children of the quarrelsome second wife. No complaint against marital injustices pass her lips, even when her father expresses concern over the indigent condition of the household. Her behaviour is ideal in every respect and she is upheld as a paragon.
“Manottama” in Bangla can be translated into someone with a superior mind or soul and the protagonist named as such fits the bill. She keeps quiet about her individual woes while trying to ensure the well-being of the whole family.
The novel shows the impact of the many instruction manuals and advice/conduct books that were plentifully available at the time and herein lies part of the problem of the book as a novel. For one, there is no attempt to depict the inner thoughts of the protagonist. She at times seems like a cardboard cutout, a compendium of all the virtues extolled by patriarchs and paternalists in 19th century Bengal and India. She is a stereotype and seems almost a parodic version of the ’good woman’ who sacrifices self-interest at all times. Whether this narrative qualifies/succeeds as a novel is something which has to be decided by the reader .She embodies the ‘patibrata’ or the devoted wife, a kind of woman who helps in the salvation of the husband and nation. To quote a writer at the end of the 19th century:
The Patibrata wife is the road to liberty and mobility of man. If the women of India follow the footsteps of Sita and Savitri, then this fallen country will be the blessed land again. (Chandranath Basu, Bagchi 85)
The discovery of this text forms a story by itself and is a precious nugget as it was located in the British library relatively recently, in 2010. The significance of this text is also that it is a woman’s voice addressing other women, advising them with a strong didactic intent. As readers, we can only speculate that the writer intends this homily as a form of advocacy to women that they should not abandon their traditions and customs, but use their education in order to better themselves, and devote themselves to serving their husbands.
The narrative in a dialogic style seems like an extended conversation or debate between a proponent of tradition and a spokesperson and modernity. Some of the conversation between Nilabrata, the irresponsible husband, and Manottama, echo aspects of this debate. According to Nilabrata, who is rendered somewhat insecure by his educated wife and voices the biases against women’s education, only foolish men will send their daughters to school in order to train their daughters as prostitutes. “Educating women and showing them the path to go astray are similar,” he asserts.
One is reminded of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s (1838-1894) essay on Prachina o Nobina or “The Traditional Woman and the New Woman”(Woman Old and New, 1879). The debate on whether to educate women were along the contours of conservatism versus progressivism, albeit with shades and finer nuances.We can suppose that the author is in conversation with a conservative perspective which argues against women’s education and where she attempts to demonstrate that tradition and women’s education are not mutually opposed or divergent.
Bengali literature offers many examples of women who were poised on the brink of the paradoxical conundrum of modernity, which made them embrace education and reform without abandoning traditional values. This attempt to recast and position the ‘new’ Indian woman was a pre-emptive gesture to counter the accusation of Westernization and deracination levelled against the reformist attempts to redefine gender roles and relations in late 19th century India.
While one can grasp the discursive aspect of the text, the lack of what we understand or perceive as a natural human response on Manottama’s part to any of her husband’s actions — misdemeanours, follies or vices — leave us feeling deeply dissatisfied. If the novel as a form shows the interactions of the individual with other individuals or with society, the lack of any credible response from Manottama casts her in the mould of a ‘patibrata’ woman but stifles the text as a novel.
However, if we keep in mind that many great writers novelists from Bengal and elsewhere — Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhayay— have often used the novel as vehicles of ideas, which generate debate both within the world of the novel and in a larger socio-historical context, this novel can surely be counted as a precursor and a prototype of the discursive/social discussion novel in Bengali. As for the other question raised earlier about the possibility of a subversive reading, Manottama by showing the evils besetting patriarchal systems, manages to show the untenable nature of the same and the fact that men like Nilabrata, for all their bravado, are liable to collapse, unless rescued and sustained by sensible wives. In that sense, it hold a lesson for men to marry wisely and recognise the true worth of educated wives, without getting lured either by false friends or duplicitous women.
The book has received a fresh lease of life in the hands of a competent translator and commentator. The foreword similarly draws out the significance of the narrative, placing it in the context of its times and the larger context of Bengali literature. An exploration of its discursive trajectories and varying cartographies adds to the joys of discovering and reading the narrative.
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Meenakshi Malhotrais a Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory.
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Mount Parnassus in Greece, where the muses were said to gather, was regarded as the home of poetry: From Public Domain
For the longest time, women were uncomfortable occupants of the house of poesy[1], particularly where there were existing canons of poetry established by the institutional gate-keepers and male custodians of literature. At best, they were viewed as Jane-come-latelies who sought to transgress the hitherto hallowed domains of high verse, interlopers to the hallowed heights of Parnassus who dared not “drink the milk of paradise”.
This ‘absence’ of women from the terrain of poetry is in spite of the fact that women have always written poetry, from ancient times to now. Sappho in the western tradition, was a Grecian poet from 5th-6th century BCE who was the pioneer of lyric poetry, a genre which apart from being set to music, also inaugurated the poetic ‘I’. In India, Buddhist nuns in the Mahayana and Theravadas who wrote poems known as the therigathas were early precursors of female poets. These early women poets engaged in the sometimes forbidden, sometimes lascivious charms of verse and versification. Down the ages, there were many others who joined them and kept the lamp of women’s versification lit. However, if women have always been versifiers, why has there been a resistance and grudging admission for women to the poetic domain, which becomes a sort of “No (Wo)man’s land”? Why do women poets have only a token presence in traditional poetic anthologies?
Some reasons have been offered, not least among them being the preponderance of male poets who have often also been self-proclaimed and self-appointed guardians, legatees and arbiters of poetic tradition. Canonical poetic traditions, many claim, require a knowledge and understanding of Latin and Greek in the West while a knowledge of Sanskrit/Persian in the Asian context was deemed necessary. Thus women, who, for the most part, lacked formal education and had but small Latin and less Greek, could only hover around the margins and fringes of poetry. The situation with Sanskrit and Persian was similar and women remained mostly absent from or shadowy denizens of poetic terrains. Even if and when women were writing, they were doing so in colloquial registers and in the languages of the common people and not in formal or decorative language, deemed essential for poetry, for the most part. Almost the first group of women writing poetry in India were Buddhist nuns who wrote in Pali, one of the many ancient languages in the ancient Indian subcontinent, which enshrined its own scholarly tradition. Sappho wrote in the Greek Aeolic dialect, which was difficult for Latin writers to translate.
Between 12th and 17th century, there was an advent of devotional mystic poetry called “Bhakti” and “Sufi” poetry. While the poems were uttered/written in a devotional idiom, the poems and songs were often rebellious and iconoclastic, rejecting institutional religions and social norms. This poetry was rooted in personal and unmediated devotion and rejected formal languages and established societal norms. Some of this poetry was in an informal register, colloquial language and performative with a strong dramatic quality. Thus we have lines in Kannada from Akka Mahadevi (1130-1160) who rejects her earthly husband:
I love the handsome one: He has no death decay nor form… no end no clan, no land. Take these husbands who die, decay, and feed them to your kitchen fires.(Vachanas)
Women poets for the longest time had a crisis of identity, identification and non-belonging. They laboured under the anxiety of authorship where they felt the absence of precursors and fore-mothers and the lack of a poetic tradition to which they could belong. They were often made to feel as if they lacked genuine poetic talent or that they were transgressors against womanhood and femininity.
In Aurora Leigh (1855) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the eponymous title character, considers the diverse fields of literature where women can exercise their talent and claim a space. The field of dramatic writing poses a challenge because the former demands that the woman writer be in the public eye in order to promote her plays. Further, to achieve or even aspire to the rank of Poet, Aurora must become capable of “widening a large lap of life to hold the world-full woe”. Over the course of the long epic poem, she tries to reconcile her femininity with her artistic aspirations. In both cases, she is denied emotional fulfilment. She refuses to accept the role of an obedient wife, since it would mean foregoing the intellectual independence needed to develop as an artist, but then she must also refuse the love of a husband. In Book Five, she mentions three poets, none of whom she admires for their “popular applause”. Yet she admits that she envies them for the time they can devote to their chosen vocation and the adoring women that surround them and provide emotional support and fill their days with glory.
Another issue with women’s writing and poetry is the uncomfortable positioning of women in relation to patriarchal language or male centred language. If as Dale Spender declares in “Man-made Language”, the masculine is asserted as the norm, where do we position women’s voices? While language is a universal medium of communication, man-made language is full of sexism and chauvinism and expresses reality from a predominantly masculine and patriarchal perspective. If language is a social system which women are persuaded or co-opted to use, how do they work within its confines to express their poetic aspirations? How do they stretch, bend, subvert language to express their own realities? Can we read techniques of irony, satire and other figurative and metaphoric strategies of defiance and subversion and an attempt to undermine from within?
Juliet Mitchell in her essay on ‘Femininity, Narrative and Psychoanalysis’ states that the woman writer/novelist must of necessity be a hysteric, straddling two opposed worlds. One world is that of male definitions and conceptions of femininity and the other, a resistance and defiance of such conceptualising, accompanied by an attempt to undermine from within. Her defiance and resistance makes her character that of a hysteric, one who defies accepted notions and standards of femininity and is therefore considered transgressive. She troubles fixed gender categories, roles and definitions. She also disrupts and challenges the symbolic order of language, one which insists on rules of grammar and linguistic structures through the semiotic order which uses word play, repetitions and childish rhymes, in order to express inner desires and drives. The symbolic order deals with the denotative aspects of language and the semiotic order with the affective aspect.
Women’s poetry often houses and accommodates the semiotic, seeming psychobabble that plays with and disturbs fixed notions of femininity and binary gender identities.
What are the popular themes that inform women’s poetry? Some themes are to with women’s search for authentic self-hood and identity, their search for roots and a space of their own. As we see in Aurora Leigh, much of women’s poetry is self-conscious and self-reflexive, about the act of writing itself, the “awful daring of a moment’s surrender which an age of prudence could never retract.”(T.S.Eliot)
Many contemporary women poets, across continents, have evinced a substantial interest in exploring their poetic self through their poems. On the one hand is the confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, on the other the brief gnomic utterances of Emily Dickinson. Before the advent of the twentieth century, one hears of Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, among many others. Names like Aphra Behn and Anne Bradstreet have been included in many syllabi, often as a token inclusion in an otherwise male centric course.
Women poets have talked about the horrors of war including rape, pillage and destruction. In their critique of war and violence, we find the forging of transnational solidarities, whether it is women’s poetry from Sri Lanka or Birangona (War heroines).
In India the many names that come to mind are that of Kamala Das, Eunice D’Souza, Meena Alexander, Sujata Bhatt and Sunuti Namjoshi. Women poets have employed effective means to explore the entire gamut of experience.The private and the public domain, their process of self-analysis; the process of poetic creativity and a probe into poetic identities are all significant fields of exploration. For these women writers, analysing the creative process becomes much more than just a poetic theme. As they unravel the mystery of their poetic psyche in their writings, it becomes an epiphanic journey for the poets and their readers.
Dr Meenakshi Malhotra is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory. Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.
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