rains ...rains ..n more rains...i hope my writing shall be excused here on the account of rains , if at all. by the way, did it snow in shimla as yet ! ( i m asking 20 since he is most potent recipient n most likely to reply ..lol) whats happening guys. (rest of us ?)anything to share about the coming year. i guess, we r past that point where the new year 2011 or 2068 makes any difference to us. We shall get up lousily, or may even leave our teeth unbrushed, skip the bath even for it is far too cold, n might continue to wear the same old dress we wore yesterday to bed. ( since most of us r having holidays, so it might be that u ve the same set of clothes which u put on quite some time back..hehe ) so nothing new anywhere..same old house n family to greet, same bed to get up from n same chores to do, same smiles to fake , similar fb activity, status updates n friend requests..hah !..and even for those, who might have partied the umpteenth time , ended up fully turbo boozed, coming home late at night, n Forcibly snuggled into bed, with maybe one shoe hanging unceremoniously on ur toe..whats new guys..nothing is new ...but for this change on the Julean Calender which pokes out on ur face..I M the new year...u r such a loser..why don't u get up n ring up some of ur friends n relatives or in some really sick old way , greet ur 'undesirables' through sms...or maybe leave a lines or two on orkut or fb..so this new year sucks as all the other years.. except forthose , who r expecting kids ! i remember even while at school, how much i hated those guys who sucked up in front of TV to usher into the year..this wishing new year sucks all the more guys. Let me recall a small anecdote from dharampur. Now this dharampur is a small place with hardly any sizeable crowd. shops r numbered. hang-outs not in the imagination of natives. Most people have their ideas of a party in daaru n meat. there r five raw meat selling butcher shops in the distance of 100 mts, with the 'bakra' ( excuse me jerry, this was unavoidable !) hanging upside down on a peg n only the tuft of his tail visible on the top of a while clothwrap. The villagae cum town folks simpletons. Of ourse, i love the place for its laid-back lifestyle n accomodation rent ( 700rs for a two room set !) n of course, rustic rural peace. But i could not have been left without the stung of modernity. This nasty business of wishing Happy New Year n stuff. So, there is little thin emaciated nieghbour i have, very pale and very nasal in voice,whose husband is JE around . This poor creature is very bashful, reserved and n i have never talked to her before in my life. So on the morning of 25th , i m still there waiting for the vacation to start. Its a holiday.I move from the stairs to the slab of my room to enjoy some sun, with a book in hand , in my trek n cap. She hears my footsteps or something n i hear the creaking of her door. " Happy Christmas Bhaiji" she goes before her husband butts in ," kya lagi ri bolna Happy ni Merry christma hoan". I move on to the roof n i throw my novel away ,laughing at this absurdity which westernisation has brought upon.

Emerging Selfhood: A Study of the Narrative by women writers in South Asia

Theory and Practice

Amit Sharma Asstt Prof in English Literature G C Dharampur, Dt Mandi.

1

At the outset, I should hold forth a barrage of questions which underline the representation by women in colonial and postcolonial literature, especially in South Asia.

What would constitute a true and honest representation of South-Asian women? (1) In this postmodern age of high capitalism, is there any space for the incorporation and recovery of the mystic and the irrational? Can any neat literary boundary exist which can celebrate the locus of ‘South Asian women writers’ ! Is not the tag itself a marginalizing tendency. Is not the third world feminism being cloaked disparagingly in rather ambiguous regional terms ?How does the European Orientalist discourse analysis as problemitised by Edward Said , Homi Bhabha, Spivak and other postcolonial critics, give, or rather not give us the voice of truth? Can any counter-narrative dethrone the hegemony of this dominant discourse? Can it communicate the truth of the subcontinent and adjoining nation states in question? And lastly, but most important is the question posed by the Subaltern Historians group and Spivak (2); can the colonized have both the subject and agency on their own to communicate ‘their’ historical truth? Or is it, just to feign sympathy with third world narratives, that the high table of postcolonial theory looks eastward which, at best, are exotica but never mainstream.

Now, let me come to the problematic of ‘emerging selfhood’. Does it mean that before the intervention of Western Academy in the third world literature, the selfhood was relegated, at best, as embryonic or even primitive. It existed in some ‘other’ ostracized dark corner. Western feminist attitude is poignantly similar to the white man’s burden, where the civilizing mission is the euphemism for the most heinous intellectual suppression. Ironically, It is now , when any effort at the investigation of this selfhood is subjected, that it needs be theorized in some new red hot emergence. This high capitalistic tendency commodifies all women writing in South Asia as exotic. It also fraternizes with the Western dominant models of assimilating and appropriating the third world literature by women writers. The notion of ‘emerging selfhood’ in case of women writing is a case of aporia. Firstly, it tries to disfigure and mutilate the selfhood as seen in Eastern philosophy as something which is ‘mythical’ , ‘irrational’ or ‘intangible’ since Eastern philosophies are ‘primitive’. Secondly, after the denial of any space to articulate the axiom of participation, it loads the third world feminism with the burden of oppression. Oppression which is no less ideological as it is derogatory by positing a selfhood which has to emerge. Like an exotic flower in wilderness that must be brought to be manicured, and then marketed, in the city garden !

The very notion of selfhood is contestable because it can be seen as necessary for mechanics of advanced capitalism to function. Edward E Sampson has debated that this theorization of selfhood creates racial, sexual and national divides and does not allow for observation of the self-in-other and other-in-self (Sampson :2008). Nicholas Rose has argued on the heterogeneity not being a temporary condition but the inescapable outcome of the discursive processes through which the self is socially constructed ( Nicholas Rose: 1998).She goes on to argue that this psychological projection of the selfhood functions as technology which as a result, dupes humans into buying an invented and arguably false sense of self. Rose has demonstrated further how this sense of freedom resulting from the fabricated selfhood assists governments and exploitation. This seminar unfortunately addresses the issue only partially. That the third-world literature is not only tagged as ‘South-Asian’ , but also that the heterogeneity of this complexity is masked by simplifying nature of the women’s question, in terms of selfhood only. It is ironically neocolonialist. What kind of emergence of selfhood is being asked to be narrativised here. The ontological or the genealogical ? It must be differentiated that this selfhood has only started emerging once its sibling ( which is the prototype Western Feminism )has attained maturity and now tottering on margins of overblown superfluity or decadence. That , these western paradigms, which enforce the evaluation of this feminine self, must necessarily, in absentia, spawn the discussion of this selfhood, is questionable and it marginalizes the awareness of South Asian women in regard to their self which can be better understood in the cultural and materialistic codifications of their own experiences and philosophy. This is the reason why M.Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty propose a theory of ‘transnational sisterhood’ in place of global sisterhood which defines all women’s knowledge in narrow terms of white, western middle-class women’s experiences. ( M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty : 1997)

Unfortunately, such marginalizing tendencies are becoming unavoidable where literature by third world women is either fetish /exotica or, at the most ,subaltern but never mainstream, since feminist themes in the West have dried up due to democratic innuendos and marketing complusions . Postmodern high capitalism dictates the tangential direction and agency of such insidious neo-colonialism. Arundhati Roy’s winning of the Booker Prize is culminated only when her narrative successfully puts exoticisms of rural India to a generalization-hungry Western Academy. Elsewhere, this cultural dominance is exerted by the so-called imperialistic center by awarding another Booker to India-bashing by Arvind Adiga in The White Tiger. It is a predicament that all the recent award-winners in English literature might be seen to represent an India which never really existed or which is fabricated and twisted enough so as to salivate the politically famished palate of the Western Academy.

How any articulation of selfhood is possible when it is bereft of its assimilating cultural and material paraphernalia. Mukhtaar Mai succeeds only when an individualism driven western feminism lauds it. It needs to be investigated why the liberation of Mukhtaar Mai comes via France. Does it need to be said that it is effected mainly because the western feminism finds it as a fodder to fuel its canonization of feminist individual selfhood. The phenomenality of Tasleema Nasreen’s narrative not only rests on her anti-foundantionalist repressive stance against Islam but also because the western academy must have some similar examples of third-world to glorify. Only when that the third world exhibits some isolated examples of this feminist paranoia , that the struggle for feminism is said to have started. The master narrative of western feminist thought demands compliance with its high table where it is the final arbitrar of any meaning. Anything deviant is taken to be the prototype and thereby controversies are masqueraded as the face of truth. The sheer multitude at the site of feminist struggle is lost thought of, and the selfhood which thus comes to be glamorized in literary circles, is ,in fact ,just a façade of Pandora’s box. The real issue lies much beneath, and can only be investigated in respect to its cultural and symbolic fields where it stems from. Circumspection from the dominant modes of feminist thought might result in a transitory euphoria but they are all the more detrimental to its final solutions.

II

Now, I come to the question of narrative. Narratives could also be used as effective vehicles of theory, and even ancillaries to offer resistance to, if not completely overturn, the theory over which the patriarchy and white race appear to exercise complete power, control and hegemony. It’s my opinion that such attempts to create counter-discourses should be taken more seriously than they often are. Interrogation is not marginal but central to the task on hand. Very often, the invocation of South Asian in recent western critical theory alludes to mark the limitations of western knowledge. Such rhetorical positions always portray the South-Asian women subjects as pitiable, mute objects of western representation who are denuded of culture, language and history. This depiction of non-western subjects at the unrepresentable limits of knowledge may guard against the utopian claims of political programmes such as Marxism or national independence, which claim to represent the interests of disempowered or oppressed groups(Stephen Morton :2003). Then , any narrative which seeks to represent the selfhood has a double bind to unravel. At first, it must dethrone the hegemony of the grand historicism mired in patriarchy. Secondly, it should snatch its true voice and tenor from its empathizers who speak for women. To put succinctly, any real validation of selfhood in the narratives by women writers can only be accomplished if it breaks from the canonical methodology. It is in this light that I propose to examine River of Fire by Qurratlain Haider.

River of Fire by Qurratlain Hyder was originally written as aag ka dariya in Urdu in 1968 but translated into English by Haider nearly four decades later in 1998.The narrative here contests the protection, assault ,abduction and recovery of the selves. How they figure in nationalistic discourse or the grandiloquent master narrative is vital to understanding the history and its implications for the present. This following section seeks to explore the heterogeneous tendencies of this novel which works against , parallel to and as a supplement to the emergence of a selfhood. This selfhood, it must be noted, in not constructed in the codes of psychoanalytic theory and on the notions of western Marxist feminism. The episodic grand design of Haider convolutes the notion of temporal reality as immanent in representing history. It also brings to the fore the disconnectedness, fragmentation , discontinuity and ruptures in the writing of history. There are other small spaces where myths, irrationality , poetry, dream, ghost and even notions of God which are incorporated in the main narrative. These act not as ancillary to the main narrative but question the crucial limits of history and selfhood. She, in her unique effort produces a intermingling of manifold narratives in multitudinal epistemologies.

In the literary panorama of this novel, the princes relinquish their thrones and beautiful women, and they are more determined in the investigation of eternal and intellectual pursuits. There is a vast canvas which encapsulates 2500 years and touches upon the lives of renouncers, intellectuals, painters , musicians and traders. There is a deliberate lack of any ‘hero’ in the story.The women are characterized with their preoccupation of mundane pleasures. They are waiting for their husbands to return from extraordinary pursuits. They bear their sorrow in eerily beautiful ways. Overall, River of Fire tells a story of the struggle for idealism where the characters continue to straddle the path of idealism despite the repercussions of history. This also underlines the most important theme of such an epic work : the individual versus history or selfhood versus representation. Besides the feminist undertones , this work also becomes the oblique voice of all the people who have suffered endlessly under a process of history. It articulates the issue of a brutalization by the colonial rule which ended up splitting the outer as well as the inner landscape of South Asia and its inhabitants.

The novel’s episodic structure jumps over centuries and while the first pages talk about 4^th century BC , after omission of a thousand years, it moves into fifteenth century. This is the first tool which Haider employs in respect to the formation of a historical selfhood. Where history is coherent, consistent and complete, River of Fire intentionally ignores all these fundamental qualities and relies on discontinuity and incoherence to startle the reader out of one’s brutal normalization of accepting history as a linear progression. The self is juxtaposed with fluidity of history. In fact, River of Fire has the lack of a single protagonist and a single coherent story. It presents the reader with four similar stories where links between the stories are more mythical than historical. The first story takes place after 150 years of Buddha’s death. The next in the Mughal period and then late-colonial and postcolonial episodes follow. Thus , the total span of this narrative is roughly 2500 years which also hints at the Buddhist prophecies of avatar. The novel employs recurring names throughout the narrative which suggests the circular sense of time . ( it must be noted that such naming technique is also used by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Hundred Years of Solitude but here, with the epic dimensions of temporality, they serve greater mythical purpose)This is also complicated because the stories from the four periods are essentially similar. It is one story which happens four times with slight differences. It is a simple story about separation of lovers, loneliness and relations between men and women. By being similar , these stories also posit the universality of human nature in suffering and also the circular nature of time.

There is a great achievement which Haider manages to unfold as the narrative progresses. Of course, it is a narrative which is preoccupied with history, historiography and the subversion of the dominant Marxist way of deciphering it. In other words, Western historiography is inverted by Haider’s narrative by her deliberate use of the mythic, supernatural and the irrational. Some sort of intervention by God is also implied in the narrative. That these supernatural powers had agency to decide and direct the process of history. Partha Chatterjee links this to the Puranic history. He goes on to say that this was the form of historical memory prevalent among Bengali literati at that time( 3).With the British rule and modernization, history entered in its modern form , and it was no longer a “play of divine will” but merely a “struggle for power”( 4). Thus , mythical stories might be exonerated from a modern scientific viewpoint but they do have a very important cultural episteme of a community. It can be said that although mythical story is a supplement to history, but it gives to history what history itself cannot preserve. These mythical stories can also be seen as providing the other to the self of history.

Women in this novel trace the trajectory of their selfhood in a fluid Eastern epistemology. It also becomes significant that Haider’s narrative exhibits a compliance with the accepted role of women in third world societies, long before French feminism awoke to the possibility of revolt against patriarchy and canonization. The women in this novel are significant in terms of the theme of this novel. Haider brings her female characters in the foreground of her narrative in such a way that their very presence enhances the meanings of the novel in a remarkable way. As usual, men are the real agents and subjects of the history and its important ‘macro-events’. Women, as any western feminist observer might put it, are the victims and observers of this history. Haider underscores what women add to history. She makes a conscious attempt to read the history of the Indian subcontinent through its women. As Jasbir Jain suggests, that here is a conscious effort towards ‘feminization of history’.(5)

She not only inserts women in small spaces like that of Razia Sultan, but also that she does is through the obscure travelogue of Kamaluddin. Haider wants to tell about the stories of the women about whom the world knows little :

I marveled at this woman who knew how to rule over the vast empire and a people who belonged to a very different religion and were generally hostile to Turks. She belonged to theTurko-Iranian tradition of the female monarchs, though the world knows little of them. (pp. 61-62)(6)

Kamaluddin also scribbles the story of the second queen, Bibi Raji, who places a musician son on the throne in place of a despotic one. She also intervenes in thwarting an attempt to dethrone the just prince. These women who play some part in River of Fire change the course of the realm where real history takes place. Even when they don’t have any real political say, they challenge the patriarchal male-centered history by standing for alternative views and sensibilities. Bano is another such woman who prefers music, art and aesthetics to war and the statecraft. Not only Bano, but other women in this novel like Champak, Nirmala, Champavati, Sujata and many others represent the alternative domain. Hyder brings to the fore that women ideas are otherworldy ideas about worldly matters. Haider’s narrative places them as alternative, and not colliding as it is with the Western Feminism where the other can not be reconciled in self.

There is yet another different yet extremely important aspect in the representation of women as well. Haider’s female characters produce a strong postcolonial critique of the condition of women in pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial India. Champak, Nirmala and their servant who appear in the first story of the book , at 4^th century BC, are educated ,appear to have knowledge outside their homes , and they are shown to be discussing matters of intellect, in a time when there are sixty-three systems of thought, Buddhism being the latest addition. It’s true that men have not included them in their worldy pursuit , nevertheless the women of this world are neither illiterate nor ignorant. Women are not excluded from what is happening. Having a space of their own does not mean that they are left out of what men are doing. The relationship between Champawati, the second champa of the novel , and kamaluddin, the Persian traveler, denote the equal social and intellectual position of the women and men. As a fellow student of kamaluddin, Champwati engages in erudite conversations with him and freely befriends other men. This is fifteenth century India not very different from the first Champa of the novel who was in 4^th century BC. Then comes colonialism with the full ideological baggage about Indian women. The remaining two Champas of colonial and postcolonial India suffer too. Within the universal suffering of these women in two millennia, Haider brings home the fact that it is from the colonial time that men began to intentionally play with women’s lives. Colonial ideology has created social norms and those norms are backed the colonial administrative structure. All these norms and the power structure are , in fact, colonial power structures, who in the longer run seek to aggravate the marginalization of women. Hyder’s depiction of the limits of European liberal humanism, and the irony it produces, dismantles the colonial universal history into which the colonialists had tried to put India and its women. The Champa of the postcolonial segment, to return to the novel, is a victim of colonial ideas of sexuality. In many ways, pre-colonial women enjoyed a much higher position in their relationship with men than colonial or postcolonial women do. This again defies the well-known claims that it was European colonialism that saved Indian women from Indian savagery. A case which is further strengthened by the questioning of Spivak in Sati and the limits of representation. ( Spivak:1988). River of Fire provides a nuanced depiction of pre-colonial Indian women and juxtaposes it with an equally nuanced portrayal of colonial Indian women such that the novel becomes a powerful text resisting colonial history and its ideology. Haider has demonstrated that it is possible to construct alternative versions of selfhood which do not toe the line of patriarchal white mythologies.

Lastly,Let me remind once again, that all these narratives which any classroom disseminates are essentially the part of undocumented history. They are unrecorded life histories that shall always remain under erasure; their self-exposure always threatened with a burden of oppressive silence.Unless this post-colonial feminist theory turns inward and becomes truly self-reflexive where it can unmask the unequal processes of appropriation, possession and distribution of power/knowledge in our classrooms, it would perhaps continue to destabilize and deconstruct itself into a series of narratives of de-empowerment and dis-possession. As Spivak puts it that the ‘need is for the patient work of learning to learn from the oppressed’ rather than speak for them. (Spivak:1999)

REFERENCES

1. Alexander M.J. and Mohanty C.T. (eds) (1997) Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, London and New York: Routledge.

2. Chatterjee, Partha( 1993) Nation and its Fragments, Princeton: Princeton University Press. P. 85

3. Haider, Qurratlain (1998) River of Fire (Aag ka Dariya), New York:New Directions

4. Morton, Stephen(2003) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, London and New York:Routeledge, p 32.

5. Rose, Nicholas (1998) Inventing our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.pp. 1-5

6. Sampson, Edward (2008) Celeberating the Other: A Dialogic Account of Human Nature, Ohio: A Taos Institute Publication. pp. 3-5

7. Spivak, Gayatri Chakraborty (1988) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?in Marxism and Interpretation of Culture, Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg(eds.), Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp.271-313.

8. Spivak, Gayatri Chakraborty(1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of Vanishing Present, Cambridge : Harvard University Press.

NOTES

1. The opening argument resists the homogenization of the experiences of South-Asian women as one site where all different cultural and material differences are subsumed under the tag of ‘South –Asian women writing’. Such an approach does not justify the varied experiences of women ranging from the east of South Asia from countries like Indonesia, Malaysia which have different ethnic , social and material realities to countries in the West of South Asia where national formations are based on ethnocentric identities.

2. Subaltern Historians group investigates the narrative of History on the tools borrowed from Classic Marxist Theory. Spivak differs with them as this ‘proletarian ‘ model does not include other oppressed groups, tribals and most significantly women in its ambit. For details see Stephen Morton(2003) pp. 139-142.

3. Partha Chatterjee argues that modern “scientific” history expelled supernatural power from the historical narrative.

4. When referring to the Puranic history, it’s the mythic element which needs to be deciphered to understand the importance of this mythic social memory. It is the place where the earliest examples of the formation of the self in Eastern epistemology can be found. This is the greatness of Haider’s narrative that it re-invests agency in Eastern philosophy.

5. for details see Jasbir Jain in his essay ‘Post-colonial Realities: Women Writing History’ in Interrogating Post-Colonialism Theory,Text and Context, Harish Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee (eds.)(1996), Shimla: IIAS pp. 161-162. Here, Jain examines the historiciztion of the past in Krishna Sobti’s Zindagi Nama ( The Saga of life),1979 and Nayantara Sehgal’s Rich Like Us, 1985 along with the present novel, against the backdrop Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Anand Math (1882).

6. Taken from the text of River of Fire