My article “J.S. Mill’s The Subjection of Women: The Text in History and Society” published in De-coding the Silence! Reading John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women. ISBN: 978-93-82630-51-7. Jaipur: Aadi Publications, 2015, Pp. 125-33.
Dr. Amit Shankar Saha's article, "J.S. Mill’s The Subjection of Women: The Text in History and Society” looks at Mill's influences on the long history of women's struggle and gender equality by exploring, analyzing, and examining all of the theories of Mill's arguments and his relationship with Harriet Taylor, whose intellectual abilities were crucial in Mill's writing of the article. - Dr. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley (Introduction)
The formal book release of Pegasus volume on Reading and Writing Difference: Gender and Literature (Ed. Sanjukta Das, ISBN 9789380542560, Kolkata: Monfakira, 2013, Rs. 150) took place on 4th January, 2014, at Bhawanipur Education Society. Pegasus (www.pegasus-press.net) and especially its steering head Prof. Salil Biswas have been striving for the last thirteen years in producing volumes on research work of academic merit in the form of journals and books. This latest volume consists of excellent research articles by academicians as well as Sanjukta Das's review article of the book Media, Gender and Popular Culture (co-authored by Sanjukta Dasgupta, Sudeshna Chakraborty and Dipankar Sinha). The Pegasus volume was launched by Dr. Paromita Chakravarti, Director of School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University. She also spoke on “Gender and Politics” delineating the history of women’s movement from the time of Mary Wollstonecraft to the modern feminism of today. She showed how issues of class, caste, race, economy, and other categories of double marginalization fracture the binary of gender difference. More so in the current consideration of issues of sexuality, gender is seen as a spectrum rather than being constricted by definition in terms of difference.
This lecture was followed by a group discussion on “Gender and Literature” by the panelists comprising young researchers Jashomati Ghose, Sanghita Sanyal, Swaty Mitra and Gargi Talapatra. They spoke variously on representation of gender in fairy tales, women’s writing in England, the coloured women’s literature in the US and gender representations in Indian literature. The audience enthusiastically participated in the discussion especially on the issue of representation of Little Red Riding Hood, which underwent transformation from an oral erotic tale of how the girl seduced the wolf and escaped to a Victorian tale of being rescued by a male hunter. One member of the audience pointed out that in a retelling of the tale in the TV series “Once Upon a Time” it is the girl who is transformed into the wolf. There was heated debate on whether the whole oeuvre of fairy tales should be rewritten to make them gender sensitive and suitably consumable for the children of the new generation. Dr. Chakravarti intervened to say that instead of rewriting fairy tales in an age where all sorts of information is freely available it is advisable that children should be taught to read correctly. Sensitivity has to be inculcated rather than censorship imposed.
Dr. Chakravarti had earlier narrated an anecdote about the 2006 Autonomous Women's Conference where malejournalists were banned from entering because it was a women-only event. But interestingly the labouring class who worked to put up the event were all males. She pointed out that the underprivileged male workers were somehow not seen in terms of their masculinity whereas the male journalists were not treated similarly because of their privileged status. Then there was the issue of LGBTs. There was the question of whom to include - whether those who are biologically male by feel psychologically female or those who are biologically female but feel psychologically male. She then legitimately raised the perplexing question - Who is the subject of the discipline of “gender” or just who is a “woman”?
This situation made me think of a discussion I once had in Calcutta University with some fellow researchers on whether those Dalits who belong to the creamy layer and have attained economic and social status need the privilege of positive discrimination. Then came the question of Dalit consciousness. All subalterns who have passed through years of discrimination inherit this consciousness which often may not seem apparent. Gender consciousness may not be apparent when a privileged-class woman is in front of a poor male stall owner on the street. But it will be apparent if it is the middle of the night and the street is abandoned. It becomes an issue of power and not necessarily of strength but a consciousness of dominance and marginalization. So to answer the question “Who is a woman?” we just have to take two individuals from the gender spectrum and whoever is potentially the vulnerable of the pair in a given situation is the representative woman and the right subject of the discipline of gender.
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Read my article "The Indian Diasporic Creative: Literature to Music" in the January 2014 issue (volume 2 issue 1) of Diplomatist magazine released on the occasion of the twelfth edition of Pravasi Bharatiya Divas in New Delhi, 7th-9th January, 2014.
Conference paper, written in collaboration with Bhawana Jain of Nice Sophia-Antipolis University (France), published.
"Food in the Culture of India and the Indian Diaspora: An Analysis through the Selected Works of Anita Desai." DESI: La Revue No. 2 (Diasporas: Etudes Des Singularities Indiennes – Circulations). Eds. Jean-Francois Baillon and Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud. ISBN: 978-2-86781-870-7. BORDEAUX: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2013, Pp. 171-89.
"The Spiritual Sense of Alienation in Diasporic Life: Reading Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Sunetra Gupta and Jhumpa Lahiri". Indian English Fiction: Postmodern Literary Sensibility. Ed. Vishwanath Bite. ISBN: 9788172736774. New Delhi: Authorspress, 2012, Pp. 129-38 (Re-print from The Criterion journal article)
My research article titled "The Changing Face of the West and the Indian Diaspora: Reading Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Sunetra Gupta and Jhumpa Lahiri" has been published in the book Concepts and Contexts of Diasporic Literature of India, Ed. K. V. Dominic, ISBN: 9789381030240, New Delhi: Gnosis/Authorspress Publications, 2011.
On 2nd November 2011 Naseeruddin Shah delivered the Nabayug Acharya Memorial Lecture on "Literature and Theatre" at the Darbhanga Hall, University of Calcutta. The hall was filled with students, researchers, teachers and officials, all eager to listen to the actor's speech and some perhaps to get a picture of his. The speaker didn't disappoint, just as he said that for an actor the most important thing is the word.
My first print-publication in an academic journal is out -
"Parent-Child Relationship in Diasporic Life: Engagement with the issue by Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Sunetra Gupta, and Jhumpa Lahiri", Families: A Journal of Representations , Vol 5 No 2 & Vol 6 No 1, 2008, Ed. Sanjukta Dasgupta. (more)
Read the book review of Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth published in the literary e-journal MuseIndia (Issue 23, Jan-Feb 2009).
My Three Guineas: Reflections on a Seminar
CSSH Hall: I sit clenching my palms into fists in excitement and listen to the presenters as they speak on the topic “Breaking the Silence: Reading Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and Ashapurna Devi" (Alipore, 15th & 16th January, 2009). For company I have a venerable audience populated by the likes of Prof. Bani Basu, Pushpa Renu Roy (daughter of Ashapurna Devi), Dr. Nupur Gupta (daughter-in-law of Ashapurna Devi), and many more.
Home: I relax and open out my palms to find three guineas there. Dr. Barnita Bagchi had spoken of Three Guineas of Virginia Woolf and as if miraculously the three Woolfian guineas have come to manifest in my palms. What do I do with them? Should I give them to anti-war efforts, but there isn’t any war; or should I give them to build women’s colleges, but there are many women’s colleges; or should I spend them for the advancement of professional women, but what about my profession? So, whom should I give the guineas to?
CSSH Hall: Ashapurna Devi (1909-1995) was never allowed to go to school by her grandmother, but was encouraged by her mother to read books. After her marriage at a tender age, she made writing as her profession. Her profession helped her to buy the proverbial “room” of her own and she filled the room with domesticity. Prof. Sanjukta Dasgupta’s phone rings and an eminent writer calls her to tell that, compared to the feminism of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), Ashapurna Devi is regressive. The seminar goes on. Feminism was not what Ashapurna Devi chose but feminism was that she chose. Ashapurna Devi is regarded as the writer of the “antahpur” (often derogatorily called “kitchen writer”). If Virginia Woolf had known Ashapurna Devi, she may well have understood the impediments that prevented her to write a War and Peace. But Prof. Jashodhara Bagchi pointed out that social transformations do begin from within domestic space. In the opinion of Dr. Shoma A. Chatterji, the confined spaces, like the “ghomta” or the bedroom, are symbolic “antahpurs” and it is these mute chambers that provide the seeds of articulation. A woman under the “ghomta” may silently mock at society's strictures. But why is the muteness? It is because Ashapurna Devi’s world is totally different from say Simone de Beauvoir’s world. Unlike Ashapurna Devi, de Beauvoir could have a live-in relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre without causing a major scandal in France, which is quite inconceivable even in today’s India. On the other hand Ashapurna Devi lived in the world where often writing was prohibited for women, as reiterated by Dr. Mallika Sengupta in her paper titled “Creativity versus Domesticity.” What is common between the two societies is the overbearing patriarchal order. Simone de Beauvoir despite her canonical text The Second Sex is recognised as an intellectual with the epithet “woman” attached in front. Virginia Woolf despite creating her polemic alter-ego in Judith Shakespeare had to follow her doppelganger towards a similar fate in death. Coming back to Ashapurna Devi’s world it is seen that the patriarchal order is so stringent that even breaking silence is a form of revolution, as Dr. Laxmi Parasuram clarified. Prof. Jharna Sanyal went on to explain different forms of silences in Ashapurna Devi’s narratives. There is not only the silence of women (housewives, widows, etc.) but equally the silences of the men-folks. In Pratham Pratisruti (The First Promise) the silence of Satyabati’s husband Nabakumar, or her father Ramkali are conspicuous in front of the questioning female. Prof. Jharna Sanyal further stressed that silence can be a token of power. In one of Ashapurna Devi’s short story (I fail to recall the title) the wife of a man, who has been missing for a long time, gets the news of his death. She hides the news and attends to her sick father-in-law. In a few months when her death-bed-bound father-in-law dies, she reveals the secret to all and accepts the societal norms of sparse life of widowhood. The widow temporarily suspends time so that her old and ailing father-in-law might be spared the pain of knowing the death of his son during his last days. In another of Ashapurna Devi’s short story titled “Amay Kshama Karo” (Please Forgive Me) a man accidentally kills his brother and runs away leaving his wife behind. He goes missing for years and his wife lives a derided existence at her in-laws’ place. But just before the fugitive husband is to be declared dead he returns secretly to his wife to take her to a place where he has acquired a new identity and amassed substantial wealth. The wife perhaps for the first time in her life faces a choice to determine her own future. She decides not to elope with her husband despite knowing that soon she will have to live the miserable life of a widow. She will have to suspend time perhaps permanently. Why does she make such a choice? The answer lies in the psychology of the mind that has been constantly deprived of decision-making opportunities. Such a mind, on getting the least chance of volition, will exercise its enormous pent-up capacity to produce the greatest impact. The protagonist’s decision indicts her husband, who had left her in a lurch without even seeking her opinion many years ago; it indicts her in-laws, who will keep taunting her without knowing that by not disappearing she has kept the family name untarnished; and it indicts the society, which will unduly impose unfair norms of widowhood on her. This is precisely her revolt – a kind of Camusian absurdism. In Ashapurna Devi’s world a more radical revolt is escapism (Lalita & Tharu). At best there can be a dream – Padmalata’s Dream (“Padmalatar Swapno”). As Dr. Anasuya Guha remarked that the Amazonian warrior is utopia.
Home: I give my first guinea to these three writers, namely Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and Ashapurna Devi.
[Aside: Why does a speaker asks to be excused / permitted when s/he includes Bengali passages in an English oration? Is it only a matter of courtesy and decency? Then why is the same courtesy / decency not shown when interpolating French or even Sanskrit within English speech? It seems that English discourse “goes up” to French but “comes down” to Bengali as if the Bengali language is not academic enough.]
CSSH Hall: The bringing together of these three writers raises a fair amount of problem as explicated by Prof. Ratnabali Chatterjee. Virginia Woolf comes into reckoning primarily through mainstream English Literature as studied in traditional English departments of universities established by the colonial rulers. Simone de Beauvoir mainly finds focus through gender studies in the relatively newly established social sciences departments. Ashapurna Devi enters the debate still more obliquely through the study of Bengali creative writings in the vernacular department. Moreover Ashapurna Devi never considered herself a feminist as pointed out Dr. Dipannita Dutta. Dr. Mohar Daschaudhuri stressed that there are people like Madhu Kishwar who do not call themselves feminists but still champion the cause. It is so because, according to Dr. Murari Prasad, there are various forms of feminism – theoretical, creative, and so on. Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir fall well within the groove of theoretical feminists but not Ashapurna Devi. Feminism through creative writing is a matter of hermeneutics. That is why gender can be historicized by feminist re-interpretations of ancient texts. Prof. Nrisinha Prasad Bhaduri gave examples of ancient Indian Sanskrit writers who were women. He also recited compositions of male versifiers like Jayadeva and Chaitanya to show how their minds are “feminized” (in the sense of having acquired female sensibilities). That Kunti and Draupadi of The Mahabharata have become feminists mouthpieces, implicitly credits the male author Vyasa to some degree. But the female voices in the Vedas, which are supposed to be authentic female oracles and not “feminized” male voices, are preoccupied with regressive rituals (puberty rites, warding off husband’s consort, etc.). The depiction of the “sejuti” custom in Ashapurna Devi’s Pratham Pratisruti is nothing but an echo of the Vedic ritual. Such women’s texts perhaps can be read, in Dr. Mitali Goswami terms, as “cultural critiques.” The arguments are true even for ancient Western texts with its fertility myths and heroic legends as Prof. Blanka Knotkova-Capkova depicted. According to Dr. Naina Dey, the sex of the writer should not determine the sexuality of the text. Her paper “Speaking through the Androgyne” dealt with instances of the fictional Orlando, the real-life Sackville-West, and adhered on the “queer” of The Well of Loneliness, to show the search for a “neutral narrative.” In the Indian traditions there are Androgyne in the symbolisms of “Haragouri”, “Ardhanariswar”, “Shivashakti”, etc. But as Prof Sanjukta Dasgupta pointed out such symbolisms are convenient escapist modes of masculine orthodoxy because they do not purport equality – it is always the female in the male (Shakti in Shiva) and never the other way round. In this context the Hegelian dictum, as quoted by Prof. Sudeshna Chakravorty, becomes relevant: “Every consciousness desires the death of another.” It becomes even more resonant if the word “another” is replaced by “Other” for in the masculine world the feminine consciousness is the perennial Other. The male consciousness desires the death of this Other. It is perhaps the violence inherent in this state that is depicted in the statistics of atrocities committed against women as read out by Prof. Chinmoy Guha. Thus gender study is literary, social, historical, philosophical, political, cultural, and many more fields all at once. And here lies the need for an interdisciplinary approach for holistic knowledge as Prof. Banita Aleaz explained.
Home: I give my second guinea to the organisers of this interdisciplinary seminar, namely the Department of English, the Women’s Studies Research Centre, and their parent body the University of Calcutta.
CSSH Hall: As Prof. Pabitra Sarkar reminded the audience of the missing balcony, so cherished by Ashapurna Devi’s eponymous heroine Subarnalata, it reminded me of Prof. Sanjukta Dasgupta’s short story “A Room of His Own.” Here the male protagonist, Raja, buys for his family a four-bedroom apartment with five bathrooms. The fifth bathroom is his cherished private space where he won’t be disturbed. But the family finds the fifth bathroom as unnecessary and remodels it into the “Pooja room” while Raja is away on an official trip. So when Raja returns he is shocked to find that the least space that he had fashioned and desired as a room of his own is missing. His predicament and that of Subarnalata apparently become the same. Simone de Beauvoir belonged to a school of philosophy whose summation is found in Sartre’s famous statement: Existence precedes essence. Taking this cue Simone de Beauvoir formulates that a woman exists first before she becomes a woman. If psychologically womanhood is a becoming then it is contingent upon social circumstances. So any individual who has an awareness or experience of continuous deprivation of will, decision-making capacity, choices, and the peremptory say in one’s future is capable of identifying and being in empathy with the women’s predicament. In the valedictory session of the seminar the only male speaker on the podium was Prof. Chinmoy Guha. He was seen as the “other” in the group but he was not so because he has not been othered. His case is a matter of being and not of becoming. He may possibly be the white tiger (though not of the Balram Halwai variety) in the pack – rarity being his prime essence. In the same sense, and in the world where the male minds constantly ply their omnibuses over the female imagination, for once I want to be positively discriminatory, and instead of calling myself man, I call myself a rare woman.
Home: I give my third guinea to myself. I put it in my pocket and find the all-pervading presence of Mrs. Ramsay inspiring me to journey to the lighthouse.
