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Mala Sen’s "Death by
Fire" is yet another addition to this burgeoning field of
India-centred NRI scholarship. It is an attempt to understand
contemporary India and what it means to be a woman in this
socio-cultural, temporal and ideological space. Its narrative,
ostensibly woven around the lives of three women — Roop
Kanwar, Selvi and Karupayee — is essentially a
woman-centered intervention against the andocentric
construction of India. Taking sati, dowry-deaths and female
infanticide as entry points, Sen apparently attempts a
feministic/womanistic problematisation/deconstruction of
gendered investments in institutions like family and marriage,
within larger discourses of tradition and modernity, nation
and state. In short, it is the narration of Indian women at
the intersection of gender and customs.
The book is
conceived of as a narrative journey that criss-crosses modern
India to unravel the existential essence of Indian womanhood.
It is a "marked" essence. It is a fossilised collage
of eternal images — the faithful and devoted wife, the
potential mother of sons, self-sacrificing to the end — that
constitutes the core of Indian womanhood and purity of Indian
family. It is only through a continued affirmation of these
images that a woman is given meaning in and after life.
Violence
constitutes the essence of this womanhood. It circumscribes
both the confirmation of and rebellion against this essence.
It is this thesis that structures Sen’s narrative
exploration of the lives of her protagonists, be it Roop
Kanwar, Selvi, Karupayee, Bhanwari Devi or even Naina Sahani.
While Roop
Kanwar’s sati is a portrayal of tradition as violence, and
violence as a religious ritual, Karuyapee’s act of female
infanticide is a portrayal of patriarchal-craving for son as
violence. Selvi’s life is a narration of
female-sense-of-independence as violence.
Bhanwari Devi’s
trauma showcases the metamorphosis of sexual assault on women
into a contemporary political weapon.
In modern
India materialism (dowry demand) emerges as the mainspring of
violence against women. This fact conditions the precepts and
practices of women. Further, all these narratives unfold
against an all pervasive backdrop of patriarchy as violence.
Mala Sen aims
at understanding the actuality of Indian women in situ so as
to appreciate its heterogeneous specificities: "I needed
some first-hand experience of the prevailing social
climate," she informs us. The author inserts her own self
into the narrative. This "I-centered" core of the
text seeks to strike an empathy with its narrative subjects
via a creative envisioning and vicarious reliving of the
experiences narrated to her. "I wondered why they did
what they did?" — is the constant refrain of the
narrative.
An
undercurrent of activism informs the whole narrative.
"Death by Fire", imbued as it is with
"reflections" on "the possibilities we form, as
women in my own life time... we are all parts of a process to
which many have contributed... not alone historically
speaking," in fact, become an extended exercise at
female-bonding.
Mala Sen’s
impressions about Roop Kanwar’s sati-sthla, Deorala,
epitomises for her the contemporary reality and meaning of
India. It is a place that is feudal in character but modern in
amenities. And within this ambivalence, the Indian woman is
trapped viciously. It is this mix of traditions (the practice
of sati/feudal sense of honour and community/hierarchal social
structure of Indian society and space) and modernity
(materialism/individualism/commodification/vote bank
politics/rule of law) in its present day patriarchal
configuration that metamorphoses violence against women into a
religious ritual, tourism and commerce. Overnight Deorala, the
site of widow burning, has become a place of pilgrimage:
"The villagers were creating a new goddess."
Narrative
emphasis here is on the constructedness, commercialisation
(over Rs 30 lakh were collected within no time) and
politicisation of this process by manipulative male gaze
(crowd that watched sati was mostly male). The glorification
of this gruesome event by the media got crystallised into a
sense of Rajput pride and thus reinforced Rajput manhood. This
masculine assertion was, ironically, earned through the
erasure of female subjectivity. Womanhood in Rajasthan is
based on the "conspiracy of silence". Sati is not an
exercise of free will: "A choice can be made only between
viable alternatives; for many women, there are no viable
alternatives."
Sen then goes
on to narrate the aftermath of this event — the countrywide
protests, the legal wrangles — as an antithesis between the
pro-sati Rajput (male) lobby and the anti-sati women (urban)
movement. The dithering state is caught in this crossfire. The
final outcome is predictable: acquittal of all those who were
involved in the perpetration of the crime and its perpetuation
as a symbol of Indianness.
The story of
Maria Selvi, who lives in Kodaikanal, offers another aspect of
this daily ordeal by fire for Indian women. Selvi was set
ablaze by her husband. Her trauma showcases the "reality
of powerlessness against the will of man". She is a
victim of the male ego that refuses to live in the shadow of
vivacious female self. Her beauty, her economic independence,
her "bright and energetic" persona and, of course,
her public image were too much for her drunkard husband.
However, her "pragmatic and cheerful approach towards
life" and her tremendous sense of resilience are in
keeping with the author’s answer to such oppression —
"not retaliation but searching for alternative ways of
empowering themselves and creating value systems of their
own."
Karuppyee, a
Kallar of Uslimpatti village in Madurai district, is a typical
product of a society in which she grew up and lives. Her act
of female infanticide springs from this fact. It is not an act
of individual aberration, but a manifestation of a
tribal/social evil. This sympathetic understanding informs the
author’s portrayal of this tribal woman. Karupayee, in fact,
becomes a trope for state’s erasure of the subaltern
margins. The modernism inherent in post-independence India is
nothing but a duplication of and the perpetuation of colonial
perspective and stereotypes: even today the Kallars are
stigmatised as robbers and worst offenders.
In such a
scenario, the crime committed by a tribal woman becomes all
the more heinous. However, Sen’s ironic juxtaposition of
female infanticide — one rooted in poverty and tribal
superstition and the other located in urban materialism and
pragmatism (in Delhi a hoarding exhorts: "Pay Rs 500 now
or Rs 50,000 in 18 years" ) — diagnoses
"dowry" as the central issue that affects the lives
of women in India today.
"Death
by Fire" is apparently the outcome of the labour of love.
(Or is it of despair?) This labour spreads over 23 chapters.
Sati, in being both an opening and a closing sequence, acts as
a narrative framework, a scaffolding, that holds together
different, yet interrelated vignettes of women in contemporary
India. Sen apparently struggles to make a nuanced critique of
the traditions that surround her narrative subject/s,
especially sati. She tries to differentiate between sati and
jauhar. The folklore surrounding Jhunjhunoo sati temples,
together with the depiction of the tradition of sati in the
village of Devipura (Rajasthan), throws Roop Kanwar’s
episode in a broader relief. She wades through history,
historical narratives, folk tradition, feminist discourses and
media clippings to glean this reality. She explores public and
private opinions, interviews legal experts, family members of
her protagonists, experts on Indian culture, police personnel
and bureaucrats, missionaries and NGOs and women activists,
and tries to have a peep into the lives of women she manages
to meet.
But this
effort, located as it is within "I"-centric binary
glance (modernity versus tradition; rural versus urban; East
versus West), in the final analysis, fails to add new insight
to the issue. It is merely one more addition to "this
tradition of recording events as they happen and affect the
lives of individuals in contemporary society". Her
overall understanding of Indian women vis-a-vis the issues
that surround them is trapped within yet another oft-rehearsed
simplistic paradigm: the urban and the rural. One (the rural)
is externally trapped in the values and tradition, the other
(the urban) is comfortably and consciously outside it. The
reality of women in contemporary India, though still pathetic,
nevertheless, cannot be subsumed and resolved within this
simple urban-rural divide. It is much more intricate and calls
for a more complex analysis of India as a socio-cultural
category.
Further, even this
restrictive glance is essentially selective. Despite a fair
sampling and sprinkling of native scholarship, it nevertheless
tends to provide and orientalist or modernist understanding of
issues surrounding contemporary Indian women. Its strength
lies in the fact that its narrative adds an emotional
poignancy to the whole issue. But this is not reason enough to
have it on our bookshelf.
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