River Runs Over
Four Essays on the Poetics of Bodies
So, after all, we have notfailed to make use of these generous spaces, thesespaces of ours. (How frighteningly great they must be,since thousands of years have not made them overflow with our feelings.)
RAINER MARIA RILKE
PRELUDE
All too often, it feels as though my bones are demanding liberation – from what, I do not know.
I have always been a reluctant occupant of my body, I begrudge it the writhing that accompanies growing. So like many before me, I fantasize of a freedom that begins and ends with a dissolution of the flesh. My daydreams of oblivion unfortunately don’t serve me in the waking world, so I will turn now to other ways of naming this feeling. Elizabeth Grosz calls the body a sort of hinge or threshold – which to me is the same way the river is a threshold to the sea. The body, in its living, flows across a path carved in loam by an un-pinnable sea. For those of us who hold life brimming, waiting, under Eve’s inherited rib, the idea is an amicable one. To think of the body’s confluences on the verge of spilling over into an unattainable sea of freedom brought down by the silt of living, can seem like a mirroring. But mirrors can be chancy things – particularly if you’re a woman.
I see myself mirrored in rivers enough to know that freedom is a phenomenon always becoming; never quite. To be stretched across two halves, the inner and the outer; the self and other, river on its way to becoming sea – is the life we lead as women, I think. To know, remember, be shown time and again, that our bodies in all its shape and seeming will never truly be ours alone. Decades of the feminist movement have contended with the politics of the female body; its forms, its freedoms, its restrictions. When does it become a site of power for its own sake, and is any of it ever inviolable? Tracing the body’s morphology through space and time has been invaluable in understanding how problems of the micro-politic extend to those laid down by larger hegemonies like patriarchy. In what is perhaps one of the most seminal works of feminist literature, Simone de Beauvoir asks how the mere fact of being women will have affected our lives. What precise opportunities have been given to us, and which ones have we been denied? The former is of course, a far lower number than the latter. The constraints by which our bodies are formed – culturally, materially, physically, all speak to the larger concept of a freedom that is quite complex. A feminist comprehension of liberty therefore very quickly shows that the personal is the political when it comes to women’s lived experiences. The body in its living can form the basis for knowing itself.
I think of Penelope weaving her shroud at Ithaca – steadfastly unspooling it each night. What we hold fast to our chests as truths of living are really as tenuous as the shroud. Knowledge lies in the unravelling. The American political scientist Nancy J. Hirschmann speaks of this unravelling, the remaking of our discourse as essential to arriving at a feminist comprehension of liberty. In a world socially constructed and understood by frameworks of the patriarchy, it is important for women to mould the discourse where they can – often beginning with their own bodies. Hirschmann’s understanding of a reality socially constructed in a masculinist context leads to a paradox in conceptualising liberty for women. The values that we hold important – freedom, autonomy, selfhood, are all settled and formulated in a language that excludes the female lived experience. Women’s identities and experiences are concretely formed by the requirements and limitations that patriarchy has imposed on the material conditions of women’s lives and the theoretical understanding of that experience which patriarchal ideology allows. On this level, social construction is not at odds with our material reality; it actually produces it.
Understanding how bodies are composed in different discourses of gender is a pathway to understanding the nuances of this material reality, to understanding choice, desire, and subjectivity. In the following series of essays I examine fiction and poetry written by four prominent women authors in postcolonial India through this lens of a feminist freedom. I explore the work of Ismat Chughtai, Wajida Tabassum, Kamala Das, and Tishani Doshi; four women who in their life and work have stood at the crossroads of self and other to emerge victorious against the deluge of convention. Again and again, history demands reshaping. Again and again, we silt our rivers, clogging our hips, our thighs, our necks with the weight of expectation. This book is an ode to the women who have spent their lives overhauling the ossified. The women who desilt the rivers, and let them shake the centuries old bones out onto the banks to be swept away.
THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD
I imagine a slip of a girl at fourteen, sitting at the breakfast table of a sprawling house in Rajasthan– her chin set in defiance, demanding an education of her father with a vehemence that was unprecedented in a Muslim girl of her time. Whether it was the sheer audacity of the proposal, or her threat to run away and convert to Christianity that caused Ismat Chughtai’s father to relent, she was enrolled in a hostel at Aligarh. The tenacity she brought to her education poured over into the rest of her life – Chughtai is revered as one of the country’s most fearless writers of prose in Urdu. Her fierce advocation for women’s self-definition and unflinching critique of the patriarchy was, as Hélène Cixous writes in The Laugh of the Medusa, a way to ‘bring women back to writing from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies.’
Cixous insists that women must put themselves into the world on their own terms, in their own words and Chughtai’s stories navigate the intricacies of women’s lives in her candid, gritty prose so rooted in the worlds she inhabited.
Cixous insists that women must put themselves into the world on their own terms, in their own words and Chughtai’s stories navigate the intricacies of women’s lives in her candid, gritty prose so rooted in the worlds she inhabited.
Chughtai’s creative world is always teeming with characters – spilling over with aunts, uncles, servants, and miscellaneous children. A writer in the realist tradition, she took inspiration largely from her own life and the society she knew so well – middle-class Muslim families in Uttar Pradesh. In his introduction to a collection of her short stories, Mohammed Asaddudin describes her work as having the sense of an ‘imagined interlocuter,’ as though someone is always listening in. Her style of writing is narrative and conversational; some of her sentences seem almost as though they were whispered between two giggling cousins in a stairwell. While her work is colourful, and brimming with details of a time gone by, it is also caustic in its honesty, her ideology sometimes taking over style. She was unwavering in her insistence to expose the hypocrisy of these worlds she inhabited, the double standards of men who prayed their sins away and considered them gone, women who bit down their unhappiness, and women who were tarred and feathered for refusing to do so. Her male characters remain on the fringes of her fixations, marginalia to the lives of the women she portrays. The men in Chughtai’s writing serve a purpose; placed in her stories to demonstrate how aspects of power, religion, and sex affected the women who inhabited her worlds.
Chughtai is perhaps best known for her short story Lihaaf (The Quilt, 1942) and the uproar that followed its publishing. The work holds overwhelming historical significance in several ways – she wrote in vivid detail about female sexuality, and alluded heavily to lesbian desire in a manner unseen from a woman writer of her times. She faced a long, drawn out, obscenity trial, and was acquitted. Lihaaf became synonymous with the kind of writer she was – unapologetic, daring, free. As Yeats writes in The Second Coming:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Chughtai’s life and work show her to be a woman who shook the foundations of the world she lived in, dismantling the centre, opening doors to women’s lived realities in all their complexity to a society that ignored them for so long. While Lihaaf remains a monumental work in many respects, I turn now to another short story by the same author – The Homemaker. All of the women Chughtai writes into being are as Hélène Cixous puts it, an attempt at ‘inscribing the whole breath of the woman.’ She returns to the body time and again, its wants and cravings. This resolute ownership of the physical self comes through almost blindingly in the protagonist of The Homemaker; Lajo. An orphaned maid who grew up on the streets, she appears in the story as the flagbearer of confident, almost intimidating sexuality. In her exposition she’s portrayed as wild, uncontrollable – ‘a freewheeling mare’ as Chughtai herself puts it; a woman who through her life has learnt to use her body as an asset for survival. Lajo is a singular creature, a product entirely of her unique circumstances, and excellent demonstration of what Nancy Hirschmann calls a self constituted by context. In her book On The Subject of Liberty, she writes how our relative freedoms cannot be understood alienated from the contexts and discourses that shape us. If freedom is essentially about choice, then both the inner and outer factors that affect those choices stem from the contexts we live in.
The illusion of choice that we live under, is of course a materialisation of one of our many mortal instincts to unmoor ourselves from the colossal clutches of chance. We spend our lives in the pursuit of our delineation from the world, a constant retracing of where we end and the rest of it begins, forgetting that the precise confluence of time and space that brought us here will forever be inexplicable. It makes sense then, that our living is marked by clinging tightly to simulated choices, habits and roles we twist to fit ourselves into if for nothing else other than escaping the reality of our smallness.
It also makes sense then that liberation as we understand it, is rather paradoxically as much an imprisonment of chance as we can manage.
Lajo’s entire navigation of her life is a constant wresting of this control from the forces of chance that took it away from her as a child. She grew up in poverty, tumbled from hand to hand, and was treated like an addendum for most of her life. As the story unfolds, we see how her ways of establishing her dominance in her employer Mirza’s house stem from what she was deprived of. At the outset of the story, Chughtai writes in Lajo’s voice, ‘A house does not belong to a man. He is more like a guest.’ She identifies a non-interference in Mirza, and recognises that she is finally in a position to have a home she can be in control of. Her brazen command over the situation never comes off as self-indulgent, but rather an unaffected gallantry. She gives herself over freely, and Mirza is enamoured against all rationality, by a woman he feared employing because of her sexual reputation.
Hélène Cixous writes:
We’ve been turned away from our bodies, shamefully taught to ignore them,
to strike them with that stupid sexual modesty: we’ve been made victims of the old fool’s game
Lajo is exempt of this stupid sexual modesty that befalls the rest of us; presumably because it was taken from her before she could name what it was. Her early experiences with sex are a foundational part of her self-worth, so much so that Mirza’s visits to the town courtesans offend her. Chughtai writes the pair as inevitable lovers from the outset of the story – the sparkling, lively young maid breathing life into the lonely, ageing bachelor living a big, dusty house; so their eventual transition to lovers comes as no great narrative surprise. But where Lajo views the relationship as a conquest between equals (as love should ideally be), Mirza finds himself rattled by its implications. As James Baldwin writes in Giovanni’s Room
Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
In the face of an inexorable liberation, we can feel an inexorable terror. The urge to leave our bleeding hearts behind and escape to our ivory towers of convention, of prescribed social codes, roles and taught moralities is our way of bearing the unbearable. In the second part of the story, we see Mirza retreat into his own ivory tower. The combination of a lack of expectation from Lajo, an abundance of her affection, and disproportionate amounts of jealousy cause him to react to the developing relationship with a panicked marriage proposal. This in turn, alarms Lajo, who cannot comprehend ‘the crime she committed’ to deserve this declaration of marriage from her perfect lover, which sets off a series of domino events that eventually bring the relationship to a violent head. Chughtai used her work to write extensively on the flaws of marriage, and in The Homemaker she tackles several perspectives with incredible dexterity. Key among them is a critique of the patriarchal instinct for power and domination in a marriage. Mirza’s motivations for the marriage rise out of a need for ownership of his lover, his jealousy of the attention she garnered from other men in town, and a healthy dose of religious guilt. ‘Censor the body, and you shall censor breath and speech itself,’writes Cixous. Mirza sets about doing exactly that, finding ways to exert his control over Lajo’s body most notably by insisting that she replace her flowing lehengas with salwar pants instead. The implications of Mirza banning the lehenga are symbolic of his need to control Lajo’s sexuality, and the vast discomfort Lajo feels at the role she’s required to play sheds light on the hypocrisy around a woman’s identity in marriage. The coquetry that Mirza was once charmed by is now vulgar to him, and he spends his time turning Lajo into a ‘respectable woman’. The attention he lavishes on her disappears, as well as his fidelity, and the once fierce Lajo becomes akin to a sad bird in a crate. Lajo orchestrates her release from the oppressive marriage by having an affair with her neighbour and being nearly beaten to death for it.
Buoyancy of spirit is a difficult thing to come by. As Ellen Bass writes, to hold life 'like a face between the palms' even in an ‘obesity of grief’ a strength of the highest kind. Lajo is an example of one act of resilience among several, a palimpsest of strength in the wake of great anguish. Her return to Mirza even after the violence, her return to what she deems love, she does on her own terms. The resolution of this woman to wear her life on her flesh, trade it over and over again to leave her heart unshackled to anyone but herself is her greatest form of liberation.
VENUS, FALLEN
I return again to rivers. The largeness of them, the oneness. The mutability – feathering wordlessly from crippled creek to a roaring flood carrying driftwood and dreams along the banks. I return to rivers, and I return to lives. How they fold over each other, rippling across and around, an accretion of time and space. So much of what we lay claim to as our own is inseparable from what we have filtered through others – the genesis of things is an ever-growing tapestry of our collective minds.
Another thread in the constantly developing tapestry of Indian women writing in Urdu was Wajida Tabassum, who wrote with a fervent candour about the Hyderabadi elite in the 1950s. Drawing from Ismat Chughtai before her, Tabassum placed women at the centre of her artistic preoccupations, writing about their inner lives and the outer forces that controlled it. Tabassum wrote in ‘Dakhni’ Urdu, a colloquial, conversational dialect different to the chaste, elegant Urdu women were expected to write and converse in. Language was only one of the ways Tabassum broke the mould in terms of what was expected of her. Her affinity for placing sex at the thematic centre of her stories caused immense uproar in its reception by the masses. She was labelled as impure, incendiary, and faced death threats. But the public, and even familial reproach of her work did not stop Tabassum from writing with steamrolling honesty about depravity, hypocrisy of religion, and perhaps more notably, women who claimed their desires as their own.
In her introduction to a set of collected essays on gender and desire in the Indian subcontinent, Brinda Bose asserts that the very articulation of female sexual desires can in and of themselves be considered sites of active resistance. Sexuality, when transmuted into culture transcends the personal bounds of physical desire and becomes a politics in its own right. Tabassum’s work is almost pornographically explicit in its language, straddling the line between ‘rapture and revulsion’ in bombastic iconoclasm. Because Tabassum focused so centrally on the body, the spaces surrounding those bodies factor into her particular form of literary rebellion. Most of her stories are set in the havelis of Hyderabad’s waning royal elite – everyday, domestic spaces for women. She uses these spaces to symbolise conflict between the inner and outer, to demonstrate how larger social hierarchies of power find themselves mirrored in domestic settings. Within these spaces, and their intimacy, she illustrates how the bodies inhabiting them negotiate questions of agency, hierarchy, and power.
Tabassum’s short story The Flesh Market (Ladki Bazaar) is about the lecherous Nawab Habib Yar Jung exerting his unmitigated command over young adolescent girls in what can only be compared to a large scale, anticipatory droit de seigneur. The Nawab institutes a law wherein he is the first to marry a harem of the village’s teenage girls, and dissolves the marriages within the year. The tradition and the Nawab both remain consistently deplorable to the end of the story, the girls are nothing but ‘powerless shadows’, herded in and out of the palace like livestock on the whim of the volatile ruler. Here, the haveli becomes a symbol for unstoppable sycophancy. In the face of such immense control, the ways freedom manifest take on entirely different forms. Wafa Hamid in her essay on Tabassum’s magazine fiction draws attention to how the domestic settings of the stories display instances of everyday and local resistances that display workings of power in strategies and structures we may not have seen before. She writes:
Thus, the women in the stories use their bodies to negotiate with power, and though their actions cannot be read as radical resistance, it is important to note that within the structures of power and society, their bodies become indispensable sites for re-writing agency to negotiate with power, and this embodiment itself cannot be dismissed.
The Flesh Market brings us the character of Mehtab, a plucky sixteen year old who powders her glass bangles and swallows them to escape a marriage to the Nawab. Tabassum shows us a world so confining to women’s bodies that the only form of resistance lies in its destruction. In her work on body politics and the feminist movement, Elizabeth Grosz calls our corporeal forms ‘pliable flesh – the unspecified raw material of social inscription’ that produces subjects of a specific kind. Nancy Hirschmann in her work on liberty reminds us time and again that freedom arises out of individual contexts; which are often shaped by how the body negotiates its social inscriptions. Given this, isn’t Mehtab’s suicide too a form of liberation, a demonstration of the circularity of power? She chooses to dissolve her body, and its inescapable social burden rather than bend it to a will that would imprison her. Tabassum writes Mehtab as the indelible casualty of unchecked male authority, ending the story with an unconcerned Nawab washing his hands of the entire affair. The suicide is undoubtedly a tragedy, but it also speaks to a form of resistance that might be unpalatable but essential to consider nonetheless.
Local resistances through the body show themselves in several ways. I turn now to another short story, Fallen Venus (Chhinaal). Like The Flesh Market, Fallen Venus is a story warning against the societal excesses inflicted on women. It narrates the marriage between a prostitute Gauhar Jaan, to Sabir, the heir to a wealthy family. It holds a similar premise to Chughtai’s Homemaker, but navigates the Madonna/ Whore dichotomy in a markedly different way. Where The Homemaker is a story about sexual liberation, and agency over the corporeal, Fallen Venus is in many ways about a stripping of that agency. Both stories however, hold in common that only a certain kind of woman is worthy of becoming a wife. Sabir’s mother is vocal in her opposition to the marriage, saying
I always say, a whore, like chickenpox, cannot stay inside the house
This association of prostitution to pestilence stems from what Hélène Cixous terms ‘antinarcissism’. She writes:
Men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilise their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs. They have made for women an antinarcissism!
Cixous’ observation rings true even today – how quick are we to turn on each other as women? In the endless unfiltered barrage of commentary on social media, how much is women picking each other apart like vultures over trivialities like clothes? The pervasiveness of the patriarchy is not limited to men alone. As Hirschmann suggests; it is impossible for us to change our discourse of liberty without first acknowledging we are a part of its shaping. Fallen Venus shows Gauhar step above this antinarcissism she’s faced with. Tabassum negotiates this interchange of power with a nuance not expected in the situation. When she’s used as the scapegoat for her sister-in-law’s affair, Gauhar realises that the weight of her reputation stands against her, and chooses to step out of her marriage despite her innocence. Her choice to acknowledge the injustice committed against her by a woman she trusted, and still withdraw from the situation with dignity is her way of breaking the cycle of antinarcissism perpetuated against her.
Forgiveness too, is its own kind of freedom.
INTERLUDE
Younger, on garden stones with my sister, I laughed when she shrieked at a frog that jumped out between blades and into the murky pond. Beady eyes, unassuming, darting from one to another like it meant nothing at all – soil and still lily water equal homes. Sometimes I wish to slip my casings; begin a departure. Memory is a kind of punishment isn’t it, cavalierly roping around longing, retracing fear. But I’m older now so I hear Whitman speaking from the pond about multitudes, reminding me I contain them. I wish he spoke of abandon instead.
THE BODY ELECTRIC
Stagnancy is untenable. It is the way of the world – spring arrives again and again. Blooms dredge themselves from the undergrowth, heave themselves up from the dank and shift – spring arrives again like the endings that precede it must. ‘April is the cruellest month’, T S Eliot wrote ‘breeding lilacs out of the dead land.’ To invite spring into the soul means looking inwards, into that which is dead and gone to waste, and breed lilacs anew. Kamala Das was among those who were not strangers to this deliberate metamorphosing of the self; living in a perpetual April – taking stock of her life and turning what was dead to something new and alive. In her poem Composition she writes:
The tragedy of life
is not death but growth
Growth means writhing, spackle-hard and uncomfortable. To move past the maelstrom of the present, to recognise that the current moment is carved by the uncontrollable tides of the past and future, is a harsh realisation. Das understood this. She had a penchant for reinventing herself, reaching deep into the wellsprings of the soul and society to emerge changed.
Kamala Das was without question, one of the most prolific writers the country has seen. She is credited with mapping out the terrain for women writers in India both socially as well as linguistically. Stylistically she was a pioneer in many ways, she wrote in a personal lexicon that entirely disregarded the iambic pentameter and traditional structure of poetry written in English at the time. Her poetry was conversational, confessional – she brought in unique speech rhythms and distortions into her work in a way that erased the boundaries between poetics and ordinary speech. Das wrote all her life, but her poetry began to be published in the late 1960s when the landscape of Indian literature was already changing – works that centred around independence from British colonialism made way for more personally charged pieces. The 60s saw sweeping global changes in the conversation around gender – the political force of the feminist movement was momentous, and it made investigating gender roles and identity on a personal level the thematic focus for several women writing at the time.
The methodical focus on female interiority and the material realities that shape it is, as Adrienne Rich wrote, ‘an act of survival for the woman’. The need for self-knowledge, for self-definition and identity often begins with the physical. Elizabeth Grosz writes:
Debt is ultimately expiated by flesh and blood. Civilisation carves
meanings onto and out of bodies.
This non-verbal coding of the body binds it to narratives and creates normative associations that seem impossible to break out of. In her poem An Introduction Das writes:
I was a child, and later they
Told me I grew, for I became tall, my limbs
Swelled and one or two places sprouted hair.
Gender is, as Jan Morrison wrote, ‘a nebulous entity’. It cannot be conveyed, ‘it lives in cavities.’ And yet, the lines cited above from An Introduction show us how rapidly we bridge those spaces as a society. Contextualizing the body as a site of social change often means that we inscribe signs onto it – growing limbs, breasts, hair, clothes – and assign power to them. Like most of Das’ poems, An Introduction is a clarion call to belonging. She writes of her marriage at sixteen, the shock of it. The vulnerable request for love, because what else could she ask for?
He did not beat me
But my sad woman body felt so beaten.
The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me. I shrunk
Pitifully.
Casual disaffection can cut as deep as intentional pugnacity, and the weariness with which Das writes of her introduction to matrimony obviates any hopes of idyllic domestic bliss. Her candour and outspokenness about her marriage and emotional life as a housewife garnered great hostility, particularly in Kerala. Like Chughtai and Tabassum before her, the institution of marriage and its imbalance of power towards women was certainly a central theme of contention, but where they travelled the subject in fiction, Das drew fiercely from her own experiences.
The miasma of societal backlash didn’t deter Das from writing about her life in bejewelled honesty. In certain lines of An Introduction, there is almost a stoic acceptance of the deluge of demands laid at her feet. ‘Fit in. Oh belong, cried the categorisers,’ she writes. The malleability of spirit Das brought to living was not appreciated by all. Still, she stood firmly in herself:
I am not yours for the asking
she writes in a later poem Composition. The line lashes across my mind, fierce and cutting. To stand steady in the face of such pointed inquiry takes a resolute sense of self I can only hope to achieve someday.
Composition is an aria to life; stretching wide over several pages. Das begins with the sea, that recurring friend, its vastness and endless whispering. She flits through the dereliction of her innocence, guilt replacing love, and her self-betraying skin. The tragedy of growing, she writes, is losing time for the sea. I think of a summer day I spent in Cherai as a child, a small strip of sand and tide away from the bustle of Cochin city. I explored the old waters, spending hours on the strand collecting pearlescent shells – hundreds of them. The sea has a boundlessness that draws you in, a stillness that is inescapable. Das yearns for a freedom in dissolution, an immortality attainable only in unravelling.
Unfettering the mind from its querulous tirade against itself is a difficult form of liberation. Confessional poetry like Das’ often engages with these innermost depths of the human psyche, the parts of us that remain opaque even to ourselves. In Loud Posters, she writes:
…oh, never mind, I’ve
Spent long years trying to locate my mind
Beneath skin, beneath flesh and underneath
The bone. I’ve stretched my two dimensional
Nudity on sheets of weeklies, monthlies,
Quarterlies, a sad sacrifice.
She writes of herself as a ‘creature turned inside out.’ And despite the fact that it is addressed to the faceless reader, she writes with a yearning that can only be described as intimate. Loud Posters speaks to what Nancy Hirschmann terms the discursive construction of social meaning. Power is a circulatory mechanism, it is ever-present and contiguous. This means that we are all constantly constructing our discourse, not operated on by an untouchable figure on a rostrum, but actively a part of our realities. What Das calls here the ‘sad sacrifice’ of stretching her proverbial body out towards her readers is really an offering of power in the hope of receiving it back. She picks at her coverings, overturns her body with her words over and over again. What does the body carry? And what does it hide?
Quarrying at the shorelines of the mortal frame to reach the bindings of the soul is a common motif among Das’ work. In line with her affinity for Whitman, her poems sing of ‘the body electric’, and her exertions to reconcile flesh to soul often manifest in how she navigates the planes of love and desire. In The Suicide, she returns to the sea in her heartbreak –
Bereft of soul
my body shall be bare.
Bereft of body
my soul shall be bare.
The opening lines of the poem are elegiac even in their sparseness. She speaks to the sea, fantasising of discarding her rotting flesh. ‘I throw the bodies out,’ she writes. ‘I cannot stand their smell.’ Her need to dislodge the flesh is visceral. She writes of her body as it would journey through the sea, the corpse scraping on coral and rock. The imagery in this poem is morbid, the violence that Das fantasises about rending her body pervaded with an urgent desperation. The need to escape is self-evident, she writes:
O sea, I am fed up
I want to be simple
I want to be loved
And
If love is not to be had,
I want to be dead…
Slaking the emptiness of a heart is a task rightfully delegated to the sea. To love is to lose, this is an inexorable truth of life. But when the weight of loss sits so heavy against your chest, so crushing, as Ellen Bass writes ‘fit for gills than lungs’ – what else is there to do but take to the water? Das writes of the sea with a longing to be one with it; her vision of freedom is as boundless as the ocean. I wrote earlier of an un-pinnable sea. Das writes of the sea differently – to her, dissolving is within reach; she simply chooses not to at the moment. Freedom here is an unshackling from reality, the need to escape her pain. It isn’t an impulse to wrangle order out of the disarray of her life, it is an innate urge to become the chaos itself.
The monolithic influence of love in Das’ work is a conscious thematic choice. More often than not, she engages with love through the body, through descriptions of the sensual. Das is a writer who prostrates herself at the altar of love readily, and writes her lovers as gods. In his introduction to a collection of her poems, Devendra Kohli writes:
There in a nutshell we have the yet unformulated love-ethic of Kamala Das: looking for the divine in her man or for the man in her divine. Such a romantic view of love is, paradoxically, both liberating and confining.
The stirrings of the heart, its velocity of feeling – transmuting from one into the other, can hardly be contained in words, but she tries nonetheless. The Suicide, in all its macabre visions of bodily dissolution is still a veneration of love. ‘Love is the bone and sinew of my curse,’ Sylvia Plath wrote. It is indelibly intertwined with grief, which is perhaps why we run from it so often, dreaming of becoming ocean foam to escape the ache. But love is never a fastening we choose, just one we learn to need nonetheless. It is as much about absences, spaces, and the intangible as it is about mortal living. Our lives are composed, to our innate terror, around the crescendo of our inevitable mortal ends. But one cannot exist without the other. Das in her writing on the body transgresses the elusive, using her mortality as an anchor to what she wishes for. This reshaping of her material reality, as Hirschmann calls it, is a reshaping of her context. Women taking ownership of their own sexuality always forms the basis of discussions on liberty, because so much of liberty is choice, and so much of choice is desire. Hirschmann writes of the paradox surrounding our desire – what we want and how we want is carved by time and the space that binds us to it. I return to Cixous, and her insistence that women’s bodies and consequently their minds have been confiscated from them. She writes:
We the precocious, we the repressed of culture, our lovely mouths gagged with pollen, our wind knocked out of us, we the labyrinths, the ladders, the trampled spaces, the bevies – we are black and we are beautiful.
She reminds us again of the dangers of categorising women – the virgin, the temptress, the Medusa – a sentiment Das echoes in her work. In her writing on love, love that she sought out of the confines of her marriage, she breaks from what’s morally expected of her. ‘We are all alike, we women,’ she writes in Composition: ‘in our wrappings of hairless skin. All skeletons are alike, only the souls vary.’ She writes the perfidy of living as women, even in our disjointedness there is a universality of loss.
But what remains of her poems is temerity, the record of a woman’s relentless pursuit to excavate the caverns of her self and emerge (albeit bruised) into a new April.
EVERY ANGEL IS TERRIFYING
I wonder too often, about the irreducibility of things and how death is really a palindrome for flowering. The openness of life is overwhelming sometimes, all this breathing starts to feel like an exercise in futility. When I lean over a memory, it disappears; when I breathe on petals, they die. I want to explain to myself, in words I can understand, the shape of this largeness. All this land and its bloodied maw, waiting to welcome us back in.
‘Say you began as rib or clod of earth’, Tishani Doshi writes in Every Unbearable Thing. Whenever I see the word rib, I feel a phantom pain in my own – I fancy myself Eve reborn – our legacy as women is punishment for the obdurate need to know. Doshi writes of our geographies of pain, she writes of how women were the cosmos, the gardens, the origin, everything and nothing at once. I think of Rilke, who realised that beauty and terror are but twin faces of each other, and composed the lines that culminate in the title of this essay – ‘For beauty is nothing//but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,//and we are so awed because it serenely disdains//to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.’ There is a Rilkean plurality in Doshi’s women, they are several magnificent things at once. Every Unbearable Thing features in Doshi’s newest volume of poetry A God at the Door , a towering meditation that draws on themes as ancient as mythical conceptions of the feminine interceding with issues as current as Indian politics, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The huge scope of the book allows Doshi to expand on her associations of the feminine to the natural world, retracing a legacy of female power and creation. In Every Unbearable Thing she writes:
say you gather sisters and tell
one another legends about when
women were keepers of the universe
when gardens proliferated between our thighs and even if
we were hacked and scattered
over the earth temples
would grow from the bits of us
She writes of pain as eternal, the wounds we carry ground into our bones, inherent to being women. Time is twisting, snake-like and there is no beginning to the violence. There is no beginning to beauty either, and knowing that the two live congruent forms one of the largest axes Doshi’s work is framed around. In doing so, she casts women as the simultaneous bearers and inflictors of beauty and violence – there is an innate multiplicity to the way Doshi portrays women. In her work she dissolves the boundaries between the self and other, drawing the largeness of the cosmos into our mortal frames. The body trails through Doshi’s oeuvre like Ariadne’s thread – her poems are entreated with its movement through space, through time, over generations.
In a recent essay, Doshi writes on how dance interleaves with writing in her world. ‘Language is breath, divinity,’ she writes. To her, words are inscribed on and through the flesh – moving through time and the earth. Doshi is also a dancer, she feels the creative force as a physical one. Like Kamala Das, Doshi too finds freedom in the notion of dissolution. Where Das sung of the sea and its largesse, Doshi sings of dance. ‘Dance, and certainly performance, can be a kind of dissolution, where the body – that thing that has brought you to this feeling, ceases to exist, a kind of out of body feeling. Gender-free, hierarchy-free, it is an ultimate freedom,’ she says in a recent interview. She views the body precisely as what Elizabeth Grosz calls a threshold, a hinge, a way to open out into the world at large. Employing the body as central to understanding space also allows Doshi to understand themes of belonging, of what is home, and what isn’t. In an early poem titled What the Body Knows, Doshi writes:
The body collects its wandering parts,
leans back through layers
of thickening water; roots above
boughs beneath, feet caving in to wonder.
This return of the body to itself is a common motif in Doshi’s work; she often writes the body righting itself akin to the seasons. There is an implicit hope in her work – no matter the depth of ruin, she will find her way back to herself. This resolute anchoring of the body informs ways we understand subjectivity, space, and as a central theme in Doshi’s work – the earth. She sees the body’s impermanence, its propensity to drift in and out of its moorings, and cherishes it. In Overnight in the Dance Theatre, she writes of a chance encounter with a girl in a dance theatre while looking for a saviour in the moon:
Your body is your universe, she sighs,
prising open hearts of things in her hands:
water, spirit, sand till everything’s held-
even bodies raw from dereliction,
mending themselves again, as the muted lisp
of morning’s tongue pushes against the sky.
I wrote earlier of spring, the inescapability of it. To bloom, there must be a breaking.
As reverently as Doshi writes of nature’s cycles and the body’s capability to heal, she also writes of the implicit terror and violence that surrounds them. For a writer who lives so rooted in her body, it makes sense that she would feel the ways it can be stifled with an acute intensity. Doshi has written extensively on the violence perpetrated against women, and the several ways in which our freedoms have been stripped from us. In her third collection of poems titled Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, Doshi extends the limits of the body to its erasure and the forces that create those circumstances for disappearance. She writes repeatedly of silenced women, the ones who have been slain and struck down, missing from collective memories. And through her poems she makes sure that these women speak, no matter how ungainly the sound. In Everyone Loves a Dead Girl, she writes:
A girl ---
call her my own, call her my lovely, stands up and says,
I would like to talk about what it means to suffocate on pillow
feathers, to have your neck held like a cup of wine, all delicate
and beloved, before it is crushed.
The poem chronicles the pith of violence with imagery that’s unsettlingly sweet yet thronging with a quiet rage. Doshi moves through several stories like this one, several women who finally begin to speak, nameless but their stories ‘ocean-like, glamorous.’ The imagery she uses is a subversion of innocence, the dead girls are all heart-wrenchingly beautiful, and some have ‘satin strips’ for faces. That she frames this imagined world of dead girls in the context of upper-class parties is surreal, and a lashing commentary at how far we go to silence women. She forces specificity into the situation. She forces us to think of breath ripped away, of a heart stopped by force. And it is force she contends with in the poem – power that crushes the physical body. But simultaneously, she writes of how to navigate this force, of how ‘the telling is a kind of nourishing,’ bringing the stories across into the present.
In an interview about the collection, Doshi says, ‘How do you write about violence without perpetuating it? What do you do with it?’ Simple. Circumvent the physical, and write auguries from the bloodied souls instead. In the eponymous poem from the collection Doshi writes:
Girls are
coming out of the woods, lifting
their broken legs high, leaking secrets
from unfastened thighs
Resilience here takes on a wholly different form, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods is a battle cry. Doshi writes of women releasing themselves from the forgotten annals of history in a swarm, holding their tattered forms up in determination to be heard. The poem is written in the unspeakable shadow of the rape of Jyoti Singh, and the murder of one of the poet’s own friends, so it is heavily coloured by both personal as well as political sentiments. Doshi chronicles violence of a more physical nature, but she also speaks to social coding and violence inflicted within Indian family structures. The poem, and the collection account for several kinds of violence, in varying degrees of severity but Doshi’s women are not inert receptacles for them. Instead she creates a constellation of resiliencies, polyphonic maps of challenge against fear and resistance against oppression.
Polyphony, as Mikhail Bakhtin understands it in narratology, literally translates to ‘multiple voices’. Extending this plural view of a narrative further, Bakhtin elaborates on texts that are ‘dialogic’, inherently constituted of multiple perspectives. A text is not read through the singular keyhole of the author’s voice, but as an interaction between several characters. Consciousness, in these texts, is always a product of responsive interactions, and cannot exist in isolation. It involves the interleaving of entirely incompatible elements within different perspectives of equal value. In the context of post-colonial feminism, it is useful to extend such theories of narrative multiplicity to an understanding of the world.
Dialogism then, posits, that the world is fundamentally irreducible to unity.
Doshi’s work offers a dialogic view of resistance – one that is transformative, one that can affect change. She subverts the notion of body, transcends its borders to offer a fierce testimony against huge cycles of violence against women. In poems like Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, and Everyone Loves a Dead Girl she creates worlds where multiple truths are forced upon us. The silenced women will return to speak like ‘birds arriving at morning windows’, and the world will listen.
Violence is only one form of subjugation. As decades of feminist theory and politics have shown, so much of women’s imprisonment lies in their minds. In the fallows between what they should be, and what they are. I return to Elizabeth Grosz, and how she speaks of the commodification of the female form in the 1980s:
A body more amenable, malleable, and more subordinate to mind or will than ever before. Just pick the body you want and it can be yours (for a price).
In her recent poem Why the Brazilian Butt Lift Won’t Save Us, Doshi addresses this pressure we feel to reshape the body. ‘The body grows dissatisfied,’ she writes, ‘once it starts towering over dogs/ and staring into the hearts of kitchen counters.’ Beauty, in today’s world is its own kind of imprisonment. Grosz writes on this increasing medicalisation of the body, and its effects on subjectivity and choice:
The increasing medicalisation of the body, based on processes of removal (incision, cutting, removing, and reduction) or addition (inlaying, stitching, and injection), demonstrate a body pliable to power, a machinic structure in which ‘components’ can be altered, adjusted, removed or replaced.
Social construction pervades so deeply that the body becomes a functional entity serving a specific cultural purpose. The ways we inscribe upon our bodies – through clothing, jewellery, or surgery make them textual objects, a set of signs to be read. As the antipode to this conception of form, I turn to Doshi’s poem It Has Taken Many Years to See My Body, a transcendent journey through self acceptance. Doshi draws again on the ancient understandings of the world – she uses the metaphor of the seven energy centres or chakras to chart her return to the body. Overcoming the guilt and societal pressures put on our bodies is egress in itself, and Doshi stands firm in her veneration of the self. In the very last stanza of the poem she writes:
One day at sunrise you come across your body
and greet it, as though it were a guest or traveller.
She writes with reverence, with a tender sincerity of returning to the body. There is a liberation in hope, the kind of hope that Vaclav Havel wrote of – not prognostication, but an orientation of the spirit and heart. The kind of hope that liberates us from the torrent of carnage we inflict on ourselves and look at the body in devotion:
touch it in all its fraying places,
bring it to your chest,
starving and full.
POSTLUDE
I began in rivers and so I shall end in them. I cannot explain this fidelity to water, except that I cling to the promise of change it offers. I ache to be riverine, flowing towards a vastness unexplainable. There is something freeing in anchoring the spirit to that which is impermanent, to fluctuation.
Freedom has been the primary concern of these essays – freedom as women hold it in their bodies. These essays are an attempt to sift through the legacies that have been bequeathed to us, and find spaces for shaping new ones. The essays are not concerned with what type of oppression was the greater one – they are concerned with how women have chosen to overcome them. Overcome seems like an irreverent epithet for the generations of resilience – in reality women, negotiate, resist, navigate, subvert. The ways and the spaces in which we carve out our freedoms are as multiple as the ways and spaces in which they can be taken from us. Ismat Chughtai and Wajida Tabassum centre their resistance in havelis, in bedrooms, in brothels, in kitchens. They reframed spaces that women traditionally inhabited as a result of their oppression and turned them into centres of power. Kamala Das finds freedom in loving, in her lover’s bodies and in overturning her own. Tishani Doshi transforms the meaning of resilience by giving voices to dead girls and finding her way back to her body. Throughout these essays, I also return to Nancy J Hirschmann and her conception of liberty. All four women whose work I have chosen to explore redefine subjectivity and freedom of the self by reframing the discourse of the times they lived in. Hirschmann insists on subjectivity, on choice, and a full-bodied desire as the basis for any kind of liberty. Once the choosing self is free in its comprehension of itself, all of its choices point to liberty. The only way to achieve that is to find crevices in our discourse around women’s rights, our cultural monoliths and reshape them.
So I return to water, and realise that freedom lies in the permeable, the collapsing of boundaries, the courage to be mutable.
