The Activist vs Sunflowers: Writing Fifty
ANURADHA MARWAH
I DON’T REMEMBER THE FIRST POEM I WROTE BUT I AM FAIRLY CERTAIN it would have rhymed. One of the earliest literary successes that I do remember was my yoking together ‘blue’, ‘slew’, ‘flew’ and ‘crew’ in verse that was all about the small desert-town where I was born and where I attended a missionary-run English-medium school. For years, I wrote fragmentary sentences studded with antiquities like ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ in the centre of the lined pages of my dog-eared diary. I found an oddly comforting secret life in inscribing my rhymester self.
The moment of disclosure came when the school anointed me as one of four house captains and I was asked to address the assembly. I had prepared for the event for days. I recited a poem about the ‘significance of my Alma Mater’ – cleverly rhymed with ‘…in every weather’ – and earned accolades. ‘Did you really write it or did your father compose it for you?’ But it wasn’t as though the plain-speaking, scarily efficient principal – a handsome nun called Sister Frances – was clueless about poetry. She sent me off to a British priest at the brother school (only for boys) to burnish the raw gold she had mined from the native boondocks. Thus began my writing apprenticeship with a white man.
This was in the year 1978 and I was going to turn sixteen. Three years later Salman Rushdie – who was stalking the world stage with his first offering even as I attempted my childish verse – would dazzle the literati with his distinctive dialect and it would unofficially become the language of Indian writing. Many men, and a few women writers, would follow in his wake developing trendy Indian English and elegantly denouncing Anglophone hegemony in Indian literature. In sheer ignorance of all that was building up globally I sat at the white missionary’s feet every week in far-off Ajmer trying to emulate Hopkins, Keats and Coleridge – and E. E. Cummings.
But then what else could I have done in a small town that had all of one bookshop that didn’t sell only textbooks?
What else could I have done but grab at this one chance to create meaning? I was miserable and didn’t know why.
The year-long apprenticeship was an exhilarating period for me. At our first meeting Father Lesser told me to stop rhyming and write just like I speak – and use correct grammar. A black ink bottle uncorked itself in my heart that evening and darkness began to pour out. I wrote ghoulishly of death and dying, of defeat, of loss, of rejection and neglect. Nothing had prepared the priest for the unending stream of grief and pessimism that threatened to swamp his certainties the following Monday afternoon and then regularly every Monday for over a year. I was a pretty girl – thin, in a way that would have been cool in a metropolis but was only unusual in a provincial town and, of course, a high achiever in school: I invariably stood first in class. My parents were well-regarded lecturers in the town colleges. Nothing warranted a near-suicidal, obsessive personality. Nothing! At least to a touchingly innocent priest who had been celibate and praying all his life to the son of the virgin mother; who believed in good and bad and I was so obviously a ‘good’ girl. ‘Why are you so sad? Why is every poem about death?’ Father Lesser asked, perplexed.
I couldn’t have told him that if I didn’t write about death I would write about sex. I didn’t know it myself. I was plagued by sexual fantasies; I masturbated continuously; I was physically affected by each and every man creature I met. And it wasn’t only since I had hit puberty; the horrible truth was that it had been like this ever since I could remember. While the submerged part of me had become adult at tender years; the adolescent persona remained stubbornly infantile. I made no connection at all between my writing and sex. Or my childhood and my violent sexual fantasies.
When I spoke about my growing-up in therapy many years later I was nearing forty and getting out of an extra-marital affair – that with hindsight seemed terribly sleazy – and a marriage which I even then recognized as abusive. Both had started off as love and their failures had broken my heart twice over. My therapist pointed out that I relate to men only via sex. It was an epiphany from hell. As I narrated my memories of sexual abuse when a child of four or five, she nodded gravely. I wept and wept because it had been so obvious to her. I was only an illness waiting to be diagnosed; a sickness crying to be therapeutized. Yet, I went weekly to her office – sometimes twice a week – surrendering to be decimated. I feared becoming her statistical data, one of the many anxiety syndrome cases she was dealing with. After all, I was a writer trying to create new meaning.
My first novel had been published six years ago in 1993. It was a campus novel – funny and sexy. Reviewers had most seized on the opening lines: ‘It was morning. I didn’t have to go to college till ten-thirty. There was nothing to do except cry, make a phone call or masturbate’. However, the reviews – except for one – were not unkind.
The protagonist of my first novel, Geetika Mehendiratta, lives my life more confidently than I ever had and then breaks out of its bourgeois logic by having a baby out of wedlock. I had just given birth to my second son when I wrote it. I had two small children – two years apart – and a husband who was always away. It was difficult to find the time to go to the loo. I had a continuous sinking feeling that my marriage was over. Yet I wrote the novel in nine months flat and fell in love disastrously with a professor when I finished it. My younger son was barely a year old at the time. I was up to my nose in diapers and baby formula. The caged bird – after putting herself through a crash course in singing – was flapping her wings.
Till then I had not realized the importance of doing: of acting and activism. Cages do not give way to the softness of feathers; protest songs – by themselves – do not bring down oppressive regimes. Revolutions demand that you come out on the street and wage battles. In the case of writers, perhaps the call is to become the revolutionary heroes we create from the confines of the ivory tower. But stubbornly dealing in romance, I only fantasized of rescue from my tower-prison. The professor instinctively shrank from my desperation. Also, he did not know what to do with a married woman who threw herself constantly at him. He was flattered and shocked alternately.
In my first novel the protagonist is a small town ingénue and narrates her story in the first person. In my second, Idol Love, responding to criticism that my writing was informal I tried to be intellectual. Besides, I was addressing the professor. Idol Love projects into the future and through the subjectivity of a one hundred-year-old writer I describe the advent of Hindu fundamentalism. There is a love story too in the novel that knits the present and the future together. There had to be as I was so much in love:
You have closed the door
I won’t look in
I won’t knock
I won’t call
I won’t cry
I am going to be dead for a while
says the woman in love in the novel. One of the foremost literary publishers of the country, Ravi Dayal, published it. ‘There’s a lot here,’ he reassured me while chiding me gently about the occasional baldness of my language. His suggestions were geared to contain the emotionalism of the novel and highlight its political thesis. Ravi was extremely literary – the best mentor a writer could have had. He believed in literature – the ultimate triumph of a well-written text. The manuscript went back and forth between us for years and was published elegantly in 1999. But Ravi was also notoriously unfashionable and took no cognizance of the demands of the market.
Mainstream papers paid little attention to my intellectual novel. I loved the book. I should have exulted quietly with the couple of literary journals that affirmed it. But the problems in my marriage were becoming monstrous; and once again my expectation that my writing would provide release from an unbearable personal situation proved unrealistic. The persona of a beautiful woman about town that I had worn successfully for many years slipped. There was no occasion for quiet exultation. I went into therapy instead and cried over my unrequited love life week by week.
My third novel written during, and after, four years of intensive therapy is about sexual abuse. I retraced anger, frustration, coercion, betrayal in the third person via a split persona: two sisters in Ajmer, the younger one, raped and blackmailed; the older, seduced and humiliated. The book is earnest and naked; composed in the harsh light of many insights. At last I was out in the street: in court fighting a freedom battle that grew uglier by the day. I grew by leaps and bounds in experience that exposed me for the first time to the nasty, brutish side of life – financial wheeling-dealing, power-play – that I had circumvented all these years. I also felt I grew in my craft by departing from the autobiographical mode. I called the novel Dirty Picture (2007). In Dirty Picture sexuality was dealt with straight. The novel is based on a real-life incident that took place in Ajmer – rape and blackmail of school girls by men who mostly belonged to a minority community and several incidents of office-affairs between young pretty secretaries and ageing, lecherous bosses: men in power and women in love. One silly woman at the end of the book metamorphoses into a writer-activist.
To the misfortune of the literary world – but especially to mine – Ravi Dayal passed away in 2006. He had promised to read my manuscript after recovering from surgery: ‘I hope there will be something left,’ he had said to me two days before going into the hospital from where he did not return. So many times I ask myself how he would have responded to the book. A small publisher brought the novel out ultimately and after its eventless publication, feeling oddly empty inside, I went off to get myself a PhD. I wrote my thesis on women’s writing since the 1990s.
I intended my dissertation to be my writerly biography. I wanted to make sense of why my writing career that had started off fairly well when I published in 1993 had begun to seem so marginal and insignificant by 2008. After winning the fight for a divorce in the lower court and putting together a family – comprising my two sons and my live-in partner – in a middle-class, conservative neighbourhood of Delhi, I had realized the importance of the outer world and the many ways it shapes what we like to designate as personal or individual. I knew I needed to explore the field of literature in India to understand my situation as a writer. However, the individual signified by the personal pronoun ‘I’ had to take a backseat in this quest as ultimately I could not mention my three novels in my dissertation. To find reasons for one’s disappointments one would have to begin by defining success. I was evaluating market success. My books had sold too little for me to be an example of anything.
My thesis is that women novelists of the 1990s were mainly overshadowed by Rushdiesque writing – grandiose and phallic – till the middle of the 1990s. In 1997, with the publication of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things a new feminine age apparently begins with global interest focusing on the smaller concerns of Indian women. However, the space created for women’s voices is hijacked by the market that prioritizes glamour and femininity over the writers’ activist impulse against patriarchy. The contemporary market I discovered works in various ways – obvious as well as insidious. There aren’t only professional marketers; editors and writers themselves are co-opted in the sophisticated industry as well. Thus, in bestselling literary fiction and in the creation of market persona of writers who are brand names, market hype serves to defuse the challenge to patriarchy. I titled my dissertation ‘Liberation or Liberalization: The Woman Writer and the Market for Indian Fiction in English’. I describe in some detail the global publicity campaigns for selling Indian women writers’ books and the construction of a saleable hip Indian-ness in the media. I argue that the kind of cosmopolitan sensibility Rushdie had made fashionable continues to be projected as quintessentially Indian in the global market. So, in spite of the apparent focus on Indian women and their concerns, the themes in valorized women’s literature in English do not plumb the Indian Marxist feminist agenda which arises from women’s movements at the grassroots level. The political purpose of Indian women’s writing is, I argue, being served better by researched non-fiction (Roy’s political essays, for instance) that is not subject to the same kind of hype and glamour associated with awards and celebrity-hood as that which goes under the rubric of global literature.
I got my PhD in April 2012. I published a section from my thesis and presented some papers. At seminars academics ask me a lot of questions about well-known writers and novels. There are predictably no questions about my novels and I do not mention them in my talks. But I still feel I have been able to segue one of my dilemmas as a feminist writer into literary studies.
The relationship of activism with writing is a concern that increasingly obsesses me these days. A child victim of abuse who confronted her demons; a wife who divorced and fought tooth and nail for her sons and her share of the marital home; and now a sister who is claiming her fair share of her parents’ property – I have gradually approximated the kind of resistance my creations offer to the patriarchal world. My writing, even as I attempted to use it as a mode of escape, continued to impel me into action. Now, when with active association with voluntary organizations I have accepted activism as my mode of being; and while I am gravitating more and more towards those who are attempting to change things for the better in palpable ways – for the under-privileged, for women – writing remains a desire and, sometimes, an urgent need. I realize I need to create to move on.
Subconsciously, after my third novel and the thesis, I had started looking for a form other than the novel that would be more suited to my purpose as a feminist writer. I tried my hand at other things – writing plays, for instance.
I had always enjoyed writing dialogue; there are pages and pages of conversation in all my novels. My partner is the founder-director of a theatre group that works mainly with marginalized children and women. Sanjay and I do a lot of things together and it seemed only natural to me to begin to write plays for him, especially as I had not started a novel after 2008.
The performance of my second play ‘Sarkari Feminism’ – Feminism as the State Ordains It (2010) – that he directed, got an overwhelming response from young people. It is bilingual – Hindi and English – and funny. Theatre seemed to me a medium of immediacy and intimacy through which I could access my readers directly. I was exhilarated.
In August 2012 I attended the Ninth Women Playwrights’ Conference in Stockholm where my first full-length play was presented along with several others from all over the world. It was another moment of triumph especially as the half-hour presentation led to considerable interest in my use of the myth of the Pied Piper of Hamlyn to tell the story of missing underprivileged children in Delhi. But feminist activism is a space that is not won easily, I discovered. At the conference there were accomplished women who were actors, directors, dancers and above all, producers of their own material. All of them had found it exceptionally difficult to stage their work. A lot of discussion in the conference was about the problems women face in getting funding for the themes they gravitate towards. Eighty-five per cent of theatre in the US is directed and produced by men. ‘You are so lucky; you have a director-producer at home!’
The realization that the medium of theatre is as mediated as novel writing was slow in coming but a sobering one. No matter what I write I would always have to negotiate the unequal world out there – just as all these women were doing. Like an epiphany the reason for the unexpected hostility and insults from women I liked and even admired – that I had been subject to in the last couple of years also became clear. In my professional pairing with Sanjay, to many I must have appeared to be at best a supplement, sometimes an appendage. Theatre is, after all, primarily performance; words serve action. I must have seemed like a sunflower seeking the warmth and light of my partner’s passionate commitment to theatre – and many, no doubt, felt I had no business monopolizing the sun. ‘What if she dies?’ an infatuated woman had enquired loudly of Sanjay embarrassing the entire party in Italy. She had fallen in love with his work. She was an artist whose own work had been eclipsed by that of her more famous husband. Both of us were accompanying our male partners at the residency. Her husband seemed to be a kind man who indulged her – let her display her art to all those who came to admire his – but then, they were his devoted followers: admirers of his artistic challenge to capitalism; mesmerized by his use of his own body as a weapon against commodification. I would have whispered to her, ‘Sister, I understand! But move away from the shadow of the sun while the going is good.’
Mariola and I never became friends. She avoided me and I, to my shame, could never work up enough courage to go to her and discuss darkness and death. In the meantime, I seemed to run into too many sunflowers. More than one strong woman friend was surrendering to the inexorableness of conventional patriarchy. Where does heterosexual love end and surrender begin? I had completed therapy more than ten years ago with the distinct feeling of having emerged from darkness. It was the sense of clouds gathering and obscuring my sun again that made me go back and mourn.
I had created a sunny space with my partner for two vulnerable little boys. We had defied convention and forged a family against all odds. My put-together family was the actualization of my dream; a heavenly fulfillment of the promise of love and romance. But after ten years of magic my day was done. ‘Mom, just chill!’ My sons had grown up and the heroic comrade-in-arms and single mother character that had done quite well seemed to be knocking around morosely in her paradise looking for bit parts.
My therapist and I discussed love, theatre, and feminist options. Do some feminist roles – mirroring subsidiary roles conventionally assigned to women – also come with an expiration date? Or is it that while playing at the fifteen per cent women’s share of theatre and improvising painfully every word, every act, the flesh and blood woman tires just a little, puts up her feet on cushions of convention in the penultimate scene and begins to murmur lines from the big eighty-five per cent soap opera? I always knew that creative work is uncompromising and solitary; I always knew that there is a gender difference between the way artistic achievements of men and women are conceptualized. Women are consigned to middle-age and the shelf much faster. Besides, successful men invariably attract young women votaries who play daughters and lovers and seek guidance and protection. But older women do have the myth of Oedipus for the romantic scene, and above all, other women for the entire play. This is the way it has always been and this is one of the reasons I am a feminist. Why did it lead to such despair when it became increasingly clear to me that a prized and beloved heterosexual partnership has a social handicap?
Self-pity! It was dark for so long and then the sun shone so briefly. Don’t I know only too well that to try and cling on to what must necessarily change is to submit to the neck-bending neurosis of sunflowers!
This is no country for middle-aged women. In pique I stopped dyeing my hair. I celebrated my fiftieth birthday in November 2012, flamboyantly, unashamedly grey, with my two sons, my father, my close friends and Sanjay on the terrace of my flat. Sanjay gave me a diamond ring and did the drinks. It was a wonderful party with Jamaican rum punch and music and love flowing, engulfing me, and it continued late in the evening. They all loved my new look.
The fifties have started, the clock is ticking, but while I exult in the love of my man and glow with pride in my grown-up boys I also know that I would need to follow my own advice to the woman artist to distance herself resolutely from reflected glory. Thankfully though, I am beginning to appreciate that the approaching dark that so horrifies me might not be destiny/bad karma but my métier.
Do I write to publish, get known, get rich or do I write because I must? When my first two novels were remaindered I felt obliterated. I realize that when I write and publish, no matter how deeply buried, there always will breathe in me the base desire to be adopted, celebrated, and, perhaps, consecrated. But that is not all there is to my writing; otherwise knocking at the door of one publisher after another with my tract on sexual abuse – the manuscript of my third novel – being told off: it is commercial fiction; it is too long; it is politically incorrect as it represents Muslims as villains; it is oversexed – like a B-grade Hindi film, would have erased the writer in me.
It didn’t. I went on to write my thesis and the plays. I was accessing those parts of myself that I hadn’t tapped up till then: the academic and the bilingual.
I suppose I write also because I must make myself – I know no other way to carry on.
A mountainous life more than fifty per cent scaled! What do I see beyond? A hair-pin turn? It is a return in more ways than one to the barren landscape of my childhood: Ajmer, the desert town of my origins. Five years ago I took over the voluntary organization that my Gandhian social-activist mother had started in Ajmer. She passed away in 1997 but through monthly visits to her institution – that had miraculously continued to run itself after her death for more than a decade – I discovered the commitment and the amazing efficiency of the woman I had spent most of my adult life blaming. Quietly she had created a centre of hope for the illiterate and marginalized in Ajmer. I had spent years resenting my mother’s work, blaming it for her neglect and abandonment of me. Ironically, when it was folding up I couldn’t let her legacy go. I taught myself lessons I had half-heard and hated all through my growing years.
Becoming the secretary of a community NGO is the most definite statement I have ever made regarding my activism. For the first time in my life I made policy. No, the paternalistic approach towards women’s welfare had to go. We held a national conference on laws against domestic violence. Women’s groups in villages are encouraged to protest and picket.
I know it is relatively easier for me to get away with such work. People are ready to cooperate with us because they remember my mother. They see me continuing her work, taking her legacy forward. It is that but also a confrontation. I still can’t forgive my mother for not loving me enough; for letting me grow up with a void in the centre of my being; for letting me be collateral damage to her Gandhian social reconstruction. But after getting to know her posthumously, I question circumstances more. Was her rejection of me much more primal? Did her eager little daughter remind her too much of herself? Was it the desiring, fun-seeking aspect of her own self that she was rejecting when she tried to school me into restraint and sacrifice? She too was doing too many things traditional women do not. She too had a family to manage along with her two full-time jobs. I started a dialogue with her recently – the talk we should have had many, many years ago. I have started a book of poems entitled Fifty. It will be mainly about her, our relationship, and my life as a fifty-year-old woman:
I remember the empty pit inside me, the lock on the door
and your eyes,
impatient, tired
turning away from me.
I am now fifty and full
and must watch my weight,
deal more effectively with the craving for
strawberry-cream
and lovers.
I do not quite know why I am talking to her in verse. After those heady days in Ajmer of first discovering that I am a writer, I haven’t written much poetry. This and a few others came out as poetry. I am back to my origins.
Form and content should be inextricable.
But what about the novel that has given me so much pleasure and pain and with which I have been obsessed for more than twenty years! The PhD thesis withstanding, I am left with no excuse for not writing another. The novel form is an elusive lover; Krishna to the Radha in my name. It is inevitable that I will be seduced. How can I continue to resist the magic of an image slowly expanding into a theme? I hear the distant flute. I am still wary of entering the darkness that continues for years before the writer sees a slim ray of light – when the novel stops being a random pulse-beat and becomes a living thing. But I will not abstain for too long. Why should I? An activist must challenge market forces, even if to retire hurt ultimately.
And theatre? I have played at theatre; perhaps I will work there. Perhaps I will learn more stagecraft; about actors, acting, and production.
This is what it has been and always would be – many beginnings; some arrivals in sunny spaces; but mainly flowerings in the dark. Activism is not about success but about hope. There is always light somewhere. The most important thing is to write on through the night.