Abstract
In this collection of essays on women’s autobiographical writings, it is the idea of performance in the title that attracts the reader immediately. It is to this concept that some essays more than others return in the book. Not happy with the term autobiography that has been associated with Western, primarily male models, the authors use life history/stories and personal narratives with more ease. The collection of 10 writings that range from the sixteenth century to the present day, look at subversion, the secret self, addressing a public as though in a performative space, the journal and the diary.
Writing in journals was the chosen mode for Zakira Begam of Hyderabad. When, in the 1980s, Sylvia Vatuk worked with Zakira Begam of Hyderabad on her writings, she observed that the text was a multi-layered document: the first level is the life as it was lived and the second is the 1950s reconstruction of this childhood and adolescence of the 1920s and 1930s. Many such reconstructions remain at the second level, if they are unread, private. There is a third level when these writings are offered to the reader, in this case a Western woman anthropologist keen on learning about Zakira’s life. The fourth layer is, of course, that of translation and presentation to a different cultural milieu. Though Vatuk does not go into the challenges and travails of a translation, these are very relevant as there are many Indian women’s life stories in various languages waiting to be translated. On this issue of translation, nobody can say it better than Umberto Eco in Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation. He points out that it is not merely a question of linguistic ease but also cultures that need to be understood and conveyed to readers in another language.
Such issues did not concern Ritu Menon while working on Nayantara Sahgal’s Prison and Chocolate Cake and From Fear Set Free. Not only are both these autobiographical texts in English, but also many long interviews and discussions were possible with the Dehra Dun-based daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit. Menon found the books by a well-known Indo-Anglian author of fiction remarkable testimonies of a woman who chose to reject a gendered life scripted by her husband. She walks out of her first marriage, enters into a relationship and then marries a second time. For Menon itself, it was a case of pentimento, discovering what lay below the existing text; it was a rediscovery for her, and as commentators on autobiographical writers often find, they too are rethinking their presuppositions—if not their own lives.
Women found their voices in a variety of situations—on a country boat like Kailashbashini Debi in nineteenth century Bengal—where as Shubhra Ray found, she was able to have a relationship with her husband independent of the larger joint family. And she wrote of this with great ease. Noted Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder’s mother, Nazr Sajjad Hyder, was from a reformist Punjabi Shi‘ite family; she serialised her memoirs over a period of 21 years in two Urdu women’s magazines. As Asiya Alam points out, there is an everydayness of her writings, sometimes accompanied by personal letters to the editor explaining her state of mind at the time of writing. And when the daughter edited her mother’s writing, she brought ‘her own sensibility of a fiction writer’. A dominant leit motif of her writings is sorrow at the loss of close relatives; Alam observes that there is a certain ‘audacity in revealing her whole emotional life to the public’, and it was indeed part of her social background of reformism that the private should become a part of public discourse.
In her analysis of Pakistani women writing fiction about Partition, Uma Chakravarti positions herself as a ‘feminist historian…interested in the way in which history personal and political, appears in this body of writing’. Perhaps because of Chakravarti’s own position or perhaps the emotively charged subject material led to a three-way engagement between the authors of the texts, their female protagonists and her own investment in reading these. An investment that bound Chakravarti to the writers, their loss and ‘the terrible lived trauma’ of Partition. Chakravarti, like Menon and others, reiterates the ‘new autobiographical pact’ between authors, their protagonists and the reading self; such a pact need not be overtly subjective—but certainly a feminist reading does bring into play certain subtle nuances perhaps missed by others.
Looking at ghazals and tawai’fs, Shweta Sachdeva Jha points out that connoisseurs of Urdu highlighted the fact that these are often autobiographical, the poet expressing many personal emotions through them. Mah Laq Bai ‘Chanda’s’ rendering of these is accordingly emotive. A well-placed courtesan at the late eighteenth–early nineteenth-century Hyderabadi court, she was among the first women tawai’fs to compose an entire diwan or volume of poetry. Jha adds that Chanda wished to be remembered as a woman of piety—somewhat of a contradiction given her avowed calling. A high status, however, allowed her freedom to refashion an understanding of her role. More than a century before her, Jahanara, daughter of Mumtaz Mahal and Emperor Shah Jahan too had wielded considerable authority as the keeper of her father’s harem. She had also developed a powerful relationship with her Sufi pir, and written two treatises. Afshan Bokhari draws attention to the strongly ‘first-person historicised narratives’ of these two treatises. Bokhari makes the interesting point that though imperial Mughal women were significant in keeping the bloodline clear, it was only Jahanara who was able to negotiate a role for herself in the imperial apparatus. It could not have been easy.
Anshu Malhotra finds in the life of Piro, a Muslim prostitute of the nineteenth century, an escape through writing: unlike the more sharif women discussed in the book, Piro wrote to escape her many oppressions. And in doing so, she was able to deal with her life, using dominant tropes and literary metaphors. It was much easier, as we shall see, for women of class. A particularly interesting life is that of Raihana Tyabji, a Sulaymani Bohra woman who in The Heart of the Gopi wrote about herself as a gopi, though to all intents and purposes she was a Muslim and a staunch Gandhian. Siobhan Lambert-Hurley discusses Raihana’s urge to write—and to write of herself as a completely different persona from what she appeared to be in public. Kathryn Hansen’s discussion of the ‘theatrical memoirs’ of two prominent Parsi actors who impersonated as women on stage brings to a dramatic close (pun intended) the entire discussion of autobiography as performance. Here, in sharp contrast to Raihana’s life, the personal was not the acquired role—but again, like her, there was a sharp split between the personal and the public lives of the actors as also of Raihana.
Speaking of the Self—Gender, Performance and Autobiography in South Asia is an interesting collection—though perhaps a bit dated in style and content: in the present-day world of multiple identities and competing if not conflicting cultures, it is not always enough to interpose the self (the academic author) between the subject (the autobiographer) and the reader. It is important to hear the voices of the women in their own words—and this is easily done by interpolating significant extracts in the text. Interestingly, apart from occasional quotes, no author has used this method. Jahanara Begum’s life is enriched by the use of images—this again is something that could have been the norm for all papers. Even in academic publications, a text-visual combination can rarely be rivalled by only words, and an increasing number of editors and authors are using the rich corpus of visual material available today with remarkable success.