Inaugurating a (Feminine) Public: Women’s Romances in Kannada,1950s–1960s

Introduction

The paperback revolution of the 1950s–1960s in Kannada publishing sparked an upsurge in the production of books at very low cost. It enabled certain types of writing such as works by women (novels and advice books) and detective fiction to become popular. ¹ The spurt in paperbacks, especially what came to be known as pocketbooks, generated a huge debate on books published for the ‘market’, something that I examine in detail elsewhere. ² For the purposes of this article I look at a set of Kannada novels written by women that became hugely popular in this decade. Foremost among these novelists were Triveni (1928–1963), M.K. Indira (1917–1994), Vani (1917–1988) and Anupama Niranjana (1934–1991). ³ The novels were popular because they were serialised first in periodicals before they were published as paperbacks, and also because they were easily accessible from libraries, particularly private circulating libraries. This article explores how the novels constitute an important means of conceptualising modernity, in terms of identity and subjectivity, in the region of Karnataka. ⁴ The regional focus, I suggest, does not preclude but in fact throws into relief the formation of and disruptions within postcolonial Indian modernity.

Among the novels written by women, I specially draw attention to the romances. Romances typically have as their narrative core a central hero and heroine who go through a phase of ‘romance’ before becoming a couple. The importance of these romances is in their inauguration of a public—a feminine public. I use ‘public’ rather than the notion of ‘public sphere’ since the ‘public’ constituted by women writers radically differs from, and in fact is incommensurate with, the Habermasian notion of the ‘public sphere’. For Habermas, the public sphere is forged through rational dialogue and debate leading to consensual public opinion (Habermas, 1989, p. 36). ⁵ The public that the women writers created interrogates the discourse of modern scientific rationality.

The feminine public has usually been discussed as alternative or oppositional to a masculine public (Fraser, 1992). ⁶ However, when these romances were written there was no masculine public. In fact these novels inaugurated a public. It was only through its displacement, enabled by Navya (modernist) criticism, that a masculine public came into existence. ⁷ In the early 1960s the Navya school formulated for the first time a literary canon based on notions of good realism and bad realism, within which the women’s novels were seen as ‘sentimental’ and ‘excessively emotional’. Navya literary criticism, which was to become hegemonic, can be traced to Kirtinath Kurtakoti’s magnum opus Yugadharma haagu sahitya darshana (Spirit of the age and a view of literature) (1962), in which he dismissed Triveni and others writing like her as pandering to popular taste through simplistic delineation of characters, clever dialogues and pace of story (1962, pp. 191–201). As against this hegemonic characterisation of the 1950s women’s novels, this article asks ‘how can we read them today?’

This article closely examines the following novels: Triveni’s Sothu geddavalu (The one who lost and won) (1954), Huuvu hannu (Flowers and fruit) (1953?), Bekkina kannu (Cat’s eyes) (n.d.), Mukti (Freedom) (1959), Sharapangara (Cage of Arrows) (1965) and Hannele chiguridaga (When old leaves sprout) (1963); Indira’s Tunga Bhadra (1963) and Gejje pooje (Ritual of anklet worship) (1966); Vani’s Chinnada panjara (Golden cage) (1958) and Kaveriya madilalli (In the lap of Kaveri) (1965); Anupama Niranjana’s Himada hu (Snow flower) (1966) and Hridaya vallabha (King of hearts) (1968). ⁸ The article does not merely commend the novels for their popularity but, importantly, investigates their articulation of subjectivity vis-à-vis the state’s language of development. In Karnataka the focus on development mirrors that of the young nation state. ⁹ However, the project of development in Karnataka was older than that of the nation as it had been initiated by the princely Mysore state much earlier. The Mysore state was at the forefront of promoting women’s rights such as the extension of franchise for women, maternity benefits and birth control, sometimes in direct conflict with ‘public opinion’. ¹⁰ In the post-independence period the developmental policy of the nation state centrally foregrounded women’s equality. The constitutional ideal that all citizens irrespective of gender, caste or creed are equal translated into modernising programmes for women, such as the expansion of education for women and a series of legislations promoting women’s rights: the Hindu Marriage Act (1955) that provided for divorce and banned polygamy, Hindu Succession Act (1956) that gave property rights to women and Dowry Prohibition Act (1961).

The formation of modernity is marked not merely by the estab-lishment of the nation state but includes the naming of the citizen subject. The citizen subject, according to Etienne Balibar, embodies within himself both the citizen—representing an ideal, a figure instituted by an abstract state and possessing rights equal to all other citizens—and the subject who has to, in historical time as it were, become the rights-bearing subject (subjectum) (Balibar, 1992, p. 51). In that sense, Balibar says, the citizen is always a ‘supposed subject’ where the subject as a rights-bearing individual is a figure who is yet to emerge. However the subject as a rights-bearing individual is also implicit in the conceptualisation of the citizen ‘in the Declaration of Rights, and in all the discourses and practices that reiterate its effect’ (Balibar, 1992, p. 45).

Thus the ‘citizen’ embodied in the Declaration of Rights and the Indian constitution carries an internal contradiction—of being determined as a subject who also is not yet a subject. Thus, the journey of becoming a subject is marked by ‘conflicts’ that we need to map (Balibar, 1992, p. 46). Additionally, if we take into account the subject as marked by his or her social location, we recognise that the possibility of occupying the space of the subject (as subjectum) is premised on his or her social positioning. This becoming a subject as envisaged by the state and the constitution can be seen as the performativity ¹¹ of the subject within an ‘identity frame’. This performativity constitutes one of the strands of our modernity. We see in Anupama’s writings, for instance, a vision for the nation as secular-modern. ¹² In the foreword to her novel Chinnada panjara Vani (1958, p. 3) mentions the possibilities that were opened up for women by the divorce law. Both writers articulate a desire for women’s equality that is manifested in the legislations of the 1950s–1960s but express doubts about whether the promises of modernity would be fulfilled, given the cultural context in which we live. For example, Vani (1958, p. 3) states in the foreword mentioned above that even though the divorce law exists, the culture we live in might deter women from making use of the law. The gap between modernity as an ideal and a cultural context that might not enable its realisation however is not outside, but is already contained within, a modernising state’s discourse. ¹³

In the novels, we see the subject’s performativity as identity in the woman confronting and restructuring dharma. Instead of understanding dharma as a norm of Indian culture, which is then sometimes read as reflected in popular Indian culture (see, for instance, Uberoi, 1997), we need to understand dharma as a framing device that is negotiated within the novel. Dharma, as Shivarama Padikkal points out, is one of the foundational frames of the Kannada novel. Padikkal (2001, p. 56) suggests that when the Kannada novel emerged as a new genre at the turn of the 19th century, the genre simultaneously drew on, and in the process redefined, both the realist mode and historicisation of society, which was intrinsic to the English novel, and the frame of niti or dharma (ethics) which governed earlier modes of storytelling (kathana) in Kannada. Examining early-20th--century novels like Indirabai and Indira, Padikkal suggests that these fashioned a new femininity within a redefined dharma. As against the 1920s novels what is new in the mid-century women’s novels is that the confrontation between dharma and the ‘identity’ of the woman does not lead to a positing of a new dharma but significantly to a blurring of lines between dharma and adharma (the unethical). The writers articulate for the first time a critique of ‘patriarchy’ by drawing upon modern notions of ‘self’ and ‘equality’. In this sense we find the novels representing the becoming of subject that Balibar envisages, the closing of the gap between the citizen and subject. Here we need to specifically mark the liberal nature of the citizen subject who is envisaged by the state.

What we find in the novels is importantly the subject’s performativity in excess of identity. We cannot yet clearly talk of another frame that is divorced from the former (Kakar, 1989; Kishwar, 1999) but point to another set of coordinates that do not sit in compatibility with ‘identity’. The other set of coordinates are not outside modernity in the sense of being pre-modern but there is something different about their relationship with modernity. Here, we need to understand modernity as not automatically subsuming the subject’s performativity within its structure of ‘identity’. What I wish to present in this article is not merely an arrival at the excess but to give it a name.

The performativity of the subject in excess of identity, I suggest, is hinted at in the form of the romance narratives. This narrative form that constitutes the subject differently gestures to the impasses in the narrative of modernity. By form I mean first, the genre of the romance novel, which can be identified by the particular narrative movement towards couple formation. In the mid-20th-century women’s romances we see the failure of couple formation and the representation of a crisis in conjugality. Second, form refers to the set of narrative devices used to structure the narrative, structure as different from content. This narrative structure that uses what I call a ‘psychological mode’ undermines the developmental-modern language of the plot. The psychological mode refers to the representation of persistent mental conflicts experienced by the women protagonists, specially the hysterical excess that the narratives themselves represent. This form of ‘excess’ I suggest can be productively read against what Luce Irigaray calls a Female Symbolic that shows up the limits and failures of the dominant Symbolic, here the developmental-modern language of the state. I now elaborate this argument through an analysis of the women’s novels.

The Novels

The women novelists were middle-class and except Anupama, Brahmin. However, Anupama was part of a growing Sanskritised middle class. The writers were well educated except for Indira, who studied only till the third standard. Indira and Anupama belonged to notable families. Indira came from a rich zamindar family in Shimoga, south Karnataka. Her brother, T.S. Ramachandra Rao was the noted editor of the Kannada daily newspaper Prajavani. Anupama was a doctor and wife of a renowned writer, Niranjana. She belonged to the Devanga or weavers’ community and married out of her caste, which was revolutionary for her time. She was part of the communist milieu of which her husband was an important member and had socialist leanings herself. She explicitly identified herself as a feminist in the 1970s, with the emergence of the women’s movement in India. Irrespective of the differences among the writers, they represent those who would be characterised in the nation’s history as ‘exemplary citizens of an independent India’.

The romances raised questions of women’s subjectivity in relation to marriage, education, work and sexuality. The women characters were represented as seeking education not only to be literate but to learn new manners and behaviour, to beautify themselves and dress well, aspiring to new ideals of wifehood and motherhood. ¹⁴ The romances are particularly interesting because though they follow the conventional romance narrative’s theme of couple formation, they show the eventual failure of couple formation. I explore this failure—the ways in which it is enacted and the meanings that we can derive from that. I am interested in exploring how this diverges from other conceptions of the couple as in the Navodaya (new dawn) school’s (in the 1930s–1940s) celebration of the couple as heralding the nation ¹⁵ or in the narratives of early women novelists such as Thirumalamba and Kalyanamma who wrote in the 1920s. However, the departure is not in terms of ‘violence’ in the conjugal space. ¹⁶ The romances provide an alternative critique of the conjugal space.

The romances can be distinguished from the genre of ‘social’ novels in terms of the narrative of couple formation and the kind of subjectivity that the female protagonists represent. ¹⁷ If couple formation is one of the many themes in the social novel, in the romance genre couple formation and the elaboration of the romance between the couple is central to the narrative. Also, as opposed to the social novels, the romances of the 1950s are mainly set in urban locations and revolve around a female protagonist, focusing on her as an individual whose mental and emotional struggles are portrayed. However, they are different from earlier romances, for instance, the novels of Kalyanamma (1920s), in that (a) there is a failure of couple formation or (b) if couple formation occurs in the beginning or middle of the novel the rest of the novel focuses on the failure of the romance which does not end in marriage. This does not diminish the significance of the romance between the couple, which is delineated in great detail. The romance novels describe the formation of the couple in its materialities from the rites of passage to marriage—of the girl-viewing ceremony with descriptions of how the girl ‘dresses up’, ¹⁸ of the shy girl who blushes when she glances at her husband-to-be, the man unable to take his eyes off her, the exchange of looks and the conversation where he asks for her ‘consent’ ¹⁹ —to the honeymoon after the wedding. Though critics dismiss these details as ‘trivial’ (Rao, 1982; Shyamabhatta, 1993), they are what the readers recollect ²⁰ and are important in the constitution of the image of the couple. The novels further represent the dissatisfactions within marriage, particularly dramatising the conflicts and dilemmas of the woman protagonists, which I will analyse below.

These novels mostly revolve around middle-class Brahmin women who initially live in a village or small town, then move to another town after marriage (Huuvu hannu, Sothu geddavalu, Chinnada panjara) or in search of job opportunities (Mukti) or to study (Hannele chiguridaga). In tandem with the move the protagonist grows either intellectually or as a person. Growth is precipitated by a crisis in the protagonist’s life: either the protagonist does not find a man (Mukti, Gejje pooje) or becomes a widow (Huuvu hannu, Hannele chiguridaga) or the husband moves away from the home (Sothu geddavalu) or the husband is unable to provide emotional and sexual satisfaction (Hridaya vallabha, Chinnada panjara). This crisis leads to questions regarding women’s education (Hannele chiguridaga), widow remarriage (Hannele chiguridaga), women’s need to work (Himada hu) and woman’s sexual desires (Hridaya vallabha, Sothu geddavalu).

Mainstream critics like Sheshagiri Rao (1982) and Shyamabhatta (1993) have dismissed Triveni’s novels as ‘trivial’ on the ground of their preoccupation with the ‘domestic’. On the other hand feminist critics from the 1980s have argued that it was precisely through addressing questions raised in the domestic sphere that Triveni brought in the woman’s world into the novel. However, even sympathetic feminist critiques have found the novels inadequate in their inability to move beyond the conventions of patriarchy and in implicitly endorsing the institution of marriage (Dabbe, 1989; Sumitrabai, 1989).

At one level, these novels articulate the centrality of marriage in women’s lives as the legitimate space for women, one that offers women protection and security (A. Niranjana, 1966, p. 10; Triveni, 1969, p. 36). At another level, in the delineation of marriage and conjugality the authors of the romances critique these ideals as well as that of pativratya or husband worship enjoined by tradition. While pointing to how Triveni’s narratives along with the writings of other women writers reproduced dominant notions of femininity and marriage, Seemanthini Niranjana argues that the ‘situations’ that the heroines find themselves in show up the limits of such dominant notions. The narratives show how societal practices which revolve around notions of ideal femininity also contain within themselves contradictions of the same (S. Niranjana, 1994, p. 198).

Taking forward the argument about the ‘contradictions’ in Triveni’s novels, let us examine for instance, the representation of pativratya in Huuvu hannu, where the protagonist Rama is forced to become a prostitute in order to ensure that her daughter is educated and brought up in a respectable manner. Though the novel endorses the pativratya ideal, the narrative shows that the ideal can exist only alongside its ‘other’, thus foregrounding the social construction of the ideal itself. In Huuvu hannu, the ‘growing up’ of Sheela (which is both the name of Rama’s daughter and refers to the moral quality of being ‘sexually pure’), is built on Rama’s career as a prostitute. Through the novel we see how the ideal and its other are constitutive of each other. The author remarks, ‘Just as the mother was falling in[to] the depths of a dirty life, the daughter was rising up in the company of the civilised’ (Triveni, 1969, p. 108). The reader knows that it is the ‘dirty woman’ that makes possible a Sheela. As Rama says at one point, ‘To establish the peace of one house … she broke the tranquillity of another’ (Triveni, 1969, p. 195). The enactment of the making/unmaking of an ideal is central to the romance narratives. This is an important feature that marks their difference from both earlier and later women’s novels. It is in this double dynamic of the making/unmaking of the ideal that I want to locate the theme of couple formation. Though the romance novels dramatise the desire for marriage and the romance in the narrative moves towards marriage, this desire should be seen only alongside the crisis in couple formation that the writings present. ²¹

In the early 20th century novels by women, such as those by Thirumalamba and Kalyanamma, which raised the ‘problem of marriage’, the problem was resolved through the formation of the couple. ²² As is characteristic of all romance novels, the formation of a couple constituted through romantic love figures prominently in the women’s romances under review. However, in contrast to the earlier novels, what is dramatised in the romances of Indira, Triveni, Vani and Anupama is the sundering of the couple and all, except for the novels of Anupama, which I will discuss later, have tragic endings. Either the couple do not unite or marriage is followed by a crisis.

The absence of couple formation, for instance, is found in Mukti where the protagonist Amrita’s desire is to get married (Triveni, 1997a, p. 164) but Amrita’s dark skin and thick spectacles initially put off suitors. Though she falls in love with a colleague towards the end of the novel, she finds that the man has a wife who is mentally ill. The novel concludes in an open-ended manner with the man informing Amrita about the death of his wife and proposing to Amrita, without however indicating her response.

An example of a novel in which romantic love leads to couple formation but does not find resolution in marriage is Vani’s novel Chinnada panjara, where the narrative starkly shows the fracturing of marriage in all its violence. Though the protagonist Manjula has an arranged marriage and her friend Malati marries a man she loves, both are unhappy in their marriages. If Manjula’s husband has multiple extramarital affairs, Malati’s husband, who becomes disabled, detests his wife to such an extent that he provokes their own daughter to despise her mother. A scene where the daughter shrieks in disgust on seeing her mother represents graphically the ‘fracturing’ of the ideal of ‘motherhood’ (Vani, 1958, p. 228). This scene appears in the narrative as an unusual and strange scene, a bizarre element that disturbs the tenor of the narrative.

Marital discord is represented as arising from the dissatisfaction that the woman feels with the husband and vice versa. For the man, the basis of his discontent is the refusal of the wife to perform her dharma or duty as a wife, to be ‘obedient’. For the woman, the unhappiness is sometimes because of an obvious ‘fault’ in the man, as with Sheshadri who has affairs with other women or with Vasu who is jealous of his wife (both in Chinnada panjara). Sometimes dissatisfaction is not traceable to any identifiable fault, as with Shekhar in Himada hu, who is not represented as a ‘cruel’ husband but as one who does not want Lalita to work because he feels emotionally and sexually dissatisfied. In these cases, the man is shown as ‘loving’ his wife. The narratives can be seen as initial attempts to articulate a critique of ‘patriarchy’, a critique that is not yet firmly established. In the same novel when Lalita is asked if she knows how to sing and cook at the girl-viewing ceremony, she angrily thinks: ‘How much I have studied! But here they are treating me like a trivial object! Whatever high office one holds, one cannot perhaps escape the denigration attached to being a woman’ (A. Niranjana, 1966, p. 45; emphasis added). However, the authorial standpoint wavers throughout while making the critique of patriarchy unlike the later feminist novels of Anupama such as Madhavi (1976).

Conflict in marriage is situated in the inability of the woman to find support in the frame of niti or dharma to sustain her in her marriage. There are many occasions when this is pointed out. In Sothu geddavalu (1954), in Bharati’s conflict between ‘nature’s logic/sexual need’ and ‘being faithful to her husband’ kama (sexual desire) poses a threat to niti (Triveni, 1997b, pp. 95, 109). In Chinnada panjara, when Malati’s mother says that it is not dharma to hurt her husband, Vasu, Malati asks: ‘How can you put the burden of dharma on my head? You tell me, what wrong have I done?’ (Vani, 1958, p. 129). Further, when her mother tells her that there have been people like Gandhari who have blinded themselves for their husbands, Malati says, ‘That was in the purana [epic]. Also she was a queen. Even if she blinded herself, there were people to serve her’ (Vani, 1958, p. 130).

The women are represented as ‘individuals’ in the romances. The notion of the self is delineated in Chinnada panjara (a) when Malati talks about self-respect (abhimana): ‘Other than my conscience, I will not fear anyone else. Whatever problems I faced, my self (abhimana) could not be trampled and that is what angers them’ (Vani, 1958, p. 235) and (b) when Malati has to silently swallow the ‘order’ of her husband Vasu and feels: ‘The trampled self (abhimana) was like a hurt snake’ (Vani, 1958, p. 134).

The conflict between self and dharma can also be seen when Lalita in Himada hu talks about the struggle between her self-esteem (ahambhava) and duty (kartavya) when she faces the choice between continuing her career or protecting her home (A. Niranjana, 1966, p. 160). Although ahambhava could suggest ahankara (selfishness or egoism) I suggest that the context in which the term appears could render its interpretation ambiguous, as with Anupama’s stance throughout the novel, allowing for an understanding of ahambhava as ‘self’. In her autobiography, Anupama talks about the search for a thannathana or ‘self’ by women writers in their writing and lives. ²³ One significant aspect of the notion of thannathana points to the ‘individual’/‘identity’ confronting dharma or tradition in the frame of ‘equality’. The conflict between dharma and ‘identity’ of the self is also found in the early 20th century novels of Thirumalamba and Kalyanamma but the 1950s novels show a blurring of the division between dharma and adharma. Let me elaborate.

In the reform novels of Thirumalamba and Kalyanamma, conflict occurs between dharma and identity where identity is constituted through education, and dharma by the feminine virtues of pativratya, patience and kindness. These women novelists articulated a concern about the deterioration of women’s status in society, a fall from an idyllic Indian past when women were ‘revered’. The novelists sought to re-establish the earlier ideal through an incorporation of values like education. That is, they resolved the dharma-identity conflict by establishing a new dharma, a new pativratya for the woman that now incorporated the values of being educated, possessing a self and the need to work outside the home for the ‘upliftment of women’. For instance, Thirumalamba argued for women’s education on the ground that it enabled women to run their households more efficiently. This position was different from that of canonical male writers like Masti Venkatesha Iyengar who did not accept the notion of woman as assertive, possessing a self and moving out of the home into the public sphere, even if it was to reform the husband or the family (Padikkal, 2001, pp. 135–136). In contrast, the 1950s women novelists did not unequivocally support the ideal of pativratya. As we saw earlier, in Triveni’s novel Huuvu hannu the condemnation of Rama for turning to prostitution cannot be read without knowing that vyabhichara (prostitution) is constitutive and the foundation of her daughter Sheela’s respectability. Thus, though women writers of both the 1920s and the 1950s–1960s were redefining dharma, the significant difference between the older writers and those of the 1950s–1960s lay in the former’s assertion of normative ideals like pativratya and positing a binary between the good and the bad woman; the latter, in contrast, questioned the binary between the normative ideal of dharma and its other. I suggest that the delineation of woman as an individual and the subject’s performativity as identity form important constituents of modernity in Karnataka in the post-independence context.

As women subjects did the writers articulate a language different from the developmental-modern vocabulary? The plot itself raises such questions. For instance, let us examine Indira’s Gejje pooje (1966) that revolves around a female protagonist Chandri who belongs to a jati (caste) of prostitutes but wants to get married. Chandri is not allowed to marry but forced into the rites of gejje pooje (the ritual of anklet worship before the girl enters the profession of prostitution). Tradition represented by the devadasi or caste practices ²⁴ is oppressive to Chandri and it is only modernity that can possibly erase Chandri’s caste and devadasi markers and foreground her instead as an ‘individual’. However, the plot moves towards an understanding of how even in modern time and space, these possibilities might not be realised. Thus, the novel ending with the death of Chandri spells out the impossibility of her becoming a ‘respectable wife’, and raises doubts about the promises of modernity. ²⁵

Anupama’s novels before 1975 explicitly articulate a faith in the nation’s project of development. In Hridaya vallabha, the protagonist Sadashiva’s belief that modern medicine is a boon that will save lives is shared by the author (See A. Niranjana, 1970, pp. 16, 104, 113). The narrative revolves around Sadashiva’s success as a doctor travelling to ‘international conferences’ as a representative of Karnataka (A. Niranjana, 1970, pp. 180–181). Similarly, Anupama’s Himada hu attempts to represent how women are enabled by the possibilities of modernity in a new nation. Having done her botany honours, the protagonist Lalita realises her ambition to become a professor (A. Niranjana, 1966, pp. 9–10). However, placing Hridaya vallabha and Himada hu side by side, it would seem as if the position of the male protagonist in the new nation is more clearly demarcated than that of the woman. That is perhaps why Himada hu ends with the woman giving up her job to look after her family.

However, the critique of modernity is inadequately captured in the plot where Chandri is made to die or Lalita has to choose her home over her career. I suggest that if we locate the critique in the form of the narrative, we get an entirely different picture. First, as suggested above, we need to read the narrative of these women’s romances against the conventional romance narrative of couple formation. We find that though the plot moves towards couple formation, the unfolding of the plot undermines what should be the conclusion. We saw how the desire for marriage in these narratives has to be read alongside the crisis in conjugality that occur in the narratives.

One of the important aspects of the narrative is the representation of the protagonists’ psychological conflicts. The portrayal of conflict was a device also deployed by the Navya male novelists writing in the same period (1950s–1960s). Both male and female writers were influenced by popular versions of Freud’s theorisations, especially his theory of the unconscious and of sexuality that became widely known at the time. The authors of the romances specifically explored women’s feelings, conflicts and desires, which were hitherto not overtly expressed. These conflicts are shown as persistent and recurring, infusing the narrative with what I call ‘hysterical excess’. This excess hints at the limits of modernity despite the desire for the modern. The excess is seen, for instance, in Triveni’s Huuvu hannu where the protagonist Rama experiences great mental conflict when she fears that Sheela too will become a prostitute:

Should Sheela become a prostitute? Should the girls in her class, the vagrants on the road call her by dirty names? What was Rama’s husband’s last wish? Hadn’t he taken her word that she would get Sheela married to a respectable boy?

 But which respectable boy will agree to hold the hand of a girl who is the daughter of a prostitute? Sheela might be beautiful. She might be of good character. But will any respectable boy agree to marry her if her mother has sold her body to men? Will his elders agree? Will [Rama] agree to submit the responsibility of Sheela’s happiness–sadness to an unrespectable boy on the streets? It is possible for her to forget the pain of becoming a prostitute if Sheela takes the hand of a respectable boy. A respectable boy will not marry her. A boy who is not respectable, she will not agree to. That means Sheela will remain unmarried. As long as she lives, she will be able to protect her daughter, even by giving her blood, from the eyes of lustful men. But what will happen to [Sheela] after [Rama’s] death. Probably, [like Rama,] Sheela too will ultimately have to take up the very same profession.

Sheela…. Prostitute…!

Here Rama is thinking about whether Sheela will be able to marry a respectable boy given her mother’s disreputable past. The persistent nature of Rama’s conflict in having to make the decision to ‘give up’ her daughter is shown through the series of questions, the possible answers and the implications of each. In the portrayal of the conflict, the narrative plays on the notion of respectability. Though the notion is invoked in an absolute sense, our knowledge that it is Rama who is speaking and our awareness of the context that caused her to become disreputable only makes it ironic and thus undermines it. The narrative shows that the vicious circle of disrepute in which Rama is placed makes it impossible for her and Sheela to break out of it. The only way in which Sheela can become respectable would be to break away from that past. This would be at the cost of leaving behind her mother and significantly at the cost of forgetting and erasing her mother’s history, as Sheela does in the novel, making Rama the ‘other’ of her own respectable self.

The narrative of excess is shown in a spectacular fashion in the ‘psychological’ novels of Triveni, which have as their main protagonist a neurotic or psychotic character. The novel Bekkina kannu revolves around a young girl, Kusuma, who becomes a hysteric because she is deprived of love from her mother who dies, and her father, who after marrying the second time neglects her for his new wife. The stepmother treats Kusuma badly and constantly abuses and beats her. Kusuma feels alienated and unable to confront her stepmother displaces her anger on her cat Polly whose green eyes resemble those of her stepmother.

This excess is not to be read merely as realistic representation— a representation that necessarily follows from having to represent a hysterical woman. Though the representation of mental conflict is more evident in novels that revolve around a psychologically disturbed woman, similar depictions of ‘normal’ characters can be found even in non-psychological novels such as Huuvu hannu (discussed above) where the protagonist has no psychological problem. In Bekkina kannu the excess is shown in the description of Kusuma’s stepmother—with her buck teeth, her dishevelled hair and her fiery green eyes, as well as in the way she mistreats Kusuma (Triveni, 1997d, p. 56). Even Sudha, a girl in the neighbourhood, is at times hysterical and shivers at the sight of Kusuma (Triveni, 1997d, p. 109).

If we look closely at the description of Kusuma’s hysterical behaviour in the novel, what is striking is not so much her behaviour as much as the manner in which the author presents it. The scenes of hysteria are presented as a tableau, a spectacle of Kusuma’s hysterical behaviour. The narrative extensively uses animal metaphors to describe Kusuma’s fear of her stepmother and her anger against her cat. For instance, the novelist uses the metaphor of a snake being preyed upon by an eagle to describe Kusuma’s fear (Triveni, 1997d, p. 56). Elsewhere she compares Kusuma’s hysteria increasing with the crowd’s provocation to an elephant’s madness that increases with noise (Triveni, 1997d, p. 109). Likewise, the narrative makes much of Sudha’s fear at the mere mention of Kusuma’s mother’s ghost. It dramatises how Sudha’s wails would cause the very earth to shiver (Triveni, 1997d, p. 109).

Importantly then, the narrative space given to the portrayal of hysterical excess and the endless repetition of those spectacles of excess surpass the narrative requirement and make you wonder what the representation is actually about. It is as though the hysterical excess is contained in the structure of the narrative itself—the repetitions of words, the flow of the narrative, almost like a rush of words that leap onto each other as they hasten forward. This is shown in a stark manner in the representation of Rama’s mental conflict in Triveni’s Huuvu hannu cited above. A bizarre element that does not fit into the realist narrative is inserted—the daughter shrieking in disgust when she sees her mother in Chinnada panjara or the cry of veni, vidi, veci (I came, I saw, I conquered) in Sharapanjara (Cage of arrows, 1965). Thus, despite the narrative’s overt intent to be scientific-rational, the hysterical excess points to a different frame of reference in excess of the modernising logic of these narratives and in fact shows the limit and failure of scientific rationality.

The Female Symbolic

This article attempts to not merely talk about this alternative frame of reference as an ‘excess’ but also provide a positive description. It might be useful in this context to turn to psychoanalysis, particularly Luce Irigaray’s body of work. I especially draw on recent readings of Irigaray by feminist philosophers like Margaret Whitford, which move beyond literary interpretations, and show Irigaray’s work as extremely productive for a philosophical understanding of woman, woman’s speech and woman’s representation within culture (Whitford, 1988, 1991). Here, ‘woman’ refers to not ‘real women’ as much as a perspective, a positioning within culture but one that nevertheless informs and impacts ‘real women’. For purposes of this article I would like to draw attention to Irigaray’s conceptualisation of the Symbolic, which is a reformulation of the Lacanian Symbolic. The Symbolic, as feminist psychoanalyst Elizabeth Grosz (1989, pp. xviii–xxiii) explains,

refers to the social and signifying order of culture that all beings must occupy in order to be a subject. One, it is governed according to the imperatives of paternal authority. Two, it refers to the order of language, and particularly to language considered as a rule-governed system of signification, organised with reference to the ‘I’, the speaking subject. The Symbolic is the order of representation.

In other words the Symbolic denotes a cultural system that everyone necessarily inhabits to be a subject. It is the Law (of the Father) that constitutes subjects as male and female but also binds them by that subjectivity. The Symbolic is the ‘order of representation’ that in itself is abstract but effects imaging practices in this world, what Lacan calls the Imaginary. ²⁶ It is the order defining the masculine and feminine and shapes representational practices within literature, science, myths, etc. Luce Irigaray gives a twist to the Lacanian Symbolic and argues that it is in effect the Male Symbolic. That is, subjectivity exists in only one form, and that is male (the female exists only as the other). Likewise the order of cultural representation is male (the female exists only as a lack or a hole). As Irigaray (1985, p. 78) says, within the existing Symbolic ‘the feminine finds itself defined [only] as lack, deficiency, or as imitation and negative image of the subject’. She (woman) ‘does not have access to language except through recourse to “masculine” systems of representation which disappropriate her from her relation to herself and to other women’ (Irigaray, 1991a, p. 131). ‘In our given social order … they [women] have never taken part as “subjects”’ (Irigaray, 1991a, p. 131; see also Irigaray [1991a, p. 118; [1991b, p. 57; 1991c, p. 108]).

This is well represented in Triveni’s novel Sharapanjara that revolves around a female protagonist who gets affected in the course of the novel with what is variously described as ‘hysteria’, ‘hucchu’ (madness) and ‘unmada’ (intoxication, madness) in the novel. The question that Sharapanjara raises is: why does the protagonist Kaveri turn ‘mad’? The novel itself provides different answers. The husband is perplexed, ‘What did Kaveri lack? Love? Affection? Trust? Money? What did she after all lack?’ (Triveni, 1997e, p. 79). The servants say she is ‘possessed’. The psychiatric opinion is that hysteria is caused by ‘deficiency of blood and bodily strength’ (Triveni, 1997e, p. 63). It is revealed to readers that the trauma is caused by the rape of the protagonist by a male friend. The hysteria then can be read within a psychoanalytic frame as the surfacing of a repressed trauma, a shame that could not be spoken of. However, the novel prompts us to ask if there is something more? Does Kaveri’s trauma signify the positioning of the ‘mad woman’ as ‘lack’ or ‘absence’ within our sociocultural order? Is not the ‘mad woman’ erased within Law, Science and Philosophy that have as their ideal the ‘reasonable man’? Does the novel then provide an insight into the location of the ‘mad woman’ within culture, within the Symbolic, of her very erasure that Irigaray gestures at in her writing?

Irigaray suggests that it is not merely about the incapacity of the Symbolic (rational, male) to understand the ‘other’ (non-rational, female), something that can be remedied with effort but that the foundations of the rational, male world is predicated on the very exclusion and disavowal of the non-rational female. This is exemplified in one of Irigaray’s interviews titled, ‘Women-Mothers, the Silent Substratum of the Social Order’ (1991d; see also Irigaray [1991a, pp. 125, 131; 1991b, pp. 53–54; 1991d, p. 47]). For Irigaray the female and the non-rational constitute the magma, the residue, the ‘necessary outside’ of the Symbolic that allows for any organisation of reality, whether linguistic, social or individual. Irigaray suggests that this residue is unsymbolisable (within the existing Symbolic). It is the undifferentiated unconscious from which identity emerges but which is disavowed (Whitford, 1988). For Irigaray the figure of the ‘reasonable man’ as the ideal within Law, Science and Philosophy comes into being through the erasure of another being, another way of being. If this is indeed the case, which is a signalling of a much more profound kind of othering than merely an attitude or a stigma, what does it mean for the non-rational, the woman, to find representation as herself? Is it at all possible? If so, how?

We need to understand that though the residue and magma that Irigaray calls female and non-rational is unsymbolisable within the logic of the existing Symbolic, they however seek symbolisation and in fact find symbolisation. However, symbolisation of the female and non-rational is of an order that is different from that of the existing Symbolic. We can draw inferences from Freud’s work on dream interpretation, especially where he analyses the mechanism of dream work (Freud, 2010). Freud shows how unconscious desire finds symbolisation in dreams; however the language, that is, the images and symbols of dreams cannot be understood or deciphered in the same way in which we conventionally understand those images and symbols. They exist in another logic or language that has to be deciphered through a different method. They lie in the interspace between what Freud calls the manifest dream content and latent dream thought (Freud, 2010, para. 2). ²⁷ Likewise, the female, which lies outside the male Symbolic, in its symbolisation is of a different order and constitutes an alternate Symbolic, what Luce Irigaray calls the Female Symbolic. We should not read the Female Symbolic as something that already exists and is waiting to be discovered. Nor is it a mere Utopia or a non-discursive abstraction. It lies in the interstices of and interrupts the dominant Male Symbolic Order and is something to be arrived at through interpretation. The Female Symbolic refers to, as Irigaray says in another context, ‘another economy of the whole, which requires a new language’ (1991c, p. 110) and ‘this path has to be invented, created’ (1991c, p. 105). In an interesting section, Irigaray describes the Feminine Symbolic as not a mere reversal of or opposition to the Male Symbolic where the woman now is subject. Instead, speaking within the Female Symbolic involves ‘repeating/interpreting the way in which, within discourse, the feminine finds itself defined as lack, deficiency, or as imitation and negative image of the subject … [It] should signify that with respect to this logic a disruptive excess is possible on the feminine side’ (Irigaray, 1991a, p. 126).

The Female Symbolic might allow us to think about the uniqueness of the form of the romance novels whose narratives are structured by a ‘hysterical excess’ that break the linear and rational language of develop-mental modernity. This is despite novels like Bekkina kannu and Sharapanjara accounting for the protagonists’ hysterical behaviour and insanity as not arbitrary and irrational but as grounded in reason, repressed though it may be in the unconscious of the protagonists. Triveni herself is avowedly working within a frame of rationality condemning superstitious beliefs. Bekkina kannu and Sharapanjara explicitly talk about an underlying rationale for hysteria and appeal to the reader to view such cases from a scientific perspective. Hence, the novels show that psychological disorder needs to be treated by a psychiatrist rather than an exorcist. However, the hysterical excess of the narratives override the scientific, rational explanation that the plots provide and constitute the Female Symbolic. Hence, the Female Symbolic needs to be understood as delineating the limits of a dominant Symbolic (male and rational) that is embodied in the developmental-modern language of the state. It is in this sense that the novels of the Kannada women writers of the 1950s–1960s inaugurate a ‘feminine public’: a public that is constituted not merely through bringing out of the private sphere questions of woman’s subjectivity (in relation to education, work, marriage, desire) but importantly by the logic of a Female Symbolic.