The Red Earth

Same As it Ever Was

March 8, 2020March 8, 2020 Gayatri DeviLeave a comment

With apologies to David Byrne:

“You may find yourself wanting to vote for an educated, smart woman
You may find yourself wanting to vote for a socialist with a complete plan
You may find yourself wanting to vote for a gay man
You may find yourself wanting to vote for the environment
your child’s education
your parents’ medical needs
your soldiers overseas
your farmers
your factory workers
But no matter who you want to vote for
You’ll end up voting for some red or blue nepotist white guy.
You may ask yourself
How did I get here?
You may ask yourself
Where does that highway go?
You may ask yourself
My God what have I done?
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was.”

Facts of Life

March 6, 2020 Gayatri DeviLeave a comment

*Facts of Life*

When we were kids, the boys made fun of one of Appu’s friends, a bookish genius; he had a photographic memory and knew the entire logarithmic table from start to finish by heart. The mockery went something like this: “Hey, S., what are the Facts of Life?” the boys would ask S. The story goes that S. would then say. “Oxygen, Nitrogen, Hydrogen, Chlorine . .” Ha ha ha.

S. went to Organic Chemistry for the Facts of Life. The rest of us thought we were all very smart, but really, we weren’t. All of us kids comprehended the Facts of Life with varying degrees of gaps, misinformation, and plain absurdity. As in other parts of the world, we kids picked up our sexual lore mostly from films and books, and to a lesser extent through prurient observation of backyard animals and their mating behavior.

Indian films and television have changed radically now, but when we were growing up, in the seventies, eighties and even into the early nineties, there was no kissing, no bodily nudity, or images of sexual consummation on screen. There was plenty of salacious and titillating content, but the censors drew the line at any type of sexual bodily contact, including kissing.

Thus after the hero and the heroine slide and slither around each other in barely concealed estrus, and the titillation potential borders the pornographic, suddenly we will see on screen two flowers coming closer and closer and closer to each other, falling into each other, smashing into each other: flowers “kissing” for lack of a better word. The more creative directors represented human sexual union on screen coyly with birds touching their beaks together, bees drinking nectar from a flower, deer nuzzling their noses against each other, and in the really daring instances, huge waves breaking roaringly on the shore, firecrackers bursting up in the sky, and milk boiling over. There was one particular film, where the hero breaks open an egg on the heroine’s exposed belly between the blouse and the sari; the egg sizzles and curls and turns into a Spanish omelet. She was that hot.

Thus, the Indian cinema filled our heads with a semiotic system for human sexuality, which included birds, bees, flowers, seashore, the sky, firecrackers, kitchen utensils, milk and eggs. It is a fact of life that human beings have a seemingly uncontrollable need to see sex represented. They want to see it, they want to write about it, they want to film it, they want to sing it, they want to hear it. It is sort of like how Tom Cruise always wants to have sex with his real wife on screen as well. Representation adds to the Reality. While couples in coitus have graced the walls of Indian temples for thousands of years, that was not sufficient for the movie-going Indian public who wanted to see “real” (real on screen?) sex on screen leading to all kinds of creative and not-so-creative short cuts to sex scenes of the afore-mentioned kind by directors and actors.

I remember one particular event of mass frustration by the movie-going Indian public over their lack of access to some flesh scenes. It was the 1987 International Film Festival in Trivandrum. John Huston had just made a film adaptation of Joyce’s short story *The Dead.* Great short story, but the movie adaptation does not work at all. That insight is in retrospect, but in 1987 we all wanted to see it. So, a bunch of us from the Institute of English—three girls and nine boys – we went to the theater that was screening the movie. International Film Festivals are big crowd-pullers in India, particularly Kerala, which has a very evolved film culture. Two types of film-lovers attend these foreign film festivals; one, those who really want to see the retrospectives of a Kurasawa, Bergman, Tarkovsky et al because they know the cinema of these directors; and two, those who want to see foreign films, because foreign films contain uncensored nudity. The foreign film festivals also brought movies with such titles as *The Big Blonde.*

So anyway, *The Dead* was playing in a duplex theater in Trivandrum; one screen showed *The Dead,* and the other theater screened a Swedish film called, let us say, *The Big Blonde.* It was a matinee. I and my friends, boys and girls from the Institute of English stood in a long meandering line to buy tickets for *The Dead.* Wow, such a big crowd to see *The Dead,* we remarked to ourselves. The crowd was all men; street-vendors, head-load workers, auto-rickshaw drivers, men with a beedi in one hand, in disheveled clothes, with blood-shot eyes, and mesh t-shirts with the arms cut off. Imagine, they want to see Joyce’s *The Dead*; we smiled in utter incomprehension.

The men eyed our group, a group with more boys than girls. The boys were all our good friends. Several creepy men eyed us girls lewdly and started making obscene comments. Our male friends turned red in the face and looked at us apologetically. “Do you want to go back?” Our friends asked us in a low voice. “No, that is okay,” I and my girlfriends replied, “We would really like to see *The Dead.* This filth does not bother us,” we said. The creepy men kept ogling us.

We bought our tickets and walked into the theater. Inside the dark theater, there was yelling and shouting; several men in the audience loudly anticipated the fleshly delights they were about to witness. We sat down and the film started.

Two very old women came on the screen; Gabriel’s aunts. Old, wrinkled, and with a twinkle in their eyes, they started talking about the Christmas party. They talked and they talked. A low rumbling started inside the theater. So far, no flesh. Then the guests started arriving at the party. Lily, the caretaker’s daughter was literally run off her feet. More talking. Lots of old people talking, talking, talking. The rumbling inside the theater intensified. The men were getting really antsy; they needed to see some flesh and they needed to see it right now or they were going to get their ticket fare back!!

Finally, Gabriel and Greta arrived on scene; a reasonably young couple. There was a temporary cessation to the hum inside the theater. Maybe this man and woman will have sex? But Gabriel walked off into the library and started to rehearse his speech. Greta mingled. Alcoholics waxed poetically; old aunts propped up the alcoholics. Every time a man and a woman came towards each other on screen, we heard a loud roar of anticipation from the men in the theater. This is it; now we will see some flesh.

Alas, there is no breeding in *The Dead.* How disappointing. We tasted the sweetness of revenge on our tongues. Twenty minutes into the movie, the men in the audience began to hoot and holler and shout. Several of them got up and left, loudly swearing how the theater ripped them off. Needless to say, we watched two movies that day.

But the politics of sexual representation came much later. In our adolescent years, our understanding of human sexuality was an absurd schtick. For instance, I believed, and I later found out, many of my friends and cousins did as well, if a woman in a wet, white sari hugged a man, she became pregnant. This was directly from the films. In one scene, Prem Nazir is chasing Sarada around a coconut tree. It rains and they hug. In the next scene, Sarada is clutching her stomach and throwing up. Pregnancy.

My cousin Kunji had another explanation for pregnancy. She was an exemplary student and got her information from the biology textbook. The male gamete is called sperm, Kunji began. It has a head, which is 5 microns and a tale that is 50 microns long. It propels itself by moving its tail in a motion called flagellation in a liquid medium towards the ovum, which is the female gamete.

Yeah, really? We would say. We were taunting her then; we were slightly older. What liquid medium?

The textbook does not say what liquid medium it is, Kunji admitted.

How far is it traveling then? How does it make a woman pregnant? We asked.

Kunji drew a blank.

We stared at my aunt, Kunji’s mother, one of the most respected OB/ GYNs in Ernakulam sitting there listening to us discuss the mechanics of human reproduction. What is this, ammayi, we would ask her. Your daughter says that the 5-micron sperm is swimming in a liquid medium flagellating its tail towards an ovum! Very bad parental instruction!

This was true; in our childhood, our parents did not spend a lot of time educating us about human sexuality. Our mothers told us girls that there was no reason for any boy or any man, other than our fathers or brothers, to touch us; so, there was no touching between boys and girls. We were unsure of the actual steps, but we naturally believed that touching mystically led to pregnancy. When he was in his teenage years, my mother told Appu that he should never feel tempted to give in to the prostitutes and pimps that hang around the train stations, bus stations and airports looking for young men. That was the extent of our parents discussing human sexuality with us.

For the longest time, I believed that for chicken’s eggs to hatch into baby chicks, a rooster has to approach and gingerly “step” on the said eggs. I don’t know where I got that idea, but in my mind I saw a rooster approaching an egg and stepping on it, balancing itself precariously on top of the egg. Then the egg was fertilized and baby chicks were born. It was a standing joke in my family and my cousins torture me to this day recounting this story whenever the occasion presents itself. I was reminded of my chick story, and relieved at the same time, when Dayani once brought home some chicks to foster while in fourth grade.

I will never forgive Sierra for saying this, Dayani told me when I picked her up at school. What, honey? I asked her.

Sierra told everyone in class today that my chicks are “dating” her chicks, Dayani said.

That is okay, honey, I told Daya, chicks can date chicks.

You know what mama, Dayani said, we know now for sure that Fudge is a boy and Sunshine is a girl. Fudge and Sunshine are the two chicks that Dayani was fostering.

Oh, yeah? I said. How did you figure that out, honey?

Mr. Miller in class today, Dayani said, showed us Fudge’s reproductive parts.

Really? I said.

Yes, see I had to do the dirty work because Fudge is my chicken and I am going to be a veterinarian, Dayani said. Mr. Miller showed me how to hold Fudge’s feathers up, and right near the “vent” – you know it is called “the vent” and not the bad nick name, mama – there is a small pimple. That is what makes Fudge a boy.

Oh, wow, honey, I said. I had no idea, I said.

It is true; I did not know what the reproductive organs of a rooster were like. Apparently, it is a pimple, near a vent.

Well, that explains why Fudge was constantly trying to jump out of the box, I said.

We couldn’t really understand it. We had kept both Fudge and Sunshine in a box in my office (where else?) and every time we opened the box to clean the paper or put food and water, Fudge would try to jump up over my hands and out of the box. He preferred to perch on the box lid or on top of the lamp we were using to keep them warm.

Sunshine just sat in one corner. Rooster behavior, I said; you know, “roosting” means to sit on top of something. Being caged in that box must be stifling for poor Fudge. Dayani had to take the chicks back to school, but if we ever get them back for fostering, I am getting Fudge a nice big box with plenty of flying room and a perch.

Seeing is Believing: The Invisible through Aravindan’s Eyes

January 21, 2020January 21, 2020 Gayatri DeviLeave a comment

[March 7, 2016]

Perhaps no other artistic medium is as apt and made to measure the invisible as cinema. The very premise of the movie camera is that if there exists something that can be seen, the movie camera has the power and capacity to show it to you. Conversely, if it cannot be represented by the camera, it might not be an object of perception. The most enduring quality of Aravindan’s films is their search to depict on screen in three dimensional images, shapes, and colors that our five senses would be able to comprehend, things that are invisible; in particular, entities that are the products of imagination and faith.

It is commonplace to assert that a story is an act of imagination, which it is, to be sure, but Aravindan’s stories work on more than just the narrative level. There are symbolic and allegorical levels that run alongside the narratives that reach out to a matrix completely outside the world we experience through the senses or our brain. Aravindan’s stories and films show us the simultaneous existence of both the visible world of phenomena, as well as the invisible world of noumena–or what is thought, products of our mind, in particular, myth and faith. Indeed his films may be read as subtle and sophisticated explorations of the capacity of myth and faith to create an ethical community, not merely the community within the space of the film, but also the community of the viewers..

we have never seen them before. With great love, Aravindan shows us these “things” as they are in their original, uncorrupted and sacred state. In Aravindan’s eyes, these aspects of nature or the human mind become sacred images. Our encounter with such sacred images cannot be anything but ethical. The following is a brief appreciation of such an ethical encounter of one viewer and one film, Kummatty.

Kummatty, the earliest of these films, tells the story of a folk figure, the Kummatty, a relic of grandmother’s tales, a larger-than-life figure, a wandering folk minstrel who is also a boogeyman in popular imagination with an anecdotal propensity, it is suggested, to abduct children. Kummatty will take away unruly children from their parents. Thus Kummatty’s charms and powers are both positive and negative. He is a source of wonder and fear because his powers are unlike yours or mine. In other words, Kummatty is a liminal figure that embodies a pathway that connects the material world with the non-material world. He exists simultaneously in the visible and invisible worlds.

In the film, Aravindan is careful to expose us to the forged and fabricated aspects of Kummatty’s personality such as his fake beard, and his human necessities such as needing a shave. Kummatty falls sick as well and needs to be cured. The human limits of Kummatty are well established. When we first see him on the screen, he materializes literally out of nowhere—he simply shows up in the scene from a distance, his song preceding his form. Indeed much of what we know of Kummatty resides in products of imagination such as folk songs that the children of the village sing. Kummatty himself sings songs of the Brahman, as formless as the deep, dark and vast sky, formless as the rain, thunder or lightning as represented in the movie’s unforgettable song “Karukara Karmukil” written and sung with great devotional clarity by Kavalam Narayana Panicker.

Kummatty upsets the placid pace of the village life when he befriends the children of the village. Children are as much liminal figures, as he is, as they contain both the past of a community and its future. In a grand processional scene, the children celebrate the myth of Kummatty by recounting his story from the folk tradition in song form (“Manathe macholam talayeduthu”) as they follow him all across the mountain. The children are transformed by this contact. We see this in Chindan’s new solicitousness to the old grandmother.

That Kummatty represents something regressive from the progressive perspective is indicated in the earlier scene where Chindan’s mother, in particular, calls Kummatty a “mad man” and discourages Chindan from spending time with Kummatty. To be sure, there is a critique of modernity and progress, as we normatively understand it—“Forward! Forward!” is the chant of progress – in the film, in the episode where Kummatty turns the children into animals whose masks they were playing with. Human children turn into a peacock, an elephant, a monkey, a dog etc. The critique of modernity continues when Chindan—the boy turned dog—is abandoned by the wealthy family that initially takes him in only to cast him out as a “country” breed. Animal masks in folk traditions echo the totemic functions of their counterparts in the mythical world; animals are spirits. The children see them as toys. Thus in turning the children into the animal they were playfully mimicking, there is an implicit transformation of a toy into a totem, an encounter with the “uncanny,” an inanimate object turning into a living entity. This uncanniness is the ground of the children’s ethical transformation in Kummatty.

Ritual, community, the uncanny, the unknowable and the invisible come together in the final scenes of the film when the narrow domestic tragedy of a family that has its son turned into a dog opens into a communal ritual to reverse the metamorphoses. Oracles and priests attempt to reverse the transformation but to no avail. Kummatty alone can reverse the metamorphoses because Kummatty is not a part of stagnant village rituals, which are as meaningless as modernity itself. Kummatty’s power is of another invisible order, the order of the formless and the unknowable, the order of the sky, the rain, the lightning and the thunder. It is the order of openness. It is the order of freedom. It is instructive that in the one year that the Kummatty has been gone and Chindan lives his animal existence as a dog, the grandmother who was the repository of the old stories, including that of Kummatty, has died. This loss of communal memory, however, is offset by Chindan’s metamorphoses into a dog, and a family’s and community’s suffering over this transformation. The family and the community have to mourn. They have to believe in loss. They have to believe in the magic and the power of the Kummatty. They have to believe in the power of the invisible.

Chindan (and us, the community) learn the lessons of the metamorphoses in the final euphoric climax of the film where Chindan, now reverted back to being a boy, sets free the caged parrot and watches it fly away into the sky. For nearly four minutes we see nothing but birds flying in the sky, nothing but the rapid crisscross of birds traversing the sky in pure freedom, from one side of the screen to the other, as the children’s chorus sings the song of the Brahman, “Karukara Karmukil.”

The flight of the birds is much more than a simple metaphor of freedom. What is the flight of a bird? The flight of a bird is the pathless order of freedom. The overall plot of Kummatty is overdetermined to bring us to this vantage point where we dedicate our full attention to the random flight of birds, almost in real time, since not many of us would have watched birds in flight in nature as part of our daily routine. Yet, birds have flown in the sky without any particular pathways since the beginning of time. That is all they do. This simple and serious truth is the ethical promise of this cinema to its viewers. It is a direct representation of what Aravindan saw with his eyes.

Winter Solstice Blessings

December 21, 2019December 21, 2019 Gayatri DeviLeave a comment

I am awake enough now to write for the first time in the last one week. I had my achilles tendon reconstruction surgery done on my left ankle on Monday, December 16th. Posted final grades, took out the recycling and went to the surgery. I briefly remember waking up sometime in the hospital after the surgery, then the car ride home, then sobbing continuously as Krish propped me up on my non-weight bearing operated foot with crutches as he helped me up the long, wintry walkway and steps to our front door– it was a long walk; I didn’t think I would make it — slumping into bed, then searing pain, seething pain, screaming pain as the general anesthesia and nerve block from the surgery wore off, then periods of wakefulness and sleep, wakefulness and sleep, and wakefulness and sleep. Many many Percocets later, I am awake now with my pain manageable enough, so that I don’t have to dose myself into narcotic and narcoleptic oblivion for another four hours. I didn’t take even one opioid this morning.

I had the following procedures done: they opened up my left ankle, cut out the extra bone growing out of my calcaneus and into my achilles tendon (Haglund’s deformity and resection), cut and repaired the achilles tendon where the extra bone had broken it, and rebuilt my achilles tendon by doing a tendon transfer from my big toe and giving new insertional points. I had the same surgery and the same recovery in 2017 for my right foot. I am in a splint for 3 weeks, in a cast for 12 weeks, in a boot for four weeks. I am in the splint stage now. I am non weight-bearing with full and partial immobilization of my left foot for the next foreseeable future. With physical therapy I will be able to walk and drive by the end of May 2020. I am on medical leave from the university for the spring 2020 semester. As my friend Sharon astutely observed: another saga of the Achilles without the glory of the Iliad! Indeed.

It is a strange Christmas. Dayani is home which is wonderful. I put up the tree for her before I was immobilized. But I am not able to bake the cookies for her and with her, which is something I have always loved doing over christmas: peanut butter cookies with chocolate and peanut butter candy, peanut butter cookies with hershey’s kisses, sugar cookies, oatmeal raisin cookies. Next year.

2019 was a good work year, except for the daily pain reminder. Four good classes; thank you, students. Some of the student evaluations were very sweet. Two presses gave me a contract for my manuscript on indigenous films: I accepted Rowman and Littlefield/Lexington Books. My SdB review essay is coming out shortly in SdB Studies; my review essay on Vera Hildebrand’s Rani of Jhansi regiment is also coming out soon. I will miss campus, my friends, colleagues and students in the spring semester. I have never not taught, so this feels strange to be marooned on this invalid bed like this for 20 weeks.

But here is my winter solstice blessings for you. May the great mother goddess Sun protect you through the dark pathways of your life.

“With faithful progress,
The Great Sun has traveled,
From north to south again,
And on this day pauses.

So we also stand still,
With the whole Earth,
In quiet thankfulness,
To the Source of Blessing,
The Giver of All Light.” [https://www.uua.org/worship/words/ceremony/292649.shtml]

meyer

Women and Work in Regional Cinema

December 10, 2019December 21, 2019 Gayatri DeviLeave a comment

My article on women and work in regional cinema in Feminism in India: Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar, P. Bhaskaran’s Anweshichu Kandethiyilla, and Jabbar Patel’s Umbartha.

https://feminisminindia.com/2019/12/10/women-work-mahanagar-anweshichu-kandethiyilla-umbartha/

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An ordinary morning for most women in India would be tangled and cluttered in getting their children ready and off to school or college, stepping aside so husbands can get ready and leave for work, and often feeding and helping aging parents and sick relatives. If lucky enough to have house maids, women lay out their chores for the day and supervise them as well. Women who themselves work do all of the above, in addition to getting themselves ready for their own job responsibilities. Many women also run the gamut of grocery shopping, paying bills, settling accounts at the bank, keeping children’s medical appointments, attending parent-teacher conferences, taking children for tuition, helping children with their homework, making social visits and any number of other responsibilities.

A World Bank study indicates that India’s female labor force participation stands at 27% compared to 96% for men. Women, disproportionately, are engaged in unpaid work at home and the outside. While women of each generation find opportunities for greater and varied labor participation, it would not be inaccurate to say that women in general, face greater challenges in finding and keeping gainful and satisfactory employment. Women also face greater obstacles in defining and claiming their relationship to their professions with the same degree of dedication, satisfaction and pride with which men own their paid labor.

THE THREE FILMS FROM THREE DIFFERENT REGIONS OF INDIA IN THREE DIFFERENT LANGUAGES DISCUSSED HERE PROVIDE A PROPHETIC AND RESILIENT VISION OF HOW WOMEN HAVE NEGOTIATED AND CLAIMED THEIR ECONOMIC AND EXISTENTIAL WORTH IN A SOCIETY THAT IS ALL TOO READY TO DENY THEM THE OPPORTUNITY TO DISCOVER THEIR OWN AUTONOMOUS PERSONHOOD THROUGH WORK.

Women’s troubled relationship to compensated labor, and thus their own autonomy, share a history of resistance against certain types of deeply rooted patriarchal norms characteristic of all societies across the length and breadth of India. The three films from three different regions of India, in three different languages discussed here, provide a prophetic and resilient vision of how women have negotiated and claimed their economic and existential worth in a society that is all too ready to deny them the opportunity to discover their own autonomous personhood through work.

Two Films And A Common Theme Of Solidarity

Both Satyajit Ray’s Bengali film Mahanagar (The Big City, 1963) and P. Bhaskaran’s Malayalam film Anweshichu Kandethiyilla (I Searched But Did Not Find, 1967) were released in the same decade—the former telling the story of a young married woman from a genteel family fallen on hard times in Kolkata in the 1950s, and the latter narrating the story of a bright young woman from a Christian family in Kerala in the 1950s.

In Mahanagar, based on a story by Narendranath Mitra, Madhabi Mukherjee plays Arati Mazumdar, a sprightly young wife, mother and daughter-in-law in a traditional Bengali household who decides to break the family’s principle—”a woman’s place is in her home“—and take on the job of a salesgirl for a company that sells knitting machines. Susamma, played by the Malayali actress K. R. Vijaya in Anweshichu Kandethiyilla, likewise, decides to become a nurse in the military to offset the financial hardships of her family.

Both Ray and P. Bhaskaran artfully expose the social prejudices, not only against women entering the labor force, but also women working at certain specific jobs. In the time period in which the films are set, in the 1950s, both being a door-to-door salesgirl as well as a nurse were not seen as professions suitable for “good” women. These were jobs that necessitated women to go into unknown areas and mix and mingle with unknown men. Of course, these strictures were placed upon women by a patriarchal code of honor, chastity, mobility and modesty.

A Scene From Mahanagar
Image Source: FirstPost

Arati’s husband Subrata, played by Anil Chatterjee, is at first supportive of his wife taking up the salesgirl’s job, but soon he finds himself resenting his unsuspecting wife, as his own insecurities at his inability to find a better-paying job begin to fan the flames of a competitive jealousy within him. Ray expertly shows the bitterness contracting Subrata’s demeanor as he watches his mother serve his wife breakfast alongside him in the morning as they both get ready to leave for work, or when Arati comes home with presents for the family when she gets her first month’s salary. Subrata turns away petulantly in shame and jealousy at the clear evidence that his wife, his efficient “housewife,” is equally efficient at work and has even received a commission on top of her salary! Underneath the vows and the intimacies or lack thereof, a marriage is an economic partnership, and a family is an economic unit. Man is the head of this unit in patriarchy’s version of the story.

In Anweshichu Kandethiyilla, Susamma becomes the head of the family as she lovingly accepts the responsibility to take care of her aging uncle and aunt who had fostered her after her own mother had died, and her father and his wife had cast her out. If married women had to ensure that they did not earn more than their husbands did and always stayed a step behind and not tarnish the glow surrounding their husbands, unmarried women found their single status itself to be a burden in the workplace.

BOTH RAY’S FILM AND P. BHASKARAN’S FILM IN THE 1960S ASSERT SOLIDARITY WITH WORKING WOMEN IN THE CHARACTERS OF ARATI AND SUSAMMA… SUSAMMA STANDS UP FOR HERSELF. ARATI STANDS UP FOR EDITH.

Based on a story by the acclaimed Malayalam writer Parappurath, P. Bhaskaran’s film explores the baseless prejudice Kerala had against nurses from the Christian community; often, young single women who traveled far and wide, all over the country and the world, worked and took care of their families, and served as exemplary examples of the nursing profession. Susamma’s brother refuses to accept a watch she sends him, and once again, imitating Subrata in Mahanagar, he commands Susamma to quit her job.

Also read: Fishing For The Hidden Feminist Agency In Kumbalangi Nights

He fears social disapproval of her nursing profession, and the disapproval staining him as well. A potential groom tells her that he will marry her if she would keep the fact that she had been a nurse, a secret from his family and friends. Susamma stands adamantly against these irrational demands. Befitting an educated and progressive woman, Susamma tries to find a partner herself. It is instructive that the two male romantic interests of Susamma are both cowardly and weak men who Susamma ultimately rejects. Susamma has to choose between her profession and dreams of a family. She chooses her profession.

Both Ray’s film and P. Bhaskaran’s film in the 1960s assert solidarity with working women in the characters of Arati and Susamma. Arati’s decision to quit her job when her boss insults her colleague, a young Anglo-Indian woman named Edith, after slandering her character (“Anglo-Indians girls like to have fun“) is an unforgettable moment in the film. ‘Apologize to her‘, Arati tells her boss. ‘It is a big world, we will both find some job, won’t we?,’ Arati asks her husband, who was also newly unemployed, and who finally admits and admires her courage to stand up for justice. Earning our daily bread has made us cowards, Subrata tells her, but you are brave. Susamma stands up for herself. Arati stands up for Edith.

Umbartha (The Doorstep, 1982)

Women standing up for oneself and for other women in both private and public life is reprised in Jabbar Patel’s Marathi film Umbartha (The Doorstep, 1982), which was also simultaneously made into the Hindi film Subah (The Morning). Based on the Marathi writer Shanta Nisal’s story Beghar (Homeless) and scripted by the Marathi playwright Vijay Tendulkar, Umbartha is the story of Sulabha Mahajan, a thoughtful young wife and mother, who wishes to escape the gilded cage of a loving marriage with a carnal husband and affluent in-laws.

Sulabha, played by the Marathi and Hindi actress Smita Patil, eventually convinces her husband Subhash, acted by Girish Karnad, to let her go to the village of Sangamvadi to take on the job of the superintendent of a women’s reformatory home. Living in the midst of abused, sick, unwanted, cast out women, Sulabha instinctively understands that even the most comfortable woman is just one unknown step away from being homeless, as she institutes changes in the women’s reform home, and the women’s home makes changes in her.

As with the professions of nursing and salesgirl, being a social worker in an abused women’s home is not where women of “sound mind” work, according to Sulabha’s husband, her in-laws and the people who know her. Why worry about these women who nobody wants? The most “good”, that women can do for such places is to serve as a member of the board or management. While Umbartha does have its limitations for an eighties film, especially in its treatment of lesbian sexuality, it admirably and boldly exposes the dangers awaiting professional women who put themselves in the frontline and show solidarity with other abused and exploited women. Sulabha’s husband goes back estranged from her when he visits her at the reform home. She stops him when he accosts her for a quick shag while an inmate bleeds to death in the hospital from premature labor. Sulabha carries her own homelessness within her like a talisman; she finds her home with the other homeless women. This is not a tragic ending, but a clear awakening.

Also read: 4 South Indian Movies That Start A Conversation About Caste

Susamma, Arati, and Sulabha. Decades later, these women still give voice and face to scores of Indian women who grapple with the true object of their attention: themselves, their work, and the others.

“Norway of the Year”

November 16, 2019November 16, 2019 Gayatri DeviLeave a comment

(I wrote this in 2010 November for the local paper. It feels the same to me now, raking the planet. I miss you, Sally.)

“Norway of the Year”

I was walking down the hill to the university from my home yesterday morning, a beautiful fall morning. We had a week of no rains so everything was brown, cold and dry. Halfway down the hill, a huge pile of dry brown leaves blew past me left to right in a swift wave motion, away into the woods, imitating the sound of hundreds of tiny feet pattering on the asphalt. The sounds of fall are crackly, crispy and brittle. In a month’s time, these curving hilly roads will become rather treacherous to navigate. Mama, did you put snow tires on your car, my daughter reminds me everyday.

But yesterday, everything was bone-dry, brown and black, full of lines angles and planes. Walking down the hill, I could suddenly see all the neighboring houses, their back porches, the tarped patio furniture, the covered swimming pools, the knick-knack heaps–bouncy balls, plastic chairs, toy guns, pool supplies, push-mowers, chopped wood– piled against the back walls that you don’t normally see when the trees are lush and thick with leaves. In this part of Pennsylvania, trees cover everything over summer. Whichever way you turn, trees block your view far and near. With the trees all bone-bare in November with barely a dry leaf hanging on for dear life, a sudden clarity has manifested itself everywhere. You can see clearly near and far; you can see the squirrels scampering in the leaves in the neighbor’s yard; in the distance, you can see the thin, ribbon-like winding roads leading off into houses high up on what my daughter calls “the broccoli mountains.” As the poet observed, fall returns us to a plain and simple sense of things. Each fall we look at these houses that disappear in the summer and become visible again in fall with wonder: “My God, how on earth do they get up there? Who maintains the roads?” We ask in amazement.

In a letter to a friend, the poet Emily Dickinson called the month of November “the Norway of the year”: “The noons are more laconic,” Dickinson wrote, “and the sundowns sterner and Gibraltar lights make the village foreign. November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.”

Indeed, isn’t that what change of seasons do? Make what is familiar, foreign? Transport us from one mode of being to another? Make mercurial and unpredictable your own backyard? From my kitchen window, my daughter’s trampoline blends in with the bony trunks of the November trees in the backyard. It is now a collection cup for falling leaves; nearly a quarter of the trampoline is filled with dead dried leaves. Dayani and her friends go on the trampoline to jump on the leaves! Careful, I tell them; watch out for bugs in the leaves. Shake yourself and check for ticks before you come in! From the kitchen window to where our backyard slopes and dips, the ground is now an undulating sea of leaves into which our littlest dog sinks each time she goes out.

Each fall, we find ourselves filled with a new sense of solicitousness for all that we don’t know, and cannot predict, or prepare for in the coming winter months. This much we know: soon as we rake the leaves and clean the gutters, the ground would be covered by snow for the next five or six months. There is oil and heat to think about, blankets and comforters to be aired, shovels and driveway salt to be set aside. Throbbing with impatience in the near offing is the first snow day of the year when the bony clarity of fall will give way to the brooding dark heaviness of wet winter dawns.

Then there are those mornings when the car refuses to start, the pilot light in the boiler gives out, the heater in your daughter’s room quits working, and the dog runs away into the snowy woods. Sally, our smallest dog will refuse to go out; she will stand at the kitchen door looking at the mountain of snow; in her mind she will think– this is not my house, am I in Norway? Did I really see a truck drive by with a cargo of snow? Are they taking the snow somewhere? I will put three sweaters on and pull a blanket around, just in case, when I walk downstairs to the basement to do laundry. I will let the water run for 15 seconds before letting my fingers touch it. I will hesitate to touch metal surfaces–quick pass and then grab the handle– trying to outwit the static charge. I once read that “Victor,” the feral child they discovered in the woods of Aveyron in France, did not have any sensitivity to cold. Dr. Itard, who worked with “Victor,” and the other scientists, noticed that Victor would go out and play in the snow naked like an animal. Victor was not cold at all; nor did he catch hypothermia. Dr. Itard concluded that our sensitivity to cold is a learned response. I have learned the lesson really well; I am always cold.

It must be so with any extremity of season, which pits the frailty, and vulnerability of all things man-made, against the obdurate persistence of nature. Winter returns us to our most unadorned human selves. When you peel away all the colors and shows of life, as fall does, as winter does, what we are left with is the easy slide towards death. Emily Dickinson knew this too. What is a stone? Is it alive or dead?

“This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived
As freezing persons recollect the snow–
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.”

It must be our awareness of how easy it is to die that makes us want to celebrate winter with festivals of sacred births. If there were no Christmas, no Hanukkah, no winter solstice, no winter celebrations, we would invent one. We would invent some excuse to contact friends and family that we have not seen in a while. It is our awareness of mortality that makes us take note of the occasional squirrel foraging for a pinecone, the rare bird in the ruined trees, the surviving deer traipsing across a snowy field. We stop to see if a stalled car needs help. We check to see if a neighbor needs a ride. It is Norway that teaches us the value of life.

In Memoriam: Dr. K. Ayyappa Paniker

August 2, 2019 Gayatri DeviLeave a comment

In Memoriam: Paniker sir

By Gayatri Devi

(forthcoming in a memorial anthology for Dr. K. Ayyappa Paniker)

I was standing in the main office on the first floor of the Institute of English in the summer of 1986 to turn in my mark list. I had just graduated with my BA in English from the Women’s College and was seeking admission to the Institute’s MA English program. The administrative office was empty; the staff must have been on a lunch break. As I was about to leave, Dr. Ayyappa Paniker, or Paniker sir, as we knew him, walked out of his ante-office and into the main office. He was the head of the department.

Entha? He asked me in Malayalam. (Literally, “What”? But discursively, “How can I help you?”).

I lifted up the copy of my mark list and said, also in Malayalam, “I am here to turn this in.”

Paniker sir walked up to me and took my mark list in his hand. He read it attentively. Then he asked me, again, in Malayalam, “Samskritham aanalle padhichathu?” (“So, I see you studied Sanskrit?”). I nodded my head. Paniker sir asked me seamlessly without lifting his head, this time in English, “What is the meaning of “idaneem”?

I stared at Paniker sir. He was waiting and looked at me. My mind went completely blank. I could not recall what “idaneem” meant in Sanskrit. I had studied Sanskrit for five years through high school, two years for Pre-Degree, and three years for BA. Ten studious years, always scoring above 90 percent, and I could not remember what “idaneem” meant.

“I don’t know what “idaneem” means,” I told Paniker sir. I was embarrassed and appalled at myself.

“Ippol,” Paniker sir told me with his twinkling smile. Of course. Now. Idaneem means “now.”

That was my first personal introduction to Paniker sir, though he was beloved in our family. Conversations with Paniker sir were always interesting and never predictable. Often you just listened, and you always learned something. He was friend, colleague and teacher to several of my aunts and uncles, and my mother. Everyone spoke of him with great respect and awe, and when my aunt Savithri used to visit from Montreal, I would accompany her when she went to visit Paniker sir at their house. I would sit there listening to them talk about anything and everything from Brazilian literature to Canadian writers to Stephen Jay Gould to Bengali novels. Paniker sir would joke when he saw us: “Savithri and Gayatri together? One of you would have been enough!” (Savithri and Gayatri both mean the same: Sun). His jokes and puns always made you laugh and put you at ease and were never malicious. Paniker sir was a polymath in my mind, though he had told us once in class, when we described someone as a “walking encyclopedia,” that “encyclopedias should not walk.”

That was not strictly speaking my first personal introduction to Paniker sir. When I was doing my BA in English at Women’s College, he had recruited my friend Sarada Muraleedharan and me to be volunteers at the All India English Teacher’s conference which was held in Trivandrum and hosted by the University of Kerala. As volunteers, we had to make sure the delegates from all across the nation knew where they were going—the conference was jointly held at the Institute, Senate Hall, and University College—and that they got fed. That whole conference was one of Paniker sir’s many prophetic and prolific efforts to connect teachers, scholars and creative writers across the country to facilitate a much-needed conversation on Indian modernity, status of English teaching, idolatry of the traditional English canon, Indian English, postcolonialism, gender issues, the geopolitics of commonwealth literature, the rise of vernacular and regional literatures, teaching of translation, literary theory and even transnational solidarity, though the term would gain currency only some three decades later. The writers who gave the keynotes that year—Raja Rao and Nissim Ezekiel—join the illustrious company of many teachers, writers and artists who visited Kerala and Kerala University under Paniker sir’s watchful tenure.

It was only natural that Paniker sir would organize an English teacher’s conference. Paniker sir was an exemplary and great English teacher, one who believed in the power of a humanities education to inspire and make real the deep well of our human imagination, so that we may nourish ourselves and each other in our times of need. Now when teachers shy away from lectures and opt instead for discussions, myself included, somewhere in my mind, I wonder whether the scholarly lecture has become a lost art. To germinate an idea, to ask a question that impacts the text and the world, to offer a personal interpretation, and then to sustain it extemporaneously for an hour with passion and intensity is not easy. Paniker sir did it every day for us, whether it was lecturing on Shakespeare’s comedies, or explaining the social tensions underlying modern British drama. There was never a wasted or superfluous word in Paniker sir’s lectures; every word was precise, perfect and needed. He was a man of the right word at the right time. His puns are a testament.

After I finished my master’s degree, in 1989, I did an year’s worth of M.Phil. work with Paniker sir before I went to the US to work on my doctorate. I didn’t complete my MPhil, but those were joyful years. Paniker sir vastly opened up my intellectual circles while I worked with him. Once, Paniker sir sent me and my friend Jayalekshmy to the home of G. Parameswaran Pillai, freedom fighter, lawyer and multifaceted personality from India’s independence and post-independence phase. Over a period of several weeks, Jaya and I systematically went through his papers and arranged them and catalogued them in a coherent form for archival use. That was my first foray into archival research. Paniker sir also sent me to SNDT Women’s University in Bombay to attend a women’s studies conference directed by Professor Shirin Kudchedkar. Women’s Studies was just beginning to be recognized as an intellectual discipline in India in the 80s, and Professor Kudchedkar was one of the first academicians to work in the area. He also made it possible for me to attend a Canadian Studies conference with Dr. Jameela Begum at M. S. University in Baroda. It was during Paniker sir’s tenure that Canadian Studies began as a research field at the Institute.

Paniker sir introduced me to the novels of the Canadian writer Margaret Laurence and helped shape the direction for my research. With Paniker sir, I worked on the novels of three Commonwealth writers: Margaret Laurence (Canada), Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai (India) and Patrick White (Australia). I had always been interested in land and landscape in literature, the power of places and cultures on stories. So that is what I started studying with Paniker sir. Under Paniker sir’s guidance, I read their novels against a framework of Sangam literature and “thinai” theory. Each week, I selected a text for discussion and then wrote about 5-7 notebook pages reflectively on any aspect of the reading that appealed to me. Then I would meet with Paniker sir for an hour and we would talk about my thoughts and ideas. It was wonderful. It was wonderful in the sense that I would spend the entire hour mostly listening to Paniker sir talk about “thinai” theory, “thinai” poetry, Akananooru, Purananooru, and the novels. However, he left brief but excellent written feedback on my notes spurring my research forward. Later, in graduate school in the US, one of my first research presentations would be a reading of Thakazhi’s novel Chemmeen and Patrick White’s Voss as Thinai novels. My professors at the University of North Dakota knew of Paniker sir when I introduced the paper describing my research with Paniker sir. Similarly, on one of my return visits to Trivandrum, when I told Paniker sir about my doctoral work, he knew of Sadegh Hedayat and his novel The Blind Owl; my dissertation advisor Michael Beard is one of the foremost scholars of Persian modernism and Hedayat. My mentorship had come full circle.

When in 1989 I received two higher education scholarships for doctoral work on the same day– Commonwealth scholarship to go to the UK, and a Rotary scholarship to go to the US—my mother called to ask Paniker sir where I should study. Paniker sir’s advice was very simple: if she wants to come back to India, he told my mother, let her accept the Commonwealth scholarship. If she does not want to return to India, let her go to the US. I went to the US, with thoughts of return, but Paniker sir was right. I stayed.

When I told Paniker sir that I was going to study in the US, sir told me to read Gary Snyder’s poems. Paniker sir was not amongst the poet-activists of Kerala, but his special recall and recommendation of Snyder, a poet deeply associated with ecopoetics and the environmental movement in the west surprised me. But there it was. That was Paniker sir’s recommendation: Gary Snyder. In a way, that was not surprising; Paniker sir’s canvas was wide. He was a poet of the human tribe and of our toils and turmoils. Even more, Paniker sir knew the direction of English studies in India and in the world: the postcolonial moment, the gender critiques, environmental humanities, textual studies, vernacular studies—he anticipated them all, and prepared his students and faculty to meet those new directions competently and confidently. I, and his other students, were indeed blessed to have studied with this great teacher.

Bio of the author: Dr. Gayatri Devi is Associate Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Pennsylvania, United States. She was Dr. Paniker’s student at the Institute of English from 1986-1990.

Lalithambika Antharjanam:The Writer Who Helped Shape Kerala’s Feminist Literature

March 31, 2019March 31, 2019 Gayatri DeviLeave a comment

https://feminisminindia.com/2019/03/30/lalithambika-antharjanam-kerala-writer/

In one of the stories told about her birth, as recounted in her memoirs, Lalithambika Antharjanam, writer and social activist, tells of an incident that “affected her very deeply over the years.” Lalithambika writes of herself in the third person in Balyasmriti (Childhood Memories), and in Gita Krishnankutty’s translation in the collection Cast Me Out If You Will(1997), we can infer with absolute clarity the domesticated shock of this incident for both the father and the daughter.

Lalithambika writes,“”When her father, a learned man of progressive views, heard that a daughter had been born to him, he exclaimed angrily, “No, I will not live here any longer. I’ll go away, maybe to Madras, become a Christian, and marry an Englishwoman.”

“And what if she has a daughter too?” asked my mother.

“At least I will be allowed to bring her up like a human being. I will have the liberty to educate her, give her the freedom to grow, get her married to a good man.”“

Lalithambika’s father’s words underscore a father’s helplessness at the suffering of a generation of Namboodiri women in Kerala, including foreseeing the same for his own newborn daughter, at the turn of the last century. The Kerala Brahmin caste of Namboodiris in the 1900s were for the most part wealthy landowners whose influence extended to the royal houses of Travancore and Malabar, and who were widely regarded as ‘keepers’ of the Hindu scriptures, brahminical learning, and the Hindu caste hierarchy since they occupied its topmost tier in the state.

LALITHAMBIKA’S IMAGINATION WENT BEYOND THE BORDERS OF KERALA TO EMBRACE THE HIDDEN AND CONSPICUOUS TUMULT IN THE LIVES OF ALL INDIAN WOMEN.

While Namboodiri men wielded a great deal of social, cultural, and personal power, the community lived by a strict patriarchal and patrilineal code of ritual seclusion for their women, often giving prepubescent girls in marriage to men fifty or sixty years older than them, consigning women exclusively to the kitchen at puberty, forbidding them from getting an education, prescribing rigorous ritual seclusion for widows, including child widows, prohibiting widow remarriage, and casting out or ostracising women from family and community if they dared to question, confront or reject any of the strictures placed upon them. The term “antharjanam“ is a Namboodiri caste name; it literally means “one who lives in the interiors.” A cognate is the gendered feminine form “akathullol“ or “one who is inside.”

It was primarily this women’s world that Lalithambika delineated with great compassion and boundless imagination in over a hundred short stories written over a period of forty years between the late 1930s and 1970s. In shedding light on the inhuman indignities suffered by Namboodiri women in Kerala, Lalithambika’s stories shed light on all toxic patriarchal structures and held them accountable for the gendered abuse of women for all times.

Lalithambika’s chosen form was the short story, which she described as “the art form best suited to the powerful interpretation of a comprehensive union of thought and emotion.”Indeed, her stories, while exhibiting a heavy preference for the diegetic narrator, explore the innermost thoughts of abject women (and men) with an immediacy and rawness that contain an urgent social critique. In 1976, she won the state’s prestigious Vayalar award, the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award and the Kendra Sahitya Akademi award for her one and only novel, Agnisakshi.

Lalithambika was born in 1909 to a traditional Namboodiri household in Kottavattom in Kollam district, Kerala. Unlike many Namboodiri girls of her generation, Lalithambika’s parents, particularly her progressive father, allowed her to secure an informal primary education along with her brothers that was supplemented with informal discourses on literature, religion, nationalism et al that amorphously and inconsistently rippled through the family home as well as the larger Kerala society.

In Ormayile Nidhikal (The Treasures of Memory), Lalithambika writes that “as she grew older, she was aware that people disapproved of the way she was being brought up. They thought that a growing girl had no right to so much freedom”. In her autobiography, Lalithambika details a cultural milieu where in the far southern corner of the nation, news of the slow and steady fervour of a brewing nationalism and independence movement brought the external world with its full force of new ideas to a young girl growing up in protected isolation.

Her stories, such as Kodumkaattilpetta Orila (A Leaf in the Whirlwind), DhirenduMajumdarinde Amma (The Mother of Dhirendu Majumdar), explore the effects of the partition of Punjab and that of Bengal during India’s independence struggle, which birthed untold calamities and disasters on Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, particularly the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh women. Lalithambika’s imagination went beyond the borders of Kerala to embrace the hidden and conspicuous tumult in the lives of all Indian women.

“I BELIEVE THAT EVEN AS THE ARTIST, MAN OR WOMAN, PULLS DOWN THE GIRDERS OF A NARROW, DECAYED SOCIETY, HE OR SHE MUST ALSO FORGE THE TOOLS TO BUILD A CULTURED AND WHOLESOME NEW STRUCTURE IN ITS PLACE”

As a child and young woman, Lalithambika grew attracted to the ideas and ideals of Gandhi, Vivekananda, and Tagore. Tagore’s depiction of women in the traditional Bengali society, in particular, influenced the young writer, and Lalithambika referred to Tagore as “[her] god in the early phase of my literary career.” Both writers featured women characters on the cusp of climactic incidents that ruptured personal and political lives. One can easily see how Tagore modelled a form of radical womanhood to the young and aspiring writer even in a novel like Agnisakshi, a work of Lalithambika’s mature years, and which pits a socially conscious young woman to choose between a loving but placid marriage and another way to engage with the world around her. Lalithambika has often cited Tagore’s Ghaire Baire (At Home and Outside) that she read in Malayalam translation, a book gifted to her by her father, as one that had attracted her deeply.

In the early 1930s, when Lalithambika started writing, Kerala was a cauldron of social reform movements that confronted several social inequities, particularly the intersectional oppression perpetrated on putative lower castes, non-Hindu religions, and women, through a sickly confluence of caste, religion and gender prejudices. These oppressive practices included untouchability and unapproachability through an obscure system of ritual distances of pollution between upper and lower castes enabled by the janmi-kudiyan feudal economic system, as well as prohibiting the “lower” castes from entering temples or other public places.

The anti-colonial and anti-feudal Mappilla Uprising (1921), and Vaikom Satyagraham (1924), and Guruvayur Satyagraham (1931) against untouchability were all social protests against such inequities. Namboodiri women and Muslim women were the most ritually secluded in terms of their access to education and freedom of movement. In her writings, Lalithambika often acknowledges her debt to Sree Narayana Guru who advocated for “oru jathi, orumatham, oru daivam,” (“one caste, one religion, one god”), and Kumaran Asan who connected gender oppression to caste oppression in his famous long poem Duravasthawhere a Namboodiri woman falls in love with a lower caste Pulaya man in the fiery days of the Mappila rebellion.

Lalithambika’s life was personally affected by the reformist movements led within the Namboodiri community by pioneering reformers and writer-activists such as V. T. Bhattathiripad who wrote Adukkalayilninnu Arangathekku (From the Kitchen to the Stage) and M. R. Bhattathiripad who wrote Marakkudayile Mahanarakam (The Hell behind the Umbrella Screen). In 1932, Lalithambika, who was by now married to a loving and supportive husband who encouraged her intellectual labors and social activism on behalf of women and the marginalised, inspired by the internal discussions about putting an end to the ritual seclusion of Namboodiri women, attended a Nair Sammelanam organised by Mannath Padmanabhan to honor two Namboodiri women, Parvathi Nenmini Mangalam and Arya Pallam, who had thrown away their umbrellas and overshawl coverings.

In Marakkuda Neengunnu (We Cast Away Our Umbrellas) , once again referring to herself in the third person, Lalithambika recalls the event that sealed her ethical stance as a woman and as an intellectual. She says, “A group of courageous women who had decided to cast away their umbrellas were going to be there. She pretended she was going to a temple, started out with her umbrella and shawl, and threw the umbrella away as soon as she left the house. She then rearranged the mundu that covered her as a saree, and took a bus to the venue of the meeting. It gives her great pleasure now to think of that inspiring event.“

A few of Lalithambika’s stories, such as Prathikaradevatha (The Goddess of Revenge) and Kuttasammatham (Admission of Guilt) are milestones in the great progressive leap she brought to Namboodiri women’s social and cultural liberation, as these stories directly exposed the hypocrisy of the polygynous patriarchal Namboodiri men and their tedious rituals to ostracize their women who engaged in sexual relations with men of their choice through a ritual trial known as smarthavicharam.

The narrator in Kuttasammatham (1940) is eleven years old when she is given in marriage to a man whose daughter was taken as her own father’s one of many wives. She writes, “The thirty-year-old daughter of a senior Namboodiri who was to be my husband came into our family, and I was given in exchange. I was eleven years and three months old at the time. The two fathers married each other’s daughters, a good exchange.”

Also read: Begum Rokeya: The Writer Who Introduced Us To Feminist Sci-Fi | #IndianWomenInHistory

When the old Namboodiri dies in two years, the young girl becomes a widow at thirteen years. Consigned to the interior of the house, considered inauspicious, forbidden from any and all ornaments, occupations, and interests available to any other adolescent girl, the narrator languishes and withers away inside the thevarappura (the part of the Namboodirihouse that houses the shrine for daily worship). She is heartbroken when she hears her own brother’s newly wedded wife playfully laughing with her brother.

During her trial, she tells the presiding Namboodiri men why she sought out a sexual encounter with a man of her choice. “I speak out of my sorrow. I am not envious of anyone. But when I think of how vastly experiences can differ, my heart breaks. After all, she was only six months older than me. A widow fears laughter and enjoyment more than tears. No matter whose it is, it hurts her. To stand and watch while the pleasures of life forever denied her are being experienced by another–do you know, you great vaidikans, how deeply that can hurt and sting? It is the fire fueled by this pain that smolders in the antahpuram of Namboodiri houses“, she writes.

In Manikkan (1949), the beaten and broken ox Manikkan is a stand-in for his loving owner Azhakan, a lower caste Pulayan, who tries to make ends meet in a hardscrabble life. This brief but powerful story gives life to the enormous indignities suffered by man and beast alike in the casteist oppressive regime of janmi–kudiyan (land-lord-tenant labourer) structure in Kerala society a few decades ago.

2019 marks the 110th anniversary of Lalithambika’s birth. In her unshaken faith in the power of art to raise up the awareness of people, Lalithambika modeled the existentially engaged writer. In Kathakarthriyude Marupadi (A Woman Writer’s Reply) (1962), Lalithambika described artistic work as a structural effort. She says, “I believe that even as the artist, man or woman, pulls down the girders of a narrow, decayed society, he or she must also forge the tools to build a cultured and wholesome new structure in its place”.

Also read: Ashapurna Devi: The Feminist Writer Of Bengal | #IndianWomenInHistory

This beneficence of a creatrix, primarily in the role of a nurturing mother, struggled with the social activist and critic in Lalithambika’s stories, but the conversations she started about women’s rights and roles reach well into our own times for our own intellectual and social engagements about the human rights of women.

References

1. Lalithambika Antharjanam, Cast Me Out If You will. Trans. Gita Krishnankutty. New York: The Feminist Press, 1998.
2. Lalithambika Antharjanam. Lalithambika Antharjanathinde Kathakal Samboornam. DC Books, 2014.

Seeing Is Believing: The Invisible Through Aravindan’s Eyes

March 15, 2019March 15, 2019 Gayatri DeviLeave a comment

Here is an article I wrote about Aravindakshanmammen’s *Kummatty* in 2016.

“Seeing is Believing: The Invisible through Aravindan’s Eyes”

Perhaps no other artistic medium is as apt and made to measure the invisible as cinema. The very premise of the camera is that if there exists something that can be seen, the camera has the power and capacity to show it to you. Conversely, if it cannot be represented by the camera, does it exist? The most enduring quality of Aravindan’s films is their search to depict on screen in images, shapes, and colors that our five senses would be able to comprehend, things that are invisible; in particular, entities that are the products of imagination and faith.

Aravindan’s films trace the arc of the invisible as it lands and rests on a varied group of people bringing them together as a community. In his films, contact with the invisible changes the people for the better, even if in the most imperceptible manner. Two feature films, *Kummatty* (1979), and *Esthappan* (1980), in particular, and the biopic documentary about the philosopher and teacher Jiddu Krishnamurthy *The Seer Who Walks Alone* (1985) show us through Aravindan’s eyes our world imbued with “things” of sacred value and weight that possess transformative power to forge a new ethical community. We see fields, roads, the sea, rocks, boats, hands, trees, birds, animals, and the sky as we have never seen them before. With great love, Aravindan shows us these “things” as they are in their original, uncorrupted and sacred state. In Aravindan’s eyes, these aspects of nature or the human mind become sacred images. Our encounter with such sacred images cannot be anything but ethical. The following is a brief appreciation of such an ethical encounter of one viewer and one film, Kummatty.

*Kummatty,* the earliest of these films, tells the story of a folk figure, the Kummatty, a relic of grandmother’s tales, a larger-than-life figure, a wandering folk minstrel who is also a boogeyman in popular imagination with an anecdotal propensity, it is suggested, to abduct children. Kummatty will take away unruly children from their parents. Thus Kummatty’s charms and powers are both positive and negative. He is a source of wonder and fear because his powers are unlike yours or mine. In other words, Kummatty is a liminal figure that embodies a pathway that connects the material world with the non-material world. He exists simultaneously in the visible and invisible worlds.

In the film, Aravindan is careful to expose us to the forged and fabricated aspects of Kummatty’s personality such as his fake beard, and his human necessities such as needing a shave. Kummatty falls sick as well and needs to be cured. The human limits of Kummatty are well established. When we first see him on the screen, he materializes literally out of nowhere—he simply shows up in the scene from a distant darkness, his song preceding his form. Indeed much of what we know of Kummatty resides in products of imagination such as folk songs that the children of the village sing. Kummatty himself sings songs of the Brahman, as formless as the deep, dark and vast sky, formless as the rain, thunder or lightning as represented in the movie’s unforgettable song “Karukara Karmuki” written and sung with great devotional calm by Kavalam Narayana Panicker.

Kummatty upsets the placid pace of the village life when he befriends the children of the village, children who are as much a liminal figure as he is, as they contain both the past of a community and its future. In a grand processional scene, the children celebrate the myth of Kummatty by recounting his myth from the folk tradition in song form (“Manathe macholam talayeduthu”) as they follow him all across the mountain. The children are transformed by this contact. We see this in Chindan’s new solicitousness to the old grandmother.

Ritual, community, the uncanny, and the unknowable and the invisible come together in the final scenes of the movie when the narrow domestic tragedy of a family that has its only son turned into a dog opens into a communal ritual to reverse the metamorphoses. Oracles and priests attempt to reverse the metamorphoses but to no avail. Kummatty alone can reverse the metamorphoses because Kummatty is not a part of stagnant village rituals, which are as meaningless as modernity itself. Kummatty’s power is of another invisible order, the order of the formless and the unknowable, the order of the sky and the rain and the lightning and thunder. It is the order of openness. It is instructive that in the one year that the Kummatty has been gone and Chindan lives his animal existence as a dog, the grandmother who was the repository of the old stories, including that of Kummatty, has died. This loss of communal memory, however, is offset by Chindan’s metamorphoses into a dog, and a family’s and community’s suffering over this transformation. The family and the community have to mourn. They have to believe in loss. They have to believe in the magic and the power of the Kummatty. They have to believe in the power of the invisible.

The flight of the birds is much more than a simple metaphor of freedom. What is the flight of a bird? The flight of a bird is the pathless order of freedom. The overall plot of Kummatty is overdetermined to bring us to this vantage point where we dedicate our full attention to the random flight of birds almost in real time, since not many of us would have watched birds in flight in nature as part of our daily routine. Yet, birds have flown in the sky without any particular pathways since the beginning of time. That is all they do. This simple and serious truth is the ethical promise of this cinema to its viewers. It is a direct representation of what Aravindan saw through his eyes.