Women and Work in Regional Cinema

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

Image Source: IMDb

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.

Image Source: Wikipedia

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.

Women And Work
Image Source: Hungama

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.

Women And Work
Image Source: Amazon

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”

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.IMG_0371

In Memoriam: Dr. K. Ayyappa Paniker

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

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 through his eyes.

Why the Indifference to Sexual Assault of Women in Trains?

Gayatri DeviLeave a comment

https://feminisminindia.com/2019/03/04/sexual-assault-women-trains/

Sexual harassment of women and girls inside Indian trains has turned train travel into personal hells for female passengers. The criminal behaviours of male offenders escalate from pornographic comments to sexual touching, groping, public masturbation and ejaculation, violent assault and rape.

Fellow passengers who witness the terror of female passengers are largely indifferent to their suffering. As a general rule, bystanders in such contexts do not intervene or stop the criminals. They watch it as a spectacle.

When criminals are finally apprehended, as it happens in some small percentage of cases, mainstream media run sensationalist articles about the criminal and his crime for one or two days of the news cycle. The criminals come and go with new and uninteresting details. The crime continues.

THE CRIMINALS COME AND GO WITH NEW AND UNINTERESTING DETAILS. THE CRIME CONTINUES.

In November 2017, a woman and her daughter traveling from Kolkata to Delhi were forced to jump off a moving train to prevent a group of male travelers from raping the young girl. As soon as they boarded the train, 10-15 men started attacking the 15-year-old, and tried to drag her into the toilet. After repeated appeals from the mother to the police on the train, the men were ordered to move to another compartment, from where they returned to resume their attacks on the girl.

The mother and daughter “had no help available with other passengers in the train remaining mute spectators to their ordeal…and had to jump off the train when it slowed down near Kanpur station, news agency PTI reported quoting a police officer.”

Also read: Why Are Women Still Being Masturbated Upon On Public Transport?

A 13 year old girl in Bombay jumped from a moving train to avoid sexual assault, and a 25-year old woman in Andhra Pradesh did the same. The frightened woman in Andhra Pradesh “sought the help of other passengers in the coach but none came forward to help them.” 

One year before the kidnapping, torture, rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey or ‘Nirbhaya’ on a bus in India, in 2011, in Kerala, a young woman, Soumya, was fatally sexually assaulted in a train. She fell on the tracks from the moving train where she was raped. Two men in a nearby compartment heard Soumya screaming for help as Govindachamy assaulted her, but according to the prosecutors, “Even though witness No. 4 wanted to pull the chain, he was told by a middle-aged man that the woman had jumped off the train and made good her escape and that he should not take the matter any further as they would all then be dragged to the court.”

Most recently, on February 9, 2019, Alice Cheevel was traveling by train to Thrissur when she fought off a man who was sexually assaulting another female passenger. When Cheevel who occupied the upper berth loudly interrupted and confronted him, he turned his attack towards her, at which point, she slapped him across the face. Cheevel physically fought the man off from attacking her, dragging her down from the upper berth and from stripping her clothes off. Cheevel noted that a large group of people gathered inside the compartment to watch the stand-off, but no one intervened or stopped the offender, whose outrageous conduct continued for almost an hour. This was enough time, Cheevel noted, either for the man to have killed her, or for her to have killed him in self-defense. No one lifted a finger to stop the offender.

WHY DO WE LET SEXUAL VIOLENCE ESCALATE IN PUBLIC PLACES, PARTICULARLY, IN MOVING TRAINS AND BUSES?

Finally, after the lapse of almost an hour, the offender was taken down by another passenger, at which point the spectating mob moved in to hit him and kick him and display their righteous indignation. The man was arrested when the train reached Thrissur.

What is wrong with this picture?

Why are we indifferent when we see criminal rogues assaulting women in trains and buses?

Why do we stand around looking bored, uninterested, shocked, surprised, revolted? Put your favorite spectatorial state of mind here.

Why do we let sexual violence escalate in public places, particularly, in moving trains and buses?

When mainstream media cover sexual assault in trains, why do the headlines lessen the crime by framing the criminal conduct as under the influence of alcohol or drugs?

The people’s historian Howard Zinn in the United States had famously invoked the metaphor of a “moving train” to teach his students about social justice and civil rights. History is a moving train, Zinn told his students, and you have to know where it is going. You cannot be neutral on a moving train, Zinn said. You are either going with it, or you are not going with it. But you cannot be neutral about it. Zinn later named his autobiography You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.

We cannot afford to be neutral on a moving train in India either. Either you are for sexual violence against women in trains in India. Or you are against the sexual violence perpetrated on women in trains in India.

Will you, as a bystander, intervene the next time the thug next to you attacks a woman?

Will you, bystander, pull the emergency break and call for help?

Will you, bystander, stop him even if it means temporarily worrying about your own safety?

Will you, bystander, make it your number one priority to find the police, the TTE, and to bring as much loud attention as possible to intervene and stop the attack?

Will you, bystander, step in to assist the person fighting off an offender, with your bare hands and feet, if that is all you have?

Will you, mainstream media, stop qualifying these criminal events as caused by alcohol and drugs?

Will you, mainstream media, stop sensationalizing sex crimes, and instead, be an ally to women and men working to stop the rape culture of our nation?

Will you? Whose side are you on?

Also read: Women in Public Spaces: Do Public Spaces Only Belong To Men?

Gayatri Devi is Associate Professor of English and Women and Gender Studies at Lock Haven University. She can be reached at gdevi@comcast.net.

Featured Image Source: Aaj Ki Khabar

Hunten Eggles in the Crick

Gayatri DeviLeave a comment

Hunten Eggles in the Crick, Lock Haven Express, October 25, 2010

There is another side to the debate as to whether new technological applications such as instant messaging, texting etc ruin the English language or not.  It is to be expected that language purists and parents of a certain generation would shudder at each new instance of language change: the cryptic abbreviations, the mangled grammar, the new and shocking vocabulary.

Are you worried that your kid is AATK doing something D&M?  If we are to go by historical patterns, it is probably best if you GOYHH and GWI.

Language is in a constant state of evolution, and while the newness of the vocabulary or the non-standard uses of grammar might shock the more conservative speakers amongst us, the fundamental matrix of the English language is remarkably stable and is not going to devolve into incoherence any time soon.

When I teach the introductory principles of sociolinguistics to my students–how social variables influence language–I am always reassured at how self-sustaining, healthy and vibrant English language is despite dire predictions to the contrary.  The healthy state of our local dialects is strong evidence and best proof of how resilient language is amidst all kinds of social changes. Local dialects are one form of language variation that is relatively impervious to overnight changes in vocabulary and grammar.

Take our central Pennsylvania dialect, for instance; the English those of us who live in the region bordered by the counties of Northumberland to the east, Bedford to the south, Clearfield to the west, and Lycoming to the North speak. I was reviewing the vocabulary, phonology and grammar of the central PA dialect with my students, and one student said with a broad grin, “this is exactly how we speak at my house!” Every example we reviewed was literally right out of their mouths, their parents’ mouths, and their grandparents’ mouths.

For generations, it seems Lauren’s family has only “redd up” their rooms, not “tidy” or “clean” them. That is great, I told her; “redd up” is an old Norse form that survived through Old English, Middle English and Modern English in certain Scots-Irish dialects of English, and which probably came to Pennsylvania with its first wave of Scots-Irish immigrants. It is a historical form that our central PA dialect has preserved intact for thousands of years, I told her.  You don’t find it anywhere else in Standard English. Isn’t that totally cool?  Nothing has taken its place in our community.   And now you will probably transmit it to your kids the same way you learned it from your folks, I told her.

This is how dialects create a strong sense of place and local identity. Another student enthusiastically agreed that there is no plural form for “turkey” where she comes from: you are driving along when you see “three turkey,” not “three turkeys.” Game animals in central PA have no plural forms; only domestic animals do.  Strangely enough, this is an approximation to match other game animals such as “deer,” which have no plural forms; if “deer” has no plural form, why should a “turkey” have one? Local dialects are terrifically economical!

Five years ago, I remember my surprise when my daughter’s friend had a sleep-over at our house and in the morning asked that I make her a “dippy egg.” I had just arrived in Lock Haven from Dallas, Texas where there are no dippy eggs. I had not heard of dippy eggs in India or North Dakota either, two other places where I had lived for extended periods of time.  I had no idea what the kid meant, and I asked her to describe to me what a dippy egg looks like. She said that it is cooked on one side and with runny white and yolk on the other side so she can “dip” her toast in it.

Do you mean “sunny side up”? I asked her. Okay, she said.

Aha, in India we call it a “bull’s eye,” I told her.

But two weeks ago, I surprised myself when I heard myself say, “the deck needs cleaned.” We all say that, my students said in a chorus–the grass needs cut, the car needs washed, the deck needs cleaned, the room needs picked-up, the windows need cleaned and on and on.

Well, I guess I am officially now a Lock Havenite, I told them.  You don’t use the “to be” infinitive here, I said. In most parts of the English-speaking world, the use of the auxiliary “need” is followed by the infinitive “to be” before it completes the verb phrase with a past participle. The car needs to be cleaned. The grass needs to be mowed. That is, except in central Pennsylvania. And why not? It is not an anomaly at all; we use the need +past participle without the infinitive only for certain types of transitive verbs. It is not arbitrary at all. It is part of our dialect’s grammar and is quite systematic in its usage.

But some of our usages are really crazy, John said. Why do you say that? I asked him. Well, do you know the expression, “jeet” he asked me. I come from the coal county region, John said, and we say “jeet,” “juze,” and “jugo.” They stand for “did you eat”? “Did you go?”

An interesting phonological change, don’t you think? In casual, unemphatic speech, “did you eat,” in fact, does sound like “jeet.” I am sure there are no such extreme phonological contractions for other auxiliaries such as Does or Have. Again, it is rule-based and not random. It is not incorrect.

My students were surprised to learn that the accent that we call Standard American English, or the newscaster’s English is the relatively feature-less English of the American mid-west speech; the English spoken between southeastern Nebraska, southern and central Iowa and western Illinois, or as one newscaster once put it: “we have to sound like we are from nowhere.”

In fact, Americans who speak a recognizable dialect, or with a regional accent have certain stereotypical qualities–often negative ones for comic relief in Hollywood movies– associated with them. Movies like My Cousin Vinny, Fargo, The Usual Suspects, Deliverance etc intentionally or unintentionally document the linguistic features of particular regional dialects, even if they are at times unflattering to the people they represent.  The most profound irony of our times though is the fact that the most heinous villains in Hollywood films speak the Queen’s English, once the most prestigious dialect of English. Perhaps there is some poetic justice to that as well; you don’t really get to be a Lord or a Duke or an Earl without exploiting a lot of people along the way, right?

How we talk is closely connected to how we regard the world and our place in the world, ultimately. One of the sweetest things about the English of the American south is how a conversation is never direct, never to the point; it takes a lot of talking about other stuff before you come to the point of the conversation. A conversation is a real interpersonal search; it is never just a transaction. This slowness and indirection can drive a New Yorker mad, where bluntness is a virtue.

Our central PA dialect is not as distinct as that of Pittsburgh or NewYork but we do have certain unique features; we are a quiet people.  I like how the old folks–your “gram” and “pap”– in Lock Haven and State College express agreement –“how about it?”  How about it indeed. It is true; as a student observed, you don’t need a lot of yammerin when you are hunten eggles in the crick.

 

Film Review: Evening Shadows (2018)

Gayatri DeviLeave a comment
I want to put a plug for the film *Evening Shadows,* a coming-out film of a young middle-class man to his oppressively conservative parents directed by Sridhar Rangayan who has made several LGBTQ themed Hindi films. Rangayan’s *Pink Mirror* did not really work for me; the plot was a bit too melodramatic for my taste. But *Evening Shadows* is a good watch. Both are available on Netflix.
 
*Evening Shadows* tells the story of Karthik, a young photographer living in gay-friendly Bombay and played with an impressive and disarming mix of vulnerability and confidence by the young actor Devansh Doshi, who goes home to visit his parents in a conservative small town in Karnataka for a puja, which morphs into a match-making standoff between the son and the father. Karthik is in a longterm loving relationship with his lover and partner Aman back in Bombay. Anant Mahadevan–the last time I saw him was in Sai Paranjape’s *Adose Padose* in the mid 80s — plays Karthik’s father Damodar with the kind of patriarchal cluelessness, entitlement and lack of imagination to push everyone around as he pleases in his family, particularly his wife, Karthik’s mother.
 
Indeed it is this awareness–that homophobia is another eruption of an extremely vilified form of patriarchal misogyny–that is the backbone of this film. In glittering saris and jewels, and with all the auspicious markings of a good Hindu wife, a deerkha sumangali, Karthik’s mother is played with a larger-than-life screen presence by Mona Ambegaonkar, who won the Best Supporting Actress at the Out At the Movies awards in 2018. The award is entirely justified. Vasudha, Karthik’s mother, in many ways, fits the long-suffering silently loving mother we are used to seeing in Hindi melodramas. But Ambegaonkar plays that mother in a finely nuanced performance that shows us a middle-aged woman awakening to her own abject status within her family by gradually identifying with her son’s oppression. It is a very good performance.
 
Gay characters out of the closet used to be either campy entertainment or tragic victims in Hindi films. But *Evening Shadows* shows two cosmopolitan young men comfortable in their relationship and sexuality and putting the responsibility for homophobia firmly back to where it belongs: it is not they who need to hide anything; it is the society that needs to change. This is our new generation. They are here and they are queer. Deal with it, nation.
 
Set against the backdrop of the social and cultural debates in the last couple of years in India regarding Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalized homosexual acts, *Evening Shadows* shows that one casualty of such homophobic laws is the clandestine and exploitative lifestyle of men like Karthik’s uncle, a married gay middle aged man with children who at one point tries to sexually assault Karthik. The film has an ambitious scope and it manages to connect all the dots well. Doshi and Ambegaonkar both deliver memorable performances with their characters bursting the bubble of patriarchal privilege with natural power. I highly recommend this film for a campus screening and discussion at some point for a transnational representation of gay rights in reel life and real life.

P. Bhaskaran: A Tribute

Gayatri DeviLeave a comment

February 25th marks the 12th death anniversary of eminent Malayalam poet, lyricist, actor and filmmaker P. Bhaskaran (April 21, 1924-February 25, 2007).

Bhaskaran, Bhaskaran master or Bhaskaranmash, as he was affectionately known in Kerala, wrote songs for over 3000 Malayalam films between 1950-2003. He also directed numerous films, and acted in them as well. The Malayalam film *Neelakkuyil* (1954, The Blue Cuckoo) directed by P. Bhaskaran and Ramu Kariat that told the story of a prohibited relationship between a Dalit woman and an “upper” caste Hindu

man in Kerala’s casteist society brought a new socially responsive sensibility and an innovative aesthetic to Malayalam cinema in the fifties and sixties. *Neelakkuyil* won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Malayalam as well as the All India Certificate of Merit for Best Feature Film. His enduring and memorable films from this decade include Rarichan Enna Pauran (1956), Iruttinde Athmavu (1967), Anweshichu Kandethiyilla (1967), Mooladhanam (1969), Kallichellamma (1969), Kaattukurangu (1969), Sthree(1970), Vithukal (1971) and Ummachu (1971). In his films, P. Bhaskaran addressed socially and culturally resonant themes of a changing Kerala society navigating between feudalism and progressive politics, untouchability, the mistreatment of the mentally disabled, and the status of women. He also directed several commercially successful films and documentaries.

The thousands of songs P. Bhaskaran wrote for Malayalam films spanning six decades have left behind a rich aesthetic lore about nature and the human heart, particularly the varied experiences of romantic love. As a lyricist, P. Bhaskaran’s songs are closely associated with the music direction of K. Raghavan and M. S. Baburaj and the voice of S. Janaki. Rich in homespun imagery and in a clean and cultured register that uses vernacular Malayalam as well as Sanskritized compounds when called for, these songs endure from generation to generation with their ability to invoke extraordinarily beautiful ways of feeling, thinking and being.

 

Travel Tips for Troubled Times

Gayatri DeviLeave a comment
So here is a frisking story. I wrote this for the local newspaper in 2006.
 
“Travel Tips for Troubled Times”
Gayatri Devi
 
(The Lock Haven Express, 1 March 2006)
 
You know that handsome black dress that Spiegel’s and Peterman’s catalogs insist is a “must-have” for the smart traveler? Long, and loose-fitting, soft, smooth, suede-cotton blend, hides spills and stains, roomy enough to tuck your feet inside and fall asleep when your plane is delayed or cancelled?
 
It is a great dress. Pack it with a couple of turtlenecks and you are all set to go. Mine has gone with me to India, Canada, the United Kingdom and the Middle East.
 
But on a recent trip from Lock Haven to Louisville, Kentucky, this hardy, traveler’s dress turned out to be absolutely worthless.
 
I arrived early enough at the Louisville airport for my flight back to Lock Haven after presenting a paper at the Twentieth Century Literature conference. Maybe it was the flap over the Vice shooting his hunting partner in the face. Or maybe it was the excitement over the sale of US port management to the government of Dubai. Whatever the reason, the terror-alert level at the Louisville airport was a bright orange. Every ten minutes, the PR system blared out that there was heightened security at the airport.
 
I got my boarding pass and walked over to the security check-in. At the security gate, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) staff told me that I have been randomly selected for additional security screening.
 
Step aside please, ma’am, the TSA woman told me.
 
Wow, “selected,” I thought. Here is my chance to prove to the world that I am not carrying a bomb. Feeling grateful, I walked over with the TSA woman to a glass partitioned area.
 
The security screening posture, as you might know, is a combination leg-split/scare-crow form. So I split my legs and positioned them over their footprint mat, the painted feet spaced just wide enough to make the muscles on your inside thighs stretch that extra bit. I got my hands spread out at the shoulder, palm outwards.
 
The TSA staff talked the whole time she checked me for concealed weapons of mass destruction with the special probe that resembles a blunt sword. It beeped over the metal buttons of my jumper and the metal hooks of my bra. She pinched both the button and the hook with her hands to make sure they are not weapons. She narrated what she was doing in the manner of a friendly OB/GYN. A pity, she should have been a doctor.
 
“You are wearing a dress, ma’am,” she said. “I need to check your legs. I’d like you to take one step forward, bend your toe away from your body, so I can check the inside of your legs.”
 
My daughter takes karate lessons at the YMCA and I have seen her do this leg movement many times. Leg out, toe turned away from the body, knees slightly bent.
 
“Keep your knees straight, ma’am” the TSA woman said. I got back in position.
 
The TSA woman stood behind me and inserted the blunt probe through my dress at my crotch and ran it down my leg. It felt slightly obscene. There was no bomb inside my left leg.
 
“Now step back, ma’am. Put your other leg out, toe away from your body,” the TSA woman ordered me.
 
She inserted the probe again through my dress at my crotch and ran it down my leg. Again, no bomb there.
 
“You’re all clear, ma’am. Now step over to Roy who will clear your baggage,” she told me.
 
Roy was tall and bald and he frowned as he checked for bomb residue inside my one set of clothes and pajamas. He checked my toilet case and found only toothbrush, toothpaste and mouthwash. He spent a few minutes over my books and student papers I had taken with me to grade on the plane. He studied the cell phone charger. No bomb anywhere.
 
“You’re all clear, ma’am,” Roy said.
 
What a difference it makes, I thought to myself, as I sprinted to my departure gate on a distant concourse. My body, my clothes, my books, my toiletries all read like evidence.
 
It turned out that I sprinted that last mile for nothing. The plane had left.
 
“We paged you 3 times,” the United Airlines rep said. “But I was held up at the security screening!” I was in anguish.
 
“We don’t hold planes for passengers, ma’am” the UA rep made the airlines’ position clear.
 
I got back home to Lock Haven one day late, after a rebooking, 2 delays, 2 missed flights, and an overnight stay in Chicago. Next time, I am driving from Lock Haven to Louisville.
 
But here’s my travel tip for these troubled times.
 
Lose the skirt. Lose the dress. Wear something tight and fitting so they can prod, pinch, and pat without you losing your plane. What if it feels slightly obscene? Remember, as David Byrne said, we are all naked in the eyes of God.
 
And on those special days when the terror-alert level is the color of paranoia, buck-naked and bare-assed is the way to go.