IndiaStar: A Literary-Art Magazine Ginu Kamani 's Junglee Girl by Kavita Sharma
When we talk of eros or romantic love, we imply two things: how society views romantic love and the position of woman in such a relationship. This positioning determines her status not only in the domestic sphere but also broadens into her place in society. Relocation to another culture especially to N.America, stereotypically associated with liberation for women from patriarchy naturally leads to the re-examination of gender roles. That such a process is going on is evident in intergenerational conflicts in the South Asian diasporic communities especially with regard to dating and marriage. Innumerable South Asian associations based on linguistic, regional, religious and even caste identities have been formed to provide opportunity and venue for young people to meet with the possibility of eventual marriage. Numerous organisations, like Apna Ghar in Chicago, have sprung up across US to provide counselling services, shelter homes and legal aid indicating that the much extolled stability of Indian marriage is in danger. Collections of short stories Chitra Divakaruni' s Arranged Marriage (1), and Shauna Singh Baldwin's English Lessons (2) explore Indian patriarchal norms and man-woman relationship within them.
Diasporic experiences are always gendered although they tend to be presented as neutral. Emigration to a new country requires readjustment in traditional roles in the domestic sphere. It makes new demands in which gender relations have to be renegotiated. On the one hand, women who earn an independent income even if it is in an exploitative and racist society, experience greater independence and control over their lives than they had earlier in traditional patriarchal societies like India. On the other hand, they are simultaneously required to maintain homeland kinship networks and religious and cultural traditions in order to transmit them to their children. This tends to reinforce patriarchy and makes the domestic sphere both a refuge from the material and spiritual insecurities of exile and a trap in which the conflicting demands of family, work, and old and new patriarchies have to be dealt with. The situation is painful but preferable to the option of return to the homeland especially on terms dictated by men. Diaspora women are caught between patriarchies, ambiguous pasts and futures.
The Junglee Girl
Ginu Kamani's Junglee Girl, a collection of eleven short stories seeks to explore the suppressed sexuality of women in the Indian patriarchal society. It presents a frighteningly morbid world in which female protagonists recklessly pursue their sensual paths through a complex social world that seeks to shut them out (3). The first story, "Cipher,"sets the paradigms. India is represented by a traditional Gujarati woman, mother of three children who is so scandalised by the Westernised narrator that she refuses to accept her as a fellow Gujarati. The narrator is presumably liberated by her easy acknowledgement and acceptance of her sexuality because of her sojourn abroad while the Gujarati woman who has never moved out of India is repressed.
Stories like "Lucky Dip," "The Cure," "Maria" and "The Smell " present different aspects of the awakening of sexuality in adolescents. "Lucky Dip" evokes the atmosphere of a suburban English medium school in Bombay with undercurrents of sexuality that are hard to categorise. Class disparities are presented in the relationship between Maya, an upper middle class girl and Savitri, the untouchable of slums, the unacknowledged daughter of Mrs. D'Souza, the Maths teacher. The school girls have crushes on popular film actors and giggle at the bathing hijras visible from the classroom (4). Savitri is truly the junglee girl who offers to teach Maya some games that you can also play with boys. With men. Then you don't have to play with those stupid girls in school. There are undercurrents of lesbianism as Savitri sleeps with the ayah on her bedroll stuck to each other. These two had a real boy-girl crush on each other (5).
"The Cure" is simultaneously about a young girls sexual awakening and abuse. Her above average height, symbol of her strong sexuality, is seen as "Danger to society. Sex hormones out of control. Shameless and uninhibited. Look how she tempts!" (6). What follows is her subjugation through systematic rape with the full concurrence of her parents. Maria portrays not only a young girl's awakening sexuality but also class exploitation in which the child threatens to reveal her maid, Maria's, liaisons with the cook and the housecleaner unless Maria allows her to fondle her breasts and play with the rest of her body. Rani, a young girl and her brother rebel against the orthodoxy of a vegetarian, Gujarati household by eating eggs on toast in their servant's quarter in "The Smell." The grandmother cautions Rani, Eating meat is not good for women. Unnecessarily you will pollute your unborn son "(7). But already it is too late. Rani not only enjoys meat but vows to herself, "When I grow up, I will never marry. I will smell the meat on men and the smell will keep me hungry" (8).
Bordering on the bizarre is "Shakuntala" in which the protagonist keeps a kitten beneath her Rajasthani skirt. It is discovered by the precocious child of the house who insinuates her prying toes between Shakuntala's thighs. The kitten who drinks Shakuntalas blood and substitutes for all her daughters buried at their birth. "Waxing the Thing" is wickedly funny as it unmasks the hypocrisy of respectable Indian women. Its protagonist, a beauty salon assistant, earns her living waxing pubic hair of rich Bombay socialites.
Kamala's extreme revulsion from her husband keeps her stubbornly dry at night but her womb opens during day to shed a drop at a time till she counts a hundred. Arranged marriage comes under direct attack in "Just Between Indians." The story is significant in its nightmarish presentation of molestation of a young teenage school girl, Daya, by her two brothers and their friends during a camping trip. Abnormal and perverse family relationships in the apparently righteous patriarchal family structure form the theme of "Younger Wife." The narrator had an incestuous relationship with her father and mentally prepares for a similar relationship between her husband and her daughter.
While the Indian characters do not seem to be aware of the perversity of their sexual behaviour, their repressions are revealed by Anju, the MA from America in This Anju who refuses to marry Sanjay because of his mother's obsessive and almost incestuous hold on him. Thus, normalcy in Ginu Kamanis book is provided by characters liberated by America whether it is the narrator in "Cipher" or Anju in "This Anju." All Indians in India are seen as neurotic victims of their suppressed sexuality that leads them to unnatural behaviour bordering on the perverse.
In this context, it is worth recalling Inderpal Grewal's comments on Bharati Mukherjees Jasmine. The review of the book in the Baltimore Sun describes it as "Poignant...Heartrending...The story of the transformation of an Indian village girl, whose grandmother wants to marry her off at 11, into an American woman who finally thinks for herself" (9). This, as Grewal points out, constructs South Asian women as oppressed and exploited in contrast to the free and independent American woman. In the process, there is an erasure, or the deliberate forgetting, of women's exploitation and oppression in the US and the denial of women's agency in India. Both these erasures are necessary for the formation of 'freedom' and 'democracy' in the United States as well as in other first World nations. The discourse of `freedom' is essential to the consolidation and ongoing construction of Western state power structures (10). It has its origins in the European colonial discourses that contributed to the formulation of the position of women in India. It also represents complicity with post colonial agenda in which the "post" is always shadowed by the "neo."
While Ginu Kamani's world is pathologically exaggerated, it has an essential truth. The degradation of women was a pressing reality and remains one today in many sections of society. Patriarchy in itself presupposes a secondary role even in the best of times. Dowry, child marriages, plight of widows all bear eloquent testimony to it. However, Indian women are seen as a homogenous group that ignores the complex social matrix of India and leads to oversimplification. It presents mainly the milieu of the urban, middle and upper class women moving in a Westernised metropolitan society. It is their world view which is projected as the only reality of India. It is a common error. As Uma Chakravarti points out, the interaction between colonialism and nationalism has given rise to ideas about the past which have got so deeply embedded in the middle-class consciousness so as to assume the status of revealed truths(11). The British influenced the Indian perception of the past in two separate and contradictory ways. The Orientalists reconstructed the glory of Indian civilisation in the ancient past. The Utilitarians and Evangelicals attacked the ills in contemporary Indian society especially the obviously low status of women. The two strands coalesced in the works of early nationalist writers who tried to glorify the lost past and status of women then to counter the real existence of women in the humiliating present.
In this context, two more things need to be kept in mind. One, India has always had a joyous, healthy celebration of sexual life in which the woman's sexuality and individual rights took precedence over narrow patriarchal morality. Second, the rigid sexual norms imposed by patriarchal morality were themselves confined largely to the Brahminical classes. They later came to be seen as the norm in society because of the collaboration between the Brahminical order and the British colonial rulers. Mulk Raj Anand traces the evolution of the free spirit of love in his beautifully lyrical introduction to Vatsyayanas Kama Sutra. Anand raises the question, How is it, then, that in this book of all books about sex, we feel no surprise at the meeting of the four eyes, the penetration of the lingam into the yoni, and the interlocking of two separate organisms in embrace? Why are these unions, recommended by Vatsyayana, different from the kind of furtive connection which takes place from complete ignorance of the feelings of each other, and from the denial of the body-souls, by those who are ashamed of the dream tryst(12)?
As Anand points out, Vatsyayana made love holy by exalting the intensity of spontaneous love. He infused physical union with a grace that uplifted the human couple to the state of godhood. Tracing the development of the primitive man to the worship of the yoni, he brings it to the Upanishads in which the mating of the man and woman became the holy sacrifice, the sacred means of salvation itself, in which each became both and together, they were freed of all bonds to merge with the cosmos. As the upper hierarchies of the Aryan culture composed cultivated poems about the beginning of the Universe their verbal ejaculations in praise of the Beautiful Usha, the adoring words for Urvashi, and excitement on seeing, Nriti, the dancer, "who gently bares her breasts, strict Brahminical injunctions gradually transformed them into intricate ritual of symbolic chants in the sacred Sanskrit language. The high-bred fictions of super-consciousness led to Mount Kailasa in the mists but the Dasyus below continued to worship the Mother Goddess in secret. She came to called Lajja Gauri, Shy Woman, with her head cut off, replaced by a garland of leaves, creepers and red oxide of mercury on her pudenda and breasts, and she was prayed to for children in forest shrines, away from the vigilance of the high priests(14).
The paternalist Aryan dispensation was accepted but the fluid desires of the forest peoples expressed themselves in song, dance and free love, according to what was later to be called, the conventions of the Gandharva, flying spirit, marriage. Not even the advent of the ascetic Buddhism could restrain instinctive love and happiness of the folk. It survived in the hints for oils, perfumes, ointments and aphrodisiacs that later came to be used in the decorative ritual of secret Tantric sects. While the upper hierarchies of the Brahmins pursued the higher esoteric consciousness, the life of senses blossomed below the surface of the exalted life of the shrines.
Even an ascetic like Shankara had to come to terms with erotic love. In one of the legends, he engages in a philosophical debate with the Vedic ritualist and householder Mandan Misra, whose wife challenges him with questions about erotic arts and sciences. Forced to admit that true wisdom must include an understanding of all aspects of life, he asks to be excused from the debate for a month in order to master the theory and practice of love. Shankara enters the body of Amaru, identified in the legend as a king of Kahmir, who had died on a hunting expedition in the forest. And so King Amaru of Kashmir appeared to come back to life, appeared to return to his palace, and appeared to indulge in love games and erotic experiments with his lovely wives and mistresses. He played dice with them setting sexual favours as the stakes, drank wine with them, kissed and caressed them with what appeared to be exuberance (15)." Shankara who was supposed to have been "eternally immersed in the joy of the absolute," appeared to experience the transient joys of carnal love. He is said to have composed a poetic work in the name of Amaru displaying his mastery of the sexual sentiments and erotic arts--Amarusataka. The holy man then abandoned the body of the king and returned to win his debate with Mandan Misra. As Lee Siegel suggests, the poems are in no way ascetic, yet they might be in some sense, religious (16). While it was the goal of the sanyasis, inspired by the teachings of saints like Shankara, to experience the sacred through asceticism, it was the goal of rasikas, inspired by the words of poets like Amaru, to experience the sacred through aestheticism. Lee Siegel points out: Both Sankara and Amaru were worshippers of Siva, and in the vast mythology of that god -- Siva is the erotic ascetic, fire and water -- there is implicit fusion of the passionate and renunciatory impulses. At once ferocious and gentle, Destroyer and Creator, slayer of demons and lover of the goddess, Siva is an exemplar of power: sexual power, martial power, and religious power, the power of yoga (17)."
The Colonial Construct
This tradition of the erotic got relegated to the "obscene," the low social order at variance with morality with the British rule in India. As Susie Tharu analyses, class differentiation based on redefined sexual mores for women had taken place in Europe itself in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century(18). When the British assumed judicial responsibilities in India, diverse systems of law existed. Not only were there literary traditions of Hanafi and Ithna Ahari Muslim Law and the Dayabhaga and Mitakshara schools of Hindu Law, there were also numerous practical traditions of customary law that were applicable to caste, tribe, lineage or family group. The British promised their subjects that they would be governed by their own personal laws. For the upper-caste Hindus, it meant textual Hindu law -- Dayabhaga or Mitakshara as appropriate -- in suits concerning marriage, adoption, succession and legitimacy. Each of these issues is directly connected to the position of women in society. Indian pundits were appointed to expound personal laws and to advise the courts. The British also undertook to collect, compile and translate standard legal texts which were recognised by the British legal system as authoritative. By mid-nineteenth century, the texts replaced the pundits as repositories of Hindu Law. Customary law, however, rests not in literary works but in mores and behaviour of people. Lucy Caroll argues that while the British Indian courts paid lip-service to Customary Law, in actual practice it was extremely difficult in most cases to prove custom in the face of judicial presumption that the Hindu book law applied. Hence it led to the erosion of Customary Law and the pre-eminence of law found in judicially recognised texts. The ideas regard to the sexual mores for women were in agreement with the code prescribed by the bourgeoisie in Europe and hence found preference although they were at odds with the values of the majority of the population.
The puritanical British attitudes turned the spotlight on the supposed degeneration of Indian society. Bureaucrats, missionaries, journalists and Western commentators of various kinds filed sensational reports about Indian culture and made authoritative analysis of it depicting it as irrational, deceitful and sexually perverse. It enabled them to serve a colonial purpose; assume the white man's burden to save India from itself.
The consequences of the brahminical collaboration with the British value system is exemplified in Lata Mani's analysis of the debate on Sati (20). According to her, official knowledge about sati was gathered by questioning the pundits resident at the courts. The interactions between pundits and judges, pundits and magistrates, gave rise to the official discourse on the subject Women became emblematic of tradition and the debate did not remain confined to the problem of sati but got focused on what constituted authentic cultural tradition. Brahminic scriptures were increasingly seen as the locus of authenticity so that legislative prohibition of sati became a question of scriptural interpretation. Brahminic scriptures came to be regarded as authoritative texts for the entire Indian society and as the repositories of tradition. As Lata Mani points out, British officials insisted that brahminic and Islamic scriptures were prescriptive texts containing rules of social behaviour even when the evidence for this assertion was problematic (21). These assumptions were then institutionalised. Warren Hastings made these texts the basis of personal law in 1772. The constituting of personal law from religious texts has had lasting consequences for women. Even when enormous regional variations challenged the hegemony of the scriptural texts, the diversity was regarded as `peripheral as opposed to the `centrality of the texts and the principle of textual hegemony. Gradually inferential conclusions or recourse to customary practice were only acceptable where explicit documentation was impossible. Scriptures, however, were an enormous body of texts composed at different times. They included Srutis, the Dharmashastras or Smrits and the commentaries. The fact that these texts were authored at different periods accounted for their heterogeneity on many points. The official response to such heterogeneity was that the older the text, the greater its stature. An expanding colonial power needed systematic and unambiguous modes of governance. What it adopted was born out of a particular view of Indian society that had to serve colonial interests.
The impact of British Victorian morality with its puritanism and hypocrisy on Indian mores and norms of the majority has been traced by Susie Tharu in her study of Muddupalani's Radhika Santwanam (22). Written in the genre of sringaraprabandham in which the principal rasa evoked is the sringara. The focus is on his pleasure. In Radhika Santwanam the woman's sensuality is central. She takes the initiative and it is her satisfaction or pleasure that provides the poetic resolution. Muddupalani celebrates a young girls coming of age and describes her first experience of sex. Radha, a woman in her prime, instructs her niece Iladevi in the art and joy of love. She encourages her to express her desire and recognise the value of her pleasure. Though Radha encourages the liaison between Iladevi and Krishna she herself is in love with Krishna and cannot bear separation. She calls him names, accuses him of ignoring her and demands that he keep up his relationship with her. Krishna responds warmly to her and appeases her with sweet talk and loving embraces. When Nagaratnamma reprinted the poem a little over a century after it had first been written, Victoria was queen of England and empress of India. Major political and ideological shifts had taken place. The respectability of women from the emerging middle classes was being defined in counterpoint to the crude and licentious behaviour of lower class women. Decent middle class women were warned against unseemly interaction with lower class women and against the corrupting influence of wandering women singers and dancers whose performances were laced with bawdy and healthy disrespect for authority.
Sumanta Banerjee examines the same aspect through popular literature of Bengal (23). Women in nineteenth century Bengal, like women in other regions, were not economically or socially a homogenous group. Their life styles and occupation, according to contemporary observers, varied depending on whether they were women of rich families, or from the middle station, or whether they were poor women. While women of the rich and middle station stayed in seclusion in the andarmahals, they were a minority. The majority were working women, like cleaners, owners of stalls, selling vegetables or fish, street singers and dancers, maid servants, or women employed by mercantile firms. Whatever time they had left after housework they assisted men in traditional occupations like cultivation, pottery, spinning, basket-making and others. Hence, they were equal participants with men in the economic sphere. Such participation extended to the cultural sphere like community singing and dancing during festivals. Because of the nature of their work these women moved in what was considered `dangerous society for the sheltered upper class Bengali women of the andarmahals. These working women provided the only link for the members of the zenana with the outside world. While bhadralok women were being warned not to appear in public places women from the lower groups not only congregated in public but also sang and danced during popular festivals. They posed a threat to the hegemony of upper class men of the bhadralok and so their culture was suppressed and often denigrated in terms of moral values newly acquired by the elite bhadralok from their English mentors. Hence, the denunciation of popular culture was simultaneous with the formation of a new bhadralok culture. Sumanta Banerjee talks of the robustness of popular culture as seen in forms like the Kheur in which the Radha Krishna love affair is treated in a merry ribald manner (24). Popular among all classes of Bengalis till the beginning of the nineteenth century, it began to be condemned as obscene by the educated Bengali gentry and was finally banished from "respectable" society by the end of the century. Their bawdy satirical wit, the frank sensuality, the hearty unashamed expression of love served to challenge the orthodoxy embedded in brahminical religion. Venerable Hindu gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines were ridiculed to satirise the purist convention sought to be imposed by the Brahmin priestly order. The bhadralok sought to justify them as forms of the lower orders whose base instincts needed to be tickled by such obscene songs. At another level, such songs afforded a "dissenting space for women."
According to Banerjee, the five major social issues directly affecting women in nineteenth century. Bengal that were taken up by contemporary bhadralok social reformers--sati, widow remarriage, kulin polygamy or female education --were almost always the concern of the educated bhadralok or their women (25). They do not find a place of any serious interest within women's popular cultural forms probably because these issues had no relevance for the strata of women involved. Kulin polygamy, for instance, affected mainly the upper caste and upper class Hindus. Lower caste and lower class Bengalis, who formed the majority of the population, accepted widow remarriage or her co-habitation with a man as normal. The system of child marriage was also more widespread among the classes upper caste Hindus.
These findings are borne out by the empirical study of N.K.Wagle in "Women in Kotwali Papers, Pune, 1767-1791 (26)." He presents a contrast in the dharmashastra rulings as articulated by the shastris of Pune in British pay and the laws and regulations as administered by the Kotwali. The government at this time, unlike the later British government, was not an alien one with its strange laws and regulations. Wagle's work is based on the records of thousands of cases. The Kotwal was the head of Pune police whose duties were to maintain law and order in the city. The issues were decidedly modern. Cases of sexual misdemeanours were punishable by fines. Women suffered physical abuses from their husbands and in-laws, but the perpetrators of such acts were punishable by Kotwal's laws. Equally important is the fact that women had rights to go to the police station and lodge complaints against men and they appear to have exercised these rights freely. There are cases of men beating their wives, mother-in-law victimising the daughters-in-law, brothers-in-law using violence against the sister-in-law. In each case, the perpetrator was fined. But there are also cases of women beating and even murdering their husbands for which they were penalised. When women committed suicide, usually the husbands were held responsible and fined. Most cases of rape and attempted rape that were successfully tried by the Kotwal's office occurred within members of the same caste or jati or among members of the extended family. Women lodged complaints against the rape perpetrators or the crimes came to light when paid informants, agents and intelligence gatherers of the government learnt of them through their sources and reported them to the police station. On an occasion, even when a man was in love with a woman and had regular sex with her, he was penalised for forcing himself upon her. In husband-wife relationships, too, sex without consent constituted rape.
The British asked the shastris of Pune in 1824 and 1825 to state the laws of the shastras prevailing in Maharashtra. As Wagle points out the shastras were terrifyingly oppressive. The core structure of legal thought as propounded by shastris was based on the concept of a Brahman ordained society based on the principle of hierarchy. The brahmans in this view had to be placed at the top of other varnas and the scale of justice had to be unequivocally weighted in their favour. The idea was that their views of social order should prevail over those of other classes in society. These values were accepted by the British as the norm. They became normative values and instruments of oppression on women.
The society that writers like Ginu Kamani are rebelling against is the one in which the above formulation, a consequence of the collaboration between the elite brahminical order with the colonial British order, has come to accepted as the unchallenged norm. It is ironical that the post colonial agenda is being set by the erstwhile colonisers and once again India is paying the price because of complicity either out of ignorance or because of the influence of western feminism to the exclusion of the exploration of the self, or ones own cultural heritage. It is about time that alternative strands in our own cultural heritage were explored and understood.
EndNotes:
1.Chitra Divakaruni, Arranged Marriage, New York: Anchor, 1996 2. Shauna Singh Baldwin, English Lessons and Other Stories, CanadaL Goose Lane Editions, 1996. 3. The description on the backcover page of Ginu Kamani's Junglee Girl, Penguin Books India, 1995. 4. Ginu Kamani, "Lucky Dip," Junglee Girl , p. 37 5. Ibid. p.39 6. Ginu Kamani, "The Cure," Junglee Girl, p. 49 7. Ginu Kamani, "The Smell," Junglee Girl, p. 194 8. ibid p. 195 9. Cited by Inderpal Grewal, "Reading and Writing the South Asian Diaspora: Feminsim and Nationalism in North America," Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the South Asian Descent Collective, ed., San Francisco Aunt Lute Books, 1993, p. 226. 10. Ibid 11. Uma Chakravorty. "Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi: Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past," Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, Kumkum Dangari and Sudesh Vaid, ed., New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989, p.28 12. Mulk Raj Anand and Lance Dane, ed., Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana, New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann, 1982, p.23 13. Ibid., p. 23 14. Ibid., p. 26 15. Lee Siegel, Fires of Love--Waters of Peace: Passion and Renunciation in Indian Culture, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1981, p.5 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid 18. Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha, Women Writing in India: 600B.C. to the Present, Vol. II, The Twentieth Century, (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 9 19. Lucy Carroll, "Law, Custom, and Statuory Social ReformL The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856," J. Krishnamurti, ed., Women in Colonial India: Essays on Survival, Work and the State, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989, p.2 20. Lata Mani, "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India," Recasting Women, pp. 89-90. 21. Ibid. 22. Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha, Women Writing in India, Vol. II, pp. 1-9. 23. Sumanta Banerjee, "Women's Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal," Recasting Women, pp. 128-129. 24. Ibid., p. 134 25. Ibid. p. 145 26. N.K. Wagle, Unpublished Paper, "Women in Kotwali Papers, Pune 1767-1791. 27. Ibid
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