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Vermillion Clouds: A Century of Women’s Stories from Bengal WRITING was never regarded as a women’s forte. Yet, mainstream literature has been known to be silently nudged by the saintly articulations of Akka Mahadevi, Mirabai or Lal Ded in the past. It was during the national movement in India that many writers put down their experiences in the spirit of social reform. The women writers associated with the Progressive Writers’ Movement, in particular, such as Rashid Jehan and Ismat Chugtai are well known for having taken up social issues that affected the lives of women. But women have always had to work from the peripheries to snatch, as it were, this position in society.
Most of these stories possess a naiveté that we might even call an artlessness, which is not surprising considering the time period they were written in. Early women writers lacked the art of constructing an arresting plot coupled with crisp writing, the methods of developing central characters, novel subject matter, or the subtle suspense of a denoument that make for "good" story telling. Some of the stories in this collection were written as early as the first two decades of the twentieth century: Dedication (1908) by Susheela Sen symbolises the eternal antagonism between swadesi and Western materialism, manifested in the lifestyles of a wife and her husband. An old fashioned and somewhat tried theme, it nevertheless remains a fascinating subject once contextualised in the period when it was written. The latent feminist strain of the story is also reflected in Giribala Debi’s Baruni (1920), in which the female protagonist of a bygone age insists on not being sized up like "a bottle-gourd or a pumpkin from the garden". Although commonplace today, these stories do articulate counter-cultural spaces for women. In other words, they do invert traditional notions of womanhood at a time when clichés relating to womankind were becoming more stereotypical. In the context of the increasing deradicalisation of women, resulting from the constraints of the official discourse of nationalism, Rokeya Hossain’s short story, Fruit of Knowledge endeavours to overturn the rules of the game by allegorising both the biblical tale of Adam and Eve and that of imperialism gnawing at the roots of the empire. In the late nineteenth century, nationalist ideology had created the concept of the Bengali bhadramahila, the educated, respectable woman, culturally refined yet safeguarding the virtues of homeliness; it was Hossain who advised women not to regard marriage and children as the final aspiration. Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream, in which men and not women wear purdah, is still cited today as an instance of subversive feminist politics though it is not included in the anthology. As chronology turns towards the nationalist decade, it is expected that the stories acquire a more urgent flavour: who could, after all, compose outside the fold? But, surprisingly, these crucial years are elided over. Even Ashapurana Devi’s House of Cards (1947) and Sulekha Sanyal’s Vermillion Clouds (1953) are free of references to the national struggle per se. On the other hand, it is perhaps their attempt to transgress events of overarching national importance and probe instead the concept of female "honour" as Bengal stepped into the modern period. It is here that issues of gender become important to the female writer, culminating in Mahasweta Devi’s powerful story about flesh trade, Giribala (1982), with the words: "Lost if she is dead, /Lost if she is wed." We ought to be grateful
that the short story, at least, is pretty limited in its borrowings
from colonial culture and its various legacies. Unlike its bigger
cousin, the novel, the short story has originated from legends,
folktales and oral narration as much as from written forms like the
ancient Indian epics. Thus, imagery is vivid with local colour and
dialogues remain tied to Indian rather than imported contexts.
Chakravarty succeeds admirably in her translation.
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Through
the ages, short stories have found an affinity with women writers: the
illustrious names of Swarnakumari Devi, Indira Devi, Anurupa Devi and
Nirupama Devi cannot be brushed aside. Although no one can forget the
remarkable contribution of its pioneers, lately many women writers
have taken to writing short stories such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Vandana
Singh, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Bharati Mukherjee, Anita Nair, Ginu
Kamani and a host of others who write in regional languages in the
Indian literary landscape. Radha Chakravarty has done well to
translate lesser known Bengali short story writers and give them
visibility in this anthology.