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Popular songs and lullabies of the
day played upon ‘this place of torture’ which separated
young daughters from their mothers and playmates. In such a
claustrophobic environment, women had to learn to read and write
in secrecy, what Rashsundari Debi called ‘jitakshara’ or ‘mastery
over the word’. One of Sarkar’s essays focuses on
Rashsundari Debi, who had to abandon her schooling owing to an
early marriage, and teach herself through the recognition of
alphabet learnt long ago in childhood. Despite household chores
and the demands of the many children she bore, she succeeded in
writing her autobiography. Amar Jiban, perhaps the first
autobiography ever to be written in the Bengali language and
certainly the first by a Bengali woman, recounts the household
experiences of Rashsundari, and as such is hardly eventful.
Sarkar, however, exposes the transgressions, the desire for
freedom, the misery of having to bring up children, all of which
she discovers by uncovering the subtleties in the autobiography.
Interestingly, Rashsundari declares: ‘I came to Bharatvarsha’
implying that the India she came to already existed: the sansar
she came into was not one she lived in. She lived, on the
other hand, in a world of her own as is clear from the
autobiography, a secret world of dreams and fantasies.
Rashsundari’s focus on time which is not ‘real’ worldly
time, her indifference to politics and to other events all
indicate her determination to free herself from the concept of
‘Indian’ womanhood at least in the world of imagination.
Other excellent
contributions are the essays on Bankim where Sarkar shows how
Hindu identity could be conceived in the abstract shape of the
Hindu woman who ‘was moulded from her infancy by the Shastric
regimen of non-consensual, indissoluble infant marriage, and by
iron laws of absolute chastity, austere widowhood and a
supposedly proven capacity for self-immolation.’ While one
might argue that Bankim has created heroines like Santi (Anandamath)
who is trained in both scriptures and military valour like any
man, she is, simultaneously, revealed to us disguised as a man
and can put her talents to use so long as she is in the garb of
a male. In another novel, Kapalakundala, Bankim created a
woman completely freed from domesticity, yet her enslavement
through marriage is never articulated in terms of Hindu social
reform. Bankim’s liberal-rationalist attitude was seen to be
intersected by his Hindu nationalism marked by the politics of
revivalism which he saw as the only alternative to counter
colonialism.
A fitting finale is the
discussion on the Hindu rashtra and its Hindutva ideology
whose main protagonist here is Sadhvi Rithambhara. She is the
advocate of Hindu purism; through her speeches, she excludes
Muslims and dalits. Sarkar throws light on the
mythical-imaginary devotion of post-independence female cults in
north India, namely the worship of Vaishno Devi, Jai Mata Di,
Bhawani Ma, Mamta Ma, Shakti Ma and Santoshi Ma brought into
prominence by popular films. These are the various icons of shakti
propped up by male ideology but disseminated by Rashtrasevikas.
In fact, the concept of motherland has been ‘husbanded’ with
Ram to construct ‘Ramjanmabhoomi’ out of the existing
national ‘matribhoomi’. And if Ayodhya is taken as the
birthplace of Ram, it also succeeds in making Ayodhya a
motherland to all Hindus. Never mind if the ‘indigeneity’ is
corrupted by the use of DCM Toyota vehicles for rathyatras.
Sarkar makes use of archives which historians are gradually
discovering: prostitutes, artisans, minor theatre persons and
criminals are there; she also does not discount the
contributions made by bazaar paintings, woodcut prints, street
songs and popular theatre. However, except for chapters seven
and nine, the book appears rather dated owing to the publication
of most of Sarkar’s essays in the last decade when analyses of
the feminisation of India, that of the mother iconography as
encapsulated in Vande Mataram, or the Hindutva agenda of
the nationalists held more appeal.
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MOST
of the essays in Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation have been
written over the last many years and published separately. All
of them work upon ideas of gender and Hindu cultural
nationalism, particularly with the late 19th century Bengal as
context. Sarkar has dealt with larger national ideological
traditions but not neglected the small, bounded, local events
which are skilfully connected with the former. Thus issues
of conjugality, deshbhakti and nationalism in their limited
parlance are foregrounded against the backdrop of the ‘Hindu
way of life’.
