Engendering resistance
Rumina Sethi

Writing Resistance: A Comparative Study of the Selected Novels by Women Writers
by Usha Bande. Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla. Pages 293. Rs. 350.

Resistance and Womanhood have long been contradictory categories since methods of empowerment have never been central to political, cultural or social agendas. Only in terms of a religious iconography, there exist examples of female power, but recent feminist criticism has demystified such well-preserved postulations that are often invoked to quell resistance among women. Just to take one example from Hindu mythology, while the goddess Saraswati exists as an exemplum of learning, there seem few instances of writing by women in Indian society. Despite all odds, recent literary criticism and research into subaltern resistance in the 19th century has enabled us to produce a body of literature which manifests women's empowerment. Usha Bande's book, Writing Resistance, adds to this genre of writing.

Bande takes as her focus nine Indian women novelists (the title of the book is a little misleading here) and explores small, everyday examples of resistance and subversion that would sometimes go unnoticed by a casual reader. One would not call such acts "protest" or "defiance" yet they underscore what is called "resistance literature". Resistance literature concerning women has to pose the question: is there a woman in this text? Or, going a step further, one could ask with Mary Jacobus: is there a text in this woman?

Such issues are inextricably linked with issues of representation of women in literature or any other art form. A woman is represented this way and that, objectified in analysis, buried in space and time, never an agent in her own life or in making her own decisions. It was in this regard that Gayatri Spivak asked the rhetoric question after scrutinising Bhubaneswari Bhaduri's suicide which took place in 1926 in Calcutta: "Can the subaltern speak?" Roop Kanwar's sati lent even greater credence to feminist writing seeking to recover a voice and narrative in women's lives.

Usha Bande charts the course of women's resistance in India from its early beginnings to their participation in the national struggle to more contemporary issues. Her focus travels from Kamala Markandaya, Shashi Deshpande, Anita Desai and Bapsi Sidhwa to Arundhati Roy, Gita Hariharan, Manju Kapur, Shobha De and Bharati Mukherjee. In her own words, she attempts "to chart the cultural territory in the formation of the resisting consciousness." But does Bande attempt to see the contribution of culture in developing resistance among women or should it be vice versa? This rather ambiguous intention plays counter to the premise that culture and tradition always tend to inhibit resistance, especially in women, unless Bande is, in fact, implying that she will expose the narrowness of the liberatory potential of culture via-`E0-vis women. There are other similar mystifying statements such as: "The authors offer a critique of the existing social reality and recognise the potential of the struggle to confront both inside and outside fields of power." Perhaps "inside and outside fields of power" signifies both the conflict within one's consciousness and that with the patriarchal forces outside.

Bande deserves credit for treating hitherto unexplored territory such as the role of the matriarch in safeguarding patriarchal structures. The female patriarch here is the mother rather than an older woman, who has to exercise power over her daughter to conform to acceptable social behaviour. She becomes, thus, a figure of domination for her daughter. Bande treats matriarchs sympathetically since they are "at once as victims and perpetrators of the despotic regime."

There are other paths that Bande does not take such as the tensions inherent in gender identities when conflated with race, religion, sexuality, caste, language and so on. There is also simply too much emphasis on novels and their characters. A more theoretical and broad-based study with a neo-historical approach would definitely help to expand the project which, nevertheless, should be a useful aid for researchers specialising in the area of gender studies in literary texts coming from India.

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