Abstract
The endless exploitation of women continues through the combined efforts of male dominated institutions. Women witness the gender atrocities, and painful experiences. They are deprived, oppressed, and neglected in the male-centric domestic sphere where they are treated as “burden”, unwanted, “others” and made them subaltern and marginalized. They are unaccepted “objects” and “commodities” in both houses of “own” parents and father-in-law and lots of them are the “hunted victims” of the “disgraceful social practice” dowry and also are to face ignoble death. Their fundamental identities as voiceless and “homeless objects” are “unceasing” (endless) since the ancient age of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. They were also made the objects of sacrifice in the game of partition and the sexed subalterns were identities as “fallen” woman, “polluted” girl. The article seeks to explore how Jyotirmoyee Devi in her partition fiction The River Churning has unveiled the gendered subalternity unleashed on women since the ancient time to the post partition India through her protagonist Sutara Dutta who is the metaphor of the “voiceless” women like Valmiki’s Sita, Vyasdev’s Draupadi, Rabindranath Tagore’s Nirupama and Bindu, Manikuntala Sen’s Snehalata, Shaktipada Rajguru’s Neeta, Amit Shankar Saha’s “outsiders” and many others.
Key Words: Domination, oppression, partition, subalternity, subordination, Women,
1. Introduction: Concept of Subaltern
The term “subaltern” has been defined from multidimensional perspectives with the passage of time. In general, subaltern people are those who are deprived, oppressed, unprivileged, marginal, “dalits” and excluded sector in the social frame. In critical views, the concept of subalternity also carries with different connotations. In his noted article “Notes on Italian History”, particularly known as “Prison Notebooks”, the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci coined the term to identify the people of “low rank” who were made the voiceless objects under hegemonic domination of privileged segment. He focused on the working sector of society who were oppressed, discriminated and excluded from the socio-economic institutions of society by the political dictator of the National Fascist Party, Benito Mussolini and his authorities. Gramcsi’s views were also further developed by the well-known forefather, Ranajit Guha. He published a twelve-volume series entitled Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society. He puts his concept of subaltern in his first volume:
The word ‘subaltern’ in the title stands for the meaning as given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, that is, ‘of inferior rank’. It will be used in these pages as a name for the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way (Guha vii).
The pioneer of the Indian subaltern studies, Ranajit Guha has identified subalterns as those who are oppressed by the “elite” sector of Indian population from the caste, class and other categorical perspectives. For him, subalternity is particular entity of domination which constitutes “the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the elite” (5). The Indian-American post-colonial feminist critic Gayatri Spivak in her vastly influential classical essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" has examined the state of subalternity from gendered perspective. She has unburied pangs and sufferings of “voiceless” women who are excluded from male-dominated society in the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial eras.
2. Literary Review: Revelation of Women Pangs
The Partition of India engendered shocking records of brutal violence, slaughter of hundreds of thousands, mutilation, rape, abduction. Women became the worst victim before, during and after the partition. Indian history was blackened with the brutal forms of tortures on women. Women were raped, abducted and sex organs were mutilated. According to Urvashi Butalia, the bloody history of partition of India recorded that approximately seventy-five thousand women were abducted and raped (Otherside 3). The male dominated post-colonial nation also made the “living” abducted women crucially marginalized imposing “fragmented identities” on those “noncitizens”. David Ludden in his Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning and the Globalization of South Asia has stated that the refugees face traumatic sufferings and are kept “underside, at the marginal, outside nationalism” (12). According to Ludden’s theory, the government subalternizes rootless refugees, in particular women, in all respects - socially, culturally, geographically, politically and psychologically. Alison Mountz and Jennifer Hyndman in their article “Feminist Approaches to the Global Intimate” have reviewed nation from their own perspectives and propounded the dominating role of a nation-state on its components “through the construction of identities of citizens, noncitizens, and partial citizens” (451-452). The critic Ania Loomba in her Colonialism/Post colonialism has propounded her extensive thoughts on the issues of sexuality and colonialism and the intersection of feminist and postcolonial thought and racial forms in colonial, pre modern and the globalized world. She has also unfolded the dual roles of nation creating a demarcation between its components, one group being inseparable and the remaining keeping alienated:
Nations are communities created not simply by forging certain bonds but by fracturing or disallowing others; not merely by invoking and remembering certain versions of the past, but making sure that others are forgotten or repressed (Loomba 169).
The subalternity of those “others” due to tragedy of the partition is unfolded by many creative geniuses in their literary creations. In Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan records the spine-chilling civil riots, blood-bath, rapes that followed in the wake of partition. A Bend in the Ganges by Manohar Malgonkar tried to bring the bottled - up barbarous cruelties and violence of common men and women to the surface at the very moment of victory of independence. Raj Gill’s The Rape, a partition novel, consolidates the mass migration of millions of refugees from Pakistan, killing of people, communal riots, rape caused due to partition. Manto’s stories like Thanda Gosht, Toba Tek Singh, Khuda KI Qasim, Open It, A Tale of 1947 etc. also unfold the sexual brutalities engendered on women.
A number of writers of Bengali origin like Rabindranath Tagore, Shaktipada Rajguru, Jyotirmoyee Devi and many others have registered the traumatic experiences of women in the pre-partition, partition and post-partition eras. Nirupama, an oppressed female character in Rabindranath Tagore’s story “Dena Paona” (1892), is the victim of the brutal practice of dowry in the house of her father-in-law. Tagore in his classical story “Streer Patra” delineates the unceasing suffering and negligence of women through the character Bindu who are the unwanted “objects” and “apod” [nuisance] in the world. Bindu has been made the symbolic representative of oppressed women of all ages:
It’s is a girl! Also black! Whose house to shelter! What will happen to her! - It’s good not to think about it. When it is thought, the soul tore and shaken (579, translated mine).
Manikuntala Sen in the article “Struggle Against Dowry” of her renowned autobiographical book In Search for Freedom, An Unfinished Journey has also chronicled the ever subalternity caused due to the “barbaric practice” of dowry. Almost all women, “irrespective of whether they are poor or rich”, are “hunted victims” of this “disgraceful social practice”:
"The condition of the woman was [is] pathetic: even if she was [is] educated or highly accomplished in managing a household, she had [has] no worth in society’s eyes. Her worth lay in terms ancestral jewellery, money or money or property that would be given with her (182)”.
The protagonist Snehalata represents all women who become victimized of oppression and violent attacks in the hands of the people of her father-in-law. Shaktipada Rajguru’s post-partition fiction Meghe Dhaka Tara is centered on the female protagonist Neeta, a refugee girl, who is also one of the symbolic representatives of ever deprived and marginal women:
What a frustrating pain in her body and mind as Neeta! …Not Neeta. But she is one of them in the [deprived] sector of Neeta. They are seen at streets, school, offices and everywhere. They don’t find love and respect in life – they were cheated by everyone (128, translated mine).
The poet Dr Amit Shankar Saha in his “feminist” poem "The Outsider" (2019) has also unfolded the subalternity of women with a positive note to “call them all to rise from the dead”:
I imagine myself like a woman, … [who is]
oppressed and depressed, …
who stirs her imagination within utensils, …
struggling within bellies and breasts, …
suffocating behind eyelids of unrest,
until my water breaks,
words spill out and get lost
between the kitchen and the guests (34).
Jyotirmoyee Devi has also exposed the gendered violence, oppression, abduction, pangs and sufferings of “friendless tribe” [Women]. Her story “Protilom” reveals psychological conflict of women through the character Sunetra Roy. Her “Bandmasterer Maa” has focused on the tragic plight of widows in the male dominated patriarchal society. Devi’s anthology Aravallir Kahani was published in 1965 (Kolkata: Key Book Store). Her two another anthologies Aravallir Kahani and Aravallir Arale have also unburied the silenced sorrows and sufferings, hopes and heart-breaking tears of unknown women who were kept within the four walls of the “harem” (separate domestic spaces reserved for wives and female servants) of kings of Rajasthan. The partition story “Shei Chheleta” has focused on the abduction, rape and pangs of women engendered by the Lahore riots of 1946-47. Rajkumari, who evacuated from Lahore with the members of her family except her mother, met her presumed “dead” mother, begging on the streets of Delhi with a little boy – the “wrong” child – several years after their migration to India. She became embarrassed and pretended not to recognize her raped mother but her mother did. Devi in her collection of stories Aravallir Arale has unburied the psychological sufferings of pretty girls who were used at “commodities of enjoyment for kings within the impregnable walls of the royal palaces of Rajasthan. The author has unfolded the plight of widows in the male dominated Hindu society through the character Uma.
Jyotirmoyee Devi in her fiction The River Churning (originally Epar Ganga Opar Ganga) has explored how the partition-victim women were exploited first by the male of antagonist community and also by their “own” community. She has also chronicled how women were made voiceless objects since the time of the epics the Mahabharata and Ramayana. Her protagonist Sutara Dutta has been made the representative of subaltern women of all ages including the partition and post-partition India.
The fiction The River Churning is textured in four parts titled “Sutara Dutta”, “Adi Parba”, “Anusashan Parba” and Stree-Parba”. The last three Parbas are derived from the epic Mahabharata. The novel chronicles the communal riots in 1946 in the district of Noakhali in East-Bengal and the post-Partition life of sexually “polluted” women refugees like the female protagonist Sutara Dutta. Sutara’s mother committed suicide jumping into the pond behind their house during the communal atrocities in their house. Her elder sister Sujata is abducted and killed brutally. She is also victimized of rape. After her nightmarish incident, she came to take shelter to her brothers Sanat, Subodh, Sudhir who lived in Sanat’s in law’s home in Calcutta. Sutara becomes victimized in her “own” community there. Sanat’s mother-in-law does not approve the “polluted” girl and then she is sent to a Christian boarding school for “homeless” women of lower caste and victimized by partition. She completes her education and becomes a lecturer is history at the Hastinapur Yajnaseni College. The article will take the example of Sutara Dutta to justify theoretically the unbroken subalternity of women.
3. Theoretical Analysis and Justification of Women Subalternity
The theories of different critics, particularly Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ania Loomba, David Ludden, Homi K. Bhabha and Urvashi Butalia have been made the fundamental theoretical framework to discover the subalternity of women through the analysis of Jyotirmoyee Devi’s fiction and her protagonist Sutara Dutta. Their theories are applied to justify that women are not treated as “full human beings” (Anderson 8) in domestic and national sphere making them marginalized and subaltern since the time of the epics The Mahabharata and Ramayana.
Almost all the scholars who have reviewed The River Churning have concentrated on atrocities, sexual violence, and patriarchal injustice on women like Sutara by nation, antagonist and even one’s “own” community. Homi k Bhabha in his Location of Culture views that the intrusion of history into the “recesses of the domestic sphere” marginalizes the lives of abductees and the “borders between home and world become confused, and uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other” (9). If Bhabha’s notion is applied to the situation of Sutara, her “history” at Noakhali has confused her domestic life and her private world has been a part of the fallen history of women. Bhabha’s view is also applicable to Rabindranath Tagore’s Nirupama who are the victim of dowry, and Bindu, an unwanted black girl, Manikuntala Sen’s Snehalata, who are “killed” due to dowry, Shaktipada Rajguru’s Neeta, a refugee girl who are marginalized in domestic oppression and Amit Shankar Saha’s “outsiders” [women] who are marginalized making them oppressed, depressed and are bound to keep themselves in utensils of kitchen and struggle “within bellies and breasts.”
The scholar Paulomi Chakraborty in the Abstract (1) of her dissertation has made her visible “the traumatic relationship between the extraordinary violence of the partition and the gendered, ordinary, everyday life. The scholar Debali Mookerjea-Leonard has examined “how women, sexually abused by the rival community in the riots of Partition, unless excluded, become representative of the ‘fallen’ nation” (1). Jyotirmoyee Devi has delineated oppression and severe marginal identity of women in male dominated society and nation through her protagonist Sutara:
…hit twice by patriarchy: first by the male of one community who establishes his own
“identity” by exercising his territoriality over her body, second by her “own” community
which invokes compulsions of ritual purity to exclude her from the ritually pure domains
of heart and marriage, and drinking water”(Devi xxxii).
The post colonial nation has also paved women to be made marginalized. “Nation, thus, stamped the partition-victim women as “abducted” or “recovery” women through organizing the recovery mission to mount “national honour” claiming the abductees as national property. Veena Das in her Critical Events has revealed how state legitimated the unique identity of those victims of gendered violence configuring the paradigm of its symbolic territory:
Abducted women came to be defined as the responsibility of the nation. Hence legislative enactments named them, defined their legal status, and formulated legitimate means by which abducted women… could be recorded (7) ... [and] “the birthmark of two nations [India and Pakistan] (1)
Ania Loomba’s views on the role of nation - Nation fractures or disallows it’s a sector making them “others” who are kept “forgotten or repressed” (169) - is applicable to “Sutaras” are subalterns making them “aliens” in the post colonial India. According to Jill Didur, Sutara is labeled as “abducted by India” (Untruly Alliances 233).
For Paulomi Chakraborty and Debali Mookerjea-Leonard, Sutara is the symbolic representative of those gendered victims due to partition of India. There is great affinity between Jyotirmoyee Devi and Urvashi Butalia has also folded back “the layers of silence” of physical and mental violation of women. Butalia in her “Muslims and Hindus, Men and Women: Communal Stereotypes and the Partition of India” has also put her voice that: “The very formation of the nation of Pakistan out of the territory of Bharat... became a metaphor for the violation of the body of the pure Hindu woman” (67). If Butalia’s concept is applied to Sutara, it is revealed that Sutara’s silent physical and psychological sufferings regarding the formation of India and Pakistan are rightly exposed by Jyotirmoyee Devi.Sutara and her colleague Kaushalyavati who have been the symbolic representatives of marginal and oppressed women who have been made the objects of political game of nation and the “powerful denunciation of patriarchy’s hypocritical obsession with woman’s sexual purity” (Back cover page of The River Churning). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has unveiled the “speechless” voices of “sexed subaltern” from “the bottom layer of society” (Subaltern 324). She comes up with the contention that: “There is no space from which the sexed subaltern subject can speak” (“Subaltern” 307). Spivak’s theory justifies the frightening subalternity of Sutara who has been made the voiceless “object” by the antagonist community to impose their patriarchal identity. Thus, she is the “sexed subaltern” like millions of other women. Sutara, the sexually abused subaltern, is made more voiceless subaltern imposing the new identities - “abducted”, “polluted”, “untouchable” women, “recovered” women, “sexually assaulted” females, by her own society. Ironically enough, the ‘’Hindu” mother of Sutara’s sister-in-law Bibha rejects Sutara as a “polluted” girl. Snehalata and Nirupama are treated as “commodities” that are sold to the houses of their father-in-law. These “unwanted” women are purchased to depute “between the kitchen and the guests” (Saha 34). Thus, the countless women, according to Spivak’s theory, are made voiceless and marginal in the patriarchy’s hypocritical society.
Sutara like countless riot-victim women became “instrument” played upon by atrocities twice: first by the antagonist community and “second raped” by the nation and “own” community and this gendered violence constructed the stigma of multiple identities -“abducted”, “polluted”, “untouchable” women, “recovered” women, “sexually assaulted” females, stigma of refugee women and the masculine identity of “independence”, and the wheels of bureaucratic nationality and ritual purity trampled them to suffer endlessly. Jasodhara Bagchi in the “Introduction” of The River Churning has focused on the “author’s anger” which is “directed against the dual control exercised by patriarchy” on riot victims like Sutara:
Thus riot victims like Sutara are hit twice by patriarchy: first by the male of one community who establishes his own “identity” by exercising his territoriality over her body, second by her “own” community which invokes compulsions of ritual purity to exclude her from the ritually pure domains of hearth and marriage, and drinking water (xxxii).
Rajmder Singh Bedi’s Lajwanti is another Sutara. She is an abducted woman during the Partition riot and was rejected from her family by her husband Sunder Lal. Butalia’s From The Other Side of Silence has focused on the “stories of family and community violence where Mangal Singh and his two brothers “were said to have killed the women and children” of their own families (Butalia 48) to keep “honour” of their family from abduction and sexual violence by the other community.
Jyotirmoyee Devi has chosen the mythical characters to configure her narrative foundation which justifies gender crime and injustice against women of all ages including the “abducted” partition survivors like Sutara who were rejected by their own families. The agents of masculinity have committed gender crime to show off their manhood at the cost of humiliation, sexual atrocities and injustice on the members of the “friendless tribe” [women] (Devi viii ) like Sita, Draupadi, Ahalya, Kaushalyavati , Sutara and countless others since the mythological era .
Jyotirmoyee Devi has alluded to the mythic character Sita, the female protagonist and the chaste wife of the hero Rama from the Indian epic Ramayana originally composed by Valmiki to unfold the silenced traumatic experiences of exiled women like Sutara. Rama led an exiled life in the forest for fourteen years to pay homage to his father’s will. Sita followed Rama willingly. She was abducted by the demon-king Ravana during the exile. It caused a great battle between Rama and Ravana and Sita was rescued. Unfortunately, she was to face “a test of fire” (by walking through the flames unscathed) to prove her chastity. She proved her chastity. After returning to his kingdom Ayodhya, the subjects doubted her chastity and were exiled again, and later Rama appealed her to repeat the test of fire again, which she refused. Sita was exiled for the same offence [of Sutara]! (Devi 43). Jyotirmoyee Devi has narrated Sita’s suffering and mental agony.
The author has also depicted the tragic marginalization of the “characterless” Sita, Sutara, Draupadi, Ahalya, Kaushalyavati making their identity “like a shadow” (Devi 118). Jyotirmoyee Devi has textured her narrative referring to another important mythological character Draupadi from the Stree Parva of the epic Mahabharata composed by Vyasdev to unveil the “open secret” of silent humiliation of “the sacrificial animals” [women] in the political game of partition. According to Debali Mookerjea-Leonard,
Draupadi was a ‘pawn’ in the game of territorial acquisition and scramble for power just as women like Sutara Dutta are in competing 20th century nationalisms (34).
Vyasdev wrote a chapter titled, though, “Stree Parva”, where the humiliation of women and their endless exploitation by patriarchal supremacy are kept silence. In Jyotirmoyee Devi’s words:
Robbers openly attacked and abducted the women in the presence of Arjun, who tried to use his mighty weapon, Gandiva, against them but found himself powerless to lift it. Before his eyes, women were insulted and humiliated, some were forced to accompany the bandits out of fear, perhaps some were killed ... But what happened afterward’s? Vyasdev is silent about that (xxxiv-xxxv).
In the third and last section of The River Churning, “Stree Parva: The women” the author has alluded to the incident committed by Dushasana to whom Yudhisthir offered as “pawn” his wife Draupadi in the game of diceand lost her. Then the warrior Dushasana affectively humiliated the helpless Draupadi by trying to take off her clothes in the royal court: “Think of Mahabharata - how great warriors behaved in front of the seniors in the royal court – thinks of the plight of the helpless women” (Devi 103). “Sutaras” were the same “pawn” in the game of nation building. In this context, Jasodhara Bagchi has stated in the Introduction of The River Churning: “The “new country” is nothing but our familiar unjust society” (xxv) where women’s bodies are made “pawn” by the “ancient” Yudhisthir and also by the colonial and post colonial Indian political agents. In the Introduction of The River Churning, Jasodhara Bagchi states that:
Vyasdev was also silent about the death of Draupadi. When Draupadi died of severe tiredness and biting cold in the deadly winding track on the way to ascend to heaven no one of her five husbands, five Pandavas - Yudhisthir, Arjun, Bhim, Nakul and Sahadev - the heroes of Mahabharata lamented for her, though she was their devoted wife (Devi xxiv).
Jyotirmoyee Devi has also narrated the helpless fate of Draupadi:
Even the five Pandavas did not pause [when Draupadi collapsed] to mourn the woman [Draupadi] who was so dear to them, who had remained at their side constantly in the royal court, in the thickest of forests. … A woman who was equally devoted to each of her five husbands - but the husbands did not shed a single tear for her (108).
Gayatri Spivak’s theory of subaltern silence: “the subaltern cannot speak” (308) is very applicable to the voiceless women who are victimized by the brutal domination and suppression by the antagonist, “own” and even by the nation. Her notion on subaltern women - females are the worst subalterns (“Subaltern Speak” 287) - is applied to Sutara, Sita, Draupadi, Draupadi, Ahalya, Kaushalyavati, Tagore’s Nirupama and Bindu, Manikuntala Sen’s Snehalata, Rajguru’s Neeta and other women who became the victim of sexual savagery and ceaseless oppression by patriarchal supremacy (“Subaltern Speak” 308). According to her theory - the women as subalterns are not allowed to speak making them voiceless (“Subaltern Speak” 307) - the male dominated society curbed female-led agitation for their fundamental human rights and made them voiceless. This notion of Spivak is relevant to the tragic incident in silencing the ancient, colonial and postcolonial voices of women like Sita, Draupadi, Draupadi, Ahalya, Kaushalyavati, Nirupama and Snehalata, Sutara and other subaltern women by committing brutal atrocities on them in various forms.
Their oppression never allowed them speaking or expressing their inner feelings and sufferings of gendered violence.
Sutara’s story of humiliatation and sacrifice is the story of Draupadi whose stories have been silenced by men. According to Paulomi Chakraborty, like Draupadi, Sutara, too, embodies “sacrifice” as a Partition victim, a refugee woman, representing, metonymically, the people who were thought expendable in the scheme of the Partition (182). Cynthia Leenert in her article “‘How Can We Be Like We Used to Be?”: The Collective Sita and the Colletive Draupadi in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura and Jyotirmoyee Devi’s The River Churning” has reviewed that Jyotirmoyee Devi has used the allusion of Draupadi to symbolize “the thousands of women violated during the Partition” (84). In other words, women are the victims of oppression since ancient period.
The post-partition nation also identifies her as raped woman and makes here “identity less” subaltern. David Ludden’s notion of subaltern – homeless people are exiled “underside, at the marginal, outside nationalism” (Ludden 12) – is very applicable to Sutara, Sita, Draupadi, Ahalya, Kaushalyavati, Nirupama, Bindu, Snehalata, Rajguru’s Neeta who have been kept as marginal socially and psychologically identifying them as “alien” both in society and nation. Antonio Gramcsi’s concept on subaltern people - subalterns are people of “low rank” - is also testimony to justify the state of subalternity of Sutara, Sita, Draupadi, Ahalya, Kaushalyavati, Nirupama, Bindu, and Snehalata who really are made the women of “low rank” in the patriarchal society.
Debali Mookerjea-Leonard in the article “Jyotirmoyee Devi Writing History, Making Citizens” has examined Jyotirmoyee Devi’s writings and pointed out: “how women, sexually abused by the rival community in the riots of partition, unless excluded, become representative of the ‘fallen’ nation” (Mookerjea-Leonard 1). Arundhati Roy’s Ammu and Ayetha, in her “The Greater Common Good”, who are gendered subaltern, have also, become the symbolic representatives of Sutara. Ammu, Ayetha, Sutara and other unnamed refugees have become same genre of subaltern class who were marginalized by gendered violence.
4. Conclusion
Sutara, thus, is made to be the metaphor of all subaltern women of all time - in Hindu mythology Satya, Treta, Dwapar and Kali Yuga – “who have been insulted, tortured, neglected, deserted, through history” (Devi 69). Spivak’s notion on women’s exploitation is rightly reflected in Jyotirmoyee Devi’s views on marginalized, oppressed and destitute women: “… the humiliation of women, the endless exploitation of helpless women, which continues through the combined efforts of savage men …” ( Devi xxxv). Sutara is the symbol of exiled Sita, Draupadi, Amba, Ahalya, Kaushalyavati and any other women oppressed in the name of “ideal” womanhood by the patriarchal communities and also by many kinds of male violence and manipulative patriarchy. Thus, Jyotirmoyee Devi has merged the mythological and historical components to focus on the silenced tragic history of shame and humiliation and patriarchal injustice committed by the patriarchal violence on women of all ages. It is, thus, theoretically justified that subjugation and subalternity of women through the combined efforts of male supremacy in different forms is continuing endlessly from the mythological time to the post partition eras.
References
Dr. Milan Mandal, Ex-PhD Research Scholar, Department of English, Seacom Skills University, Shantiniketan, W.B. Email: milan.mandal77@gmail.com