|
Jameela Nishat
Are women censored in specifically gendered ways? Do family and community influence their choice of language, style, subject and do they face problems in getting published and receiving critical literary attention? A hundred women writers in 6 languages at 6 workshops, organised by Asmita and Women’s World in India, explored the answers to these questions. In the process they discovered that before they are silenced by state or community, women censor themselves. They even destroy their own work.
Urdu: I have no wings
What do women write about? Everything under the sun! Except for religion, politics and sex. So what is there left to write about? Women use the beauty of traditional Urdu literature to express longing, loneliness and sorrow ...
- The house in which I live
- a stranger
- Its walls sting me
- I fear the coming darkness.
- I know those who stay in this house
- they recognise me and yet
- I draw a line across my life
- My heart is not easy in this alien space
- Fatima Taj
- Why do women write? To survive, to escape the claustrophobic environment of home, to express feelings, desires and frustrations.
- Women’s voices are suppressed in the name of culture and tradition. Their writing, they are told, desecrates a precious cultural heritage and under no circumstances must Muslim women expose their weaknesses before the majority Hindu community.
- They have suffered, too, from globalisation and the advances in modern technology. A foreign diet of sex and violence can be relayed to homes in the remotest villages and the reaction to this avalanche of ‘immorality’ is the imposition of ever-increasing restrictions, protecting women from the corruption and licentiousness of a global culture. The purdah is not only of the body, but of the soul.
- Few husbands are supportive. Athari Fiza constantly suffers her husband’s disapproval who says that her writing is like a vegetable curry (without strength or taste in a culture where meat-eating is the symbol of virility). She writes:
- I have turned to stone
- my heart’s secret locked within
- darkness is there to follow light
- but my heart why does it burn?
- The moments of pain linger on.
- With the gift of my life.
- For most of her life Ashraf Fari had to deny her own gender. Forbidden to write her poetry in the feminine by her family, her traditional ghazals sounded artificial and remote. When, later, her husband’s attitude changed she was able to express herself in her own voice, although there is no question of these pieces being published...
- Betwixt us
- Talk of college awhile, then office
- Is there nothing left then to speak of
- My Lord?
- When she recited this at a mushaira, later in her life, Ashraf Fari was instantly reprimanded by scholars in the audience: such verse brought her no ‘dignity’.
- Most of the women mentioned how their families play a part in their writing. Mothers, husbands, fathers, children are all encouraging or inhibiting factors. Fear of disapproval, loss of reputation, acceptability and finally audience are powerful means of censoring thoughts and ideas.
- Grateful for the little space available to express their pain and sorrow, women writers in Urdu are willing to barter their right to freedom of expression for that precious space.
- Telugu: Betwixt Rebellion and Reconciliation
- by Volga
- Historically, Telugu literature has been closely linked with social reform, although significantly the left, progressive and revolutionary literary movements, never welcomed women writers into their fold.
- This all changed with the feminist movement in the seventies when women writers critically questioned the values and the language of the dominant literary culture. A wave of women’s writing entered the hitherto calm Telugu literary scene and brought with it a turbulence and tension never experienced before. They wrote of sexuality, their position in the family, motherhood, labour rooms, menstruation, abortions, cooking pots, kitchens, spices, brooms, dusters.
- This surge of feminist literature was received with stunned disbelief and was regarded as ugly and discordant by literary society. Revolutionary and left intellectual writers began a systematic attack on women writers, determined to stamp them out. Feminist literature was labelled pornographic, the writing of prostitutes. Space for women writers in magazines and papers was reduced drastically.
- Now, these women who had revolutionised women’s writing in India, are being threatened by a foreign language. With English dominating the educational system hundreds and thousands of children are completely ignorant of Telugu and its rich literary history.
- After being
- planned to perfection with
- weep like this walk like that
- laugh like this
- comb out your very life like this
- when the tangled noose tightens
- the dying declaration flows effortless
- like a ryhme learnt by heart
- Kondepudi Nirmala
- Malayalam - Cursed Souls
- by Ammu Joseph
- Kerala’s progressive policies which have raised literacy rates, employment and life expectancy suggest that life for Kerala’s women is relatively good. But these measures of women’s development do not, in and by themselves, guarantee freedom and equality. Many women writers were unable to attend the workshop and it was noted by the organisers that many of the reasons given were all too closely linked to the subject they had been invited to discuss: chronic ailments that are closely associated with stress, preoccupation with domestic responsibilities, lack of mobility, an unwillingness to be associated with what could be identified as a feminist enterprise.
- Although over the past 50-60 years, women writers in Malayalam have achieved a significant position in the literary world, they nevertheless have an instinctive understanding of gender-based censorship.
- Many women admitted that their reluctance to hurt people they love prevents them from writing freely and fearlessly and those who have tried to overcome their inhibitions have suffered repercussions. Self-censorship was identified as a major form of gender-based censorship, the roots of which are most often embedded in women’s desire to avoid conflict. “People look for personal elements in whatever women write”, stated Chandramathi who chose not to write for 18 years after her marriage.
- They are also at the mercy of powerful literary critics. Only one word considered ‘unacceptable’ can bring an entire work under vicious attack. As a result women writers deliberately avoid certain subjects, certain language.
- The poet Sugatha Kumari said that society considers writing poetry a harmless activity - “like buying a silk sari” - but when she became involved in activism she was asked by the Chief Minister why she was fighting for trees and animals instead of sitting at home writing poetry: All writers are like cursed souls, stigmatised by god and unable to sleep soundly through the night. As for me, I believe I am thrice cursed: cursed as a writer, cursed as a social activist and cursed as a woman.
- Marathi - Cactus Blossoms
- by Gouri Salvi
- During the 20th century Marathi literature developed a sharp style and a vibrant vocabulary and whether through drama, fiction or poetry it has become stamped with a concern for people’s predicaments. Landless labourers, the “untouchables”, and women, have all found a place in recent social realist writings. Against this larger backdrop Marathi literature has created counter-cultural spaces where women have been portrayed as individuals, often challenging traditional notions of “womanhood”.
- Yet in recent times it seems that the earlier vibrancy in women’s writings in Marathi has waned.
My writing is the most enormous bane of my husband’s life. He hardly ever leaves the house and he will not allow me to go out either. But despite this, and in spite of my household chores I find the time to write. He finds this intolerable. But perhaps even more intolerable is the fact that when I’m neither reading nor writing, I’m immersed in my own thoughts. For this he is forever trying to teach me a lesson ...
- This excerpt from a letter by Vidya Bal to her editor brought discussions alive amongst a group of women writers who had not previously dwelt on the issue of censorship .
- Social class and caste were discussed at length. Journalist, Sandhya Taksale, said “it’s very clear that while working class women speak openly of oppression, middle class women find it difficult to voice their grievances”. The Dalit poet Pradnya Lokhande expanded on this point: “As our status rises, we seem to internalise many ‘middle-class’ norms. We should not forget that for the rural women singing their folk songs or the working class women who can articulate their oppression more spontaneously, the personal is political.”
- Women complained of being intimidated by religion and the accounts of censorship by religious institutions were described as “ideological terrorism”. Cecilia Carvallo who reinterprets stories from the Bible from a gender perspective is refused publication by a Catholic magazine and lives in constant fear of being excommunicated. Aruna recalled the outrage that followed her short story on Sita.
- In general, women writers in Marathi do not face a shortage of space for publication of their work, but time and space for creativity was, again, one of the main problems: For me, creativity is like a raincoat. When I enter my house I hang the raincoat outside the front door. I long for the day when that raincoat becomes my skin. But it has never happened yet ...
- Mangala Godbole
- Hindi - Guarded Tongue
- by Ritu Menon
- By virtue of being the language of almost half the country, Hindi writers are read beyond their immediate location. Publishing, distributing and retailing facilities are well developed, literary and popular magazines provide a forum for the dissemination and discussion of new writing, and there is a large potential market. Yet:
A woman’s life is censored from start to finish, and if not censored, then severely edited.
Family honour, the compulsion to be a good daughter, a good wife and a good mother, the poet Anamika spoke of the “needle and thread” syndrome in women’s lives: scissors to cut with, a needle and thread to sew my lips with. If I write my subconscious, the earth will be covered with paper.
- Oppressed by respectability women Hindi writers avoid sexuality, religion, politics, even social issues. To write honestly, they agreed, was almost impossible and to write about the family was the most difficult. Many have avoided writing their autobiographies.
- Mridula Garg decided to break free of some of the taboos but had to suffer the consequences of a two- year court case when no further editions of her book Chittkobra could be published, and all because she had written that the sexual act was devoid of any pleasure for her heroine.
- Professional jealousies and rivalry were considered powerful forms of censorship - Mridula and short-story writer, Nasira Sharma, said that censorship doesn’t always come from an over-zealous state, but from their peer group.
- Men don’t need to censor - we are already censored by so many women. First our mothers, then our mothers-in-law, then our daughters. Men never enter the picture.
- Azra Parveen
- Critics, again, were considered to be the ones to make or break a writer. Women are again at the mercy of a literary establishment controlled by men, who all too often distort the meaning of what they write and who are quick to describe their work as “pornographic” or “obscene” making any separate discussion of literary merit virtually impossible.
- Eighty-per cent of the group said that they supported their families with income from their writing, yet they write whenever they “can find the time”, early morning, before the household stirs, late at night when everybody is asleep. They agreed that very few men would be similarly constrained by cooking, cleaning and caring for the sick and elderly.
|
