BODY , DESIRE, SEXUALITY AND WIDOWHOOD

Submitted by Mr. Bhaskar Jyoti Hazarika

TOPIC

                             BODY , DESIRE, SEXUALITY AND WIDOWHOOD

ABSTRACT:

      Women are the home makers and the men are the bread earners. They are expected to be submissive and docile. The common element in Mamoni Raisom Goswami’s literary work is the concern for women. She raises questions on several facets of women’s status in India. Foremost among them are attitude to girl children, marriage and widowhood. There are many more aspects to Goswami’s feminism.  There is an increase, even explosion, of research and publications on women’s problems while on the other hand the violence against women i.e. rape, molestation, eve- teasing, domestic violence and institutional and reproductive violence are rampant even today. Mapping the status of Indian women would become fragmentary without knowing the conditions of the women in Northeast India.   Northeast India is the habitat of different ethnic groups, both tribal and non tribal and where both patriarchal and matriarchal control co-exists, the status of women for various reasons does not differ from that of the mainstream India. Women, here too, are oppressed, marginalized and the overall condition of the womenfolk of the region is quite disillusioning.

          Writers like Indira Goswami are famous for their active participation in introducing this isolated region to the rest of the India and drawing attention of Government towards these states who are suffering since ages. Indira Goswami’s story “The Offspring” reiterates with disturbing impact the deep rooted prejudices and patriarchal norms that make a woman destroy a newborn offspring fathered by a low caste male and a man trapped in a maniacal frenzy in his desire for a male heir of his own blood. Indira Goswami’s writings echo the voice of a woman writer which proves that her writing offers good pieces to be studied from a gynocentric point of view. Indira Goswami’s novels will be evaluated here from one of the pillars of gynocentric theory i.e-

biological. By applying the model of Gynocentricism, it will be reflected how women have been harassed in the patriarchal culture  biologically and how their body is an immense source of inspiration to them.

KEYWORDS:

        Female Body , Sexuality, Widowhood , Feminism , Patriarchy, Oppression, Caste

INTRODUCTION:

       Indira Goswami’s novels are women oriented. She minutely analyzes the unwholesome situation in which a sensitive woman has to live and move about, caught between the powerful currents of tradition and patriarchy, of terror and suppression. Such a woman is subjected to physical tortures and sexual assaults in society.The loss of personality, voice of self – assertion leads her to confusion and tormentation to loss of self – identity and even prestige. She understands it very well and makes her female protagonists search for ‘self’ to discover her identity. Indira Goswami was a creative writer who could not bear the brutality and intolerable oppression of human being. Excessive pain and sorrow left a deep impact on her psyche which led her stand in support of the oppressed and the unprivileged. Her own experiences go into making of her literary oeuvre.

               One of the most reputed and distinguished Assamese woman writer Mamoni Raisom Goswami, popularly known as Indira Goswami wrote her life story Adha Lekha Dastabez (1988) along with her other short stories and novels. It was originally written in Assamese but later translated into English as An Unfinished Autobiography in 2002 by P. Kotoky .She has written originally in Assamese and many of her works have been translated into English which include Datal Hatir Une Khowa Howda (The Moth Eaten Howdah of the Tuskar) (2005), Tej Aru Dhueire Dhusarita (Pages Stained with blood) (2001), and Chinnamastar Manuthu (The Man from Chinnamasta) (2005). During her stay in Vrindaban, she wrote her well-known novel Nilkanthi Braja (The Shadow of the Dark God and the Sun) (1976). This was her first novel, in which she highlighted the utter poverty and exploitation of these women. She has been the winner of Sahitya Academy Award (1982), India’s highest literary award, the Jnanpith Award (2000) and Principal Prince Claus Laureate (2008). She refused the Padmashree award (2002), saying it was too late to receive a Padmashree after receiving Jnanpith award. She won the highest civilian award of the state Asom Ratna in 2011. Often, she is termed as a feminist for speaking on behalf of those women, who have remained on the periphery and have suffered under the patriarchal control.

            This paper is an attempt to focus on her short story “The Offspring Translated from the Assamese original, “Sanskar” by the author and Anthologized in The Shadow of Kamakhya, Through the protagonist of her story “The Offspring”, the young Brahmin widow , Goswami penetrates the harsh and dark realities of the social system where a woman is nothing but the possessor of the womb”. She is valued because of her womb, which is her greatest asset and without which she is nothing but a beast of burden. The female body is subjected to different punishments by humiliating and hurting her productive and reproductive power, her sexuality and morality and above all by abusing her political, legal, social, economic and human rights.

The most threatening phenomenon is that women are at the receiving end of an entire system of social structures and practices based on the fascist ideology that men are, and should be, superior to women. Among the atrocities and violence committed against women perhaps the most heinous one is Rape. The intensity of this crime to which the female body is subjected shatters the victim’s mental, physical and psychological being.

 Susan Brownmiller aptly calls rapists the“shock troops of male society” in her work, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975).

       This results not only in personal and bodily loss of freedom but impacts materially on women’s lives which disempowers them as economic and socially productive beings. For instance, women may be excluded from many night jobs and parts of town that might give them more economic opportunities. When it comes to wife-abuse and domestic violence, in all cultures women who are beaten up by their husbands or lovers are likely to be blamed implicitly for not being good wives and mothers and conforming to men’s expectations of them. Wife-beating exists in almost every culture on earth. To cite a few one only needs to remember the North African expression, “Women and camels need to be beaten,” or the French variant, “Women, like walnut trees, should be beaten every day.” An old Chinese saying goes, “A wife married is like a pony bought; I will ride her and whip her as I like.” And, of course, in the Indian context the examples are too many to cite. Among all the crimes committed against women, the institutional and reproductive violence is perhaps the most frightening as it is enacted under the cover of state and institutional sanction. A precise feminist analysis must also address the fact that women are not perpetual and mute victims.

OBJECTIVES OF STUDY:

The objective of the present study are as the following-

1)      To appreciate Mamoni Raison Goswami as the voice of North East.

2)      To Highlight the affects of traditional caste system .

3)      To Examine the relationship between Body, Desire, sexuality and Widowhood

4)      To analyse the present story in the light of Gynocritics.

5)      To explore the cause for the rise of atrocities on women.

 METHODOLOGY:

       Data used here are mostly collected from First hand reading of textual book and secondary sources. The study is purely analytical and descriptive in nature.

OUTLINE OF THE STORY:
       Indira has also written many exquisite short stories. "The Offspring" (also translated as "The Sun") is one of the very special ones. The protagonist in this story is Pitambar, a non-Brahmin and a rich merchant. His wife is chronically ill and his chances of ever having a child by her are rapidly receding. An indigent though grasping priest kindles a hope in Pitambar that , a poor but beautiful Brahmin widow, could bear him a child. He then functions as a go-between frequently extracting pecuniary favour from the wealthy merchant.
      Acute poverty forces  to submit to Pitambar, following which she becomes pregnant. The priest arranges for their marriage so that the child (it is assumed that the child will be male) is not born with the stigma of illegitimacy. Pitambar’s dreams ride high as he awaits the birth of his son. His moment of reckoning comes on a stormy night when he receives the news that  has undergone an abortion. It then unfolds that  had frequently in the past sold her body to maintain her family. But in every case, she had undergone an abortion in order to retain her caste. The aborted foetus was invariably disposed of in the bamboo grove of her backyard.
      One night  she hears a noise in her bamboo grove and discovers Pitambar digging up the earth to recover and touch the flesh of the foetus - the scion of his lineage, a part of his own flesh and blood. There is no story in modern Indian literature which quite describes a comparable yearning for a child to continue the family line. Indira Goswami captures this emotion with a dreadful intensity which touches on the grotesque.
       Now let us analyze the story from one important pillar of Gynnocritics i.e-Biological Study. Gynocriticism is a woman-centered way of approaching a literary work, and most, if not all, the theorists who would consider themselves a part of this school of literary criticism are women themselves. One way to summarize gynocriticism might be to describe it as “women writing about women writing.” However, gynocriticism as a term may also refer more broadly to the study of women’s writing.(cited from :www.saylor.org)

Biological study:

 In order to live a fully human life we [women] require not only control of our bodies, we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, the corporeal ground of our intelligence

( Rich : 1976, 21 ).

      The opinion of the gynocritics is that women are different from men biologically and so they have a different set of biological experiences. Therefore it is important and useful to study the biological imagery in women’s writing. Female body is under patriarchal domination. Beyond the male gaze, a woman’s body is considered as a possession, to be used, abused or traded. The Gynocritics believe that woman’s body and its associated experiences are the source of immense

energy and power for women writers. Violence against women is a world wide social phenomenon which is not new. It has been inflicted in one form or another. One of the leading psychologists Rehana Ghadially rightly observes:

…..violence against women is often seen as an

assault against her body…more importantly it is a negation of her integrity and personhood

( Ghadially :1988, 149 ).

When Pitambars wife is chronologically ill and Krishnakanta asks him the condition of her health :
“What about your wife? Is she better now?" Pitambar replied hesitantly, " Several times I have taken her to Civil Hospital at Gauhati but it is useless. Her whole body is swelling up now."
"So there is no hope of an issue, is it? Very sad, indeed. There will be no one to continue your family line."
        Pitambar remained silent. The silence of Pitambar can be interpreted as the male ego not to accept the reality of not having a child in the future. At the moment when both Pitambar and Krishnakanta were involved in a casual discussion , on the same rainy day suddenly a lady passes by and both observed her. She was , the widow of a young priest from the Satra. Immediately we could see how Goswami has cleverly tried to share the Libido increasing thoughts in the mind of Pitambar.
                        “Her rain drenched clothes clung to her body. The colour of her skin was like the dazzling foam of boiling sugarcane juice. Though her figure was rather ample, she was immensely attractive.”
When Damayanti bent down to squeeze out the water from the wet folds of her mekhala, Pitambar still was observing her with lustful eyes which is quite evident from the minute details he observed:
                        “Her blouse had stretched tight and was pulled up, revealing the white flesh which, to the two men, looked as tempting as the meat dressed and hung up on iron hooks in a butcher's shop! Krishnakanta turned his eyes away almost immediately, a little self-consciously, but Pitambar kept looking, enthralled by the sight”
Before furthering our discussion we should try to analyze the way how Krishnakanta  mockingly asked his first question to Damayanti:
                        Krishnakanta called out, " Hey, where are you coming from?"Damayanti
 replied"Can't you see these cocoons?"
"So, now you have started mixing with that crowd of Marwari merchants, eh! When the need arises, one stoops to washing even goat's legs as the saying goes, is it not?"

        Damayanti was a widow and the typical rigid traditional believers like Krishnakanta and Pitambar had already assigned the label of a whore on this poor girl . Mamoni Raisom Goswami’s widowhood after only two years of marriage, and her subsequent sufferings, intensify her sensitivity towards the victims of social and individual oppression. Due to her personal sufferings, Goswami understands the plight of those living in the periphery and her sympathy for such victims translates into touching sagas of the people in and around her life. Again Pitambar’s ill wife’s act of forwarding a “moora” with the help of a servant for her husband to take a sit and Pitambars act of not noticing it carries a dual layered meaning. Apart from this simple act we can also understand that Pitambar was desperate for a male heir and his neglected wife was still trying to play the role of a caring wife. The most ironical words uttered by Krishnakanta to convinve Pitambar were:

                                    “Nowadays Brahmin girls are even marrying fishermen. The daughter of the Gossain on the Dhaneshwari riverbank married a Muslim Boy! Gandhi Maharaj has shown us the path.”

        Mahatma Gandhi stood against secularism and welcomed all the citizens to get united irrespective of caste , creed , language and religion but here what we could see is that Krishnakanta had interpretated it in a different way. After seven days Pitambars eagerness heightened at each sight of Damayanti. But this heightened emotion In his heart was not love for sure but physical lust which could be justified from the following lines:

                        “Damayanti's clothes seemed to disappear each time revealing more and more of her beautiful white fleshed body.”

So, lust comes before love; let me cite an example of Shasi Despande’s novel That Long Silence (1988) in which Jaya the female character married to Mohan hints at this when she says –

“First there is love, then there’s sex – that was how I had

Always imagined it to be. But after living with Mohan, I

had realized that it could so easily be the other way round.”

      Next a very valid question asked by Krishnakanta to Pitambar was –“ Who will marry a widow?” Widow remarriage at the time when Goswami wrote the story was not acceptable in the then society. More importance is generally given to caste as the primary agent in defining identities within Indian communities and the role of class structure within them is almost always ignored. In the story, the upper castes are in perpetual fear of being contaminated and the Gossains, along with other Brahmins belonging to higher castes, make conscious efforts to maintain their purity by avoiding the touch of lower caste people.  This fear of contamination is so extreme on the part of the upper caste people that it almost seems comic in the end when Damayanti slept with Pitambar for the sake of money.

Though Damayanti had already given justification for her repeatedly conceiving and destroying her foetus for the sake of money still we cannot accept the act of involving her small daughter in it:

“That was the very spot where both mother and daughter had, some nights before, dug a pit for the aborted child!”

        The varieties of violence, all avoidable, that humanity inflicts on itself, whether as group or individual, the pain and the misery they create, the protection and love which they are either unwilling or unable to provide but which they desperately crave - these are some of the themes that run through Indira Goswami’s oeuvre. Her graphic depiction of violence and her use of startlingly fresh images are aspects that make her works unique not only in Assamese but in all of Indian literature. Her autobiography conveys a sense of the pain, the restlessness and the suffering that she has undergone in various phases of her life. Writing was her way of overcoming these. With indefatigable energy and incessant effort, she rose above the circumstances that moulded her, but never lost her profound sense of identification with those who continued to suffer in the river of pain.

CONCLUSION:

        The case of Damayanti and Pitambar in the short story serves as a good example where caste is seen to be in direct conflict with class. Pitambar, a low-caste, has money that he uses to “buy” Damayanti, the Brahmin widow. Though Damayanti destroys their offspring as she is not willing to bear the child of a low caste, this story gives more social power to Pitambar because of his purchasing power. The story reveals a complex social machination through a clash between caste and class where a caste-oriented society is seen to gradually shift towards a more class-oriented setup.The power of Goswami’s story lies in its recognition that women are complexly located at the juncture of gender, caste and community. This often renders their acts of resistance deeply problematic. The contradiction in Damayanti’s action is that while it challenges gender hierarchy, it seems to reinforce caste inequality.

          When it comes to Female Body,Lisa Leghorn and Katherine Parker (1981) argue that the dominant (male) culture sees women as breeders, natural rearers of children, closer to the earth, big talkers, gossipers, passive, devious and indirect. . Force, physical violence, verbal abuse and other forms of aggressions have always been used to control women‟s bodies and gain their obedience. It is always „the female body‟ which is both the object of desire and the subject of control.

Women’s sexuality has been defined always in terms of violence, pornography and as a potential commercial commodity. Even in the films and media eve teasing, taunting songs, following females and eventually winning and taming them is eulogized making it look as if women really enjoy and are impressed by such activities