I roll dreams of a world more serene with my rolling pin

In the world of cultural interventions, one transformation that has happened is that in writing, staging and teaching literature, women have outnumbered men. Immediately after the American Civil Rights Movement of the late sixties, men had started discarding the world of literature as barren, unproductive, oblique and abstruse. And that was the time when, with the advent of feminism, more women had entered this suddenly deserted realm to convert it into a lush green patch again. The female genetic code promotes a better survival instinct. Even in an extreme situation, when a man must perish, a woman survives as did the little girl caught up in the waves of Tsunami and as did the women warriors of peace during the Iraq War. Against odds they laugh, and laughter, we all know, is a great leveler. They laugh to quash hierarchies and divides between the high and the low:

Wo hansi bahut kuch kahti thi, phir bhi apne mein rehti thi/ deti thi subke daav, bandhu

Nirala

[Many a tale that smile told, a smile so coy and yet so bold, a smile that cut you to the core]

Though written by a male poet, and much before the times we are talking about, the above words capture the quintessential meaning of that laughter.

What is singularly attractive in contemporary Indian women’s writing is that gender is a component in the experiential matrix but it does not exhaust the range of themes and its stylistic departures are major too.

As a woman rolls out chapatis, the identity is kneaded like dough and rolled out. Not only the extremities of the four directions in NEWS (North, East, West, South) are rolled out but the word ‘I’ also is rolled out as round as the earth… Poetry, to my mind, is a rolling pin that helps women expand their identity in all directions till all poky edges are rounded off well.

There are sparkling one-liners such as ‘Anna thinks Anna Carson is God/ No smaller Than Marx (Mukta Sambrani). ‘Life (in India) is cheap because people are reborn’ (Mukta Sambrani). ‘How many oceans deep is desire?’ (Rukmini Bhaya Nair). ‘We are the sum of our ordinary days. We feel boredom like rage but without its bright burning pleasures (Anjum Hasan), ‘Main ek darwaza thi/Mujhe jitna peeta gaya, main utna khulti gayee’

[I was a door, the more they banged on me, the more I opened]

All over there are traces of deep spiritual angst pondering on man-made divides like class, caste and religion; even when women write about the jouissance, a joyous life experience, like those of the first ritual bathing after the delivery, they could be thinking about the wider issues like the imposed exile of Hussain as does the young Hindi poet, Leena Mehrotra Rao:

Seated on steps (of the ghat) is Christ, Mohammad, Krishna and Moses

And the thirty crores of devi-devtas watching:

Her face looks quite like Durga’s

And her womb is quite like Mariyam’s,

Her aura is quite like Gabriel’s!

She has delivered a baby.

This is your new birth, Hussain,

With many a colour in eyes

You have descended on the earth this time

To be exiled to the moon.

(Translated by the Dr Anamika)

In fact, the best thing about women’s poetry in Indian languages is that it is fine-tuning the egalitarian model of justice with a great sensitivity. How is it doing that? By crashing down hierarchies both at the level of social dynamics and its literary manifestations.

Women poets, at least, in India seem to be staging this compassionate model of justice by pulling down the Berlin Wall between not only the personal and the political but also between the cosmic and the commonplace, the rural and the urban, the sacred and the profane, the home and the world, the body and the soul, the subjective and the objective. The hierarchy between fact and fiction too is readily being pulled down and tears in the heart of things and nothings are being telescoped in the minutest details, the melancholy and angst of life captured through pulsating word pictures.

How is this hierarchy being pulled down? My own observation is that, at least, in poetry it is being pulled down through the dramatic juxtaposition of binaries. With a metaphysical stroke, women weave together the macro with the micro, cosmic with the commonplace, the terror at the war-front with the terror in the bedroom, the hurly-burly in the kitchen with the chaos at the World Trade Centre or even in Iraq and Gujarat.

Even the overtly political poems addressed to ironies of the terror-torn world talk through vibrant, images drawn from the kitchen, the panchayat, the nursery and the play-fields of children, and they are written in a structure parodying the famous aarathis, keertans and folk motifs.

The force of language has much to do with the level of deprivation. People who suffer more, absorb more, and those who absorb more get a better portion of libido and angst transmitted to the innermost folds of language. Their language is multi-layered, highly nuanced, full of tonal variations and geothermal energies, as is the language of the Dalit and the Adivasi women poets like Aneeta Bharti and Nirmala Putul.

Women’s language in general radiates a constant oscillation between the subjective and the objective. The half-forgotten rhythms of movements inside the womb get filtered into their language and are freely expressed because, unlike boys, girls don’t have to pretend that they have risen above ‘being emotional’.

Social conditioning and multi-tasking (the pressures of handling many kinds of jobs, right from kitchen affairs to file-pushing), have guided women consciously and sub-consciously to ensure there are constant shifts and variations of tone and inter-textual flights within their writings.

Love, death, home, mothering, sisterhood and the angst of being a part of the truncated, egocentric world are the six gray areas that have staged a Copernican shift in this bio-mythographic feminist poetry of the Hindi heartland too. Most of the poems work through intelligent language games. They are witty, naughty and humorous, beaming with confidence and grace. Among the women poets of another era, the pathos of Mahadevi Verma and the veer ras and vatsalya ras (two of the nine rasas) of Subhadra Kumari

Chauhan radiated the Gandhian notion of ‘dignified suffering’. The contemporary poets challenge hierarchies and narrate their pangs in a voice clear and loud, polyphonic and multidimensional.

Most of the poets, be they Marxists like Katyayani and Shubha, or those reflecting on the existential angst of being such as Gagan Gill, Savita Singh, Aneeta Verma, Neelesh Raghuvanshi, Nirmala Garg, Kshama Kaul, Madhu Joshi, Ila Kumar and Pragati Saxena or the more biomythographic ones like Leena Mehrotra Rao, Mridula Shukla, Monika Kumar, they realise that women’s gift for relationship is fundamental, and they can definitely work wonders in nurturing and recasting souls into newer moulds if only their psychic energies and the latent mother instincts stand firmly grounded in the liberal humanist version of empowering inner resource, positing human essence, transcending all forms of socio-economic power-play.

Women, unlike men, are not required to separate from the mother as they acquire a gender identity. They simply identify with the closest person to them as they grow up, their own mothers. No separation of identity is required, no jolt borne in the primary stages of ego-formation; this explains the fluidity of expressions, care-ethics and many other positive traits that the Indian women poets adhere to. Theirs is a worldview different from men. Women are more attuned to preserving the earth from destruction by weapons and ecological disasters devised by men.

A tentative analysis of their texts prompts me to believe that theirs is a re-integrated approach and they do not consider men being repaired. Perhaps under the rubric of Gandhian and Buddhist paradigm of a change of heart, they do grant men their space for growth into full-fledged womanists. Considering harmony, feelings for fellow beings, love, justice, cooperation and forbearance are not completely alien to men’s nature, so a better rapproachment between men and women are not quite impossible, they seem to be saying:

Shaam ho gayi hai, Shyam,

Barish mein bheegi ek dhundhli roshni udh rahi hai

Barish ki ek-ek boond se tapakta

Samay chuk raha hai

(The evening sets in, Shyam/A faint light rises, soaked in rain/Time trickles out drop

by drop)

So, Shyams should make up before it is too late!! Women are still reaching out for a dialogue because they think it is never too late for men to curb excesses and settle down as a ‘sakha’, a soulmate dreaming of a world more green and serene.

The author is an eminent poet, writer, translator and a Delhi-based academician