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Inner Spaces: New Writing By Women from Kerala
Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1995 by K. Narayana Chandra
A Southern Harvest collects 16 stories, four each from Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, and Telugu, the major South Indian languages. Each set of stories is introduced briefly by distinguished writers from the respective linguistic groups. Translated by various hands, these stories present somewhat average lives lived to no point or purpose in villages and towns, portray current "social realities" - corruption in high places, exploitation of the rural poor, privation of the old in cities, etc. - and provoke serious thinking on the way they live and what they live for. It is a little embarrassing, however, to hear some of the narrators here speak much more savvily than they ought to in situations of uneducated distress. The political rights and wrongs of which these characters do not seem to be aware come to us now as part of a narrator's harangue. Does not the appropriation of another's narrative constitute the violation of a basic human right? The narrators of two well-told stories here ("The Paddy Harvest" and "The Desolation Within") are guilty of almost denying their protagonists distinctive voices of their own. Unless handled carefully by their makers, narratives of sociopolitical awareness have a tendency to trap their speakers into saying what the makers, rather than their characters, mean to say.
Is it, again, a coincidence that the women in these stories feel themselves awfully discriminated against and underachieved? Narmada in Vaidehi's "Confession," Lalaji's wives and Veena in Manasi's "Goddess of Arshabharatha," Palaniammal of Dilip Kumar's "Mirror" and the eponymous character of Chakravenu's "Kuwait Savitramma" are all victims alike of man-made disasters. The proudest of them all, and the one who commands our immediate respect, is Yellamma in "The Desolation Within." Having served her educated husband and son for long, and having lost both - the former metaphorically, the latter literally in an accident - she knows enough to go her way all alone.
Of the stories that seem effortlessly told, and indeed have an unbuttoned air about them, are Zacharia's "Train Robbery," Anand's "The Kayasthas," and Jayant Kaikini's "Dagadu Parab's Ashvamedha." "The Kayasthas" is probably the farthest the South Indian story seems to have reached in terms of narrative speculation. Anand presents us with a rather complicated but engaging genealogy of the Indian scribes and accountants. Told by a voice that holds a wealth of facts and figures with easy aplomb, the story also reflects on its "truth"-telling dharma amidst the usual temptations of fictional exaggeration. Zacharia's "Train Robbery" is the pathetic story of a young revolutionary who lacks nerve at the crucial moment. In its climax, a hungry father and son unwrap their crude "bomb," a papaya. "Let this shattered weapon of our revolution," declares Rajan, "be our breakfast." At this turn, so decorously poised between the pathetic and the preposterous, the story could have ended. "Dagadu Parab's Ashvamedha" narrates a farcical episode involving a hapless youth forced to ride a hired circus horse on his wedding day. The hilarious scene that follows is John Gilpin Indianized, complete with local color oddities and excitements, and, finally, a happy resolution. Kaikini's story has a ballad-like inevitability and an appropriate momentum, both intelligently harnessed by his translator.
The 15 stories in Inner Spaces are both "rich and varied," a claim too modest perhaps for a publisher's note. It is doubtful if any other South Indian language has had a like collection by women translated and introduced on the lines of Inner Spaces. K. M. George's rapid survey of the Malayalam story and stories by Kerala women is admirably factual and helpful. It is worth pondering nonetheless why the varieties of "feminist" experience, or what the editors consider to be such, alone merit wider circulation. For one cannot help noticing a tiresome insistence on Malayalee women's suffering in all but one story (Kamala Das's "The Game of Chess"). K. B. Sreedevi's Ahalya, for example, returns to her stony silence, a protest that hardly squares with Malayali notions of feminist dignity or tragedy. It is arguable that Ahalya of the myths has been granted only a transit accommodation in a Malayalam story, but the mode of her protest seems to me quite uncharacteristic. Saradakutty of "The Soil That Grows Diamonds" barks up the wrong tree. I cannot imagine a Malayalee woman going to a male acquaintance to malign her husband and solicit pity or admiration thereby; she would rather fight it out with him, unlike Saradakutty, who seems to relish her status as a "commodity," however subliminally. What if one reads her questions at the end of the story unrhetorically? "Does it matter what he is? Isn't it enough if my affairs [sic] are managed without my having to toil, like someone who is public property?"
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