Chapter One

Some years ago, Carl Friedman was looking for Frances Bartkowski and me at a bar called Polly's in Middletown, Connecticut. The bartender had called out, Carl reported, "Did anyone see two girls alone?"

Two girls alone. I have been thinking about this - when and indeed how are women not single, as I take hesitant steps toward older women in my family.

These women were not single in the usual sense, except for one. I respect that category, respect women by themselves, making sense of their lives within a general culture of reproductive heteronormitivity. I can look at one or two who have made themselves visible.

But stepping toward my great grandmother, the shadowy grandmother on my father's side, my mother's aunts - I am moved to ask, when and indeed how are women not single? Do we need a special analytic category for female collectivities? For lesbian couples? For single lesbians? Is the antonym of single - double? Multiple? Or always - married?

These are women who bred me. I am nobody's mother. I ponder a bit on why we take this sense for granted. The Mahabharata provides an answer: nathavati anathavat. My mother's aunt made me understand that phrase in a way that no one else has. Will I be obliged to explain that phrase somewhere in the book? Not now, I think.

She was single, but also singular. Singularity is - repetition of difference, repetition and difference, repetition with difference. That is my relationship with these women. I am their repetition, with a difference. We are single, singular and together.

My biological mother, Sivani Chakravorty, was singular and in important senses, single. She lived as a widow for 48 years, and she did singular things on her own. With her recent death, I have lost an archive. For the first time, I have responded positively to writing my memoirs.

In this hesitant decision, I have been helped by my niece, Medha Chandra, my sister Maitreyi Chandra; and most recently, by one of the most eminent, conventionally single women I know - Romila Thapar, historian of ancient India.

Confronted with the task of writing about the past, even my own past, I was planning to carve out time for research. Romila, a thoroughgoing social scientist who can be interdisciplinary with the humanities, without nervousness, dissuaded me.

"It is your enriching memory," she said, "that will make your work worthy of readers." She restored me to my convictions and made my task more difficult. I dedicate this beginning to Romila. I want to dedicate bits to all kinds of people. I have never written like this.

My title comes from Assia Djebar, who is technically as unsingle as I am - married a number of times. For what Romila opened me onto was that grand line of Assia's - if only one could occupy with desire that single spectator body that remains, and circle it more and more tightly in order to forget the defeat. The defeat that is life.

Assia is writing about pictures of insurgencies with women wailing on the side. Somehow, I seem to see Boronani, Thakuma, Taludidu, Pawto - and mother gone so recently. Didi even more recently. And I started the memoir the last time I saw her devastated being. I see them as part of some grand and distant picture - a field of singular women, my forewomen.

And I sigh - if only I could occupy with desire their singular bodies, encircle them more and more tightly, in order to forget the defeat. The first in line is Barahini Debi, my mother's grandmother, Boronani - literally, the eldest grandmother. Yet Nani is a maternal grandmother and this one was my mother's father's mother.

Perhaps the detail means nothing. Perhaps there's a story there. It makes my heart twist for my mother, for she knew the answer. Boronani died between 1929 and 1931, I think. But I want to catch the resonances in the cavern of her mind, between five and eleven - the probable ages when she was married and widowed.

I can remember my own life, though selectively, but well, during that period in my own life. At five, I got my first double promotion into kindergarten 3 and met Bharati Mukherjee. At 11, I was in junior year of high school, and received my music degree, since I was precocious.

I was developing a "nudge nudge" interest in boys. Since she went into my making, how was it to live through such a different experience? "Marriage" is a word. I must think marriage differently in order to enter my great grandmother's normality. A tremendous and enviable party for a five-year-old, or perhaps seven; I do not remember exactly what age she was at marriage. And Mother is not there to tell me.

Her parents loved her. They had researched the family painstakingly, attempting to assure their daughter's future social security. She would have been sent to her husband's parents' extended family house after puberty, but was widowed before that could happen.

Did the boy come for a visit sometimes? Was there a version of that nudge-nudge feeling toward this designated lover in the restricted public sphere of the extended family? To be widowed in childhood was a terrible fate. I wrote, some years ago, about the devastation of the caste Hindu widow, as an alternative to the visible violence of sati.

I just looked it up. This is what I wrote, in that quaint wordy prose that I fancied 20 years ago, and for which I have been punished all around, from all political spectrums, from the most traditional racist, sexist; and the most energetic anti-racist, feminist. And here it is. I quote: "The woman as widow, by the general law of sacred doctrine, must regress to an anteriority transformed into stasis."

In other words, the widow's lot was stagnation and a terrible feeling of self-hate. In that very essay that many, many people seem to resent, I also congratulated the collaboration of Indian and British reformers for criminalizing sati and commented on how it did not necessarily rearrange the women's desires, as did the class marked access to colonial subjectship.

Rearranging desires. That is how I understand my task, as a teacher. I am no one's mother, but many people's teacher. This is my forty-first year of full-time teaching. If you count when I started coaching, at 17, it's even longer: 1959.

Rearranging desires. That is how I understand my task, as a teacher. I am no one's mother, but many people's teacher. A paid teacher. A sort of servant, rearranging desires. That is why I understand the emptiness of mere reform. That allows me to see that widow remarriage is unevenly distributed across the caste divide.

If I were a Dalit intellectual, from the Hindu out-castes, or an aboriginal, this part of the story would have no poignancy. Widow remarriage was customary among Dalits. And apparently, at some remote date, even among caste Hindus. The word devara - the husband's younger brother as second husband - apparently signifies this.

Gayatri, I say to myself - you are writing a memoir; go back to your great grandmother; forget the historical analysis. Barahini's father, Biharilal Bhaduri, was a friend of Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, one of the chief proponents of widow remarriage among caste Hindus, in 19th century Bengal. Since I mentioned the uneven relationship between reform and class mobility, let me also mention that Vidyasagar's challenge to Thomas Babington Macaulay's infamous Minute on Indian Education (1842), as distinguished from his involvement in caste Hindu women's liberation, is now split a few ways in the history of class formation.

Will people stop reading this if I quote from a long footnote on Martha Nussbaum? Here, Toni Morrison gave me courage. My agent had said - don't make it too theoretical; this is a memoir.

And sweet and wonderful Toni said to me - tell her it's Gayatri Spivak's memoir.

(laughter)

Not just a memoir! So here is a bit from my footnote. I quote myself now. "The point I am trying to make is that, whereas Vidyasagar's literacy activism, aware of the detail of rural education, applies to the subaltern classes even today - his feminist activism applied to the metropolitan middle class to which I belong."

Biharilal gave Barahini in marriage, to Pratap Chandra Majumdar, Mother's grandfather, her Dadabhai. This appellation, too, was unusual. Why not the more common Thakurda? Why didn't I ever ask mother? It is of no importance to anyone and even that seems an unutterable loss.

What was that wedding like? There are accounts of such weddings in 19th century male reformists' autobiographies. They are clandestine affairs on moral high ground. Some years ago, Dilip Basu from Santa Cruz sent me a bit of print memorabilia that he had found in the India Office Library where this man, my mother's grandfather, on being asked why he wanted to ruin his future by marrying a widow, is reported to have said that he considered his life fulfilled if he could provide a future for a young woman.

I don't have the actual Bengali in front of me, and so, cannot give you an accurate translation. But it was a noble sentiment in its own way. He was not a rich young man. He had put himself through medical college by cooking for a family - a cook in a domestic family.

My brother located his name in the records of the Royal College of Surgeons as having become licentiate of the medical faculty - an LMF degree holder, rather less than an M.D. or an FRCS, of course. But still, an achievement in 1865.

Did the wedding take place before or after this? How did he get to London? Was there an unofficial dowry? I should say, since I'm not getting there, my father did the unbelievable thing of refusing a dowry - a very poor man refusing a dowry in 1928. That story . . . all I can say here is that we were brought up to despise the rich.

Was there an unofficial dowry? As far as I know, Biharial Bhaduri was not a rich man either. I must find answers to these questions, I say to Romila, in my mind. The question that I will not find an answer to, yet learn most from asking, is - how was it for her? If only.

This is the difference between an historian, as it were - not that historians are not imaginative - and a literature person. They learn from the singular and the unverifiable, and that is not there, or only there imagined.

How was it for her? She is, by now, 13. Much less infantilized than a middle class U.S. teenager. Yet, undoubtedly, sexually innocent. Was she completely an object of benevolence in the hands of reformist men? Or did she feel herself part, specifically, of a moral adventure?

Remember, I was precocious. I entered college at 13. And this is my great grandmother, after all. I must have got all that precocity from somewhere. Because I ask these questions, my mind shifts to the blithe lack of preparation with which, an Afghan or Iraqi woman, let's say, is constituted for Americans. And how easily their speech, reported by an interpreter, is further reported as evidence.

I sit at UNIFEM lunches, remembering the inaccessibility of Boronani. If only I could occupy with desire, the single woman's body at that remote wedding, encircle it and hold on. But I have another rather contradictory question, as well. If, in the general sense, singularity is something that is repeated difference in single humans, before we are persons or individuals - is singularity, in the narrow sense, exceptionalist? Subject to the law of the talented tenth?

Is Barahini representative? Most of us, writing memoirs, looking back to the past, make them representative. They become evidence in a kind of social record. But is she representative? Is she at least representative of a narrative of class mobility?

Does the study of single singular women illustrate this law as well? She wanted to do something independently, and opened a pawn shop in the back part of the house with an interior courtyard where I used to go for lunch when I took my B.A. exams. Thirty-six hours of written, for English - honest. No wonder I learned the language.

(laughter)

Was this common? Mother didn't think so - this opening up of a pawn shop by a middleclass woman in a good family. Here, a social historian may be able to help me. All I know is that my ma gave me a pair of earrings that were never redeemed from her pawn shop, saying to me - Boronani wanted to be an independent woman. In this generation, you are the most independent woman. These are yours.

I wear them sometimes. I think of my father's mother, Bimalasundari Debi, who died in 1928, just before my parents' marriage. The only photograph of her that was ever taken was when she was dying, held up by her two sons. I don't know where that photograph can now be found.

She died of cancer of the uterus, which was discovered only when she could no longer stand. They lived in a remote village in northeastern Bengal, in the shadow of the foothills of the Himalayas. She literally could not speak of a disease in her genitals.

I think of her whenever I go to the doctor for a pap smear; the hospital for a mammogram, as I will after this session. For I have the singularity of her body. I am tall like her. Big-boned. My father used to say, when I shot up like this at 11, that when his mother was married at 5 or some such age, nobody knew she would be so much taller than her husband. (laughter) And so, all her life she walked roundshouldered. And so my Dad would say, Gayatri, the air is cleaner up there; people are jealous of you because you are so tall, you know that? And this is where my posture comes from. We would go out for walks at 5:30 in the morning in Calcutta. That's what middleclass families did in those days.

And the cows would be out, because that was the milk service in my youth. And so, since I was constantly told -- "walk straight, don't walk like your grandmother" I was taller than everyone else. I would walk bent backwards, straighter than straight and I would say - tell me if there is a cow in my way.

(laughter)

I am tall like her. Big-boned. The only thing of hers that the family had, that lasted the move from the village of Dashahal-Andatia, via Dhaka, to Calcutta, a cataclysmic move related to the fact that my mother's grandmother was a remarried widow . . .. That will come in later in the memoir. Rejection by the village and all that stuff.

The move from the village of Dashahal-Andatia to Calcutta was, then, a cataclysmic one. The only thing of my grandmother's was a huge and wonderful quilt - now lost. And a metal waist ornament - gone also. I was the only woman in the larger family who could wear that waist ornament, because I repeated her frame. On everyone else, it just slid down to the floor. And yet, shame killed her. I have her body, but shame killed her. I think of her in locker rooms all over the world, as I strip publicly. She was a woman of power and control - a manager of the many details of my grandfather's farm. Yet, it was the weight of ideology that killed her. This is why reform is not enough. We must rearrange desires.

She could read a bit, but could not write - I've heard. What can it mean to read and not to write? To have a half share of the right to dispose of the phenomenal world? I think of literacy differently because I learn of it as I approach my formidable foremothers.

From my own experience over the last 15 years, teaching the children of the poorest of the poor and training their teachers, I have consolidated that sense that reading and writing do not just give access to the phenomenal world. It is of the right to dispose of the phenomenal world that we speak, when we speak of what reading and writing might bring.

In one of the rural schools where I have been training teachers, there was a girl child, a student - Shamoli Sabar by name - who was, I think, my equal in intelligence. There was such a gap of cultural difference between her and me that I could not be absolutely sure of this. She was utterly reserved, but she had moved to the high school, to the girls' hostel that I also run; and I thought I would get a little closer to her now.

But she died two years ago, of encephalitis. I bring her up here because she stood in the place of my village grandmother, although my grandmother might have found it peculiar to have been compared to a tribal girl. But can I be sure? Again, I think - if only.

The entire business of reading and writing is inhabited by my grandmother. A couple of years ago - I said this in Toronto - George Steiner and Susan Sontag were sitting in the audience. That I was speaking of my mother was audacious enough. They could not have known that in my thoughts was my grandmother of the village.

I said in Toronto that we betray contempt when we think of literacy merely as a primary vocational skill. Although it is that, too. Also if we think employability is identical with freedom. Although employability is indeed necessary for legitimate social mobility.

I speak from experience. My mother was an indefatigable social worker. At age 11 I learned how to grade papers. Precocious, right? Because my mother worked day and night to make destitute widows employable, my mother and I talked about what employability meant since I was a pre-teen.

I do believe that although employability is indeed necessary for legitimate social mobility, to equate it with freedom is a major mistake. Have we ever known what it is to read and to write? Two separate, but related activities. Performances that transform ourselves and the world. It is not just learning to read and to write, but learning to read and write ourselves, in every sense of that phrase - that I encounter every day in the work of teacher training.

Yet, reading also allows us to privatize the public sphere and to contextualize and decontextualize the other; at the same time, all reading transforms and holds the key to making public our most private being.

I heard stories of this village grandmother from Jyotsna Chakravarty, who is my second cousin, about 20 years older than I, who had seen her and lived with her because she came from my father's side. They left the village at the time of the partition of Bengal. My father had left as a student, in 1917.

They left the village at the time of the partition of Bengal into West Bengal and East Pakistan, in 1947. She had been hit so badly by her violent father that her reproductive system had been damaged. Hers was a peculiar singularity. She had her wedding arranged, while they were still in the village. But her new husband took off the day after the wedding, never to be seen again.

She insisted all her life that she was not single and remained carnivorous - refusing to go on the Bengali widow's vegetarian diet. It was, once again, my indefatigable mother who recognized her singularity in the '50s. Just after my father's death, my mother organized and started running the only working women's boarding house in Calcutta.

It was called the Sarada Sangha Mohila Nivas. She ran it with such efficiency that even people from the state government marveled at her success, where they had failed. And much of the success of the undertaking came from my mother's choice of the superintendent, Jyotsna, this woman, Pholindi, as we called her.

She was not institutionally educated, knew how to read and write. Steel in the flower personality at once - gentle and firm. Stern and kind. Looking after women who were "single" in the strict sense, the early years of lower middle class economic independence in West Bengal.

There is a bit here about the great aunt that I will skip in order to speak of the foremother who opened up my intellectual world. Boronani was from my mother's father's side. Thakuma was from my father's side. Now I come to my mother's mother's side.

My grandmother, Raseswari Debi, had two sisters - Saileswari and Bhubaneshwari. The youngest one killed herself at 17. It is her story I tell in "Can the Subaltern Speak?" In order to show, that whereas the British Indian reform of sati is much celebrated, when a young, single girl attempted to write resistance in her very body, she could not be read.

If only I could occupy with desire, that singular inscribed body. I have tried to understand how she felt as she waited for her periods to begin, so she could disprove what she knew would be the conclusion drawn from her hanged body - illicit pregnancy.

My modest reputation rests on two items - the introduction to Derrida and the commentary on Bhubaneswari Bhaduri's suicide. I am following that track, still. Why did I not mention my relationship to her, when I wrote of her? I wanted to see what would happen if she didn't have that certificate of authenticity which would reflect more on the people's approval of me, than on her.

And I learned a lesson from people's complete neglect of her, except for Abena Busia. Most people did not understand that I spoke on her behalf.

The extreme reaction came when my dear friend, Raji, said in public - some of you were present there - kindly commemorating the 20th anniversary of the speech that became "Can the Subaltern Speak?", that, had she lived, she would have grown into a fascist, nationalist grandmother - like some character in an Amitabh Ghosh novel.

Now, Raji would never have expressed herself so, if she had known the family connection. I was cut to the quick, of course. But the defense I offered was reasonable. Ghosh was representing in fiction a woman who had wanted to stand by the "self-styled terrorist freedom fighters." Bhubaneswari had joined such a group.

I would like to think that my pacifism resonates with her inability to kill. Yet, she supported armed struggle. When recently, in a public conversation with Judith Butler, I said in answer to a question from the audience as to how I could be a pacifist in the face of Palestine, that the problem with the situation in Palestine was that politics would not allow me to be ethical, no one in the audience knew that I was thinking, in my heart, that it was a lesson I had learned from Bhubaneswari, who was only 17 when she died. She was four years older than my mum.

And it was my mother who told me the story, and what kind of flip is given to a mother's testimony, in terms of veridicality? One doesn't know.

In my reading this morning, I cannot tell how it was she who opened up for me that line from the Mahabharata - a description of Queen Draupadi, dressed in her single cloth, stained with menstrual blood, dragged into the royal court. But I can say that it is perhaps from this single woman, a girl of 17 who engendered my intellectual trajectory, that I get my sense of singularity.

I repeat in difference, these singular women who are mothers in many different ways, who teach me that reproductive heteronormativity is simply one case among many - like a stopped clock giving the correct time twice a day, rather than a norm that we persistently legitimize by reversal.

The entire epic of the Mahabharata is about this insult to Queen Draupadi, who had five husbands. And in the beginning of the Mahabharata, because it was an oral formulaic epic and each bard had to know the whole story - the entire story is given in the form of a young boy telling it to the blind king.

And in that story, again and again, we hear that all of this disaster happened because a woman was brought into public while she was menstruating; while she was in her feminine nature - stridharma.

She was a queen. The queens, when they menstruated, were taken to a lower chamber and they wore only one piece of cloth until the menstruation was over; then they took their bath - healing bath, I suppose - because they were unclean.

That's the whole story behind Bhubanehswari also, that I'm asking you to remember. She used this menstrual blood as a way to inscribe her message and was not heard. But anyway, when the five husbands in the epic are playing dice in the main court - they keep losing and finally they wager her.

And so, when they wagered her and they lost, she was dragged up from that chamber downstairs. So the queen comes into the open court wearing nothing but that one white cloth, smeared with menstrual blood. This is the thing that led to the fight.

Now, as to how a feminist reads this, that's something else. This is not a presentation of a feminist reading of the Mahabharata, but I'm just saying that because my grandmother's sister dragged herself into the open court of death menstruating, only earned me opprobrium from people who read quickly, and said - Spivak refuses voice to subaltern resistance.

And I see women every day saying - the subaltern is speaking because I am, and so on. And I say to myself - my mother was wrong. She had said - you are using her name? I had said - ma, no one will pay any attention to her. And I was right.

So the queen is dragged up. She asks the oldest member of the court, who also has a marriage story - am I a piece of property that can be wagered? And the oldest member of the court, Bhishma, is not able to answer her.

This is not a bit from the Mahabharata that's given much popularity. If you have seen Peter Brooks' version, you certainly have not noticed this. But there are female versions of the epics, StriMahabharata, which are very different and in the best-known of them, the entire epic ends, not with the brothers climbing the hill to heaven, but Draupadi laughing in the devastated field of war, somewhere in the empty camps. Draupadi's laughter ends the women's epic.

Now, the bard describes Draupadi as nathavati anathavat. Generally, this is translated as - someone with husbands, as if an orphan. Natha actually means lord. I translate it differently. And as I said, I am the object of opprobrium from the traditionalists and the racists and the horrible guys, as well as the resenters of theory, the activists; as well as the folks who are in the traditional camp, faulted for being too European.

But on the other hand, the folks who are in disciplinary Sanskrit fault me for daring to offer new translations of these kinds of ancient texts. It's hard.

Nathavati anathavat: Lorded, and yet, as if not lorded. In my reading, each time the woman menstruates, lording has misfired in the suspension of reproductive heteronormativity. And I believe that's why, again and again and again, in the opening conversation that is the entire story, what is told is - she is in her feminine nature, in her stridharma, suspended.

A suicide at age 17, and a disgrace in the family, made me understand how the message in the ancient text was transactional. She became my allegory of reading of a powerful woman-moment in my past. And in fact, that way of reading is what allows us to be responsible to our students. I hope I have not been too theoretical for you, but I gave you my alibis before I began. Thank you very much.

(applause)

Fragment of an answer

I am really trying to write in a way that these women would understand. Of course they didn't understand English. But this is what I have learned from my schools as well. There are people who have no institutional education at all, ever, for thousands of years. Are the ideas such that they will travel without my compromising them too much? That doesn't mean I'm against education. I remain an educator. We shouldn't burn the universities. But nonetheless, my desire in this thing has been to write in such a way that they would find the questions answerable . . . I want to be haunted. Some people will know what I'm talking about. I want to be haunted by them. It's a hauntological autobiography.