If Only

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."