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.
