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.
