[Reader-list] Umbilical chords and family ideologies: 4 generations of Indian women in Kenya and Britain

[Harsh Kapoor]

Himal
March 2003
http://www.himalmag.com/2003/march/review.htm

REVIEW
Umbilical chords and family ideologies
Four generations of Indian women in Kenya and Britain, in a history 
of mixed genres and shifting
emotional registers which hums like a wire stretched taut

reviewed by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

Shards of Memory: Woven
Lives in Four Generations
by Parita Mukta
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2002
£16.99, pp 214

Over the past decade, in fiction and autobiography, South Asian women 
have begun to explore the stories of their pasts in an efflorescence 
of writings. Among others, Mrinal Pande, Manju Kapur and Suguna Iyer 
have accomplished this through the medium of fiction, while Sara 
Suleri, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Mira Kamdar stand out for their 
memoirs. This proliferation has to do, in part at least, with such 
authors' complex historical situation. Tied to the Subcontinent 
either by birth or ancestry, many South Asian women, particularly 
those of the middle class, have moved so far beyond traditional 
gender roles that their present-day 'liberation' and achievement lies 
in sharp contrast with the lives of struggle and confinement led by 
their mothers and grandmothers. This produces not only the lived 
contradictions of their lives but also the burden of an intimate 
knowledge of a past through the lives of the women they have known 
and loved, women from whom they have derived their beings, no less. 
It is this situation that provokes their search for understanding, 
both of the self and of history.

Parita Mukta's memoir derives, at one level, from the wish we have 
all known at some point in our lives to ask: in what way am I a part 
of history? Indeed, am I, obscure, alone, driven along by 
circumstances, of any consequence in the larger movement of forces? 
It is in the intricate weave of individual lives with the 
community's, the precise placement of human beings within larger 
events, the acute sense of the shaping of people's everyday choices 
by historical forces - without leeching their lives of agency - that 
the rich narrative texture of this book is produced.

But Shards of Memory is, as well, the work of a historian, though it 
wears the marks of that affiliation lightly. Parita Mukta's emphasis 
on family, on women in the family, and on a genealogy that is traced 
via the female line (Mukta is her grandmother's given name), means 
that it is also, specifically, a feminist history. And indeed Mukta 
belongs to a notable company of feminist historians of India who have 
expended considerable scholarly energy on recovering the lives of 
women. She owes an equal debt to contemporary British feminist 
historians on the left such as Carolyn Steedman, for whom 
autobiography is an intricately wrought product of social (class) 
history and psychoanalytically inflected understanding of gender 
relations within the family.

Work of this kind performs not only the necessary and never 
wholly-achieved task of 'adding women' to the historical account, but 
produces a paradigm shift in historiography by re-evaluating the 
criteria for what counts in the historical record. Thus the ordinary, 
whether describing events or people, achieves significance because 
the gendered perspective is, if arguably, necessarily personal, 
subjective, representative and inclusive. Generically, family 
histories occupy the terrain of the novel, and methodologically they 
mine myth and folk-tale as productively as they do the archives.

A tale of the ordinary
Now, a quick summary of this particular 'ordinary' story. The four 
parts of the memoir are focussed on four individuals: Ba, the 
author's paternal grandmother; Harshad, her father; Rajni, her uncle; 
and Sonpari, her daughter. Thus, this is the story of four 
generations (the last part includes the account of Mukta's own life). 
Beginning in the 1920s, when her grandparents arrived in Nairobi from 
Kathiawar in Gujarat to start their married life together, the 
narrative takes in events momentous and small, the defining one being 
her grandfather's death in 1948, leaving Ba a widow at the age of 33 
with nine children to support, the youngest six months old, the 
eldest still in school. It then traces the slow trickle of the family 
to Britain through the 1960s and 1970s, and ends with the present, 
the generation of Ba's grandchildren, dispersed in many parts of the 
world. Mukta's daughter, now 12, is partly British by birth and 
culture. Mukta herself was an active participant in the turbulent 
struggles of race and gender politics in Thatcherite Britain (one of 
the founders of Southall Black Sisters), moving away from the 
political scene in the mid-1980s out of sheer heartsickness. It was 
at that juncture that she entered the career of historical research 
and writing.

Parita Mukta

Mukta makes her family's ordinariness - a description and judgement 
that she frequently reiterates - serve several functions. One is that 
of truth-telling, a simple objectivity that is made to prevail over 
any desire to boast. The blazoning of success is a temptation that 
family narratives, particularly of the immigrant variety, are prone 
to. The men in Mukta's family followed ordinary professions with 
either ordinary success or outright failure - her father was a clerk 
in the Kenyan railways, her uncle Rajni owned a pharmacy in Britain 
which ended bankrupt - the women remained tied to domesticity. (By 
way of scornful contrast, Mukta drops an intriguing hint about a 
"philanthropist" who is now among the "top twenty Asian millionaires 
in Britain" who had appeared as a creditor in Ba's house soon after 
her husband died and "stripped it of all its possessions".) But a 
different and larger purpose is also served in recording the family's 
unexceptional qualities, which is to insist on the fact of survival: 
its survival as a family for over 70 years, in the course of which 
its members have dispersed over four continents; but also sheer 
survival, especially in the early years, the overcoming of starvation 
over seven years on a diet of bhakhri ("thick, crumbly chapatti", in 
the glossary). Hunger is the very leitmotif of this book, a topic to 
which we will have to return to, in order to do justice to its 
extraordinary forcefulness. Thus, success has been displaced in the 
telling of these life-stories because survival is the primary and 
more urgent account to render.

There is more at stake here, though: Mukta's is a family that made an 
ethical choice of living as they did. Their principle is one that 
Mukta, quoting Stuart Hall, states as follows: do not go out and eat 
this world. Hall's impassioned plea, made at a conference on 
children's education that the author attended, is recalled in an 
epiphanic moment in this book, a moment of "acute and intense 
recognition". Hall's words called attention to the "profligate use of 
both human beings and material resources" which Mukta views as a 
"central feature of history since the Columbian expansion". This is 
how the principle links to hunger, the focus of the second part of 
this book.

Varied appetites
It is the author's conviction that hunger leaves its indelible 
psychic imprint, whether as principle (her grandmother's austerity) 
or as pathology (her aunt Tara's shopaholism), on the people who have 
known what it is. Hunger appears at/as the origins (in India, Africa) 
of this family's history, which then moves towards plenty (in 
Britain, the United States) - it is not reified into a condition of 
perpetuity. But what it leaves nonetheless is its traces, not the 
less poignant for being borne as memory. "Š[T]he disjuncture between 
the plenty found in the present and the memory of hunger lingers onŠ 
Unable to view themselves in the social universe, my father, aunts 
and uncles have imploded, the fissures leaving deep grooves on their 
faces".

Within the larger perspective of global political economy, hunger 
structures the geography of the world into a South and a North. One 
of the offshoots of this division is that some people in the world 
are spectacles, and the others spectators, of hunger. But Mukta 
insists on exploring the phenomenon that disturbs this neat divide: 
she explores the difficult ethics of witnessing hunger. "You cannot 
just look. The act of witnessing is fraught with difficult tensions, 
and at times trauma. There are shocking nightmares, sometimes death 
by suicide". Without this understanding of the costs of affluence 
(even if only for some, let us admit), fasting-feasting as a way of 
conceptualising difference might have produced a merely vulgar 
polemic.

Hunger is susceptible to easy tropological metamorphoses into 'hunger 
for' - into a metaphor for desire, sexual appetite, driving ambition, 
immortality itself. But Mukta keeps the focus simply and literally on 
food: its lack, and its consequences. This integrity is reinforced by 
her careful marking of the gradations of hunger in order not to 
sensationalise her after-all-middle class family's experience. What 
they knew was endemic hunger, not the starvation found in times of 
famine. Of the latter, "May no one ever experience this", she writes, 
and the fervency of that prayer says more than the rest of her 
writing on the subject.

As much, then, as family memoir as historical document, this is a 
reflective book driven by a clear political and ethical agenda. 
Understandably, the narratorial tone is not always stable, moving 
from the deliberately sought-after historical understanding of, for 
example, the reform movements around widowhood in 19th century India 
('Archive Odyssey', 'Voices that rise from the Past'), to the 
passionate pity for her grandmother's privations following her 
husband's death:
  	We [her daughters and granddaughters] hover around her, like 
anxious butterflies around a precious flower. We are chary of 
drinking of her sweetness, fearful of depleting this, intent always 
to say: 'Oh, but you are beautiful.' And swift comes the reply: 'Your 
eyes have made me so.'

This is as naked a love as one can find written in literature.

Sacrificial loves
The mixed genres and shifting emotional registers create a palpable 
tension within this book, producing a hum as on a wire stretched 
taut. Inevitably, given that an account of this kind must negotiate 
generational and cultural differences in beliefs and values, there 
are other kinds of tensions as well. There is, to begin with, the 
idealisation of the extended family - of the love and closeness it 
nurtures in an alien and hostile world - that must contend with 
(indeed, is asserted against) not only the fact of the actual 
dispersal of the family, but also the exclusions it performs, the 
costs it extracts.

Only briefly, for instance, does Mukta reflect on her mother's 
situation in the family she marries into, the eldest daughter-in-law 
in a household where all resources had to be shared (her wedding 
trousseau, for example, was passed on to her sisters-in-law); and in 
which she 'lost' her daughters' love to a mother- and sisters-in-law. 
As well, the hard labour of keeping the extended family together in a 
single household, first in Nairobi and then in Wembley - the large 
meals that had to be cooked and served all the time, if nothing else 
- was without a doubt performed by the women, her mother and the 
other daughters-in-law of the family. The family romance is preserved 
by the problematic, surely even dubious, assumption that domestic 
love lightens domestic labour.
Family romance is
preserved by the
assumption that
domestic love lightens domestic labour

'Sacrifice' - for this is one of its forms - is, indeed, the ideology 
and practice that proves most troublesome in writing about this 
family. "My father, mother, aunts and uncles became adept at crushing 
the expansion of their needs, stamping down on novel ideas and 
tastes". This expresses the grimness of (a necessarily sacrificial) 
family ideology. Mukta's father dropped out of school at 16 to go to 
work to support the family. Her uncle Rajni ('Haba' is his niece's 
nickname for him) "gave and gave and gave; he asked for nothing". He 
and another uncle, Pushker, died, she writes, "having borne the 
burden of settling a very large migratory family in the very heart of 
Britain". She adds, with bitterness, "While none of us has gone out 
to eat this world - we ate him up". Mukta's condemnation, arising 
from a modern individualist ethic as much as stricken personal guilt, 
is kept in check by her personal admiration and gratitude towards the 
sacrificers. Her dispassionate, somewhat remote, historical 
understanding also diagnoses within this the persistence of a
"rural peasant household" ideology conditioned by a "subsistence ethic".

Sacrifice is accompanied by other religious values, passivity, 
exalted spirituality, acceptance, which are also both admirable and 
problematic. Mukta will not allow herself to be critical of her 
grandmother. "What if she had shown more courage", she begins to ask, 
but checks herself, "Stop, Pari. Stop this". Instead, she dwells on 
her strength, her calm, her transcendence of bitterness, her seeming 
oblivion even of suffering, her entry into the "dense yet luminous 
world" of religious faith, bhakti. Her grandmother's asceticism, 
which limits her to one meal a day, links her story to the thematic 
of hunger. Fasting is ordained as one of Hindu widowhood's ritual 
prescriptions, though for Ba obedience is a voluntary exercise in 
spiritual self-discipline. (Gandhi deliberately adopted and adapted 
this female religious ritual as an ethical and political praxis.) 
Thus, ascetic widowhood brings together (voluntary) sacrifice and 
(involuntary) hunger within a specific problematic of gender ideology 
to which I shall return.

Here is another of the tensions that informs the book. I use the word 
'tensions' rather than 'contradictions', which these moments could 
otherwise be taken for, in order to indicate that these crucial 
questions are consciously marked and allowed to remain as questions. 
The dilemma in judging the religious faith of others is one that I 
share (as a reader able to identify with the author in several 
respects). Between practising or at least accepting widespread and 
culturally 'authentic' ways on the one hand, and on the other making 
a commitment to a secular modernity that must
function as an antidote to Hindu fundamentalism in India today, the 
Indian intellectual finds herself in muddy and deeply troubled 
political waters.

Ladli
I share another of Mukta's political and theoretical commitments, 
that of feminism. I have suggested already that I believe Mukta to be 
disingenuous in not fully acknowledging women's problematic position 
in the (idealised) family. But in other places, the question of 
gender is addressed in powerful and original ways. One of these is 
the examination of the "actual father", as Carolyn Steedman has 
described the contradiction of patriarchy in 20th century Britain. In 
Mukta's family patriarchy is posed not so much against the lack of 
stature of the actual fathers (for the patriarchs are indisputably 
the breadwinners in the family), but against normative cultural 
definitions of masculinity.

These gentle unassertive men, her father and uncles, how could they 
fulfil male roles which demanded success and authority above all 
things? Haba was thought to be a "bit of a simpleton", "anyone could 
walk all over him"; his goodness was "interpreted as weakness, as a 
lack of manliness". Mukta re-evaluates these qualities in paying 
homage to them. More interestingly (and characteristically), she also 
finds a genealogy for the weak man in the romanticism of a certain 
kind of historical male type, the colonial Bengali babu. The icon of 
this type is Sarat Chandra Chatterjee's eponymous hero, Devdas, and 
especially his cinematic personification in the actor KL Saigal opens 
up a rich seam in the cultural terrain that Mukta mines.

Mukta opens up another site of gendering in the culture through her 
extended meditation on the figure of the ladli, the beloved daughter. 
Drawing on the legend of Sonbai, as well as memories of her own 
growing-up years - the fine education her father scrimped and saved 
to give her, the out-of-school treats he organised for her, the 
sheltering love of her grandmother, the companionship of sister and 
aunts - Mukta shows how the ladli becomes a particularly vulnerable 
social being, not only victim but also an agent of conflict in this 
culture. 'Beloved daughter' is a paradox that should be of particular 
interest to those pondering the murderous misogyny expressed in India 
as femicide (the killing of female foetuses, infants, young brides, 
or women's reduced life expectancy as a result of simple neglect in 
childhood), reflected in a national sex ratio that points to 37 
million "missing females", in the words of the economist Amartya Sen.
'Beloved daughter' is a paradox that should be of interest to those 
pondering the murderous misogyny
expressed in India as femicide

Mukta does not attempt an answer to the puzzle of why daughters so 
beloved are yet destroyed. But that simple misogyny cannot be the 
answer points to the need to pursue the question within, if need be, 
psychic spaces in the culture (which need not be Oedipal stories). 
Analysis must venture into the structures and practices of the 
exchange of women, the rivalries of love, the complicated (il)logic 
of its expressions, and the confused psychology of filial fears, 
frustrations, anger.

Mukta remains content with suggesting, as reason for her father's 
estrangement from her following her decision to choose an Englishman 
as a life partner, the likelihood that he was "raw" from "the 
injuries inflicted on him by a privileged race". No outsider, not 
even a reviewer, is authorised to probe such profound family events 
without presumption, especially since what Mukta reveals of the pain 
of a ladli's rejection by her father and community could not have 
been easy to write.

When she tentatively advances an explanation, it is in terms of the 
choices a daughter must make in this culture, between being a 
baapkarmi ("to be bound to the fortunes of the father"), and an 
aapkarmi ("to cut one's own path in life"). And having chosen to be 
the latter, she must pay the price in pain and isolation - but also 
must have the wisdom to seek reconciliation. But I cannot help 
thinking that explanations must go beyond ascribing sole agency to 
the daughter, into exploring the dynamics of father-daughter 
relationships in the culture more fully. If the framing of the 
choices in this particular, over-determined way is not questioned, 
the closure of this moral fable can seem too pat. (I must also admit 
that I found Mukta's device of narrating her own story in the third 
person in this section, in the persona of the mythical "Sonbai", 
irritatingly coy.)

Pause, exhortation
In writing of religion, masculinity, childhood, Mukta draws upon the 
resources of everyday popular culture, the devotional Bhakti songs, 
the films and film songs, and the folk-tales and myths, which are to 
be found on everybody's lips in South Asia and its diaspora. In this 
way, the author finds a language - really a strategic shorthand - in 
which to write a history and autobiography that might otherwise have 
been too vast, as well as too personal, to handle. It is a very 
successful device for the most part. Sometimes, however, the 
references to too diverse a range of European and Indian sources 
(Pinocchio and Narsinh Mehta at the same time, for example), can seem 
random and eclectic, though admittedly this does describe the 
Western-educated South Asian's actual hybrid cultural knowledge quite 
accurately.

This book's thematics of diaspora and cultural hybridity, the 
invocation of 'magical' stories, the fragmented narrative structure, 
the privileging of memory: a recitation of these features would 
appear to add up to a recipe for the typical postcolonial/post-modern 
contemporary text. What I have tried to suggest, through a greater 
immersion into its form and politics in this review, is that this is 
a book that also resists such incorporation. As a feminist historical 
account it transforms our understanding of both stay-at-home 
nationalism and of diaspora, both of which have tended to be largely 
gendered male in the most influential accounts and theories of these 
phenomena in the Subcontinent so far. The title's mixed metaphor of 
"shards" of memory that depict the "woven" lives of four generations, 
points to the contrary pulls of severe (though not contingent) 
selection on the one hand, and the desire to make (comprehensive) 
meaning of one's life on the other.

Above all, Shards of Memory is a deliberately didactic work, 
reflected in the bibliographies and reading-lists, the frequent 
pauses for self-reflexive takes, and the self-righteous exhortations 
to the reader on political issues. Its gravitas places it at a 
distance - generic as well as political - from the exuberant tones 
and the playful historical licenses of, say, Rushdie's fiction and 
its ilk. The didacticism is likely to be hard to take for some 
readers, but for others it will serve as a sign of the integrity of 
the self that speaks in these pages. At the very least its difference 
should mark the heterogeneity of contemporary South Asian writing.