UNBOUND: 2,000 YEARS OF INDIAN WOMEN'S WRITING
Annie Zaidi (editor)
Aleph Book Company;
372 pages; Rs 595
It seems oddly comforting to be reading an anthology of women's writing at a time when leading male scientists are trivialising the years of work that women across the world have done to be where they are today. Tim Hunt's remarks on female scientists being a "distraction" for men inside laboratories points to a larger narrative of women's identities being closely linked to their bodies. Every time I've debated with a male friend about whether women should be a part of the armed forces, the reasons for their exclusions are these: they menstruate, they can get pregnant, there's a greater temptation to rape them and - the most compelling reason perhaps - they're not supposed to play these roles in society.
In a country where even the educated bourgeoisie has such problematic views, Annie Zaidi's compendium of Indian women's writing is like a breath of fresh air. At first, Unbound seemed like an ambitious project. What is India and Indian? How do you define women's writing? Do men writing about women fall in this category, too? Ms Zaidi's painfully detailed introduction to the anthology answers many of those questions. She approaches the book and women's writing as a critic would, answering each question a critic would raise with meticulous precision. The opening paragraphs of the introduction to the book have me smiling. She writes about the need she feels to write her name on the books she buys, claiming them as her own. That, she says, is what women did to stake claim to their place in a society where writing itself was considered an act of rebellion.
Each of the 11 sections comes with an explanatory note from Ms Zaidi. Some of these sections - on secular love, spiritual love and marriage - are expected. But others - on food, children and battles - are delightfully surprising. Without taking away the wonder and awe of encountering a piece of writing for the first time, these are immensely helpful in putting the authors and their chosen subjects in context. Ms Zaidi also explains her choices of slotting certain pieces of writing in the particular category, affording us a rare opportunity into an editor's mind. I feel like I'm a part of the process of putting this anthology together, though I can only envy the editor for the vast amount of reading that she had to and could do to complete this project. After a rich glossary of notes, there are short notes on the authors and translators, too, that don't need you reaching for your smartphone to Google unknown names. The one thing that the book lacks in terms of structure is perhaps dates and timelines with the author's name where their work has been printed. Since all of the works are uniformly translated into English, it is sometimes hard to catch the cultural and social nuances of the time in which the texts were written.
The sections that stood out for me were the ones on children and food. Preceding the literary works on children, Ms Zaidi writes a fascinating note on her choice of the word "children" over "motherhood" or "parenting". This is because, she says, "children continue to have a great hold over women's lives even after they have grown up". I have often wondered: do women truly bring their personal journeys to their writing? An outstanding piece by Manju Kapur on the loss of her child partly answers that. The section on food is a fascinating take on women's own bodies, their relationship with food as work and the sensuousness that food brings with itself. My personal favourite, though, is Mirabai. Her writing has an assertive quality that makes her stand out, especially for the social context from which she comes. Some of the writing seems banal, too, but I am willing to give the editor the benefit of the doubt and blame it on the cultural idioms that are lost to an English translation.
Following the editor's example of meticulousness, I set out to read this book one section at a time. An hour into reading I realise I can go through multiple sections without realising they're different had it not been for the editor's notes. That, for me, is the greatest beauty of the anthology - its fluidity allows me to reach out to it, open whatever page I fancy and begin reading. For the nights I miss my grandmother, I want to read the section on "ends". For when I am struggling with the idea of marriage and children, I have three sections - on children, marriage and work - to soothe me. While I can't seem to commit to an ideology, whether feminism or not, these writings tell me that there's someone, in some era, who may have thought and felt the way I do today. As Ms Zaidi eloquently says in the book's introduction, "We cannot know what to do next unless we know what we have already done, or what was done to us."
