The voice of the marginal player

As an 80-year-old first time author, Sethu Ramaswamy is unusual. Her book even more so. In a world obsessed with celebrity worship, a reader could be pardoned for showing more interest in the works of mothers "" other than 'unknown' 15-year-olds.

There's mom Madonna penning kid lit, or Mother Seth writing about a life well lived and family well loved, including suitable sonny Vikram.

Yet Ramaswamy is right when she assumes that her personal history would be of value to a 'larger circle' outside her extended family.

For one, like that other account by an 'unknown Indian', Nirad Chaudhuri's Autobiography of An Unknown Indian, Sethu's is not merely a narrative of personal history.

Instead, intertwined with her journey of 70 years "" from a carefree childhood in Kandy, collecting pictures of film stars printed on Cadbury's wrappers, to a child bride forced to give up her studies, bringing up six daughters, and finally author, writing to overcome her husband's loss "" is the journey of an entire nation.

Sethu divides her book into three sections: Kandy, Trivandrum and New Delhi. In each of these cities, her life, as 'an ordinary woman', representative of an entire generation, nondescript and uneventful, becomes the prism through which history, and sometimes historical figures, are viewed.

Through her eyes, then, we see "painfully sad images of the coolies". Plantation labourers in Ceylon as well as the slaves, "little boys and girls bought from poor families and made to work as servants in the house".

These were times predating the Sinhalese-Tamil trouble. But her father's work as a labour official, allows Sethu a glimpse of large-scale migration into Kandy.

Yet these are events at the very periphery of the narrative, whose focus remains her unburdened years till she needs to suddenly grow up with marriage to her cousin, Ramaswamy.

'Trivandrum', deals with this coming of age. The child bride is now a daughter-in-law defined by her joint family set-up.

For Sethu, life starts revolving round weekly oil baths that she needs to give reluctant children of the household, not being allowed to continue with her singing lessons though the daughter of the house does, and, well, her monthly 'confinement'.

As a menstruating woman, Sethu is confined to a small dark room, airless and cheerless, so far removed from the rest of the family that she is scared to sleep alone at night.

For those who have picked up this book with a view to gender or subaltern studies, this is also the most interesting part.

You may get a little lost elsewhere with Sethu's detailed recollection of her extended family: each mama, mami, cousin twice removed accounted for.

Tedious for a reader not interested in tracing the family tree. But it is here in the recounting of customs and rituals as applied to Sethu, the woman and Sethu, the Brahmin woman, that one is most rewarded.

The last part of the book, 'New Delhi,' deals with life with her journalist husband. As Ramaswamy goes from assignment to assignment and the family grows from one daughter to six, India too is in giddy motion.

The Independence movement is in full swing and World War II comes home. Congress politics and riots follow but all these 'bigger' events are at the periphery of a narrative centred firmly on the family.

In the inner courtyard, children "" and childbirth "" are major preoccupations. As also death. In the absence of family planning and trained medical help, mortality rates for women during childbirth are high.

But the death of a woman, we're told, is never mourned. Sethu recounts the death of her cousin where the "grief was very private" since "wives were never mourned, though the death of a husband was always mourned."

Sethu herself goes through several miscarriages and at other times hopes she will abort. "I ate great quantities of pineapple, papaya, hot chutney and ginger in an effort to drop the baby...."

Despite her faithful recording of such marginalisation, Sethu's voice is a mixed one. Battling between individualism and conformity, she veers between recording the discrimination and justifying it, using a patriarchal discourse.

"My husband was a great believer in women's education... Surprisingly, however, he never took my thirst for knowledge and my desire to educate myself seriously... my books were promptly give away to my younger sister-in-law who was not even interested in academics."

A couple of sentences later, she justifies: "I know my husband was passionately in love with me, but that did not make him blind to what he thought were my serious failings... I was not an efficient housewife and did not run a neat and orderly household...."

The biggest failing, however, remains that the narrative does not emotionally engage a reader sufficiently. Sethu remains strangely distanced from her story. Nothing exemplifies it better than her hasty dealing with the death of her daughter, harassed for dowry.

"Jayshree's tragedy is not an uncommon one. The emotional and physical battering of a young bride in India is de regem, but knowing it exists does not make the crime less heinous or the pain less agonising."

The reader, who does not quite know Jayshree since she has barely been introduced into the narrative, cannot empathise adequately.

The book is also littered with seemingly pointless details: dutiful recordings of a servant's entry and exit from the household and the like.

Plus there are repetitions. Sure, memory does not proceed in a linear fashion but is it necessary to subject the reader to each arbitrary turn?

The biggest achievement, on the other hand, remains that we finally get to hear the voice of a truly 'unknown Indian woman'.

The traditional paradigm of the heroic is done away with, as also the supposition that an autobiography is merited only by someone who is somebody.

BRIDE AT TEN, MOTHER AT FIFTEEN
Autobiography of An Unknown Indian Woman

Sethu Ramaswamy
Roli Books
Pages: 174
Price: Rs 295