'Crossing Thresholds': Radical Notes in Women's Writings ... - JPCS

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)Crossing thresholds:Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South AsiaMadhu SinghThe impetus for this paper came, unexpectedly, from a news report published in one ofthe leading national dailies of India about women‘s non-conformity to stereotypical rolesin terms hitherto unthought-of. Though tucked innocuously amidst news of greaterimportance, it caught attention because of its unusual subject matter -- something that thecivil society in India (read the Indian subcontinent) cringes to talk about openly anddiscretely tries to shove it under the rug. An eye opener, the reportage went like this (notquoted verbatim):It is 6 pm in Sangli, the sugar bowl of southern Maharashtra and the city that is secondonly to Mumbai (erstwhile Bombay) in its numbers of HIV/AIDS patients. As theevening descends, the red light area in Sangli's Swaroop Talkies locality swarms withcustomers and clients looking for nocturnal ‗pleasure‘ trips. But, Amirbi ShikandarSheikh popularly knows as Awwa,( mother in their local language Kannada) sits like aguard dog, fiercely preventing an eager customer from entering the red light area at thistime when her students (girls- young and not so young) are painstakingly learning thethree R‘s. They are the students of India‘s first school of sex workers and she, the ‗scarletschool mistress‘. Awwa holds the man by his collar, variously showering Hindi, Kannadaand Marathi abuse on him, then watching with some satisfaction as he makes a hastygetaway. She then orders customers already present on the scene to stand up straight forthe national anthem at India's first school for sex workers. It is a signal that class is overfor the day and time for the sex workers to start plying their trade.‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201179

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)Without any help from the NGOs or the government, single handedly she has been ableto run the school successfully for the last five years and continues to empower theseunprivileged ‗deviant‘ women. On a nostalgic and reflective note, Amirbi says:When we started the school people laughed at us. Especially the regularcustomers who said it's a nautanki,(farce) which will end in few days. Some saidthat we were doing it to get funds. When we started classes in the evening, thecustomers said that nothing would happen even if we got graduate degrees asonce a sex worker always a sex worker. There is no way out from our profession.But we don't bother what the world says. It's a fight for our dignity. My eyes werefull of tears when for the first time, I had a pen in my hand and signed in anotebook. (The Times of India, Feb. 6, 2011)This small but no less significant assertion of their desire to be literate against heavy oddswas, indeed, commendable. Linking the idea of protest, resistance, and non conformitywith the notion of transgression of boundaries, I intend to study multiple feministstrategies of ‗threshold crossings‘ in the context of women‘s writings in South Asia.The notion of ‗threshold‘ indicates the restricted periphery of the woman‘s place infamily and society. Hence, ‗Crossing Thresholds‘ serves a strong metaphoric functionboth in the context of women‘s writing and in the exegetical reflections. It is oftenequated with deviance and transgression and also freedom in the modern context in asociety that imposes behavioural conformity on its women in both metaphorical andliteral sense. However, contrary to the popular Western perception of Indian women as‗passive‘ and ‗eternal‘ victims, and ―paralyzed by a sense of helplessness‖ (Murray1987)women writers have written consistently and movingly about negotiating and resistingmultiple patriarchies and internal colonization. Through these acts of ‗thresholdcrossings‘, they chose to ‗transgress‘ patriarchal boundaries and articulate radical viewson urgent socio-political issues and also on sexual politics. The present paper, thus,‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201180

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)attempts to extend this evocative and emotive notion of threshold crossing by interpretingand equating it witha. transgression, subversion or devianceb. assertion of women‘s agency for social change andc. freedom from social , economic and political ‗unfreedoms‘(Sen 2000)The writings of South Asian women, despite a heavy hand of official and unofficialcensorship, reveal an intricate interweaving of the political and the personal. By‗personal‘ I mean ,what Chandra Talpade Mohanty maintains, not something ―as‗immediate feelings expressed confessionally‘ but as something that is deeply historicaland collective -- as determined by our involvement in collectivities and communities andthrough political engagements‖ (Mohanty 2003: 191). These acts of defiance, bothorganized and anonymous, serve as powerful tools of political/personal intervention.Literature can act as a radical tool for opinion formation, providing deep, meaningfulunderstanding of the problems, conflicts and struggles of South Asian societies. Manyscholars and authors have focused on South Asia but not much attempt has been made tosee the contemporary South Asia through women‘s eye. The feminist vision of socialtransformation and change has been observed in the textual creativity and in the writingpractices of women writers of South Asia.This feminist practice of ‗looking at‘ the worldcritically and creatively stems from a deeply collective nature of feminist thought andalso by the fact that ‗being a woman has political consequences in the world we live in(Mohanty 2003:3). Recent years have seen women writers from this region far bettervisibility in literary domain with the opening up of Indian offices by foreign publisherslike Penguin and Harper Collins which gave them opportunity and a platform to expressthemselves . With the Booker Prize to Arundhati Roy for The God of Small Things, theOnassis International Competition Prize to Manjula Padmanabhan for Harvest and thePulitzer Prize to Jhumpa Lahiri for Interpreter of Maladies, women writers' creativity hasreceived international recognition.‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201181

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)Also, the emergence of feminist publishing houses such as Kali for Women, Stree,Zubaan ,Women Unlimited aspart of the global women‘s and women‘s studiesmovements, created space for feminist voices and participated in feminist activism.Pioneering feminist scholars and activists in South Asia and abroad such as BinaAgarwal, Paola Bacchetta, Kamla Bhasin, Radhika Chopra, Radhika Coomaraswamy,Neloufer de Mel, Zillah Eisenstein, Rada Ivekovic, Indira Jaising, Kumari Jayawardena,Kalpana Kannabiran, Nighat Said Khan, Fatima Mernissi, Chandra Mohanty, MarthaNussbaum, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Shahnaz Rouse, Vandana Shiva and Romila Thapar;and the finest creative writers including Bama, Ismat Chughtai, Esther David, MridulaGarg, Qurratulain Hyder and Nayantara Sahgal were published by these womeninitiatives in print culture. Still there is a growing need to bring to light writings withfeminist commitment to social and economic justice and female sexuality by focusing onautonomous concerns and strategies which are historically, politically, and culturallygrounded.The present paper is an attempt to investigate and explore the not- so- large butdistinctive body of contemporary progressive literature by women in South Asia and itsengagement with the issues of caste, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, ecology and genderedviolence keeping in mind the specificities of these issues within different contexts thatconstitute ‗South Asia‘ and also the shared, unequal, and overlapping histories of theregion. (The term ―South Asia‖ is now applied to what, in colonial days, was commonlyknown as the ―Indian subcontinent‖ – a diverse mix of British India and a range of kingdomswith varying degrees of subservience and fealty to the colonial power.) This means thatthere is a need to explore ―race, class, gender, nation, sexuality, and colonialism not justin terms of static, embodied categories but in terms of histories and experiences that tie ustogether—that are fundamentally interwoven into our lives‘ (Talpade 191). And also, tothink relationally about questions of power, equality, and justice, the need to be inclusivein our thinking, and the necessity of our thinking and organizing being contextual, deeplyrooted in questions of history and experience‖(192)‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201182

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)The texts used in the present paper are either English translations from different SouthAsian ‗vernaculars‘ or indigenous writings in English. The reason for not including thecosmopolitan young women writers in English though far more accessible and visible orthe South Asian diaspora (with their attendant immigrant life and/or sensibilities),instead, opting for those who write in regional languages or ‗vernacular‘ (even thoughtheir works may be accessed through translation) is that the latter‘s writings arepreoccupied with contingent realities and grass root experiences that are often unknownto even to a majority of South Asians.This paper argues for a different academic practice in relation to women‘s writings andacknowledges their specifically literary and intellectual contributions of activisms. Thewriters selected for the purpose are from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.Their writings go beyond the domestic spheres of 'hearth and home 'and they themselvesfreely and boldly on a variety of themes. Though there may still be cases of theoccasional male envy, these new writers are not holding back in expressing the point ofview from a feminine eye without adopting feminist postures. Or, as poetess RukmaniBhaya Nair puts it, " Have wrung poems from households tasks/carrying water, child,sorrow... The issues that occupy these writers are no longer feminist or chauvinistic, but,socio- political issues of everyday life.One of the earliest instances of ‗literary radicalism‘ in the Indian Subcontinent , to usethe phrase made popular by Priyamvada Gopal in her now famous work LiteraryRadicalism in India: Gender, Nation and Transition to Independence (2005) goes back tothe turbulent years of India‘s anticolonial struggle .The year was 1931 when Dr RashidJahan a Muslim young ‗lady doctor‘ from a progressive family contributed two of herstories: ‗Dilli ki Sair‘(A Visit to Delhi) and ‗Parde ke Peeche‘(Behind the Veil) to anUrdu anthology Angare (Live Embers). Angare was edited by Sajjad Zaheer andcontained radically progressive short stories and plays by Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, RashidJahan and Mahmuduzzafar .These writers were young and charged with the desire tochange the world, and the anthology was an attempt to shock the reader into a new‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201183

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)awareness. Angare was principally concerned with social and economic justice, but thetreatment of sexuality, as well as its discussion of the issues that were always pushesbehind the veil was also provocative.Rashid Jahan‘s stories shot her into prominence as they were an expose of the evils offeudal patriarchy and domestic misery. To quote Priyamvada Gopal : ―Rashid Jahan -asa woman and as a doctor- writing about gender, medicine and the politics of space,became an icon of the literary radicalism of Angare itself , decried by some andcelebrated by others‖ . ―In progressive families she became a symbol of the emancipatedwoman; in conservative homes an example of all the worst that can occur if a woman iseducated, not kept in purdah, and allowed to pursue a career‘ (Zubair and Coppola 1987:170) Structured as a conversation between the women in purdah, ‗Parde Ke Piche‘discussed the oppressive domesticity, and the tyranny and infidelity of husbands and theirfrequent divorce threats even for trivial reasons. It also spoke about the ‗hithertounnameable acts‘ in upper class Muslim homes: reproductive, systems, foetuses,breastfeeding, sexual practices, sexual abuse, and contraception and otherunacknowledged problems affecting women‘s health. This ‗unveiling‘ of ‗the mystiqueand silence that enshrouds the female body and letting out the ‗secrets‘ of zenanaoutraged people who threatened Rashid Jahan of dire consequences if she did not retract.The ‗unmediated truths‘ of the private domestic space came out in the open as a result ofher daring act of exposing patriarchal and cultural oppression and by speaking for the‗other‘ and even about the ‗other‘. Years later, another radical Urdu writer writer, IsmatChugtai recalled in a 1986 interview:Rashid Jahan shook me up. I stored up her work like pearls… The handsomeheroes and pretty heroines of my stories, the candlelike figures, the lime blossomand the crimson outfits all vanished into thin air. The earthy Rashid Jahanshattered all my ivory idols into pieces… Life, stark naked, stood before me.‖‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201184

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)A few years after the Angare fracas and the furor over Rashid Jahan‘s genderedinsubordination, Ismat Chugtai‘s story ‗Lihaf‘(The Quilt)created another controversy bypresenting what was considered as ―the most suggestive and sensual representations ofhomoeroticism in modern Indian fiction‘ (Gopal 64). Neglected by an aristocratichusband who prefers to spend time with beautiful young men, a young bride Begum Janfinds physical and emotional fulfillment in her maid. The quilt that covered the twowomen and threw moving shadows on the wall functioned as a trope for the reworking ofwife‘s oppressive conditions, first into survival and then fulfillment. In 1998, a similartheme was explored in Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta's controversial film, Fire inwhich the marital crisis of the two sister-in-laws Radha and Sita , who end up in drawingmutual sustenance in a same sex relationship , are resolved through homoerotic pleasure.Lesbianism, therefore, unlike its Western reflection, takes on the connotations of anunequal power relationship, which the two women set out to equalise through their sexualintimacy without men.In this paper I have included writings across the genres by ‗home writers‘ from within theIndian Subcontinent such as, Kamala Das, Mahasweta Devi Saroop Dhruv from India,Kishwar Naheed and Fahmida Riaz from Pakistan, and Taslima Nasrin from Bangladesh .Thus, we have a poem by Kamala Das, a short story by Mahasweta Devi, an extract ofprose writings of Nasrin , and poems by the Pakistani writers .Renowned Indian poet and writer Kamala Das from India, who triggered controversyboth in her writing and her lifestyle, wrote in English and Malayalam, the language ofsouthern state of Kerala. The winner of several national and international literary awards,Das wrote frankly and explicitly about sexuality, often outraging orthodox readers. Herwritings most often focused on love and betrayal. Written in a confessional mode,Kamala Das‘s poem ―An Introduction‘ , a frequently anthologized piece, depicts her as arebellious poet who searches for cultural-linguistic as well as sexual identity in a postcolonialreality whish is so oppressive and overbearing. The first few lines of her poem‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201185

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)‗Introduction‘ introduce her to the reader as someone who is unfamiliar with the Indianpolitics but familiar with the names of the elite political bigwigs who rule the nation. Herstance as a writer who can ‗speak three languages, write in/Two, dream in one‘ shedslight on her polyglot ease tempered by her desire to be made free to write in a languageshe prefers. The politics behind language is rather irksome to her:Don‘t write in English, they said, English isNot your mother-tongue. Why not leaveMe alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,Every one of you? Why not let me speak inAny language I like? The language I speak,Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernessesAll mine, mine alone.It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,It is as human as I am human, don‘tYou see? It voices my joys, my longings, myHopes, and it is useful to me as cawingIs to crows or roaring to the lions, itIs human speech, the speech of the mind that isHere and not there, a mind that sees and hears andIs aware. Not the deaf, blind speechOf trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain or theIncoherent mutterings of the blazingFuneral pyre.At a time (in the 60‘s) when writing in English was akin to accepting the ideologicalapparatus of empire and writing in vernacular was considered a political act of resistance,Kamala Das chose to write in English. She was ―an heir to two poetic traditions, that ofMalayalam whose roots go back into the ancient Tamil Sangam poetry and medievalfolklore, and that of Indian English poetry beginning with Henry Derozio or ToruDutt…‖ (K. Satchidanandan, ―Transcending the Body,‖ ―Introduction to Only the SoulKnows How to Sing, 9).‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201186

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)From the explicit assertion of linguistic creativity, she moves on to the expression of hersexual identity as a child-woman imposed on her:When I asked for love, not knowing what else to askFor, he drew a youth of sixteen into theBedroom and closed the door, He did not beat meBut my sad woman-body felt so beaten.The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me.I shrank pitifully.As a reaction to this male invasion of her body, she defies the normative dress codemeant for women which is a patriarchal strategy to contain women into a stereotypicalmould. Refusing to conform, she took to wearing shirts and her brother‘s trousers, cut herhair short and thus ignored her womanliness. But the society at large that is out to forcewomen into submission took charge:Dress in sarees, be girlBe wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook,Be a quarreller with servants. Fit in. Oh,Belong, cried the categorizers. Don‘t sitOn walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows.Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or, betterStill, be Madhavikutty. It is time toChoose a name, a role. Don‘t play pretending games.Don‘t play at schizophrenia or be aNympho. Don‘t cry embarrassingly loud whenJilted in love …Trapped in a loveless marriage, she takes up a lover, much to the chagrin of the peoplearound her. This is her final act of defiance though tempered with heartbreaks, sorrows,loneliness and midnight bouts of alcoholism:I met a man, loved him. CallHim not by any name, he is every manWho wants. a woman, just as I am every‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201187

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)Woman who seeks love. In him . . . the hungry hasteOf rivers, in me . . . the oceans‘ tirelessWaiting. Who are you, I ask each and everyone,The answer is, it is I. Anywhere and,Everywhere, I see the one who calls himself IIn this world, he is tightly packed like theSword in its sheath.Going against the social imagination of a woman as sexually passive, gentle, selfsacrificing, monogamous and as the repository of the honour of the family, the poetnarratornarrates in a tone that is unambiguous, forthright, assertive yet somewhat tingedwith despair:It is I who drink lonelyDrinks at twelve, midnight, in hotels of strange towns,It is I who laugh, it is I who make loveAnd then, feel shame, it is I who lie dyingWith a rattle in my throat. I am sinner,I am saint. I am the beloved and theBetrayed. I have no joys that are not yours, noAches which are not yours. I too call myself I.Kamala Das‗s poetry, thus, pulsates with an urgent and compelling need to breakthrough the conventional barriers and establish a new tradition. Helene Cixous oncewrote:Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnablelanguage that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes,they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve discourse.(Cixous, 256)In the light of the above statement, it may be argued that Kamala Das‘s non conformistpoetry is a befitting example of feminist discourse on woman‘s body.‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201188

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)A prolific fiction-writer, journalist, and activist Mahasweta Devi‘s story ‗The Hunt‘maps the experiences of the 'tribals'( a tribal woman, to be precise) and tribal life underdecolonization. The central female subaltern of the narrative Mary Oraon is a half-Anglo,half-tribal woman who finds some measure of independence in her outcast status. She isharassed and stalked by a male logging contractor named Tehsildar Singh who earliercame to her village to buy logging rights. ‗Wow! What a dish in these woods!‘ TahsildarSingh comments when he first set his eyes on Mary Oraon. Despite her resistance to hissexual advances, he cannot forget her. Finally, tired by his ‗tireless single-mindedpursuit‘, she invites him on a rendezvous at a secluded place deep into the forest duringthe annual spring festival, Janiparab or the ‗festival of justice‘. According to this tribalcustom, gender roles are reversed once every twelve years. Women become hunters whilemen dress up like clowns amidst drinking and a festive merrymaking. ‗This year is thetwelfth year. Mary will become a hunter in this year‘s ritual hunt‘. Rejoiced at theprospect of having a long desired tryst with her, Tehsildar Singh lies in wait as shereaches the deeply wooded area near the ravine. ‗Today a small thing cannot pleaseMary. She wants to hunt the big beast! A man, tehsildar. She is approaching a ravine.Nobody knows how deep the ravine is. Bottomless, cold darkness‘.At the appointedrendezvous, as Mary drinks ‗imported liquor‘ offered by him, thetehsildar is flushed and excited with the urgent expectancy of the moment of union. Marycaresses Tehsildar‘s face, gives him love bites on his lips. There is fire of lust and passionin his eyes. Mary watches him and she notices his face change into an animal. She hasmade up her mind:--Now take me?Mary laughed and held him, laid him on the ground. Tehsildar is laughing. Marylifts the machete, lowers it, lifts, lowers‘.A few million moons pass. Mary stands up. Blood? On her clothes? She‘ll washin the cut. With great deftness she takes the wallet from Tehsildar‘s pocket. A lotof money. A lot of money. She undoes the fold in the cloth at her waist and putsthe money with her own savings .‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201189

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)Then first she throws the Tehsildar in the ravine, his wallet , cigarettes, hishandkerchief. Stone after stone. Hyenas and leopards will come at night, smellingblood. Or they won‘t.Mary comes out. Walks naked to the cut. Being naked in the cut she feels her facefills with deep satisfaction. As if she had been infinitely satisfied in a sexualembrace. (16)After the ‗big kill‘ she wants her fiancé Jalim. As women drink, dance and sing aroundthe fire at night and celebrate the Janiparab festival, Mary quietly leaves them and runsfast in the dark. She knows the way to Tohri where her fiancé Jalim lives. Then, both ofthem will then escape to some faraway place.She looks back to find ‗the spring festival fires … scattered in the distance‘ (17). ‗She isnot afraid, she fears no animal as she walks…Today all the mundane blood-conditionedfears of the wild quadruped are gone because she has killed the biggest beast‘ (ibid).Mary, thus, ‗activates ritual into contemporary resistance‘ as she kills her mainstreamexploiter-cum-potential rapist as part of the Jani Parab.Mahasweta Devi, in conversation with Spivak informs that ‗every event narrated withinthat story is true‘ (2001: xi). Recollecting the memory of a ‗light skinned‘ tribal girl in ayellow sari, she says:I see her in the Tohri market, bargaining for fruit and other produce, chewingpan(spiced betel leaf), smoking biri(tobacco leaf cigarettes), arguing and alwaysgetting the upper hand. Such a personality. Then I learnt what she had done onJaniparab day in order to marry the Muslim boy.(ibid)This incident of a woman‘s assertion is open to multiple interpretations which may besummed up as follows: First, according to Mahasweta Devi , Mary ‗ resurrected the realmeaning of the annual hunting festival day by dealing out justice to a crime committed‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201190

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)against the entire tribal society‘(Devi 2001: xi). Thus, in her we find the concretealternative to resist and destroy not only the injustice of gender politics but also theincursion upon tribal land and forests by feudalism, colonialism, and global capitalism.As a result, the subaltern figure of Mary Oraon become s a metaphor for tribals andmarginalized people all over the globe. The story of Mary‘s resistance also points to the‗profound ecological loss‘, ‗complicity of local developers with the forces of globalcapital‘ (Spivak2001:201)Secondly, Mary‘s act of killing her ardent suitor and sexual harasser and a wealthy loggerTehsildar Singh from the city, is a clear statement of transcending and destroying bothpatriarchies that are totally corrupt. Moreover, by this very act, Mary challenges thedominant structures of middle-class, upper-caste heteronormative femininity andgendered subjectivity. And, finally, Devi merges the ritual of the tribal women's huntwith Mary's murder of her suitor, suggesting that indigenous practices still provide afertile ground for myths that can be deployed to combat contemporary oppressions. As acreative artist, however, she would not like to allow the First World reader to understandher work as an exotic artifact of the Third.Contemporary women's writing in India has moved away from the confines ofdomesticity to engage with the historical, political and economic dimensions of the publicspace. Women's poetry in India has responded to communal violence in their own way.Writers like Saroop Dhruv ‗transcend their class-religion-region affiliations and adopt acosmopolitan liberal-humanist secular stance to document their anguish (Beniwal andMehta 2011) The creative response from women poets is not merely a gendered responseto escalating violence in the contemporary world and its devastating toll on women; but ismultifocal, complex and nuanced(ibid). Gujarati poet Saroop Dhruv based in Ahmedabadis also a playwright and cultural activist who writes modernist, feminist and politicallyengaged literature in her mother tongue. Her poem ( translated into English) ‗It‘s All inMy Hands‘ captures the agony of the poet at the communal frenzy and experiences the‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201191

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)dilemma of shared responsibility and commitment of the intellectual and the articulateclass towards the well being of civic society. Writing against the ‗conspiracy of silence‘,she chooses to ‗retrieve‘ her pen and write ‗without mincing (her) words‘. The poettranscreates the violence torn city in the opening lines of the poem:In a momentthe city turns to pebble, stone, dagger, razorruin, spark, flame, ashIn a moment,mobs with hammer, pickaxe, shovel and hand grenadepulverise the city.The present brings back remembrance of the fractured subcontinental history whenpartition was followed by riots and blood shed. Past creeps into the present, old memoriesare raked up by the present violence:My pen collides with the skeletons of historyWinds howl, like the death rattle of corpses waking from their slumberWhirling winds of death shake the very pillars of civilisationHurling dust into an ebbing faith in lifeSinking claws, vomiting blood everywhere.In a moment, vision is blinded and directions obscured,The skin of humanity flayed offA poet cannot merely remain as a mute spectator or an observer. Despite belonging to themajority community, she writes in a tone that is anti-establishment in tone and tenor.With this frame of mind she tries to salvage a writer‘s ethical commitment to the society.She has the courage and the determination to speak against atrocities committed againsthumanity in clear unequivocal terms‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201192

I: a poetI cannot exist as a mere reporter.Nor as a court bard.Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)I want to grit my teeth and speak without mincing my wordsabout this conspiracy.But for thatI must retrieve my penfrom a deep dark well —my father‘s well,my ancestral well,the well that is the final refuge of womenwho dive to their own shameful death.I have to throw in a fishing hook, and pull outmy pen, a brand new penwith my hands alone.Women‘s writing in Pakistan is inseparable from the country‘s politics, and from thebeginning their writings have been characterized by certain toughness. ‗The winds offeminism and the zeitgeist of postmodern times gave rise to a group of poets in India andPakistan who speak in a remarkably intelligent and confident voice. They may or may nothave studies western feminism, but they did share dissatisfaction with the status quo, notconcerned so much with the academic or theoretical aspect of gender bias as with itsblatant manifestation in the everyday life of a woman in the subcontinent. Long years offeudalism coupled with repression by regime fanned and fuelled the smoldering spark ofsuppressed anger.‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201193

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)The last three decades of the 20 th century witnessed the poetry of protest , at times ,vitriolic, often gloomy, but always self-confident. The emergence of Ada Jafarey,Fahmida Riaz, Kishwar Naheed, Zehra Nigah, Parveen Shakir, Sara Shagufta, AzraAbbas, and others on the horizon of poetry marked a new epoch in Urdu literature. Someof the poets resisted the stereotyping of women in Urdu poetry as a beloved with fabulousbeauty but with a fickle and callous heart. Their poetry became a vehicle of their dissentand protest against exploitation of women by a hypocritical and iniquitous society‘(Baig2005:9) Journalists like Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah, a columnist for Dawn, the Karachibased newspaper, discovered that women would lose their jobs if they wrote aboutpolitics instead of sticking to the accepted women‘s sphere of domestic issues.A distinctively feminine voice from Pakistan that is innovative, defiant, political, and selfaware is that of Kishwar Naheed. Her poetry dared to go beyond the prescribed accepted'feminine' realms to include issues of female sexuality, politics, and social issues. In aninterview with Rakhshanda Jalil for the Indian daily The Hindu (11/4/2001), KishwarNaheed explained her writing as an attempt to redefine the man-woman relationship.Rejecting being branded as a radical or a bohemian, she declared herself ―a realist‖ who―never let herself get pushed around by men or by circumstances‖. The 1961 FamilyLaws ordinance, which had seemed to predict an increasingly happy time for women,were in fact drawn up by women. Then in 1979 came Zia ul Haq‘s infamous HudoodOrdinances, ―which does not differentiate between rape and adultery‖. Educatedprofessional women formed the Women‘s Action Forum (WAF) protesting in the streetsagainst Zia‘s laws. They were backed by Pakistan‘s English language Press. Some of thefinest women journalists emerged during this period Rukhsana Ahmad translated Urdufeminist poetry, associated for many Indians with the fiery verse of Fahmida Riaz andKishwar Naheed. Naheed‘s poem against the infamous Hudood Ordinances i in Pakistan‗We Sinful Women‘ appropriately lent its name to a collection of poems by otherfeminist poets. In this anthology, a group of poets from Pakistan, who refuse to conformto both socio-cultural and literary traditions, react to oppression by calling attention to theway in which female experiences are policed and controlled by the state.‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201194

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)The following poem ‗We Sinful Women‘ depicts how ‗cultural production becomes atool of resistance in a climate of social repression‘ (Silva 2003:28) and underlies thesignificance of the act of articulation, as opposed to silence or oppression. It is a boldindictment of a society that uses custom, religion and even brute force to keep womendown. The poet writes fearlessly against social and political injustices and at thematerialism and sham religiosity that she sees around her.It is we sinful womenwho are not awed by the grandeur of those who wear gownswho don't sell our liveswho don't bow our headswho don't fold our hands together.It is we sinful womenwhile those who sell the harvests of our bodiesbecome exaltedbecome distinguishedbecome the just princes of the material world.It is we sinful womenwho come out raising the banner of truthup against barricades of lies on the highwayswho find stories of persecution piled on each thresholdwho find that tongues which could speak have been severed.It is we sinful women.Now, even if the night gives chase‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201195

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)these eyes shall not be put out.For the wall which has been razeddon't insist now on raising it again.Thus, the ‗sinful women‘ of the poem are not overawed by the repressive forces out tosilence voices of dissent; they are ready to defy their diktats and challenge themAnother Pakistani poet who has made a mark in the literary world by her outrightnessand defiance is Fahmida Riaz. Her poem ‗Four Walls and a Black Veil‘ (which also bearsthe title of the anthology) is considered to be one of her most controversial poems. Criticslike Aamer Hussein have found that this poem can be interpreted as her response to therise of Khomeini and events in Iran, when Islam was appropriated by the clergy in waysthat were designed to hurl women back into the dark ages. Cloistered and confined withinthe four walls, women in Islamic society of Pakistan are forced into silent submission andsubjected to suffering if they defy societal norms.What shall I do Sire, with this black veil?Why do you bestow on me this great favour?I am not in mourning that I should wear itTo show the world my grief. Nor am I sickThat I should hide my shameIn its dark folds…. SireIf you assure my life, may I tell you,Most humbly: There lies, in your perfumed chamber,A corpse that stinks. It begs for pityCover that shroudless corpse. Not me.Its stench is everywhere…‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201196

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)Because of her radical stance and courageous voice, Fahmida Riaz suffered wrath of theauthorities and spent a period of self-exile in India.Bangladesh emerged as an independent state at the end of 1971 through a nine monthlong war of independence against the then West Pakistan. But, the Nation-state is yet tohave a uniform civil code regulating the domestic life of its citizenry, and women inparticular, irrespective of their affiliations (Pereira2002). Recent years have seen avirulent fundamentalism increasingly manifesting itself in Bangladesh. The Bangladeshiwriter Taslima Nasrin needs no introduction. Despised by Islamists and fundamentalists,equally loved and loathed by the reading public, considered with caution by secularintelligentsia and fellow feminists, and ultimately banned by the state, the Bangladeshiauthor has the European Parliament‘s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought and theUNESCO Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance and Non–violence. An outspokenfeminist and secularist, Nasrin is a stern critic of the role of religion in the oppression ofthe women and the poor. She has worked as a physician in Bangladesh before her exile inEurope and the US since 1994.Despite the efforts of the Bangladeshi state to suppress her works on the charges ofreligious offensiveness, immorality and expression of sexuality, Taslima has created aspace for herself in Bangladesh‘s literary and public sphere. Her writings unsettles theissues of minority and of women and/in religion and bring to the forefront the issue ofliterature and its uneasy negotiation with state politics in the postcolonial state. Her novelLajja (1993), a harsh critique of Islamic politics, was the first novel to document minorityrepression in Bangladesh literature. Her Selected Columns or Nirbachita Kalam(1993)created waves in Bangladesh when first published. Along with Nashto Meyer NashtoGadya(1993) (Fallen Woman‘s Fallen Prose), the two volumes have created a significantniche for Taslima among South Asian feminist writers. Nirbachita Kalam was awardedthe Ananda Puruskar, one of the most prestigious of West Bengal‘s literary awards.Taslima says: ―My columns had created a storm inside offices, outside in the Press Club,‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201197

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)in literary gatherings. I do not know how to please readers. I simply know how my eyesfill up with tears as I write every column. Every sentence, every word in each sentencetakes shape from my heart, not from my pen‖(Nasreen 2004). ―The columns flow fromTaslima‘s belief that "from the dawn of civilisation, humans have been guided by societyand religion. Society and religion have always been owned and directed by men in everyage. State and society surely, but religion too had forever dishonoured women‖ (ibid). Inher columns, she builds a strong case for indictment against marriage, Vedic diktats,social mores for women, lusty Pirs and holy men and even the Hadish, which propagates:―If a man wishes to be physically united with his wife and calls her, she must come atonce, even if she is cooking‖(ibid). Or, ―If your wife does something shameless, banishher from your bed and beat her‖ (ibid). Thus, her assertions in the public and privatespheres, her notions of equality and social justice and her feminist ideas and theories arecrystallized through her indomitable spirit in the Selected Columns.The discourse of transgression, assertion and resistance presented in the paper suggestswomen‘s confrontation with the ‗scripts‘ laid out by the masculine dominated system inwhich they are muted ,completely silenced or even eliminated. These feminist writingstend to undo such ‗scripts‘ and rewrite the ways in which women confront and critiquethe intertwined power structures of patriarchy and authoritarianism In all the texts dealtwith in the paper, writers and their protagonists have crossed the proverbial ‗threshold‘ ofthe female space by critiquing communalism, questioning capitalism, condemningreligious fundamentalism and supporting female sexuality for these were not the usual‗womanly‘ topics of discussion and also veered towards immorality and promiscuity.But the time is ripe to accept change, to recognize difference and place it outside a powerrelationship, so that instead of hierarchical structures, equal relationships are madepossible.‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201198

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)BiographyMadhu Singh is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Modern EuropeanLanguages in the University of Lucknow, India.Works Cited and ConsultedAhmad, Rukhsana. We Sinful Women: Contemporary Urdu Feminist Poetry. London:Women‘s Press, 1991.Baig, Mirza Nehal Ahmad ‗Lifting the Veil‘ in Biblio: A Review of Books, vol X nos.7&8 (July –August 2005) 9.Beniwal, Anup and Amrita Mehta.‗Communalism and the Poetic Imagination: A Studyof Indian English Women's Poetry‘. Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and thePacific Issue 25, February 2011Das, Kamala. ‗Introduction‘. New Delhi: Everest Press, 1965.Devi, Mahasweta. ‗The Hunt‘. .Imaginary Maps. Calcutta: Thema, 2001.Dhruv, Saroop.‘It‘s All in my Hands‘.http://www.poetryinternational.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=9982Jadhav, Radheshyam. ‗Like every woman, a sex worker should know how to sign‘. TheTimes of India, Feb 6, 2011.Gopal, Priyamvada. Literary Radicalism in India. New Delhi: Routledge, 2001.Kumaramkandath , Rajeev . ‗Glimpses of the fire: Documenting the debates around thefilm Fire‘. The Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore .Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders. New Delhi: Kali for Women,2003.Nasrin, Taslima. Selected Columns. Trans. Debjani Sengupta .New Delhi: SrishtiPublishers & Distributors, 2004.Pareira, Faustina. The Fractured Scales: The Search for a Uniform Personal Code.Calcutta: Stree, 2002.Satchidanandan, K. Preface. ―Transcending the Body ―. Only the Soul Knows How ToSing. By Kamala Das. Kottayam: D C Books, 1996.9.Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 201199

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and SocietiesISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)Silva, Neluka. ‗Shameless Women: Repression and Resistance in We Sinful Women:Contemporary Urdu Feminist Poetry‘. Meridians Vol 3, No 2, 2003.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Appendix. Imaginary Maps. Calcutta: Thema,2001.Zafar, Manmay. ‗Policing Literature, Disciplining Taslima: State Censorship inPostcolonial Bangladesh‘ . Southern Postcolonialisms: the Global south and the ‘New’Literary Representations.ed Sumanyu Satpathy. New Delhi: Routledge, 2009.Zubair, Sajida and Carlo Coppola. ‗Rashid Jahan: Urdu Literature‘s First ‗Angry YoungWoman‘. Journal of South Asian literature 1987, 22(1).i The Hudood was a law in Pakistan that was enacted in 1979 as part of then military ruler Zia-ul-Haq'sIslamisation process, and replaced/revised in 2006 by the Women's Protection Bill. It was criticized asleading to incidents in which a woman subjected to rape, or even gang rape, was eventually accused ofZina (extramarital sex) and incarcerated , and defended as punishment ordained by God and victim ofextremely unjust propaganda.‘Crossing thresholds: Radical notes in women’s writings from contemporary South Asia,’Madhu SinghJPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 2011100