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

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

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