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STOLEN PLEASURES, LOST DREAMS |
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Bengali Writers’ Workshop
17 – 19 November, 2000 |
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Nainan, Phalta, West Bengal
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Bangla is a language with a rich literary tradition, characterised by the presence of many women writers who have been writing with some visibility for more than a century now. They write in different genres: poetry, short stories and novels, essays and articles. For some reason, two kinds of literary writing have not been much favoured by women: plays and travelogues. The ‘little magazine’ culture in West Bengal is another special feature of the state, which means that there are many women who write regularly for them—7,000, at last count—though they may not yet have been published by the big houses. All in all, women writers in Bengal are by no means a small group.
The workshop formally began on the afternoon of 17 November, with 16 participants and three facilitators. Ritu Menon, the representative of Women’s WORLD in India, inaugurated the session with a brief introduction to the history of Women’s WORLD, a summary report of the seven workshops held earlier in India, and an outline of the objectives of this workshop. She emphasized that the workshop needed to be residential, as women are known to find it difficult to leave their homes while in the town or city they live in. Ritu said that the primary purpose of these workshops was to discuss the conditions under which women write. There was no pre-determined structure, nor were formal presentations necessary. Informal, free-flowing discussions would be the norm, as in all other workshops, to allow for intensity and richness. Earlier workshops had also demonstrated that an organic structure automatically evolves as discussions continue.
Once Ritu had clarified the context, self-introductions followed. It was interesting to note that almost all participants talked about their families, husbands, children and in-laws as part of their self-introduction. Those who had not mentioned such familial details were asked to do so, an indication of the important place the family occupies in a woman’s mind, and writing life. Kana’s longish self-introduction, in particular, immediately demonstrated the pressures that marriage can generate for a creative writer. However, other interesting details also surfaced. Which aspect of one’s life, other than the familial, for instance, is perceived as more significant than others? Some excerpts from the participants’ voices:
Chaitali: It is easier to introduce oneself through one’s writings, rather than through spoken words.
Nabaneeta: We are all Brahmins here, for we’ve tried to create a separate identity for ourselves. We’re dwija– twice born… I’m a teacher by profession, and a writer. I have two daughters, for whom I’d been married… I was a single child – no siblings.
Mandakranta: I was a medical student, but didn’t complete the course. I do not have a job; I only write. I live with my family– mother, father, brother, sister-in-law and husband. This is my second marriage.
Kana Basu Mishra: My father was interested in literature… Of seven siblings, three of us write, though I’m the only professional writer… But my husband considers my writing to be a secondary affair. I just sit idle at home, writing about a make-believe world… When I used to work, my husband never objected to it, but he’d create problems… It’s only because of my son that I’ve been unable to walk out… ‘Put that pen of yours down and I’ll give you everything’… But I haven’t stopped writing… I’ve bought a plot of land now, where I want to set up house with a flower-garden, and hold literary readings… My husband always says that I don’t understand the real world at all because I live within the four walls. He’s a good man, educated. But he broke a name-plate with my name on it, simply because he was afraid that more people would come to see me. Either I walk out, or I live with him as a simple housewife – that’s always been the situation. He used to tear up my writings when angry, but now I lock them in the closet . . .
Shabori: I teach in a college in Calcutta. Have a husband and a daughter. I try to write.
Kana’s self-introduction set the tone for the first session. Self-introductions over, Family as Censor automatically occupied centre-stage. The inter-relationship between marriage and independence, or the lack of it, emerged as significant. Participants felt that an unmarried woman does not necessarily live with an independent identity, gained effortlessly, in her natal family. Married or unmarried, acquiring a distinct identity is always a struggle. Sometimes, marriage from a conservative household into a ‘more liberated’ family acts as a stepping-stone to greater freedom, but marital ties create their own forms of censorship. This strange tug-of-war between family/marriage and freedom surfaced, especially through the one generation’s perceptions about women of preceding generations. Jaya pointed out that many of the participants would have had mothers who used to write and sing, but such qualities were never the defining features of their identity. Kanchankuntala recounted that her mother was termed ‘a shameless Christian’ and ‘a whore’ by contemporary society, for the simple reason that she had won a scholarship and chose to shift to Calcutta for her studies. Husband and wife being in the same profession also has its share of problems. Discussions revealed that not much has changed over time in this regard. It is a predicament that has continued, unaltered, from the time of Radharani Devi and Narendra Dev, both noted litterateurs and parents of Nabaneeta Dev Sen, to Chaitali Chattopadhyay or Mallika Sengupta, very much writers of today, as evidenced by the concerns that determine their writing.
Two generations later, Mallika and Chaitali face the same problem, that of deliberate comparisons between spouses, to play one against the other. But, there is a difference, and that is that these younger poets have not felt the need to give up writing.
The family emerged as a key players in the common experience of identifying women writers with their characters. Family members resent the portrayal of certain ‘sensitive’ or ‘unconventional’ or ‘immoral’ issues by women. They feel that the writer in question is deliberately embarrassing them by divulging family secrets and inviting readers to identify fictional characters with their families. In other words, families, natal or marital, would rather censor the woman writer than denounce the habit of identifying the author with her creation. Identifying the writer with the characters she creates emerged once more as a major problem. Jaya, Nabaneeta, Shabori and Mandakranta recounted personal experiences to substantiate this point. Every single participant acknowledged feeling this particular pressure in one way or the other. This opened up the discussions in various ways and helped raise several important issues. Participants were unanimous that such identification was never a problem for male writers. They also felt that this was a problem in any creative field, not just writing. As a case in point, Nabaneeta referred to Satyajit Ray’s Piku’s Diary and Aparna Sen’s Paroma. Both films focus on extra-marital relationships, but Paroma was instantly identified as an autobiographical venture, while no one ever wondered about Ray’s possible inspiration for creating Piku.
The debates around feminism clearly revealed that many of the participants were feminists at an individual, personal level, but preferred not to be called that as writers. Others felt differently. Sanjukta, for instance, argued that to be feminist was not like being a party member. A woman, she felt, experiences the world differently from a man at both the biological and emotional levels, and Saswati drew attention to the pitfalls of attaching too much importance to a media-created version of feminism. One of the most important aspects of feminism is its emphasis on increasing women’s choice— a feature that has been systematically underplayed, to the point of being almost obliterated.
The debate around feminism was not resolved by any means, but in the end there was a clear consensus about the need for a women writers’ collective—both to fight certain forms of censorship together, and to carry on important debates among ourselves. Such a collective, christened Shoi (a Bangla word that has three different meanings—a woman friend, signature, and enduring), was born then and there, after the workshop was formally closed but before the participants dispersed, and it has met regularly ever since, in Calcutta.
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Paramita Banerjee & Sumita Bandyopadhyay
Workshop Co-ordinators
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Partcipants:
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1. Anita Agnihotri (44) Poetry, fictional and non-fictional prose
2. Chaitali Chattopadhyay (40) Poetry
3. Esha Dey (61) Poetry and fictional prose
4. Jaya Mitra (50) Poetry, fictional and non-fictional prose
5. Kana Basu Mishra (54) Fictional prose
6. Kanchankuntala Mukhopadhyay (47) Poetry and fictional prose
7. Krishna Basu (54) Poetry
8. Maitreyee Chattopadhyay (60) Bilingual, non-fictional prose, children’s fiction
9. Mallika Sengupta (40) Poetry, fictional and non-fictional prose
10. Mandakranta Sen (28) Poetry and fictional prose
11. Mandar Mukhpadhyay (42) Poetry
12. Nabaneeta Dev Sen (62 yrs.) Poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction
13. Sanjukta Bandyopadhyay (42) Poetry
14. Saswati Ghosh (40) Non-fictional prose
15. Shobori Ghosh (44) Poetry
16. Swati Bhattacharya (31) Bilingual, children’s fiction and journalistic writing
17. Sumita Bandhopadhyay
18. Paramita Bannerjee
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