WomensWorld

NEEDLE AND THREAD SYNDROME

Hindi Writers’ Workshop

Anandgram, New Delhi
Oct. 30 to Nov. 1, 1999

	In the morning my eyes opened to paradise. Around me, the sweet twittering of birds, the delicate fragrance of harsringar on a cool, gentle breeze. This was Anandgram, a cultural centre located on the Delhi-Gurgaon road. Dotted around its several hundred acres were cottages with mud walls, groves of trees, a few peacocks, dew-drenched velvety grass.
	Away from the noise and pollution of Delhi, a world apart. As we gazed at red and white lotuses abloom in ponds, the water-birds of Hindi literature began to alight.
	--Ghazal Zaigam

The 15 women writers who participated in a three day residential workshop at the Sanskriti Kendra on gender-based censorship came from different parts of North India: Delhi, Lucknow, Jaipur, Bombay, Faizabad, Jammu. They write principally in Hindi, and have all been published (some have as many as10 to 22 books to their credit). Many are very eminent writers and have been recognised and celebrated, and they write in diverse forms: letters, diaries, short stories, novels, plays, newspaper columns, poetry, autobiography, screenplays and radio-scripts. They ranged in age from the mid-20s to mid-60s, and among them, can be said to represent much of the best in Hindi writing today.

There were teachers, women who work with trade unions and women’s organisations, media women, government officers. Beginning with the writers I knew who made many very helpful suggestions, putting me in touch with writers I did not know, I gradually made contact with others both in Delhi and outside. One constraint with this workshop was that there are obviously far more writers than we could absorb, who should have been present. Then, although we tried hard to have a special session with the four greats of Hindi literature—Shivani, Krishna Sobti, Mannu Bhandari and Dineshnandini Dalmia—they were unable to attend. The loss was ours, because their insights into the issue of censorship and on the circumstances of women’s writing would have been invaluable.

By virtue of being the language of almost half the country, Hindi has acquired a quasi-‘national’ status. Hindi literature, thus, has a presence and visibility among Indian literatures that other languages, despite their greater antiquity or strength, may not share. Hindi writers are read beyond their immediate location, publishing, distributing and retailing facilities are well developed, literary and popular magazines provide a forum for the dissemination and discussion of new writing, and there is a very large potential market.

Women have been writing for at least one hundred years in Hindi—which is to say, almost as long as it has been a “literary” language, for it is of relatively recent provenance. Women were part of the Progressive Writers’ Movement of the 1930s and 1940s; some, like Mahadevi Varma, for example, used their writing for social commentary; others like Krishna Sobti experimented with language; or, like Mridula Garg and Nasira Sharma, broke social or cultural taboos. Writers like Shivani privileged the ordinary or quotidian, and made of the dailiness of life, something memorable. Unlike Telugu, though, it would be difficult to mark a watershed in Hindi for the emergence of a “feminist” consciousness. Individual women writers may or may not consider their writing to be informed by a feminist perspective (many would stop short of calling themselves that), some would say they write a kind of social fiction, but of the writers present at our workshop, perhaps only two or three would say that they are avowedly feminist.

Our discussion on censorship was located in the experiences, and from the perspective, of the writers present at the workshop, but drew on discussions held at the earlier four workshops—Telugu, Urdu, Marathi and Malayalam. It also used the analysis and more general account of how we might understand the changing contours of the gendered nature of censorship, from a Hindi translation of The Power of the Word . This workshop was perhaps the only one in which we had writers who have actually been censored by the state.

Respectability

	Scissors to cut with, a needle and thread to sew my lips with. If I write my subconscious, the earth will be covered with paper.
	--Anamika

The enormous pressure exerted by cultural censorship on women’s subconscious makes the conflict between public and private unbearable. Anamika said that in her 15 years of writing experience as a poet and essayist, she had imposed a kind of “spiritual dieting” on herself. She spoke eloquently of the “needle and thread” syndrome in women’s lives, keeping their lips properly sealed, observing a stern “aesthetics of silence”. For middle class women like her, this aesthetics has been particularly oppressive. What are we so ashamed of and why? Who are we hiding from? she asked. Family honour, the compulsion to be a good daughter, a good wife and a good mother locked her into the “good girl syndrome”. She tried to find role models in early women’s writing and turned to women in her own family. She discovered that they all wrote furiously, but the values of forbearance and patience, of restraint and refinement had paralysed them.

Two writers who broke free of some of the taboos on subject matter are Mridula Garg and Nasira Sharma. Yet, as their accounts made clear, they have also had to pay the price of this freedom. Nasira’s collection of short stories, Khuda ki Wapsi,(Turning the Tables) confronts the issue of religion head on by constructing each story around one aspect of law in Islam: unilateral divorce, inheritance, custody and guardianship, and contract marriages, to name a few.

Mridula Garg was obliged to suffer a court case that went on for two years, during which time no further editions of her book Chittkobra could be published, and all because she had dared to write that the sexual act was devoid of any pleasure for her heroine—it was mechanical and repetitious, and her thoughts lay elsewhere. This was unacceptable! Both Nasira and Mridula, however, pointed out that professional jealousies and rivalry, and the fact that they are women, were the reason for their being censored. In both cases, the impulse came not from an over-zealous state, but from their peer group. As many participants noted, this is not unique to Hindi. But the situation today is somewhat different. Post-Salman Rushdie, Taslima Nasrin, Deepa Mehta, M.F. Husain and other recent incidents, all participants agreed that the threat to free speech is very real—and growing. Mridula Garg categorised censorship today as being of four kinds: political, cultural, familial and internal. Political censorship almost always follows cultural, and self-censorship certainly does so.

Maitreyi Pushpa, who writes mainly on rural issues, made a telling point in this regard;

she said:

Because I come from the village and from another class, I may not have experienced the kind of censorship or constraints on mobility that my fellow writers seem to have had. I started to censor myself when I found myself in a big city. I was in awe of sophistication, of citified ways. I felt a complete misfit in this society and gradually became disempowered. I felt the tyranny of English, the censorship of language

Visibility

	When I was less well known, much younger, I was far freer than I am now. I don’t know how my creativity has developed—all I know is that my writing has become more ‘dishonest’, distanced, deceitful.
	--Gagan Gill

Getting published did not seem to pose a major problem for most of the writers in the workshop; on the contrary, almost all of them have an impressive number of publications to their credit, and a wide readership. Obviously, this is truer of the older writers, but even the younger generation has been well received and is quite visible. Hindi clearly offers greater opportunities to writers because it has a well-developed publishing, reviewing and distribution system, but the dearth of an informed, sympathetic and sensitive critical environment was deplored by all the women.

Particularly regrettable is the lack of good women literary critics. The censoring out of women writers in the literary who’s who, the double standards employed by male litterateurs and powerful editors of literary magazines and in publishing houses, and the insiduous “personalising” of any evaluation of women’s writing are still the norm. Mridula recalled how words like “pornographic” and “obscene” were used to describe Chittkobra, thus making it difficult for anyone to discuss the literary merit of her work. The power of a critic—usually male—is such that he can distort the meaning of what a woman writes. Or he can simply appropriate it. Sudha Arora spoke of how, when she published her early stories as a very young woman, word went around that they had actually been written by her older, male mentor.

	When we are made aware that others have suffered like us, it is a great solace. We can also agree on questions of subject matter, on the constraints we face as women writers, on the issue of censorship. But how does this solve my problem of a search for meaning? Of content and expression? This is my own predicament—can anyone really help me solve it?
	-- Rajee Seth

Talking about her initiation into the world of activism, she spoke about her very first experience of visiting a mental health institution, and seeing and hearing, at first hand, the plight of women incarcerated there. She believes—like some others at the workshop, such as Lalitha Lenin and Chandrika – that writers must respond to social problems because they can use the might of the pen to make such issues into matters of public concern.

For Rajee, censorship cannot be seen as distinct from the entire creative process. Her writing she said, was born of sorrow, of a profound sense of futility, because she derived no answers from either human relationships or material goods. Like Mridula who said, “I did not write to escape pain, but writing did not give me any relief either,” Rajee, too, finds fulfillment only in writing. For both of them, any subject is the true subject of women’s writing, the struggle lies in the creative process, itself.

To try and conclude an on-going discussion on a subject as rich and complex as gendered censorship defies the imagination, and so this report ends with a poem by Shama Kaul who said, “To speak poetry is to speak the truth.”

They Threw Me Out

First they threw me out of my home
And then my city
Again and again
I was ousted from the city where I took shelter.
They say I will be thrown out of this city too.

In each place I left behind
Grew the fruit I had planted
Haunted by my absence.

They say my spirit

Spelt destruction.

Now, I have a bag of seeds
All tied up
To lean my back against.
Spinning around me

Is the earth
So spinning,
Some day, my home will
Spin into view again

And I will open my bundle
Never to tie it up again.

Ritu Menon

Workshop Co-ordinator

Participants

1.Anamika: (40) Poetry, criticism, short stories, novels.

2. Azra Parveen: (38) Poetry, short stories, novels, essays, autobiography, journalistic writing, spiritual writing.

3. Chitra Mudgal: (54) Letters, diary, short stories, novels, essays, plays, TV scripts, journalistic writing.

4. Gagan Gill: (45) Poetry.

5. Ghazal Zaigam: (32) Letters, diary, poetry, short stories, essays, autobiography, plays, TV scripts, journalistic writing.

6. Maitreyi Pushpa: (54) Short stories, novels, essays.

7. Mridula Garg: (61) Letters, short stories, novels, essays, plays, journalistic writing.

8. Mrinal Pande: (51) Novels, short stories, journalistic writing, autobiography, general non-fiction.

9. Nasira Sharma: (52) Short stories, novels, essays, plays, TV scripts, journalistic writing.

10. Pushpa Goswami: (41) Poetry, short stories, essays, TV scripts, journalistic writing, academic writing.

11. Rajee Seth: (64). Diary, poetry, short stories, novels, essays.

12. Shama Kaul: (40) Poetry, short stories, review.

13. Sudha Arora: (53) Diary, poetry, short stories, novels, essays, plays, TV scripts, journalistic writing.

14. Suman Gupta: (34) Essays, journalistic writing.

Sunita Thakur: (31) Letters, poetry, short stories, essays, journalistic writing, spiritual writing, academic writing, criticism.