DR SAJEENA SHUKKOOR
Which is the more viable solution for the peaceful coexistence in a matrimonial alliance – Adjustment or Accommodation? Adjustment requires conscious efforts of reconciliation from either one or both the couples. If I prefer coffee to tea and my husband tea to coffee and if I make the drink catering to these preferences it falls under adjustment. Accommodation resorts to a sense of harmony in relationships. If I make tea for both, despite the differences in preferences or if my husband makes coffee for both, though he likes tea then it encompasses accommodation. If I insist him to have coffee or if he insists me to have tea, then it is annihilation.
Most breakdowns are the results of annihilation, where one partner wields supremacy over the other and resolutions are not possible for the constant conflicts. Imposing the interests makes the companion fret and fume and consequently the victim looks forward to an early chance for untying the knot.
When the partners adjust between themselves the relation lasts till a point of saturation. Then they weigh the volume of sacrifices each has offered to restore balance in the family. A stone may not break apart with the first strike. But the first strike also shall contribute to the final crumble. So, adjustment costs dearly.
Both the partners give mutual respect and dignity in spite of the obvious dissimilarities, when they accommodate each other. Mutual love feeds the relation with consistency and strength of bondage. Love is contagious and innocence and trust one shows infects the companion and the relationship thrives beautifully. The holy Quran gives an exquisite metaphor for this kind of relationship, “they are as a garment for you and you are as a garment for them”. (2:159) The couple gives warmth, relief and comfort to each other and conceals the shortcomings. As the dress, they are more intimate and they present each other in the most favourable disposition.
The Jnanpith Awardee, Ashapurna Debi’s short story entitled Matchbox included in the higher secondary curriculum in the State of Kerala provides the teachers in English with enormous opportunities to delve deep into a variety of issues related with women empowerment and man woman relationships. The mid-adolescents who are yet to hatch out towards their adulthood are too sensitive symptomatic of their age. Since prefrontal cortex, the logical part of the brain is in developmental stage, the adolescents depend upon the amygdala which is associated with emotions, impulses, aggression and instincts. The sort of code these teenagers decode from the words uttered advertently or inadvertently by their teachers, is of great importance. We cannot free ourselves from the duty of inculcating values by belittling the characters in the stories or plays comprised in the textbook as fanciful. Moreover, the team of experts and policy makers conceived and developed the textbook issue based and value oriented. Women empowerment is one of the core themes identified and incorporated in the very beginning of the textbook. So, the suicidal attempt of the character Nomita in the story poses a catch 22 situation to many a teacher while transacting. This article attempts to read the gap between the silence and scream of women characters in a few pieces of literature including the trilogy of Ashapurna Debi, which may assist the teachers to devise their lesson plan. In this process, this may resolve their dilemma.
The story Matchbox inserted in the unit ‘Flights of Freedom’ is preceded by the poem Any Woman in which the traditional and patriarchal concept of woman as an angel in her home is presented. True to the curriculum objectives the text is processed so as to focus the all-embracing power of a woman to bind her family in union and to analyze this theme in view of Indian women’s plight in the social context. The learners can take the cue from the final line Take me not till the children grow when they are steered into the story Matchbox.
The challenges that Nomita meet in her husband Ajit’s home is multidimensional. The joint family system (twenty six members as author puts the number of members in the family) in which the duo finds it hard to squeeze time and space for an intimate talk, Ajit’s suspicion of Nomita, his attempts of concealing the letters addressed to her, his malicious contempt towards his in-law, Nomita’s financial dependence upon her husband’s income etc., are a few issues unraveled in the story.
The core of the rising action in the story is related with the crumbled letter which Ajit purposefully concealed from Nomita. When she chanced to find that letter sent by her mother in Ajit’s pocket the conflict begins. Nomita’s fury relied on the fact that her husband maintained this ugly habit though she had resisted it many times with her anger, offences, reproaches, humiliations, sarcasms etc. A violent argument follows which leads to the climax of the story in which Nomita torches the anchol of her sari. Ajit rises to action in no time by extinguishing the fire and this leads to the falling action in the story and its final resolution.
Is Nomita’s action becoming? She must have undergone that much indignation at the hands of her husband; even then can we justify it? Ajit’s offensive remarks about her mother cross the limits a daughter can bear; should this give her the reason to resort to a heinous means to divulge her protest?
A discussion of the protagonists of the author’s trilogy sounds good in this context. Nomita’s action can be juxtaposed with the way the author conceives her female characters. Nomita also bears testimony to what the author points out about the heroine of her novel Prothom Prothishruthi, “I have thought and written mostly about women because I have seen their helplessness and that is what I know best. Over the years, great clouds of protests have accumulated, unexpressed in my mind, and Satyabathi the heroine of my novel is the expression of that protest.” i
The colonial Indian social structure was infected with abominable social evils like superstitions, prejudices, gross injustice to women etc., and Satyabathi’s fight was against these vices. She does not stand for a rejection of the patriarchal culture outright, but she was taking up the woman’s question in order to establish women’s rights. For instance, Satyabathi is treated mercilessly by her mother in law and consequently her husband Nabakumar asks her father to take her away back to home to escape from the torture. But Satyabathi’s decision is to stay back in her husband’s home and to obtain her rights. It is discernible that, to the author, male female dichotomy is not the central issue of concern. The novel ends with her decision to abandon her family and go to Kashi, when against her wishes her daughter Subarnalata is forcefully betrothed at a tender age.
Second volume of the trilogy entitled Subarnalata also attests Ashapurna Debi’s literary feminist activism. The author introduces her heroine, “Subarnalata is the helpless cry of an imprisoned soul…sociologists write down the history of a changing society, I have merely tried a curve to depict the change.” By the time Subarnalata got betrothed, her mother Satyabati had already initiated in her a drive for finding a liberated space within the patriarchal structure. Even while she was confined within ‘antar mahal’ (inner house) her quest was always to find a real open space symbolized by ‘dakshiner baranda’ (south facing balcony). Like her mother, she also treasures the value of education and even gives her sons and daughters personal coaching. Thanks to her mother’s guidance in her childhood, Subarnalata was well aware of her own rights though denied in the social milieu existed then. For example, a hygienic labour room could be accessed by the affluent class at that time and Subarnalata demanded for its proper sanitation.
Subarnalata could not accept herself as a machine for producing children. She even contributes in her own unique way to the nationalist movement surging in the country. She became a part of the Swadeshi movement by burning all her new clothes. Her efforts were to bring women from inside the four walls of the kitchen to stamp their own identity. A letter from her mother written long ago encouraging her not to give up her fight to live her own life was her stimulation at the times of bereavement. But her dreams were not consummated and she realized that her struggle to liberate her children from the existing subjugating power structure became fruitless. Bakul is her only daughter who identifies the real self of her mother and throws light on her mother’s deleted stories. In the last volume of the trilogy, Bakul Kotha, Bakul is an unmarried author who cherishes the matrilineal inheritance and delineates the trials and tribulations of women of three generations starting with her grandmother.
The heroines of Ashapurna Debi are not passive, they are strong women who try to assert their voice in a society wooing to listen to the voice of male only. Nomita is portrayed as an outspoken lady who speaks her mind, for the reason why no one attacks her outright, to her face. She is not a silent sufferer; she knows where to strike and when to strike.
The patriarchal narrative carved women in a way so as to abide by the rules of obedience and chastity and if she is beautiful all other accomplishments are useless. Ajit is the typical representative of the male dominated society where the position of a woman is that of a product. Beauty adds value to the product and nothing else is needed. She is a goddess in the silenced corner of the kitchen with her qualities of purity and meekness. Nomita’s protests and shocking arrogance does not provoke Ajit to discard her for two reasons the prominent one being her looks and the other being his confidence that never shall his real self be unmasked by his wife. Ajit stands parallel to Kedarnath, Subarnalatha’s husband who takes delight in the alluring beauty of his wife. His love for his wife is centred around her charms which Nomita is conscious of.
Readers have to keep in their mind that it was pre-independent India in which conservatism and cultural hegemony had taken its deep roots. Women’s role was subservient to men in every sphere of life. Born in 1909 Ashapurna Devi had first hand experience of marginalization inside her home. She admits in one of her interviews that marriage did not change her life. Like Mary Anne Evans who wrote with the pen name George Eliot, Ashapurna Debi also had to write under a male pseudonym when she took to writing and she received better acclaim for her works. When the male world later identified the real author as a woman, she was dismissed by some for the compelling force in her works.
Even in today’s so called civilized society women are denied opportunities, their voice unheard, their aspirations unfulfilled, their dreams shattered and their needs brutally neglected – the reason why initiatives at the governmental level need to be launched in abundance and curriculum comprised with women empowerment as major theme required to be set in order to uplift a section representing half of the population. Hence in the colonial India, it was daring indeed on the part of Ashapurna Debi who created characters distinguished for their assertiveness and boldness.
Woman’s silence itself is pregnant with meaning. It is noteworthy to recall the daring lines of Kumaran Asan’s Chintavishtayaya Sita written in 1919. What did the best man on earth, Sri Rama, (as the answer given to Valmiki) do with Sita? Kumaran Asan elegantly fills the silence of Valmiki, in the context in which he leaves Sita all alone in his ashram and goes with Lava and Kusha to the court of Sri Rama where he conducts Rajasuya. Asan explores the thoughts flashed through Sita’s mind on that eve. Sita, the embodiment of chastity and purity was asking herself whether she was a doll. In the concluding sloka, Asan describes the Sita who reaches Sri Rama’s palace as ‘proud’. She was not ready to testify her chastity, instead she sought asylum in the inner recesses of her Mother Earth.
Nora in Ibsen’s Doll’s House leaves her husband Torvald slamming the door behind her, she took such a decision with the perturbed thought that even after eight years of marriage they could not understand each other and all these years she had been treated like a doll to play with and to admire.
Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique) defines ideal woman stereotype as “finding fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination and nurturing maternal love” ii . Ashapurna Debi’s female characters go beyond this typecast. Nomita is no weak and meek, instead shrewd and bold. Her act of igniting the anchol was not an impetuous and irrational action. She was meticulous enough to choose the anchol and not any other part of the sari. Had not Ajit intervened well timed, Nomita was sure to save herself. Like the matchbox, she has enough material within herself to set ablaze a hundred Lankas, but she is hesitant to burn the mask of her husband’s high-mindedness. Like Satyabati and Subarnalata, Nomita also wrestles to assert her own rights including the right to open letters addressed to her by herself. Her venture was not the negation of man which makes her shells coloured, but to establish her personal identity and to broaden her space. She is not the Ophelia in Hamlet, drowned in the despondency caused by Hamlet’s indifference, but she is the Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, who wages a war against Benedick and often wins her battles.
I Datta, D. 2015. Ashapurna Devi and Feminist Consciousness in Bengal: A Bio-critical Reading. Oxford University Press.
Ii Friedan, B. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. W.W. Norton
District English Language Teachers' Association, Thrissur 