Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction

6. Fashioning New Fables: Suniti Namjoshi

Suniti Namjoshi’s Feminist Fables, first published in 1981, begins with a fable entitled “From the Panchatantra,” which, among other things, serves as an introduction to the discontinuous mode of the book and as an acknowledgment of the Indian sources from which the author fashions at least part of her work. The story is not a retelling of a fable from the Panchatantra, but in its texture and its ideological stance, it could well be a parody of this collection of stories. Namjoshi’s story is about many things: gods, brahmins, women, gender, patriarchy, and Hinduism, although the “plot” deals with a brahmin who desperately wants a son and with his daughter who, with equal desperation , wants to be a human being. At the end of the fable in which a woman is denied her request that she be given human status, the author/narrator sums up by saying that while Aesop’s fables include only beasts, the Panchatantra uses both beasts and brahmins. The deliberate reference to animals in a story that includes no beasts points clearly to the author’s perception of the status of women in the world depicted in Visnu Sarma’s popular Indian text. Obviously, the Panchatantra includes much more than brahmins and beasts, but the point made here is well taken. The text priviNotes to chapter 6 are on pp. 194-95. 121 CHAPTER 6 Fashioning New Fables: Suniti Namjoshi leges both men and brahmins and de-emphasizes women to the point that they are denied their humanity and serve as appendages to a male world. In another tale entitled “Svayamvara” the traditional Indian practice of a bride choosing a husband–ostensibly an egalitarian and non-androcentric attitude–is interrogated to reveal that in fact a male code of prowess and valour is being valorized in the ritual, rather than the free will of the woman. Comic and parodic in turns, the fable ends on a positive note with the woman marrying the prince only when he concedes that he has been beaten fairly in a whistling match. According to Namjoshi, Aesop’s Fables, myths, fairy tales, and in fact a whole literary canon works within an ideological framework that privileges men. It does not matter, as she demonstrates in “Myth” (Fables 106) that gods and demons endlessly fight each other or that Brahma is complicitous in prolonging the violence. In the end it is the fault of the goddess–“she gave in” (106). Discussing both the patriarchal and misogynist assumptions in his introduction to Aesop’s Fables, Robert Temple makes the point that in the world of Aesop, “women were relegated to such obscurity and powerlessness that they…were essentially slaves.…Second, there seems to have been no general consensus that compassion towards one’s fellow human beings had anything particular to recommend it” (xvii). Writing against this tradition has been Namjoshi’s major objective, although the degree of satiric denunciation has varied over the years. In her many interviews, she has been candid about the ideology that shapes her work. For example, in a dialogue with Pratibha Parmar, she makes the observation that her consciousness “is a lesbian feminist one and an Indian one in some curious way” (20). Speaking to Brenda Brooks, she insists that women have eavesdropped on male discourse for a long time and had to find a niche in the gaps and silences of male-centred texts. She also believes that now feminists in their own writing must necessarily transform the power balance and write for a female readership, allowing men to eavesdrop if they choose to.1 In short, her writing in the late 1970s and early 1980s was, like so much of the feminist writing and schol122 Counterrealism in Indo-Anglian Fiction arship of the period, concerned with deconstructing a literary canon and an ontology that insisted on privileging patriarchy. In a significant article, entitled “Poetry or Propaganda” she elaborates on the impulse behind her writing, and although she sees no purpose in literature that is purely tendentious, she has no qualms about writing with definite goals in mind.2 One of the tales in Feminist Fables, which deals with Philomel, makes it clear that art for art’s sake, despite all the assertions of the self-sufficiency of the text, is the consequence of having silenced the female voice. Philomel sings and is celebrated only because she forsakes the story of her rape...