India is a deeply iniquitous society. Some of our people belong to so called "lower castes" and face discrimination from upper caste folk. Dark-skinned people face discrimination no matter what caste they are. Misogyny has free play in our public and private spaces. Poor people, and we have a third of the world's poor in our country, are on the margins of "mainstream" society. It is the light-skinned, upper caste and upper class male who has the major share of the representation that our popular culture, read Bollywood, so famously churns out. People like myself - a non-Hindu (it doesn't matter that my ancestors from centuries ago were "upper caste"), dark-skinned and middle class female - go largely unrepresented in our art and culture, except in a less-than-flattering light. So when I read someone like Toni Morrison I feel exhilaration! I feel liberated! I feel I'm looking at a mirror where I can see myself and my clan. And that is very useful as I'm sure you'll agree.
In the next few posts I'll be sharing an essay I had written, as an outsider looking into a very American story, on Morrison's novel, Sula. I wrote it last year, partly to clear my own head on issues like female friendship and sexuality, and also as a writing sample to be sent to universities. Although I did not get a place at the university I applied to, they wrote to tell me they liked the essay. I hope you'll like it too.
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Suddenly Nel stopped. Her eye twitched and burned a little.
“Sula?” she whispered, gazing at the tops of trees. “Sula?”
Leaves stirred; mud shifted; there was the smell of overripe green things. A soft ball of fur broke and scattered like dandelion spores in the breeze.
“All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude.” (pg. 174)
Dedicating her 1973 novel, Sula, to her sons Ford and Slade, Toni Morrison had written, “It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody before they leave you.” This good fortune is denied to the characters of Sula, whose lives are touched, sometimes marred, by the heroine after whom the book is named. Sula’s best friend, Nel, experiences the epiphanic moment described in the last page of the novel and quoted above, 25 years after Sula’s death. The moment also comes 45 years after Nel first befriends Sula. Forty-five years in which a young child had lost his life in their play. Years in which, the “stronger”, Nel, had been “selected” away by marriage, on the day of which Sula leaves town, only to return 10 years later to sleep with Nel’s husband, thus breaking the marriage up. In the culture I come from, this is more than what would usually happen between girlfriends. But girlfriends who form a bond of love, possessiveness and rivalry, one that is sisterly, not lesbian, and is ultimately more precious than the friendship of men… that is known to me.
It is not uncommon for daughters even in modern cities of India to be sent to all-girls schools, and even colleges. Dominated and ignored at home, many young girls find solace in their female confidants on campus. While their brothers explore the limits of societal norms more freely, girls form bonds of dependence with each other in taking liberties like late-evening movies at busy theatres and dressing in fashion. More rigid taboos associated with discussing sexual fantasies and defying parents in their choice of groom within the arranged-marriage set-up are harder to break. With globalization kicking in, women have become more assertive in terms of the careers they choose, what they do with their paychecks and who they marry. Pre-marital sexual experiments are also not uncommon. Through it all, there is usually a best girlfriend who provides succor. Not surprisingly, there are violent backlashes from men in the form of gang-rapes and other kinds of assaults on women. It is no exaggeration to say that it is a rare man who doesn’t resent his partner’s best female friend and it is usually marriage that breaks up the relationship between the girls. The girls too don’t look back and as years pass spend much of their energies trying to be as desirable for their husbands as when they were on the nuptial night or when they retained some of their individuality during the initial years of marriage.
It is a rare friendship that survives marriage. A standing joke between my now-married friends and I is that, after marriage a woman loses touch with her friends and a man loses touch with his emotions. The latter part of the joke may or may not be true but the first part may well be. Perhaps we women fear we are less attractive than our best friends, less interesting, and that our men might compare us with the “better” friend. The bond of marriage is still sacrosanct however. Yet, even with little danger of the marriage breaking up – men standing to lose not a little social standing if their wives leave them – women fear being compared. An unattached woman is likely to be disparaged in private and it is no exaggeration to say couples prefer to form bonds of friendship with other couples.
The husband usually actively encourages the distancing of his wife’s friends. A friend of mine, who had an arranged marriage while we were still in our final year of school in 1991, refused to discuss her nuptial night which some of us teenagers were desperate to know about. She said her husband had forbidden her to discuss with us any part of the ceremony except the public bits. Not quite brothers-in-law, husbands of friends need the presence of other men in the equation between their wives and their friends to feel comfortable. It then becomes an extension of the family and women go back to being scrutinized and controlled as they were in their parents’ homes. How good a wife is she, how “undemanding” of her husband, how faithful and how safe a keeper of his honor? It’s a tightrope walk and you better not fall. My former landlady told me how she had, in a fit of anger, once walked out on her “cold” husband only to be lewdly propositioned by her best friend’s husband who said she must be “broadminded” to have taken such a step. My landlady came back home to her husband.
In the next few posts I'll be sharing an essay I had written, as an outsider looking into a very American story, on Morrison's novel, Sula. I wrote it last year, partly to clear my own head on issues like female friendship and sexuality, and also as a writing sample to be sent to universities. Although I did not get a place at the university I applied to, they wrote to tell me they liked the essay. I hope you'll like it too.
____________________________________________________________________________
Suddenly Nel stopped. Her eye twitched and burned a little.
“Sula?” she whispered, gazing at the tops of trees. “Sula?”
Leaves stirred; mud shifted; there was the smell of overripe green things. A soft ball of fur broke and scattered like dandelion spores in the breeze.
“All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude.” (pg. 174)
Dedicating her 1973 novel, Sula, to her sons Ford and Slade, Toni Morrison had written, “It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody before they leave you.” This good fortune is denied to the characters of Sula, whose lives are touched, sometimes marred, by the heroine after whom the book is named. Sula’s best friend, Nel, experiences the epiphanic moment described in the last page of the novel and quoted above, 25 years after Sula’s death. The moment also comes 45 years after Nel first befriends Sula. Forty-five years in which a young child had lost his life in their play. Years in which, the “stronger”, Nel, had been “selected” away by marriage, on the day of which Sula leaves town, only to return 10 years later to sleep with Nel’s husband, thus breaking the marriage up. In the culture I come from, this is more than what would usually happen between girlfriends. But girlfriends who form a bond of love, possessiveness and rivalry, one that is sisterly, not lesbian, and is ultimately more precious than the friendship of men… that is known to me.
It is not uncommon for daughters even in modern cities of India to be sent to all-girls schools, and even colleges. Dominated and ignored at home, many young girls find solace in their female confidants on campus. While their brothers explore the limits of societal norms more freely, girls form bonds of dependence with each other in taking liberties like late-evening movies at busy theatres and dressing in fashion. More rigid taboos associated with discussing sexual fantasies and defying parents in their choice of groom within the arranged-marriage set-up are harder to break. With globalization kicking in, women have become more assertive in terms of the careers they choose, what they do with their paychecks and who they marry. Pre-marital sexual experiments are also not uncommon. Through it all, there is usually a best girlfriend who provides succor. Not surprisingly, there are violent backlashes from men in the form of gang-rapes and other kinds of assaults on women. It is no exaggeration to say that it is a rare man who doesn’t resent his partner’s best female friend and it is usually marriage that breaks up the relationship between the girls. The girls too don’t look back and as years pass spend much of their energies trying to be as desirable for their husbands as when they were on the nuptial night or when they retained some of their individuality during the initial years of marriage.
It is a rare friendship that survives marriage. A standing joke between my now-married friends and I is that, after marriage a woman loses touch with her friends and a man loses touch with his emotions. The latter part of the joke may or may not be true but the first part may well be. Perhaps we women fear we are less attractive than our best friends, less interesting, and that our men might compare us with the “better” friend. The bond of marriage is still sacrosanct however. Yet, even with little danger of the marriage breaking up – men standing to lose not a little social standing if their wives leave them – women fear being compared. An unattached woman is likely to be disparaged in private and it is no exaggeration to say couples prefer to form bonds of friendship with other couples.
The husband usually actively encourages the distancing of his wife’s friends. A friend of mine, who had an arranged marriage while we were still in our final year of school in 1991, refused to discuss her nuptial night which some of us teenagers were desperate to know about. She said her husband had forbidden her to discuss with us any part of the ceremony except the public bits. Not quite brothers-in-law, husbands of friends need the presence of other men in the equation between their wives and their friends to feel comfortable. It then becomes an extension of the family and women go back to being scrutinized and controlled as they were in their parents’ homes. How good a wife is she, how “undemanding” of her husband, how faithful and how safe a keeper of his honor? It’s a tightrope walk and you better not fall. My former landlady told me how she had, in a fit of anger, once walked out on her “cold” husband only to be lewdly propositioned by her best friend’s husband who said she must be “broadminded” to have taken such a step. My landlady came back home to her husband.
To be continued...
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