How The Traditional Cookbook Evolved Into The Food Memoir

Deya Bhattacharya

March 27, 2020

A few years ago, when I was studying abroad, I cooked my mother’s recipes with a vengeance – I would make yakhni pulao or khichdi and devour it with a sense of homesickness. I would beg fellow Indians to bring garam masala from their travels home, just so I could find some familiarity in it. Cooking late into the night also became the only way to survive my time out of home. Food and memory became so intrinsically linked that I was bemused at my own ability to find solace in the kitchen.

Now, several years into having my own home and being obsessed with baking all the time, I have realised how much comfort I derive from reading cookbooks and stories about food and cooking. Food and cooking express the untold stories of our lives, and it is reassuring to be able to read about people’s memories related to how they prepare and serve food from all over the world.

Through my essay, I will be looking at food, cooking and cuisines as depicted by traditional and modern cookbooks, and how the basic cookbook evolved into the modern food memoir. I will chart what spurred this change, and unpack how food memoirs have become a conduit for nostalgia and unearthing memories. Additionally, I will examine why readers prefer memoirs that focus on the art of food and cooking, instead of traditional cookbooks.

The Death Of The Cookbook

The memory of food is a thing of nostalgia, and cookbooks are the monuments that hold this nostalgia in place. Published in 1955, Dharam Jit Singh’s Classic Cooking From India was one of the oldest cookbooks detailing Indian cooking. It had elaborate narratives of India and its traditional dishes and became the first cookbook of its kind to be published in the U.S.A. The book primarily demystified several myths about Indian cooking, especially those related to the myth of the Indian curry. Journalist Santha Rama Rau in her New York Times review in 1956 described it as a ‘pioneer attempt’ to persuade Americans that Indian food was ‘not the gummy, pasty mess known here as curry’. A little more than a decade later, Rau wrote her own cookbook called The Cooking Of India, modelled after Singh’s structure, and packed it with the geography, customs and traditions of the country and how it influenced food and memory.

Traditional recipe books such as Rau’s and Singh’s were modelled on the lines of Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking and Irma Rombaeur’s The Joy Of Cooking, where a set of instructions were provided to professional and amateur cooks on how to handle classical ingredients. But these cookbooks failed to provide the canvas against which these instructions would operate, and felt almost pedantic in the way they looked at various cuisines. Moreover, they also fell short in creating a culture, where the mainstream traditions of cooking would give way to include diverse voices. In fact, many of these cookbooks were unidimensional – providing no space for improvisation, no space to interact with the authors’ own experiences and no conversations with the ingredients they had chosen.

Even in the 1990s, most Indian cookbooks did not break away from this formal voice. Madhur Jaffrey’s At Home With Madhur Jaffrey: Simple, Delectable Dishes From India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, And Sri Lanka, Mridula Baljekar’s The Complete Indian Regional Cookbook and Sanjeev Kapoor’s How To Cook Indian are all cookbooks that understand the best use of South Asian flavours. But these cookbooks only provide a stepping stone towards the nuances of food – they are purely instructional, with recipes and with little to no cultural context, almost removed from the authors’ own preservation of memories.

Readers, by this time, had also discovered that they wanted to converse with the author and the recipe alike. Matt Sartwell, the manager of the New York bookstore, Kitchen Arts and Letters, speaks about bringing a personal voice within cookbooks, a narrative that would evoke something deep in the reader. Keeping this mind, a good and personal cookbook would need to be a well-structured, interesting and witty narrative that would evoke vivid scenes in the readers’ minds, and have a plot so intriguing that it would thicken as quickly as the curry does.

Traditional cookbooks lacked this vivid and delicate balance between the personal narrative and the delivery of the recipe. Readers are not necessarily looking for a story within each ingredient, but sometimes, it is best to provide elements within a recipe that would strike a chord in their minds, and make them remember something personal about their own lives. This impetus would not just help readers to remember the recipe, but would also open a dialogue between the writer and the reader.

Because the cookbook could not stretch itself like a bridge to accommodate the desires and voices of readers, it led to the rise of a completely different genre of books that honour food: the food memoir. Very distinctive from the cookbooks of yesterday, these books, in addition to recipes, give us a narrative that not only highlights the ingredients but can also be read as a personal essay on the lived experiences of the author.

Interweaving Of Food And Memory

The genre of the food memoir is widespread and its success is supported by the fact that a simple plate of food can ‘set off such a frenzy of thoughts – of people, places, time, tingling all your senses at once – taking the form of a kind of soul stirring carnival in your head’. Food memoirs are not just about the recipes. Barbara Frey Waxman, in ‘Food Memoirs: What They Are, Why They Are Popular, And Why They Belong In The Literature Classroom’, tells us how food memoirs are ‘about the treasury of metaphorical associations that link food with love and emotional nourishment that are often present in the personal histories and confessions of food memoirists’ and about ‘associations of food with cultural identity, ethnic community, family, and cross-cultural experiences’.

Though the term ‘food memoir’ has only recently been subsumed by the lexicon of food writing, the genre is said to have begun in 1825, with the publication of French writer and gourmand, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology Of Taste: Or Meditations On Transcendent Gastronomy, where he took readers through a journey on the close links between smell and taste. He believed that understanding food would help people understand the world, famously saying, ‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are’.

Food memoirs are significant because firstly, writing and reading about food within a larger narrative can help process lived experiences; secondly, they legitimise quotidian experiences of preparing, serving and eating; and lastly, they challenge mainstream cultural scripts, in which alternative and vulnerable identities may not be accepted.  

Natalie Eve Garrett’s Eat Joy is an illustrated anthology of essays by 31 different authors about the magic of comfort foods – and their recipes – and how cooking these have helped them survive challenging times in their lives. The collection does something unthinkable – it gives you a taste of love, loss and grief, while also reminding you that food and cooking are restorative. Eat Joy does the work of seeing the author as well as the reader, thereby, creating a beautiful relationship between the writers, the food they discuss, as well as the readers’ own experiences.

Maira Kalman’s Cake, on the other hand, seems almost like a reverie – it is a cookbook for cakes, punctuated by Kalman’s Matisse-like paintings and stories from her childhood. The book is a collection of her memories – both happy occasions as well as sad – and the recipes are timeless, connecting the concepts of food and memory together.

Sadia Dehlvi’s Jasmine And Jinns and Lathika George’s Mother Earth, Sister Seed provide an experience of understanding the mundane processes of preparing, serving and eating food. Dehlvi’s book is a poignant journey into Old Delhi, as she weaves stories of her childhood with the beauty of Delhi’s ancient past and cuisines. It is her endeavour to become one with the city through food. Mother Earth, Sister Seed, on the other hand, is a rare food memoir that speaks of ‘our umbilical relationship with food’. The memoir gives us a story of the food that sustains us – its source, history, production, and its producers in faraway places such as Himachal Pradesh, Meghalaya and Tamil Nadu. The narrative is an adventure that helps readers reaffirm their connection to the planet.

Salma Husain’s The Emperor’s Table: The Art Of Mughal Cuisine challenges the mainstream cultural script by beautifully intermingling food and history. Taking us through the delectable cuisine of the Mughal Empire, the book looks at the Mughal Emperors through their palettes, their favourite dishes and their love for certain flavours. Husain’s book collects recipes from ancient Persian manuscripts, and shows us the evolution of each, as we rediscover the influence of the empire on our everyday cooking. Similarly, Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat challenges the myth that people only want to understand mainstream food cultures. Her book explains the hows and whys of cooking by using the four most elemental ingredients (mentioned in the title) to highlight how their history can help us explore little-known dishes and cultures.

Food is a remarkable prism through which we are able to see, reflect and appreciate life. The measured and scientific nature of traditional cookbooks are unable to hold space for this narrative around food and memory, which is why, in recent times, we see a dwindling of cookbooks, and an explosion of food memoirs.

We look towards food memoirs as they go beyond particular ingredients, cooking methods and recipes to give us a glimpse into the mind of the authors. They become written souvenirs, as a result – reminders of cuisines, places and experiences that are special. Food memoirs do what cookbooks are simply unable to achieve: they sit at the intersection of food and memory, giving readers something tangible to hold, in the kitchen as well as in life, as the pressure, of everyday existence and the cooker, is slowly released.

Carving Space For The Unheard Narratives Of Marginalised Womxn

Deya Bhattacharya

March 03, 2020

Note: The author uses the word womxn within this piece to be inclusive of the spectrum of sexual and gender identities. Inclusion in language begets inclusion in literature.

Does our present literary culture hold space for all people? Does the construction and interpretation of mainstream literature often other non-mainstream cultures and communities? And does this deliberate or inadvertent othering mute and silence some narratives, while aiming to do the opposite? How can we articulate such narratives of unheard, unspoken voices within the current but limited framework of mainstream literature? These are some questions I grappled with as I attempted to understand our access to literature and language today. These are also significant questions that should be posed to the gatekeepers of the Indian literary scene.

Language, and by extension literature, often alienates the unheard narratives of marginalised womxn. Non-cisgendered, trans, non-binary, queer, Dalit, and disabled narratives often go unheard as the texture of the literary landscape looks and feels out of reach because of this underrepresentation. When lived realities don’t find a place in mainstream literature, it stands to further devalue and dehumanise certain womxn, resulting in multiple marginalisation. Therefore, it is significant to acknowledge the ways in which that current literature silences certain voices, and how we can work towards foregrounding these narratives.

Minor Literature And Marginalised Womxn

To understand why narratives of marginalised womxn are often left out of the mainstream literary culture, especially in India, it is significant to learn and understand the place that English as a language occupies.

In her book The Sexual Life Of English: Languages Of Caste And Desire In Colonial India, Shefali Chandra talks about the superiority of English as a language in both colonial as well as present-day India. She speaks of the ways in which colonised Indians were convinced that ‘English [was] complete in all its useful and entertaining elements, and adequately expressive of individual thoughts, feelings and wants’. This created a hierarchy between the colonists’ language and our own. It is this disciplinary and phallocentric nature of English that deliberately keeps non-English speakers and writers out of the literary space. Or worse, their work is subject to over analysis and interpretation. This is a demonstration of power that relegates non-English speakers and writers to the margins and silences their voices.

This is the reason why comprehending the concept of minor literature is significant. According to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘a minor literature is not the literature of a minor language but the literature a minority makes in a major language’. Minor literature is political; even individual narratives are plunged into the political, and it has collective value.

Ruby Hembrom’s work with her Calcutta-based publishing house, adivaani, has aspects of minor literature. Hembrom is the first and only Santhal publisher who has been recording unheard, indigenous voices, and showcasing them adjacent to mainstream literature. She chose to publish in the major language of English as a form of protest. adivaani’s work is feminist and is an attempt to carve a place for minor literature within the mainstream literary community. Minor literature, therefore, is rebellion. It is evidence that literature can in no way escape the realities and power structures of our quotidian lives.

Writing As Righting

Meena Kandasamy, a Dalit-feminist writer and poet, has said that ‘[P]art of writing is to open up wounds.’ The function of unheard, unspoken narratives by womxn from marginalised communities is to propel change and drive movements, while gradually eroding at traditionally established literary boundaries. In essence, the writers of unheard narratives, the ones who strive to bring these stories to the forefront, are engaging in rights-based work, while struggling to access the knowledge and social mobility that the publishing industry brings.

In an interview, Kalyani Thakur Charal, well-known Dalit feminist poet from West Bengal, talks about what writing means to her – ‘For me, writing poems is participating in cultural movement. I write poems to register my thoughts and feelings. It does beyond the literary boundary. My poems address social issues. They are the poetics of age-old oppression against the Dalits.’ Her autobiography in Bangla titled Ami Keno Charal Likhi (Why I Write Charal) compares her time working in a traditional government office with Sita’s trial by fire in the Ramayana. The various books and journals published by Kalyani are about a plethora of topics including Dalit folklore and poetry, their attempt at reading and writing, short stories on famous Dalit womxn activists, to water crises in the world as well as Bangladeshi refugees.

From Tamil Nadu, Bama Faustina Soosairaj, a pioneer of Dalit feminist literature, wrote Sangati, a novel that can be described as an autobiography of a community. The story deals with the personal and private narratives of Dalit womxn, charting their social identity as well as their struggles towards transformation. The format of Sangati is not like a mainstream book of short stories or essays – the stories are not linear, the events do not seem episodic and some characters are banal stereotypes, and yet, Bama is able to show us the realities of Dalit womxn. Her other work, Vanman, talks about the atrocities by the police against the womxn of Parayars.

Kandasamy’s poetry is about the empirical truth, power and autonomy. In an interview, she acknowledges that she chose poetry deliberately, as a medium, as ‘poetry is intricately connected with language, and since language is the site of all subjugation and oppression, I think poetry alone has the power of being extremely subversive.’ Kandasamy’s understanding is that her narratives will be heard through poetry because that is how she offers up her resistance:

‘I dream of an english
full of the words of my language.
an english in small letters
an english that shall tire a white man’s tongue.’

Some books published by Zubaan Books, the feminist publishing house, also highlight unheard womxn’s narratives, alongside other literary and academic content. This is because they publish fiction and non-fiction that transcend conventional rules of literature and explore obscure thematic areas that are rights-based and feminist. A few of their books that mandate mention are Thingnam Anjulika Sanom’s Crafting The Word: Writings From Manipur, a collection of feminist writings from Manipur by a group of womxn writers, highlighting their activism at the forefront of peace-building in a region ravaged by armed conflict; and filmmaker and writer Anungla Zoe Longkumer’s The Many That I Am: Writings From Nagaland, a collection of short stories, poetry, first-person essays and visuals about the journey of womxn to reclaim their past, portraying the culture of the Nagas, who had no tradition of written language before the Church introduced it.

Blurring Conventional Lines In Fiction And Real Life

Unconventional narratives of womxn from marginalised communities also defy traditional rules and customs, of both language and gender roles. Existing frameworks and tropes of mainstream literature and politics have been rendered inadequate as they do not represent marginalisation. These identities exist in an intersection, and tropes from mainstream Indian literature are incapable of adequately capturing such nuances.

For instance, mainstream Indian literature is cultivated on the public/private divide – narratives highlight brave men fighting in the public sphere, while beautiful, sensitive women hold up the household in the private sphere; their lived realities situated only in these respective spheres, entrenching gender roles and biases. Non-mainstream narratives take the public/private divide apart completely, implying that a Dalit, queer, trans, disabled womxn has mobility in and out of each sphere, but both spheres may be equally inaccessible, violent and exploitative for marginalised and intersectional identities. Kalyani Thakur Charal’s poem no. 33 from Chandalinir Kobita puts forth this idea:

‘My grandfather was prohibited
From stepping into the tol premises.
My father became literate
Using palm leaf and ink of charcoal
After a long struggle.

My mother visited Durga bari
With cow dung on her left hand
To paste the place where she was standing.’

Besides blurring conventional lines within academia and activism, such unheard narratives also distort the rules of fiction, writing and storytelling, while deconstructing the modern novel, essay or memoir. One such book is Kai Chen Thom’s Fierce Femmes And Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir, which is a sort of a bildungsroman of massive proportions told through the landscape of mythological archetypes and fairy tale wonder. The Chinese-Canadian trans-woman writer draws up a fictionalised memoir that is populated by anthropomorphic characters that function as exaggerated reflections of reality, thus compelling readers to explore the complex lived realities of a trans person in the comfort of a fantastical world.

Other books such as Motherwit by Urmila Pawar and These Hills Called Home: Stories From A War Zone by Temsula Ao tell the stories of common people, mostly womxn, who have been survivors of caste oppression and victims of war respectively. These books focus on telling the stories as they are – they do not embellish or exaggerate; they seek and tell stories from the grassroots, because that is where the movement is, as opposed to mainstream literature that glorifies only luminaries.

Merely understanding the role of silenced or unheard narratives is not enough. The present literary landscape is obligated to look beyond what it deems as literature – writing is not the only way to document narratives, and English is not the only language that should be used. 

There are thousands of tribes within India, with their own languages and dialects and their narratives that are passed on through generations orally. The idea, essentially, is to radicalise the ways in which we view literature – making it inclusive of people, identities and formats. Another way is to provide more visibility to marginalised womxn writers by publishers through social and other forms of media. This would result in easing access of readers towards minor literature and provide recognition to these writers. Lastly, the idea is to be open, as opposed to rigid – open to understanding the ways in which our own biases and prejudices, in the real world, make it challenging for us to reach out towards the works of marginalised womxn writers.

The Power Of Women’s Testimonies In Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Testaments’

Deya Bhattacharya

September 21, 2019

Offred, the mysterious and unreliable protagonist of The Handmaid’s Tale, ensconced herself inside my mind when I read the book in 2011. She began to appear periodically as I witnessed the world through a character who represented dystopia, socio-political oppression and chaos. She appeared during discussions around abortion laws; she walked across courtrooms where sexual harassment allegations were debated; she became visible when the refugee crisis began. Canadian author, Margaret Atwood’s Offred was meant to be omnipresent and singular. She was a protagonist, who went on to become an allegory for global women’s rights.

Readers of The Handmaid’s Tale had made their peace with not knowing Offred’s fate at the end of the book. The nebulous conclusion of the novel left readers gasping for breath, but Offred had also become a symbol of triumph for women everywhere- she became a sign that perhaps there was hope, freedom and solidarity in the years to come. In November 2018, however, Atwood announced that there would be a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale called The Testaments. To her fans, she wrote in a press release, “Dear Readers. Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.” This was a bolt out of the blue for readers – after not having known Offred’s destiny for about 35 years, were we finally being let in on the secret? Over the course of several months, the book became, for readers, a sequel that we did not need but wanted. On September 10, 2019, Atwood unleashed The Testaments onto the world. 

The Story So Far

The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985, is the story of Offred, and others like her, and their struggle to survive in a dystopian future where America has fallen, and the Republic of Gilead has been formed. This is a place, where though women uphold the socio-political structure of society, they possess very few justiciable human rights, are not allowed to read and write, and their value in the world is determined by their ability to bear children. The novel is told in Offred’s own words, and is based on her view of Gilead, its practices and what occurred before the totalitarian state was established. It ends on a bewildering note with Offred being placed in a van that would take her towards freedom from Gilead, while the epilogue narrates a professor’s lecture on the authenticity of her story in the year 2195, based on a few tapes he discovered in Maine.

Atwood’s The Testaments is set 15 years after the final scene featuring Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale, and contains the testimonies of three other female characters, who have lived and experienced Gilead’s oppression in various ways. The sequel is not connected to the televised series by Hulu, which seems to have extended beyond the 1985 novel and continues with Offred’s story.

She does not feature in The Testaments, and yet Offred’s spirit looms over the book. The reader does not know what becomes of Offred – did she head towards doom or freedom? Did she survive or die? Is she still harbouring secrets of the totalitarian state? Did she flee to Canada or stay back in the oppressive Gilead? There is no firm answer, and yet Offred is everywhere in The Testaments, as the reader turns pages excitedly, nervously, furiously. Atwood uses this feverish anticipation with the glee of a writer who knows her readers much too well.

Writing Dystopias Through Lurid Testimonies

In Atwood’s own essay titled ‘Writing Dystopias’ in her book Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing, she says – “All fictions begin with the question What if. The what if varies from book to book . . . but there is always a what if, to which the novel is the answer”. The magic of The Handmaid’s Tale was that Offred spoke to us, from within the dystopia – as she walked from room to room, ritual to ritual, with her secrets at her fingertips, the readers moved with her. We knew dystopia because we knew Offred, and though, the book set her up to be an unreliable narrator, we believed her. Atwood, through Offred, was setting us up to experience what she believed was already happening – a blatant misuse of power, freezing of constitutional rights, and women as breeding vessels. According to The Cambrigde Companion To Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale was an “explosive conjunction of elements include widespread environmental catastrophe, high incidences of infertility, the rise of right-wing Christian fundamentalism as a political force” through the perspective of one woman.

35 years later, Atwood registers a different aspect of our popular anxieties – she builds the world of dystopian Gilead, through the voices and testimonies of three women. In an interview, Atwood says that – “’[i]nstead of moving away from Gilead, we started moving towards it”, while explaining both her new novel as well as the current state of affairs. Through the three narrators, Atwood focusses less on the brutality of Gilead’s oppressive regime, and more on how each narrator’s past experiences and disposition shape the individual characters’ reactions and responses to their circumstances. The interaction between the three testimonies gives the readers a glimpse into the  psyches of the characters, and how they make decisions about what amounts to ethical behaviour in an autocratic regime, where the individual ceases to exist and the community looms large. Should one negotiate with Gilead for better conditions? Should one start a revolution? Or should one sometimes condone the totalitarian state just to be able to live? These are questions that Atwood takes us through.

As The Testaments allows us to see and understand what created the monstrosity that is Gilead, it also upholds the power of the female testimony, and borrows from the events of the #MeToo Movement, where women from all over the world spoke up against serial perpetrators of sexual harassment and sexual assault. In the book, Atwood takes us through the testimony of three women – unlike The Handmaid’s Tale, where there was just one – in order to acquaint us with the horrors of Gilead.

The multiple perspectives in the book intermingle with each other and create a tapestry of historical memory of the violence and destruction subject by the Republic of Gilead. It also compares to the experience of The Handmaid’s Tale where Offred’s lone testimony seemed unreliable at the height of Gilead’s power, and readers take the three testimonies in The Testaments at face value.  

The Cryptic Language Of A Dystopian Subject 

A central motif of The Handmaid’s Tale was the metaphorical slicing away of the mind and the spirit from the body by the state since this was how Gilead could keep its power upon its people. In the book, the female body is abused, and this makes the subject of the female body very vulnerable and extremely significant. An illustration of this is when Offred describes a routine check-up at the government doctor as an “disembodied experience”, where her mind remains separate from her physical body. She narrates, “at neck level there’s another sheet, suspended from the ceiling. It intersects me so that the doctor will never see my face. He deals with a torso only.” The sheet symbolises the separation of her identity as a silent rebel in Gilead from her identity as a subject of Gilead by virtue of her fertility. It is also a deliberate detachment – in a world where she is defined by her body, she takes a free hold of her own thoughts and protects it from Gilead. This is the definition of rebellion for Offred.

In The Testaments, Atwood brings the concept of the body and the mind together. The personhood is no longer disembodied, and there is a fusing together of the mind and the body to create complete identities. Physical bodies become the rebellion, with the body also becoming a vehicle for the cause. As all three female protagonists speak their truths, their bodies and their spirit can no longer remain separate even if Gilead still holds power. With each testimony, the characters begin to own their bodies again, and unite them with their minds.

Atwood indicates subtle subversions in Gilead when she uses the cryptic language of the subjects of a dystopian state. She shows that rebellions and revolutions need not be a physical battle between the powerful state and its subjects, and could be through thoughts, feelings and autonomy of the subjects.

Before The Testaments came out, I asked myself whether a sequel is really necessary. And then when I read it, I realised why Atwood wrote it – she wrote it to instil hopefulness in a world where it is increasingly felt as if the quest for political power usurps important voices. The book is also about a collective of extraordinary women who speak their truth, and rebel against Gilead in their own ways. It does feel less honest than The Handmaid’s Tale, but so do all real and mundane stories. Atwood’s most recent work does not exist to puncture our fantasies about freedom, but to become a vehicle for aspirations in a world that, in the future, might not allow them.

Have you read The Testaments? What did you think of it? Share your thoughts below.

An Ecofeminist Reading Of Margaret Atwood’s Work

Deya Bhattacharya

September 20, 2019

For as long as I have read Atwood’s works, her identity as a feminist writer has remained ensconced within the paradigm of dystopia, oppression and women’s rights. As an ardent admirer of Atwood’s prose and poetry, I was taken aback when I realised that I had a very unidimensional view of her literary work. While she is best known for being a feminist writer, Atwood also considers herself an environmental activist, and a large portion of her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have had some elements of, or were spun keeping the environment, nature and climate change at the centre.

On a cursory reading, it may seem as if Atwood’s immensely acclaimed work does not explicitly mention environmental crises; however, a more careful reading shows that they highlight undeniable connections between women’s rights and environmental justice. In fact, Atwood’s works often reflect a deep connection between an erosion of the climate with the erosion of women’s rights.

The Female Body As Landscape And Nature

A plethora of Atwood’s work, especially her poetry, seems significantly tied to ecofeminism, which is a brand of feminism that draws on the concept of gender to investigate the relationships between human beings and the natural world. While the term was introduced by feminist Francoise d’Eaubonne in 1974, Mary Mellor, an ecofeminist and academic, defines the concept as “… a movement that sees a connection between the exploitation and degradation of the natural world, and the subordination and oppression of women”.

At the outset, it is impossible to understand whether Atwood wrote her poetry with an ecofeminist agenda – there is no essay or documentation of this rationale. And yet, the reader cannot help but see environment, nature and climate action as motifs within her poetic works. Atwood’s childhood as the daughter of an entomologist, and living deep within the backwoods of northern Quebec may also explain the imagery of nature within her poetry.

In the poem, ‘She Considers Evading Him’, Atwood compares women’s identities to nature – their flexibility and malleability in a patriarchal world, where both women and nature have to alter themselves in order to be acceptable to men. It also speaks to women and nature alike occupying inflexible space in the world where they “could grow bark and become a shrub, or switch back in time.” This changing identity, she says, “would be inconvenient but final.”

In Surfacing, the famous lines “I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees and animals move and grow, I am a place” play out as the nameless protagonist’s search for her father, and also the search for her inner-self, and is indicated through her gradual submersion into nature. Atwood unearths the strange connection between the natural world and the feminine vision, as the protagonist is able to bridge the gap between the artificial construct of herself and her true self when she encounters nature. In doing so, the protagonist raises her consciousness of the victimisation of women. The language, characters as well as the trajectory of the novel reflect a world very true to our own – one that oppresses nature and femininity.

Atwood’s celebrated poem, This Is A Photograph Of Me explores the tension between an obscured, surreal reality and a factual one, that is guided by the imagery of the Canadian landscape. She writes – “It is difficult to say where/ precisely, or to say/ how large or small I am:/ the effect of water/ on light is a distortion” as she alludes to the woman in the photograph, whose identity is marred by nature, but also protected by it. In this way, Atwood’s work intertwines the environment and women – as victims but also as participants of their own emancipation – where each protects and is protected by the other.

The Politics Of Food, Bodies And The Environment

Atwood borrows heavily from Carol J Adams’ theory on the ‘absent referent’ where through a process of objectification, fragmentation and consumption through technology, language and cultural representation, a breeding ground is created for the oppression of animals (and by extension, of women). In this process, they are separated from their identities and the actualisation of their human rights. Using this theory, Atwood portrays how the objectification of women and animals often results in fragmentation – as Adams describes it “the object is severed not only from its body but its ontological meaning”.

Atwood’s The Edible Woman is the story of a woman who is so oppressed by patriarchy that she is unable to consume food. The protagonist, Marian, during a meal with her fiancé begins to see the animal in her dinner – “She looked down at her own half-eaten steak and suddenly saw it as a hunk of muscle. Blood red. Part of a real cow that once moved and ate and was killed.”

Atwood also uses her brilliance to indicate the “sexual-edible continuum” in her works. Towards the end, in The Edible Woman, Marian bakes a cake in the shape of a woman – “All that work had gone into the lady and now what would happen to her? ‘You look delicious,’ she told her. ‘Very appetizing. And that’s what will happen to you; that’s what you get for being food.” Atwood has interwoven the narratives of consumerism, consumption and the woman’s body so intricately in the novel, that her protagonist ignores her absent referent and embraces her role in the world as consumable for the patriarchy. In The Year Of The Flood, Atwood twists the concept of being “on the menu” suggesting that customers at SecretBurger can have a pick of the meat or the women.

In most of her works, Atwood splices together the narratives of women and other elements of nature, such as flora and fauna, through the concept of the absent referent. Her characters and language reflect on the violence and destruction that consumerism, unbridled abuse of technology and the avarice for profit bring about on women’s bodies, their autonomy and the environment.

Erosion Of The Biosphere Equals The Erosion Of Women’s Rights

In June 2018, Atwood told the The Guardian that what is happening to the earth is not unforeseen – she said that “this isn’t climate change – it’s everything change.” In 2015, she wrote for English In Matter – “Planet Earth – the Goldilocks planet we’ve taken for granted, neither too hot or too cold, neither too wet or too dry, with fertile soils that accumulated for millennia before we started to farm them – is altering.” While this is the first time that Atwood spoke publicly about the environmental crises, she has been hiding away bits and pieces of climate struggles, environmental chaos and degradation for years within her fiction.

The Handmaid’s Tale – a very formidable way to come face-to-face with dystopia – is the story about life under a futuristic, religious totalitarian state named Gilead that has taken over after the collapse of the United States, where the fertility crisis and religion’s preoccupation with women’s wombs dictates the hierarchy of the society. But what spurs this crisis is the complete breakdown of the environment – the colonies of Gilead are uninhabitable, toxic wastelands where unwanted people are sent to die. At some point in the book, we also read about the erratic weather patterns that disrupt and ruin natural crop-cycles threatening food security. In the sequel, The Testaments, we see a progressive effect of these environmental crises where unbabies (still-births and birth defects) are common and cancer in children is rising.

In Oryx And Crake, Atwood’s anxiety around environmental degradation is apparent as she reflects upon growing disparities between the rich and the poor, increasing starvation and the immense ecological damage caused by consumerism and capitalism. She also writes in her worries around the abuse of science and technology to brutally devastate the environment. In the book, we are witness to a post-apocalyptic world that we often fear – nature as we know has been destroyed and only genetically modified flora and fauna exist. The protagonist, Snowman, is the last human being left; but he has survivor’s guilt – his father contributed to the development of biotechnology that ultimately caused the extinction of the human race.

Atwood’s dystopian novels have borne witness to how environmental catastrophes give rise to undemocratic structures that impede the actualisation of women’s rights. In an article in The Guardian, she discusses her greatest fears that she attempts to fictionalise – “More extreme weather events such as droughts and floods, rising sea levels that will destroy arable land, and disruption of marine life will all result in less food. Less food will mean that women and children get less, as the remaining food supplies will be unevenly distributed, even more than they are. Climate change will also mean social unrest, which can lead to wars and civil wars and then brutal repressions and totalitarianisms. Women do badly in wars – worse than in peacetime.”

As Atwood’s literary works grapple with themes of climate change, science, gender, capitalism and politics, her characters and the realities they experience indicate to her readers that the dystopia we are so fearful of, is already a possibility. She explores the delicate chaos between the identities of women and the environment as a whole – any irreversible damage to the environment could mean a widespread change in how women live their lives. In many parts of the world, especially in the Global South, communities of women may lead struggles for conservation of nature and the sustainability of resources, but they are routinely excluded from decision-making. But it is these women who are most vulnerable to environmental degradation. Atwood’s works paint a grim picture of the future, but she also says that the future is dynamic, and our realities can change completely, if we use technology, language, privilege, and culture to protect the environment and the rights of women.

Do you think there is a connection between climate change and women’s rights? Have you read any of Atwood’s works that reflect with these themes? Share your thoughts below.

How The Male And Female Gaze Have Shaped Partition Literature

Deya Bhattacharya

August 09, 2019

For a long time now, literature has been able to preserve the collective memory of the epoch-defining  historical events, in a way that is both a release for the survivors, as well as providing for a nuanced space for the interpretation of long-term grief. The Partition of India is one such cataclysmic event that has occupied a very significant place in South Asian literature, and as Pakistani historian, Ayesha Jalal describes it, “[a] defining moment that is neither beginning nor end, partition continues to influence how the peoples and states of postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present and future.”

Partition literature has many literary forms, including novels, poetry, short stories and non-fiction works. However, the sub-genre in its most mainstream version, mostly navigated by male writers, has been singularly focused on the community, its intertwining relationship with religion and the scale of gendered violence in order to integrate power and authority over people and territories. On the other hand, women writers write more about the realities of the Partition, and delve into the nature and structure of gender relationships against the backdrop of this historical catastrophe.

As a sub-genre that is at the cusp of several genres – history, literary fiction, dystopian, biographical, magical realism and romance – it is imperative that, as readers, we look at the Partition through both gazes – the male and the female. Through this piece, I will take readers through Partition literature across the years, and point out the difference between the female and the male gaze and how each has contributed to the shaping of this sub-genre. In doing so, I will reflect on how these gazes interact and intersect with each other, to provide for a comprehensive and nuanced narrative of the historical event.

The Male Gaze: Looking Outwards At Community, Independence, Religion And War

There is a distinct place for the male gaze within the nostalgia of post-Partition literature. The male gaze looks externally, while examining the events and effects of the Partition; it looks at grief from the point of view of the community, religion and social institutions, and uses the prism of nationalism, independence and communal identities.

For example, Yashpal’s This Is Not That Dawn (originally published in Hindi as Jhooth Sach) and Bhisham Sahani’s Tamas are considered very significant in depicting the Partition through a lens of politics, general elections and communal riots. Salman Rushdie’s novel, Midnight’s Children, looked at the “idea of the uniquely dysfunctional independence granted to the Indian subcontinent”. The story chronicles the peculiar coming of age of 1001 children born during the first hour of India’s independence, especially two boys, Saleem and Shiva. Through the narratives of these two boys, Rushdie analyses the predicament of two new countries that were born and raised alongside its own citizens, a generation trying to make its way into the world. As Rushdie, through his masterpiece, questions the tectonic implications of the Partition, he also looks at concepts of fate and self-determination.

Other works such as Rajinder Singh Bedi’s short story, Lajwanti, indicates in a very succinct way, that the seemingly extraordinariness of the Partition may be different in degree and spectre but it is ultimately proximate to the violence that women go through every day, perpetuated by the nation and the family, both patriarchal structures.

Khushwant Singh’s Train To Pakistan tries to illustrate the moral confusion of an extraordinary event like the Partition on the residents of a fictional village in Punjab called Mano Majra, a relatively peaceful place, where, for years, Sikhs and Muslims have lived with equanimity but things quickly change as communal violence spreads through India like wild fire. The story reflects the cynicism and savagery committed on India-Pakistan border during the Partition, but it is more focussed on the extrinsic aspects of the event, without delving into the human psyche.

Saadat Hasan Manto’s famous short story, Toba Tek Singh, is an unusual story set in a mental asylum in Lahore, a few years after the Partition. The story is about the Indian and Pakistani governments preparing to exchange inmates within mental asylums, as they did civilians, and how this results in  extreme discomfort when one inmate, bewildered by concept of the Partition, climbs up a tree and refuses to come down. Through the ramblings of Toba Tek Singh, the readers understand how painful the idea of the two nations was in the 1950s, and how much mental anguish it created for the people it displaced. The story ends with his death in between the two countries – in no-man’s land – a reflection of how the male gaze was more invested in capturing territorial anguish. The story does hit subtly upon the loneliness of Partition, separation and confusion, but does not capitalise on exploring these fully.

In the larger scheme of things, reading about the event from a strictly male gaze is to understand the Partition’s historicity, and its deep connections with social, political, and gendered institutions, structures, and practices, and to delve headfirst into its morass of “unequal, nebulous flows power” between individuals and their identities (of caste, ethnicity, religion, language, class, region). In doing so, the madness of the catastrophe is subsumed within the pragmatic politics of the community, thereby, buffering writers from fully experiencing their grief.

But the problem of a mass, generalised telling of the Partition is that it is too black and white, and in its fervour to show the traumatic dimensions of the event – madness, violence, unspeakable horror – it often uses women’s bodies to tell their stories. And this is where the female gaze becomes significant.

The Female Gaze: Looking Inwards At Lived Realities, Trauma, And Private Lives

Male writers tend to look at Partition literature as a complement to history, and as a result, fail to explore the lived realities of the time. Urvashi Butalia finds this approach extremely flawed: “As an historical event, Partition, for example, has ramifications that reach far beyond 1947, yet historical records make little mention of the dislocation of people’s lives, the strategies they used to cope with loss, trauma, pain and violence. Why have historians been reluctant to address these? Are these questions of no use to history at all?”

The female gaze on the Partition is, primarily, built on Dorothy Smith’s concept of the “everyday world” which points to “lived reality within the private sphere: women’s embodied, gendered lives within the domestic space that are effected and affected by major events in the public, political sphere of men”. Ideally, the female gaze is used to connect the domestic, private lives of women to the political world at any given historical context. What this does is both necessary and prosaic – it filters the lived realities of women through sieves of ordinary as well as extraordinary times, deconstructing the political space through infinitesimal narratives of women during the Partition.

Krishna Sobti’s 2017 autobiographical novel, ‘Gujarat Pakistan Se Gujarat India’ (A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There), tackles the experience of being displaced from Gujarat, arriving in Delhi as a “refugee” and taking up work as a governess in the ruling family of the erstwhile princely state of Sirohi in Gujarat, India. Sobti reveals her deep memories of the event, as the joy of being a part of an independent country also meant the loss of home, life, dignity and self. This beautiful and yet painful contradiction is a very apt example of the female gaze on the Partition – Sobti’s body moved through the history of the Partition, through grief, suffering, violence and anguish, and yet, that is not the only essence of the story.

Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa has been called the “female visualisation” of the Partition. The story presents the perspective of Lenny Sethi, a young Parsi girl, who lives in Lahore during India and Pakistan’s partition, but is mostly perceived to be an outsider – she is neither Hindu or Muslim, and suffers from polio. Lenny’s view of history is that of a dispassionate observer, as she has access to a luxurious lifestyle at home, and is also able to view a different reality, outside of her house- of her ‘ayah’ (caretaker) and the Ice Candyman. As she discovers more about the world beyond her reach, she becomes the perfect lens for viewing and experiencing the tension and violence that is building up within the country.

Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side Of Silence endeavours to place the private experiences and lived realities of displaced people from Pakistan and India at the centre of the historical event. Butalia’s book is intersectional – through interviews and an examination of personal narratives through diaries, letters, memories and government documents, she asks an all-important question – how were marginalised people – women, children, lower-caste, adivasis affected by this event.

Khadija Mastur’s The Women’s Courtyard provides for an inward perspective of the Partition: Aliya’s courtyard is far removed from the Partition, and yet, it is a part of its impending force. The book contains so little of the usual tropes of Partition literature – violence, rape, ethnic cleansing – that one might even question why it would be categorised under the sub-genre. The story is about Aliya, a Muslim girl and her small family, as her country grapples with this new-found independence, suspended between life and death, and tethered to history.

Viewing The Partition Through Both Gazes

Both the male and female gazes provide for unique schemas of history – one contains the public realm, and the other looks at pieces within the private realm. However, it is important to state that the female gaze tends to be more inclusive, accessible and looks at empirical evidence of lived realities as its foundation. This may also mean that the female gaze tends to be more feminist – it does not reduce the women to their bodies, and does not equate the woman to patriarchal notions of honour, familial pride and national identity. While the male gaze is more objective to the politics at hand, it does not depict the invisible subversions at the margins of the public realm – both by men and women. It also creates an unnecessary hierarchy of trauma – loss of identity, nationality, community over the grief of losing family, homes, love and dignity.

Partition literature occupies an evocative space in expressing individual and community grief, and while it is important to chart out the differences between both gazes, it is imperative to understand that both have shaped the sub-genre in their own way, and looking at the Partition through both gazes, instead of either one, offers up a more holistic and all-encompassing picture of this historical event.

Do you think there is a difference between the female and male gaze? Why do you think it’s important to read both perspectives on Partition Literature? Share your thoughts below.

Adaptation ScoreThe adaptation score is a scale used to measure the accuracy of the book’s adaptation into a movie. It is not a score which judges how good the book or movie is: 4/10

Leila – both the book and the Netflix series – is about the real and imagined trepidation of living in a dystopia. This year, two years after Prayaag Akbar wrote the book, Netflix released a series of the same name, adapted by Urmi Juvekar and produced by Deepa Mehta. The series, described as ‘gut-wrenching’, ‘haunting’ and ‘intense’, is based on and inspired by the book, and does what no other Indian series has done so far – it unveils an Indian dystopia on a global platform. It has also been described by critics as the Indian The Handmaid’s Tale.

The Story

Prayaag Akbar’s novel, Leila, is about a mother, Shalini, who is separated from her daughter, Leila (born to a Hindu mother and Muslim father), forcibly by the members of an authoritarian, fundamentalist cult, and detained in a “purity camp”. She goes in search of Leila in a dystopic landscape that is overwhelmed by sectarianism and totalitarian rule. Akbar’s Leila is set in the “near future”, in a fictional but readily recognisable Indian city – Purity One, where various communities live somewhat “comfortably” segregated and sequestered behind 60 feet walls. Everyone who lives in this dystopia is in fear of The Council – an omnipresent, all-powerful body whose slogan is “Purity for all”; there are vigilante thugs of The Council called the Repeaters who do the Council’s dirty work, and a purity camp exists for the ones who have gone astray. Purity One’s administration believes in separating the privileged from the filth and decay of the rest of the city – creating a classist, misogynist, casteist and communal bubble. And this is what scares the reader the most – the darkness of the prose, the tempered fragility of Shalini’s psyche after 16 years of holding her family (her disappeared daughter and murdered husband) inside her mind, the all-encompassing feeling of existing in a dystopia.

Akbar’s Leila, though overtly is a story of Shalini’s ceaseless resolution to find her daughter, becomes a narrative about the subject within a dystopia – her struggles with the Orwellian dilemma of being imprisoned in the better world of the past, while simultaneously being coerced to face the twisted totalitarian future. On the other hand, Netflix’s Leila (2019), while based on the book, takes liberties with the prose. It condenses Akbar’s 207 pages into six episodes, and alters major plot points, much to the chagrin of the reader. The series retains Shalini’s (played by Huma Qureshi) quest to find her daughter, but fleshes out the narrative of the dystopia in broad strokes.

While in Akbar’s work, the elements of dystopia remained a distant hum in the background and were portrayed through Shalini’s character, in the miniseries, the dystopia is literally larger than life: India has been transformed into Aryavarta in the year 2047 – a new country, a political entity, a regime of purity, productivity and innovation, led by a mysterious Joshiji. Aryavarta’s advent began with the scarcity of water, immense air pollution, and the infiltration of arts and literature into the political productive space; in essence, Aryavarta was established to ‘cleanse’ the economic and socio-political scenario. The series sets Shalini, against Aryavarta, as newer pieces to the plot are introduced, perhaps to make the story appear more real, more proximate and more immediate.

Shalini’s Moods Become The Readers’ – A Win For The Series

It is understandable that it would be challenging to subsume the spirit of Akbar’s work into a miniseries. The book explores Shalini’s inner and outer world; and the difference is stark because Shalini’s narrative, though portrayed in words, is happening in her head. She has lost 16 years of her life to the regime’s fixation with purity; she converses with Riz, her dead husband, often as if they are allies in her search for Leila, and with Leila, who has disappeared from her life. For the producers of the show, adapting this portrayal must have been a mammoth task because how must one depict the feelings, the imagined fears and the horrors of the mind on screen.

But Netflix’s Leila does this by creating an atmosphere of panic in the visual schema of the miniseries. Shalini’s psyche comes alive through the depiction of the places she inhabits. Through Aryavarta’s unscalable walls, the audience feels occluded; the walls of “a digitised city, some time in the near future” represent Shalini’s long separation with her family and everything she holds dear, the perfect geometrical precision of the city evokes suspicion and fear in the audience. Through the Vanita Mukti Kendra (purity camp) and the Labour Camp, when Shalini feels confined and trapped by her fate, the audience feels this too. As Shalini walks into the Slums, amongst the doosh, we, the audience, walk with her through the wasteland, dilapidated houses and the pollution. The atmosphere and texture of the episodes are greyish, dark and murky – all windows for the audience to feel what Shalini feels. There are times when the camera comes close to Shalini’s face – her face is the only one on screen – at these points, Shalini and the audience become one: the nauseating unquiet, the overstrung anxiety and the apprehension is perhaps more the audience’s than Shalini’s.

The Construction Of A Dystopia In Progress

Akbar’s book does a splendid job of constructing the dystopia through crisp, unyielding language. The political climate is built beautifully in the book, and indicates Shalini’s own learned helplessness in the face of a powerful regime – “Purity One is believed to have an inscrutable power. People come here to pray and plead. Take my own situation. I should be standing alone, yet here Riz is, by my side, etched sharp against the dusk as anything around us.” Akbar also designs the socio-political situation, without giving out many details – “On the roof a white flag flutters the Council’s insignia, black pyramid, white tip. Hundreds of people shoulder past each other to get to this room. In the great heave all we see is a trapezoid of blue light where the double door extends above the devotees. A cage-like barrier divides the room; behind the wire squares is the holiest part of the wall, centre of the lowest line of bricks, painted ochre-like red. They worship this brick. They call it the first brick of Purity One.”

This predicament of the book is delivered beautifully in the series. Aryavarta’s walls, the austerity of its politicians, the tactile sense of loss – indicated as collateral damage – in both high-level officials and slum-dwellers alike, and the barter of disciplined conformity with the comfort of resources (water, security, housing) has been fitted into the miniseries in a way that it respects the original text but also magnifies the sentiment of dystopia.

The miniseries takes liberties to reflect to its audience the state of affairs in the real world. The blatant discrimination of marginalised people, the intense hatred of intercaste and inter-communal marriages, the power that God-men share with politicians in a ‘democratic space’, the lynching of people different from the majority in the name of religion, the policing of women’s bodies, the separation of children from their parents – are all depicted on screen. At several moments, the global audience may forget whether the scenes are from present-day 2019 or from a miniseries set in 2047. Perhaps this is the reason why Leila’s presence on Netflix has been questioned by a wide range of people. Recently, a group of Indians also moved for a ban on the series for Hinduphobic content – it is almost bizarre to see how the real and make-believe intertwine in Netflix’s Leila.

Where The Series Falters

While it is understandable that a series cannot be completely faithful to the book, Netflix’s Leila falls prey to the trap of pleasing Indian audiences through the over-dramatisation of certain parts, such as Shalini’s time at the purity camp. In the book, Shalini’s existence blends with the regime’s discipline and obedience, in a way that reminds the reader of Winston Smith (from George Orwell’s 1984) and Offred (from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale). The protagonists merge with the principles and objectives of the dystopia, only to be subversive and individualistic in private. In the book, Shalini is a representation of the oppression of the regime, and the readers see Purity One’s languishing human quality through her jaded perspective. In the series, however, Shalini’s subversion is explicit and feels very displaced.

Shalini’s tryst with the regime while looking for her daughter also feels extremely overdramatised in the series, as she moves through obscure information on the internet, to a child trafficking agency and various other sectors. In the book, however, Shalini gains access to the Records Tower, through the bureaucracy, to get more information on Leila. The book is a great primer on how neatly-designed totalitarian regimes work – they are simple to navigate because there are rules for everything. The series does not reflect this ease.

The series also alters major plot-lines. For instance, the character of Bhanu (played by Siddharth) and the rebel army is an introduction by the creators of the show. Though the book mentions the emergence of rebel groups within Aryavarta, these groups do not occupy any real estate within the original text, and Shalini does not engage with them. But the series establishes another arc within the primary plot line to accommodate Bhanu’s narrative of serving Aryavarta, while rebelling against it. Bhanu’s character is portrayed remarkably, but there was little need for the creators to add a new male character. The book honours Shalini’s journey as isolated and cloistered – like a representation of Purity One’s walled existence. Having a new character, especially cis-male, alongside Shalini, feels forced and takes away from the spirit of the book.

The Netflix series is not a very good adaptation of the book. While the series, on its own, is an exhilarating watch, it does not do a good job of adapting from Akbar’s original work. It leaves loose ends, introduces unnecessary characters who take away from Qureshi’s brilliance as Shalini, and downplays major parts of the book. As someone who devoured the book in one sitting and was horrified by the feelings it evoked in me, I was deeply disturbed by the miniseries’ inability to absorb from the original text. It tries to do too much in six episodes, but borrows too little from the book. That being said, the series depicts the construction of a dystopia in progress in an intrepid manner, truly reflecting the current atmosphere and socio-political situation in the world. From a large-scale water catastrophe to acquiesced segregation, and violence, stigma and abuse against the marginalised, Leila feels very real, very fast.

What did you enjoy more- Leila, the book, or Leila, the TV show? Do you agree with our analysis? Any other differences you’d like to highlight? Share with us in the comments!

Good Omens

Deya Bhattacharya

June 13, 2019

Adaptation ScoreThe adaptation score is a scale used to measure the accuracy of the book’s adaptation into a movie. It is not a score which judges how good the book or movie is: 7/10

It has taken about thirty years for Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s 1990 fantasy novel titled Good Omens: The Nice And Accurate Prophecies Of Agnes Nutter, Witch to be adapted for the screen. Fantasy is a challenging genre as it is – elements of world-building have to collapse perfectly into real-world myth and folklore. Transforming an epic and fantastical novel like Good Omens into a miniseries, therefore, was no ordinary task. But Neil Gaiman has done this before: Amazon Prime’s Good Omens is his third venture into adapting his books into miniseries; Starz’ American Gods and Netflix’s Lucifer are the other two.

An Adaptation That Almost Never Came – Like The Armageddon

Gaiman and Pratchett always wanted to make an adaptation of Good Omens. In an interview, Gaiman talks about how several years after the novel was published, he and Pratchett spoke about the various ways they could have brought in some flavour into the storytelling: since 1991, they spoke about adding in more angels and re-visiting Heaven and Hell within the storyline. One of their ideas was to mould the book into a film for a wider audience and to also incorporate newer ideas that they had for the evolution of the plot.

 In 2002, Terry Gilliam, the director of 12 Monkeys, attempted to start the film, but these plans were thwarted by anxieties arising from the 9/11 attacks. Gaiman said, in an interview – “[b]ut it was post 9/11. No one was interested in an apocalyptic comedy”. In 2011, Terry Jones declared that he would “shepherd” Good Omens into a television series but this plan fell through, and Gaiman and the original Terry (Pratchett) decided that they would develop a miniseries on the book. By 2014, however, Pratchett’s Alzheimer’s – or Embuggerance, as he lovingly called his disease – grew worse, and he sent his co-author a letter that Gaiman holds close and regards as Pratchett’s last request to him – “I’ve never asked you for anything before, and we’ve always agreed that with anything related to Good Omens we either do it together or we don’t do it. But you have to do this. No one else can do it. I know how busy you are, but I want to see this before I can’t see anything.” The rest, of course, is history. Pratchett passed away in 2015 but Good Omens was adapted to the screen.

Keeping The Spirit Of The Text Alive

In many ways, Good Omens – the series – is a  great rendition of the book because it welcomes both fans and newcomers with the same enthusiasm. The story, as originally devised by Gaiman and Pratchett, is about a demon (Crowley) and an angel (Aziraphale) working together to stave off a looming Armageddon and save the earth. What happens in over 400 pages in condensed into six episodes, all crafted by Gaiman himself.

And what makes Good Omens, the show, extremely riveting is the fact that it is both enjoyable and timely: the end of the world is a real possibility now, as it was thirty years ago. The book’s promising hopefulness and ecological consciousness that worked well against the background of the Cold War and the threat of depletion of the ozone layer has been translated so effortlessly into the show. A line from the book such as “your polar ice caps are below regulation size for a planet of this category” can be adapted into the screenplay of the show because against the backdrop of the climate change protests, it rings true.

While keeping the show relevant, Good Omens preserves the spirit of the text in a very wonderful way. The screenplay holds onto a lot of the characters and dialogues and gives into the weighty descriptions within the book. As each scene gives into the next, it feels like turning the pages of the book itself, and uncovering the remarkable world that both authors have built. Even the end credits feel like the end of a chapter.

What Works And Does Not In The Adaptation

The leitmotif about Queen’s greatest-hits CD mentioned in the book has been brilliantly adapted into the show. When Gaiman and Pratchett wrote the music into the plotline, it was a take on the inescapability of the grandiloquent music from the 1980s. The theory behind this was that any cassette left in the car long enough would turn into the best of Queen – “All tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums”.  What was written as a joke on the times, translates beautifully into a plot-device, in providing layers to Crowley’s character – it is almost perfect when Crowley’s Bentley pulls up during the first episode and we hear “Beelzebub Has Put A Devil Aside For Me”. It is hilarious when Crowley drives through London’s inferno to the tune of “I’m In Love With My Car”. Each important moment in the show features a significant song by Queen – Pratchett would have perhaps been doubly proud of this part of the screenplay.

Besides this, obscure but humorous details that readers love about the book made it into the miniseries. For instance, the book’s expository narration by God – a woman, and played by Frances McDormand – was a magnificent way to keep the essence of the text alive. Details such as the Earth’s exact birthday, it’s zodiac sign (Libra), and how God “moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways” are all wonderfully portrayed in the show.

Some bits were adapted to the recent times, though – Crowley, in the miniseries, brings down the whole London mobile network (much to his own chagrin, because he cannot make calls!), as opposed to the Crowley in the book, who messes with the London cable network. There are also omissions and additions in the making of the series. Archangel Gabriel’s character did not occupy so much real estate in the book, but Jon Hamm’s comic timing brings a certain depth to Sheen’s reluctant acquiescence to the bureaucratic machinery of Heaven, with its exhausting approvals, meandering paperwork, and intense red-tape. The omission of details on the Them (Adam Young’s friends) and their friendship is a big blow to the plot; the Antichrist and his friends, and even the apocalypse remain secondary to the demon and the angel. Adam’s attachment for Tadfield is erased but Tadfield’s “optimal microclimate (…) the kind of weather you could set your calendar by” is retained.

Crowley-Aziraphale Friendship Casts A Shadow On Other Characters

What the miniseries does well is showcase the relationship between Crowley and Aziraphale – like two long-lost friends; like an old couple – their interdependence growing and showing in each episode, as the world crumbles around them. Their 6000-year-old friendship along with a backstory that spans various centuries and world events – Noah’s Ark, Nazi Germany, the Reign of Terror – is an addition to the miniseries, that certainly enhances their character sketches. Both Michael Sheen and David Tennant are perfect as the cultural aesthete and the insouciant fallen angel; like old friends, they talk about their work, dine at the Ritz, and generally discuss the difference between good and bad. All this and working together to stop the apocalypse slowly help Aziraphale and Crowley, who were initially on opposing teams, to grow very fond of each other.

The problem, of course, with magnifying the plot around Aziraphale and Crowley, amongst many others within the book, is that the miniseries forgets to explicate other characters’ backstories like those of the prophetic witch, Agnes Nutter (she features only in a handful of scenes) or her descendant, Anathema, or the Witchfinder’s Army or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The other plotlines, when contrasted with the Aziraphale-Crowley friendship, seem to fizzle out, and non-readers don’t have a lot of context on why they are so important in fending off Armageddon.

This is perhaps a failure of the adaptation – people who have not read the text would not truly understand the value of the other characters in the overall plot. Readers of Good Omens will also lament that most characters don’t make it into the miniseries, or that some loose ends remain and parts of the screenplay are stripped of the literary pleasure of the original text. The ending, too, feels abrupt and anti-climatic as Gaiman writes an additional twist for the miniseries – both the demon and the angel have been kidnapped by their celestial colleagues and sentenced to death.

In the larger scheme of the things, it is extremely difficult to say whether the book was better or the miniseries, especially because both were created by Gaiman (and Pratchett), or even if the adaptation was faithful to the book. As John Green says – “the book is different from the movie; it has to be. I don’t think there is something called a faithful adaptation because you’re turning scratches on a page into visible humans speaking audible words.”. Moreover, there are things that are possible with a miniseries – it reaches a wider audience and often, with such outreach, it is challenging to think exclusively of the readers. The makers of the miniseries had to balance the concerns of the readers with the need to reach a much larger audience, and this is where, in my opinion, Good Omens has bested other adaptations. It has won the hearts of many with the story of an unlikely friendship between a demon and an angel, and the meeting of good and evil at the end of the world.

Which did you prefer- the book or the TV show? Was the TV show a good adaptation of the book? Why? Share your thoughts below.

Coming Out Of The Bookshelf: Why India Needs More LGBTQIA+ Literature

Deya Bhattacharya

May 31, 2019

In January 2019, Calcutta, the city of my birth and where I have lived for more than half my life, hosted its first ever Queer Literature Festival. It was a platform for the queer community to come together and occupy space in a way that was not possible before. Lucknow, in February this year, hosted the Awadh Literature Festival, another celebration of the queer community’s contribution to literature and art. Earlier, in July 2018, Queer Chronicles Chennai (QCC) had organised the Queer Lit Festival in Chennai through crowdfunding from its community members and allies.

Queer literature in India is finally coming out of the closet, and one of the biggest reasons is the Supreme Court judgment in September 2018 which decriminalised Section 377, a draconian Victorian-era law, that criminalised sexual conduct “against the order of nature”. While legal recognition is only one battle in the larger scheme of identity politics for the LGBTQIA+[1] community, and the struggles for other constitutional rights remain, it has opened up many avenues for queer expression to be represented, especially in literature.

In contemporary India, where queer communities are being accepted, what space does LGBTQIA+ literature hold? In what ways are the voices of queer people amplified in literature? Moreover, why does India need more representation when it comes to LGBTQIA+ voices in literature and publishing, and how will this change the landscape of Indian literature in the years to come? These are some of the questions that this piece will examine.

[1] LGBTQIA+ refers to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex and Asexual. The initialism keeps growing to value the human rights, dignity and the right of more non-binary people to self-identify.

LGBTQIA+ Literature Within The Colonial Machinery

LGBTQIA+ literature in India, right from the beginning, has been at tenterhooks: the journey by queer writers or writers writing about queer subjects, as a part of the colonial machinery, has been challenging. This is because most writers were not just confronted by Section 377 but also by constructed ideals of morality, sexuality, culture and obscenity.

In 1922, freedom fighter, Gopabandhu Das published a book titled Poems Written In Prison, in which there are at least two poems that talk about male friendships, and these are described in an intense and erotically charged manner. In the shadow of colonisation, Das couldn’t write about male friendships with sexual overtones; however, later, these poems came to be accepted as an important part of Oriya literature.

In May 1924, a Calcutta biweekly called Matvala, carried a short story by Pandey Bechan Sharma “Ugra” titled “Chocolate”. The story is about Dinkar Prasad, a modern-day Romeo obsessed with poetry and ghazals, and an adolescent boy, Ramesh, who is also Dinkar’s “chocolate” – the object of his erotic affections. Ugra, in his story, twists into a few words what same-sex love means – “He’ll sift through history, finish off the Puranas, and prove to you that love of boys is not unnatural but natural.” The tumultuousness of “Chocolate’s” narrative was centred around sexual ambiguity, rather than “a spirit of hypocrisy”. Both editors of Matvala, as well as Ugra, received several letters after the publication of “Chocolate” – some reproachful of the portrayal of same-sex love, and others full of acclaim. Ugra would go on to publish more such work in Matvala – “Paalat” (Kept Boy), “Hum Fidaye Lakhnau” (We Are in Love With Lucknow), “Qamariya Nagin Si Balkhaye” (Waist Curved Like a She-Cobra), and “Chocolate Charcha” (Discussing Chocolate).

In 1942, Ismat Chughtai wrote her short story “Lihaaf “ (The Quilt) and published it in the Urdu journal, Adaab-e-Lateef. “Lihaaf” is both controversial and celebrated, and takes its readers on a journey of same-sex love, while acknowledging female sexuality and consent, as well as alternative but forbidden desires in the midst of a heteronormative society. “Lihaaf”, in many ways, redefined the relationship between the lesbian identity, the patriarchal Muslim household and the idea of a dysfunctional, heteronormative matrimonial home. It also transformed Chughtai’s own identity as a writer – Chughtai was put on trial for obscenity following this story. In 1946, “Lihaaf” became an object for arbitration in the trial of Ismat Chughtai v. The Crown – an ironic reflection of how same-sex love is often on trial by society’s ideas of morality. Chughtai recorded her experience of this legal battle in an essay titled ‘The Lihaaf Trial’, where she notes with humour and defiance, that the trial would not dampen her spirits or her truth as a writer – “My mind tempts my pen and I’m unable to interfere in the matter of my mind and pen.” To an older writer, M Aslam, Chughtai conveys her motivations for writing about the controversial subject – “[N]o one ever told me that writing on the subject I deal with in “Lihāf” is a sin, nor did I ever read anywhere that I shouldn’t write about this…disease…or tendency”.

LGBTQIA+ Literature Occupies Literary Space

Chughtai’s quintessential feminist move opened up literary space for LGBTQIA+ literature, and many new voices came to the fore. In 1962, Rajendra Yadav, a Hindi novelist wrote a short story called “Prateeksha” (Waiting), depicting a lesbian relationship. Vijay Dan Detha, a Rajasthani author, wrote A Double Life showing a homoerotic relationship between two women who live together in rural Rajasthan. Kamala Das’ autobiography, My Story (1976) is another celebrated work that discusses lesbian desire at a time when same-sex love and desire were morally unacceptable in literature. Vijay Tendulkar’s 1981 Marathi play Mitrachi Goshta (A Friend’s Story) explores lesbian love and coming to terms to one’s own sexuality at a time when conversations around sexuality were not explicit in India. While a lot of literature around lesbian relationships began to come out, it was only in 2003 that R. Raj Rao’s The Boyfriend was published, and was widely considered India’s first gay novel. The book plunges into Mumbai’s gay subculture and “locates queerness in ordinary spaces, such as the Mumbai local trains”.

Even vernacular queer voices have found a space in the literary world. For instance, Kannada writer, Vasudhendra’s book Mohanaswamy (2013) looks at queer identity in India, and not what the consequences of Section 377 were. The text moves through several divides – urban/rural, English/other bhashas (languages) to give the readers a full view of homoerotic cultures.

Trans voices within the realm of LGBTQIA+  literature have been more autographical. Laxmi Narayan Tripathi’s Me Hijra, Me Laxmi (2015) is a notable memoir reflects the life of Laxmi, a transwoman who was born an upper caste man, and the emotional turmoil of transitioning, against the backdrop of India’s struggle against HIV/AIDS.  A. Revathi’s A Life in Trans Activism (2016) is another powerful memoir about the author, a transwoman, and her identity and activism.

Post-colonial LGBTQIA+ literature was allowed to occupy its own space within the literary world, whether it be the representation of more queer authors in publishing or that more stories on queer subjects were being written. It expanded the ways in which the lives of queer people were viewed in literature: they were no longer people at odds with the law, they were people who led mundane lives and whose stories were more than battling penal codes and legal provisions on obscenity.

The Question Of Visibility For LGBTQIA+ Literature

While LGBTQIA+ literature has been out of the closet for a long time in India, it’s visibility and positionality within the Indian literary scene is still very spurious. The LGBTQIA+ community stands at the centre of trauma, stigma and discrimination – an intersection that is antithetical to the notion of space and power, and while a lot of Indian queer literature exists, the presence of queer writers and their lived realities is often invisibilised.

So far, Indian LGBTQIA+ literature has stood between the public and private realms, stretching out like a bridge in order to amplify the voices of the community. Like queer people in India themselves, foreshadowed by a draconian law, and a society that is based upon archaic understandings of sexuality, gender and sexual orientation, queer literature in India is “at once an insider and an outsider, a participant and a voyeur, is insubstantial and corporeal at the same time, a figure whose identity is fluid and transient.”

A very pertinent example of this is Abha Dawesar’s Babyji (2005) that is set in the 1980s, against the backdrop of the Mandal Commission’s recommendations and the protests against it. In Babyji, 16-year-old Anamika Sharma, who sits at the heart of upper caste privilege, indulges in same-sex relationships with three women, and in the midst of these relationships, discovers her sexuality while also grappling with issues of caste.

In Cobalt Blue (2006), writer, playwright and director, Sachin Kundalkar pieces together the narratives of a brother and sister in a traditional Marathi household, who fall in love with the same man, a paying guest in their house. In Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman (2002), the reader sees the female protagonist, Astha’s anguish and repression within a traditional, arranged heteronormative marriage as she discovers her latent sexuality with the widow of a political activist. Kapur weaves together the narrative of a lesbian relationship in the backdrop of the Ayodhya communal riots – indicating Astha’s internal strife, unrest and struggle with understanding her own sexuality.

LGBTQIA+ literature in India, in the pre-decriminalisation era, is an exercise in amplifying the voices of the community and simultaneously, diminishing the visibility and power of queer protagonists and writers alike. All the protagonists in Babyji, Cobalt Blue and A Married Woman are hidden figures: they don’t exist as queer subjects, and their sexuality is a mysterious, clandestine subject. Whether it be Anamika in Babyji, the unnamed paying guest in Cobalt Blue or Astha in A Married Woman, they live in cities – visible in everyday lives but wrapped in the anonymity and invisibleness of large cities. This is a haunting reflection of what a repressive, draconian law had done to the community: pressed their identities into layers of obscurity and ignominy.

The public visibility of the queer community has grown exponentially after the Supreme Court verdict of 2018, and yet, queer realities are not adequately reflected in literature. A lot of mainstream literature continues to be focussed on heteronormative love and desire written by cisgender, straight authors. There is a definite need to fill the vast gap within Indian publishing and literature where queer people write their own stories, without being eclipsed by past notions of what was considered ‘normal’ in the Indian literary scene.

This need stems from issues of diversity and representation, but also to intentionally break away from the notional public/private divide that has held back queer writers from creating protagonists who exist within narratives as queer people. This will also prevent LGBTQIA+ sexuality in stories from being this will-o-wisp, unattainable mysterious object that might exist only in an alternative, fantastical world.

To do this of course, we will have to open up our hearts and bookshelves to authors like Suniti Namjoshi, an openly lesbian author from India, who has written several books around female sexuality, queerness and feminism; publishing houses such as Queer Ink, that provide the community an exclusive platform and space for writing and publishing LGBTQIA+ literature, and online forums such as Gaysi, that portray stories of the LGBTQIA+ community. Doing this will ensure that the landscape of Indian literature expands to be more representative, diverse and inclusive.

Do you think we need more LGBTQIA+ literature in India? Why? Share your thoughts below.

Are We Living In A Dystopian India?

Deya Bhattacharya

May 03, 2019

It is November, and the festival of lights is upon us. After an evening of delight and mirth, as if by clockwork, there is a crisp smell in the morning air, people are wearing masks to escape the dark haze and the air quality index (AQI) has dipped to 428 or severe/hazardous. It is December, and a young woman and her friend step out this winter night to catch a late-night movie, but they do not return. Two days later, there are nation-wide protests over the brutal gang-rape and killing of this woman, and these protests are quelled by the government through tear-gas and violence. For close to thirty years, a draconian law has uprooted the lives of people in a faraway land where they can be arrested, searched and their basic rights can be violated without a warrant. In another faraway land, there exists a register that contains the names of its genuine citizens; people whose names do not appear on this register are now stateless – thousands of people, especially women, are turned out of this faraway land.

Do these invoke strong images of a dystopian future? However, these are real-life events that have occurred in our own country in the past years, which brings to question whether India’s extant volatile political and socio-cultural environment has morphed it into a dystopia. What is a dystopia? It is not just a ‘not-good place’ – in fact, it is an environment that is born out of the hope of a better future but has turned into a grim and dismal place because of a mistake or oversight. In simple terms, a dystopia is a utopia that did not have regard for humanity in a bid to be the perfect society.

In this piece, I sift through recent developments in India in order to understand its tryst with dystopian tendencies and compare it to classical and contemporary dystopian literature in order to comprehend what it means to live in a place where human lives are violated and squandered for a neo-capitalist, oppressive political spectre.

India As A Dystopian Democracy And The Dilution Of Identity

The idea of a dystopia stems from the depiction of several forms of discipline exercised by the government over the body and mind of its subjects, and how this discipline creates a dissociation of the subjects from their individual identity. Early classical dystopian literature such as George Orwell’s 1984, Ayn Rand’s Anthem, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale – reflect how the state produce controlled and disciplined bodies through the utilisation of a “strictly regulated routine, prescribed social functions, reproductive control, and constant surveillance”. There is also heavy use of indoctrination, that happens gradually – people are indoctrinated to follow certain rules and logic, while at the same time, are encouraged to ignore their individualistic feelings and ambitions. As a result, they end up idolising the collective and simultaneous erasure of their own identities. This seems to be a prerequisite in dystopian literature – a gradual estrangement of the characters from their own identities.

In 1984, Orwell portrays a dictatorship state with ceaseless surveillance, protracted wars and horrid living conditions, where individuality is regarded as a “thoughtcrime”, and people live in a constant state of anxiety and fear. The novel is characterised by a constant suppression of the identity of its characters as the ideology of the Party’s ruler, Big Brother is strengthened through propaganda, the invention of Newspeak and the blatant manipulation of past political and historical narratives.

In Kallocain by Swedish writer, Karin Boye, a society is born out of the elimination of identity and suppression of individualism as people are continually subordinated by the political apparatus of the Worldstate. The invention of a drug called Kallocain – a truth serum – becomes the ultimate weapon in the hands of the state, as it can reveal any individual thought, and annihilate all possibilities of a rebellion. Ayn Rand’s Anthem, inspired by the condition of the Soviet Union, speaks of a place where all individual dreams and ambitions are expunged, and people worship and idolise the collective; children, who are state property and are raised by the government, are assigned specific social roles so that they can contribute to the overall commonwealth and prosperity of the state.

These fictional dystopian trajectories are not very distant from our real lives in India. In November 2016, as currency notes in India were demonetised in public interest – and in a bid to win over corruption and encourage the use of e-cash and virtual banking – the citizens of the country were expected to shed their individual identities and the rigmarole of their daily lives to further the national interest. The narrative weaved by the state was that this cultural shift from hard currency to online banking, from ‘black’ to ‘white’ money was a supreme purpose for the nation, and citizens were expected to perform the role of the collective – to stand in long bank queues to contribute to the good of the state.

The world’s largest biometric ID system, India’s Aadhar, is a unique identification number that can be acquired by its citizens by surrendering their biometric and demographic data to the government. This system is by definition dystopian, considering the quantum of data that is collected from individuals – the translation of actual human beings to statistics, in the name of welfare, through formidable technological linkages; what can be achieved through the collection of this data is yet to be witnessed, but it will certainly lead to a gradual dilution of individual identities for the greater good.

The concept of a dystopian democracy is not just a grim forecast of the distant future to be; it is a dystopia-in-progress, an actual dystopia that is constructed every day through the enforcement of surveillance, the heightened use of technology and the bartering of individualism for an “empowered” collective identity.

The Feminist Dystopia As A Cautionary Tale

Prayaag Akbar’s Leila is set in the near future, in an unnamed city that resembles a cosmopolitan Indian city where communal violence, identity politics and class divisions are normalised; it brings up images of an ominous world where its characters have willingly bartered their freedoms for a society that is based on predictability, convenience, stability, and security. The novel strikes at the heart of India’s pride, its diversity – citizens are divided up into residential sectors based on their religious identity, and there is enforced segregation. This segregation is intensified by stringent patriarchal values, the blatant ostracism of widows, and heightened inequality – this is all imposed in the name of purity. The novel is characterised by deepening patriarchy in the life of the protagonist, Shalini, which is commonplace in India, where women are asked to give up their personal narratives in order to be consumed by the collective.

Feminist dystopian literature, a sub-genre that burst at the seams with Margaret Atwood’s much-acclaimed work, The Handmaid’s Tale, uses the lens of fantasy and science fiction to project concerns around women’s equality on to the future. In a country where women are treated as second-class citizens, most feminist dystopias take space in the literary world to send out warnings about how constant political inaction, coupled with religious fundamentalism and technological advances will be used to curtail women’s freedoms, rather than giving them a level playing field.

Vox by Christina Dalcher is about the diminishing voices of women in society. The novel shows how an orthodox, conservative political party gains control of the White House and the Congress and adopts policies that force women to be stripped of all basic human rights, such as the right to vote, the right to work and the freedom of expression. In this dystopian work, girls are not taught to read or write; women are forbidden to work, and their voices are literally silenced as they are forced to wear bracelets that shock them if they exceed their daily word limit. Words, phraseology and the power of voice is an expensive commodity for women, and Dalcher’s novel reflects this in an almost sinister manner.

Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure is an almost-claustrophobic novel, not about totalitarian governments and cultural barriers to women’s rights, but about the perils of a dystopia within the familial structure, and most importantly, about toxic masculinity. In doing so, Mackintosh delves into questions around violence against women, the violation of reproductive rights and pervasive and institutionalised sexism.

There is a stark similarity between these novels and how women’s rights are perceived within India. Sexual assault, erosion of basic rights and the diminishing space for women’s voices, representation and leadership is a fact well-witnessed in the country. From the Delhi gang-rape to the Kathua rape, women’s rights are murky in India, with little to no respite within the present legal framework. In political as well as socio-cultural spaces, women’s representation is nominal and women are not able to contribute to the overall structural change within the country.

Achhe Din – The Dichotomy Between India’s Utopia And Dystopia

Achhe din aane waale hain (good days are coming) was the campaign slogan for the ruling party in 2014 in India – a promise of prosperity and economic growth, coupled with security, convenience, freedom from disorder. In retrospect, this statement of achhe din sounds suspiciously like a utopia gone wrong; where a good place ultimately becomes bad because like, in many dystopias, there was hope for a better world, but without regard for the human and environmental costs.

Is India a dystopia or a utopia? Do we continue to hold our individual identities or are we just diluted versions of ourselves? Is it possible to dismantle this dystopian democracy that is being constructed before our very eyes? These are questions that I leave you with, dear Reader, for both the utopia and the dystopia exist in our imaginations as abstract, speculative narratives – thought experiments, if you will – and come alive, based on how we tell the story.

Do you think we are living in a dystopian India? Why? Share your thoughts below.

Convenience Store Woman: The Paradox Of Being A Machine In Japan

Deya Bhattacharya

April 18, 2019

Keiko Furukura is a creature of mystery, not just for her readers but also for herself. She is 36 years old, unambitious and a convenience store worker whose life has remained stagnant for 18 years. For Keiko, she is a convenience store worker even “more than she is a person”, and for her, it is an informed choice to find structure and peace in this, even if her family, friends and colleagues think otherwise. Keiko is the protagonist of Japanese author, Sayaka Murata’s novel Convenience Store Woman (translated from Japanese to English by Ginny Tapley Takemori) and is a captivating voice, almost always bluntly honest about society’s blurring boundaries between public and private when it comes to women’s lives and bodies. Murata’s novel is a transgression as it moves between hilarity and hopelessness, and portrays a candid feminist story of a woman who has chosen to confine herself inside a 24-hour convenience store. In many ways, Keiko’s story is a sharp criticism of Japan’s mechanistic society, where women have little choice and control.

In Japan, work culture is often mechanised. In fact, Japan is one of the countries where automation is favoured – there are more vending machines in Japanese cities than anywhere else in the world; workers in Japan are expected to go beyond their brief to serve their employers and clients; their days are structured in a way that work is prioritised over the self. In the backdrop of this mysterious mechanistic work-culture, Keiko fits in like a perfect cog – obedient, diligent, with no glitches – exactly like a machine. Keiko’s identity revolves around her work, by her volition, exactly how Japanese society would prefer it.

The Story

In Convenience Store Woman, Murata, who still works part-time in a convenience store, chronicles the life of Keiko, who began working at the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart when it opened (when she was 18). For Keiko’s parents, this was a relief as Keiko was an oddball throughout her childhood, often getting into trouble for being brutally honest and having no skills of diplomacy. For them, it meant that Keiko is trying her best to become a functioning and ‘normal’ member of society. However, it is a shock that almost two decades later, Keiko continues to work at Smile Mart, without a “real career”, husband and children. Keiko has, in many ways, dissipated into Japanese work-culture.

Keiko finds her safe space within the convenience store; this is where she finds predictability that is mandated by a stringent store manual – this dictates the conduct of workers, how they should dress, what they should say and how. Keiko has superimposed Smile Mart upon herself in a way that is almost surreal: while the store manual is her base, she also copies her coworkers’ style of dressing and speech patterns – this is Keiko’s normal. Moreover, Keiko does not really care about marrying and having children or even with upward mobility within her career. Everyone, including the reader, is almost bewildered with Keiko’s satisfaction with stasis.

The story also puts Keiko in a position where she has to cohabit with a man when she has never been in a romantic relationship with anyone. Keiko’s formidable co-worker, Shiraha, a close-minded man who believes that the world is still “basically the stone age with a veneer of contemporary society,” begins to live with her under the guise of a ‘convenience marriage’. Through this quid pro quo arrangement, Keiko tries to appear more normal to her friends and family.

Keiko’s Feminism

Keiko’s story centres identity and looks at the challenges, expectations and pressures of being a woman in Japan. Even within the deeply mechanistic culture of work, Keiko is expected to find enduring love, have a family and find peace in her home-life. Her feminism, which is subtly reflected in Murata’s hilarious depiction of Keiko’s routine life, fits in this culture almost seamlessly, while rejecting and often manipulating the expectations that society has for her.

Keiko is subversive when year after year, she remains an employee at Smile Mart, when she refuses to change her lifestyle by falling in love or dating; when she and Shiraha move in together to appear as a couple to the external world. Keiko’s subversion in a world and culture where adherence to obedience and performing societal roles for external validation is critical is a gift that the reader is delighted to enjoy. Keiko has refused the double burden; she has a predictable life that she does not let anyone change; she believes, even though others around her don’t, that she is a well-functioning part of the world, by being a well-functioning part of the store. Murata writes Keiko as an independent protagonist – she does not need anyone. This may often look lonely to the reader because we have been conditioned to believe that single women are lonely, but in many ways, Keiko’s character feels liberating. And therein, lies her feminism.

Keiko As A Machine

In a society that reveres machines and automation, Keiko becomes one. This, in many ways, is her idea of normalcy, even though there are overwhelming ways in which her lifestyle is subversive to the culture she is a part of. Some readers may view Keiko as an alien scientist, but to me, she feels like an evolving algorithm – Keiko knows that society is a constantly moving mass, with jagged edges; that all “babies are like stray cats and all people are just like cattle”. She moves around feeling like a piece of software, who needs to be rewritten and rebooted, often depending on who she interfaces with, and she refers to this as “being infected”. In her mind, she records how and how much people talk, how they react and respond – Keiko learns these behaviours like a machine, and uses this to interface with others.

In a famous interview with Gene Swenson, Andy Warhol talked about his process, “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.” As a lonely artist, Warhol used machines to buffer his interactions with others. In a review of The Lonely City by Olivia Laing, that also chronicles Warhol’s obsession with machines, the Guardian talks about how loneliness can wed people to machines – “Acting as servant or companion to the machine was another route to invisibility, a mask-cum-prop like his wig and glasses.”

In many ways, Keiko’s machine-like, monotonous behaviour is her way of combatting her feelings of loneliness, and of being different from the world. As opposed to Warhol and his art, Keiko does not take to a machine, she becomes one – robotically chanting ‘Irrashaimase’ every time a customer walks in the door – this is how Keiko feels alive. This, however, creates a dichotomy in the minds of the readers; we never really know how to perceive Keiko – is she eccentric? Is she brave? Is she a monster? Do we feel elated for her silent subversions or feel pity for her loneliness? It is difficult to decide even towards the end.

As a reader, it is a marvel to understand Keiko’s ceaseless struggle to be normal, and her constant reluctance to completely give in to the utilitarian demands of what a ‘normal society’ demands. Keiko, then, is a bridge to understanding and grasping Japanese cultural and social cues: from a distance, Keiko is submerged within this culture because of her work, but a closer look would prove that she is an outsider, looking in, just like the reader is. Convenience Store Woman and Keiko’s character strikes a chord with readers especially because seeing the world through her eyes, the reader feels acknowledged: who hasn’t felt different from their peers in their quotidian lives and questioned their loneliness because of it?

The reader is also drawn to Keiko because one cannot guess, even at the end, who Keiko really is. As Murata dissects Japanese culture through the portrayal of an unusual protagonist, one wonders whether Keiko is a machine or the subversive subject in a sharp, stringent society. Keiko is a symbol as well as a symptom of Japanese work-culture, where one has to become a machine in order to be one with the society, but may also become subversive to keep parts of their individualistic identity alive. It is through this novel that readers are promptly rescued from their own mundane existence by bringing them closer to Keiko’s mundane existence.

Convenience Store Woman, for all its disturbing allegories and oddities, is a book about a single woman finding her happiness, in a society that leaves women no choice or agency to decide for themselves. Keiko has managed to craft her own “good life” even if this does not resonate with others. Murata’s novel is quirky and satirical towards Japanese culture, at the same time; it offers its readers a trance-like, almost transcendent thread of feminism in a culture where women are viewed as convenient beings upon whom society can project its expectations.

Have you read Convenience Store Woman? What do you think of Keiko? Share your thoughts below.