Though women in India still struggle to claim space in the public sphere, even a cursory glance at the history of Indian women’s writing reveals that the genre of autobiography has been a preferred form of writing by women since the 19th century. This choice of form is not an arbitrary one. Autobiography or the memoir as a form allows public articulation of the private, allows the personal to become political. Some of the most radical women over the last one-and-a-half centuries have shared their life stories as testimonies of their times, as important documents of the history that they inhabited and tried to change. Renuka Narayanan’s A Madrasi Memoir must be read in this larger context of women’s writing in India.
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” asks poet Muriel Rukeyser. “The world would split open,” she replies. Narayanan’s memoir tells the truth not only of her life but those who are closest to her by blood and heart with courageous, candour, unsparing wit and critical insight. The Tamil Brahmins or ‘tambrahms’ (the north Indian descriptor for this tribe) are an intriguing lot, mired in legend and mystery, object of admiration and stereotype. The memoir is an epic narrative of a Tambrahm family, the contradictions and challenges of people who have been a powerful force and presence for over a century. The book begins with a childhood recollection of the author where she is strongly reprimanded by her aunt and mother for using the word ‘untouchable’. This anti-caste position taken by her mother and aunt is a radical departure from a family that had a history of conforming to ritualised forms of social and personal behaviour. The family that the author represents in her writing, her own, is full of luminaries, scholars, artists, believers and atheists, conformists and rebels.
The author tells the story of her life, her growth and limitations through the narratives of women who made her the person she is. Struggling to find a balance between being a cocktail-drinking, western-educated, agnostic young woman to being mesmerised with the Vedic chants and kitchen aromas of a traditional Tambrahm home, Narayanan tells the stories of women—her grandmother Lalita, her aunt Kanti, her mother Kausalya, who had made the most difficult journeys through tradition. She says, “Every interfaith meet I had gone to was peopled by men spouting clichés on peace and brotherhood. But they had invariably closed ranks against women.”
A Madrasi Memoir creates a new kind of autobiographical telling that reveals the extraordinariness that hides behind seemingly ordinary lives.