BENGALURU: When I read The Madwoman of Jogare by Sohaila Abdulali’s for the first time, I had a hard time believing it was the author’s debut. Abdulali’s writing brims with natural craft and astounding descriptions. The novel develops in a village near Karjat in the Konkan region of Maharashtra. The indigenous tribal people of the valley, a white man who runs an establishment for their benefit, a Bombay-based social activist, protagonist Ifrat and her eccentric parents, a young builder who dreams of bulldozing the green valley to construct apartments, villas, condos, the madwoman and the picturesque, mysterious valley itself – form the major characters of the novel.
I must have read this book countless times. While discussing the novel, someone said that most of the literary debuts are usually autobiographical in nature. The Madwoman of Jogare is a model work from the perspective of the ecofeminist literary criticism. There are many more reasons why I admire Abdulali. She has worked as a teacher, journalist, researcher, industrial spy, blogger and what not. Now a freelance writer, she lives in New York.
More than forty years ago, at the age of seventeen, Abdulali survived a gangrape. By the time she was 20, in 1983, she openly wrote about it in a women’s magazine – perhaps the first rape survivor in India to do so. When her article re-surfaced on internet almost 30 years later, it was flooded with comments.
Abdulali did not want it to be the only impression about her so she wrote an op-ed piece about her recovery in the New York Times and it went viral. Her book What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape deals with various social, personal issues related to rape and healing.
While writing about the global response to her piece, Abdulali emphasises on the need to do away with the stigma surrounding a rape. She speaks of doing everything in her power to stay alive while being raped. “Time and again, people have hinted that perhaps death would have been better than the loss of that precious “virginity.” I refuse to accept this. My life is worth too much to me,” she wrote in her first article, narrating how the cops managed to make her feel like the guilty party.
She wrote about her speaking to a group of Indian women and a mother among them telling her that if her daughter ever got raped, she would never let her speak out in public. I recall a case from my high school years wherein a batchmate of mine who got pregnant after being raped by a relative chose to attend classes. I doubt anyone was kind to her. She wrote her exams and had the baby. I never heard her speak.
Not much has changed in all these years. Rape survivors do not have a voice even now. Abdulali says, “We must stop shrouding it in secrecy, and must see it for what it is — a crime of violence in which the rapist is the criminal.”