My daughter,’ her foster father spoke in a voice quivering with emotion. ‘Like Damayanti was to Nala, who abandoned her in the deep jungle to the wild beasts; like Seetha to Srirama, who saved his people and his throne that he had retaken after full fourteen years, by sending his pregnant wife to the forest, be an ornament to your husband. Remember, because your body is to be consigned to the flames of your husband’s pyre, his health and longevity are of utmost importance to you.’
The dialogue is from Malayalam writer Manasi’s short story, Sheelavathi, included in the collection, Subversive Whispers. It’s a difficult tale to classify: is it magical realism? Or is it all metaphor, symbolism? Is the peacock up on the rafters real, or is it the protagonist Sheelavathi’s imagination, drawing her attention away from the foul-smelling, diseased and neglectful husband, whose lust she must satisfy?
It doesn’t matter, really. What matters, instead, is the essence of the story, and that of the anthology, which is set in the India of the 70s and 80s: the plight of women—the stifling patriarchy that surrounds all of us, and manifests itself in myriad ways. There is the young working wife, juggling home and baby and career while her husband behaves like the lord and master of the house: demanding, indolent and entitled in Bhanumathi’s Morning. In Scars of an Age, there is the widow, working as a secretary, who finds herself caught between two opposing views: on the one hand, the exacting (and sexist) boss, who demands that she dress a certain way, look young and glamorous; on the other, her grown-up son, who sees red when he sees her dressed up, angry enough to let fly at her.
There is Sheelavathi, the heroine, so to say, based on the mythological story of the same name, where she is the wife of a cruel and leprous king. She, however, continues to remain the chaste and devout wife, who carried her disabled husband around in a basket on her head, even taking him to a sex worker because that was what he wanted.
The stories in the collection vary in tone, setting and the issues they tackle. They vary, too, in the vocalness (or not) of Manasi’s feminism. The initial stories, including Devi Mahathmyam, The Walls, Spelling Mistakes and Square Shapes, are subtle, to the point that it’s easy to miss the anti-patriarchal thread running through them. On the contrary, many of the women in these stories may come across as strong-willed and not in any danger of being oppressed. These are women who defy society and bear children outside of wedlock; women who are married but have lovers; who snap too, at those lovers, and stand up for themselves—like Santhi of The Far End of the Gravel Path, who puts her foot down and gives back as good as she gets.
But the veneer is just that, a veneer. These characters battle discrimination, but they do not always win. The woman who strikes back at her violent and abusive husband may briefly have the upper hand, but for how long? Bhanumathi’s rebellion may be, after all, short-lived (the author leaves it to her reader to decide). And the young mother of The Experiment, who discovers that her little daughter has been sexually abused, may not even acknowledge it, let alone address it.
The objective of Subversive Whispers, therefore, is not to paint portraits of women who dare to fight, but to show how insidious misogyny is; how it creeps in, disguised as tradition, duty, love and a million other ‘virtues’, but all calculated to keep women in their places, well under the control of men.
A few of these stories may be hard to understand. The Serpents of Tirumala, for instance, is strange to the point of being elusive as well as illusive. But, as the book progresses, the characters become more life-like, the subversive whispers increasingly strident and outspoken, until they cannot be mistaken for anything else.
In the translator’s note at the beginning of the book, Devika writes of Manasi’s stories, “…the questions she raises are central to the ethics of the feminist life, relevant perhaps for all times…’ As the translator also mentions, most of these stories are from four decades go; a sobering thought, then, that they are still so relatable.