What does it look like to be single by choice, and not by chance? This question alone could probably draw a thick, dark line between today’s women and their predecessors. This is Sharanya Manivannan’s generation, and these are the pertinent questions for a single woman in India in her late 20s. “We are the first generation with the freedom to make this choice; yet we are grappling with the big questions: how to find love, and how to keep it,” she says.
Sharanya Manivannan’s book, The High Priestess Never Marries , explores what this new paradigm looks like, and starts with a casual thought: can a certain kind of woman, in a certain kind of society, have both love and freedom?
“As I began to write and live that question, seeking answers, it became another question: If the answer is no, then what do you do with your heartbreak?” The book is personal, she says, but it also comes from observing women of her generation who are finding many different answers to these questions; there are many shades of ‘maybe’ in between, and these became a part of her stories.
At 31 and still single, Manivannan is an anomaly in Indian society. But she’s still seeking — and believing — in love, but not necessarily in the institution of marriage.
This is something she has in common with all her characters. “Marriage as an institution is inherently patriarchal, and that’s why women question it more than men. But love is rebellion. Love is subversion.”
An arranged marriage is simply a way to carry forward caste and wealth. Even the so-called “arranged-cum-love” marriage is little more than a PR class. It’s an oxymoron, she says: “It may give you comfort and social legitimacy, but it won’t necessarily give you what your heart truly asks for.”
Hence, she, and the characters she creates, choose to listen to their hearts, even if it entails waiting, loss and enormous amounts of heartbreak. This is another major theme that runs through her book. “It’s so easy and comfortable to allow the institution to take care of you and give you companionship and a warm body to sleep beside. So to say no, despite being lonely, is quite courageous.” In a society that denies single women social legitimacy, it’s difficult to keep challenging thestatus quo.
The High Priestess Never Marries is Manivannan’s first attempt at writing fiction. The book is a collection of stories of varying lengths: some as small as a page-and-a-half, others over 40 pages long. Set almost entirely in Chennai, the book is very much a ‘Madras book’, as she calls it, with a lot of Tanglish, a bit of Tamil and plenty of local references, which Sharanya says she was very particular about not highlighting or explaining.
So references that range from TASMAC to kuthu vilakkus , allusions to the Gemini flyover and Naidu Hall are all presented without any words in italics, no translations in brackets or even a glossary at the end of the book. “I strongly believe in translingual literature, literature in which real people talk and think and live, because diverse literature is important. I don’t think language would deter someone from reading the book.”
Moral ambiguity is another recurring theme: “Many of my characters don’t do things that are strictly principled, because in that mess and in that complication is where real life is. And that’s where fiction is as well.”
Manivannan has been inspired by Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros, a Mexican-American author whose style of storytelling (short vignettes alongside longer stories) as well as voice made her put together all of her writings from 2010 into this collection. She also took inspiration from the Pulitzer prize-winning Junot Diaz, whose The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao unapologetically uses liberal amounts of Spanish and English to narrate the story.
Her book is like her baby, and she definitely had maternal pangs before her fiction debut went to print. “But I’m lucky because I had twins,” she says. That is, her second book released just last month. A children’s picture book that deals with advanced themes like death, grief and the supernatural, The Ammuchi Puchi was written in 2010, but found a serious publisher, Lantan,a only last year.
The author hopes that The High Priestess Never Marries will help challenge the existing narratives of love, sex, romance and marriage in this country, and make it more open and compassionate. “If my work can move people, and if people can see themselves reflected in some way, they can help support more radical choices.” Having encountered many things in art that have reassured her that there are others like her, she hopes that her work can do the same.
It’s an unusual wish for a writer whose book is yet to hit the stands, but Manivannan hopes that after its release, her book gets outdated pretty soon. “If the generation after mine sees that this struggle and conflict between love and freedom is easier, or it doesn’t even exist, and you don’t have to challenge anyone to have it…” her voice trails off. You can list this one under, ‘The things we do for love’.
The High Priestess Never Marries (HarperCollins India, Rs. 399) launches in November.
