T he bitter truth struck R. Vatsala quite late in life. There she was, an independent young woman, fending for herself and her little girl after she walked out of a bad marriage. It was the 1970s, when few women stepped out of their homes. Vatsala vowed to give her daughter the best possible life and education; this was perhaps what drove her to succeed in a fiercely male-dominated society of the time. “I never looked at myself as a woman,” she recalls, seated in her sun-lit Thiruvanmiyur apartment. “When I worked, I was just a person. This was my strength and, sometimes, my weakness.”
The 73-year-old has brought out a book of poems in Tamil called Suyam and has two novels to her credit — Vattathul , which was translated by her daughter, poet and writer K. Srilata, as Once There was a Girl (Writers Workshop) and Kannukkul Sattru Payaniththu (Bharathi Padhipagam), which was released at the Chennai Book Fair last month.
It was during the course of her career that it dawned on Vatsala that the indifference she faced from male colleagues was not because they considered her less intelligent or inefficient; it was because she was a single woman. Consider this: an office almost entirely comprising men. As the lone woman, Vatsala faced innumerable difficulties (this was almost five decades ago). “My colleagues would be discussing something work-related, but the moment I entered the room to join in, there would be silence,” she says.
Being single
“In my 25 years in the institution, not once was I invited for a cup of coffee by my colleagues,” says Vatsala remembering one particular incident. “They were all heading out to the canteen for coffee one day, and I asked if I could join them.” The men stopped in their tracks and looked up at her in sullen silence. Vatsala does not blame them, for she says that the men were subconsciously conditioned to behave in a certain way towards women. “They knew how to relate to their wife’s friend or their friend’s wife,” she says. But when it came to a single woman, that too a divorcee, there was animosity.
Years of “refusal by the patriarchal system to recognise my capabilities in the work place” gradually shaped Vatsala into a feminist. It was the All India Women’s Conference in Calicut in 1990 that changed her life. “There were 2,000 women from across the country. As I heard their stories, I realised that all their problems were due to the fact that they were women,” explains Vatsala.
It was a life-changing revelation, one that answered all her questions about prejudices at the workplace — she was not at fault; it was society.
The female perspective
The conference introduced her to feminists such as V. Geetha. From then on, Vatsala started a new life. She started writing and rode the feminist wave in her own style. In Vattathul , published by Uyirmmai in 2006, she wrote of the lives of “upper-class women from my mother’s generation; women of the pre-Independence years and their problems in a patriarchal society”. Kannukkul ... is also along the same lines, but the story takes off from the next generation. “The problems women face, however, remain the same.”
In her years as a young feminist writer, Vatsala has met some wonderful people who have motivated her to keep writing. Among them was writer R. Chudamani. “I was among the lucky few to have met her in person,” smiles Vatsala. As her tribute to her, Vatsala worked with Prabha Sridevan, who has translated Chudamani’s stories for a Delhi-based publisher. She adds: “My job was to ensure that the translated stories had Chudamani’s spirit in them.”
