Women’s writing in Kannada has a history of addressing the negative effects of local cultures, castes, religion on them, and their role in resisting the patriarchal norms. P. Chandrika’s Chitti looks at life through the eyes of a girl, and its socio-cultural implications is a valuable addition to the women’s narratives.
Chitti is a Bildungsroman that narrates the life of Sireesha—fondly called Chitti—a girl living in a village trying to come to terms with her adolescence. She belongs to a privileged caste, but the family has its financial woes. Sireesha’s father has two families to feed; the mother has to put up with her cranky children and an annoying mother-in-law. In this novel what runs parallel to Sireesha’s life is the portrayal of her village and its politics.
To use Raymond Williams’ phrase, the ‘country’ has always been an important space of exploration in Kannada novels as against the ‘city’. In Chitti , the village — the ‘country’ evolves. It is constantly changing and affecting people’s lives. A club started by the dominant family in the village creates ripples in the lives of Chitti and her friends. The village’s economy expands, but families disintegrate, several inter caste love affairs result in communal feuds, marital relationships get complicated and finally, the ‘country’ breaks down. The core of Chitti is body — the changing human body, it’s transition from childhood to youthhood -- and the kind of values and meaning society attaches to it. Sireesha is inquisitive and very eager to understand the changing phases of her body. But the cultural sphere of her village pits her innocent somatic experiences against aunts who preach morality only to defend their licentiousness and uncles who misunderstand violence for manliness. Though, the narration traces Chitti’s life for a little over a decade focussing more on her schooling, in the end, with Sireesha becoming an ‘obedient’ housewife, the novel doesn’t steer away from the hard realities of a woman’s life. Sireesha’s ‘obedience’ to her grumpy husband is not her failure. But her transformation from being an inquisitive and daring girl to a ‘caring’ wife, voices how society fails to accommodate differences. All of Sireesha’s daring is ironed out and she has no option but to normalise. Sireesha’s husband is a successful, modern man, but his values conservative and rigid -- unlike Sireesha’s father who could see his daughter beyond her gender.
The promising premise of Chitti doesn’t shine in its execution. It is a coming of age story, but would have worked well if the life of the protagonist had been embedded in a strong plot. Despite its linear construction, Chitti ’s life -- that appears in fragmented episodes -- lacks cohesion. Compared to the tradition of narrating landscapes in Kannada literature, Chitti’s village is barren! Narration reads more or less like reportage; the passive narrator doesn’t make an impact always. The tenses remain inconsistent at places, and several sentences are syntactically similar. Metafiction, that is the relationship between art and life constitute major scenes of the book, but they don’t derive philosophical insights and fall flat.
Chitti has several issues related to narration and language, but its criticism of society, its hierarchies, the ambiguities of rural space and patriarchal prejudices call for an attentive reading.
