Once upon a time, exactly 114 years ago, a woman named M. Saraswati Bai, wrote Brainless Women , a story now considered the first ever story written in Malayalam by a woman. But to think that the first story authored by a woman had this title... well, what a woman says is not always what she means!
Interestingly, this story portrays the predicament of a woman writer. “Whenever a woman begins to work for money, she loses her femininity... I want no such woman for wife, ” that’s what aristocratic Nair men of the time, like Govindan Nair in the story, believed. Hence, convincing the world of their ‘brainlessness’, even when they had it in their heads, was the burning need of the women.
Kalyani Amma was an average homemaker and Govindan Nair, her aristocratic, scholarly husband. Nair used to write for papers and magazines but as his creations got returned promptly, the couple found it difficult to repair the leaking roof, to pay the grocery man, the milk man, and above all, to keep shut the mouths of their children whose number kept going up annually. Kalyani Amma offered to tutor the children of a neighbouring house but Govindan Nair laughed at the idea – ‘What do you know to teach? Have you read Cicero, Aristotle, Plato or Spencer? You’re truly mad!’
Matters became worse when none of the editors had the intelligence to comprehend what Nair wrote (well, that was it according to him!) and favoured a new-hatched writer, Balakrishnan Nair. Luckily, a grand competition for novel writing then got announced. The prize money was huge. Nair was certain that the sensible judges would appreciate his writing. So when the prize was announced and Balakrishnan Nair declared the winner, Nair could not help cursing him from the bottom of his heart.
Then he heard a feeble voice– ‘Please don’t curse Balakrishnan Nair. I myself am he.’ ‘What, What? So all this time I have been living on your earnings, Kalyani?’ Nair decided to leave for his ancestral home that instant but Kalyani Amma implored him to wait till their next child who was already on its way, arrived.
The next day, soon after the delivery, Kalyani Amma called Nair to her side and said, “I’m dying. You must use the prize money and bring up our children.’ Nair lost all control and said, ‘Kalyani, say you will not die.” ‘Then you will not go away?’ ‘No, Kalyani. With my heart enshrined in you, where can I go?’ ‘Then, I’ll not die.’ Brainless Kalyani Amma smiled(?)
Could it all have been so sweet as Saraswati Bai had imagined in her story? Or, was it just wishful thinking – of how women could dream and write and still escape sort of excommunication?
Why is it that absolutely no other information on this writer is available but her name? Did women of those times write under men’s name as Kalyani Amma did? If yes, how do we trace early women’s writing in Malayalam?
(A fortnightly column on the many avatars of women in Malayalam literature. Sreedevi K. Nair is Associate Professor of English in NSS College for Women, Neeramankara, Thiruvananthapuram)
