Generations of women are led on to the stage….Uma, a graduate from Miranda House, gingerly stepping into the doorsill of matrimony; a mesh of mystery clouding over her late mother-in-law's life; her great mother-in-law Haimanti who hid well a life layered with fears and tears behind a commandeering image, a litany of maids; and then a green-eyed widow in a shrouded existence in the “one-and-a-half-storey” of Uma's new rambling home, Kailash, in North Kolkata whose walls obviously hide more stories than the many books its library holds.
Pitted against these “real” stories is the imagined figure of the goddess in Bengal, Chandi, the lion and tiger rider, the slayer of demons, the symbol of fertility, whom they all pray to.
What binds the pages of academic Saswati Sengupta's recently published debut novel “The Song Seekers” (Zubaan), is a strong feminine thread that exposes the chinks between the lived experiences of women and that of the imagined idea. The English Literature teacher from Miranda House gives a meticulous treatment to the storyline, set in Kolkata of the 1960s, travel back in time creating sub texts, to bring under the scanner the conflicting images of women — prayed and preyed upon. Edited excerpts:
How did you choose the subject of your book?
Quite simply, I wanted to tell a story. The disparity between the imagined power and freedom of the female envisaged as goddess and the quotidian reality of flesh and blood women has always intrigued me. In the classical Greek world, for instance, democracy takes shape in Athens which is named after a goddess. But while Athena is worshipped, and according to legends the city chose her over the male god Poseidon to be their patron deity, real women were not considered to be citizens of the polis. How was that justified and accepted? Closer home, the Hindu pantheon is full of goddesses who ride lions and tigers, battle demons, protect forts and fallow land, preside over learning but real women are associated primarily, often exclusively, with the secluded private space of home. How did these contradictions come about? So I focused on a particular narrative — the Chandimangals — a canonised genre from medieval Bengali literature that celebrates Goddess Chandi. Does the fact that male poets, overwhelmingly upper-caste, who composed these narratives primarily from the 16th Century to the 18th, have anything to do with this image of the feminine? Is it a case of Brahmanical retelling of laukika/folk/popular traditions to strengthen caste-patriarchy? How did these ‘stories' touch the lives of real men and women? That's how really my ‘story' began.
The book beautifully weaves its feminist thread straddling social strata.
Gender does not exist as a monolith, does it? Yes, women in patriarchal societies share much in common but the female experience is also shot through by other structures of hierarchical difference — class, caste, religion, region, race, etc. I did try to capture some of that through the tale. For instance, the scenes in the kitchen where the women discuss the Chandimangal, show how they come together and are also drawn apart by these differences…my story begins in 1962 and looks back to the 19th Century. It is also a sort of bildungsroman of Uma, the novel's sutradhar in some ways, who begins to understand that behind the appearance of modernity lurk many oppressive and structured assumptions in the name of tradition.
Bengal's political history, particularly the Portuguese influence, fills the book's backdrop. How did you go about its research?
Reconstructing the past was through memory: oral as well as printed. Archives like the British Library and the National Library of Kolkata yielded a rich haul of old almanacs, researched history and popular novels of the early 20th Century which helped me understand the ‘taste' of the bhadralok. I also visited some old ‘reading rooms' such as the Bagbazar Public Library of Calcutta and the Joykrishna Mukhopadhyay Library of Uttarpara in search of popular fiction devoured then. The Jyotindramohan Bhattacharya collection of Punthis (the handwritten manuscripts) helped me understand tradition as a layered narrative.
The Portuguese presence in Bengal was excavated through works of maritime historians like Ashin Dasgupta, M.N. Pearson, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, etc, besides an account by Joachim J. Campos. Words too unravelled as history — we call ribbon fita in Bengali and that is Portuguese. Such words still pepper Bengali, much of this I learnt from Sisir Kumar Das. Looking at paintings also helped, especially of ships and ports. I also visited places that mark the Portuguese presence in Bengal still, like a church in Bandel in Hooghly district, and the Firinghee Kalibari in Kolkata.
What next?
I am working on stories of goddesses still, particularly those of Manasa, Chandi, Sashthi and Lakshmi who represent the gamut of the consecrated feminine from the luminal to the sanctioned in the Bengali tradition. This has been the area of my research. But it is more academic in nature. As to fiction, I will wait till I am seized by the urge to tell another story.
