2

POST script
JULY 22, 2012

SEVEN SISTERS

NELit review

FIFTH WALL
UDDIPANA GOSWAMI
Literary Editor

Chandraprabha Saikiani: fiery feminist

Aparna Mahanta delves into the oeuvre of a writer who was way ahead of her time in championing womens rights
HOUSEHOLD name in pre-independence Assam, Chandraprabha Saikiani (1901-1971) was a forgotten figure at the time of her death. There was hardly a ripple of interest when, while literally on her deathbed, she was awarded the Padma Shri. The resurgence of the womens movement in the last quarter of the 20th century revived interest in the pioneering women of the pre-independence period. Thanks to the efforts of women like Puspalata Das and Nirupama Borgohain, one of the figures who emerged from oblivion was Chandraprabha Saikiani. Her contribution as freedom fighter and social worker, as a force behind the Mahila Samiti movement, as feminist and as rebel in her private life is now being documented, but that she was also a bold and original writer is hardly known. Apart from the reprint of her only novel, Pitri Bhitha (1937), and inclusion of a short story, Daibagya-duhita, in a collection of womens writings, her works are yet to be collected or reprinted. The male-dominated Assamese literary establishment has not taken notice of Chandraprabha Saikiani as a writer, even though many lesser male writers find a place in the literary canon. It is true that Saikianis literary output is not large, but it is not negligible either. Gender constraints hampered Saikiani as a writer. Like other women at that time, she could not find any publisher for her writings. Nor did she have money for self-publishing. Out of the many novels she wrote, she could publish only one by paying half the cost. Other manuscripts remained unpublished. As the female literacy rate in Assam was then less than one per cent, there were few women readers, not to speak of women critics. The male readers and critics who made decisions on a works merits could hardly grasp or appreciate the women-centric and often fiery feminist content of her writings. As a result, her writings remained unread, unnoticed and literally disappeared from sight. Nirupama Borgohain was providently able to rescue what must have been the last surviving copy of Pitri Bhitha. Puspalata Das could save a few fragments of the manuscript of the novel A-

Barenaked ladies

HERE is nothing novel about a group of grown men stripping and/or molesting a woman in public, while the said public looked on. Mythology tells us about (self?) righteous kings and warriors who also happened to be husbands allowing something like this happen a long time ago. In contemporary times, one hears of women being similarly humiliated in many parts of India. But then that is mainland India, right? We always do love saying that in the Northeast, we women are treated with greater dignity. Apparently, thats a myth as well. The public humiliation of a teenage girl in Guwahati captured on camera recently has everybody talking the media, the activists, the online forums, the person on the street, you name it. With even international TV channels picking up the video that went viral, it has very nearly become the event of the year. Axamiya society is aghast! And yet, not just Assam, but the entire Northeast should have been hanging its collective head (if there be one) in shame for a long time now for the double standards we hold, if not for anything else. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Assam and Tripura have been recording among the highest rates of crime against women in all the Indian states. According to another estimate, nearly one rape has occurred every three days in Mizoram in the first four months of the current year. So what happened to the respect we have for our women? This latest incident of humiliating one particular woman on the streets of Guwahati is only a symptom of a larger malaise. Junu Bora discusses some pertinent problems women have been traditionally facing in her book which we review in this issue of NELit review. In one of her chapters, she aptly quotes Bishnu Prasad Rabha, freedom fighter turned insurgent-against-theState turned Axamiya icon, as stating: Women cannot do what they want to. They cant go out, cant study, cant write. They cant eat, wear, live, deliver speeches, hold political meetings, sing, dance, act according to their wishes. Today, women are imprisoned in their homes. Chandraprabha Saikiani, though, was a trailblazing woman who even in early 20th century Assam, led an active public life while being a single unwed mother. As Aparna Mahanta points out in her discussion of Saikiani as a fiction writer, Saikianis female characters boldly spoke out against the repressive practices in Axamiya society long before Indira Goswamis more well-known characters did. Her views on womens emancipation were, of course, ridiculed by Dandinath Kalita, the father of her child. Anjali Sarma whose biography of Saikiani we review digs into the letters sent her by the more well-known (because male?) writer to find that he tried to control her life in various ways despite being unable to go against societal norms and marry her. It is a clich that behind every successful man, there is a woman. From my experience of knowing and reading bold and independent women and (at the risk of sounding pompous) being one, I have found that behind most successful women are usually one or more abusive, dominating and/or deranged men. In Mon Gongaar Teerot, veteran journalist Sabita Goswami recounted her professional achievements set against a personal life lived with a violent, overbearing husband and two traumatised daughters. Having been in an abusive marriage myself, it struck an empathetic chord in me and I requested her publisher to provide NELit review with a preview of the forthcoming translation of her memoir. This issue, therefore, is dedicated to a few bold women of Assam who took on the double standards of patriarchal society and what is more, triumphed. They created a niche for themselves in traditional male bastions, despite the many hurdles placed in their paths both by society at large and by the men they were close to. It is perhaps these men who strip us women of our dignity more, much more than the ones in uniform whom we have been taught to fear in the Northeast. After all, for the Indian occupational forces or for the terrorists of the region who repeatedly revile us, it is not personal. T

parajita (printed in her Agnisnata Chandraprabha). When most women writers only ventured into poetry, Saikiani wrote boldly in prose: short stories, narratives, reports, travelogues and novels, besides poems. Her first piece Devi, possibly the first short story published by an Assamese woman, appeared in Banhi in 1921 under her maiden name of Kumari Chandraprabha Das. As her fathers name was Ratiram Majumdar, the identification of Saikiani as Chandraprabha Das had probably not been made, but both she and her sister, Rajaniprabha (the first Assamese woman MBBS doctor), had adopted the surname Das as students of Nowgong Mission School. Even then, a single reading of the story leaves no doubt that only Saikiani could have written it. The theme, the struggle of a child widow, and, more importantly, its presentation from a feminist perspective bear her unique stamp. Born and bred in a village, Saikiani knew firsthand the suffering of women in a tradition-bound and backward society. At the same time her access to education, rare then for girls like her, and particularly her two-year sojourn as a Normal student in Nowgong Mission Girls School, established by American Baptist women missionaries, introduced her to the modern womens movement and the concept of womens rights. Mahatma Gandhis noncooperation movement then sweeping over the country, including Tezpur where Saikiani was working as a schoolmistress, was another factor in the choice of theme and attitudes expressed in her first piece of writing. Gandhi had made the plight of child widows part of the nationalist political discourse, but Saikianis own approach was thoroughly modern, progressive and feminist. At a time when women characters in Assamese literature by male writers were figures of male fantasy, serving as romantic interest to the hero or sometimes as the idealisation of the nation like Joymati Kunwari Saikianis women characters are flesh-andblood representations placed in a familiar milieu, torn by very human impulses and desires. Almost 60 years before Mamoni Raisom Goswami wrote about Giribala in Dotal Hatir Uye Khowa Howda, Saikianis eponymous heroine

FRONTIS PIECE
RRRRRRT G

THE male readers and critics who made decisions on a works merits could hardly grasp or appreciate the women-centric and often fiery feminist content of Chandraprabha Saikianis writings. As a result, her writings remained unread, unnoticed, and literally disappeared from sight
Devi, a child widow who too was the daughter of a Brahmin satradhikar of a satra in Kamrup, is described as publicly demanding to be served with meat at a ritual feast of Brahmins. When her mother gives in to her desire in secret, Devi takes her meat-laden plate to sit by her father in the line of Brahmins, thus causing a scandal. When she is older and becomes aware of her situation she refuses to submit to her fate, violently rejecting her shanti-biya, the postpuberty rite when symbolic marriage to a wooden post confirms widowhood. She vehemently reproaches her father for enforcing such inhuman customs unworthy of a learned man and a follower of the liberal Srimanta Sankardev. Her passionate arguments for remarriage of child widows finally prevail on her orthodox father to arrange her remarriage with a liberal England-educated civilian. In the later more mature Daibagyar duhita (1947), Saikiani again takes up issues of female desire and agency in a contemporary context against the backdrop of the freedom struggle. The heroine, Menoka, a child-bride, is another victim who stands up and fights against those who betray and exploit her. Married off to an old man for ga-dhan (bride-price) by her father, an indigent village priest, she refuses to consummate the marriage on reaching puberty. When her husband dies she sees no reason for mourning or assuming eternal widowhood. Succumbing to the cravings of youth, she falls in love with a village youth of the same caste and gets pregnant. When the community mel, called to try Menoka, orders her to get a prayachitta (penance) naturally after aborting the child or face social os-

tracism, Menoka refuses to accept such an unjust and one-sided ruling where all blame and punishment falls solely on the woman. She leaves the village, determined to keep her unborn child. At a time when extra-marital or illicit sex, abortion, illegitimacy and unwed motherhood or prostitution were unmentionable topics even though widespread, Saikiani boldly engages with them from the womens point of view. She subverts the classification of fallen woman given to women who fail to conform to the norm. At storys end, Menoka is a freedom fighter in jail, the last transformation of a journey that has taken her from a village, an outcast, a fallen widow, an unwed mother, a prostitute in a Dubi brothel, to the goal of freedom she had been searching all the while. Pitri Bhitha is about womens property rights, again challenging societal stereotypes of womens role and duties. The heroine, Madhabi, is torn between love and duty following her resolve as her dead fathers inheritress to repay his debts and redeem the ancestral homestead. Like Saikianis other heroines, Madhabi believes in a womans right and duty to make her own decisions based on rational consideration of her own circumstances, notwithstanding the diktats of society, and stand by them, whether they lead to happiness or in Madhabis case, tragedy, a message as relevant today as it was daring then, and proving again how much Saikiani was ahead of her time. T

Emotive and academic: tribute to an extraordinary woman

TILOTTOMA MISRA

N her Preface to the biography of Chandraprabha Saikiani, Anjali Sarma mentions that at the time when she took up the work, there were already in existence at least three available published biographies of Chandraprabha, besides several articles of a biographical nature. Significantly, this extraordinary womans eventful life has also been fictionally represented in several Asamiya novels which include Chandraprabhas own Pitri Bhitha, Dandinath Kalitas Sadhana, Lakhidhar Sarmas Bidrohini and Nirupama Borgohains Abhijatri. Sarma has, therefore, knowingly set herself the difficult task of breaking new ground on a subject which has been worked upon by several others before her. Making a brief survey of the three earlier biographies, Sarma points out that though there is no dearth of material on Chandraprabhas life and work, no serious attempt has so far been made to sift through all the available biographical data and write a reasonably reliable biography of this multi-dimensional personality. In fact, as pointed out by the author at several places in the book, avoidable factual errors (for example the date on which the Tezpur session of the Assam Association was held) have occurred in earlier biographies of Chandraprabha which have gone

undetected probably because of a prevailing tendency to obliterate the boundary between fact and fiction when it comes to depicting the extraordinary life of a woman who stood apart from all her contemporaries with her radical views and practices. Sarma states in the preface that her objective in this biography has been to maintain authenticity as far as possible. In this age of epistemological relativism, the very idea of accepting any knowledge as foundational and therefore reliable is being viewed with scepticism; but, in the field of biographical studies the authenticity of facts which have been documented in a verifiable manner, must be relied upon. Sarmas biography of Chandraprabha Saikiani is undoubtedly a commendable engagement with facts gleaned from a variety of sources. Sarmas earlier research on Asamiya biographical writings has adequately equipped her to attempt the present work which may be considered as one of the few critical biographies in Asamiya literature. It has not only sought to maintain a scientific objectivity in presenting the details about the life of Chandraprabha with meticulous care, but also the available biographies, biographical notes, articles and other documents that reflect on the life, works and the political events of the time in which Chandraprabha lived, have been

CHANDRAPRABHA
Anjali Sarma Banalata, 2011 `70, 168 pages Hardcover/ Non-fiction
critically analysed. The notes, references, bibliography, the exhaustive timeline and the appendices bear evidence of all the painstaking research that has gone into the work. This well-researched book has traced the eventful life of Chandraprabha from her birth and early childhood at Daisingari village of Kamrup district to her emergence as a freedom fighter and leading light of the womens move-

ment in Assam. The author has specially focused upon the unique leadership qualities of her subject which became evident even before she came into contact with the nationalist leaders. Her courage and conviction in the nationalist cause and in womens issues made Chandraprabha the first Assamese woman who spoke from a public platform and captured the attention of the audience with her oratorical prowess. From a very young age Chandraprabha devoted herself actively to organisational work amongst women and during the crucial years of the Quit India Movement, she was arrested and jailed for her organisational activities amongst the villagers in the Bajali region of Kamrup. Anjali Sarma has presented the story of Chandraprabhas active political life convincingly with the help of available resources. Chandraprabhas personal life, which includes her relationship with Dandinath Kalita, had led to a lot of unkind gossip and speculations during her lifetime. Sarma has critically examined this aspect of her life from the available correspondence between Dandinath and Chandraprabha. Some of these letters which find a place in the Appendix reveal the opposing viewpoints of the two on social issues. From her analysis of the contents of the letters Sarma points out that though Dandinath refused to accept Chandraprabha, the mother

CLOSE READING
RRRRRRT G

CHANDRAPRABHA successfully draws our attention to significant issues which are crucial to the study of the nationalist discourse and the womans question in Assam
of his son, as his legally wedded wife because of his inability to take a bold stand against conventional moral codes, yet, through his letters, he tried to control her life and ridicule her views on womens emancipation (p43, 55). A valuable section of this critical biography is devoted to the analysis of the writings, both fictional and non-fictional, of Chandraprabha Saikiani. The fictional writings reflect the pain and frustration suffered by Chandraprabha because of the hypocrisy of the orthodox patriarchal society in which she lived and worked. She

was an unwed mother and her decision to give birth to the child conceived through her relationship with the illustrious writer, Dandinath Kalita, was an act of supreme defiance of social taboos that victimise the woman. In her short stories and novels, as shown by Sarma, she has voiced her protest against a system that upholds two separate moral standards for men and women. When men commit moral transgressions society is ready to forgive and forget. But the concept of justice changes when applied to a woman. Most of the women in Chandraprabhas fictional works are victims of such unfair notions of social justice. In her non-fictional writings, on the other hand, Chandraprabha appears as the mature woman who has been able to successfully achieve sublimation from her private grief and channelise all her energy into the public sphere where women hardly had any visibility in her own time. Her writings reveal her determined effort to universalise her own suffering by taking up the cause of all the suffering women of the world. But, Chandraprabha had no romantic illusions about the nationalist agenda of the leaders of the freedom struggle. From her own experience of life she knew that the

resolution of the womans question was impossible without conscious activism on the part of the women themselves and she had realised early in life that the burden of giving leadership to such a movement lay on her own shoulders. Anjali Sarmas Chandraprabha successfully draws our attention to such significant issues which are relevant for the study of the nationalist discourse and the womans question in Assam. In the last chapter entitled Pitribhita Darshan, the author adopts the technique of modern subaltern historians who try to recreate historical events and personalities from the oral accounts of common folk. A hundred years ago, when Chandraprabha tried to inspire the villagers of Bajali with the message of freedom from colonial rule and womens emancipation through modern education, her image was that of a fallen woman who wears sandals and rides a bicycle . Hundred years since then, the image has changed completely. She was a good woman, said villagers when interviewed by Sarma during her visit. The author returns from her emotional journey back in time, confirmed in her belief that the brave stand taken by a woman in her lonely battle for the rights of women, stands vindicated at last. The personal reflections with which the book ends do not seem out of place in an otherwise objective presentation of historical facts. As the author has stated in the Preface, she took up this task of writing a critical biography of Chandraprabha not merely as an academic exercise, but as a tribute to an extraordinarily gifted woman whose life and work continue to inspire every Assamese woman who is sensitive towards womens issues. It is justifiable that a sensitive writer would sometimes react emotionally when she is overwhelmed by shared memories of an oppressive past. T