Of female rage and space

When women’s art painting, poetry, fiction reflects this, the patronising criticism from male critics (needless to add) is that we need to outgrow this ‘victim psychology syndrome’. But rage isn’t about victim psychology. It’s a response to insidious social structures that, after all these decades, are surprise, surprise still far from equal. Which brings me to some recent work interestingly, authored by men that try to explore the female interior landscape in challenging, unconventional ways. The first is Mahesh Manjrekar’s film, Astitva. It may have been panned by the critics, but middle-class women across divides of chronology and conviction have loved it. I can vouch for the fact that my husband’s mother and I both of vastly differing generations and world-views responded with equal relish. It’s true, several parts of the film are clumsily handled; the performances (apart from Tabu’s) are largely lacklustre; and I was particularly disappointed that the camera in the romantic song sequenceadopted a male gaze (except for an all too brief glimpse of a rain-drenched Mohnish Bahl).

Is the perspective of a sexually aroused woman still too much for Indian men to handle? But no, I didn’t have a problem with the supposed improbability of the ending. After all, we accept the non-realist conventions of song-and-dance even in the most grittily naturalistic films, don’t we? The image of a woman walking out of her house with her son’s ex-fiancee, leaving a bunch of gaping men behind, may not be plausible (if we adopt straitjacketed parameters of realism), but it’s a terrific wish-fulfilment fantasy. And there simply aren’t any films out there that cater to female fantasies.

In a totally different vein, there’s Surviving Women, that zany almanac for the new Confused Indian Male, authored by the irrepressible Jerry Pinto. Written in wise-cracking vintage Pinto style, the book makes no pretence of being a profound, archeological excavation of the male psyche. But hey, here’s a book that doesn’t trivialise the gender issue. It doesn’t stink of misogyny (or of Camille Paglia, which is the same thing, if you think about it). And that doesn’t sound like male locker-room backchat. On the issue of female rage the author doesn’t claim to understand it entirely, but at least advises men to approach it with caution and with respect.

And finally there’s Makrand Deshpande’s Hindi play, Kasturi, which I liked enough to adapt into English (let me take a quick commercial break to urge you to go and see Musk Maiden at the NCPA this week!). It’s a funny surreal play about female sexuality. When I saw it for the first time, I was convinced no male author could handle the subject sensitively. And then came that amazing conclusion a woman who comes to terms with her sexuality, but without ‘surrendering’ to the man in her life. A woman who understands that the anarchic world of human feeling is about ‘letting go’, but not about ‘giving up’. About accepting the other, without denying the self.

Every spiritual tradition in the world enjoins us to ‘surrender’ our egos. But as feminist theologian Mary Gray points out, it’s so easy for women to absorb that self-abnegating rhetoric without realising that all their lives have been about subtly denying their selfhood. Such denial is surely the mainspring of so much subterranean female rage. If you don’t have a sense of a self that you consider worth surrendering, what’s the value of that surrender, anyway?

— Arundhati Subramaniam is a poet