Night Vision

Tamils rebellious writer Salma unwraps a conservative Muslim society in her novel

Tamils rebellious writer Salma unwraps a conservative Muslim society in her novel
She resists any comparison with Taslima Nasreen,the other South Asian woman writer who routinely provokes the wrath of the male patriarchy in the region. It is true they could not be more different. For one thing,Salma,as she prefers to be known,is the better writer. For another,Salma also has a political life as A. Rokkaiah Malik,the chairperson of the Tamil Nadu Social Welfare Board. She was catapulted from total obscurity to a position of power when she stood for and won a seat in a constituency reserved for women.

Taslima has courted controversy as a means of stoking the fire of her passionate need to be heard,and clearly belongs to the educated Bengali elite. Until fairly recently,Salmas life has been a slow burn. She was forced to leave school at the age of 13 and has been self-taught since. She writes and speaks mostly in Tamil. Even the title of her novel suggests the pain and secrecy in which she has had to nurture her writings first,as a poet jotting down pain and frustration closeted in the bathroom of her marital home,and then as a short story writer and the fierce narrator of her first novel,which contains autobiographical elements but also goes beyond them.

However,there are similarities between the two writers. Theres a fierceness with which they gaze upon their worlds. Their lives are more fascinating to contemplate than their work. Salma has also been attacked for the manner in which she has used Tamil language in her poetry to name and describe female body parts and was denounced by male writers of the Tamil literati. Yet none of the poems can be called titillating in the least. They are filled with the rage of being female and suppressed in a male-dominated society. Its the same rage that illumines the dark corners of her novel with a reformist edge,elegantly translated into English by Lakshmi Holmstrom.

The world Salma writes about is as constrained and restricted as the remote village Thuvarankurichi in the Trichy district of Tamil Nadu to which her family belongs. There is more of an anthropological interest in the Muslim community about which she writes and their various customs than a novel might warrant. She seems to unwrap the layers of her characters with the clinical determination of a moralist removing the bandages wound around the feet of Chinese women. What is odd,perhaps only to an outsider,is that she does not denounce the source of oppression,only the oppressors,the women,who actually perform the acts of binding the feet and minds of young girls so that they can only hobble around for the rest of their lives.
As Salma has been quoted: Feelings that could not be shared with anyone created a language of intensity. Her book is full of pain,even horror,but underlying it she has kept the songbird of love alive in her heart.u