Indira Goswami’s novel A Saga of South Kamrup is set in the Amranga Sattra in the year 1948 though there is a glimpse of changes that have taken place here in 1981. The sattra is a Vaishnavite monastery in Assam and a centre of religious and cultural activity. Its head known as the Adhikar is both landlord and spiritual preceptor to his subjects. But this sattra is now in the last phase of its dominant social and religious authority with the poverty-striken and desperate peasants on the brink of revolt under the influence of communist agitation. Moreover, almost its entire population is besotted by opium addiction.
The literal translation of the novel’s Assamese title is “The Moth-Eaten Howdah of the Tusker”, this being a symbol of the decaying sattra. The resplendent howdah made of splendid wood symbolizes the power and prestige of the Adhikar of the Sattra but the fact of its being moth-eaten now signifies its inward degradation. Moreover, the iron hooks of the howdah digging into the skin of the elephant reflects the cruelty that is hidden behind a façade of pomp and grandeur.
The world of the novel is a bleak one – the sights and smells of the rural landscape vividly delineated by the novelist reflect on atmosphere of extreme degradation. The pan leaf creepers intertwining the betel nut trees once lush and green now look like “dried up human intestines” (Goswami, 13) and the once fragrant smell of paddy is now replaced by the odour of opium.
But the most gruesome image of human misery is the picture of the three widows of the Gossain family – Giribala, the sister, and Durga and Saru Gossainee, the aunts of the novel’s male protagonist, Indranath. An inhuman and callous feudal and patriarchal system driven by avarice and religious orthodoxy deprives these widows of their share in property, their right to a decent livelihood, in fact, it does not allow them even the minutest atom of self-respect. Mortified by stringent ascetic practices and penances imposed upon them, these widows live by worshipping the clogs of their dead husbands and the only thing that they look forward to is death.
However, it is not just widows but women in general that are victims of tyrannous patriarchal norms and practices. Married women are totally under the control of their husbands who may be negligent, irresponsible or promiscuous. The marital ties presented in the novel portray forcefully Monique Wittig’s idea of women as being oppressed by the system of exploitation on which heterosexuality is economically based. One evil custom is that a Brahmin girl had to be married off before she reached puberty or else the village ostracized her family. The novelist shows the sadistic cruelty of some village women who roam about continually in search of traces of menstrual flow in growing Brahmin girls so that their families could be hounded out of society. Giribala herself is a victim of this evil custom as she had to be hurriedly married off to an elderly and dissolute son of a Gossain family who maintained an illicit relationship with a female opium – seller. Elimon, the daughter of the poor priest from Rajapukhuri has already reached her puberty but keeps it a secret as her father would then sell her off to the crafty opium – smuggler from Cooch Behar.
Women are presented merely as, in Luce Irigaray’s words, “an exchange value among men; in other words, a commodity” (Irigaray, 355). This is reflected in the old woman who examines Saru Gossainee, the new bride by measuring the length and feeling the texture of her hair, and making her walk to and fro to test her gracefulness.
The novel shows women themselves as being perpetrators of inhuman patriarchal ideologies and complicit with the oppressive caste hierarchy. From the moment Giribala sets foot in her father’s house, her widowed aunt constantly forbids her to do things which she as a girl took for granted. The village women assemble at her place not to welcome her but to satisfy their base curiosity and inquisitiveness and indulge in malicious gossip. One of the women advises Giribala’s mother to send her to her husband’s home soon as it is “like heaven for a woman. If she runs away from her husband’s house, she is like a naked woman loitering on the streets” (Goswami, 23).
Giribala’s mother is a most willing upholder of patriarchal rules. When Giribala tastes the forbidden meat curry, it is she who breaks into a terrible fury. When Giribala is bitten by the snake and the American Christian missionary is alone with her in the sacred sandal room sucking out the poisoned blood, what is foremost in the Gossainee’s mind is that her daughter is being touched by a low caste man – “What a fate that a Damodariya Gossainee has to tolerate a Christian inside her house! Will she have to go through the rituals for atonement for this sin?” (Goswami, 71). Caste and gender bias become the twin systems of oppression calculated to keep women perpetual victims. Giribala belongs to a high caste but her very life would have been put in danger because of the pervasive caste system. The lives of women thus exist at the interface of caste and class inequality as Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid point out in the introduction to their book, Recasting Women. The novel also reflects the various kinds of relationships that patriarchal practices have with class, caste, social movements and colonization which Sangari and Vaid also argue in their book.
The three Gossain widows in the novel try to eke out their existences in different ways in a patriarchal society. Durga has completely surrendered herself to the dominant system. Though she has willingly acquised in the severe penances that a Gossain widow has to undergo, the novelist highlights her inner state of mind which is one of deep anxiety. “Her mind has become a graveyard … All those customary rituals of widow-hood which she did a few years back without much effort, are now a source of fear for her” (Goswami, 9). She dreads to think of the hard rituals that she will have to follow during the approaching Amoti festival during which time the earth is supposed to be menstruating. The novelist also depicts the pervasive hand of superstition which is another instrument to make women a soft target. This is reflected in Durga being seen as inauspicious and bringing the shadow of death to her husband’s family and killing him. Indira Goswami could not show her character to rise above her situation. In fact, “these accusations and pointing fingers seeped into her mind and she really began to believe it herself” (Goswami 9). Abandoned by her husband’s family and neglected in her brother’s household, Durga is the traditional image of a Brahmin widow, and as Prof. D.K. Baruah says, neurotic and unconsciously perverse.
Saru Gossainee, the other childless widow, is somewhat bold because she is staying alone with only the jajmani Brahmin, Mahidhar to help her collect her rent and supervise her property. Her inner life is visible through her silent monologues and dreams. She is one who is aware of the restraint that an upper caste woman like her should maintain. Yet she is filled with a deep sexual longing for Mahidhar and his well built muscular body. She is often gnawed by anxiety, thinking about his wellbeing. The novelist has vividly portrayed her guilt ridden conscience “Watching this sleeping man, lying there almost half naked, behind the broken down mud wall? Should such thoughts flicker through the mind of a thirty year old widow?” (Goswami, 158). Even as a newly married woman, she would be sexually excited on seeing the graceful and sensuous movements of the body of the dancing Vishnu Ojha. “A warm sensation passed through her breasts. Her nipples hardened. The Ojha’s words became flowers and fell on her body. His eyes became swords and pierced her” (Goswami, 184).
The dream she has of Mahidhar accompanying her along the banks of the river Tarma to see the four-armed icon of Lord Krishna and the bush fire enveloping her clothes and body reflects her sexual longing and the eventual destruction of her desire. It is a picture of terrible irony that the very man on whom she placed absolute faith and for whom she felt a deep physical longing should suck her resources like a parasite. Her terror is vividly pictured “There lay her love entangled in the net like a snake! Everything is finished! It is not the same world anymore!” (Goswami, 214). She never appears anymore in the novel.
It is Giribala, the newly widowed young daughter of the present Adhikar who tries to rebel against the suffocating system. Her first signs of rebellion are seen in her screaming with rage at the group of women who have assembled at her house to indulge in base gossip. She shouts at them, “I will live on and have a better life than all of you…” (Goswami, 28). But she could not continue with her words. The image of “a severed branch of a tree” anticipates her fate.
Giribala does not feel any remorse while eating secretly the meat curry that is forbidden to a Brahmin widow. But just before eating it, her mind is full of thoughts of her husband eating pigeon curry cooked with papaya by the opium seller. It is as if she is committing an act of defiance against her dead husband, possessing only unpleasant memories of him. The room where Giribala lies and which is said to be dark and coffin-like and her inner thoughts reflect her sense of claustrophobia. “What can I do? Suicide? Ah, that Christian! Why doesn’t he say anything?” (Goswami, 127). Giribala’s sexual longing for Mark Sahib is reflected in her caressing the soft satin cloth of the ceremonial umbrella as if it were the smooth skin of Mark Sahib. “She rubbed the silk on her cheeks, her neck, her breasts… all over her body in a soft, languid movement of her hand… as if she desired to pull all the silk onto her, wrap herself in its softness…” (Goswami, 129).
Their visit to a ruined estate of a once prosperous Mahajan is indicative of Giribala’s breaking down of both caste and gender convention. Giribala speaks frankly of her fondess for Mark Sahib and her hatred for all the prayers that a widow has to offer to her dead husband’s wooden sandals. She confesses that she has no sense of sin. She admits, “I cannot just exist, just for the sake of remaining alive, like Aunt Durga and Saru Gossainee” (Goswami, 168).
Giribala is calm and composed when she goes to Mark’s dilapidated room in the wet and stormy might to escape being taken to her husband’s house. She cries out that she will “not go back to that graveyard.” (Goswami, 250) and implores Mark “Oh, my beloved Sahib, touch me and realize just for once… just once!…” (Goswami, 251). However, Mark though overwhelmed with sympathy and tenderness for her, could not go towards her and stood there “as if metamorphosed into an iron contraption” (Goswami, 252).
Though the author has portrayed Giribala as taking a bold step, yet she is shown as being racked by the pain of not being able to satisfy her husband even though she was regarded extremely beautiful. In between sobs, she says, “I couldn’t bind him to me with either my body or my mind.” (Goswami, 251). During the purification ceremony, she is shown as “detached” and “motionless” (Goswami, 253). However, after the ritual incantations are over, she refuses to come out of the burning hut and is soon engulfed by the raging fire.
Thus, Giribala realizing that the only other way of escape for her, i.e. through Mark Sahib, now being blocked chooses death over life as the sole means of liberation for her. The author, through the depiction of Giribala’s suicide, shows the tragic consequences that accompany an act of rebellion. Prof. D.K. Baruah points out that if flames symbolize sexual passion, the self immolation of Giribala is a symbolic fantasy of fulfillment of desire. However, he also says that if the novelist wanted to celebrate fulfillment of desire in the positive sense, she would have found other ending to her fiction (Baruah, 39). I would like to point out that death is the easy way out and the author has shied away from showing her female protagonist involved in a more radical subversion of patriarchal norms. Thus, her final act can be seen as more an act of surrender than one of defiance.
Giribala’s suicide can be seen as an act of voluntary sati or as Rajeswari Sunder Rajan points out while citing the anti-sati crusaders’ view, not a true choice but merely an option that is preferred to life as an ill-treated widow. She is no doubt exercising choice but ultimately, she is portrayed as a victim. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan remarks in Real and Imagined Women how the colonial imagination has seized upon an actual narrative scenario of a single white man saving a brown woman from a mob of brown men. But in Goswami’s novel, the white man Mark Sahib proves to be utterly helpless.
The novel cannot be called a feminist work. It has shown all the three widows being crushed by the grinding wheel of patriarchy. Even the two men who stand out as being more humane in an environment where cruel practices are widely prevalent in the name of caste and religion cannot ultimately rise above their situation in the traditional orthodoxy. Mark, bogged down by religious conservatism and moral scruples, fails Giribala in her moment of direst need. Indranath voices his desire for the union of Mark and Giribala only after the latter’s death. And despite his love for Elimon, he had no courage to break the custom that forbids the marriage between a Gossain son and an ordinary Brahmin girl.
The author’s description of women in the novel are marked by a sexist tone – her constant focus is on the body and clothes of the women. Saru Gossainee’s beauty and her dainty ankles and feet are remarked upon. She appears before Mahidhar “wearing only a short gatala over her bosom”, her body “reflecting a kind of mysterious light!” (Goswami, 192). Regarding Giribala, the author comments on the “finely weaved gatala, which covered her shapely, swelling breasts” (Goswami, 62), she being the object of Mark’s gaze. Later, “the wet, soggy markin chemise was stuck to the contours of her bosom. Her mekhala was drawn up to the knees” (Goswami, 249).
Moreover, Elimon is turned into a woman possessing mere physicality as she is seen constantly through Indranath’s eyes – sometimes it is her pair of legs resembling the “tender shoots of bijulee bamboos” (Goswami, 16) or her body which is “as fresh as the saturated, wet ground around the newly dug well” (Goswami, 30). Indranath’s mind even veers to “her undergarments probably stained with menstrual flow” (Goswami, 45). When Indranath tries to recollect where he had seen Elimon first, she merges in his memory with other girls who had “the skin colour of white mushrooms and breasts like tender white pumpkins” (Goswami, 17). Moreover, marriage with Indranath seems to be the only goal for Elimon, though her forthrightness is seen in her very first appearance when she herself strikes up a conversation with Indranath.
Besides, beautiful young women like Giribala and Saru Gossainee are always shown as having sweet fragrances emanating from their body while poor old women are shown to be giving off unpleasant smells. For instance, the old women who is Elimon’s maid is said to emanate a “sour odour” (Goswami, 44). Thus the novelist has portrayed women primarily as sexual beings. As Monique Wittig had said, “Although women are very visible as sexual beings, as social beings they are totally invisible” (Wittig, 8).
The author not only betrays sexist but also racist bias as when she compares Saru Gossainee’s fair complexion to “the white-skinned soldiers who had camped nearby during World War II” (Goswami, 63). There are other instances where fair skin is praised as a mark of beauty which resembles European skin.
Though the most important episodes in the novel are concerning the three widows, they have very little say in it. Giribala’s voice is distinctly heard only twice – in the site of the ruined estate and in the stormy night at Mark’s hut.
The author does not give any hint of female solidarity in the face of oppressive patriarchy though there is occasionally some manifestation of love as when Giribala runs crying after the moving palanquin of Durga. But the same Durga had scoffed at her when she offered her ornaments to help her go on the pilgrimage as she herself had no desire to immerse her husband’s ashes in the holy waters. Durga had said, “It would be a sin to take anything from a person whose tongue utters such words…!” (Goswami, 170). Overall, there is much hostility among the women. This is reflected in the Gossainee refusing to part with any money to enable Durga to go on the pilgrimage and Bhoomichampa who derives sadistic pleasure from the tragedy of Giribala.
There is no picture of happy women in her novel except the women playing Golokdham is Bolo’s house. But they are only heard and not seen. Goswami’s novel has not shown any common cause that women collectively can take up and individual protests are bound to end tragically. In fact, when Giribala’s mother, says that she will go to court to settle the land disputes, the other women cry with shock.
The novel captures the weakening of the feudal structures as the historical reality of the immediate post-independence period. The land grants of General Jenkins have diminished the land-holding power of the rich Adhikars of the Sattra. Meanwhile, the tenants incited by the communist agitation into rebellion are refusing to pay taxes and threatening to seize the lands if the Gossains themselves do not take the plough in their own hands. However, this changing historical scenario of the world outside does not find a parallel in the position of women in the novel. While one section of the oppressed class, the peasants are raising a collective voice against the feudal authority of the adhikars, the condition of the marginalized women is strangely static. Indira Goswami has not shown any collective voice of resistance coming from the women.
The last pages of the novel give an account of the changes that have come in the sattra in 1981 – the land ceiling act, the Gossains involved in the unprecedented act of fighting their cases in the courts of justice, the advent of electricity but lighting only a few houses. Prominence is given to the land issue – after so much bloodshed, the communists have failed to improve the condition of the peasants, and to distribute the land effectively among them. The novelist, after portraying the misery of women, does not give much narrative space to any changes in their condition. It is in two lines that she sums up the change – the first is that there is now marriage between girls from Gossain and Brahmin families and boys coming from the lower castes. The second is that girls and boys now study together in the new college that has sprung up at Mirza near the sattra.
Thus, the author in the novel A Saga of South Kamrup has portrayed vividly the institutionalized and cruel oppression of widows in the sattras but she does not offer any reformist solutions to their problems nor does she show any animosity towards their oppressors or those who sympathise with them but cannot resist against the system.
Works Cited
Baruah, Prof. D.K. “Mamoni Raisom Goswami : The Insistent Pattern.” Indira Goswami (Mamoni Raisom Goswami) and Her Fictional World – The search for the sea. Comp. Kaikous Burjor Satarawala. Delhi : B.R. Publishing Corporation, 2002. 19-43.
Goswami, Indira. A Saga of South Kamrup. 1988. Trans. Indira Goswami. New Delhi : Sahitya Akademi, 1993.
Irigaray, Luce. “This sex which is not one.” New French Feminisms ed. Elaine Marks & Isabelle de Courtivron. New York; 1981. 99-106.
Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder. Real and Imagined Women : Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism. London and New York : Routledge, 1993.
Sangari, Kumkum and Sudesh Vaid, eds. Recasting Women : Essays in Colonial History. New Delhi : kali for women, 1989.
Wittig, Monique. “The Category of Sex.” The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Monique Wittig. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. 1-8.
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