Was My Grandmother A Feminist?
I had feminist teachers. I had Irom Sharmila. I had Simone de Beauvoir. But before everyone else, I had the stories of my Dida.
I had feminist teachers. I had Irom Sharmila. I had Simone de Beauvoir. I had Assata Shakur. But before everyone else, I had the stories of my Dida.
by Arpita Chakraborty
I didn’t know that the sound of an empty kettle could make you feel lonelier than ever. And so, while shifting through my memory for company, I start this obituary, one due long ago. Of my grandmother. The first feminist of my life.
The trajectory of our political beliefs is always in some way the trajectory of our personal history. The history of who we are, who our molesters are, who the fathers of our aborted children are. In other words, the trajectory of our politics is always the silences that mark our unlived lives. Our political beliefs are stemmed from the lives we chose not to live. Or were chosen for us. By someone except us. And it is to my grandmother that I owe the recognition of this fact. The fact that she made the silences of her life heard. Even now, in a distant country, in a different continent, two years after she stopped living them, her choices give me the strength to look for openings in the most adverse of conditions.
My maternal grandmother was an illiterate teenager married off to a widower in a distant city. A city where she suddenly found herself two days after she took her sacred vow. Benaras, the holy city of Hindus, was to be her cage for the next fifty years. She found herself a wife, a mother, and a woman expected to live for others. Nothing of this is of course unknown to millions of Indian women. Hers is the story of every child bride, every migrant housewife. Except, she bettered it. She bettered it for the rest of the life. Her life was a slow, painstakingly patient striving to grasp at the little straws she was offered over years.
She learnt three languages, Bengali, Hindi and English eavesdropping on her kids while they would study their lessons. While fanning her kids studying under kerosene lamps, she would listen to them reading aloud nursery rhymes, grammar, and children’s stories. She would memorise the rhymes as the kids would read aloud, and then go back to studying the letters later. Memorisation, and then associating the alphabets with the words she could remember — she learned three languages like this. She would see them doing their mathematics homework, remembering dates from history lessons and the names of countries from their geography textbooks. She learnt numbers while cooking, and cleaning, and buying fish in the busy markets of Benaras. One of the most vivid memories from my childhood was my Dida sitting in the verandah, with a newspaper spread in front of her, using a bonti to chop vegetables for lunch. After she was done with the vegetables, she used to pick up that old shred of newspaper, and start reading it. Every daily chore, every duty of the family was seen as a way to improve her personal sphere. Who is a feminist, after all? Does being a feminist mean explicitly voicing out one’s political choice of espousing women’s rights? Or does it mean striving for your right to lead a better life as a woman throughout your life?
The right to choice, that we as feminists fight for, was something she did all her life. Maybe she did not know the word feminism, but does that make her fights any less feminist?
My grandmother was a devout wife, like the ones Indian husbands desire. But my mother remembers seeing her without any ornaments, in simple sarees, eating only vegetarian food since her childhood. The topic was never discussed. This was the life of a widow. But why? What was she protesting against? In reply to inquisitive barbs from relatives, she would casually talk about the need for restrain. This understanding came from a spiritual Vaishnavism, but was also fuelled by the taunts for not bringing enough dowry to the family. This, was her resistance, her protest against such atrocious demands. While she was bringing up four kids, cooking non-vegetarian food she did not eat, and partaking other duties of a housewife, she joined a sect of Hinduism her husband publicly condemned and ridiculed. The valor of this decision cannot be appreciated enough if one does not fully know what being a wife of a Hindu priest in the holy city of Benaras meant. Every choice that she made, be it religious or marital, came from a decisive understanding of the personal choices, and not succumbing to the all too valued idea of the family in the Hindu Brahmin household. The right to choice, that we as feminists fight for, was something she did all her life. Maybe she did not know the word feminism, but does that make her fights any less feminist?
Religion gave her freedom. My atheism can only marvel at what she made out of religion. Coming from a Shaivite Brahmin family, she discarded her husband’s sect and became a follower of Gaudiya Vaishnavism. This exposed her to sarcasm and jibes for years, but it also gave her the freedom to travel. She used to visit cities around the country in the holy pilgrimages she undertook: Vrindavan, Mathura, Nabadwip, Kanyakumarika. She would travel alone to see her children living in other parts of the country, and live life on her own terms. Of course, there were domestic troubles, marital discords, and the self-chosen life of a widow years before she actually became one. These were the silences of her life. But she made the most of a life she did not choose; the silences thrust upon her were overpowered by the choices she made.
The story of her life came to me from relatives. My mother, my uncles, a distant aunt… but seldom herself. No one ever asked her story. We mostly assume their stories, don’t we? Our mothers, our grandmothers, our chachis and buas, we assume their stories have been that of being our mothers, grandmothers, chachis and buas. So was it with my Dida. These were not myths of a feminist handed down proudly, softly. These were roughly tossed around, here and there, only fragments from a larger story whose primary characters were others. But they sedimented over time; collected in my mind, they weaved themselves into a story which I recognize only now as feminist. As rebellious.
I had feminist teachers. I had Irom Sharmila. I had Simone de Beauvoir. I had Assata Shakur. But before everyone else, I had the stories of my Dida. And I had her. And somewhere in me, she planted the firm belief that if she could, so can I. She was very special to me, but she was not unique. We all have such naanis, buas, and dadis. Go back and look for the stories in their lives, the lives before they became just those relations in the larger matrix of our life. These stories need to be discovered and told.
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