Pennezhuthu

On Pennezhuthu

Pennezhuthu: ?Woman-writing? in Kerala

I can testify to innumerable casual encounters where the admission that I am from Kerala has prompted a selection of appreciative noises: "very progressive state", "100% literacy", "green and beautiful", they've nodded in teashops and trains. The tired joke of the first man on the moon encountering the enterprising Malayali, who had already set up shop, has been relentlessly bandied, each time with spill-over mirth. Off-hand disclosures that I was from Kerala have also gunned the narrative of the Malayali woman. This assembles all or most of the following variables: "powerful", "free", "like western countries", "matrilineal". The ubiquitous figure of the Malayali nurse has been invoked as clinching evidence. The predictable routine of these encounters has induced a compelling anxiety of mismatch, an anxiety between my lived experience in Kerala and the liberatory rhetoric that is pervasively woven around the Malayali subject, especially the female subject. I entered my research with large, sweeping questions: What are the self-perceptions and the self-projections that present day Kerala assumes? What are the contexts for imagining the gendered self? How do these play out in the self-representations of women in contemporary Kerala?

 

In the enactment of Onam, for instance, women from Kerala are by unspoken decree required to dress in what passes as the "Kerala dress"- the kasavu-mundu. They are enjoined to perform the "Kerala dance"- the kaikottikali and the "Kerala style of welcome"- the thalappoli. Here, the authoritative and, indeed, the only representative Malayali woman is also indisputably the Hindu upper caste subject. As it stands, it appears that the 'authentic', normative Malayali woman incorporates two vectors: she appears to be marginalized from some structures and privileged in others. She is inferiorized and idealised. To me this bivalence signals the internal power differences within the gendered category - woman. Obviously, some among them enjoy hierarchically more privileged positions than others. Hence, to read the 'authentic' Malayali woman is, I argue, to unmask multiple imbalances of power. Her position of dominance, structured as it is by a host of factors- caste, class, gender, education, sexuality, occupation, religion, region etc.- is ineluctably relational and contextual. Some of the tangled social asymmetries and some of the complicated ways by which hegemonic discourses select, order, exclude and construct this woman subject, is what I hope to trace through my study of "dominant women" in contemporary Kerala.

 

While mapping the contours of my research I've tried, consciously, to plot myself in the field. Given that I am an 'upper-caste', middle class Malayali woman and an insider to this study in more ways than one, it would be fairly ludicrous for me to assume a pose of disinterestedness. Consequently, I've pursued lead-offs from my academic, political and personal histories - the three, as should be evident, not being at any point distinctly separable, and being at all times absorbed into my own experience of "becoming a woman".

 

In this section I propose to investigate on-the-run, a much debated space of women's writing in contemporary Kerala "that of pennezhuthu ("woman-writing"). I do this for three principal excuses. Firstly, even though the discussions on pennezhuthu revolve around the published fictional productions of women, much of these explore the connections between women's experiences and their writings. And this is of manifest relevance to my own work. Secondly, it lays out some of the mediating contexts of reading and writing gendered experience in contemporary Kerala. In fact, Meenakshi Mukherjee has reasoned in her essay that if women are educated and opt to narrativize their personal, they cannot but be influenced by "some literary culture in their environment or the existence of certain literary models in the background". The discursive hyper-activity around pennezhuthu is likely to be a determining context both for the textualization and for the hermeneutics of women's lives even though it might not consciously be perceived as such. The third reason is that the raging controversies around pennezhuthu demonstrate the tenuous foothold, which women continue to have in the literary establishment of contemporary Kerala.

 

Most media articles that ignite disputations on the subject are prefaced by interrogations such as: "What is pennezhuthu?" "Is writing gender differentiated?" "Must we have a separate category of pennezhuthu?" Unfortunately these questions usually presume their answers. They act more as rhetorical strategies for debunking women's writing than as exploratory moves for candidly examining its possibilities. In fact, the mainstream has vigorously flayed pennezhuthu as a space that is cobbled together only so that pseudo-intellectual women, who have been justly exiled from hallowed domains, can parade their minimal genius.

 

On the other hand, Sara Joseph, one of the main (and some people allege, the only) apologist for pennezhuthu has defined it as a form of writing that contests all hegemonies. She holds that women writers in Malayalam have to actively negotiate a man-made language and that they cannot simply wish away its gender-parochialism. But, with many women writers seeking to dissociate from this label, the issue of pennezhuthu has come to be further mired in controversy.

 

What I rehearse here are only some of the issues that have been churned out by the often fierce and impassioned debates on pennezhuthu. I've selected only those that seem to intersect with the uncertainties which subtend the reading and writing of women's personal narratives.

 

Even as they disclaim labels of "pennezhuthu" and "feminist" (the two get yoked together with telling frequency) most women writers assemble on other points of concord. Most of them profess, for instance, to write from a woman's standpoint. Most also admit that they get a curt reception from the literary theocracy. One of the compelling reasons they site for wanting to distance themselves from pennezhuthu is the fear of ghettoization and of further marginalization. Their fear is that a constricting female identity will be conferred and consolidated upon them and that everything they write will be expected to contribute and confirm this identity. They would rather infiltrate the "malestream" and find a place under the arc lights. This determination is undoubtedly commendable, but it also raises certain outstanding questions. Most of these women are short story writers. In fact it has been repeatedly pointed out that the short story is the most popular genre among women writers of Kerala. The validity of the above assertion is built by ignoring expressive forms which are not elevated as "literary"; expressive forms that women use in prolific measures. Clearly, it is easier by far for women who write short stories to find a respectable place in an unrevised mainstream (despite all the difficulties they themselves chronicle) than it is for women who write personal narratives. To even begin to think of the latter as women-writers demands a political move that interrogates, destabilises and dismantles conventional norms of inclusion and canonization. By staking their identity as ungendered authors and by resisting the possibilities of collective mobilizations, it is precisely this political space that women writers, who position themselves against pennezhuthu, rescind. It is another and grave matter that even the political assertions of pennezhuthu, have not begun to address "outlaw genres" - genres that have been cast aside by literary establishments. Neither has it begun to seriously address the relations between the social profile of women and their differential accesses to genres of writing.

 

Another significant issue that has scarcely been examined is the matter of aesthetics. There is widespread fear that pennezhuthu would entail feminist sloganeering to the resultant detriment of aesthetic merit. The literary establishment thought that Sara Joseph was guilty of just that when she set out to effect changes in the masculine ownership of Malayalam. They criticised her language experiments as clumsy and ugly. She retorted that they would find all struggles to overthrow hegemony hideous. Despite this exchange, there has been very little sustained examination of the institutional interests which underpin prevailing notions of aesthetics and creativity. In effect the gate-keeping measures which expel the quotidian and the experiential continue to go unchallenged.

Then too there is the abiding way in which the "autobiographical" and the "personal" attaches to women's writing, even when these are self-avowedly narratives of fiction. Works of criticism routinely read women writers as "exploring the inner-spaces of the experiential world".The essay "Malayalam Short Stories: Evolution, Influence, Original Perspectives" offers another instance of just such a conflation. It concludes, after an all too brief comparative analysis, "Emotionally too, they [women short story writers] placed emphasis on the personal and the subjective experiences, whereas the men were attracted to the objective narrative structure." Such descriptions seem to offer ready ways for placing women's writings in the larger literary-scape. These rather indolent critical gestures conflate all women's writing with the autobiographical. In turn, they further sharpen the resistance of many women writers to the label of pennezhuthu, for they perceive it as a way of tenaciously straitjacketing their fictions into the experiential. Gracy, a leading short story writer has been particularly forceful in pointing out the fallouts - both on women's lives and on their works - of autobiographical readings which equate the female protagonists with the writers themselves. This, she concludes, is a particularly effective route to threaten, censure and slander women writers. Gita Hiranyan is another writer who has voiced her reservations on the subject. She attributes the tragic suicide of the writer Rajalakshmi to the sanctioned voyeurism unleashed by such criticisms. Her own works, she testifies have been reductively interpreted as commentaries of her familial and sexual life. The impatience of these women writers with the obstinate conflation of their fiction with autobiography is more than justified. But what goes un-addressed here is the predicament of women who want to rehearse their selves in writing. How would women who want to write the autobiographical, dodge the witch-hunt that appears bound to follow every time women produce their selves in language?

 

By keeping much of the debates on pennezhuthu at the level of the legislative ("Do we need pennezhuthu or not?") what is being wilfully overlooked are the ways in which it can be productively deployed. C.S.Chandrika has argued that instead of seeing pennezhuthu as a constraining category that keeps women in the unthreatening margins, it should be used for a political advance. Even if this were to be effected, it would clearly not be easy to read personal narratives as pennezhuthu, at least as it stands defined now. If women writers wish to "secure the space to graze freely" they undoubtedly have to picket the posts of "malestream" literature.Pennezhuthu, in this context, far from exhausting these possibilities has not even started seriously addressing them. I go back, therefore, to one of the initiating questions of pennezhuthu: "What is woman-writing?" If it is truly an open-ended poser, then it should not pre-judge and dismiss the claims of personal narratives for inclusion. Even a provisional addition of personal narratives into this category would constitutionally change the terms of references of the debate.

 

What has struck me as remarkable is that women should continue to write experiential narratives even in the less than conducive atmosphere that seems to prevail. Strikingly, most of the women whose narratives I study show a discernible ambivalence toward their writing. In fact some among them do not even care to honour their narratives with the status of "writing". One diarist, in a private conversation presented herself as a thwarted, even failed, writer. She talked of her early ambitions, when her literary talents had apparently come in for compliments from a frontline litterateur of Malayalam. There was self-deprecation as she waved her hands at her diaries, "Now I scribble only these." Yet, it is also clear, both from her conversation and her diaries themselves that she regards diary writing as an invaluable routine of her everyday. There were others who assessed diaries as important, but as green rooms where they readied themselves for other, more serious kinds of writing. Very few, it appears, were unaffected by the conflictive attitudes towards woman writing. They sometimes privileged their experiential writing and at other times devalued them. There were of course a few who were certain that the personal narratives constituted a study-worthy genre. There was one among them who was particularly enthusiastic and I spent many pleasurable hours in her company. Sometimes she would read out aloud from her diaries, she would select those sections, which she deemed were well written. (It is my persistent regret that her engaging diaries - written as they were before the nineties - are not used here for detailed study.) But even she advised me from reading all of her diaries, because she feared they would be monotonous and tedious. I suspect that she would have echoed Meenakshi Mukherjee's critical judgement about "digressions", "unnecessary repetitions" and "lack of linear chronology" in personal narratives.

 

The above section seeks to foreground some of the discursive occasions for women's writing in contemporary Kerala. It seeks to stress that women who write themselves into existence are not doing so in a social vacuum. They are in fact engaging in a crucial translation of their selves from mere objects of social discourse to articulating subjects. They are resisting the silences and erasures that come from being, at best, the "spoken for" and the "spoken about".

 

This is an extract from, Sharmila Sreekumar, "Scripting lives: Narratives of dominant women in contemporary Kerala" (Doctoral Dissertation submitted in University of Hyderabad, 2002) (forthcoming, Orient Black Swan)

 

[1]Meenakshi Mukherjee, "The Unperceived Self: A Study of Nineteenth Century Biographies," Socialisation, Education and Women: Explorations in Gender Identity, ed. Karuna Chanana (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1988) 251.

 

[2]See T. Padmanabhan, "Sahityadarsanam Puthiya Nootandil (Aesthetics in the New Century)," Mathrubhumi May 2000: 8+. This essay is a particularly vituperative attack on pennezhuthu. A forceful rejoinder to it has been made by Sara Joseph, "Asahishnuthayute Theekshnatha (The Pungency of Intolerance)," Mathrubhumi June 2000: 6+.

 

[3]See Sara Joseph, Interview, India Today 1995: 56-57. Malayalam edition, Vanita Pathippu (Special edition on Women). Also see M. S. Ajikumar, "Pennezhuthendathu (What Woman Should Write),"Kalakaumudi 1197: 55+.

 

[4]See Shiny Jacob Benjamin, "Ezhuthukarikal Kaividunna Pennezhuthu (The Woman-Writing that Women Writers Forsake)," Kalakaumudi 1159: 16+. Sara Joseph, in the previously cited interview to India Today, diagnoses the reason for the dissociation of women writers from pennezhuthu as their fear of being labelled feminists.

 

[5]For more details see the introductory chapter of Roopa Antony Thachil, "Contemporary Women Short-Story Writers in Kerala in the Context of Women-Writing in India ," diss., U of Hyderabad, 2000.

 

[6]"Women are not willing to curl up in the limited light it [pennezhuthu] throws," reports a magazine feature on the subject of woman-writing. See, K.R. Mallika, "Sanjakale Bhayakunna Ezhuthutharangal (Literary Stars Who Fear Labels)," Mathrubhumi 14 Dec. 1997: 16+. Chandramati is quoted as expressing much the same sentiment in M. S. Ajikumar, "Pennezhuthendathu (What Woman Should Write)" 57. Other women have aired similar opinions on many different occasions.

 

[7]See K. M. George, "Foreword", Inner Spaces: New Writing by Women from Kerala, K.M. George, et al ed. (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1993) xiii-xiv. The editor and critic, in his introductory note, maintains, "There are also a few novels and plays written by women which are quite popular, but the richest genre of literature by women in Kerala is undoubtedly the short story." For a similar summations, see also, Rati, "Kathayile Penmozhikal (Women's Voices in Stories)," India Today 1995: 117. Malayalam edition, Vanita Pathippu (Special edition on Women).

 

[8]I take the formulation of out-law genres from Caren Kaplan. "Resisting Autobiography: Outlaw Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects," De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992) 115-138. Caren Kaplan has coined this term for depicting, both, the margins and exclusions of the institutionalised genre of autobiography, as well as the rules and norms, which govern it.

 

[9]Sara Joseph, Interview 57. She has discussed the issue of aesthetics and protest writing, with particular reference to dalit and women's writing, more elaborately in her response to T. Padmanabhan. See, Sarah Joseph, "Asahishnuthayute Theekshnatha".

 

[10]S. Sunderdas, "Streerachanakal: Svatvanweshana Pareekshanangal (Women's Writing: Experiments in Self-Discovery)," India Today 1995: 108. Malayalam edition, Vanita Pathippu (Special edition on Women).

 

[11]Vasanthi Sankaranarayanan, "The Malayalam Short Story: Evolution, Influence, Original Perspectives," paper presented at the seminar on English and Indian Short Story, ts., 1994, Hyderabad, 5. In the revised version, which has been published, this critic and translator maintains her description of women's writing, but skips the comparison that she had previously made with men's writing. See, Vasanthi Sankaranarayanan, "The Malayalam Short Story: Evolution, Influence, Original Perspectives," English and Indian Short Story, eds. Mohan Ramanan and P. Sailaja ( Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2000) 23.

 

[12]In Ajikumar, "Pennezhuthendathu" 56. Also in Benjamin, "Ezhuthukarikal" 16.

 

[13]See Gita Hiranyan, "Ezhuthukari: Akathum Purathum (Woman Writer: Inside and Outside)," Malayalam 26 Sep. 1997: 29-31. All further references from this article will be indicated parenthetically in the text itself.

 

[14]Benjamin,"Ezhuthukarikal" 18.

 

[15]Benjamin, "Ezhuthukarikal" 57