A day after landing in Eugene, Oregon I walked into the feminist bookstore of the town. I was intrigued by the idea of a “feminist” bookstore and was keen to experience first hand what kind of cultural work they do. But I must admit that I was even more intrigued by the name—Mother Kali’s Bookstore. Who is this Kali? Is this Mother Kali the same as Ma Kali every Bengali child is familiar with even if you grow up as non-religious as me? On entering the store, I was greeted by an all too familiar image of Kali. You know, if you ever visit Kolkata you will always see them selling on the streets. What these days people in American academia call “Indian Calender Art.” I still remember that I bought a copy of Edwidge Danticat’s
Krik!Krak! from Mother Kali’s on that day. And while checking out, I asked the person at the counter, “Why Mother Kali?” She said, “It’s after the goddess.” “Which goddess?” I asked again. She gave me the look which said, “You should be the one to know it better, I guess” and said, “Well, the Indian Goddess.” “There is nothing called “Indian Goddess”,” I persisted, “And if you are talking about Hindu goddesses, why Kali?Why not Durga, Parvati, Manasha, Annada, Shashti and millions of others?” She said, “ I don’t know.” And friends, I wish language would translate her tone of voice! But it won’t. So let me proceed.
I soon realized that this is a common feminist practice in the West—to use terms, concepts, icons and figures from other cultures to talk about strong women, to construct a narrative of feminine agency. For example, there is another feminist bookstore which I came across when I visited Minneapolis and they call themselves
Amazon. For one thing, I am not sure that whether the “strong women” can always be the ones to resist patriarchy. There have been lots of women who have been very very strong in the service of patriarchy, racism, classism, homophoebia--you just name it. So I am not sure that whether I would so quickly give Kali the honor of being the feminist icon. There are layers and layers of social history and cultural ethos that need to be unearthed in there. The same goes for Amazon. Or the warrior women of Dahomey.But even if I agree that these figures are indeed feminist, why do white feminists always feel the need to look into non-Western cultures, into the bodies of non-white women for constructing a feminist genealogy or iconography? I am not sure. For example, when I encountered the woman at Mother Kali’s about the significance of the name and found out that she doesn’t know anything about Kali or India or the Hindu pantheon, I was enraged. I think, more than anything else, what disturbed me was the de-contextualized appropriation of the icon. And especially, if you are a little bit familiar with eighteenth and nineteenth century British or French literature, you begin to trace a process here. Cultural artifacts, through the mediation of colonialism, became commodified obejcts to decorate European living rooms. I must also admit that we all are guilty of it in some way or the other. But at the same time, I expect a certain kind of intellectual sincerity, honesty and self-interrogation from people who call themselves artists, intellectuals or scholars. And that’s why Nina Paley’s re-working of the Ramayana makes me angry.
I first came across Nina Paley’s work in my “Living Epics of India” class. All the white students in the class were really enthusiastic and excited about her. So I decided I should give it a try too. So I logged on to her website (www.ninapaley.com) and frankly speaking, didn’t exactly know how to react. And it took me a while to process the stuff. But here I am with what I think about it.
1)Nina Paley is a white American woman who first encountered
Ramayana when she moved to Trivandrum with her American husband. She writes in her blog:
In June 2002 I moved to Trivandrum, India, following my (American) husband who had taken a job there. Upon my arrival I was confronted with his mid-life crisis, a complete emotional withdrawal. This left me without support in a city in which women were 2nd-class citizens, unable to walk alone at night, and not expected to have an identity separate from their husbands. It was in Trivandrum I encountered the Indian epic, The Ramayana, for the first time. Like many westerners, I initially considered the Ramayana little more than misogynist propaganda. I am not surprised at Paley’s description of Trivandrum, especially after reading so many white women’s colonialist travelogues. But I am not sure that I know about a single city in this planet, including the North American ones where Paley has lived and worked, where women are not second-class citizens and where women can walk around freely at night. To be honest, I am symapthetic to Paley’s trials—being dumped by your partner in a new and unfamiliar city is not fun. But what is annoying to me is the way she points out how her life was especially bad because she was living in Third World, in India and of course, we all know the other name of Third World is “sexism.” So while she excuses her husband’s withdrawl as just certain forms of emotional crisis, mid-life or whatever, it’s the Indian geography and society which have to take the blame for all the structural violences she was experiencing as a woman. And if this isn’t a recycling of the old-style colonialist trope of brown sexist men, what is? Wait a minute, did I say “old-style”? Man, have I gone mad? There is a fucking war going on and they are justifying the war by saying how Muslim women need to be rescued from Islamic patriarchy!!!
2)Maybe Paley should better familiarize herself with the “Western” epics first—
Iliad, Bibleetc. etc.—I seem to recall that they are all a little misogynist to begin with. And if you ask me, I would say the story outline of
Iliad and
Ramayana are very similar. Why? Precisely because they are both about wars being fought by men upon the bodies of women! So I am not sure how am I supposed to explain Paley’s encountering epic-misogyny for the first time in India. A deadly combination of American arrogance and ignorance perhaps?
3)Paley explains:
Emotionally, however, my relocation commenced a terrible year of grief. The Ramayana took on new depth and meaning for me. It no longer resembled a sexist parable; rather, it seemed to capture the essence of painful relationships, and describe a blueprint of human suffering. My grief and longing for the man who rejected me increasingly resembled Sita's; my husband's withdrawal reminded me of Rama. So clearly
Ramayana for Paley became a personal artifact—something which will enable her to deal with her own grief. And as a literary scholar and writer myself, I have to admit we all have our own very persnal ways of relating to texts. And that’s exactly what that makes a text a text. But I also have to admit that such identifications often de-contextualize a text as Paley’s has done here.And in fact, through our forms of "personal identifications," we often give out our collective-structural locations.So while Paley as a reader is free to read Ramayana as a “parable of human suffering,” there is no way we can think that her readings are free from who she is--a white woman from United States of America--a white woman who has probably internalized the racist and colonialist philosophies of her society.Paley's kinds of universalist readings, I must admit, freak me out. Come on, these were exactly the kinds of readings that kids in colonial India were taught to do when they encountered Shakespeare or Charles Dickens. So Prospero’s emotions were not about a colonialist’s anxiety of establishing imperial control, but became representative of some kind of metaphysical quest for knowledge. David Copperfield was not a representative of post Industrial Revolution British sub-proletariat anymore, but the embodiment of British capitalism’s success story. Faced with such universalist readings, Indian boys could not exactly decide whether it’s okay to want to learn in ways radically different from that of Prospero or whether the Indian working class boys have any right to think of mobility in ways different than that of Copperfield.(What about Indian girls--well, that's a different story altogether!) And now that I am myself a teacher, I find that my students fall back upon such essentialist readings and universalist assumptions whenever they are really reluctant to face specificities of race, class, colonialism or gender. So while I would say that Paley is free to indulge in any reading she wants to, this is extremely politically problematic.Furthermore, her attempts can be traced back to a long history of American dominant white feminism. Remember the Abolitionists? The white middle-class women who transformed the black enslaved woman’s bondage into symbols and icons which would enable them to talk about their own forms of oppression? And this is exactly what colonialist appropriation is all about!
4)Paley claims to have re-worked the Ramayana from “Sita’s point of view.” Great! Personally, I would love to see and hear anything that tries to do that. But then she has this lengthy explanation which just makes me pissed, very pissed. She writes:
My subject matter is controversial. While I've been greatly encouraged by the overwhelming positive response from desis (South Asian expatriates), some viewers in India have been outraged. The Ramayana is a perplexing tale, and Sita is its most misunderstood character. I've heard from more than one Hindu American woman that Sita Sings the Blues is the first Ramayana retelling that offers them a real connection to Sita. My retelling is also humorous, which some people interpret as irreverent, and therefore an affront. Okay, so the desis or the South Asian expatriates they have been kind of civilized by their long stay in the West. Meanwhile, it’s those savage Indians left behind in India who are all narrow-minded pigs!!!If you read this passage and you are not familiar with the multiple traditions of the
Ramayana already, you would think that she is the first one ever to provide any feminist interpretation of the damn epic! And it is exactly this lack of pertinent research and arrogance that pisses me off. What about Chandrabati, the 16th century Bengali poetess who rewrote
Ramayana from the perspective of Sita? Or what about Molla, the 16th century Dalit Telegu poetess? What about the numerous songs, ditties and laments women throughout India sing about Sita? What about the modern Indian women writers’ attempts to re-interpret Sita? What about Nabaneeta Deb Sen’s book of short stories “Sita Theke Shuru”( To Begin from Sita)? What about Mallika Sengupata’s novel “Sitayana” published in 1996? Dear Nina, we have long been irreverent and humorous in our portrayals of Rama, Sita and other characters in Ramayana. We don’t need you to teach us how to be irreverent or humourous. Hey, why don’t you read the Bengali Kriitivasi Ramayana? I mean, Krittivasa was a man and that too a long long ago—he supposedly died in 1461. But that didn’t deter him from portraying a very angry Sita who lets on this abusive flow of words towards Rama when he asks her to prove herself through trial by fire
(agnipariksha). And if there is a Hindu-American woman who has identified with your retelling, well and good, congratulations, but do not confuse it with you offering a woman centric interpretation of the epic for the first time!
5)Another small thing: Paley named one of her features Sita Sings the Blues. And surprisingly enough, Nabaneeta Debsen, the Bengali poet and scholar has this essay called “Lady Sings the Blues:When Women Retell the Ramayana”( http://www.indiatogether.org/manushi/issue108/nabaneeta.htm). Maybe, it’s a total accident. But if it’s not, where is Nina Paley’s acknowledgement of Debsen’s work? The essay, by the way, was published in 1998.
6)And this is how Paley concludes her statement on
Ramayana:
I hope to show how the genius of the Ramayana transcends societies and generations, and is as relevant today as it was 3,000 years ago. Well, I am not sure that we need you to tell us about the epic’s relevance! And yes, there are lots of people in India today who would be annoyed at your representations of the epic for all the wrong reasons—the organized Hindu fundamentalists and a lot of the ordinary people who have internalized the Hindu supremacist attitudes, just in the way you have internalized your society's long history of imperialist and racist arrogance. But then there are also people like me who would be offended by your work too—not because you have chosen to work on
Ramayana. But because you pose yourself to be the first person to provide any feminist interpretation of the epic. Because we have a small history of colonialism where our cultures, objects, books and arts ended up in Western museums. Because we have already seen plenty of Orientalists who have used our story-outlines without paying us the due respects. And while I am against censorship in arts and letters and would by no means advocate censoring your work (politically problematic as they are), I have some words of advice for you:
a) If you are working on a cultural or literary tradition, please make sure that you know about it in all its possible complexities before you begin to work on it or pass authoritative judgements on it.
b) Learn to give other cultures their proper rights of ownership.
c)Please remember that we do not need a clueless white woman like you to prove the relevance of our literary works or to provide their feminist re-interpretations. We have already accomplished those tasks ourselves.
PS. My entry is based on Nina Paley’s online bio: http://www.ninapaley.com/bio.html
