‘An Autobiographical Myth’: Recuperating History in Suniti Namjoshi’s Goja

ABSTRACT

As an autobiography and elegy, Suniti Namjoshi’s Goja (2000) poignantly captures the great odds against which the lost history of the Indian female subaltern or class/caste subordinate can be recovered from the social and textual margins to which it has been relegated for centuries. How are the facts of such a life to be presented? How reconciled with the scripting of the life of the upper-class autobiographer? Namjoshi gives the silenced voice its due through autobiographical mythmaking which attempts to re-live and re-script personal and social history. Imagined conversations with the family’s long-deceased retainer, Goja, allow such mythmaking in Namjoshi’s autobiography, representing the writer’s long-term investment in the imbrication of fact and fiction, myth and reality, the imaginary and the historical. This paper proposes to show that although the author’s quest to reconcile the class polarities of her childhood remains unfulfilled and incomplete, the autobiography contributes to an inventive alternative chronicling of a personal and larger social history. With its explicit commitment to fictionality, affective mythmaking, and literary representational strategies, Namjoshi’s autobiography can be shown to prise open spaces and meanings which formal history and mainstream autobiography would not be able to access.

KEYWORDS:

• Suniti Namjoshi
• myth
• class
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Divya Mehta teaches literature in English at the University of Delhi, India. Her research interests include Postcolonial Studies, literary historiography, life-writing, the Novel, and gender. She has recently written a book chapter titled “Cosmopolitan Retellings and the Idea of the Local: The Case of Salman Rushdie’s Shame” in Asia and the Historical Imagination edited by Jane Y.C. Wong (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and a book review of Ruvani Ranasinha’s Contemporary diasporic South Asian women’s fiction: gender, narration and globalisation in Textual Practice (2018; Vol 32, Issue 6).

Notes

1 See Sri Craven for her argument underlining the radicalism of Namjoshi’s lesbian position which, by fusing the problem of homophobia and gender oppression with the problem of class/caste and gendered labour in India, eschews Neoliberal queer identity politics. As Craven notes, ‘in processing her own culpability as an upper-class Indian, Namjoshi writes a project of lesbian liberation that is intrinsically linked to the liberation of women who are poor […]’ (Craven 2017, 50).

2 Eakin (1992, 179–180) usefully reclaims the historical worth of autobiography in the autobiographer’s quest to give form and shape to history.

3 See Ferdinand de Saussure’s work on the arbitrary nature of the sign in language (Culler 1986, 32–33). Also see Hayden White’s formulations on the mediatory role of language and literary form in the narrativization of history: for White’s discussion on the implications for historiography of Saussure’s formulations on language, see his The Content of the Form (1987, 190–191).

4 Wallach’s insight on the complex layered nature of historical experience because of the multiple historical actors involved, is pertinent here (Wallach 2006, 457).

5 See Eakin (1992, 30–31, 141–143) for a discussion of the existence of referential (along with imaginative) elements in autobiography.

6 Harveen S. Mann assimilates Namjoshi’s writing [(with reference to Namjoshi’s Because of India (1989)] to Homi Bhabha’s paradigm of a cultural Third Space in her argument that Namjoshi upsets identity essentialisms on either side of the India-West divide (Mann 1997, 98). I argue that in Goja, the very distinctions and binaries propping up a conventional understanding of identity (for example, Indian vs Western, upper vs lower class/caste), are shown as deceptive and illusory—the socialised Indian self in its intersections and interactions of class, caste, gender and diverse cultural influences is, by virtue of its composite nature, already in a sense, ‘hybrid’.

7 See for instance her account of the reshaping of the fable of The Lion, the Cow, the Goat and the Sheep by the opponents of monarchical prerogative (Patterson 1991, 83–85).

8 In other narratives by Namjoshi, Panchatantra-sourced animal fables are subjected to feminist revisionism to highlight the social hostility to gender minorities in India and abroad (‘The Monkey and the Crocodiles’), or the common lot of women and animals in an androcentrically organised universe (‘Further Adventures of the One-Eyed Monkey’) (Namjoshi 1981, 29, 82).

9 Namjoshi makes extensive use of revised legend. In her Feminist Fables for instance, the classical legend of the fatal error and defeat of the runner Atlanta is interrogated in redeeming feminist terms (1981, 7).