“I want to do something with my life”: Reading Resistance in South Asian Girlhoods Portrayed in Keeping Corner, Climbing the Stairs, and Neela: Victory Song

Introduction

When Vidya proclaims, “I want to do something with my life” (217) in Padma Venkatraman’s 2008 novel, Climbing the Stairs, she expresses her frustrations at being hemmed into a predestined life from girlhood to marriage and motherhood. She is echoed by Leela in Kashmira Sheth’s Keeping Corner and Neela in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Neela: Victory Song. South Asian American children’s and young adult (YA) historical fiction revisiting the Indian struggle for independence brings new insights to the critique of South Asian historiography through fictionalized visualization of minoritized and subaltern voices that are missing in mainstream historiography. The previous generation of white American children’s and YA authors, such as Suzanne Fisher Staples, Michelle Moran, and Gloria Whelan, opened the space for representations of historical South Asian girlhoods in children’s and YA literature through novels, such as Shiva’s Fire, Rebel Queen, and Small Acts of Amazing Courage. Building on this foundation, the subsequent generation of authors, such as Kashmira Sheth, Padma Venkatraman, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, revolutionized representations of South Asian girlhoods by addressing the intersections of colonization, patriarchy, and the caste system. Entering this historical period through girls’ voices unlocks a niche space to consider a comprehensive vision of India that promises freedom for all, not just the upper-caste, upper-class Hindu men. In this paper, I use critical historiography from Subaltern Studies to analyze girlhoods negotiated in three South Asian American children’s and YA historical fiction, locating traces of subalternity within fictionalized girlhoods at the intersections of gender, caste, and religion. Through girl protagonists’ skillful negotiation of existing power structures, I explore the impact of social awareness, education, and literacy in upper-caste girlhood. Finally, I read feminist resistance in the girls’ determination to persist within oppressive social structures and reform them from the inside.

I selected these three novels for two main reasons: firstly, the protagonist’s upper-caste, Hindu girl identities demonstrates the intersections of patriarchy, caste, and religion in girlhoods; secondly, the setting in the Indian struggle for independence allowed the stories to borrow energy and ideas from the anti-colonial struggle toward empowering girls and girlhoods. I provide a brief overview of the three novels in the following paragraphs.

Keeping Corner by Kashmira Sheth is a YA novel set in early 1900s Gujarat in India. It is narrated through Leela, a 10-year-old upper-caste brahmin girl who becomes a child widow upon her husband’s sudden demise. Her natal family fear becoming outcasts. Therefore, they readily comply with oppressive religious and caste norms that necessitate widowhood, even in girls as young as Leela. Saviben, the village’s educator, homeschools Leela during the year of keeping corner.¹ Through Saviben, Leela learns about social reformers, such as the Gujarati poet, Narmadashankar² and the father of the Indian nation, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Awareness of the ongoing Indian struggle for independence introduces her to Satyagraha, using truth to fight injustice. Therefore, she is inspired to apply Satyagraha in her battle to overcome her oppression as a brahmin child widow. Sheth explains that her great aunt inspired Leela’s character in her author’s note. After being widowed as a nine-year-old, her great-aunt had fought to get educated and re-purpose herself as the headmistress at her village’s girls’ school.

The YA novel Climbing the Stairs, written by Padma Venkatraman, is set in 1940s south India. It is narrated through fifteen-year-old Vidya, an upper-caste brahmin girl. After her father sustains injuries at a peaceful march that turns violent, Vidya’s family moves in with their traditional and conservative paternal family in Madras. Vidya’s Thatha (grandfather), a stern but fair patriarch, heads the household. Indian struggle for independence and India’s participation as a British colony in World War II on the Allied powers’ side informs the background. The anti-colonial freedom struggle and the war against injustices highlight Vidya’s tussles to reclaim her voice and freedom while resisting sexism and casteism. Vidya’s pacifism and faith in Ahimsa (nonviolent struggle) inform her resistance strategy to renegotiate the gender norms in her own situation.

Neela: Victory Song is a middle-grade novel written by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, set in early 1900s colonial Bengal. It is narrated through Neela, a twelve-year-old upper-caste girl. The story begins with Neela’s older sister, Usha’s wedding. Neela feels the looming pressure of her own marriage. She fears undergoing the transformation her sister undergoes, from a girl to a wife and daughter-in-law, and instead seeks to change her own future. When she witnesses the bravery of armed freedom fighters, who are followers of Subash Chandra Bose,³ she longs to join them and laments the fate of marriage and motherhood awaiting girls. Finally, she gets the chance to participate alongside freedom fighters when she goes to Calcutta in search of her missing father. The exposure helps broaden her visions of the future.

The girls live during a poignant moment in South Asian history amidst the Indian struggle for independence, which shapes their awareness of oppression and freedom from colonization, casteism, and patriarchy. The movement marks the end of more than 200 years of colonization and the beginnings of independent postcolonial nations in South Asia. The three stories are set in three different corners of South Asia, covering many regional differences. The geographical term “South Asia” refers to regions that were provinces of British India before becoming independent nations, such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, and Myanmar (Bose and Jalal 3). Despite claims of unified nationhood, religious, caste, cultural, and ethnolinguistic differences persist within these postcolonial nations. These differences are ironed out through popular slogans, such as “unity in diversity.” They impose an “imagined nationhood” (Anderson 1998) over the differences in identities, voices, and energies that make up South Asians. Despite claims of objectivity, historiography tends to center those in power, pushing out those without power. Without exception, Hindu upper-caste male perspectives have dominated South Asian historiography pushing out girls and girlhoods among other minority identities and experiences.

Across the region, the hierarchical and hereditary caste system is an integral part of society. Although the caste system is closely tied to Hindu religious customs and practices, practitioners of other religions, such as Islam and Christianity, have also adopted the caste system. In the caste hierarchy, brahmins are among the upper-castes. Consequently, they carry significant sociocultural privileges and material advantages accumulated over many generations. As the scholarly caste, the brahmins have historically exercised a monopoly over the education system. It secured their upward social mobility, power, and status under different dynasties controlling regions of South Asia at different historical periods (Yengde 264). Breaking their monopoly over education has been an important part of both anti-casteist and feminist movements. The outcasts, or those outside the four varnas, are called Untouchables, a derogatory term. Dalit activist and lawyer Dr. B.R. Ambedkar chose the word “Dalit,” to reflect their broken and oppressed status in the caste hierarchy (Teltumbde 1). The term “lower-caste” refers to castes on the lower rungs of the Varna system. Since the caste system relies on endogamy laws to reinforce caste boundaries, women’s sexuality and reproductive capabilities are closely monitored and policed. Since “brahmanical codes for women differ according to the status of the caste group in the hierarchy of castes,” “the most stringent control over sexuality is reserved as a privilege for the highest castes” (Chakravarti, Gendering Caste 33). Upper-caste girls’ and women’s elevated social status on account of upper-caste is overwritten by patriarchy. Chakravarti uses the term “brahmanical patriarchy” to convey this intersection of caste and gender toward oppressing women (Gendering Caste 33). Since all three girl protagonists belong to upper castes, the intersection of gender and caste generates an obstruse combination of privilege and oppression.

At the intersections of colonization and patriarchy and casteism and patriarchy, many patriarchal forces co-opt South Asian girls and women, at detrimental costs to themselves, to promote and reinforce patriarchal social structure. For example, the colonial era saw colonizers and nationalists fighting over South Asian women’s bodies to assert their moral and physical authority over the other. In pre-colonial and colonial times, girls and women were oppressed by customs and practices, such as Sati, child marriage, and child widowhood. The British colonial administration used these issues to impose their power into local cultural and social life under the guise of feminist liberation to justify colonization (Ahmed 151). Gayatri Spivak famously calls this “white men saving brown women from brown men” (48). However, conservative nationalists, who opposed the colonial regime, protested these colonial reforms targeting local patriarchy. They preferred to retain their patriarchal power over girls and women than commit to acknowledging and reforming gendered oppression and inequity. These transactions reveal South Asian girls’ and women’s voices being used to reinforce their own oppression.

In the term, “New Indian Woman,” Rajeswari Sunder Rajan captures the conflicts between tradition and modernity in Indian society negotiated on Indian women’s identity and body (Real and Imagined Women 129). Adapting Sunder Rajan’s “New Indian Woman” to girls in contemporary Indian children’s literature, Michelle Superle conceptualizes the “New Indian Girl.” Like new Indian women, new Indian girls “honour tradition by working from within and improving family and community relationships” while also “embrac[ing] modernity in their fight for gender equality” (Superle 41). She argues that “New Indian Girl” bends to the Indian nationalist ideals about womanhood that supplanted feminist freedom to secure brahminical patriarchy and independence from colonization. However, I argue that South Asian American children’s and YA historical fiction revisiting the Indian struggle for independence brings new insights into the dilemma of complicity and silencing in South Asian girlhoods. This essay consists of three sections. The first section explores definitions of subaltern and subalternity to locate traces of subalternity in South Asian girlhoods. The second section charts oppressive structures framing these girlhoods and detects gaps and fissures where resistance can persist. The third and final section gathers definitions of resistance from Subaltern Studies and transnational feminism to read resistance in the girl protagonists’ access to and usage of education toward desired sociocultural reforms.

Tracing subalternity in South Asian girlhoods

While official records and history textbooks enjoy legitimacy accorded to mainstream historiography, feminist and Subaltern Studies scholars critique them as elitist accounts lacking underrepresented and minority voices, such as those of Dalits and women (Thapar-Bjorkert 43). Subaltern Studies scholars apply a critical historiographic lens to identify voices and agencies carrying distinct intents and purposes, different or contradictory to the elitist narratives of the Indian struggle for independence. These subaltern⁴ voices and energies contributed raw energy and manpower to the Indian struggle for independence while also losing their voices and dreams under the overarching nationalist project. Consequently, the subalterns’ struggle against patriarchy, casteism, and Hindu religious fundamentalism is masked beneath the nationalists’ anti-colonial freedom struggle to overthrow British colonization. Since the subalterns lacked direct presence in mainstream historiography, “the actual subaltern emerged between the folds of the discourse, in its silences and blindness” (Prakash 1482). Since their lack of voice and agency defines the subalterns, Subaltern Studies scholar Gyan Prakash explains, the very attempt to recover such voices “depends on the historical erasure of the subaltern ‘voice’” (Prakash 1488). He alludes to the impossibility of recovering subaltern voices. In the essay, “Can the subaltern speak?” Gayatri Spivak echoes Prakash in conceptualizing a gendered female subaltern who “attempted to ‘speak’ across death by rendering her body graphematic” but was still not heard⁵ (22). Moreover, the gendered subaltern is “even more deeply in the shadow” (Spivak 41) because male relatives and elitist historians mediate for her. Though Spivak concludes that the female subaltern cannot speak, the female subaltern’s identity and the expressions of agency beyond the act of speaking need further investigation.

In Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s response to Spivak’s essay, she problematizes the silence imposed upon female subalterns and conceptualizes subalternity in women as a fluctuating condition whereby subalterns are “speaking” but are not always “heard” by those around them. Although “silence is not always a sign of subalternity, the subaltern condition is inevitably characterized and often successfully represented by silence” (Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Woman 85). She proposes “traces of subaltern” to account for the simultaneity of privilege and oppression women experience at conflicting and overlapping intersectionalities. Furthermore, Gyan Prakash explains that “subalterns and subalternity do not disappear into discourse but appear in the interstices, subordinated by structures over which they exert pressure” (1482) to anticipate the moments where traces of the subaltern emerge. Girls and women are subaltern figures in South Asian historiographic accounts because they often lack direct representation and are mediated through colonizers and colonized men. Therefore, the three historical fiction novels rely on girl protagonists’ voices to address the gaps resulting from the lack of representation in mainstream historiography. Addressing historical fiction’s intervention into historiography, postcolonial studies scholar Christoph Senft argues that it is not “a fictional addendum to historiography” but is a “transmodern literary historiography that reconciles different epistemological standpoints relating to the representation of the before-now” (32). I draw on these definitions of the subaltern as a fluctuating condition to approach resistance in persistence in the upper-caste Hindu girlhoods depicted in the three novels.

Similar to women caught at the intersection of colonial and nationalist discourses, the girls in all three novels suffer “intersectional subordination,” which Kimberlé Crenshaw defines as the “consequence of the imposition of one burden that interacts with preexisting vulnerabilities to create yet another dimension of disempowerment” (1249). Applying Crenshaw’s definition of intersectionality to the South Asian context, Vrushali Patil strives to capture the complex layers of patriarchy in the colonies, resulting from intersections of colonial patriarchy and localized patriarchy, informed by casteism and Hindu religious fundamentalism. Postcolonial studies scholar Ania Loomba argues that “Colonialism intensified patriarchal relations in colonized lands” because native men, as a result of being “increasingly disenfranchised and excluded from the public sphere, became more tyrannical at home” (168). Since they rationalized that the westernization of the outside world could be contained if they retained control of the domestic world and the women within, they seized upon “the home and the woman as emblems of their culture and nationality” (Loomba 168). Accordingly, girls and women are forced to shoulder the burden of carrying forward traditions and cultural customs. The resulting burden and pressure catalyze the girl protagonists’ transition from girlhood to womanhood, ensuring that the result is a submissive and compliant woman who would continue to reinforce patriarchal and casteist norms.

“Behave! You are not a young girl anymore”: Transition from girlhood to womanhood

Across the three stories, the speedy transition from girlhood to womanhood involves girls being taught to find their purpose in marriage and motherhood, serving their husbands and in-laws. In Keeping Corner, Leela alludes to it through a popular adage: “Daughters are someone else’s treasure, and the sooner you part with them the better off you are; daughters look good only in their in-laws’ house, and the younger you marry your daughter the quicker you’re done with your obligations” (Sheth 9). Similarly, in Neela: Victory Song, Neela’s mother prepares her for marriage. She chides Neela saying: “Thin as a stick of bamboo from running around so much. And getting darker each day from being out in the sun. No one will want to marry you when the time comes. Why can’t you be more like Elder Sister, and sit calmly at home with a piece of embroidery, as girls should!” (Divakaruni 7). When Neela’s father points out her wit and school success, her mother quips, “what good will that do her, except fill her head with strange ideas?” She adds, “I can barely read, but I’ve done just fine, haven’t I? Usha [Neela’s elder sister] can sew and embroider. She knows how to make mango pickles and sweet rasagollas [Bengali dessert]. That’s what prospective in-laws look for in girls” (Divakaruni 8). Finally, Vidya, in Climbing the Stairs, is aware of her mother’s future expectations as a Brahmin girl. She notes: “Amma was so happy being a housewife that she was convinced that I needed to get ‘settled’ and married off to a ‘nice’ boy from a ‘good’ family, sooner rather than later” (Venkatraman 4). Vidya’s anguished outburst at her parents, “You just want me to get married so you can wash your hands of me” (Venkatraman 44), closely resembles Leela’s observations on societal attitudes toward girls.

The groundwork for child widows and widows is laid when marriage and motherhood are established as the singular life purpose for girls. Therefore, Leela’s husband’s death before her anu (when a bride comes of age and moves to her husband’s home) alludes to the oncoming tragedy of widowhood. Her mother laments with anguish that her daughter’s life has seemingly lost purpose and place within Indian society structured by brahmanical patriarchy. In Neela: Victory Song, Neela sees her older sister, Usha, suddenly transitioning from a fifteen-year-old girl to a woman upon her marriage. She worries that Usha’s mother-in-law will be a demanding tyrant and asks herself, “Why does a bride have to go to her husband’s home after getting married … Why does she have to make all the changes?” (Divakaruni 46). When Neela’s mother shares the news of receiving a marriage proposal, she panics and whispers to her mother, “I don’t want to get married at all” (94). She knows that “engaged girls are kept under strict supervision and expected to behave properly at all times. It would be the end of whatever little freedom I have!” (95). Neela dreads losing her freedom and being placed under the control of her in-laws and future husband. While the impact of patriarchal and sexist norms in these girlhoods becomes immediately evident, their diffraction upon intersecting with the caste system needs careful exploration.

Despite the privileges reserved for upper castes, upper-caste girls and women cannot access them because of their sex. In Keeping Corner, Leela’s social position as an upper-caste girl is contrasted through two other characters: Shani, a widow from a lower caste and Fat Soma, a widower from the same upper caste as Leela. Although all three are widows/widowers, the associated stigma varies among the three characters. Widowhood is a temporary state for Fat Soma and Shani. A mere two weeks after the death of Fat Soma’s second wife, his extended family is already on the lookout to secure him a third wife. Three years after the death of her first husband, Shani remarried another man from her own caste. When Leela expresses her frustration at the prohibition of upper-caste widow remarriage, Shani seemingly reinforces the caste system rules by saying, “how can people of high caste like you even think about it? If you married again, then you’d be like us” (Sheth 166). As a lower-caste girl, Shani only considers widow remarriage’s implications on caste status, that it is a lower-caste custom. She does not realize the sexist oppression underpinning the prohibition of upper-caste widow remarriage. This dialogue between Leela and Shani demonstrates Chakravarti’s observation that upper-caste women face more control over their sexuality because it is a mark of upper-caste privilege. In contrast to Shani and Fat Soma, the stringent rules imposed on Leela exemplify its application in upper-caste girlhoods. Since Leela is a brahmin widow, her situation differs from Fat Soma’s and Shani’s. Leela divulges the fate of a brahmin widow to readers, pointing out that “I would forever remain a widow [unlike Shani and Fat Soma]” (106) starting from the first year of “keeping corner” when “a widow couldn’t go out” and “have to stay in the house” (53). Even after the first year, keeping corner would continue to haunt Leela because she points out: “I’d be able to go out, but I’d always be a widow, nothing more” (112). Upper-caste widowed girls and women were not allowed to reenter society after the death of their husbands. Leela explains this by saying, “Being a widow means keeping corner for the rest of your life” (212). Thus, she describes the brahmin widow’s life as “a living death” (53), which is an interesting parallel to Sati,⁶ another upper-caste custom that is an alternative to keeping corner.

Similarly, Climbing the Stairs explores the contrast through Vidya, her older brother Kitta, and her fiancé Raman. Despite all three family members’ upper-caste status, the gendered and caste-based spatial arrangement at Vidya’s ancestral household restricts access to different areas within the home. While the brahmin widow servant who helps with cooking is allowed in the kitchen and dining areas, the non-brahmin servants are not allowed inside “because of their inferior caste” (Venkatraman 25). Vidya expresses her exasperation at her relatives’ caste segregationist practices: “periamma [aunt] makes me rinse vessels after the maid washes them to get rid of her polluting non-Brahmin touch” (118). Vidya’s position at the intersection of upper-caste and oppressed gender demonstrates the simultaneity of privilege and oppression. While she can access spaces inside her brahmin home prohibited to lower caste servants, she cannot avoid gendered labor, such as cooking and cleaning. Furthermore, she chaffs at the staircase’s gendered and casteist barrier separating the two floors. According to the unspoken rule that “the men lived upstairs and the women lived downstairs in that house” (20), the library is upstairs and out of reach to all the girls and women. Therefore, the staircases stand “silent and empty … forbidding,” because “only men used the stairs” (91). Vidya requests her Thatha (grandfather), the patriarch, for permission to access the same library that upper-caste boys, such as Kitta and Raman, can access summarily. She needs his help to break the household rule: “Girls shouldn’t go upstairs” (111). Vidya’s initial act of resistance is requesting access to the family library, challenging the norm restricting books and literacy and forcing girls and women below stairs to cook and clean. Defiance in challenging patriarchy and the caste system comes with a cost for both boys and girls.

However, girls’ and women’s positioning at the intersections of patriarchy and the caste system renders them more vulnerable. Since upper-caste women “are the repositories of family honor” (Chakravarti, Gendering Caste 143) and are responsible for upholding family traditions and the endogamy rules of the caste system (139), their acts of defiance result in “expulsion, usually referred to as ‘outcasting’” (32). Through the examples of Fat Soma in Keeping Corner and Kitta in Climbing the Stairs, who deliberately outcast themselves, we can compare the consequences of outcasting between girls and boys. After the death of his second wife and tired of the villagers’ efforts to get him married a third time, Fat Soma leaves his hometown. His last note reads: “I’ve renounced the world. Do not try to find me” (Sheth 229). Leela explains that “he [Fat Soma] would have no caste, no family, no society” (229) and “his sole purpose would be to seek moksha, nirvana” (231). Similar to Fat Soma in Keeping Corner, Vidya’s older brother Kitta, in Climbing the Stairs, chooses a radical method to escape the clutches of the caste system. The siblings believe that the caste system is a “social evil, not a religious law” (Venkatraman 5, 178) that has “degenerated into a cruel custom” (224). However, the siblings’ strategy for making a break differs significantly. Kitta repudiates the caste system’s rule that “Brahmins have no place in the army” and that they “are meant to be scholars, not soldiers” (Venkatraman 178). He believes wars are the only solution to fight off oppressors like Nazi Germany in WWII and the British in colonial India. Therefore, he enlists with the army. Even when Thatha threatens him, “you will be dead to me and the rest of this family. Forever” (Venkatraman 179), Kitta decides to break from family and community according to his personal wishes. As outcastes, Fat Soma and Kitta are thrown out of their homes and caste community. Fat Soma becomes a monk, and Kitta becomes a soldier in the British Indian army. Although they lose caste privileges, they continue to access patriarchal privileges, which gives them the means to restart their lives.

As the oppressed sex, upper-caste girls and women lack patriarchal privileges and must rely on their caste privileges to enact resistance. Neela and her friend, Samar, in Neela: Victory Song capture the differential impact of patriarchal social structure on girls and boys. When Neela’s father does not return home by the appointed date, she worries that he might be wounded, imprisoned, or killed. Because she fears for herself as a girl, she disguises herself as a boy using the village Baoul’s (storyteller) clothes and travels to Calcutta. After connecting with Bimala, Samar’s cousin sister, Neela reverts to being a girl under Bimala’s careful ministrations: “let’s get you some proper girls’ clothes, and something to eat. You’d probably like a bath, too, wouldn’t you?” (Divakaruni 113). Despite bravely traveling to Calcutta from her village, Neela, the girl, is forced to wait for news within the safety of Bimala’s father’s walled manor. Meanwhile, Samar, his friends among the Swadeshis (freedom fighters), and Bimala’s manservant, Bishu, engage in the risky business of gathering intelligence about Neela’s father and setting up the rescue mission. When Neela does participate in the action outside the manor’s walls, she fears relying on men, even if they are trusted servants like Bishu. Neela explains the lack of safety for girls like her: “Perhaps his plan is to kidnap me and sell me to slave traders” (144). She has heard of such happenings in her village, “of girls who disappeared, never to be heard from again” (144). After Neela reunites with her father, he restores the patriarchal norm: “You were a smart, brave girl to do what you did … You had better not make a habit of it [running away from home and joining the freedom fighters], though, or I might have to give you a spanking, like your mother’s always asking me to!” (156). Thus, the three stories reveal that the girls need their upper-caste benefits for protection and survival. It forces girls to devise alternative methods of resistance, persisting within oppressive structures. The model of resistance enacted by the girls reveals “traces of subalternity,” where oppression and resistance co-exist. They express their resistance in the silences, gaps, and fissures of the existing power structure to achieve the goals of their dual struggle against colonialism on the one hand and brahmanical patriarchy on the other.

Subtle resistance enacted in South Asian girlhoods

As gendered subalterns, the girls choose everyday resistance to undermine oppressive norms, such as child marriage and child widowhood. Subtle resistance takes shape in two distinct steps. First, they draw on the energies and ideas of the anti-colonial freedom struggle to challenge the rationale behind these oppressive norms. And then, they persist in resistance to renegotiate new purposes and life paths for girlhood, pushing beyond conventional expectations, such as marriage and motherhood. Although such acts of resistance may appear minor or inconsequential when enacted within the inner domesticity of household spaces, they still spark new possibilities for girlhoods. Subaltern resistance informs the girls’ subtle resistance. More recently, Subaltern Studies scholars have strived to explore the nuances of subaltern resistance beyond traditional definitions. Uday Chandra (2015) draws on James C. Scott’s (1985) everyday resistance to invite thinking of subaltern resistance not as a simple negation but as a form of negotiation. Noting the nuances of feminist resistance, transnational feminist scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes, “resistance clearly accompanies all forms of domination. However, it is not always identifiable through organized movements; resistance inheres in the very gaps, fissures, and silences of hegemonic narratives” (83). Identifying and recording elusive forms of subaltern resistance makes it harder still to capture their impact. However, Sunder Rajan anticipates a paradigm shift in approaching and recording South Asian women’s resistance. She points out,

women’s quietism, passivity, their consent and acquiescence to, and even complicity with, patriarchy are no longer understood simply as signs of abject powerlessness or of false consciousness. These are instead recognised as real alternatives to ‘resistance’ available to women in negotiating a better deal for themselves in an objectively real situation of disempowerment. (Politics Of Resistance 158)

Likewise, Robert Young close reads feminist movements during the Indian struggle for independence to observe that “recognition of the value of small‐scale movements and acts of opposition has produced an emphasis on resistance rather than larger forms of emancipation and liberation. This suits the women’s movements for whom there can be no single revolutionary moment, but rather apparently unending sequences of battles that have to be fought” (357). Young’s observation hints at women’s intersectional positionality and recognizes that liberation needs to tackle more than one social oppression to succeed. Therefore, the girls enact a multi-layered resistance powered by their awareness of colonial exploitation and colonial feminist discourse when expressing anti-colonial sentiments. For example, in Climbing the Stairs, when Vidya participates in a protest march, she boldly calls out “Jai Hind! Victory to India!” (Venkatraman 47) with the marchers, recognizing and supporting India’s need for independence from British colonization. Similarly, Neela in Neela: Victory Song also supports Indian independence. She learns and sings freedom songs like “Vande Mataram,” feeling the meaning of the words and hopes resonating in her very soul. However, their display of national pride and efforts toward Indian independence does not mean that the girls support nationalist discourses tending to oppress and objectify women. They know these discourses maintain passivity toward oppressive practices, like Sati, defending them as “a form of ‘native resistance’” to colonial intrusion into the local cultural and social practices (Loomba 168). Furthermore, Loomba argues that “this ‘resistance’ is deeply oppressive of women” (Loomba 168–9) because nationalist men deem overthrowing colonial oppression more important than patriarchal oppression. Accordingly, they perpetuate oppressing women within the patriarchal social structure to hyper-focus on the anti-colonial freedom struggle. However, the girls recognize that anti-colonial discourse resisting British colonization is prone to patriarchal oppression and strive to confront these contradictions in their negotiations with the patriarchal figureheads in their lives. When the girls participate in the anti-colonial struggle with this awareness, they learn to effectively transfer energies and ideas from the anti-colonial struggle to resist the oppressions sanctioned by patriarchy and the caste system.

Leela in Keeping Corner, Vidya in Climbing the Stairs, and Neela in Neela: Victory Song learn about Ahimsa and Satyagraha from their fathers who participate in the anti-colonial freedom struggle. After Leela’s father returns from participating in Gandhian Satyagraha to oppose the British colonization of India, he teaches her: “Satya means truth, and agrah means insistence. Gandhiji believes that if we use the force of truth we can fight injustice. He named the movement satyagrah” (Sheth 84). Like Leela’s father, Vidya’s father also believes in Gandhian nonviolence. Therefore, he volunteers as a doctor and treats protestors injured by British officers during peaceful protests. Her older brother explains: “only we’re nonviolent. The British are as violent as can be … The British beat the protestors, and the protestors don’t fight back. That’s ahimsa. That’s nonviolence” (Venkatraman 31). Furthermore, her father’s words: “Vidya, there are different ways to fight” (43), inspire her to think about resisting and fighting in innovative ways. Similarly, Neela’s father cultivates social awareness in her, saying, “I want to go and see what our leaders are doing … There’s going to be a big march – a peaceful march … because Gandhi doesn’t believe in violence” (Divakaruni 50–51). This knowledge of the anti-colonial freedom struggle’s energy and ideas become the foundations to nurture their rationale for feminist empowerment and methods of enacting subaltern resistance.

When Leela finally develops the courage to challenge the oppression imposed on her as a child widow, she relies on the same Satyagraha that her father believes in to explain her cause: “Following the truth is the same, whether it is against the foreign government or our own society. It requires courage … we have to take a pledge to fight against all that is wrong and cruel, including customs and prejudices … Don’t I have a right to wage satyagrah against that [regressive customs and traditions like child widowhood]?” (Sheth 246). When Leela equates the rationale for the anti-colonial struggle and her own struggle for freedom, her father and the rest of the family finally see the truth and wholeheartedly support her. Similarly, Vidya connects resisting colonization and resisting sexist oppression by equating Indian independence with her college education. She highlights the different forms freedom can take to address variously shaped oppressions. Vidya brings together the two struggles at the protest march for Indian independence. She wishes to express her jubilance at securing her father’s permission for college education bubbles alongside the calls for Indian independence. She wants to add: “I am going to college!” to the marchers’: “Jai Hind! Victory to India!” (Venkatraman 48). However, her joy is short-lived because her father suffers an accident, and the family relocates to Madras. Consequently, Vidya is forced to square one and has to convince her grandfather all over again to postpone marriage and support her college education. Reflecting on her persistence and resulting success in securing her grandfather’s support, she says, “I’ve lost so much … And now, finally, I’ve found freedom” (234), reinforcing the connection between freedom and her dream of a college education.

Since the cultural norm of child marriage restricts girls’ lives, their path to freedom must disrupt the arbitrary emblematic transition from girlhood to marriage and motherhood. Vidya’s words anticipate this in Climbing the Stairs: “I want to do something with my life … Something other than having babies” (Venkatraman 217). Access to education, an upper-caste privilege, is an effective disruption tactic available to girls like Leela, Vidya, and Neela. When they pursue their dreams of high school and college, they cause fissures in the projected transition from girlhood to marriage and motherhood, where they enact resistance toward re-authoring girlhoods. Fortuitously, access to education and the world beyond the domestic homestead inspires them to ponder global and nationwide changes caused by events such as the World Wars and the Indian struggle for independence. Across all three stories, education is introduced as the “golden key of opportunity for the young protagonists” (Nankani 24) to push back against oppressive social structures. The lives and activism of early Indian feminists such as Savitribai Phule and Pandita Ramabai show that education is essential in creating self-awareness among girls and women (Omvedt 31). Accordingly, I read education within these stories as both the means and the end to achieving personal freedom. I use the term “education” to capture learning in the broadest sense to include: teacher-facilitated learning, self-learning from books, periodicals, and news media reports, and experience-based learning.

In Climbing the Stairs, Vidya’s urban upbringing facilitates her early exposure to the world beyond the domestic sphere and nurtures her college dreams. Since Neela and Leela grew up in rural India, their education dreams emerge gradually, allowing readers a closer look at the steps. Though Leela’s widowhood is irreversible, her upper-caste status gives her access to education and time to pursue learning. Leela’s school principal, Saviben, offers to homeschool during the year of keeping corner, saying, “times are changing now. Leela can use an education … I’m sure Leela doesn’t need money to support herself, but it wouldn’t do her any harm to finish school. It would occupy her time, too” (Sheth 88). Again, the lower-caste widow, Shani, contrasts Leela’s positionality and privileges. Commenting on Shani’s intelligence, Kaki (Leela’s paternal aunt) says, “If she [Shani] were a brahman girl, she would be reciting Sanskrit verses” (170), conveying that access to education is dependent on one’s caste identity. While the three stories allude to the possibility of education available to many upper-caste girls, it was not universally available to all upper-caste girls. Sometimes girls, even from upper castes, did not have access to education and schooling (Thapar-Björkert 33). While upper-caste girls have access to education, they are not allowed to move freely in public spaces. Neela: Victory Song demonstrates this contradiction. A private tutor, Pandit (learned scholar), teaches the upper-caste girls, such as Neela and her older sister, at their homes. The arrangement captures the simultaneity of privilege and oppression in upper-caste girlhood, whereby education is brought to the girls to prevent them from venturing into public spaces. Moreover, Neela’s father is also instrumental in Neela’s awareness of the Indian struggle for independence. Her acquired literacy helps her understand and participate in the movement while reflecting on her own lack of freedom as a South Asian girl.

Access to education becomes the first step to many more empowering steps in their personal lives and other girls’ lives. In Climbing the Stairs, when Thatha asks Vidya, “as you don’t want to marry yet, what would you do if you were given more time,” Vidya shares her alternative vision: “[I would] go to college … acquire knowledge … pass it [knowledge] on to others … other women. Other young women who want to study” (Venkatraman 224). She also wishes to “learn more. Learn enough to earn my money to look after myself” and her family without relying on marriage for social and economic security (226). Vidya’s vision echoes Virginia Woolf’s vision in A Room of One’s Own in wanting financial independence and a space of her own. Inspired by her father, Vidya wishes to be a doctor and wants to “help people the way appa had done” (226). Leela takes a similar step in Keeping Corner and is inspired by Saviben’s role in educating her and bringing access to newspapers, magazines, and other pieces of writing from the Indian struggle for independence. She actively engages with Gandhi’s and Narmad’s ideas under Saviben’s tutelage. Narmad’s activism and writings on gender equality in access to education and upper-caste child widows’ rights to remarry inspire Leela’s activism. Knowing that her father admires and follows Gandhi, she brings up Gandhi’s belief that men and women should be equal. Then, she asks an important question: “What good are all their [Gandhi and Narmad] ideas if widows and their families don’t take the lead?” (Sheth 236) invoking her father to join her resistance efforts as an ally. Instead of being “nothing but a widow,” Leela presents an alternative: “If you send me to Ahmedabad [for college education], I’ll work hard and make you proud. I’ll be able to help people, the way Saviben helped me. My life won’t be wasted” (244). Thus, Leela enacts resistance by shaking off “Leela, the widow,” and strives to become “Leela and nothing else” or “Leela, the Teacher” (146). She wishes to continue replicating the positive impact that Saviben brought to her own life, starting with teaching Shani to read and write.

Likewise, Neela in Neela: Victory Song draws on her education and exposure to the freedom struggle to reshape her own destiny. Unlike other girls in her village and the city girls from affluent families in Calcutta, Neela is bold and daring while also curious. Although the city girls are from affluent and politically powerful families, who consider themselves superior, Neela notes: “Most of them were enrolled in women’s colleges, but … seemed less interested in books than in landing rich husbands” (Divakaruni 139). Neela introspectively reflects: “I know more about the world that they do!” (139), citing her life experiences and awareness from participating in the Indian struggle for independence. Neela’s trip to Calcutta carries two purposes: to rescue her father and escape the immediate trappings of engagement and marriage. When she returns with her father to her village, she promises to help her father with his plans for “educating the villagers about what’s really going on in the country” so that all can “support the battle for independence, one way or another” (171). When this alternative purpose is coupled with Neela’s smartness and education, it allows Neela to negotiate her own vision of girlhood.

Conclusion

South Asian girlhoods represented in the three stories call attention to the unique experiences of oppression faced by upper-caste girls, compounded by the intersections of colonization, casteism, and patriarchy. Through girl protagonists, the stories emboss young people’s agency and voices in the complex process of critiquing and re-visioning South Asian historiography. The stories bridge past and present, bringing contemporary social justice awareness to history and historiography. They allow us to recognize mistakes and gaps in history and to move toward visualizing comprehensive and authentic configurations of equity and social justice in the present and future.

When caste and gender intersect in upper-caste girlhood, brahminical patriarchy imposes gendered oppression over caste privileges available to upper-caste girls and women. Since they experience privilege and oppression simultaneously, the girl protagonists improvise by banking on their caste privileges to persist against intersectional subordination. Although this appears like complicity at a superficial glance, the girls are enacting subaltern resistance to express themselves in challenging oppressive norms, such as child marriage and child widowhood. They make two bold statements in choosing the way of nonviolence (satyagraha) and truth (ahimsa). Firstly, they show that resistance does not always incarnate as radical resistance and that it is possible to resist through persistence. Secondly, they challenge the anti-colonial nationalists’ limited use of these tools within the context of the anti-colonial freedom struggle.

As evidenced in the three stories, access to education is the gap and fissure where girls can thrive within oppressive structures. In the foreword to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Richard Schaull said,

Education functions either as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity, or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

(Schaull 15)

In sharp contrast to brahmin men who had previously monopolized education and the resulting benefits, the three stories emphasize girls’ education as the solution to uplifting society. It is echoed in Leela’s vision to become a teacher, Vidya’s dream to become a doctor, and Neela’s wish to help her father educate the villagers. The stories anticipate education as a “practice of freedom,” confronting oppressive structures and visualizing equitable worlds. In doing so, the girls successfully demonstrate how to persist to freedom and new visions of empowered girlhood.

Notes

¹ A husband’s death meant the end of purposeful life for widows in upper-caste marriages. Some widows were forced to commit Sati, where a grieving widow commits suicide by immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre (Bose and Jalal 58). Many others were forced to keep corner for the first year and live out the remainder of their lives as social outcasts. Keeping Corner, demonstrated in the novel, Keeping Corner, is a year-long period of isolation observed by upper-caste widows after their husbands’ death.

² Narmadshankar, or Narmad, is a Gujarati writer and reformer, considered a revolutionary for his liberal ideas. In Keeping Corner, his writings were considered a “bad” influence on a child widow like Leela for giving her radical ideas about female empowerment and gender equality in society.

³ He organized Indian soldiers abandoned by the British colonial army into the Indian National Army (INA) to fight British colonization of India, taking a different route to the Gandhian nonviolent struggle.

⁴ Subaltern Studies scholars trace the term “subaltern” to Marxist class analysis from Antonio Gramsci, who first used the word “subaltern” to mean “subordination in terms of class, caste, gender, race, language, and culture … signify[ing] the centrality of dominant/ dominated relationships in history” (Prakash 1477). Early definitions of “subaltern” are broad and include anyone who is not “elite.”

⁵ In Can the Subaltern Speak? Spivak provides the example of Bhubaneshwari, a young woman freedom fighter from Colonial Bengal. When she finds herself incapable of carrying out a suicide attack mission targeting British leaders, she commits suicide at home while she is menstruating. Interpreting this act as Bhubaneshwari’s statement that her death was not the result of an illicit affair, Spivak points out that Bhubaneshwari’s “graphematic” speech remains unheard because her descendants still read shame of an illicit affair to be the cause of her suicide, even though a menstruating body rules out illicit affairs.

⁶ The custom where a grieving widow (woman) commits suicide by immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre (Bose and Jalal 58)