Mother Tongues—the Disruptive Possibilities of Feminist Vernaculars

Abstract

This essay considers the methodological intervention of understanding a ‘mother tongue’ (matribhasha) as a gendered vernacular. It seeks to illustrate the subversive potential of the vernacular as a gendered lens though which we can understand the Dalit feminist critiques of caste hierarchies and Dalit and non-Dalit patriarchies, and the places they intersect. The essay considers the works of Anita Bharti and Meena Kandasamy, contemporary Dalit women authors who write in Hindi and English, respectively. Thus, this paper extends the definition of the vernacular beyond the confines of linguistic and regional specificity, allowing for a feminist reclamation of the term.

Keywords:

• Dalit
• feminism
• literature
• literary criticism
• mother tongue
• poetry
• Premchand
• ‘The Thakur’s Well’
• vernacular

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous external reviewers for South Asia for their valuable feedback on this article, which helped me enormously to strengthen and streamline my argument.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Helen Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, in Signs, Vol. 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976), pp. 875–93.

2. Meena Kandasamy, Ms. Militancy (Delhi: Navayana, 2010), pp. 8–9. Kandasamy’s first poetry collection is called Touch (Mumbai: Peacock Books, 2006).

3. The ‘double curse’ of Dalit women is a common refrain among Dalit women writers and scholars of gender and caste alike. For example, see Hindi author Kausalya Baisantri, Dohara Abhishap (Doubly Cursed) (Delhi: Parameshwari Prakashan, 1999); Beth Herzfeld, ‘Slavery and Gender: Women’s Double Exploitation’, in Gender and Development, Vol. 10, no. 1 (2002), pp. 50–5; and K.A. Geetha, ‘A Dalit Among Dalits—the Angst of Tamil Dalit Women’, in Bill Ashcroft, Ranjini Mendis, Julie McGonegal and Arun Mukherjee (eds), Literature for Our Times: Postcolonial Studies in the Twenty-First Century (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 412–32. While not discounting the power of this discursive formulation by any means, this essay nevertheless seeks to look anew at Dalit women’s writing through a different lens.

4. Anita Bharti, Samkaleen Narivad aur Dalit Stree ka Pratirodh (Contemporary Feminism and the Resistance of Dalit Women) (Delhi: Neha Publishers, 2013).

5. Anita Bharti, Ek Thi Quotewali aur Anya Kahaniyan (Delhi: Lokmitra, 2012), pp. 103–16. This translation of the anthology’s title was provided by Swarnim Khare in the October 2018 issue of Words Without Borders [https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/issue/october-2018-dalit-literature, accessed 27 July 2020]. The story discussed here, ‘The Thakur’s Well Part Two’, has been translated by me and appears as the Appendix to this article.

6. In Laura Brueck, Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014/Delhi: Primus Books, 2017), I have written about the erasure of women’s subjective experiences of sexual assault and their aftermath in much of the Dalit fiction written by men that typically use an assault on a Dalit woman as a narrative strategy, primarily to instigate the political awakening and social organising of Dalit male characters. Sharmila Rege has also pointed out the way in which women were made marginal in the early years of the modern ‘Dalit movement’ and this erasure’s damning legacy for Dalit feminist activists. See Sharmila Rege, ‘Dalit Women Talk Differently: A Critique of Difference and Towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 33, no. 44 (31 Oct.–6 Nov. 1998), pp. WS39–WS46.

7. Sieglinde Lemke, The Vernacular Matters of American Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 3.

8. Kandasamy, Ms. Militancy, p. 11.

9. Sathyaraj Venkatesan and Rajesh James, ‘Mapping the Margins: An Interview with Meena Kandasamy: Conducted at Sacred Heart College in Kochi, India on 12 November 2015’, in ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 49, no. 1 (Jan. 2018), pp. 143–54.

10. ‘Dalit-Feminist Writer Anita Bharti Gets Savitribai Phule Award—2016’, India Resists (2 Aug. 2016) [http://www.indiaresists.com/dalit-feminist-writer-anita-bharti-gets-savitribai-phule-award-2016/, accessed 21 July 2020], emphasis added. Bharti, Samkaleen Narivad aur Dalit Stree Ka Pratirodh.

11. Ibid., p. 37.

12. Bharti, Samkaleen Narivad aur Dalit Stree ka Pratirodh, pp. 146–8.

13. Laura Brueck, ‘The Democratic Aspirations of Dalit Literature’, in Manas Ray (ed.), State of Democracy in India: Essays on Life and Politics in Contemporary Times, Vol. 2 (Delhi: Primus Books, forthcoming 2020).

14. Bharti, Samkaleen Narivad aur Dalit Stree ka Pratirodh, p. 18.

15. Ibid., p. 19.

16. Ibid., pp. 282–7.

17. Ibid., p. 286.

18. Of course, Bharti is not the only one to use this term. Rege writes in ‘Dalit Women Talk Differently’: ‘The Dalit Mahila Sanghatana has critiqued the persistence of the Manuvadi Sanskriti [culture] among the Dalit male who otherwise traces his lineage to a Phule Ambedkarite ideology’. Rege, ‘Dalit Women Talk Differently’, p. WS45.

19. Kandasamy, Ms. Militancy, p. 39.

20. Ibid.

21. Other famous Premchand stories of this era and theme include ‘Doodh Ka Daam (The Price of Milk)’, ‘Sadgati (Deliverance)’ and ‘Kafan (The Shroud)’.

22. Toral Gajarawala, Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), p. 18. I have written extensively elsewhere about Dalit criticism of Premchand’s stories. See Brueck, Writing Resistance; and Laura Brueck, ‘Bending Biography: The Creative Intrusions of Real Lives in Dalit Fiction’, in Biography, Vol. 40, no. 1 (Aug. 2017), pp. 77–92.

23. See the Appendix to this article for an excerpt from the translated story.

24. Anita Bharti, ‘The Thakur’s Well Part Two’, in Ek Thi Quotewali aur Anya Kahaniyan (Delhi: Lokmitra, 2012), p. 106. All translations are my own.

25. Ibid., p. 109.

26. Ibid., p. 114.

27. D.L. Sheth, At Home with Democracy: A Theory of Indian Politics (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 169–95.

28. See an extensive evaluation of Dalit perspectives on Premchand in Brueck, Writing Resistance. I also write about Ajay Navaria’s literary rewriting of several of Premchand’s short stories in Brueck, ‘Bending Biography’, pp. 77–92. Toral Gajarawala has also addressed this issue in her book, Untouchable Fictions.

29. Rashmi Sadana, English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), p. 14.

30. Lemke, The Vernacular Matters of American Literature, p. 14.

31. Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson, The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2003), p. xi.

32. Meena Kandasamy, ‘The Struggle to Annihilate Caste Will be Victorious’, interview with Ujjwal Jana, in Postcolonial Text, Vol. 4, no. 4 (2008), p. 7.

33. Jocelyn Watson, ‘The Struggle to Be Heard: Reflections from the Sidelines of the 2011 Jaipur Literature Festival’, in Wasafiri, Vol. 27, no. 3 (2012), pp. 50–6.

34. Anita Bharti, ‘The Thakur’s Well Part Two’, in Ek Thi Quotewali aur Anya Kahaniyan (The Case of the Quota Candidate and Other Stories) (Delhi: Lokmitra, 2012), pp. 103–16.