For this week, instead of separating my reflection on last week’s seminar from this week’s reading, I’ll just do one combined reflection for the two: I’m interested in looking at Ismat Chughtai and Amrita Pritam’s way of portraying gendered subjugation in conversation with one another. Last week, Samriddhi made a point in seminar which struck me. In Pinjar, Amrita Pritam portrays a quiet, unseen form of domestic violence. Pooro/Hamida attempts to take agency and build a sense of normalcy in her life despite that. In the same breath, she portrays the very loud violence of Partition. By portraying domestic violence next to the violence of Partition, she shows that each one constitutes an equally deep scar in the South Asian psyche. The horror of the revolting, parasitic language Pritam uses to describe Pooro/Hamida’s initial feelings around her pregnancy and motherhood (34-35) is a horror on par with the skeletons of Hindus who were burnt to death and picked to the bone by the birds (87). Her project is haunting: we think of Partition as a horror of unmatchable scale; yet Pritam demonstrates to us that there is an age-old horror that women live all the time. South Asian society must deal with the skeletons of quiet domestic violence just as much as it must deal with the skeletons of Partition. It is that aspect of her project that makes Pooro/Hamida’s journey have such deep resonance: it could not be a more deeply unequivocal condemnation of gendered subjugation in South Asia. I don’t mean to imply that Pritam positions Pooro/Hamida as just a victim of this violence. Within the frame of social acceptability, she finds agency as a mother. She liberates herself from that frame as a caretaker for Kammo and her adopted son, and also in her relationship with the family she was born into. At the same time, gendered violence is something that reworks the very idea of agency itself. At the end of the book, Hamida concedes that only life left for her as Pooro is a vicarious one: “Whether one is a Hindu girl or a Muslim one, whoever reaches her destination, she carries along my soul also,” Pooro said to herself and made a last vow by closing her eyes” (127). She lives on in an impersonal register, where her only form of subjectivity is the desire to return home. By splitting Hamida from Pooro, Pritam at once portrays women's agency and the horror of gendered violence in robbing them of it.
I had more trouble with Ismat Chughtai’s portrayal of gendered subjugation. In “The Eternal Vine” (Amar Bel), Chughtai tells the story of an older man, Uncle Shujaat, who begins the story full of life until he is married off to a child bride, Rokhsanah. His health — and with it the vibrance of his character — deteriorates as his wife grows more and more beautiful. By the end, she is “a masterpiece painted with an unparalleled brush by one of nature’s most skilled artists” (54). Yet the central metaphor of the story is that she is a parasitic vine, sucking the life force out of the magnificent Banyan that is Uncle Shujaat. The story renders her subjectivity invisible: her experience as a child bride, her labor as a mother and caretaker for Shujaat, her experience with the animosity she receives from her in-laws. Her emotions are only discussed only insofar as they are visible to others, usually when she cries. Her personhood is inextricable from her physical beauty. Shujaat’s shortcomings — his deteriorating health and his increasing bitterness — are attributed to her. The only way her agency is acknowledged is when it is at Shujaat's expense: the woman’s agency is construed as an evil against the moralized agency of the man. While the story is certainly critical of these dynamics, its portrayal of them primarily reproduces them.
Though the rest of the story does not mirror the sentiment implied by this, it is worth remembering that the Banyan tree itself begins its life as a parasite: it strangles another tree before flourishing itself. But Chughtai does not portray this version of the parasitism that her metaphor implies. In Chughtai, the parasitism is one in which the woman (a child bride) is perceived as exploiting the man; in Pritam, the parasitism is one in which men are parasites of women.