The thing about being in a phase is you never realise you are in a phase. My father in my mid-teens had to gently remind me that other clothes exist because I had been wearing only kurtis for months. A friend had to smile politely when I said I am watching another Woody Allen movie. So it was, when I was telling a friend about the books I’d read recently that I realised, wow, I’ve been reading only female memoirs for a while now.
Like I had written earlier, the written word of woman is recent. Of course, it has nothing to do with our intellectual abilities. And yes, a simple, one-word answer as to why the woman canon is a short entry in encyclopaedias is patriarchy. Yes, yes, men did not allow women to learn to read, let alone write, would not publish their books in their own names, would not allow them to enjoy royalties of sales. I will never forget the impossible imagery of Rashsundari Devi learning to write from her son’s practice books, painstakingly comparing them with a copy of Vaishnavite literature, hunched over in a dreary kitchen. Yes, its awful.
But lesser is said, I believe, of what the writing process itself entails. Apart from being an uncomfortable, self-flagellating process, it is also an act of violence. Like most things in life, Didion has a quote for this: writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It is like of saying, listen to me, I have something important to say, worthy of the world’s attention. It is an act of violence that was male monopoly. Women are conditioned into believing that our lives are insignificant, that all our lives inevitably must play out like according to a script that has been handed down across generations of persons who inherited the double X-chromosome, refined each time, never overhauled.
Consider Tara Westover. In her memoir, Educated, she narrates how she ran from the shadow of fanatical Mormon upbringing towards education, a doctorate, fashionable clothes and freedom. Westover wasn’t meant to write. She wasn’t meant to read even. But she changed the script for herself, erasing the preordained inheritances. Jeannette Winterson, the working-class lesbian daughter of an adoptive Pentecostal mother read, wrote, published, loved, re-discovered her mother. She wasn’t supposed to do any of these things. Indrani Mukherjea, the worst Indian woman according to public discourse in 2015, didn’t just settle into notorious anonymity. She (or her ghostwriter) imposed her side of the story onto the world. But even women who’s lives were as per norms, writing about their ordinary lives is still extraordinary. In I, the Salt Doll, Vandana Mishra writes an entirely normal account of her life from the stage to an ordinary Maharashtrian housewife in 20th century India. She wasn’t the first actress, first actress-turned-housewife, or really first anything. But this is why women-penned memoirs are so remarkable. Women from these pages tell us, read me, my life is important.
But not all of us successfully latch onto this monopoly of violence. Kadambari, unlike our other heroines here, never really wrote anything. We do not know how whether she liked alliterations, how long her sentences were on an average or whether she liked her metaphors. But kids in ICSE schools, after setting aside their Shakespeare, sit down to learn her brother-in-law’s poems and analyse whether they were about God or not. In the university, his words hang in the lobby, encouraging us to think without fear. But Rabindranath Tagore’s words would have been laced with a bitter irony for Kadambari. The internet remembers her as a daughter-in-law of the illustrious family, a muse, an inspiration. And according to some rather quaint sources, she died by suicide due to ‘unknown reasons.’ A load of nonsense. As if her loneliness, as if her mind punished into roaming the vacant corridors of Thakurbari for slightly erasing and trying to re-write the script given to her is not enough to kill her. Rabindranath Tagore in his grief had his words, could publish them in her memory, could offer them as salutations. Kadambari could only kill herself. She could not say to the world, read me, my life is important.