“Sush burst into tears and sobbed uncontrollably. Her tears found their way into my heart and stayed there as hatred for the very race of men. She controlled her sobs and continued: When I asked him about the solution Lina had found, he shrieked like a demon: ‘It was her lifeless corpse that I saw next morning that told me what her solution was! In front of it, I took an oath – that I will douse the fire in me only with vengeance. That is how I came down here along with Krishnan Nair. Because I am capable of lively speech and pleasing behaviour – maybe also because of Providence – I gained what I wished. Because I did not know who my Hindu opponent was, I picked a young Hindu girl who was as pretty and young as my Lina to despoil. Our faith tells us to show the other cheek when slapped on one. But human beings are incomplete. The actual answer in situations like this is – the book says on thing, but the act, another. But personally, I am only full of affection for you, Rani. Helpless I am! A man’s lust destroyed my sister; my revenge has dirtied you too. But I am still sad. That Rani has not suffered the inevitable humiliation that Lina had to suffer!’
Continue reading “K Saraswathi Amma: Ramani (Part 5)”Category: Fiction
These are my translations of fiction by early feminists, especially K Saraswathi Amma. My introduction to her life and work has been included in the History section. I have also translated the stories of Lalithambika Antharjanam, though I cannot include those here. They are available as a volume published by OUP. But I will include some which are not part of that volume, and an excerpt from her novel.
K Saraswathi Amma: Ramani (Part 4)
“Then visits and conversations began to happen regularly. The familiarity soon grew into love before long. How sad! What a fool I was back then! Mr Babu started by addressing me as Ms Rani, then Sushama Rani, then Sushama, and soon, Sush. Mr Babu became just Babu to me.”
Continue reading “K Saraswathi Amma: Ramani (Part 4)”K Saraswathi Amma : Ramani (Part 3)
“Great!” Sushama said with a smile. “She who was ready for a pure Gandharva marriage, what fear of social humiliation can she have? In any case, what secret existed in the world that her father’s wealth and power could not hide? The world today worships the God of Wealth. Money can kill a lover, make a virgin pregnant, turn a whore into a chaste woman, and a criminal into an innocent, and besides, throw the sand in the eyes of the world in general.”
Continue reading “K Saraswathi Amma : Ramani (Part 3)”K Saraswathi Amma : Ramani (Part 2)
“But wouldn’t that decision been the sounder one? Ramanan was deeply wounded when he was abandoned. His life withered away, true. But if Chandrika had been faithful to her love, how many lives would have withered and died? The parents would not have lasted long at the sight of their daughter’s despicable fecklessness. Chandrika needs not Kuchela’s pure-hearted poverty but Kubera’s riches even if it is impure. Does not Ramanan who is forever singing “This world is not a fantasy” know this? The ultimate aim of Chandrika’s immense sacrifice for the sake of love would be of Chandrika, Ramanan, and their poverty-stricken children, born of the daughter of a wealthy family, sinking in the mire of hardships and disappearing from the world before or after each other.”
Continue reading “K Saraswathi Amma : Ramani (Part 2)”K Saraswathi Amma: Ramani (Part 1)
[This is my translation of her famous response to the poet Changampuzha Krishna Pillai’s pastoral elegy Ramanan, which was arguably the most popular book in Malayalam in the 1940s. It told the tale of a poor goatherd, Ramanan, who fell in love with a beautiful aristocratic maiden, Chandrika, who, the poet bewails, betrayed their love by marrying another. Unable to bear the end of their love, the goatherd commits suicide. At its time, this feminist reading of Ramanan was not treated with the seriousness that it deserved but as a typically eccentric outpouring of a strange woman.]
Continue reading “K Saraswathi Amma: Ramani (Part 1)”To Work! Tozhilkendrathilekku!
[Of the many groups who were subjected to the torture of the Janma-bhedam order (the order of difference-by- birth – caste) in pre-modern Kerala, the women of the Malayala brahmin community figured quite high. If people condemned to live outside the varna order were structurally and physically coerced to produce the material means to reproduce the order of caste on an everyday basis, women of the Malayala brahmin community were structurally and physically coerced to reproduce the community and its core culture on a generational basis. For this reason, I think that the the struggle of the Malayala brahmin women to escape the ‘great hells’ – the mahanarakams – have to be reexamined carefully when we rethink the history of women as an intersectional one in which the historical shaping of caste and gender are closely intertwined. Too often, this struggle has been reduced to or recounted in, terms set up the Reformist-Man, as an alibi for the power of the new modernised masculinity.]
Continue reading “To Work! Tozhilkendrathilekku!”In the Waiting Room: K Saraswathi Amma
Translated by J Devika
Santhy was bored. Are BA students condemned forever to absorb lessons seated mechanically in attendance? The lecturer was pouring praise on the poet’s description of Aja who had woken up from sleep and arrived for the Swayamvara of Indumathi. That description, apparently, was gifted to the poet by none other than Saraswathi, the Goddess of learning. The Goddess who wrote him these verses, and the Goddess of Sleep, Nidra, who was now pulling down her eyelids, are no doubt the thickest buddies, Santhy felt certain. Her classmates – maybe because they had a nap at home during the lunch break – were engrossed in the lecture. The lecturer, a lady, turned to Santhy, “Aja seated on green silk, Kartikeya, mounted on the peacock with plumes open … what a beautiful comparison it is. Don’t you agree, Santhy?”
Continue reading “In the Waiting Room: K Saraswathi Amma”The Riches of Love: K Saraswathi Amma
Translated by J Devika
The train kept moving and stopping at clear intervals as was its wont. My mind which was journeying in the past, too, had to linger a bit at certain places. But in the end it entered a particular place and refused to budge from there. However much I tried, it would not move an inch forward. Its pig-headedness troubled me. In this mobile world, if one single heart decided to stay immobile, would not accidents occur? I rubbed my chest with my right hand.
Continue reading “The Riches of Love: K Saraswathi Amma”Half- Chaste: K Saraswathi Amma
Translated by J Devika
Half-Chaste
Like every day, she had been walking alone down the Lovers’ Lane in the Museum Gardens at Thiruvananthapuram. She flinched when she saw the person walking towards her smile. Was it a post-meeting ritual, or a pre-meeting overture, she could not make out. She felt that it was best to walk past him with a puzzled look in her eyes as if trying to recall. He made out that trick. With the happiness of someone who had stumbled upon what he had been looking for, he asked, “Don’t you remember me? Did you forget – you sang at a meeting at the Vijaya Tutorial College some days back?”
Continue reading “Half- Chaste: K Saraswathi Amma”Poor Things!: K Saraswathi Amma
Translated by J Devika
1
The bus stopped with a grr…. Sumati strained to look outside, all around. A slim good-looking young man with a blue coat and dark glasses and a thin hairline of a moustache on his face ran up to her and said, “Oh, how long have I been waiting! Get off here, won’t you? Did you visit me even once after passing by so many times? It can’t be, this time.”
Continue reading “Poor Things!: K Saraswathi Amma”
Swatantryavaadini 