Motherwit

USA

Introduction

Urmila Pawar identifies herself as a dalit woman writer who is a Buddhist and a feminist. Dalit women writers in Maharashtra, India, have written in many genres in the last six decades or more including poetry, autobiography, and a variety of critical and personal essays, but few have worked with the short story form. Pawar, however, has been very productive in this form and warrants broader reader attention because she locates dalit and Maharashtrian women’s experiences at the complex intersections between and among gender, class, caste, rural/urban divisions and makes a strong case for human rights for all based on rational thought honed by formal education and mediated by motherwit—a very rich metaphor that points to womens/mothers’ knowledges but also local experiential knowledges that are often discarded and destroyed by powerful forces of domination.

Dalit writing has emerged in many areas of India (notably in Karnataka, Tamilnadu, Uttar Pradesh, and Punjab) more recently as political and social advances are made by the previously marginalized groups— schedule castes and schedule tribes in India—but the region of Maharashtra, suspended between the north and the south within the Indian subcontinent, with its complex historical and cultural contexts, saw the emergence of dalit writing in the Marathi language very early, influenced by reformist as well as nationalist movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The cultural and political leaderships of Mahatma Jyotiba Phule (1828-1890) and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), their role in the struggle for social reform, human rights, and women’s rights in the changing context of colonial rule, struggles for home rule, and nationalist movements to establish a new independent India were critical in the emergence of dalit voices. Both Mahatma Phule and Dr. Ambedkar recognized the Hindu emphasis on karma and moksha (salvation) in everyday practices as perpetuating the oppressive caste system. Through various means (individual and institutional) they fought to eradicate the influence of Hindu Brahminical hegemony implicit in all social relationships. Education and literacy were key human rights issues for which they advocated vociferously among women and dalits.

Disappointed by the actual implementation of constitutional rights, Dr. Ambedkar modified his secular position and led more than 4 million Indians (most of them from the Mahar caste in Maharashtra) into Buddhism in a mass conversion ceremony in Nagpur in 1956. Conversion was an important step towards severing ties with Hindu traditions, practices, and superstitions, as well as forging social cohesion and fostering a sense of pride and identity. This was a rejection of the Hindu social structure based on caste and religious texts as well as an articulation of a nationalist position for a new India based on the reinterpretation of counterhegemonic ideas from India’s past. Conversions to Buddhism continue even today. Therefore, a significant number of dalit writers from Maharashtra are also Buddhists, invested in a rational, scientific approach to reality expressly motivated by cultural critiques of caste society, gender and class domination and with a clear sense of writing for social change.

Whether a literary historian in Maharashtra wishes to trace Dalit writing back to Gautama Buddha’s period; to that of the saint-poet of the Bhakti movement, Chokhamela (fourteenth century); or to Mahatma Phule’s period; critical writing against the Hindu caste system with reference to the plight of the marginalized and oppressed by Brahminical traditions is not entirely new to Marathi literary production. However, not until the twentieth century was there a concerted effort made to define a separate dalit identity and a dalit literary movement in the context of a postcolonial India as she prepared to take her place among modern nations fully influenced by ideas of individual rights, human rights, democratic principles, and progress.

Both Phule and Ambedkar involved women closely in their struggle for individual rights and social reform and their many contributions have been recorded by Urmila Pawar and Meenakshi Moon in their history of women in the Ambedkar movement, Amhihi Itihas Ghadavala (We Too Made History, 1989, published in English translation by Zubaan in 2008). Growing educational opportunities for all women in independent India have had an impact in the concerted efforts made by individual women and women’s organizations to define their roles and issues. Dalit women writers’ voices have emerged late in the written literary traditions, but their voices were often articulated through oral forms of expression as in songs sung in everyday life as well as in formal performative songs and dances—the lavani and tamasha.

Asha Mundale in her 1987 article Dalit Streecha Va Tichya Baddalcha Bhashavyavahar (The Language of and about Dalit Women) explains this late coming of a dalit woman to the written literary traditions. She helps her readers understand the nature of orality in a dalit woman’s cultural contributions. A dalit woman’s personality is shaped by her exploitative environment—whether in terms of sexual exploitation by upper caste men or physical abuse levelled against her by her equally exploited and frustrated husband. She often demonstrates a strong, emotional mettle honed by hard-work and responsibility for her children. Many dalit writers (male and female) have recounted the influence of their mothers in their lives— revering them for primarily keeping the family fed and clothed, but also for supporting their ambitions by listening to Dr. Ambedkar’s teachings. Mundale recounts a dalit woman’s social history to show that she expresses herself fearlessly. She can be sharp and quick-witted with her words. She is often open about her sexuality as expressed in the lavani and tamasha forms. Her silence is not always quite like the silence of middle class or upper caste women. She is articulate and forceful, even though written literary expression is a relatively new avenue for her. In her autobiography, Aaydaan (Baskets, 2003), Urmila Pawar provides an excellent example of Mundale’s assertion about a dalit woman’s use of language. She tells a story about her sister who was so influenced by the language of upper-caste women that she decided to emulate it after she was married. To gain education and live like caste Hindus also may mean uncritical imitation of social practices taken for granted among caste Hindus. This emulation by Pawar’s sister meant that she would never call her husband by his first name or speak to him directly as an equal. Pawar explains that this language shift merely created and reinforced a hierarchy between them and a distance between them that most dalit women would never accept in a male/female relationship.

The example above shows that education and literacy for dalit communities have multiple dimensions and cultural literacies require not merely formal education but keen critical perceptions as well as a strong confidence in local knowledges developed and honed through the everyday experience of survival among dalit men and women. Further, instead of falling prey to Hindu caste assumptions about all social relations it is important to deconstruct these assumptions and challenge attitudes that demonize, marginalize, and belittle people on a day to day basis. Affirmative action programmes, reservations, quotas are simply one small step in the project Dr. Ambedkar envisioned for dalit communities. Dr. Ambedkar often spoke of inter-caste marriages as the only sure way to change discriminatory attitudes—a hope that is only likely to be fulfilled if the discourses of equality and human rights are fully translated into everyday reality for all Hindus as well as other practitioners of caste hierarchies and/or other forms of domination.

Of the many dalit women writers in Marathi, Urmila Pawar’s short stories mark an important emergent voice in Marathi short fiction. As mentioned before, poetry and personal narrative have been chosen genres for dalit Marathi women writers generally. After all, women have multiple responsibilities as workers within and outside the domestic sphere; and time and energy are short. Writing short stories requires time, space, financial security, and family support for a writer’s talents. Male writers have a greater chance of being able to be writers than women writers do. However, Urmila Pawar is one who has effectively used the short story form to offer us her unique perspective.

Born May 7, 1945, two years before India gained independence from colonial rule, Urmila Pawar was an eleven-year old schoolgirl when Dr. Ambedkar led four million dalits in conversion to Buddhism. She grew up at a time when dalit families, as newly converted Buddhists, were negotiating their new cultural identity and instituting new cultural practices in their communities. Her lived experiences as a young dalit woman in rural as well as urban communities; her familiarity with a variety of uses of the Marathi language and its regional variants; her insider/outsider perspective on dalit women’s lives; and her active participation in dalit and Buddhist women’s literary and social organizations provide her storytelling with an edge that throws into relief the many ironies and contradictions in the lives of dalit women. Her agenda, like that of any other dalit writer’s, is to write for social change; to critique Hindu caste divisions, traditions, and superstitions; to motivate activism; and to encourage a rational, critical perspective among readers committed to human rights.

Urmila Pawar was the youngest of four children of Lakshmi Arjun Pawar and her husband, Arjun Chimaji Pawar. Urmila grew up in modest circumstances, very familiar with hunger and poverty. Urmila’s father, a schoolteacher, died when she was a nine-year old third grader. Her mother raised the family and managed the household on her income from basket-weaving and from rental income for a couple of rooms she was able to spare. Both parents encouraged their children’s educational aspirations. Pawar’s autobiography, entitled Aaydaan (Baskets 2003), wonderfully parallels her mother’s basket-weaving to her own writing. Aaydaan is a mother’s gift as well as baskets; as such, it becomes a rich metaphor for the multiple connections Pawar finds between her own and her mother’s life and experiences. Both Urmila and her mother lost their eldest sons and carried the shock and pain of that loss over the years. Urmila married her husband, Harishchandra Pawar, very young and against the wishes of her family, but continued her education and writing after her marriage. Her autobiography candidly provides insight into the tensions her literary aspirations and social involvements brought to the family, but it also shows that her husband was fully supportive of her aspirations and work.

As a child of parents inspired by the ideas of Babasaheb Ambedkar, Urmila Pawar grew up in a family that emphasized equity in all matters including education for her brother, her sister and for her as well. She speaks of first-hand knowledge and experience of the practices of untouchability as she was growing up in Ratnagiri—not being allowed to sit with the caste-Hindu children in school, not being allowed to enter a caste-Hindu’s home or to touch anyone’s hand when delivering cane baskets woven by her mother or other women of the community, receiving money for the baskets only from a distance, and so on—all this seemed perfectly ordinary and correct behaviour to her. Belonging to a low caste seemed like a God-given verdict or a natural order of life, never to be questioned. So she insists that there is a difference between awareness of discrimination, which she always had, and a sense of outrage at the discrimination, which was fostered deliberately in her community as a result of Ambedkar’s teachings and the mass conversion to Buddhism.

Pawar lives in Mumbai and is now widowed and retired from her job as a draftsperson in the Public Works Department of the City Government. Her two daughters, Malavika and Manini, are talented, professional women. Urmila always speaks of writing as a hobby rather than a profession, even though, now that she is living alone, she sees it as a necessary occupation. She wanted to work on a PhD dissertation on Ambedkar, but was discouraged by advisors who pointed out disciplinary constraints—her Master’s degree is in Marathi literature and the dissertation on Ambedkar she wished to write fell under the discipline of Sociology. Pawar is critical of the tokenism accorded to her when she is asked to join delegations of Marathi literary people for various events at home and abroad, but is seldom offered the podium to speak. Writing then becomes an avenue for recording, protesting, and expressing personal as well as group experience.

The first collection of her short stories, Sahav Bot (Sixth Finger), was published in 1988; the historical study mentioned above, Amhihi Itihas Ghadavala, co-authored with Meenakshi Moon, was published in 1989. Pawar’s second volume of stories, Chauthi Bhint (Fourth Wall), was published in 1990; her travelogue Mauritius: Ek Pravas (Mauritius: One Journey), in 1994; and a volume of two one-act plays, Doan Ekankika, in 1996. In addition, she has also published Udaan (1989), Buddha’s teachings reported by his disciples, translated from Pali into Hindi by Jagdish Kashyap and then into Marathi by Pawar. Her autobiography, Aaydaan, (2003) and a third volume of short stories, Haatcha Ek, (2004) are some of her newer publications. In a conversation with Pawar in 2005, I learned that she is now trying her hand at a novel.

Many of her stories published as collected volumes were first published in Diwali magazines or Diwali Ank a time-honored cultural institution from the early part of the twentieth century when it was first started by K.R. Mitra in 1909. The Times of India reported on the prominence of this institution in an article on November 8, 2002. These magazines are sold to individual readers as well as to circulating libraries. I recall home deliveries of these magazines each week in Pune as well as outside Maharashtra wherever there were Marathi Mandals creating circulating libraries for its members. Marathi Mandals in India as well as in North America and UK continue to place orders for these popular magazines. The Times article quoted the Pune city office-bearer of the Diwali Annual Committee, Chandrakant Shewale, as saying that the Diwali magazines are the only sustaining literary cultural event of Maharashtra because there is a long and prestigious tradition of quality writing in these magazines. Although there are debates about whether the quality of writing is as good as it used to be, over 350 magazines are published each year selling for Rs 60-100 each—an extremely competitive and brisk business. Some of the popular names include Aavaj, Menaka, Mauj, Maher, Vasant, Hans, Mohini, Dhanurdhari, Milun Sarya Jani and others. For new and well-known writers these magazines provide an avenue for annual publications. Many known writers are invited to submit their materials—short stories, essays, poems, opinion pieces. Pawar’s story Kavach which is translated here was published in Milun Sarya Jani.

By bringing narratives of dalit women of rural Maharashtra and/or older generations and more educated dalit working women together with narratives of middle-class urban women who may or may not be identified as dalit, Pawar inscribes the narrative of woman in its vast variety and complexity. Her short story entitled Baichi Jaat (Woman as Caste) from Chauthi Bhint speaks to this identification of the gendered reality that all women experience. This group shares issues across class and caste, and Pawar often imagines friendships and connections among its members, but also keeps boundaries visible that enable women to retreat into caste and class privilege whenever convenient. Pawar makes these subtle negotiations and nuanced differences available to her readers without compromise.

I have translated a total of fourteen of Urmila Pawar’s short stories over the years, all of them now part of her three collected short story volumes. I have also been a cross-cultural reader of Pawar’s work since my own personal background is strictly urban, having been brought up in a Maharashtrian Brahman household, educated in English medium schools because my father was in the Indian army. As a teenager and a college student in Pune, I became familiar with dalit writers in the 1960s, especially the Dalit Panther movement and its writers whose challenges to Marathi literary tradition were extremely inspiring for a young student of postcolonial literatures in English. My interest in African American studies and literature in which my doctoral degree was based and an area that I have continued to teach regularly in the American academy for twenty odd years stems from this cross-cultural engagement for many years. Whenever I presented on dalit women writers in general and Pawar’s stories in particular, I was always asked when I planned on translating her stories.

The stories I have selected for translation offer a wide representation of experiences of dalit women in rural as well as urban settings, focusing on their experiences in terms of generation, class, and caste. They are also examples of Pawar’s varying tones, ranging from ironic to serious and from comic to didactic, so that readers of the translations can see the broad scope of her interests in storytelling. While Pawar’s audience is Maharashtrian readers in general, and readers of these translations are likely to be international academics, feminists and other readers interested in multiculturalism, world literatures, or area studies. The feminism that informs Pawar’s storytelling is directed to dalit women’s concerns, which are very different from issues feminists address in the U.S, where I teach. It is important for the readership to understand these differences in order to be prepared for a cross-cultural reading experience. I try to recreate the linguistic environment of Pawar’s storytelling by being true to her tone and use of images. Regional dialect variations cannot be captured effectively in standard English. To that extent the translations are approximations of the stories’ texts, and readers must understand the retelling implicit in the translations. Even with these limitations in mind, I believe, it is important to provide Pawar’s storytelling to a larger audience.

Pawar’s use of language is quite remarkable, as she moves effortlessly between rural and urban dialects and standard Marathi. She uses a variety of dialects (the Konkani of her native Ratnagiri, her husband’s native Malvani, and standard Marathi) based on differing contexts of her stories, she captures local speech patterns effectively. It is impossible to convey all those nuances of language in translation. I have tried to be faithful to the text of her stories while also being aware of the readers of the translations. I have therefore not always translated literally, but in a manner that allows Pawar’s text to exist while being remade in a new language for a new audience.

Some of Pawar’s stories are closely fashioned after her own life experiences. For instance, Aaye (Mother) tells the story of a mother who wishes to stay in the city to raise her children, but after her husband dies his family tries to move the mother and children back to the village so that the homestead can be sold for a profit. The basic outline of this story Pawar records in her autobiography as being her mother’s own experience. Many other stories in which women interact with family members or each other in the marketplace, and a story about the name of a place that caused much harassment to women, are based on real experiences that she heard about from her sister or the older women of the community and has reworked into effective written stories.

Her stories often follow one pattern of narration— the story starts in medias res, then flashes back to recalling back-stories, and ends with a small twist and/or a learning device. Pawar’s storytelling depends a great deal on dialogue and interactions. She has always had considerable interest in theater and as a young woman often acted in school and community theatrical productions. She still speaks fondly of her experiences, and even in an ordinary conversation will recall dialogues from plays to illustrate her point. Her emphasis on dialogue and short, staccato conversations supports her overall objective for her stories. Indulgence in the beauty of the prose or experimentation with the short story form for itself seems meaningless for this dalit writer, whose social agenda is clearly at the centre of her storytelling. In her stories the theatrical and performance mode is often used to illustrate the communal aspect of life in Maharashtra, where ideas of privacy and individual space are minimal; many characters in her stories use community members and communal space to attain what they want.

The point of view of the narrator is