Subaltern experience

Ismat Chughtai

-neglect in the family

-autobiographical elements
-psychological perspective
- INTRODUCTION to Subalternity and the subaltern Indian woman
- SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS OF FEMININITY
- OPPRESSION IN DOMESTIC SPACE (Indian muslim women living in purdah)
- ALIENATION OF SHAMAN WITHIN HER FAMILY
- CONCLUSION

In the novel The Crooked Line Chughtai deals with themes related to the oppressed people of patri-
archal society. She confesses: “I have never seriously taken it to be my mission to reform society
and eliminate the problems of humanity; but I was greatly influenced by the slogans of the Commu-
nist Party as they matched my own independent, unbridled, and revolutionary style of thinking. . .”
(A Literary History of the Progressive Writers' Movement In Urdu 326).

In The Crooked Line, Chughtai is able to present Shaman's rebellious and stubborn nature as the
mind of a hyper-active and intelligent but neglected child, who will not be satisfied with the lies that
adults tell. Rukmini B. Nair observes that in this novel Chughtai discribes a world “one in which
oppression runs so deep that the female psyche has become nearly uncoverable”

The Crooked Line is an extraordinary tale of the life of Shaman. It is a “detailed fictional narrative
externalizing the emotional and psychological interiority of the protagonist. Shaman is the tenth
child of her parents: a casual if not unwanted addition into a family already teeming with children,
each one contending to create his or own space within the household” (An Uncivil Women: Writ-
ings on Ismat Chughtai 69). Shaman’s untimely birth frustrated Amma’s longstanding desire to
send for an English midwife and burdened Bari Apa’s with extra work load. Heating water for the
baby sister’s bath she grambled “May God curse this baby sister! Why won’t Amma’s womb close
up now” (The Crooked Line 1).

Shaman lives in a big family but does not get proper attention. She feels marginalized because of
the large number of her siblings. Due to lack of affection she finds herself neglected and so she
feels isolated. Her childhood and adolescent experiences are a direct result of the conflict between
her inner self and the outer world which makes demands that are not only difficult to comprehend
but also painful to fulfil. These discrepancies between her emotional self and the socio-cultural
background are responsible for her psychosmatic responses which makes her feel ostracized.

All along her journey of life she was used to being dominated and discriminated. This is responsible
for her rebellions behavior “suddenly she would be seized with a desire to strike somebody” (9).
Whenever she did something wrong Manjhu spanked harder than before and boxed her ear. For
sometimes Shaman just sat silently by herself, choked with emotion, sobbing tearlessly. She did not
allow her tears to run down, feeling the intensity of the pain from within.
Ismat rightly observes that Shaman’s greatest tragedy is that nobody is able to understand her or
empathize with her. “Vo pyar, mohabbat aur dosti ki bhookhi hai” (Terhi Lakeer Pesh-e-laffz). She
is also stubborn and refuses to succumb to the pressures of the outer world.

Title significance- Shaman’s character symbolizes the adverse effects of emotional impoverish-
ment, utter neglect and psychological deprivation of love. She is like a bird whose feathers have
been clipped and even after being set free, she remains disfigured and out of place. With all her ec-
centricities, phobias, achievements, failures and traumas she tries to carve out a smooth and even
path for herself, but it is not possible. Shaman “wanted to return, to wipe out this frightful mark and
its place draw a new line, a neat and calm line. But these curves had become too firm, like a steel
wire. Her eyes closed, she began running on these crooked lines”

Fragmented family- Bari Apa unleashes all her frustrations of a ruined married life on her youngest
sister. She constantly discriminates between Shaman and her daughter Noori to make her feel infe-
rior and incompetent. All the injustice and ill-treatment done to her by her mother-in-law is now
transferred to Shaman whom she badgers and torments mercilessly. “And so the cycle of oppression
feeds on itself among all females in this household” (ix).

Exploitation of the female characters- There are also many minor female characters in the novel. In
the earlier phase of the novel the characters like Unna, Manjhu, Bari Apa, Noori and Amma, are in-
troduced. All of them are portrayed as victims of the patriarchal and Muslim orthodoxical binding
which making them more oppressed than the subalterns.. Their emotional and verbal space is ruth-
lessly colonized by men in such a manner that they are shifted into a state of subjugation and si-
lence. Morever, their psyche is deeply influenced by the instructions of the elderly women members
of the family.

The early chapters of The Crooked Line show how those women who were unempowered in a
man’s world with absolutely no control over their destinies developed a perverted and second-class
mode of empowerment within their confined households by oppressing other women who were in a
weak position. “We see clearly how some women, quite unselfconsciously, often naively, partici-
pate in the the perpetuation of the tradition of oppression, how they can cruelly cut down another fe-
male just as society cruelly cuts them down”

Home as the form of oppression-

Subalternity and the Indian subaltern woman

The subaltern women who cannot use their “voices” to neither speak for themselves nor express
their needs to others since they are foreclosed by the battlement between traditionalism and moder-
nity discourses, must create meaning for self-representation, out of the restricted existence, to
speak, if they want to live.

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) describes the term as those subordinated by hegemony excluded
from any meaningful role in a regime of power, so by this definition, the subaltern classes are not
unified and cannot unite until they can become a State. (Gramsci, 1971)
Further complex theoretical debate about this term was the intervention of Gayatri Chakravorty Spi-
vak, an Indian literary theorist, in her seminal and controversial interpreted essay “Can the Subal-
tern Speak?” that she claims the subaltern cannot speak, by shifting from political and historical to
gender problem especially of the Indian women who were doubly oppressed during the colonial
times.

Epistemic rationality which dominates Western thinking is the main factor that oppresses and oblit-
erates the voice of the subaltern. To Spivak, in the Western-white patriarchal world, the subaltern
will never be able to speak since there is no rational knowledge in the West to support their
“voices”, including the fact that previous misrepresentations of the subaltern produced by the West
have not yet withered away. Spivak therefore concludes that the subaltern cannot speak, and under
the paradigm of knowledge that dominates, they will remain voiceless.

Spivak uses the case of Sati, an outdated funeral custom where a widow immolates herself on her
husband’s pyre, to illustrate the conflicted position of Indian women between the incongruous dis-
courses of individual freedom calling by the British humanism and the voluntary participation in the
ritual by the Hindu belief. (Louai, 2012. p, 7) This conflict leads to no possible solution since the
subjects that are the direct victims of this contestation have no voice to participate at all, so for Spi-
vak, subalternity is a position without identity (Morton, 2007. p.97)

My friends will be discussing how the women characters in this novel becomes the Indian subaltern
woman. They will be explaining how Shaman inevitably falls helplessly into the position of the sub-
altern.

However, by adhering to the method of strategic essentialism5 coined by Spivak, this reading
found that Begum Jaan actually does try to voice herself out and she speaks through her body.
5 Strategic essentialism refers to a sort of temporary solidarity for the purpose of social action, a
means of using group identity as a basis of struggle while also debating issues related to group iden-
tity within the group. It is the need to accept temporarily an “essentialist” position in order to be
able to act.

While looking at the plight of women in society through the novel, silence/speech becomes a useful
tool of interpreting women's responses to patriarchal hegemony. Silence is a symbol of oppression,
a characteristic of the subaltern condition while speech signifies self expression and liberation.

In all societies around the globe, women qualify as a minority group because they have less power
and privileges than men. Discrimination against women is apparent in various domains of society,
whether political, legal, economic, or familial.
She is a victim of classism, casteism, racism, and above all, of patriarchy. During infancy and
childhood a girl child encounters various sorts of violence like infanticide, failure of proper atten-
tion, lack of education. As grownups, women encounter violence caused by undesired pregnancies,
sexual exploitation at workplaces, sexual discrimination and domestic violence. Even more distress-
ing is the fact that the dominant powers have so naturalized the suppression of women that she ha-
bitually fails to identify the danger that she is in. Beauvior states that as long as women would de-
pend on the freedom that is given to them and not break away from their definitions as ‘secondary’
they will keep on acting in bad faith.
Can the subaltern speak, given the contemptuous colonial historiography regarding colonized Indian
women? Female subordination through male domination worked toward silencing the colonized In-
dian woman’s voice. But this was not successful, as the subaltern spoke. 4. Since the subaltern In-
dian indentured women had a voice, however small, then these subaltern women acted as a human
agency.

subaltern women who are doubly foreclosed by the traditional and modernity discourses by Ismat
Chughtai.

___________

In Gayatri Spivak‟s, Can The Subaltern Speak? Spivak raises the question whether the subaltern
has the agency to speak, whether they have a right to speak or not. She talks about representation
and argues that representation is an act done by men which is the self-acclaimed strongest and dom-
inant group in the society. She also talks about Sati, for instance, who was not given a voice, and in-
stead she was represented by white and brown men on papers arguing whether Sati was a brutal, sa-
cred or religious act.

Chughtai belonging to both the colonial and postcolonial time, explains the system of marginaliza-
tion and how this group manages and survives being in the most powerless position within the soci-
ety. The women characters in her writings suffered through spatial marginalization which includes
isolation and lack of access of certain geographical spaces to an extent of separation from all so-
cioeconomic spheres. In India, not only Muslims but Scheduled castes, Dalits, Tribals, etc. are the
victims of societal marginalization. These groups and people are kept away from the mainstream
and oppressed by the higher class of the society. As seen in Chughtai‟s writings, these are the peo-
ple who fall in the pit of identity crisis which gives rise to female subjugation, gender inequality,
even homosexuality. She deals with these rejected, ignored, oppressed and powerless women and
empowers them with the spirit of struggle, rebellion and constructing an identity. She projects the
problem of social inequality in a very lucid way and deals with the issues of dominance and subor-
dination.

This research focused on this kind of representation which depicts and dichotomizes the allotted
land and sky of Muslim women. This paradigm of their roles puts prohibitions which restrict their
steps but not their thoughts. They are secluded and separated from the mainstream, outdoor activi-
ties unlike men who are kept away from the domestic chores. As said by Chughtai, “What a
strangely wonderful thing the imagination is. Where no one can go, not even a bird, there you can
easily travel in your thoughts” (The Crooked Line 152). These thoughts were the driving force be-
hind the rebellion, realization and achievement of these women. Therefore, psychology plays a vital
role in all her texts. She plays aptly with the psyche of her women characters and goes deep inside
the mind, brings out the insightful observations. Her characters are mentally more fit than their
physical outlook and it‟s the process of imagination and thought process that one flows throughout
the texts. These vivid descriptions constitute the identity and status of these women.

Volume two „Lived Experience‟ of the book has four parts; parallels can be drawn between „The
First Phase‟ in The Crooked Line and the first section of this volume titled „The Formative Years:
Childhood‟. In both works, feminine experience is explored from childhood to adolescence and
eventually to womanhood and these stages of development forming the basis to the awareness of a
sexual identity. In the first chapters, the baby Shaman, the protagonist, forms a strong attachment to
her wetnurse Unna but soon Unna is snatched away from her, later she develops attachment towards
her elder sister Manjhu but feels annoyed and agitated when there‟s another child in the house; in
the same way that Beauvoir sees that the girl “kisses, handles, and caresses…in an aggressive
way….feels the same jealousy… in similar behaviour patterns: rage, sulkiness…and they resort to
the same coquettish tricks to gain…love…” (Beauvoir 268). There are many such instances in the
novel which comes close to Chughtai‟s The Crooked Line making the book more worthwhile for
this research.

Ismat Chughtai too drew clear line of distinction between what woman want and what they receive
as a result of abiding the norms of society. She strictly rejects the notion of veiling if it is only asso-
ciated with suppression rather she sees it as a tradition which projects freedom and she opposes
veiling only when it seizes women to move out of the space, the zenana. In her autobiographical
novel, The Crooked Line Chughtai is seen showing no objection to the customs of her religion.

Noori, the protagonist‟s sister says that her fiancé is unusual and amazingly strange. He doesn‟t
want her to follow the old traditions. “He won‟t let me wear a long veil. Now how will I go before
Bhai Mian?” (The Crooked Line 170) Chughtai presents the scepticism and reservation of how
she‟ll meet the relatives if she is unveiled. There‟s no inhibition from her side towards veiling. She
is comfortable with it. Moreover she considers it as a sign of respect which she willingly wants to
show towards some male members of the house. Another instance where the protagonist shows her
acceptance to veil is when she realizes that there‟s no fun in behaving like boys and fighting to be
at par with them.

Shamman felt that this freedom was in actuality a confinement. People are right. Women should re-
main in purdah. It‟s true, how much more fun there is in playing hide-and-seek when you are be-
hind a veil; you could hide from whom you want and show yourself to whom you wish. (The
Crooked Line 180)

Ismat Chughtai represented the voice of the Muslim women of the early twentieth century. In her
world, men were the voice of the family. Women had no right to speak for themselves. As discussed
in the previous chapter, women in Chughtai‟s stories represents the “subaltern” (Spivak 21). They
are considered to be the marginalized section of the society. One may conclude that Chughtai, by
writing these stories has liberated the veil-constrained women of the Muslim society.

In Gayatri Spivak‟s, Can the Subaltern Speak? Spivak raises the question whether the subaltern has
the agency to speak, whether they have a right to speak or not.

She talks about representation and argues that representation is an act done by men which is the
self-acclaimed strongest and dominant group in the society. The objective of Spivak‟s argument is
to state that “the representations of the developing world conflate two related but discontinuous
meanings of representation. One meaning is “speaking for,” in the sense of political representation
and the second is “speaking about” or “re-presenting,” in the sense of making a portrait” (Spivak
275– 76). She also argues that representation is a phenomenon which cannot be separated 169 from
dichotomy, in words of Said “Othering” which needed to be held more meticulously in cases where
there is unequal distribution of power like representation of the “Others” by the West which was the
developing nation and by the developing nation‟s “Other” which was the marginalized group or
sub-altern.

The feminine concerns of women writers usually fall under anti patriarchal and anti-sexist section.
This kind of representation is a deviant from the social structure and it can only become a literary
device which is adopted by these women writers especially Chughtai for two reasons: One is to al-
lude and the other is to subvert the institutional power and this becomes more pertinent when the
women characters are located in traditional colonial space where they perform those traditional
roles (example to produce children, etcetera). Out of this assumption two basic ideas emerge and
these ideas are related to theory and theory is that of representation and resistance and there‟s a
paradox of marginalization and empowerment

As mentioned earlier Gayatri Spivak‟s essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” advocates the theory of
representation which not only analyzes the position of Sati in 173 the post-colonial dimensions but
talks about the silence of women of the marginalized section of the society which gave rise to the
need of re-presenting them.

Her essay “perhaps best demonstrates her concern for the process whereby postcolonial studies
ironically reinscribe, co-opt, and rehearse neo-colonial imperatives of political domination, eco-
nomic exploitation, and cultural erasure” (Kharbe 441). This kind of representation done by Spivak
came closer to Chughtai‟s representation of the woman protagonist Masooma in the eponymous
novel. The idea to co-opt opens spheres of inequality, objectification and commodification of
women to a greater extent. Her representation differs from Woolf‟s and Spivak‟s at a line where
she dealt with the context with subjectivity and restrained herself to portray the women of the East
while they compare and contrast on a large canvas and influence of the West is more on their writ-
ings. Her stories projected Muslim women on the urge of losing themselves but still they find some
ray of hope which fulfills their destiny.
SLIDE 6

Antonio Gramsci describes the term, subaltern, as those subordinated by hegemony who are ex-
cluded from any meaningful role in a regime of power, so by this definition, the subaltern classes
are not unified and cannot unite.
-the term was applied to the unorganised masses that must be politicised for the workers' revolution
to succeed.

Further complex theoretical debate about this term was the intervention of Gayatri Chakravorty Spi-
vak, in her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” where she claims the subaltern cannot
speak, by shifting from political and historical to gender problem especially of the Indian
women who were doubly oppressed during the colonial times.

No knowledge system to support their voice- Epistemic rationality dominates Western thinking
and that becomes the main factor that oppresses and obliterates the voice of the subaltern. To Spi-
vak, in the Western-white patriarchal world, the subaltern will never be able to speak since there is
no rational knowledge in the West to support their “voices”, and also the fact that previous mis-
representations of the subaltern produced by the West have not withered away. Spivak therefore
concludes that the subaltern cannot speak, and under such dominant epistemology, they will remain
voiceless.

SLIDE 7

The conflict within Indian woman leads to no possible solution since the subjects have no voice at
all, and are doubly colonised- by patriarchy and colonialism- so the subaltern position of women
is a position without identity. Women being doubly colonised faced oppression and aggression;
and consequently remained subjugated and voiceless in a system that did not give them agency or
signification.

Silence- While looking at the plight of women in society through the novel, silence/speech be-
comes a useful tool of interpreting women's responses to patriarchal hegemony. Silence is a symbol
of oppression, a characteristic of the subaltern condition while speech signifies self expression
and liberation. This aspect of alienation and speechlessness will be further discussed.

Societal marginalisation- Chughtai belonging to both the colonial and postcolonial times, ex-
plains the system of marginalisation and how women manages and survives being in the most
powerless position within the society.

- The women characters in her writings suffers through spatial marginalisation which includes
isolation and lack of access of certain geographical spaces to an extent of separation from all so-
cioeconomic spheres.

- In India, not only Muslims but Scheduled castes, Dalits, Tribals, etc. are the victims of societal
marginalisation. These groups and people are kept away from the mainstream and oppressed by the
higher class of the society. She deals with these rejected, ignored, oppressed and powerless
women and empowers them with the spirit of struggle, rebellion and constructing an identity. She
projects the problem of social inequality in a very lucid way and deals with the issues of domi-
nance and subordination.
SLIDE 8

Notion of veiling- Ismat Chughtai drew clear line of distinction between what women want and
what they receive as a result of abiding the norms of society. She strictly rejects the notion of veil-
ing if it is only associated with suppression, rather she sees it as a tradition which projects free-
dom. and she opposes veiling only when it seizes women to move out of the space, the zenana.

- We see that Shaman felt this freedom and never the feeling of confinement under purdah. “People
are right. Women should remain in purdah. It‟s true, how much more fun there is in playing hide-
and-seek when you are behind a veil; you could hide from whom you want and show yourself to
whom you wish.” (The Crooked Line 180)

Exploitation of the female characters- There are many female characters in the novel like Unna-
the wet nurse, Manjhu- eldest sister, Bari Apa, Noori- Apa’s daughter and Amma. All of them are
portrayed as victims of the patriarchal and Muslim orthodoxical binding which makes them
more oppressed than the subalterns. Their emotional and verbal space is ruthlessly colonised
by men in such a manner that they are shifted into a state of subjugation and silence. Morever, their
psyche is deeply influenced by the instructions of the elderly women members of the family.

Second class of empowerment- The early chapters of The Crooked Line show how those women
who were unempowered in a man’s world with absolutely no control over their destinies devel-
oped a second-class mode of empowerment within their confined households by oppressing
other women who were in a weak position.

Last point- Ismat Chughtai represented the voice of the Muslim women of the early twentieth cen-
tury. In her world, men were the voice of the family. Women had no right to speak for themselves.
One may conclude that Chughtai, by writing these stories have liberated the veil-constrained
women of the Muslim society.

My classmates will be further establishing how the women characters in this novel becomes the In-
dian subaltern woman. They will be explaining how Shaman inevitably falls helplessly into the po-
sition of the subaltern.