Female desire and expression

When women opted to teach a long time ago, they opted out of unequal lives and enabled other women to add dignity and dimension to stultifying lives. Today, women remain single, teach and educate, occasionally even inspire and illuminate
Ratna Raman Delhi

The other day a friend spoke of her interaction with a student at the women's college where she teaches. Walking along the long corridor and striking up a conversation with her teacher, the student enquired, perhaps out of the curiosity that impels the young, "And ma'am, what does sir do?" Quelling her irritation on realising that "sir" implied a non-existent spouse, my friend informed the student that she was single. This rebuff was met with momentary silence. Apologising for her gaffe, the student smiled and cheerily concluded, "Oh! You have dedicated your life to teaching and educating girls!" 

An exchange of this sort, putting aside indignant feminist annoyance, allows one to recall that historically, the idea of the working woman, the woman in the public sphere, is a relatively new concept. Hoary traditions once ensured that for women marriage was the only vocation. In those days women could be very easily categorised. Their world, especially in India, was easily divided into two: one group comprised the married women - the sumangalis, and the other was constituted by widows, referred to as mundais. Childhood and adolescence were once merely nano-blips in the lives of most women.  

Remembering this gendered history, one recognises that the working woman is a recently-mutated species. Today, a large number of women hold life-defining jobs. Marriage and motherhood no longer remain automatic resting grounds for women. Nor is the larger world denied to women in the way it had been not very long ago. Out of all available career options, teaching meets with great approval since as a choice of vocation it empowers women and does not threaten the hierarchical domestic space. Most women who teach run homes and raise children while contributing to the greater public good. This work space is a hard-won victory for women, which is evident especially when viewed against the paucity of options for women barred from the world of heterosexual conjugality once. 

Revisiting texts which chronicle the lives of child-widows, one discovers lives of great struggle and hardship. Occasionally, one encounters child-widows to whom has been held out a straw of rare opportunity. Grasping at it and recognising in it a source of strength and sustenance, many women uplifted themselves and others, and in the process succeeded in sifting and gathering a small portion of the material world for otherwise hapless women.

Phaniyamma, published in 1976 by MK Indira and subsequently translated into English by Tejaswini Niranjana in 1989, is an important work in feminist historiography. It allows us to look at the atrocities heaped on the nine-year-old high-caste Hindu widow who loses her husband to snakebite. Simply narrated, the text reveals Phaniyamma's quick transformation into a widow subject to rigorous policing and ritual violence that impose on her the garb of a widow, complete with a tonsure and all sorts of food restrictions. She lives a life of self-abasement and little desire within a domestic sphere whose codes she follows unerringly, transgressing on a couple of occasions - once to prevent the tonsure of another widow and another time to assist in the childbirth of a woman from a less privileged community. 

Phaniyamma's heroism comes from her living out the relentless coda prescribed for a widow. Her frugal and selfless life, her reduced consumption of food and her adherence to prescribed austerity display a rigour not easy even for a seasoned renunciate.