“All undocumented struggles begin from the kitchen,” R Rajasree’s unnamed narrator writes, as she tells the st(h)ory of the lives, the rebellions, the despair, and the triumphs of Kalyani and Dakshayani, two women from north Malabar, a location and setting that pays more heed to local customs and rituals, linguistic, class and caste divides, and changes in political climate, than to the metanarratives of state borders and regional identity.
Prefaced with two short chapters, structured in the form of a dialogue between the narrator, a seemingly urban, middle-class woman, taking to social media to tackle the great bugbear of misogyny, and one of her protagonists, Kalyani, a woman with sharp, often unpopular opinions, and the unmistakable trait of self-assertion, the narrative traces more than just the stories of two lives. It becomes an account of the relationships between women, of friendships and intergenerational, even inter-species relationships, of stories of women transmitted through time by other women, of encounters with ghosts and the always relevant question of how women survive and subvert patriarchal oppression. The subversions of Rajasree’s women often begin in the kitchen, spill over into the bedroom, the family yard, and spread outward, threatening hegemonic order.
A clear critique of social and political structures
Embedded in the narrative is a clear critique of social, cultural, and political structures, the most obvious of which is that of marriage. Both Kalyani and Dakshayani find themselves in difficult marriages. While Kalyani’s is devoid of desire and fulfilment, Dakshayani, married to a man “from the southern parts”, sees marriage as a punitive financial institution where her husband demands a full disclosure of her income, like the Income Tax Form 16, she says, taking away everything she makes, claiming all her hard-earned money as his own. At age nine, Dakshayani performs her first, grand act of rebellion, by cursing at an abusive schoolteacher and walking away from an exploitative system of education. Kalyani, labeled a bright child and a quick learner, leaves in solidarity with her friend, braving beatings at home, starting her lifelong defiance of social norms. The book keeps circling back to the idea of women never being allowed to set down roots, never allowed the permanence of home, being forced away from their land, their “desham”, to wherever marital ties might take them.
While this displacement causes ruptures, it also becomes an unexpected point of confluence for new, often surprising friendships between women. Disappointed in marriage, Kalyani finds an unusual ally in her mother-in-law, Cheyikutty, a woman who has found and lost love, and despite her patriarchal underpinnings, can see her daughter-in-law for a person and not just an adjunct to her precious son. Dakshayani brings to the reader the story of Kunhippennu and the practice of joint-annazhikkal, where, usually for purposes of preventing familial property from being divided, a woman was to be shared, or, co-husbanded, by two brothers. Whether a modern-day Panchali, turned into property by an irresponsible pronouncement by the mother-in-law, or just another woman denied agency by the patriarchy, Kunhippennu is a cautionary tale, set against the context of love, desire, and the helplessness women are forced into.
Defying dominant frameworks
Nivedita Menon writes, in Seeing like a Feminist, “to be a feminist is to imagine occupying the marginal, relatively powerless position with reference to every dominant framework that swallows up the space at the centre”. R Rajasree’s sthory gives her readers exactly this. The women/wimmin of The Sthory of Two Wimmin named Kalyani and Dakshayani, whether everyday, working-class women, or goddesses (representing, appropriately enough, female rage), or ghosts, coming back from the dead to claim what they could not while alive, are acutely conscious of, as also defiant of all dominant frameworks.
Social order, historically, has been unforgivably dismissive of women’s illness, particularly mental illness, reductively reading it as hysteria. In a glorious subversion, the author uses tropes of women’s bodies being possessed, and women seeing and communicating with ghosts, to dismiss the hysterical in favour of the agentive, making space for disruption as empowerment. When possessed, women tell truths and claim power. When seeing ghosts, women excavate and redress past wrongs. Mothers and sisters, wives and lovers, Rajasrees’s women defy social and cultural taboos to take up space, leave their hair open, walk alone in the dark, take lovers, eat their fill, and refuse to work in the kitchen for free.
Alongside the narrative runs the contentious issue of translation. Devika J’s translation of this expansive story is an act of political intervention. In her translator’s note she writes that the novel in Malayalam “has increasingly become a medium of questioning dominant, hegemonic, standard Malayalam – as a language, culture and history.” Her translation, insistent on making visible the regional spoken word, instead of allowing it to be erased into a standard, homogenised English, directed at the global reader of literary writing in English, questions the same hegemonic tendencies in translation from other Indian languages into English. The translator takes away the ease and privilege of this global reader, forcing them into a close engagement with phonetics and variations in speech, thus ensuring that they never lose sight of the text being rooted in a language far removed from the standardised English they have consumed thus far.
Devika writes that she has followed the sound of the spoken word and incorporated features from it into her translation. The title of the novel, The Sthory of Two Wimmin, first introduces the reader to this somewhat destabilising effect of the novel’s language. As the story slips from the familiar speech patterns of the narrator’s own story to the complex and layered world of Kalyani and Dakshayani, dialogue becomes difficult to read without complete immersion into the phonetics of speech.
When Dakshayani’s husband, confident in his patriarchal right over his wife’s body, finances, and agency, declares that she “mustu obey”, he is echoed by her mother, her brother, her friends: “she musthobey.” In this simple play with vowel sounds, Dakshayani becomes situated within a very specific context. The part can no longer stand for the whole. The “wimmin” are not indistinguishable, interchangeable characters in a language the reader finds familiar. They become, specifically, uniquely, assertively, Dakshyani and Kalyani, their very speech, a challenge to the sites of culture and power.
Nothing in The Sthory of Two Wimmin runs along axes of comfort. Stories dart into each other, layering the narrative with myth, folklore, local legends, and tales from the epics. Cows talk and dispense wisdom while also telling stories and being acutely aware of human lives around them. Threaded through the narrative is the history of the decline of the Congress and the rise of communist parties in Kerala. The author brings alive the people’s movement, political upheavals, the struggles of those who did not make headlines, directing the reader’s attention to gaps, fissures, and repetitive patterns of patriarchy and state control.
In the world of Kalyani and Dakshayani, and the counterpoised world of the narrator, women suffer violence, often suffer silence, but also claim their legacy, their right to the inheritance of stories and the breaking of patterns of abuse. Rajasree’s book looks forward to a future of acceptance and redressal. “Girl is goldd!” Kalyani exclaims at the birth of a girl child, “Goldd is tha wealth of tha land!” The reader cannot help but nod in approval.
The Sthory of Two Wimmin Named Kalyani and Dakshayani, R Rajasree, translated from the Malayalam by Devika J, Penguin.