Another word on “beginnings” – moments that are always indistinct and uncertain. A decade or so ago, I re-read Shivrani Devi’s memoir of her life with her husband, Premchand, perhaps the biggest name among the founders of modern Urdu/Hindi literature and hailed as “the storyteller of India’s Independence movement.” That renewed encounter with Shivrani Devi’s Premchand Ghar Mein (Premchand in the home) convinced me more than ever of the need for a study of Hindustani Aadmi Ghar Mein (Indian men in the home) – a theme I had been mulling over for some time.
Premchand’s second wife’s reconstruction of the thirty years she spent with him differs startlingly from the single summary comment Premchand left on their life together. Hers is an uplifting account of two sensitive and committed human beings discovering each other – warts, foibles, exceptional qualities, strengths, weaknesses, all: drawing close together, sharing interests and activities, doing everything they could for one another and for others in their domestic circle. His is a brief and unexpectedly dry statement in a letter written in English in 1935, the year before he died. Following the death of his first wife, he says, “I married a ‘Bal Vidhwa’ [child widow] and am fairly happy with her. She has picked up some literary taste and sometimes writes stories. She is a fearless, bold, uncompromising, sincere lady, amenable to a fault and awfully impulsive. She joined [Gandhi’s] N[on] Co-op[eration] movement and went to jail. I am happy with her, not claiming what she cannot give.”
I have much more to say about Shivrani Devi and Premchand in the chapters that follow. For the moment, I mention Shivrani Devi’s memoir on their marriage as one intimation of a beginning.
Another beginning occurred when I was nearing the end of the first draft of the book. As I worked on what I hoped would be a close-to-finished version of one of the concluding chapters, I stopped short on encountering a term I had read – and passed by – several times before in my engagement with the distinguished Dalit writer Baby Kamble’s 1986 autobiography in Marathi, Jina Amucha, and its English translation, The Prisons We Broke.
The term, navrapana (husbandness, from navra, husband), condenses multiple dimensions of the history of male privilege, and the expected but not always welcome assertion of manly behavior and male priority, in a single edgy concept. Kamble used it to explain why she had kept her autobiographical writings secret from family members for twenty years. She had to do this, she said to the scholar who translated her memoir into English, because of her husband: “He was a good man, but like all the men of his time and generation, he considered a woman an inferior being.” Her comment on this common mindset and behavior was sharp: “Husbandness [is] the same in every man … Their male ego [gives men] some sense of identity.”
I had not come across anything like Kamble’s conceptualiastion in Hindi, Urdu, or other Indian languages I know – or, for that matter, in English. There is common talk in north India of mardangi and aadmi bano for manliness and being-a-man. Haughty male behavior is characterised as zamindarana adab, the bearing and behavior of a ruler or aristocrat, and sometimes as sahabi-pan, behaving like a Sahib or overlord, like the British rulers of India. Notably outspoken, brash, or “independent” men might also be described as suffused with devil-maycare life: full of dillagi (fun-loving, jocular), rangeela (colorful), aazad-khayal (freethinking). Rarely are they encapsulated in terms of their readily observable attitudes toward and interactions with a constant presence in their lives, their wives: that is, in terms of an everyday relationship that has come to occupy a central place in most discourses on family life in India.
Contrary to the experience of women, it is unusual to have a man, and man’s behavior, reduced to one aspect of his being: in this instance, “husbandness.” Women are regularly defined through a relationship, usually one in a confined domestic world, as wife, mother, or daughter who will soon be a wife and mother. Wifehood itself is subsumed in motherhood, for the maternal instinct is taken to be the “essential” quality of woman. The world is different for the other half of humanity, represented as being complete in themselves, almost from birth: the male of the species growing into himself. There is extensive talk of boyhood, manhood, fatherhood, alongside other “essential” attributes, which can encompass head of household, property owner, breadwinner, professional, laborer. Certainly not qualities that can be condensed into something as reductive – primal and “primitive” – as husbandhood.
The status and authority of woman in an Indian home derived commonly from motherhood, from becoming a mother, or better still, in much of the world, the mother of sons. In the case of men in modern South Asia, that authority comes earlier, but it is not given from birth. It is captured perhaps in the relationship of husband and wife –“a man” in charge of his “little community,” even if that is a community of two, or a few (a wife/wives and in time children). Yet, we must remember that in traditional multigenerational families, age and other factors often trumped “gender” (reckoned as man/woman). The biological father did not even have primary authority over his children; that privilege was reserved for the grandfather and granduncle, or, if that generation had retired, the father’s older brothers and cousins, along with family elders more generally. Consider the implications of Baby Kamble’s navrapana (husbandness, husbandly authority and behavior) in that context.
Navra, in Marathi, refers to a bridegroom or husband. The dictionary suggests it derives from the root nav, new, suggesting a “new man,” reborn as in many societies on the attainment of maturity, on becoming adult and independent, a stage signaled in India by marriage. Navri, “new woman,” is also used for a bride, wife, or girl of marriageable age, but usually for a short while, no more than a few months following marriage, after which the common term for wife or woman of the home, bai-ko (patni, gharwali in Hindi), supervenes. For the modern South Asian man, this moment in the passage from adolescence to adulthood marks the onset of new responsibilities and authority in his bit of the domestic world – and perhaps beyond. The male, now recognized as a grown-up, gains manly status in husbandhood. Conceptually, a shift occurs in the location of this individual from the realm of nature and nurture to that of politics, responsibility, and authority. And many men claim the latter as their primary, if not sole, arena of work.
It takes the doughty, down-to-earth, insurrectionist language of a Marathi Dalit woman, freshly energised and assertive in the era of the anti-Brahmanical movement inspired by Ambedkar, to deploy an idea so “ordinary,” arresting, and rich in its ability to capture the banality of men’s claims to God-given privilege and power. A banality daily on display in men’s comportment and behavior in the mundane, unremarked, everyday domain of the domestic – the supposedly sequestered and invisible space of family and home.
The concept navrapana (husbandness or husbandly authority), with its implicit critique of male arrogance in the assertion of men’s rights as men, opens up the question of male comportment, claims to manliness, and men’s vulnerability – central themes of my study – in unexpected ways. Throughout this book, I use men’s physical and psychological being in the home as an entry point for investigation of their privileged place in the domestic world and of their simultaneous denial of any serious responsibility in that space. Baby Kamble sees husbandness as emblematic of this privilege. I will argue that across castes, classes, and communities in modern South Asia, male authority has been signaled in what she calls husbandness. The privilege of boyhood mutates into the authority of man with the onset of marriage, the stage of householdership (the grihastha ashram) and the responsibilities that stage implies.
A central thread of the present study emerges more sharply from my belated recognition of the implications of Kamble’s insight.
Excerpted with permission from Men at Home: Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India, Gyanendra Pandey, Orient Black Swan.
