“A female horse, neighing Rearing, galloping through my dreams! And yet I sleep peacefully, A nightmare is not all it seems .” From Hulkadulkadulkadoo by Bachchoo
To adapt Charles Dickens — there were the best of arguments, there were the worst of arguments — but this is rather the tale of three cities or even argumentative anecdotes from literary festivals held in them.
In Mumbai recently, I was compelled to listen to women friends who were outraged at the remarks made by Germaine Greer at the city’s Tata Literature festival. This icon of the ’70s feminism jaw-droppingly asserted that female foeticide in India was acceptable as it preserved the families from the woes and expenses of bringing up a girl child and finding a dowry for her when she grew. Greer also said that Indians looked after their old much better than Westerners, who shunted them off to hospices and the waiting rooms of heaven or hell. (She didn’t exactly use those words, but a little eloquence never hurt nobody).
I am acquainted with Greer and with her work and some of her opinions and am not in the least astounded that she strove to shock and intellectually outrage her Indian audiences. I am sure she approves of abortion on the grounds of women having a right to choose whether they give birth and have the responsibility of bringing up the child which they didn’t abort. I also surmise that she weighed up the criteria, which the woman who chooses to abort a foetus might use when contemplating the decision. It follows, if my surmise is right, that Greer is convinced that the Indian woman in a family, or even a single woman, takes the decision to abort a female foetus on the grounds that bringing up girls is more costly in protective effort and money than bringing up a boy who is born to support and bring in a dowry.
The women in her shocked and dissenting audience know, as do I, that the decision to abort is very rarely taken by the woman carrying the child. It is forced upon her by a husband, by in-laws and the oppressive, if traditional, patterns and conditions of the lives and prospects of girls in India.
As for her statement about the old, she should look around the streets of contemporary India, visit the refuges for widows in Varanasi, or ask for police statistics on old-age suicides. Even so, one has to concede that the joint family has disappeared in the West and it is more likely that there is no room at the Inn for granny in Greer’s native Australia.
It was at a Kerala Literature Festival that I last met Greer. On the first night of the festival the prospective speakers were all invited to the British Council or consulate, I forget which, for drinks and dinner. We gathered in the foyer of the grand hotel in which our hosts had lodged us, waiting for the coaches to carry us to the party. Greer, a fellow speaker, descended the imposing Bollywood-palace-set stairs, and as she did she spotted me below. She turned to her poet companion with a shocked expression.
“Oh My God! Farrukh Dondy!! (her pronunciation). He used to be so good looking in Cambridge!”I wanted to reply with the acknowledgement that age had withered the modest Parsi features, but instead greeted her after all these years with the equivalent of hail-fellow-well-met. She recalled later how I had pretended to play the piano in some cabaret sketch we had performed together in one of the Cambridge University show-off societies way back in the ’60s when we were both undergraduates.
The third city of this tale is Dhaka, Bangladesh, where I listened to Jude Kelly, the renowned British theatre director and leading activist of the feminist organisation called WOW. She spoke the usual good sense about the world’s problems not being solved until women were equal partners in global decisions but her address veered off into what I thought at the time was a grammatical feint. She had heard, probably the day before she spoke on the Dhaka platform, that Labour firebrand (ashen grey now but still hot) Ken Livingston had repeated his opposition to the Iraq war.
Ms Kelly quoted him: “We killed thousands of their population. We raped their women ” and immediately took exception to this last pronouncement. How dare Ken say that the women of Iraq belonged to the men “But hang on!” I thought, as she delivered her stricture. Did Ken really attribute, even subconsciously, the ownership of the nation of Iraqi women to the nation of Iraqi men Surely the possessive pronoun “their” could, and probably did in Ken’s sentence, stand for the whole nation — as in women belonging to the Iraqi population
Yes, it’s a grammatical quibble, but hey, I didn’t start it! What was slightly more disconcerting was a forum on children’s literature. Three women writers, one Bengali, one American and one African presented their views on the changing nature of children’s literature, ranging from stories for nursery age children to teenagers.
The one thing they all seemed to agree on is that children should not be presented with any violence in stories and books. Their other forceful and unanimous assertion was that stories should not show women in a negative light. The audience seemed to agree. One or two of them, in the questions and comments that followed, expressed their appreciation for these cautions and caveats. I kept my mouth shut but the argument kept me wondering: So, no more wicked stepmothers in Snow White No more nasty ugly sisters in Cinderella No witches in Hansel and Gretel All consigned to literature’s dustbin And conniving Kaikeyi and Manthara from the Ramayan Surely chopping down a bean stalk and killing giants is valiant violence
Moving on, how about the murder by Brutus and gang of Julius Didn’t Lady Macbeth prompt her husband to several murders
Is adultery OK or Anna Karenina bad
