Attempts to read 'Stanadaayini' 'in' and 'as' India

The protagonist of the story is named after the mythological character Jashoda, Lord Krishna's foster mother. A section of voices in the story reaffirms this mythical reference and mystifies Jashoda's situation as a milk-mother. When Jashoda is abandoned at the end of story by everyone, including her husband, her sons, milk sons and the household of her masters (employers), the reference to her divineness seems ironically in contrast with her social situation. The abandoned Jashoda, homeless and jobless has also lost her social status. Readers wonder, "Why did this happen to this woman? This woman, who lived her whole life serving her relations, kins and masters in all the ways she was needed, this woman who was ‘God manifest’  ...” Pity and sympathy are evoked in readers by the plight of Jashoda. Many readers may reach a simple conclusion that all that happened to Jashoda was due to human greed and selfishness. They might exclaim, “how cruel can people be? “The religious belief that sin is inherent in man might enhance these kind of reader responses. But this is not the way we should read the story ‘Stanadaayini’(or any other story as well, because every story is embedded in a socio-economic and cultural setting which it reflects and attempt to critically examine) , for the simple reason that it will mislead you into unscientific ,surface level conclusions. Not that emotions and the pleasure from reading should be totally neglected (in fact, this is where literature differs from nonfiction), but that these alone shouldn’t be the

results of our reading.

 Our reading (not in the literal sense, but as our attempts to understand, to cognitively analyze and comprehend) should begin from the point where we are able to disclaim and expose the surface level conclusions that we have subconsciously made while reading the story. Greed, in itself is non-existent as an independent entity. Every idea, every abstract concept, like greed or love or even freedom arises out of and exists in a concrete material world. Therefore will it be mundane and imprecise to conclude that Jashoda was oppressed, exploited and finally abandoned because of human selfishness and greed. “It was not greed that created exploitative social system ; rather it was the exploitative system which begot greed in man”,

said S.Ghosh, an Indian Marxist thinker.  This understanding and a desensitized’ reading is as crucial to our analysis as the desensitizing and anti -romantic style of writing was for Mahasweta Devi to impassionately depict Jashoda’s story in a most realistic way. Echoes of

this is embedded in the story itself. Jashoda was desensitized and given a medicated sleep in the hospital so that her pains (physical and psychological) will be reduced.

The shift in our focus from sensitivities towards scientific analysis will help us identify oppressive social system as the root cause of Jashoda’s position. Jashoda’s ability to produce milk, her productivity and labor power was overused and not sufficiently paid for by the employers. This exploitation brought about an absence of economic security even after she worked for years, as a milk mother for a whole generation. But, economic exploitation effected by the upper class was not the only kind of oppression Jashoda had to face. The system had to treat her differently at different levels because different power structures were operating in her environment in distinctly different ways. One was caste. Jashoda was a Brahmin woman and this helped her in getting employed very soon when her husband had an accident and became unable to work. But in the post independence era, caste structures were getting weaker and were being replaced by class structures. Therefore, the newly emerged middle class, to which Haldar household, Jashoda’s employers belonged, was constantly and subconsciously aware of the caste structures and exploited that traditional structure itself for their purposes of exploitation. They used the fact that Jashoda is a Brahmin to abandon her when she had cancer. 

“Seeing the hang of it, the eldest son was afraid, if ‘at his house’ a Brahmin died! ….He called Jashoda’s sons and spoke to them harshly …” Besides, she was affected by the gender norms in the post colonial Indian society. She was doubly oppressed and colonized through her racial and gender identities. Colonial powers imposed their western moral norms in the colonized regions (including India) and these patriarchal norms oppressed the women in those regions racially and also exploited their gender identities. The Victorian  morality was imposed on and mentally built into Indian men and women. Even after decolonization, the neocolonial powers  like U.S.A continue to regulate and relativise status of women in the third world, among other impositions under the umbrella term ‘assistance for social progress’. Jashoda, being an Indian woman was also affected by these kind of norms.

 After having identified the various power structures (and cultural forces) acting in Jashoda’s world, now  we can go into the details such as the ways in which she was used, found ‘useful’ and thrown out of necessities  and out of societal boundaries when the ‘usefulness’ was no more.

One huge aspect is the commodification of Jashoda’s body, especially her breasts. Commodification  refers to the assignment of economic value to something which was not previously treated economically and should never be treated in economic terms at all. In systems like slavery and fascist regime, human bodies and even ideas are treated as mere commodities. For example, Jews were subjected to many fatal researches in the fascist Germany. Similarly, Jashoda’s breasts and her milk productivity were treated as  mere commodities by the employers while her supply of milk should have been  treated  as a service. The middle class economic thinking always attempts to get maximum benefits at the cheapest price. In this tendency, the Haldars put a meager price tag on the commodity (Jashoda’s breasts, which ought not have been  treated as commodities in the first place) and underpaid Jashoda for her resources and services. Jashoda was given just “her daily meals, clothes on feast days, and some monthly pay”

Besides commodifying Jashoda’s breasts (in interest of the capitalist forces), society also attempts to treat it in a traditional and religious way. It tries to approach Jashoda’s body in a mystic and spiritual way and treats her as a divine entity. “I’ve got a ‘divine engine’ in my hands.” says the second son who employed Jashoda first as a professional milk mother. Even Nabin , who desired Jashoda sexually and secretly,  “lost his bad thoughts”.  People started calling her ' mother ' and treated her as a part of the ‘goddess-glory’ with great devotion. At this juncture, we as readers might wonder (and wander from the main stream of thought) whether it was all Jashoda’s personal choice after all because we see that she herself took part in mystification of her profession. Her dream, where goddess appeared to her as a midwife seems like a weakly misinterpreted instance to claim divinity. She herself believed that she has some divine duty in being a milk mother and also took pride in her large milk-productive breasts.

But, choices are not freely made in a capitalist society. Our choices always reflect our beliefs, class interests and caste traditions. Jashoda's choices also were not her own. Her mentality towards her profession was constructed by the system so that protests against underpayment and commodification wouldn't occur. Religion and other spiritual accessories like mysticism and their offshoots like mystification and mythification were employed in this purpose by the upper class and the potential generators of such beliefs (like Nabin) who make a living out of such activities. Nabin's advice for Kangali is very relevant in this context.

 He advises Kangali to see a Gopal (Lord Krishna) in his dream and start a racket. He tells him,"start for money, later you'll get devoted" This ironic reference depicts how such beliefs work. Even the one who plots to start the racket for his personal benefits will get devoted after some time. If such is the case, Jashoda believing that her breasts and duty as a breast-giver are divine, is excusable. It is all part of the effects of mythification and syndicated religious structure. Jashoda and many other Indian women are strong supporters of patriarchy. Such is the way power structures work that mentalities of victims of hegemony are constructed by the structure to support the hegemony and to contribute to its stability.

Till now, I have been treating Jashoda’s situation ‘in India’, that is I have been attempting to analyze and read the story in the Indian context. There has been an interesting allegory in this story, treating Jashoda as Mother India. Jashoda’s milk sons (and her sons) are leaving her at the end of the story .This can be paralleled with the fact that  many  Indians  leave the nation after having used ‘her’ resources all their lives for better opportunities to first world countries like U.S.A and U.K. Milk is treated as a symbol of resources of our country. This kind of analysis also brings in the intrinsic relationship which we mentally assume that nationality and motherhood have. We always assume that earth, nature and nation are feminine. This is a societal construct inbuilt in our collective unconscious.

The concept of motherhood is far more than mere ‘female reproductivity’. It takes on much larger dimensions when it translates into the determining factor of a woman’s position in the society. Besides, Motherhood and mothering are woven into the emerging feminist rubric of the Third world nations. The mother enjoys a privileged social position particularly if she is the mother of sons. We can see this in the proceedings of Haldar household. Though a widow, the mistress, wife of haldarbabu enjoys great freedom, commanding power and a lot of other pleasures, when she is widowed. She also had immense economic potential

(“ proprietorship of this house and the right to the rice water house” ) . Though discriminated against both as a daughter and a wife, as a mother a woman gains a certain privileging and therefore motherhood becomes desirable, aspirational and often celebrated. The traditional worship of goddesses in India is also a crucial factor in this case.

In the queer reverse sexism that afflicts all patriarchal societies, motherhood takes on much larger dimensions where it has often been collated with the Mother Nation image (or the Mother India image). Benedict Anderson suggests that Nationalism is a modern phenomenon, a shared commonality and history, and is constructed and imagined by rapidly growing numbers of people. With the help of print capitalism and technology, nationhood evolves to exist as a system of signification. The National feminine in this sense is imagined by the male nationalist leaders and mainstream nationalism in order to limit the ways in which we can imagine women’s role is a newly formed society, a newly decolonized nation. In the process of nation building and instilling the national pride (the creation of nationalist sentiment) poets, writers and even political leaders have often created a picture of the earth or the nation as mother. It forms the very base of the Nationalist movement in India.

“Nationalism, typically have sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope.” said Cynthia Enloe. This should be read in parallel with the comparatively less participation of women in our national movement. Women were expected to take care of the household affairs when men were busy fighting for ‘their own’ nation, which is feminine. The movement was mentally approached by many as a masculine manifestation of winning back their woman (the national feminine). This could be better understood if compared with militarist treatment of women in many post colonial nations.

Now, let us analyze Jashoda, ‘as India’, in this particular sense. ‘Breast Giver’ is a treatise on woman’s entrapment and motherhood as she internalizes the concept. It explores the concept of Motherhood vis a vis the female body, her position in the society and nation building. The protagonist Jashoda is a mere pawn in the hands of the society. She is cast away when her role as mother (breast mother) is played out. In this complex web of race, gender, caste and colonization, women like Jashoda continue to remain marginalized. Now, we should scientifically approach ‘India’, just as we analyzed Jashoda’s situation, earlier. A scientific study of our socio cultural state and our nationalist movement must be attempted.

Secondly, India and Indian independence movement should be treated as a woman and her emancipation and liberation. Looking at the second aspect, we might wonder whether India actually got liberated or not. Though she got decolonized, masses in India are still heavily exploited by the class structures and power structure in the society. Regarding the culture associated with our nationalism and nationalist movement, it is ironic to state that our nationalist movement itself was in contradiction with other capitalist nationalist movements in the world. Our movement was internally split into a compromising trend and a non compromising trend. The stronger of the two, the compromising trend was led by Mahatma Gandhi, father of our nation (father of our mother, our grandfather!). This movement failed to disrupt and demolish the existing caste  structures and other traditional structures , basically because it intended to compromise not only with the colonizer ,but also with the feudal power structures .This compromise resulted in a continued feudal and colonial treatment of women rather than a newly developed Indian way of treating women( which never really developed).

The national identity itself was in nature, traditionalistic. The nationhood was formed by homogenizing our varied culture into the culture of the majority, with newly reconstructed syndicated ‘Hinduism’ and canonical literary texts becoming the identity-markers of our nationhood. The traditional elements in our society was preserved and all the more so, in the domestic. Males who took over the public domain is seldom as affected by the traditional structures as women are. This is because the traditional ‘Indian’ identity and ‘Indian’ culture are preserved in the domestic and in the body of women. Women, at the same time became the worst victims of these traditional age-old norms (which they still call ‘Indian’ culture) and the staunchest supporters of the tradition. Let’s look at a passage from Breast giver which supports my statement. “Jashoda is fully an Indian woman, whose unreasonable, unreasoning devotion to her husband and love for her children, whose unnatural renunciation and forgiveness have been kept alive in the popular consciousness of all Indian women from Sati-Savitri-Sita through Nirupa Roy and Chand Osmani. The creeps of the world understand by seeing such women that the ‘old Indian tradition’ is still flowing free”

Even males have to follow certain rules and norms regarding their ways of behavior and identity .But this force is all the more powerful in the domestic domain and this is precisely why writers, media and bourgeois cultural production sites group some of these norms, call them ‘family values’ and then overrate them. Most artistic forms and mainstream cultural productions are of middle class origin and support this kind of glorification of ‘family values’ and ‘middle class morality’. We can observe that such socio-cultural productions often celebrate ‘the domestic’, because it is ‘the domestic’ which gives rise to such productions. The public or the collective initiative is seldom taken into account. They are always unsung, like Jashoda’s great service of providing milk to a generation of humans, fostering a society.

If we go back to our national independence movement once more, we will observe that one powerful ideology that influenced it was Gandhism, others being bourgeois nationalism, spiritual reformism, renaissance, modernism, secularism, socialism, etc. Though there were other political leaders also, no other leader had the charisma and trust among masses as Gandhi had. Let’s look at what Gandhi himself had to say about his ideology. “I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills.” This shows how much important age-old values and those being age old were for Gandhism. The fact that values were old makes them ‘eternal’ in Gandhian view.

Gandhism is supposed to be broad over everything except truth, but Gandhi, in real life, always adhered to Hindu cultural and religious values and revoked these norms into political arena. Though, it supported the idea of political independence of Indians, Gandhism often wavered in the approach towards colonizer. It was, in fact a curious mixture of tradition and modernity, an ideology which was trying to strike a balance or compromise between that which existed and that which wanted to destroy it. In this sense, Gandhism has an interesting parallel in fascism. In fact Hindu fascism in India is only another manifestation of Gandhian principles, subjectivity not ahimsa. This revelation leads us to what might be the cause of the cultural confusion in today’s Indian society, stuck somewhere between westernization and traditional ‘Indian’ness. It is only the logical continuation of a compromise we made in the past. All these confusions are effected most powerfully in the female body, jeans and kurti worn together is only a minor instance. In the societal level, we can see doctors and scientists going to saints and swamis for sake of their traditional beliefs.

Jashoda is also victimized by such beliefs. She refuses to see a doctor or to go to hospital when she has breast cancer, which could be deadly if not treated at early stages. She is ignorant, illiterate and blinded by religion. Even at the end, she expects some miracle. She never loses hope. Even when she is all alone and friendless, her religious beliefs consoles her.

“Yet, someone was supposed to be there at the end. Who was it? It was who? Who was it?” She expects something to be there at the end. She doesn’t realize that even nothingness doesn’t exist after the end. She is hopeful of a heaven or a god to be there.  “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions” said Karl Marx. In the absence of divinity and humanity, in the absence of humaneness, it is only belief that sustains an individual. Though, destructive and deceptive in one sense, religion is also the only possible consolation for Jashoda in this oppressive system. God was never there to answer her prayers. But, “Jashoda’s death was also the death of god.”  It was in her that god existed, if he/she/it did.

In the story ‘Stanadaayini’, Mahasweta Devi criticizes the capitalistic approach towards women and the general tendency of society to marginalize everything that is comparatively weak. She raises the problems of the subaltern in Indian condition. She also criticizes the mentality of colonized which is servant-like towards colonizer even long after decolonization. But, in her eagerness to raise too many concerns, her method gets weakened and infiltrated with methods of the reactionary. For instance, there have been attempts to criticize mystification in this story. But author herself, consciously or not, has given a mystic touch to the story. Jashoda prays to Shiva to kill her and subsequently she gets bedridden and dies . Besides, it is not clear what author’s voice intends to convey in the last paragraph. “Jashoda was god manifest; others do and did whatever she thought. Jashoda’s death was also death of god. When a mortal masquerades as God here below, she is forsaken by all and she must always die alone” This passage reaffirms that there is some divinity attached to Jashoda or her breasts. Or is it ironically stated? Even if the passage is intended to be ironic, the stand of author is not clear, detached and impassionate as it should be and as it is, in other parts of story.

 Lastly, in her eagerness to capture native emotions and contemporary reality, author has partially spoilt the universality of the issue of the subaltern and confined it by attaching an ‘Indian’ness to it. For instance, there was no need for Jashoda to be named ‘Jashoda’ other than to revoke the mythical reference and reattaching Hindu mythologies to Indian identity. Even the sort of allegory author claims to have made, is ironic in light of disenchantment with nationalism. There was no need to talk about India when her actual topic was a woman, a subaltern who gets exploited and thrown away. This could have happened anywhere in the world. My argument is not that Indian realities and heterogeneity need not be detailed or discussed, but that an allegorical reference to ‘Mother’ India was meaningless. Many Indian writers and critics believe that the element of patriotism is inevitable in ‘Indian’ writing. This is a mere reminiscence of goddess-worship in India. It is inbuilt in our mental makeup that our nation is a national feminine and in the urge to worship this feminine, we evade the reality that our nation is a vast geographical area inhabited by people of diverse and hybrid cultures and not an individual or a goddess. The genuine approach towards our nation wouldn’t have resulted in this kind of an allegory. As a reader, I feel that Jashoda’s problem should have been addressed only ‘in India’ and not ‘as India’.