Book review: 'Family Fables And Hidden Heresies'

Book: Family Fables And Hidden Heresies: A Memoir Of Mothers And More
Vrinda Nabar
HarperCollins
184 pages
Rs299

Vrinda Nabar, a former chair of English at Mumbai University, wrote Caste As Woman, a widely acclaimed study of Indian womanhood, in the early ’90s after her mother died. Family Fables And Hidden Heresies began at the same time, but because its contents are far more intimate and personal, it has been separated from the larger, more academic exercise that was the first book.

Nabar’s insightful and sensitive memoir examines the lives of three women who profoundly shaped her own—her mother Ai, her maternal grandmother Sundiamma, and her paternal grandmother Aji. Nabar attributes the personal as political in her journey towards feminism to the diversity of experiences represented by these three women: “The diversity was so much a part of my growing up that I began to question the injustices of women’s lives long before I became a conscious feminist.”

The narrative begins with — and pivots around — a central episode in Nabar’s family history, the breakdown of her mother, an event so devastating that it divided their lives into a Before and After. Nabar’s obsession with Ai’s breakdown leads her to “understand what had triggered it off, to try and place it in the framework of her life as girl, daughter, wife, mother and widow.” She had used these categories as chapter headings in Caste As Woman “because, like the four stages into which the traditional Hindu view divided life, these in turn seemed to define roles that marked the passage of a woman’s life in Indian society.”

Ai’s breakdown in 1961 is “the problem without a name” described by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, her study of women in postwar United States, published two years later, in 1963. Impelled to examine this unnamed problem forty years later, Nabar struggles to understand Ai’s deep unhappiness, her misplaced guilt at having failed all those she loved, her failure as she sees it to be a good wife, daughter, and mother, the simmering subterranean tensions and unuttered emotions making Ai a “landmine” and “pressure cooker” waiting to explode. A talented woman who had been frustrated twice in her choice of career, Ai had given up what promised to be a promising medical practice to become a full-time homemaker. But the demands of marriage, motherhood, and domesticity exacerbated her insecurity, deepening her frustration over her thwarted ambitions and aborted dreams.

As a young daughter-in-law, Ai had once aspired to juggle multiple roles like the eight-armed goddess, but tensions and domestic conflicts left her embittered and longing for peace and quiet. These emotions were compounded by the closeness of the Indian ‘community’ and within it the family. Eventually, the stress of reconciling home and career shook Ai’s fragile equilibrium. Nevertheless, Nabar reminds us, Ai was never ‘the madwoman in the attic’ and her breakdown did not mark her permanently.

Nabar reconstructs the lives of her mother and grandmothers based on Ai’s copious writings (journal, letters, jottings), and on long conversations and childhood memories. This means that she, too, becomes a protagonist in this story.

Both grandmothers were widows, and their widowhood defined their existence —marked by self-denial, deprivation, and exclusion — a reality that appalled Nabar. Sundiamma, widowed very young, resisted family pressure to stay alone in Bombay with her two small children on her war widow’s pension. She defied convention by refusing to subscribe to notions of traditional widowhood, resisting attempts to have her head tonsured. Yet widowhood, single motherhood and grief extracted a cruel and heavy price, marking not only Sundi for life but also her children. Ai was only five when her doctor father’s ship was torpedoed in 1918, but she and her sibling carried the oppressive burden of his sanctified memory for the rest of their lives. While Sundi enjoyed at least some choices, Aji had none. She had been married off to a widower with one child.

Similarly, Nabar writes with clear-eyed dispassion of her parents’ relationship. Mira Bhat and Govind Nabar married in 1941 after a ‘zigzag courtship’ lasting thirteen years. Perhaps Ai found in Anna, who was eight years older, the father figure and older brother she was always looking for. “For their generation, theirs was an usual relationship. Their love was romantic, passionate, but also equal.” Given her remarkable parents, it is not surprising that Nabar came to be schooled naturally in the dialectics of feminism.

Family Fables And Hidden Heresies is a moving tribute to our parents and grandparents, an acknowledgement of their humanity and frailty, reminding us that they are ordinary people often struggling with extraordinary burdens. To dissect the inner lives of those one loves deeply is not easy, but Nabar is never sentimental and rarely judgmental. She writes honestly and sensitively about the complex emotional and psychological terrain of her family’s domestic life over three generations. She weaves history, politics, literature, culture, and feminism into the contextual setting of the narrative, raising a personal account of family life into a larger study of Indian womanhood in the last century, transcending the distinctiveness and peculiarity of individual lives to illumine larger truths.

— Malini Sood is a Delhi-based editor