GIRL

                      A Review article by Chandra Shekhar Dubey.                      

‘Girl’ is an extract from Jamaica Kincaid’s  ‘ At the Bottom of the River’. Her works are a critique of colonial history of Antigua.’ Girl ‘ shows the tensed relationship between a mother and her preadolescent daughter. Many of her works are centred around teen aged girls and their emotional problems. In this story she reflects her own complex relationship with her mother. In ‘Autography of a Mother’(1996) she explores the life of a woman faced with abject poverty and who was resentful of her children. ‘Girl’ deals with experience of being young and female in a poor country. It has been described as a prose poem for its intensity of feelings and symbolic significance. Kincaid has explored the themes of the danger of female sexuality, transformative power of domesticity and the strained social and personal relationship between a mother and daughter. She has used motifs of food, cloth and songs to underline the above mentioned themes. The underlying tone of this story is “to throw away a child before it becomes a child.”

Even though the daughter doesn’t seem to have reached the adolescence, the mother worries that her current behaviour ,if continued will lead to a life of promiscuity. The mother believes that a woman’s reputation and respectability determines the quality of her life in the community.   Sexuality therefore must be guarded .She fills her daughter’s mind with a series of prohibitions without realising that these ghosts of prohibitions would ruin her of her individuality and freedom. The whole story reads as a breathless prescription of do’s and don’ts. She scolds her daughter , the way she walks, the way she plays marbles and the way she relates to other people. The mother’s constant emphasis on this theme shows how much she wants her daughter to realise that she is not a boy. She advises her to act in such a way that will win her respect from the community. The mother is obsessed with the power of domesticity which she imbibes from her own society stricken with poverty and insecurity. The mother believes that domestic knowledge will not only save her daughter from a life of promiscuity and ruin but will also empower her as the head of her household. She basically believes that there are two types of woman ; the respectable type and the sluts .To many Antiguan women household works ,learning daily chores of domesticity such as cooking, sewing, clothing were considered to be very useful. This skill was considered to be socially rewarding in the eyes of the community.

The mother repeatedly emphasizes food throughout her lectures to reinforce her belief that happiness comes from domesticity. The acts and art of pumpkin fritters,  tea ,bread pudding, doukena , pepper pots lead to greater meanings of life. The repetitive references to food suggest the domesticity and its importance in the life of the woman to run a family. It also shows the urgency and necessity for learning this art to be successful in life. Mother’s sermons are pointer to this social reality to survive in the community.

CLOTH and its relationship to appearances and proper housing keeping reappear throughout the story to highlight the importance of respectability. The mother knows that a person’s clothing reveals much about character and personality .Poor clothing, shabbiness  and improper dress sense suggest poverty and promiscuity. Cloth is a symbol of morality and organized, well- groomed ,domestic woman. The mother therefore stresses the importance of dress and appearance to save the daughter from the life if disgrace. The mother therefore stresses the importance of dress and appearance to save the daughter from disgrace and disrespect.

‘Singing Benna in a Sunday school ‘ is central to the theme the narrator is dealing with in this story. Benna is a type of Antiguan folksong  which symbolizes sexuality and sung in a loud non- sensical sounds with accompaniment of guitar. It is often critical in tone. The mother fears that the daughter knows too much about the subject of sexuality so she might be tempted to sing Benna. Historically speaking , native Antiguans sang benna secretly spreading rumours and gossips under the uncomprehending British people’s noses.  Singing   Benna therefore in a Sunday school represents not only disobedience but also sinful.  This is a forbidden knowledge that cannot be discussed openly in public ,let alone in church.  Even though the daughter may not relate Benna to sexuality as her mother does, her protestations suggest that she knows full  well Benna’s seductive power and forbidden quality. The girl’s adamant attitude and denials suggest that she might have sung Benna in Sunday school with her friends and interest in boys  as well as a result of mother’s advice and intrusions in her personal life.

Kincaid ‘s use of semicolons to separate the mother’s advice and commands creates a prose poem that vividly captures daughter’s conflicting feelings for her mother. The long run-on –sentences, breathless commands create a sense of duty and stifles two-way communication.  The voices of the daughter are silent and her voice merges with the voice of the narrator suggesting that they are one and the same person. The daughter uses a few opportunities when she has to protest mother’s speech and belief that she would grow to be a ‘slut’. It is a resentment and suggestive only.The daughter does not use a dialogue here. The whole chronicle of advice reads like a monologue. Twice the daughter’s voice intervenes ,resisting the mother’s scolding but it is not clear where the daughter’s voice come from.

The mother’s advice is caustic and castigating. The pre-adolescent girl (daughter) who listens to her mother’s speech and says little against the accusations that she would be a slut. The voice of the mother is stern, commanding, brooking and there is no back- talk. ‘GIRL ‘ shows how gender is socially and culturally constructed by patriarchy and gradually becomes a social reality. It also shows that one is not “born as a woman but becomes a woman”.

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GANDHI'S ENGLISH PROSE AND STYLE By Chandra shekhar Dubey

Gandhi was a  multi faceted personalty.Gandhi created his own idiom of polity and literature. Whatever he did ,his works bore the imprint of his originality and style. And why not ? After all every man is style. Undoubtedly, Gandhi was innovative and experimental in his style of functioning. He was original to his core. His political movements against the  British government: social  reform programmes , methods of mass mobilization , tools of protest and agitation  reflected the originality and straightforwardness of his personality. His words  were simple, ideas were comprehensible and the consequent effect was mass appeal. Like his life ,his writings were  crystal clear and coherent  and  systematic. Gandhi as a prose writer had all these ingredients of the person that e was. He was a powerful  prose writer. He had clarity of thought and vision, strange power of fusing thought with emotion, integrating words with pictures and creating a deep and lasting impact on his readers. His descriptive skill has been revealed in most of his prose writings. Now the question rises,  what makes his prose so powerful. The answer lies in the originality  of the content, honesty of purpose and truth of mind and heart. Truth and statement of truth in itself is powerful. Gandhi didn’t speak like Jesus and Confucius in parables and anecdotes but in a narrative which were loaded with true stories scattered around him and his works which he chose to narrate or write. He talked of commonplace things and  commonly shared realities evoking a sense of community feeling and social cohesiveness. Thus the impact was overwhelming.

Gandhi’s style was never ornamental nor did he write vaulting prose. He mixed high style with low with profound wit and maturity. Gandhi used English as his medium of  expression  as a tool of defiance .He experimented with the language by using an idiom closer to Indian languages. Barely a fortnight before his death he wrote “English and English scholars in India think that there is something special about my English .” It is difficult to understand the nuances of his prose style but one can see the richness of his prose, his frequent use of  Indianism. He used  neologism , code mixing and some of the words of the source language. Gandhi was known for precision and economy of words. His description of Mertizberg ,where he was thrown out of  first class compartment is remarkable for brevity in style. He used words like  ‘Himalayan mistake’, coined the word ‘QUIT INDIA’ and popularised the word ‘fast’. Gandhi freely mixed flinched clichés and and new coinages. Gandhi’s unornamented  style diverged entirely from the mauve prose of earlier autobiographies and political writing. Undoubtedly,  Gandhi was gifted with strange alchemical writing.

Chandra Shekhar Dubey

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WHY DOES GANDHI CALL HIS EXPERIENCES EXPERIMENTS? Chandra Shekhar Dubey

          WHY DOES GANDHI CALL IT AN EXPERIMENT...?

Gandhi wrote in introduction to this book that one of his friends called Anand Swami once asked him ,what led him to set on this adventure, while writing autobiography is more akin to the Westerners.Sharing his apprehensions, he further asked “Supposing you reject tomorrow the things you hold as principles today ,is it not likely that men who shape their conduct on the authority of your word ,spoken or written, maybe misled?”Gandhi was influenced by this experience as he grew with life.He called his experience not truth but 'experiments with truth' because the validity,empirical results would remain a subject to revision and above all there is no single way to see the truth though it is monotheistic in nature.Even the Upanishads say that truth is one but scholars interpret it in many ways.Therefore Gandhi decided to speak of his experiments    only.His experiments in personal, political, religious and spiritual fields narrated in this book took a shape of an autobiography.He clarified that these would be a series of my lived experiences.Gandhi calls it THE STORY OF MY EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH.These include experiments with non-violence ,celibacy,other Gandhian tools of political experiments and other principles of conduct considered to be distinct from truth.To Gandhi truth was not only truthfulness of words but truthfulness in thought and action also,and not only   the relative truth of our conception but Eternal Truth that connects us to one who is supreme and Absolute.Thus Gandhi loved to call his accounts experiments with truth and not only   my autobiography.

Gandhi’s experiments in South Africa was designed to show that the concept of Satyagraha was derived not from moral theory or doctrine,but from the experience and practice.The narrative is driven by the conflict between ,on the one hand,Gandhi and his Satyagrahis ,and on the other, South African government.Mixing military and religious metaphors,Gandhi portrayed himself at once as a general directing a campaign and as a leading disciples on a pilgrimage.The narrative shifts swiftly between scenes describing high politics and Gandhi’s imprisonment in Johannesburg,Gandhi’s experiments in South Africa exemplified his the most distinctive formal trait as a writer.He dramatized the events with utmost economy of words thus lending a theatrical significance to his narrative.Take for instance,the extraordinary economy with which he describes the event that was to acquire a mythic status ,the turning point in Gandhi’s life,the event that set him on his path .

“I was pushed out of the train by a police constable at Maritzburg ,and the trains having left,was sitting in the waiting room ,shivering in the bitter cold,I did not know where my luggage was ,nor did I dare to inquire of anybody ,lest I might be insulted and assaulted once again.Sleep was not out of  the question.Doubt took  possession of my mind .Late at night I came to  the conclusion that to run back to India was cowardly .I must reach Pretoria ,without minding insults or even assaults.Pretoria was my goal.”

Thus was Gandhi launched on his Satyagraha campaign ,and on his political destiny.South Africa ,Gandhi concluded ,was “where I had realized my vocation in life.” With this now clear ,he left South Africa for India in 1914.The subsequent years: 1915,1917, 1920,1922,1930-1936 ,1942 went down in the history of  India as significant landmarks during which Gandhi made many experiments in the political, social, and spiritual fields. Gandhi’s legendary “Great Trial” published in YOUNG INDIA made  Britishers  restless as it became a nationalist lore. Gandhi made it clear that in indicating himself, he did so according to his own ethical principles of non-violence and not the  statutes  of the British laws-which in his words were no less than a “subtle but effective system  of terrorism and an organized display of terrorism and an organized     display of force.” The dramatization of his own life , its transformation into a permanent performance ,was Gandhi’s greatest literary achievement. Gandhi’s life is itself a great narrative parabola , driven by an unfailing internal momentum. A young hero is exiled from his home in Western India to London and then to South Africa: through the injustice and humiliation he suffers there at the hands of his rulers ,he learns spiritual and physical fortitude :he returns to pursue a quest to free his homeland of alien rule :he inspires his people to superman feats ,and leads them to liberty but at the moment of triumph he is consumed ,as his people gain their  freedom. With artful alertness ,Gandhi allowed the details of this life to be constantly witnessed and recorded befitting for a barrister whose language ,manners, and theatrical sense of confrontation were all shaped by his encounter with the British laws.

 The story of 'My Experiments With Truth’ was delivered in the form of a sequence of parables ,a modern recension of the Budhist Jataka  tradition.It could be read as a historical and political quest for freedom and nationhood,as well as spiritual mission of purification and salvation .Individual drama was masterfully blended with historical epic. He insisted that ‘I write as the spirit moves me at the time of writing...’It was not accuracy but truth that he was after: and the standard that he implied set not by memoirs or his history writing ,but by science .Gandhi described himself in the book as scientist ‘and one of the tropes that he evoked , is that of  experiment. The experimental theme recurs ; Gandhi writes of ‘experiments’ in the field of politics, experiments in the field of spiritualism, experiments on his body and experiments on in dietetics and principal and current experiments. The weekly installments of his life-stories were as laboratory reports., dissection of lived experiences. Gandhi wrote ‘I claim for them nothing more does than the scientist who, though  he conducts his experiments with the utmost accuracy ,forethought and minuteness ,never claims and finally about his  conclusions, but keeps an open mind regarding them.’’

These experiences were called experiments because Gandhi experimented these in human laboratory ie society .The results were validated by the masses and objectivity was amazingly appealing to collective shared consciousness.And it stood the litmus test of time.

Chandra Shekhar Dubey.

melodiousmeadowcsd.blogspot.com: 'Gandhi's Experiments with Truth' by Chandra shekh...

melodiousmeadowcsd.blogspot.com: 'Gandhi's Experiments with Truth' by Chandra shekh...: Gandhi’s experiments with truth are his experiments with life and his different natural, candid and naive reactions to the spur of moment...

'Gandhi's Experiments with Truth' by Chandra shekhar Dubey

Gandhi’s experiments with truth are his experiments with life and his different natural, candid and naive reactions to the spur of moments. Gandhi begins with his childhood experiences,  moves on to his school days memoirs and subsequently his journey to Europe, experiments in South Africa, India and his entry in the national politics, freedom struggle and his experiments with nonviolence,satyagrah.All these experiences have been candidly narrated by the author.His experience evoke a sense of morality and musings keeping readers spelt bound.Plain,simple,ordinary and very bizarre accounts as these are appeal to the readers .These truths come from the depth of heart.Any reader may find these accounts as Gandhi’s moral courage, his convictions and above all guts to speak in public.He touches imagination of the readers, as he grows to share his fears, apprehensions and little known secrets. Gandhi never sounds louder, never dissociated and this could be a plausible reason for why  his experiences are so inspiring. The grains of truth are put on test. Many of his experiments may not go with the ideology of the readers but no one may question the moral courage inherent in those experiments. Gandhi himself finds some of these unacceptable at later stage of life. He confesses that on many counts, he was adamant, unyielding but his lived even his whims and fancies as his convictions .Gandhi’s subjectivity has an undertone of objectivity. He shares his human fears, anxieties and failures in context of a cultural matrix, He speaks of his child marriage, which was very common in India in his time and till very recently in states like Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, Gandhi speaks in a tone of a reformer, a psychoanalyst, a moralist and visionary. He shares with his readers how Indians who went  toEngland to pursue further studies feared to be ridiculed, to confess that they are married. Gandhi had also this fear but he overcame it with his sense of truth,There are many such naive issues which he discusses as his experiments with truth.This piece of autobiography        held as the most successful work in the genre of autobiography depicts Gandhi as an ordinary man with humane limitations,foibles,deficiencies and weaknesses growing to a legendary figure of the 20^th century and generation to come,Einstein rightly pointed out”Generations to come will scarce believe that   such  one as this  in flesh and blood  ever walked upon this earth”.