594. My Brilliant Mum

                       Mum, reading (painting by Dad)

Mother’s Day has come and gone, and mine was on my mind all day. Although it has now been more than six years since she passed away, I still have not been able to sit with my memories of her and write anything that does her justice. In the evening I pulled out two manila folders of her writing, mostly essays she wrote when she was taking courses toward her B.A. at Harvard Extension School—while working at a full-time day job, mind you. What I found in them was humbling. 



I hadn’t always realized how seriously Mum took her learning—from independent reading, courses, lectures—and retirement made no difference to that seriousness. For a few years she was a member of a reading group in which the participants took it in turns to choose the book of the month. When it was Mum’s turn she took copious notes, read interviews with the author and on the historical setting, pored over critical essays on the book, and anxiously prepared—no, over-prepared—an introductory presentation. Invariably she chose an author her group were unlikely to be familiar with—Nadine Gordimer and Salman Rushdie were two that I remember—and felt that it was her responsibility to help the group understand and appreciate their work. But she was invariably disappointed. She would come home telling me that the host had been more interested in showing off her best china tea set than in discussing the book or that several people hadn’t even finished reading it.

academic snobbery

Mum’s other disappointments with the book group came from the fact that many of the participants were academics or had advanced degrees and would discuss the text at hand using obscure academic jargon that effectively excluded and humiliated her, who was wonderfully well-read and worldly wise, but not a literary scholar. Eventually the combination of the lack of seriousness and the academic snobbery led her to quit the group altogether.

Besides her participation in the book group Mum volunteered as an ESL teacher to wives of international graduate students, volunteered as an aide in an ESL after-school program, was an active member of a group called the Third Age, and took several Learning in Retirement courses taught by retired college professors that were as rigorous as any college course. I regret now that I was so preoccupied with my own work that I didn’t take the time to appreciate hers, thereby reproducing the behavior in others that hurt her the most.

Every Which Way – Maurice Bilk PPRBS. To Remember the evacuation of millions of British children separated from their families during WWII (Photo: Tim Ellis)

As a brilliant girl from a working-class background, Mum was in love with learning and with life. She aced the eleven-plus exam and won a scholarship to grammar school, but her secondary school experience was badly disrupted by the Second World War when she and her school, Parliament Hill School, were evacuated out of London and she had to live with a series of foster families who were neglectful at best. After school she went out to work and while she went out dancing and to the movies with her best girlfriend, she also furthered her education with night classes.

There was no opportunity for Mum to further her formal studies in Greece and India while we were growing up, but she continued to teach English to children—in India, to Dalit children who lived on the outskirts of the campus—and to learn languages herself. It was only when my sister was in college and I at work that Mum started taking night classes again, two every semester until she earned first her Associate’s and then her Bachelor’s degree. Looking now at the piles of term papers she wrote over the years, I am overwhelmed. How has it taken me so long to read them?

Here are some of the titles: 


• Control: A Classless Condition
• The Evolution of Discipline in Early Childhood: Development and Social Policy 

• Summerhill: For and Against
• Depression: Classification, Etiology and Treatment—A Brief Overview
• Caste and Hinduism: Dominant Themes and Modal Personality

Knowing Mum, the topics above make perfect sense. She had always been an advocate for loving, child-centered models of education that fostered creativity. With her working-class background and strong sense of justice, she had always been interested in the effects of class and caste in society. And working as she did for a psychiatrist who had taken a leading role in studying treatments for depression and schizophrenia, she was interested in how treatments for depression had evolved, developing drugs that both held considerable promise and had serious limitations.

But what humbled me the most were these two papers:

• The Politics of Nuclear Power and Our Health

Mum wrote this for a course on The Sociology of Medicine with Elliott Krause (author of Power and Illness: The Political Sociology of Health and Medical Care) in January 1988, when, at 23, I was passionately involved in the anti-nuclear power movement. Clearly, Mum, who was always supportive of my pursuits even as she worried about my future, had set out to study the nuclear industry for herself. Just flipping through the sections of the paper I can see that she investigated the nuclear fuel cycle, corporate investments in uranium, studies on the health effects of radiation, attitudes of the medical profession toward diagnostic radiation and nuclear power, and political interventions. Wow. If only I had listened to her more, actually talked with her, rather than just holding forth, talking at her. She could have taught me a thing or three.

• The Role that China Played in Changing the East India Company’s Relationship with India

It was only relatively recently, through reading Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy (2008-2015) and his non-fictional Smoke and Ashes (2024), that I became acquainted with the Opium Wars and what drove them. And here was Mum, back in 1986, before I even started my graduate studies, taking a course on India Under the British with the eminent historian of South Asia David Washbrook and writing a paper on the causes and effects of the opium trade.

Mum was so intelligent, passionate about learning, socially committed. And yet, as a mother, she built me up. Listened to me patiently, even as I talked incessantly. Was full of admiration for my work, my intellect. Said nothing about her own. I still find slips of paper in books she borrowed from me or read because I had recommended them, with her own thoughts on them. Did we sit down and discuss them afterwards? Probably not, because when I went to Mum and Dad’s house, she would insist that I put my feet up and relax while she simultaneously brought me tea, played with Baby Nikhil, and prepared dinner.

Oh, how I long to listen to her now! All I have is her papers. But I will read them with deep gratitude and remember my brilliant mum.

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566. Lift Thine Eyes

I have just re-read one of my favorite novels, Doris Lessing’s The Marriages of Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980), the second in her five-novel space fiction series, Canopus in Argos: Archives. In it, the oppressed women in the militaristic, hyper-masculine Zone Four meet secretly, while their men are away playing their endless war games, to reaffirm and pass on their undervalued perspectives and priorities. During these gatherings, the women’s seemingly-carefree songs and dances are in fact very carefully choreographed to direct the women’s gaze upward, to the distant mountains and beyond. All the dances require them, again and again, to lift their heavy heads and arch them up and back on their stiff necks, stiff because they are accustomed to moving around with downcast eyes.

When I was practicing yoga regularly, the first exercise in my morning yoga routine was to stretch my neck gently in all directions, one at a time. Now that my practice has become occasional and irregular, I have fallen out of the habit of stretching my neck backwards. An ear, nose, and throat specialist I saw recently, told me that I may have a little arthritis in my cervical spine, which directly impinges on my throat, impeding the free movement of my larnyx. It hadn’t occurred to me before that my posture and my voice could be so closely connected.

   Harvard Square, c. 1970 (Wikipedia)

Thinking about my own stiff neck, and the Zone Four women’s enforced habit of keeping their heads down, reminded me of an evening nearly fifty years ago, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during my last year at university. Our friend Leighton, I think it was, led Andrew and me down a back alley and up a fire escape in Harvard Square, onto the roof of a building that overlooked the whole square, facing the famous Out of Town News (which, sadly, closed in 2019) and the gates of Harvard Yard. A large billboard on the roof also faced in the same direction and we must have ducked under and in front of it, looking down over a low parapet. What a magnificent bird’s-eye view! However, it was not the magnificence of the view that I remember, but rather, the fact that we were invisible in plain sight. Why? Because intent upon their various worldly pursuits, no-one, but no-one, thought to look upward.

         Kanchenjunga, from Darjeeling (photo by Karl Hagen)

Thinking still further back, I remember my years at school in Darjeeling, India, in the foothills of the Himalayas (see TMA 52, Himalaya), where, whenever the mists cleared, the magnificent snows of Kanchenjunga revealed themselves before us, and will remain forever before our minds’ eyes. Our choir director, Mrs. Murray, taught us Mendelssohn’s glorious Lift Thine Eyes (from his 1846 oratorio, Elijah) 



Lift thine eyes, O lift thine eyes
to the mountains
whence cometh, whence cometh, whence cometh help.

Scurrying along the ground, heads down, each intent upon our own personal pursuits, we lose the long view, depriving ourselves of any greater purpose aside from money-grubbing and mere survival. Doris Lessing left us ten years ago, and Mrs. Murray, just ten weeks ago. Thank you, thank you, for re-directing our gaze. It is now up to us to carry forward, in our own songs and practices, the reminder to stretch our stiff necks and lift our eyes to the mountains and beyond.

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557. Revisiting Barbara after Barbie (the movie)

I’m sharing a link to an old post here and below, Dolls I Have Loved and Lost, about the dolls and teddy bears in my girlhood, including Barbara, the doll I was allowed instead of a Barbie.

The Barbie movie craze is leaving me totally cold and feeling alienated, even betrayed. At best I think it’s silly. All these grown women swooning over the film and taking selfies in pink–come on! I never had a Barbie. I wasn’t much of a doll person, but I did use dolls and bears to comfort myself and to act out with. I certainly never fantasized about being a Barbie; there was nothing about her or her brand that I could identify with. In my teens the women’s movement only strengthened my negative feelings about the phenomenon, with its sexism and its flagrant commercialism.

Barbie started as a German sex toy and turned into a sexy American doll aimed at children. Was it progress for girls no longer to play at being mothers but instead to play at being fashion models? Was it progress to create black and brown Barbies and to start selling doctor-Barbies, with all the expensive accessories to go with them? I’m glad my mother refused to get me one.

I expect that I’ll be called a party pooper and worse, but honestly, this movie was sponsored by Mattel to revive its flagging brand. It has been spectacularly successful. Director Greta Gerwig is certainly brilliant, but she’s having it both ways, using her clever “subversion” to make Barbie and all its (I refuse to call it “her”) accessories even bigger.

And I don’t like pink, never have.

https://josna.wordpress.com/2010/03/20/dolls-i-have-loved-and-lost/

 

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544. S is for SPARROW

This month I will be blogging about my recent trip to India as part of the annual April Blogging from A to Z Challenge. I don’t aim or claim to be exhaustive, but simply to share moments of the trip with you: observations, fragments of conversations, stories recounted to me, reflections on language, books, food, people and places.

     The Nest

About ten days into our trip, Andrew and I booked an auto rickshaw and rode to Dahisar in Mumbai, to the Nest, home of SPARROW, Sound and Picture ARchives for Research on Women. I visit SPARROW every time I go to India, sometimes staying on to work with them for a few days to a week. This time it had been nearly nine years, and the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, so I went with some trepidation. I need not have, since the SPARROW staff are small, but nothing if not intrepid.

SPARROW is a Mumbai-based women’s archives directed by Dr. C.S. Lakshmi, who co-founded it in 1988 with fellow women’s studies scholars Dr. Neera Desai and Dr. Maithreyi Krishna Raj. To quote from the profile page on their website, “The idea was not to set up a Women’s Archives as just a collection centre but to create an archives which would be more vibrant and more communicative. The women’s archives was conceived as an organisation which would bring people together; an archive which would be an agent of change.” It operated in several temporary spaces until 2008, when SPARROW was finally able to build its own nest with a major grant and donations from friends and supporters.

This small band of women have been able to build a substantial collection over SPARROW’s nearly 35 years of operation and, surviving on crumbs, they have been able to carry out their mission of being agents of change. In addition to its publishing program and maintaining its physical and digital archives, SPARROW has half a dozen major projects: its oral history recording program, its digital video recording projects, photography project, media watch project, multilingual collection project, and NGO documentation. All this is carries out with a staff that has had to scale down from nearly 25 to just a dozen. Andrew and I toured the collection, learned how they had weathered the pandemic, and sat down in their customary circle on the floor to share our packed lunches, spreading a coverlet in the floor and passing the dabbas around from person to person.

In addition to her scholarly publications, SPARROW’s director C.S. Lakshmi is also the renowned Tamil writer who writes under the penname Ambai. She has published several collections of short stories, and won the 2021 Sahitya Akademi Award for her short-story collection, Sivappu Kazhutthudan Oru Patchaiparavai, which has been translated into English as A Red-necked Green Bird (2021).

In my teaching I have used some of SPARROW’s booklets on pioneering women in different fields of endeavor, from literature, dance, and film to science and sculpture in stone. These publications have exemplified SPARROW’s commitment to creating a dynamic, interactive archive. The process of creating them involved inviting the subjects to a workshop with college students, who conducted oral interviews and produced the booklet. These workshops inspired some of my students to conduct their own oral histories and to carry out research into similar archival projects in the United States.

Through the booklet on the eminent Dalit writer Urmila Pawar, I came to know and teach her stories, and learned that she had been born and raised in Ratnagiri, also my father’s hometown. On one of my first visits to SPARROW I learned that their collection of oral interviews contained an interview with my atya Kumud Rege, who had lived and worked in Ratnagiri and its vicinity all her life as a Gandhian social worker, and that the interview had been conducted by none other than Urmil Pawar herself. Since the interview was in Marathi, I undertook to get it translated into English, and my youngest atya has now completed that task, all the while caring for her elder sister who passed away just before the pandemic.

My visit to SPARROW this time was necessarily brief, but I cannot describe the sense of relief and respect I felt when meeting the staff and their fearless leader again after such a long time. With children to care for and the lockdown to contend with they had managed to maintain the archives and continue the work, albeit scaled down, throughout the pandemic, returning to the Nest halfway through and then having to retreat to their individual homes during the second surge.

If you wish to learn more about SPARROW you can visit their website here. And please click on this link if you wish to donate to their work.

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538. Mum Meets Her In-laws

This month I will be blogging about my recent trip to India as part of the annual Blogging from A to Z Challenge. I don’t aim or claim to be exhaustive, but simply to share moments of the trip with you: observations, fragments of conversations, stories recounted to me, reflections on language, books, food, people and places.

                              the front entrance of the family house

In her papers, my English mother left a collection of non-fiction essays, personal narratives she had written for a night course during the 1970s. In one of them she had written about her first visit with my father to her new in-laws as a new wife and mother, when I was still an infant. The young family had made the three-week sea voyage from England to India for the first time, arrived in Mumbai with a sick baby, and as soon as the baby was well enough to be moved, had traveled down the Konkan coast to Ratnagiri. On my recent trip to India, my father’s youngest sister Manda, who had been a young woman of twenty back then, filled in the picture from her memory.

Mum had written about how uncomfortable she had felt, arriving at her in-laws’ house for the first time all hot and disheveled after the journey and immediately under intense scrutiny. She was well aware that her father-in-law had tried to stop the marriage and was struggling with a mess of conflicting emotions. His stern aspect gave her no comfort. Her mother-in-law spoke no English at all, but from the very outset welcomed her lovingly. This must have meant all the more to Mum, since her own mother had died only a year before, when she was six months pregnant with me. She was the youngest daughter in a large, close-knit family back in London and felt very much alone.

Mandatya said that Mum, Dad, and I were given the bedroom immediately off my grandfather’s (ajhoba’s) bedroom. To get to it, one either had to walk through his bedroom or around to the back verandah, where there was a second door to the room. She recalled that my mother would always walk round the back of the house and in through the verandah rather than go through ajhoba’s room. Whether this was so as not to disturb him or to protect herself from his sharp, disapproving eyes, we will never know, but Mandatya chose to interpret it as a mark of Mum’s respect and consideration for her father-in-law.

the back verandah

According to Mandatya, I used to run around the house all day and then go off to bed. Apparently, every night around midnight I would start crying loudly, and the crying would go on and on. The new English daughter-in-law didn’t seem to be able to quiet me. I can only imagine how mortified Mum must have felt, embarrassed that I was waking up the whole household and sure that her father-in-law would be judging her to be a bad mother. After this had gone on for a second and a third night, my mother must have been quite desperate. But this was when my dear grandmother (aaji) came to her rescue.

Mandatya said that on the fourth night aaji took out a soft cloth and put some warmed oil in a small bowl. She asked Mum to bring me to her, laid me down on the cloth, and began massaging my stomach gently with the oil. My wails soon subsided and I dropped off to sleep. Then aaji handed me back over to my grateful mother.

        Indian baby massage (IAIM Baby Massage)

This, then, became the nightly routine. As soon as I began to cry, my mother would carry me out to aaji, who would be ready with the cloth and the warm oil. In this exchange of the baby between the younger and the older woman, a bond developed that needed no words. I was comforted and comfortable and my mother felt accepted and supported. It would take longer for her father-in-law to fully accept her. But that is another story.

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535. J is for Jewelry

This month I will be blogging about my recent trip to India as part of the annual Blogging from A to Z Challenge. I don’t aim or claim to be exhaustive, but simply to share moments of the trip with you: observations, fragments of conversations, stories recounted to me, reflections on language, books, food, people and places.

I don’t wear jewelry as a rule, but almost all that I have has come from India in the form of gifts from family members. When I put on a silk sari for a wedding or a celebration such as Diwali, I get out my small collection of jewelry and contemplate wearing some of it. Still, I don’t always take the step from just looking at it to actually putting it on.

On this trip to India, as Andrew predicted, I took more jewelry with me than I actually used. It included a gold necklace that my dear atya (paternal aunt) had recently had made for me by melting down some of her own gold jewelry. I wanted her to actually see me wearing it. 



Apart from one or two pieces of symbolic value—most importantly my gold and black coral mangalsutra, a necklace that is an Indian equivalent of a wedding ring—I’m not a fan of gold. I far prefer silver, which I think is more elegant. But a piece of jewelry doesn’t have to include any precious metal or gems to be a treasure.

I took three pieces of jewelry to India with me to have them refurbished or repaired. My cousin’s wife took me to her jeweler’s, a small shopfront that led through a maze of narrow corridors into a warren of rooms in the back. When we had showed them the pieces I had brought they took two of them and returned the third, saying that it didn’t need much cleaning and I could do it myself with some toothpaste and a soft cloth. They did accept the other two, a chunky silver bracelet and a pearl and black coral necklace, asking us to return for them after the weekend.

The silver bracelet had been my mother’s, and I have always loved it. I have a very hazy impression that she bought it at a street market in Midnapore (or Medinipur), West Bengal, about 20 kilometers from Kharagpur where we lived, when I was five or six years old. It is a heavy tribal bangle cuff, with an aura of mystery and romance. All I remember of that trip was the night ride back from Midnapore in a car—something rare for us, since we didn’t have a car ourselves. How do I know that Mum bought it in a street market? I don’t, not for sure. But I can almost see the scene in my mind’s eye.

I gasped when I saw the polished bracelet at the jeweler’s; it was almost unrecognizable. I had never seen it with such a shine, and though the new look somewhat detracted from the dark, chunky look it had always had, now I could actually wear it.

The black-and-white necklace, another gift from my atya, had had a missing stone—not a diamond but some kind of colored glass, I suppose—but now it had been replaced and was as good as new.

Aside from the two pieces that I had taken to be made new, there were only four items of jewelry that I brought back with me. How I acquired the first two is embarrassing; I was had, like the typical tourist. On the beach in Goa a woman selling badly-made bead necklaces had approached me, spotting a pushover a mile off, but, postponing my inevitable fate, I said that I had to go and would see her another time. Sure enough, she was there the very next morning and accosted me again. Half an hour of bargaining later she had worn me down, and I emerged with the two bead necklaces in the picture above, one light and the other dark. She claimed that the light-colored beads were made from tulsi, or sacred basil, wood. I wouldn’t know.

The third item I carried back with me, a pink-and-black coral and gold necklace, was a homecoming of sorts. On a visit back to India in the 1980s or 1990s, Dad had taken pink coral, much prized in Maharashtra and used to make mangalsutras, and had asked his nieces, sister, and sisters-in-law to have necklaces made for themselves from him. On this visit my cousin in Pune made a present of her two back to me, one for me and the other for my sister.

Lastly, I brought back a pair of silver toe-rings. I don’t wear rings on my fingers and wouldn’t dream of wearing one in my nose, but have always been fond of toe rings. They have replaced an old pair from the time of our marriage, one of which had been lost years ago. Somehow I feel more more fully present when wearing them, especially while walking. At the jeweler’s, one of the staff fitted them expertly to my toes, using needle-nose pliers.

Whether I wear them or not, these pieces of jewelry have a special meaning for me because of where they came from, how they came to me, and from whom.

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528. C is for Clothing

This month I will be blogging about my recent trip to India as part of the annual Blogging from A to Z Challenge. I don’t aim or claim to be exhaustive, but simply to share moments of the trip with you: observations, fragments of conversations, stories recounted to me, reflections on language, books, food, people and places.

Rebel, Artist, Pioneer: Amrita Sher-Gil wearing a sari, Simla, India c.1936. Photos courtesy of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil & PHOTOINK

The clothes worn by a person or group of people change not only according to time, season, ethnicity, and geography, and also according to gender and class. Of course there are so many factors driving social change that also make their mark on clothes and clothing. Because long periods of time have elapsed between each of my return trips these changes stand out strongly to me. What a person is expected to wear or chooses to wear has social and political meaning, and can be an act of defiance or conformity, a political statement or a mantle of respectability. This of course is as true in India as it is everywhere. And these social expectations are also more evident to me, looking on them from the outside.

Back in 1984, little girls wore frocks, teenage girls and unmarried women wore salwar kameezes, long tunics over baggy or tight drawstring trousers, and sometimes saris, and married women were expected to wear saris all the time. It was different in the North where even married women wore the salwar kameez, but not in my middle-class family from Maharashtra. On my first return trip to India after our marriage I wore a sari much of the time, and if not, then a salwar kameez. While visiting an older male cousin, a gentle soul who was about to give Andrew and me a ride in his car, I came out wearing a makeshift salwar kameez consisting of a long straight tunic over cotton pants with a long scarf over my shoulders. My cousin took one look at me and asked if was planning to go out in that get-up. When I replied that I was, he told me in indulgent but exasperated tones, as if he couldn’t have expected anything different from me, to, for goodness sake, go in and put on a sari. Which I did, promptly. When I returned, appropriately dressed, he sighed happily, Ah, that’s better.

Nine years later, in 1993, I returned to India with Andrew and our eight-year-old son Nikhil to do research for my doctoral dissertation. Again I wore a sari most of the time. So did all my married cousins, except at home where they sometimes wore full-length “house dresses.” One or two of them always wore a salwar kameez, and some others wore them when traveling, especially traveling abroad. But thirty years later, the change is dramatic. Now, for most of my cousins, saris are for weddings, religious festivals, and formal wear, but on a daily basis they wear salwar kameezes. As for their children’s generation, they wear salwar-kameez or skirts while the younger ones wear jeans with t-shirts or short kurtas (called kurtis). Many of them no longer even know how to tie a sari. And it is telling that traditional Indian clothes, no longer simply the norm, are now called “ethnic” outfits.

But I, who can wear what I like when I like, particularly now that I have retired, and whose saris lie languishing in a cupboard most of the year, long to wear a sari when I go to India. On my latest visit, although I noted that most middle-class women of my generation were no longer wearing them on a daily basis, I remembered that two of my cousins in particular had never worn anything else. When I went to meet each one, I put on a sari “to keep them company”, only to find that they were now dressed in salwar kameezes. In one comic switch, I went out to meet an older cousin in a sari only to find her in a salwar kameez. I changed into a salwar kamiz for our next outing, only to find that she had now donned a sari! On this latest two-month visit, I wore a sari no more than half a dozen times.

In some situations, though, wearing the wrong thing is no laughing matter. Back in 1993, in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid (mosque) in Ayodhya by right-wing Hindu activists, Andrew, and I were preparing to travel from Delhi down to Mumbai with Nikhil. The situation was volatile, with curfews called in city after city as inter-communal violence broke out, and my relatives were naturally concerned for our safety.

Kashmiri cap (R. Kamal)

Andrew had a beard, I was wearing a salwar kameez, and Nikhil had on a little wool-and-velvet cap I had picked up in a cottage industries emporium. What was wrong with this picture? Apparently, we could be mistaken for a Muslim family, and that would be dangerous. It was advisable for me to wear a bindi when traveling as a marker of Hindu identity, and as for Nikhil, the cap might give people the wrong impression. Did I resist this social pressure? No, although it pains me to say so, I conformed meekly. 



On this trip thirty years later, I was stunned at the diversity of the clothing people were wearing. In a given street scene, one might see young people wearing exactly the same kind of clothes as Americans of their age and gender, alongside people wearing traditional dress in a number of different styles. There were women of all classes with saris and bindis, women with salwar kameezes in all cuts and styles, women wearing their house dresses outdoors, men in shirts and trousers and men in white cotton kurta-pyjamas. But to the educated eye, most of those people wore markers of their religion, ethnicity, marital status. All these could prompt recognition—indeed, celebration—of India’s tremendous ethnic and religious diversity. But in the current political climate, they can be seen as signs of difference, even of defiance, and a simple cap may still spell disaster.

When I go to India, hyper-aware of my outsider status, I try to fit in. But I don’t fool anyone, even myself. I know that I don’t fit in, and although there is no need to flaunt my difference, perhaps I ought to own it. This summer, back in the United States, I’m going to take those neatly folded saris out of their dark closet and wear them outdoors, as if it were a perfectly ordinary thing to do. A great pleasure for me and a very small step, perhaps, toward opening up more space for everyone to express their own difference without fear of the consequences. If it were 1993 again, and I were faced with the same situation as before, I would probably take off my son’s cap again. But what about the Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jews, and many others of various beliefs or persuasions who can not or will not erase their markers of difference? Is it right for them to be expected to conform?

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517. To Test or Not to Test?

I’m not referring to nuclear tests here, or to tests for COVID-19. Just having finished Bernadine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker Prize-winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other, I’m speaking of DNA testing. (and don’t worry, no spoilers, so I’ll say no more on this score, except that I loved it and am looking forward to reading more of her works.) While the test in question might have been a bit of a plot contrivance, I was delighted by the results, which spurred me to reconsider doing one of my own, despite the real privacy concerns.

As I say every time someone asks where I’m from—and would be rich by now if I made them pay me for an answer—I’m half and half, my father having been Indian and my mother English. (I always add, “but I’ve lived here in the United States since I was a teenager”, not that that is of interest to most of my interlocutors.) “Half and half” sounds straightforward to me, but for some reason people seem to find it fascinating. They wonder how on earth it came about, and I explain that after having completed his B.A. my father traveled to England for further studies, where he met my mother through an office-mate who knew her elder brother. But that doesn’t explain much beyond the bare facts for, after all, back in the early 1950s people rarely married outside their nationality, ethnicity, or class/caste, and my parents married outside all three. How did that come about?

On Mum’s side, her elder sister Bette married a Scot and her best friend Lily married a Welshman, but she was the only one of her eight siblings, and indeed, of all the friends of her youth, to marry a non-Brit. Although come to think of it, in 1948, the year Dad sailed to England, the new British Nationality Act “created a single, non-national citizenship around the territories of the British Isles and the crown colonies”, whereby anyone born or naturalized in Britain or one of the British colonies could now declare “civis Britannicus sum”—I am a British citizen—with free entry to Britain (to work, primarily in order to create a pool of cheap labor to rebuild the country after the Second World War, but also to stay, as many chose to do). But although, for immigration purposes, Dad was technically British, despite India’s 1947 independence from British colonial rule, of course he was not English, or Christian, or white. None of that mattered to Mum, even though she came from a working-class family and had barely set foot outside Britain, or outside London, for that matter. She was a leftist, an aspiring intellectual, loved people, and wanted to broaden her horizons. Dad was well-educated, well read, open to new ideas, and strikingly handsome. He intended to return to India after his studies were completed, and she was ready to embark with him on the great adventure of life.

I believe that in his generation Dad was also the only member of his immediate family to marry out—out of his religion, nationality, class, and caste. He was certainly the first one who had traveled outside India and the only one who was to live outside it for any length of time. Mum was different from him in almost every way. But like him, she was energetic, gregarious, and interested in everything and everyone. He came to England as an Anglophile, already steeped in British literature and culture (he often began a sentence with “as (G.B.) Shaw would say…), and he was eager to get to know it directly, although ultimately he did not want to stay there himself or to have his children grow up there.

One might wonder why, as the happy product of this mixed marriage already, I would be interested in exploring my heritage further, by means of a DNA test. Doesn’t “half-Indian and half-English” say it all? Don’t I already have “too many roots”, as Salman Rushdie once described the migrant condition? What would I hope to find? Well, it’s like this.

As we often note in postcolonial studies, the binary of colonizer/colonized is an oversimplified one. There is as much tension and complexity within each category as there is between them. It is the same with “Indian” and “English”: the diversity within these categories is tremendous and goes back centuries. As is well known, through the centuries Britain has been raided and invaded by a succession of would-be conquerors, from Romans to Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, to Vikings, Normans, and Danes. For its part, India had seen a series of invasions and migrations, from the Aryan-speaking peoples, Iranians, Arabs, Africans, Greeks, Mughals, French, Portuguese, and most recently, the British. In addition to centuries of mixing and mingling with outsiders, both India and Britain have tremendous internal ethnic diversity. While many DNA tests lump the whole Indian subcontinent together, other databases can break down the results by region and ethnicity. Most tests already break down British results in this way. Furthermore, in addition to having been invaded, people in both countries have been active traders for millennia, establishing or being important nodes on trading routes that stretched in all directions.

Much has been written about Britain’s naval might, great sea voyages, and Crown-supported trading entities such as the East India Company. Less, perhaps, about the intercontinental trade routes across Asia and Africa and the Indian Ocean that long predated the European colonial era. According to James Hancock “when Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached the Indian Ocean in 1493, he found a vibrant international trade network already in place, whose expanse and wealth was well beyond European imagination.” Surely Indians, who were centrally active in this trading network, would have mixed with their trading partners over the centuries, despite their much-vaunted pride in caste purity and their horror of both inter-caste and inter-religious marriages?

Someone once suggested to me, perhaps it was my father, that people who have grown up in coastal areas tend to be more open-minded than those from the hinterlands, because they are more likely to have been exposed to outsiders with different customs, cultures, and worldviews. If that were the case, then it follows they would also be more likely to mix with and marry those outsiders. And might not the products of those unions be still more predisposed to that cultural and racial cross-fertilization? I had answers to none of these questions, since I was completely ignorant about my family genealogy on either side beyond the generation of my grandparents.

      The Government has access to your genes (Messier)

Three or four years ago, with all these thoughts floating around in my mind, I started watching YouTube videos made by people who had undergone DNA tests and who had made discoveries about their heritage. While many, perhaps most, confirmed what they already knew, some of them revealed fascinating (and sometimes disturbing) information that forced them to question fixed notions about their identities and about identity in general. That year the two biggest DNA testing companies in the US were offering their services at sale prices and I had all but decided to get two sets, one for me and one for a close girlfriend, and do them together over the winter holidays. But I happened to mention the idea to my son, who threw a fit. He reminded me that in most cases, neither the results nor the DNA samples were private, and that the companies could make them available to commercial entities and law enforcement, and already had. Did I want to give away my genetic data to some corporation that might use it to clone me? It was the stuff of sci-fi horror movies. What had I been thinking of? Chastened and a little shaken, I shelved the idea. But now, thanks to Girl, Woman, Other, it has resurfaced.

I remember that during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, then-President Donald Trump declared that the only reason that the virus seemed to be so widespread was that there was so much testing being done.“Think of this”, he said, “if we didn’t do testing, instead of testing over 40 million people, if we did half the testing we would have half the cases” (Higgins-Dunn). His argument was, of course, that with less testing, COVID would be less of a problem. While the logic was specious, there was something in it that is relevant here. If we did more DNA tests, we would find out that more people were more mixed than they had grown up believing. To some, that would be a dangerous idea, leading to the blurring of hard-line identities and perhaps of exclusive nationalisms as well.

Perhaps I should go ahead with that DNA test after all. I must say, though, that it does feel wrong to pay a private company to take a sample of your genetic material and do with it what they will. To return to Girl, Woman, Other, the DNA test only provides biological confirmation to the novel’s informing principles: that black women in Britain are a delightfully diverse but interconnected community that will never conform to any simplistic stereotype; that the same can be said of Britain’s national make-up as a whole; and that neither race nor gender can be understood as simple binaries. Do I need a DNA test to confirm what I already know about all that goes into making me who I am? You tell me.

 

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512. My Champion

I.

During our sojourn in England in the late 1960s, many of the girls in my school would hike up their mini-skirts still further by folding over the waistbands as soon as they left home in the mornings. Of course, once they got to school they would have to fold them back down again because there were rules governing how many inches above the knee your skirt could be (see Exposing Whose Perversity?). But when we immigrated to the United States in 1970, we found that what was acceptable in Boston was very different from the prevailing London fashions. Mum had to take down the hems of several of my skirts and dresses before I could wear them to Brookline High, despite the fact that in every other respect it was more permissive than any school I had ever attended. We were struck by American prudishness, not only in fashions but also in the media, where nudity and swearing were routinely censored, even as violence seemed to be entirely permissible, even early in the evening, when children were still awake. In Britain it was just the opposite: sex on television was perfectly acceptable, while violence was a no-no. But over time I have come to appreciate more and more my mother’s open-mindedness.

As a teenager, I thought of Mum as prudish. I suppose it was a necessary stage I had to go through, of defining myself in opposition to her. As I grew older, I realized more and more how forward-thinking she was. That’s probably why most of her female friends in the States were so much younger than she was; the women her age were stuffy by comparison. In the early 1970s, as I was discovering youth culture in the U.S., I must have felt the need to shock the older generation, and my parents were the closest old fogeys at hand. But although Mum played the role that she had been socially assigned, and set ethical standards for me, I think she disapproved of American morality, which she considered backward and hypocritical. She generally presented herself as stereotypically British, prim and proper, and a stickler for good manners and “correct” diction and pronunciation. But in fact she was a rebel who had broken with tradition time and again and who stood up courageously for what she considered to be right action even when she was standing alone. There was one time in particular that I remember Mum springing into action publicly in my defense, just a few months after we had arrived in the States.

It was our first summer in America and I had just turned sixteen. Perhaps for my birthday, Mum had made me an outfit of her own design: a tiny gathered skirt, so short that it was more like a tutu, with a matching short-sleeved crop-top like a sari-blouse. The cloth was a cotton print from a little fabric shop in Coolidge Corner that carried a line of beautiful African batik prints. The day I wore my new outfit in public for the first time, Mum and I were riding a trolley on the Green Line, that runs from downtown Boston out to the Western suburbs. Out of the corner of my eyes and ears I became aware of two old ladies commenting disapprovingly on my appearance, quite loudly enough for me and the entire trolley car to hear, casting aspersions on “girls these days” but also on my own morality. I don’t remember how I felt when I heard them, but Mum certainly knew how she felt, and she made it abundantly clear to them.

Raising her voice and speaking clearly and directly to the two old gossips in her Queen’s English, she told them that there was nothing wrong with a young woman wearing pretty clothes. It was not my morality that was in question, but theirs. Her exact words escape me, but she made it abundantly clear that it was their own minds that were smutty; her daughter was entirely innocent.

Wow. That silenced them. Without a word to each other about what had just transpired, Mum and I continued on our morning’s errands. But thinking back on this episode more than half a century later, I marvel at her courage to speak out as fiercely as she had done in public and how unquestioningly she had stood up for me. My champion!   

II.

Lest you think that mini-skirts were the only things in fashion in 1970, long, flowing skirts were equally in vogue. There is another story about Mum and me and the African cotton prints at that fabric store in Coolidge Corner, Brookline. It must have been our first Christmas in the U.S., when I was wracking my brains for a present for Mum that I hit upon the idea of making her a skirt out of the material she liked so much. The only problem was that I was useless at sewing; the only time I had ever been the recipient of corporal punishment in school was in needlework class. Still, I got down to work and eventually produced something approximating what I had had in mind, wrapped it up, and waited impatiently for Christmas Day.

Now Mum was Father Christmas in our household. She loved Christmas more than any other holiday and started preparing for it months in advance, tiptoeing into the house with mysterious-looking parcels that she would bundle into her and Dad’s bedroom and hide away in a secret stash. On Christmas Day there were always more presents for my sister Sally and me than for anyone else, and certainly many more for us than there ever were for her, so Sally and I had to start opening first, otherwise Mum and Dad would have nothing to open later in the day. I had already opened a couple of presents—can’t remember what, though I’m pretty sure that my presents that year included George Harrison’s single, My Sweet Lord, and The Who’s album, Tommy—when I spotted an interesting-looking package from “Santa”; certainly not a record, but almost certainly an article of clothing, what we called a “softie” in our family. Until quite recently softies had been boring presents for us, but now they were getting more and desirable, even for Sally, who had hated them when she was younger. Anyway, I opened mine with great anticipation, and did a double-take, thinking at first that I had somehow mislabeled one of my own presents.

It was a full-length, African-cotton skirt, of identical design to the one I had made for Mum.

My champion, my role model, my twin!

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506. The Loudest Voice

After all these years, only now am I listening to this luminous story by the late Grace Paley. In 1998 she read it out aloud on Vermont Public Radio for the holidays, and there it still lives, her voice issuing forth at the press of a button and conjuring up a time, a place, and a child’s innate self-confidence. She was 76 when she read the story, one she had written 40 years before, and her voice was still clear and well-modulated. Oh the sly humor! Chosen for her clear, strong voice, the very voice that parents, teachers, and neighbors are always admonishing her for, the Jewish girl in a Jewish immigrant community attending a Christian school delights in narrating the school’s Christmas pageant. She has no feeling of being an outsider. She simply filters the entire story through her own consciousness, whence it issues utterly–and wonderfully–transformed. And her voice, the loudest voice, comes through with flying colors.

I met Grace Paley several times during the 1990s. She certainly didn’t need to raise her voice to command respect and perhaps she never had. At our first meeting I had no idea who she was. I had gone to a reception for the campus visit of the late Edward Said, and didn’t know anyone there. An elderly couple were in the room and so I struck up a conversation with the husband, who was standing a little apart from the others and wearing faded denim jeans like any old Vermonter straight out of the back woods. His wife wore a bandanna around her messy hair like a Russian grandmother. When I told him I was in the English department he said mildly, “my wife does creative writing, too.” I was curious about this wife. I introduced myself to her as well and listened to her for a while, as she talked about this and that. It must have been when I heard her casually refer to her conversations with women during a trip to Vietnam that I suddenly had a prickling feeling at the back of my neck and asked her whom I was addressing. “Grace Paley,” she replied matter-of-factly, and I wondered why I hadn’t realized this from the start. Her voice was not loud at all, but it was by no means self-effacing either.

The Lamb, Songs of Innocence and Experience

I had a loud voice as a girl, like my father before me. My parents, bless them, never asked me to tone it down or hush it up. My classmates teased me for it but didn’t ask me to change. My teachers did, though, as evidenced by my earliest report cards. By age 8 I already had a reputation to live up to; it never occurred to me that it was something I might have to live down someday. Passing through England on the way back to India at age 9, I was chosen to recite a poem by William Blake—The Lamb, I think it was—in school assembly. It never crossed my mind for one moment that I might have been chosen as a token “Other”; in fact, I was told the reason was that I was the only child in my class “without an accent.” Ironically, this girl who had grown up outside of England spoke unselfconscious Standard English, or R.P. (Received Pronunciation), as it is called nowadays: the regionally neutral middle-class accent of England. A year or two later, my father’s students organized a show in Calcutta (now Kolkata) to raise money for people affected by the drought in Bihar and asked me to be the emcee. What fun it was! I was the only child up on the stage, introducing all the university students’ performances. I was fearless at that age.

Two things happened to my voice as time went on. As a university undergraduate, where I felt like a fish out of water, I lost it for a time. One bad experience of being verbally attacked after having made what I thought was a perfectly innocent remark in class silenced me for years; not at home or among friends, but in the rarefied atmosphere of the classroom. Throughout my twenties I still felt perfectly at ease with public speaking in the outside world, though. And returning for graduate study in my thirties, my girlhood confidence returned and stood me in good stead. I knew who I was and what I wanted to say, and had no hesitation in saying it.

Then came the life of a junior professor, when one is made to learn one’s place. Those years didn’t do any favors to my voice. A decades-long habit of speaking unnecessarily loudly without breathing or hydrating properly made me develop a throat nodule. I had to learn to moderate and modulate my voice in ways that were utterly new to me. It was interesting that the voice class I attended was full of professors, many of them senior faculty, all seeking to recover their authentic voices after years of suppressing, silencing, second-guessing themselves. They–we–had to reach deep inside and learn to trust ourselves again. With these classes and vocal therapy at the UMass Center for Language, Speech, and Hearing, my throat nodule receded, enabling me to lecture and to sing again, but not to speak extemporaneously with the same innocent self-confidence as young Shirley Abramowitz, narrator of the Christmas pageant.

As noted earlier, I have my dear father to thank for my loud voice, my father whose normal speaking voice was a gentle bellow. Saying, “no need to shout” would infuriate him. He’d shout louder: “I’m not shouting; this is my normal voice!” There were only two options when faced with the full-throated power of Dad’s voice: either to lower one’s own, or to raise him one. For better or worse, I must have done the latter. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Now I am the one whom people ask to moderate my foghorn. Add to that my increasing deafness, which makes me unaware of the volume at which I’m speaking, and the need to teach wearing a mask, which requires me to project, enunciate, and bellow. After that successful voice therapy 20 years ago, my throat nodule appears to have returned with a vengeance.

Bill Barnacle bellowing in frustration at Henderson Hedgehog, Horticulturer (Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding)

What prompted this reflection was listening to Boston Public Radio last week on my way home from work. Margery Eagan and Jim Braude’s daily news program is an enjoyable mix of serious news and analysis, with comic banter and a call-in component that invites the public to join the fun. On this particular day the subject was men’s loud voices. Apparently men are greater COVID-19 spreaders than women because their loud voices spray more virus farther and wider. Then followed some light-hearted banter with a sharp edge to it, with Margery accusing Jim and men in general of using their loud voices to bully others into submission and Jim, quite uncharacteristically, acknowledging this tendency in himself with some shame. They were inviting public comment when, driving into the reception-free flood-zone of the North Quabbin region, I lost the signal. But I continued to think on the subject, and wondered about how much I had silenced the people around me with my loud voice. How much was the negative perception of loudness gendered? If I were a man, would my unnecessarily loud voice be considered appropriately assertive? But why did I feel the need to assert my opinions, already strong, so forcefully? (In graduate school, much to my eternal shame I had a verbal run-in with a famous writer whom I revered and who shall remain unnamed. He used great restraint in the end-of-semester comment he put on my grade: “Inclined to hold strong opinions.”) These were questions to which the answers only generated more questions.

I have always loved singing and taken pride in bursting into song on the slightest pretext. But I have damaged my voice by singing too loud. A singing voice ought not to be harsh and raspy like a portable loudspeaker; it can be soft and sweet. It is much harder to sing high notes softly than to belt them out. I had always prided myself on my ability to hit the high notes–even singing the descant when there was one. Now my voice was cracking less than an octave above middle C. I would have to learn to harmonize and sing the alto part rather than the tune which I had always sung. My whole identity was going down the tubes. What was I to do?

Instead of answering that question, I listened to the 76-year-old Grace Paley reading “The Loudest Voice.” With a broad tolerance and affectionate humor she affirmed that young girl’s confidence. And she didn’t have to shout to blow me away.

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