{"id":2953,"date":"2016-05-18T19:00:17","date_gmt":"2016-05-18T13:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=2953"},"modified":"2016-05-18T19:00:17","modified_gmt":"2016-05-18T13:30:17","slug":"women-housewife-history-legacy-feminism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=2953","title":{"rendered":"What Legacy Does an Ordinary Housewife Leave Behind?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

T<\/span><\/p><\/div>

here\u2019s a photograph in my phone of my <\/span>mother<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>grandmother<\/span><\/a> in the garden on a winter\u2019s day. My grandmother is laughing, eyes twinkling, I can almost hear her effusiveness. My mother squints her eyes in the sunlight and frowns at the lens. <\/span>\n\nThere is a striking resemblance between them but they were different as night and day. My grandmother\u2019s life is basically a list of achievements and milestones: a scientist with a teaching career spanning decades and a singer connecting generations across radio airwaves. She retired from her university professor role characteristically, setting up <\/span>music<\/span><\/a>, dance, and art schools that she was minutely involved with until the very end. <\/span>\n\nMy mother, on the other hand, has disappeared like a dewdrop in the morning light. You will not find her on a Google search and you will have to imagine away our <\/span>father\u2019s<\/span><\/a> features to see my mother smiling in my face and my brother\u2019s. Perhaps it was rebellion against her overachieving parents: But she refused to drive, finish her postgraduate degree, <\/span>get a job<\/span><\/a>, send her kids to the dance, music, and art schools, like her mother insisted she do. Occasionally, she would ask the <\/span>maid<\/span><\/a> to help her organise her closet after my grandmother and aunts agonised endlessly about the chaos that spilled out of it. <\/span>\n\nMy mother died before my grandmother. I think of my grandmother after my mother\u2019s death, standing tall in her elegant, slim frame, and the grief she wanted to articulate. She knows she will be remembered by more than just f<\/span>amily<\/span><\/a> and friends. She will leave behind a legacy that hopefully will be inspiring. I wonder, though, if she worried that her daughter might be forgotten. Like her own mother-in-law who died in childbirth, living on only in a pair of heirloom earrings. <\/span>\n\n

The obliteration of women from memory and time receives a double whammy if those women belong to \u201clower castes\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\nDeath<\/span><\/a> is a kind of finality, possibly more so for women. But it doesn\u2019t have to be so. \u00a0<\/span>\n\nHistory writing is cruelly aligned with men \u2013 it\u2019s a reflection of life itself that works along a patriarchal line. So while it is all too common for property to be inherited by the male descendants and keep the socio-economic roots of patriarchy thriving, it is also the imagination of time that is dominated by <\/span>men<\/span><\/a>. The way we think of historical time \u2013 linear, active, focused around large events \u2013 tends to paint men as architects and actors. Like I\u2019ll bet you\u2019ve never heard about the <\/span>women who shaped<\/span><\/a> the Indian Constitution. After all, nation-building \u2013 in all senses of the phrase \u2013 is the domain of men, no? <\/span>\n\nEven in recent history, <\/span>women<\/span><\/a> seem to have been completely written out of the whole process. <\/span>\n\nIn literary history, Virginia Woolf contemplates the career (or lack thereof) of William Shakespeare\u2019s fictional sister, Judith, who would have been denied equal access to <\/span>education<\/span><\/a> and public spaces, which in turn would have stifled her creative genius. This ruminative section in <\/span>A Room of One\u2019s Own<\/span><\/i> sheds light on how talent and achievement and even enduring memory that celebrates and commemorates these, are tainted by <\/span>gender inequality<\/span><\/a>. <\/span>\n\nThe obliteration of women from <\/span>memory<\/span><\/a> and time receives a double whammy if those women belong to \u201c<\/span>lower castes<\/span><\/a>\u201d. This is not because lower-caste women are not remembered by the community, but elite nostalgia and public memory governs what you read and choose to remember. Radhika Vemula has relentlessly campaigned against forgetting <\/span>Rohith Vemula<\/span><\/a> and Sujatha Gidla has sought to archive Telugu Dalit memory. In <\/span>Coolie Woman<\/span><\/i>, Gaiutra Bahadur undertakes a journey to trace her family\u2019s history from a village in Bihar to indentured labour in the sugar plantations of Guyana through her great-grandmother. She <\/span>writes<\/span><\/a> about the difficulty of constructing such a history, \u201cHow could I write about women whose very existence the official sources barely acknowledged?\u201d <\/span>\n\nAh, official sources! That old hobby horse, the exclusive domain of men. <\/span>\n\nBahadur turns to alternative sources such as oral traditions and visual clues to uncover the \u201cstolen voice\u201d of a marginalised community. So does Piya Chatterjee in <\/span>A Time for Tea<\/span><\/i> to present a<\/span> feminist<\/span><\/a>, ethnographic critique of the tea industry through conversations with barely literate women labourers. This is important for it is not simply exceptional women whose stories need to be shared, but also the ordinary, everyday women.<\/span>\n\nPerhaps exceptional women like my grandmother will be remembered respectfully. Others like my mother, who did not have an extraordinary list of achievements standing in for a life lived, should be too. In the <\/span>world <\/span><\/a>that we live in, certain exceptional women\u2019s achievements are celebrated \u2013 as outliers. The rest of womankind is seemingly unworthy enough of historical mention. I hope that the way we view history will change one day, so that women\u2019s stories and lives, like that of my mother\u2019s, will be passed on and cherished. <\/span>\n\nA version of this article appeared on <\/span><\/i>Feminism in India<\/span><\/i><\/a> and has been re-published here with their permission.<\/span><\/i>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The way we have come to view history, tends to paint men as architects and actors. But where are the women in our history books?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":2954,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[170],"tags":[2282,710,5856,5857,5858,2402,1772,735],"class_list":["post-2953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gender","tag-caste","tag-feminism","tag-grandmother","tag-history-books","tag-housewife","tag-men","tag-mother","tag-women"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Legacy Does an Ordinary Housewife Leave Behind?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The way we have come to view history, tends to paint men as architects and actors. 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