Spivak's family

Spivak's family rose through education and, after Independence, emigration. Sometimes, the intellectual creed they embraced was quackery- e.g. the homeopathy of her great-grandfather, grandfather, and maternal uncle. But, even so, it was a type of quackery in vogue at the time and not, all in all, too mischievous. 

This is the kindest thing that can be said about Spivak's own career.  

Some years ago, Carl Friedman was looking for Frances Bartkowski and me at a bar called Polly's in Middletown, Connecticut. The bartender had called out, Carl reported, "Did anyone see two girls alone?"

I suppose, this was back in the Sixties when these two ladies would have been young enough to be called girls 

Two girls alone.

i.e. not two girls who were part of a bigger group. 

I have been thinking about this - when and indeed how are women not single,

two married women may be sitting together waiting for their husbands.  

as I take hesitant steps toward older women in my family.

The older women in Spivak's family were also the older women in her brother's or sister's family. There was little need to hesitate in stepping towards them. 

 Her own widowed Mum had emigrated to the US and taken US citizenship. She lived with her son's family. 

These women were not single in the usual sense,

because they were not single. They were married.  

except for one.

because she wasn't married. 

I respect that category, respect women by themselves, making sense of their lives within a general culture of reproductive heteronormitivity.

as opposed to brothels or nunneries? 

I can look at one or two who have made themselves visible.

All were visible. Bengali women didn't have 'purdah'.  

But stepping toward my great grandmother, the shadowy grandmother on my father's side, my mother's aunts - I am moved to ask, when and indeed how are women not single?

The answer was that people were single if they were not married- i.e. part of a couple. The thing really isn't rocket science.  

Do we need a special analytic category for female collectivities?

No.  

For lesbian couples?

If you are part of a couple, you aren't single. Why did Spivak not understand this?  

For single lesbians?

They are single so long as they are not part of a couple.  

Is the antonym of single - double? Multiple? Or always - married?

You are either single or part of a couple. I suppose 'thrupples' too might exist. Muslim men, of course, can have four wives. However, if they divorce all of them, they become single again.  

These are women who bred me.

Only if they actually gave birth to you or played a big role in your upbringing.  

I am nobody's mother.

This is also true of many married women 

I ponder a bit on why we take this sense for granted.

We don't. Spivak is very very special in this respect.  

The Mahabharata provides an answer: nathavati anathavat.

which only applies if a married woman has no protector because her husband is dead or a slave and no relative is willing to ensure her safety. 

Incidentally, Draupati in the Mahabharata isn't really 'nathavati anathavat' because, even if her husbands are slaves, she isn't. Moreover, her father is a King and her brother is a mighty warrior. Thus, Draupati gains the freedom of her husbands because otherwise there will be a war which her Daddy might well win. 

My mother's aunt made me understand that phrase in a way that no one else has.

It isn't difficult to understand. The plain fact is Draupati wins. She washed her hair in the blood of Duhshasana. 

Will I be obliged to explain that phrase somewhere in the book? Not now, I think.

She doesn't understand it. That's why she can't explain it.  

She was single,

She wasn't. She was married to five husbands.  

but also singular.

Nope. She was a twin. The mighty warrior Dhrishtadyumna is her brother. 

Singularity is - repetition of difference,

No. What is singular can't be repeated. For Deleuze, it is pretty much the same thing as it is for physics or systems theory. It marks a phase transition. What Deluze says is that genuine repetiton is the universality of the singular. But that 'singular' must be a unique event of great power & very wide significance- e.g. the French or Russian Revolution. It can't be stuff about Mummy or Granny or Aunty. 

repetition and difference, repetition with difference.

like pissing and shitting?  

That is my relationship with these women.

No. Your relationship is biological and emotional. It has nothing to do with some sort of revolutionary philosophy.  

I am their repetition, with a difference.

No. They have a unique physical body and immortal soul 

We are single, singular and together.

No. They existed at different times and places and seldom together.  

My biological mother,

was the woman who raised her

Sivani Chakravorty, was singular and in important senses, single.

No. She was a married lady. Widows are not considered 'single' by the US or Indian Census.  

She lived as a widow for 48 years, and she did singular things on her own.

But was treated as a married lady. People called her Mr.s Charkavorty, not Miss Shivani.  

With her recent death, I have lost an archive.

Gayatri had previously lost her marbles.  

For the first time, I have responded positively to writing my memoirs.

Her memories are confabulations.  

In this hesitant decision, I have been helped by my niece, Medha Chandra, my sister Maitreyi Chandra; and most recently, by one of the most eminent, conventionally single women I know - Romila Thapar, historian of ancient India.

Romila was unconventionally single. Spivak is conventionally divorced.

... The first in line is Barahini Debi, my mother's grandmother, Boronani - literally, the eldest grandmother. Yet Nani is a maternal grandmother

it may be that her first grandhild called her that and the other kids in that cohort took it up.  

and this one was my mother's father's mother. 

She has some significance as one of the first child widows to marry within her caste. Her father was a leading homeopath as was her husband and her son.  At that time homeophathy was wildly popular. Some alllopathic Doctors converted to it- including Gayatri's great-grandfather and father. Her own father was an allopathic Doctor who had studied radiology in England.

The Indian National Congress, founded in the mid-Eighties, attracted homeopaths who were angery with the Medical Establishment. In 1867, Mahendralal Sircar- the second phyician to qualify from Calcutta Medical College- declared his conversion to homeopahty. He was shunned by the faculty. Then in 1878, the University Senate decided to admit him. The entire faculty fought tooth and nail against this decision and thus Sircar was forced to resign. 

In terms of religion, Gayatri's materna ancestors were close to Ramakrishna and Vivekananda- both of whom would become internationally famous. Thus, we may say that her maternal family was part of new movements (or fads) in the wider world. Since Vivekananda had been a big success in America, the Bengali buddhijivi came to have a good opionion of that continent. 

Perhaps the detail means nothing. Perhaps there's a story there.

Not really. My grandmoter was named 'Oma' by her eldest grandchild- who had been born in German- and the rest of us followed suit even though we don't know German. 

It makes my heart twist for my mother, for she knew the answer.

The answer is obvious.  

Boronani died between 1929 and 1931, I think. But I want to catch the resonances in the cavern of her mind, between five and eleven - the probable ages when she was married and widowed.

Spivak can't catch shit. She is too stupid.  

I can remember my own life, though selectively, but well, during that period in my own life. At five, I got my first double promotion into kindergarten

Five is the age you leave kindergarten and enter Primary School.  

and met Bharati Mukherjee.

I think women were keener then men to emigrate to the US back then.

At 11, I was in junior year of high school, and received my music degree, since I was precocious.

Spivak does not have a degree in Music.  

I was developing a "nudge nudge" interest in boys.

There is no such think. 'Nudge, nudge' means some salacious type of innuendo. Spivak may have been developing a sexual interest in boys. She wasn't nudging her classmates and saying 'Cor! look at the arse on that bit of crumpet!'  

Since she went into my making, how was it to live through such a different experience?

This is a subject pretty well covered in Indian cinema and literature.  

"Marriage" is a word. I must think marriage differently in order to enter my great grandmother's normality.

I don't have to. Why? I come from India- just like Spivak- and the thing was routine there.  

A tremendous and enviable party for a five-year-old, or perhaps seven; I do not remember exactly what age she was at marriage. And Mother is not there to tell me.

She is also not there to wipe your bottom.  

Her parents loved her. They had researched the family painstakingly, attempting to assure their daughter's future social security. She would have been sent to her husband's parents' extended family house after puberty, but was widowed before that could happen.

She was a child-widow. Then she married a reform-minded homeopath. One of her daughters married Dwijendralal Ray, the father of Dilip Kumar Roy (who was Gayatri's mother's first cousin) both of whom were major contributors of Bengali Music and Literature. 

Did the boy come for a visit sometimes?

He was a grown man. She may have seen him.  

Was there a version of that nudge-nudge feeling toward this designated lover in the restricted public sphere of the extended family? To be widowed in childhood was a terrible fate.

Whereas dying in child-birth was a barrel of laughs.  

I wrote, some years ago, about the devastation of the caste Hindu widow, as an alternative to the visible violence of sati.

Was what she wrote any good? No. It was shit. Incicentally, there was no 'visible violence' in Sati. The victim was doped up to the gills.  

I just looked it up. This is what I wrote, in that quaint wordy prose

shitty prose 

that I fancied 20 years ago, and for which I have been punished all around, from all political spectrums, from the most traditional racist, sexist; and the most energetic anti-racist, feminist. And here it is. I quote: "The woman as widow, by the general law of sacred doctrine, must regress to an anteriority transformed into stasis."

The woman, as widow, must mourn her husband- or pretend to- for some set period of time. She must not start shitting herself and screaming her tits off.  

In other words, the widow's lot was stagnation and a terrible feeling of self-hate.

Nonsense! She completed the period of mourning & remarried if that's what she wanted to do. High Caste Hindu widows could run off with some bloke who took their fancy but prostitituion too was open to them. Sadly, a lot of them preferred to live a nun-like existence.  

In that very essay that many, many people seem to resent, I also congratulated the collaboration of Indian and British reformers for criminalizing sati

There were about 500 cases a year before the thing was criminalized circa 1830. After that there were virtually none.  

and commented on how it did not necessarily rearrange the women's desires,

changes in the law don't rearrange the desires of cats, dogs, plants, women, etc.  

as did the class marked access to colonial subjectship.

All people in the colony were equal subjects of the Crown.  

Rearranging desires. That is how I understand my task, as a teacher. I am no one's mother, but many people's teacher.

They are as stupid & shitty as you.  .

Gayatri, I say to myself - you are writing a memoir; go back to your great grandmother; forget the historical analysis. Barahini's father, Biharilal Bhaduri, was a friend of Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, one of the chief proponents of widow remarriage among caste Hindus, in 19th century Bengal. Since I mentioned the uneven relationship between reform and class mobility, let me also mention that Vidyasagar's challenge to Thomas Babington Macaulay's infamous Minute on Indian Education (1842),

1835. Macaulay was echoing the views of Roy & Tagore. Vidyasagar agreed with them & introduced English & Bengali instruction in the Sanskrit College.  

as distinguished from his involvement in caste Hindu women's liberation,

Nobody was trying to liberate them. Hindus realised that they would be at a demographic disadvantage if child-widows weren't married off.  

is now split a few ways in the history of class formation.

In Bengal, that history had to do with land-tenure.  

Will people stop reading this if I quote from a long footnote on Martha Nussbaum?

They will think you are silly. Nussbaum isn't Indian. You are. 

Here, Toni Morrison gave me courage. My agent had said - don't make it too theoretical; this is a memoir.

And sweet and wonderful Toni said to me - tell her it's Gayatri Spivak's memoir.

(laughter)

it is fiction of a boring type. 

Not just a memoir! So here is a bit from my footnote. I quote myself now. "The point I am trying to make is that, whereas Vidyasagar's literacy activism, aware of the detail of rural education, applies to the subaltern classes even today - his feminist activism applied to the metropolitan middle class to which I belong."

Vidyasagar was a Civil Servant who agreed with the Missionaries & the 'Utilitarians' that Hindus customs needed to be reformed by law. He was the main native supporter of the Widow remarriage Act. Following the 1854 Wood's Dispatch, he urged the Government to first improve education for the upper classes before seeking to help the rural poor. 

Did Vidyasagar play a big role in shaping the bhadralok? No. They didn't give a shit about Sanskrit. Still he helped Michael Madhusudhan and was considered a learned man.  I suppose his own interest in homeopathy brought him closer to Gayatri's maternal ancestors. 

Turning to Gayatri's mother's father- Pratapchandra Mazumdar (1851-1922), more material is available to reconstruct the likely details of his domestic life

He was not a rich young man. He had put himself through medical college by cooking for a family - a cook in a domestic family.

As a Brahmin, he would have had to cook for himself or else employ a Brahmin cook.  

My brother located his name in the records of the Royal College of Surgeons as having become licentiate of the medical faculty - an LMF degree holder, rather less than an M.D. or an FRCS, of course. But still, an achievement in 1865.

The LMF was only offered in India. It is plausible that he got it at the age of 14.  But he soon converted to homeopathy. 

Did the wedding take place before or after this?

Much after wards.  

How did he get to London?

He may have visited at a later time in connection with his interest in homeopathy. 

Was there an unofficial dowry?

There would have been some 'stree-dhan'- i.e. gold or other ornaments given to the bride by her family. 

I should say, since I'm not getting there, my father did the unbelievable thing of refusing a dowry - a very poor man refusing a dowry in 1928.

I too refused a dowry of ten billion dollars from Beyonce. I let her rape me for free. The odd thing is no relative of mine boasts of the great nobility I displayed in this connection. 

That story . . . all I can say here is that we were brought up to despise the rich.

Her Mummy was Che Guevara. Her Daddy was Lenin.  

Was there an unofficial dowry?

It was perfectly legal to give dowry back then.  

As far as I know, Biharial Bhaduri was not a rich man either.

He was affluent and lived in a substantial house on Cornwallis street. His daughter, in later life, opened a pawn-shop. The family had no objection at all to earning money. 

Boronani was from my mother's father's side.

from a family long settled in Calcutta  

Thakuma was from my father's side.

She was a tall big-boned rustic woman 

Now I come to my mother's mother's side.

My grandmother, Raseswari Debi, had two sisters - Saileswari and Bhubaneshwari. The youngest one killed herself at 17. It is her story I tell in "Can the Subaltern Speak?" In order to show, that whereas the British Indian reform of sati is much celebrated, when a young, single girl attempted to write resistance in her very body, she could not be read.

Nonsense! Brahmins know that if an umarried daughter hangs herself while on the rag, she is reproaching her father for having committed the sin of 'pindalopa' (were menstrual blood pollutes the oblation to the ancestors) by neglecting to marry her off. 

Spivak thinks the girl was actually a Ninja Assassin. 

If only I could occupy with desire, that singular inscribed body. I have tried to understand how she felt as she waited for her periods to begin, so she could disprove what she knew would be the conclusion drawn from her hanged body - illicit pregnancy.

They would examine her hymen. If she wasn't a virgin they'd think she had been raped by a relative or had been seduced and abandoned by a neighbour. But, for Brahmins, the solution was obvious. The father had committed 'pindalopa' by refusing to marry off the silly moo.  

My modest reputation rests on two items - the introduction to Derrida and the commentary on Bhubaneswari Bhaduri's suicide. I am following that track, still. Why did I not mention my relationship to her, when I wrote of her?

Because it is one thing to say 'I know a bloke who got raped by Beyonce' and quite another to say 'Beyonce raped me after I refused her offer of ten million dollars in return for my hand in marriage'.  

I wanted to see what would happen if she didn't have that certificate of authenticity which would reflect more on the people's approval of me, than on her.

You may believe something absurd about a stranger- e.g. that some bloke was raped by Beyonce- but everybody knows you are lying if you say you yourself are that bloke.  

And I learned a lesson from people's complete neglect of her, except for Abena Busia. Most people did not understand that I spoke on her behalf.

There were no revolutionaries in Calcutta in 1926.  

The extreme reaction came when my dear friend, Raji, said in public - some of you were present there - kindly commemorating the 20th anniversary of the speech that became "Can the Subaltern Speak?", that, had she lived, she would have grown into a fascist, nationalist grandmother - like some character in an Amitabh Ghosh novel.

She could have been a supporter of Subhas Chandra Bose who allied himself with Hitler. However, after Hitler's defeat it was Stalin & then Mao who most attracted the devotion of Bengalis.   

Now, Raji would never have expressed herself so, if she had known the family connection. I was cut to the quick, of course. But the defense I offered was reasonable. Ghosh was representing in fiction a woman who had wanted to stand by the "self-styled terrorist freedom fighters." Bhubaneswari had joined such a group.

There was no such group in Calcutta in 1926. The City was consumed by Hindu-Muslim riots.  

I would like to think that my pacifism resonates with her inability to kill.

She killed herself. I don't suppose her Daddy was thrilled by this outcome.  

Yet, she supported armed struggle.

By killing herself. Go thou and do likewise.  

When recently, in a public conversation with Judith Butler, I said in answer to a question from the audience as to how I could be a pacifist in the face of Palestine,

Just say 'history shows that violence has worsened the situtation there. A peaceful way forward would benefit everybody'. 

that the problem with the situation in Palestine was that politics would not allow me to be ethical,

It is unethical to lie. Spivak's politics causes her to be unethical 

no one in the audience knew that I was thinking, in my heart, that it was a lesson I had learned from Bhubaneswari, who was only 17 when she died. She was four years older than my mum.

In which case, Gayatri's Mum would have been 13 when she killed herself. But that would make her 15, not 14, at the time of her own wedding. Perhaps, the father had learned his lesson and thus married off his daughters rather than forcing them to go to school.  

And it was my mother who told me the story, and what kind of flip is given to a mother's testimony, in terms of veridicality? One doesn't know.

If she told you the story she was either very stupid or else a habitual liar or both. 

In my reading this morning, I cannot tell how it was she who opened up for me that line from the Mahabharata - a description of Queen Draupadi, dressed in her single cloth, stained with menstrual blood,

which shows she isn't preggers. Arguably, a foetus in the womb is itself a slave if its father becomes a slave. Such is not the case. Since a slave can't dispose of a free woman and her husband had becoome slaves before he staked her freedom, she could not be a slave in law. This meant her father would have a casus belli and would invade to claim the throne on her behalf. This meant the safer course was to call the whole thing off. 

I think it was Iravati Karve who started up this availability cascade. 

dragged into the royal court. But I can say that it is perhaps from this single woman, a girl of 17 who engendered my intellectual trajectory, that I get my sense of singularity.

Sadly, Gayatri hasn't topped herself. The truth is she came from an upwardly mobile 'bildungsburgertum' family which subscribed to orthodox Hinduism. Her father was from the East and thus her paternal cousins had to run away from Muslims.  

I repeat in difference, these singular women who are mothers in many different ways, who teach me that reproductive heteronormativity is simply one case among many - like a stopped clock giving the correct time twice a day, rather than a norm that we persistently legitimize by reversal.

All these women got married- Spivak was married twice- or wanted to get married and hanged themselves because they weren't married. Spivak may not have been able to have children or may simply not have wanted them. This was perfectly normal for women of her age and class.  

The entire epic of the Mahabharata is about this insult to Queen Draupadi, who had five husbands.

No. It is merely an incident. I suppose it was brought in because of the 'Gambler's lament' in the Rg Veda.  

And in the beginning of the Mahabharata, because it was an oral formulaic epic and each bard had to know the whole story - the entire story is given in the form of a young boy telling it to the blind king.

Nonsense! Spivak is thinking of the Bhagvad Gita- a short chapter in the Epic- which is recited by the bard, Sanjaya, to Dhritarashtra.  

And in that story, again and again, we hear that all of this disaster happened because a woman was brought into public while she was menstruating; while she was in her feminine nature - stridharma.

Sheer poppycock! The disaster's happen because Yuddhistra, like Nala, is addicted to gambling. If a woman is menstruating, she should not be brought into the assembly hall. Such a thing is inauspicious. Later it is revealed that God is the only efficient cause. By his 'Maya', people become deluded and addicted to gambling, or lustful and unmindful of the rules of religion. 

Stridharma means 'duties of a woman'. Bleeding from the cooch is not a duty. 

She was a queen. The queens, when they menstruated, were taken to a lower chamber and they wore only one piece of cloth until the menstruation was over; then they took their bath - healing bath, I suppose - because they were unclean.

This was also the case in joint-families.  

That's the whole story behind Bhubanehswari also, that I'm asking you to remember. She used this menstrual blood as a way to inscribe her message and was not heard.

That message had to do with the father's duty to marry off his daughters before they started menstruating.  

But anyway, when the five husbands in the epic are playing dice in the main court - they keep losing and finally they wager her.

And so, when they wagered her and they lost, she was dragged up from that chamber downstairs. So the queen comes into the open court wearing nothing but that one white cloth, smeared with menstrual blood. This is the thing that led to the fight.

No. There was no fight because a slave can't gamble away a free woman.  

Now, as to how a feminist reads this, that's something else. This is not a presentation of a feminist reading of the Mahabharata, but I'm just saying that because my grandmother's sister dragged herself into the open court of death menstruating, only earned me opprobrium from people who read quickly, and said - Spivak refuses voice to subaltern resistance.

Spivak wasn't a Naxalite. She was paid to pretend to understand worthless shite. That's what she did in an exemplary manner.  

And I see women every day saying - the subaltern is speaking because I am, and so on. And I say to myself - my mother was wrong. She had said - you are using her name? I had said - ma, no one will pay any attention to her. And I was right.

Nobody bothered to establish that Gayatri was lying her head off.  

So the queen is dragged up. She asks the oldest member of the court, who also has a marriage story - am I a piece of property that can be wagered? And the oldest member of the court, Bhishma, is not able to answer her.

The answer was yes- as is shown from 'the gambler's lament' in the Rg Veda. The problem is tha the men had already gambled themselves away. Moreover, by accepting Draupati as a stake, the Kauravas were estopped from claiming she was already their property.  

This is not a bit from the Mahabharata that's given much popularity. If you have seen Peter Brooks' version, you certainly have not noticed this. But there are female versions of the epics, StriMahabharata, which are very different and in the best-known of them, the entire epic ends, not with the brothers climbing the hill to heaven, but Draupadi laughing in the devastated field of war, somewhere in the empty camps. Draupadi's laughter ends the women's epic.

This is nonsense. What does happen is that the Goddess Kali joins three of the Kauravas in the night-slaughter of the innocents.  

Now, the bard describes Draupadi as nathavati anathavat. Generally, this is translated as - someone with husbands, as if an orphan. Natha actually means lord. I translate it differently.

Perhaps, Gayatri saw Saoli Mitra's play, Nathavati anathavat, back in the Eighties and now thinks her Mummy or her Aunty wrote it.