River of Flesh and Other Stories: The Prostituted woman in Indian Short Fiction
Ruchira Gupta
Paperback: 263 pages
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The book presents a collection of twenty-one stories about prostitution or the sexual exploitation and subjugation of women. It has been put together and edited by an established academic and activist in women’s studies, a professor at NYU and a campaigner against the trafficking of women. In a strongly assertive introduction she states that the stories expose prostitution as a barbaric system of sexual exploitation, slavery and trade of women’s bodies, which can never be romanticized as ‘agency’ by use of the euphemism ‘sex-worker’. These stories establish prostitution as both a product and a reinforcer of gender injustice within perverted Patriarchy. She brilliantly characterizes the men involved as ‘customers, pimps, brothel-keepers, lovers, husbands and recruiters… [who]… are predatory, self-willed, entitled, judgemental and occupied with notions of shame and honour.’ Appropriately she dedicates the book to two of her grassroots level fellow fighters, one of whom was murdered and the other who soldiers on in the ‘struggle against prostitution’. Twenty of the twenty-one stories have been translated into English from regional Indian languages. The book has a pan-Indian profile as twelve languages, including English, have been featured. These are English (1), Malayalam (1), Kannada (1), Tamil (1), Konkani (1), Marathi (1), Urdu (6), Punjabi (1), Hindi (3), Bengali (3), Oodia (1), and Assamese (1). As evident from the range of languages, the settings of the stories cover the entire expanse of India including big cities such as Bombay, Calcutta, Bangalore, Lucknow, Srinagar in Kashmir and pre-Partition Lahore as well as unnamed small towns in north India, Bengal, Assam, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh and Goa. Thus prostitution and trafficking of women are seen as an all pervasive phenomena going hand in hand with poverty, greed and predatory elements in society. Ten stories (including ‘River of Flesh’ named in the title) in the collection describe the abject poverty and dehumanizing conditions under which prostitutes are force to work. Daughters of prostitutes and helpless duped poor women are the prime source of recruitment in brothels. Ghastly pictures of abuse, illness and early death are shown as the lot of these women. Kamleshwar’s story describes a woman whose customers do not desist even though she has a huge painful bursting boil in her inner thigh. All the prostitutes are shown to have sad back stories and short shelf lives. The old ones have to scrounge around and put up with rejections and low remuneration while the pre-pubescent ones die from gynaecological complications. There is no time for their own ailing or missing children. An occasional touch of humanity, as in Kamala Das’s story, ‘A Doll for the Child Prostitute’, hardly alleviates the brutal life portrayed. There is a complete absence of choice or avenues of escape for the prostitutes. The stories are all told in the conventional social realistic mode, using mostly an omniscient third person narrator, which by itself precludes any solutions or alternatives. Story after story repeats the same sordid tale of exploitation, misery and suffering. The stories are often laced with social satire and irony to touch the middle-class readers’ conscience, but the effect unfortunately becomes more of voyeurism, disgust and a patronizing pity or sympathy. It is only in two of the stories that the prostitutes hit back. The first is Manto’s ‘The Hundred Candle Power Bulb’. The other is Nayana Addarkar’s story of a prostitute, who has been cheated and abandoned by her lover in Goa. Niranjan’s story ‘The last Customer’ stands out for its use of images and symbolism, and moves into the realm of poetic realism which is compact and more evocative. The fifteen year old mute girl protagonist is pushed into prostitution when her lover abandons her in an alien land. She is constantly preyed on sexually by men until her almost lifeless body lies in a field with an encircling ‘vulture’ described as her ‘last customer. The two well known stories, Krishan Chander’s ‘A Prostitute’s Letter to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Quaid –E-Azam Jinnah’ and Saadat Hasan Manto’s ‘The Hundred-Candle-Power Bulb’ deal mainly with gang rape of women during sectarian violence and its ensuing disastrous consequences on the victims not heeded or counteracted by anyone except sensationalist media persons and writers. Qurratulain Hyder’s ‘Ancestry’ is a rather odd inclusion in this collection as prostitution is a completely tangential concluding twist to a long rambling story of the gradual decline of a female Muslim aristocratic lady. The remaining stories are about sexual exploitation of women in various ways in middle and upper classes of society. The themes of mistress versus wife, prostitute to mistress or ‘kept woman’ and vice versa come up again and again. In these stories societal double standards of sexual morality and gullibility of women harbouring romantic ideals are exposed. Premchand’s ‘The Murder of Honour’ is a bizarre melodramatic story about a deeply in love aristocratic married couple who fall out when the husband brings a mistress into the house. Then there are the stories of prostitutes/mistresses with hearts of gold, which shine through all adversities as in BB Bandyopadyay’s ‘Heeng Kachori’, (the origin of movie Amar Prem), where a babu’s ‘kept’ mistress’ kindness makes an indelible impression on a young boy’s being. The only partially amusing stories in the entire collection are Subodh Ghosh’s ‘The Kept woman’ and Ismat Chugtai’s ‘The Housewife’, where male double standards of Honour and Propriety are unmasked to show that sometimes women prefer the role of mistress to wife. The former may be exploitative and non-respectable, but the latter is false and stifling due to covert sexual exploitation and the burden of gratefulness. All in all the entire book brings together a lot of food for thought. However a few observations need to be made. Some of the translations are not very smooth or convincing, with errors such as confusions of pronoun referents and awkward diction occurring. The notes on the contributors and the individual stories come without dates, which put an a-historical spin on a very important burning social problem. Moreover, the original writers of the stories and the translators could have been put in two separate sections, as the two categories cannot be equated. Finally, most of the stories, unfortunately, are written from a middle class, liberal male point of view. The social problems are well documented and sympathy is extended but it’s all done from a superior, patronizing othering and a rather self-reflexive point of view. As a result the good intentions have no teeth and no possibility of change is observable even imaginatively. The social realistic mode has perhaps run its course as a weapon of change and we should look towards more tangential, experimental modes such as magic realism and fantasy. It is sad that the strong tone of activism sounded in the introduction should be followed by stories reflecting middle-class paralysis. Mita Bose | Earthen Lamp Journal Ruchira Gupta |