Author Guest of Honour:

Suniti Namjoshi

Internationally acclaimed author Suniti Namjoshi is an important figure in contemporary literature in English. A writer of fables, poetry, satirical fiction, children’s fictions, she has published over 30 titles in India, Australia, Canada and Britain. Born in Mumbai in 1941, she first wrote and published in India, then moved to Canada, and then to a small seaside village in the south-west of England with writer, Gillian Hanscombe. She was recently made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her books include Feminist Fables, Goja, Suki and Aesop the Fox from Spinifex.

Reading Suniti Namjoshi

There doesn’t seem to be much criticism on Namjoshi but those critics who have been attracted to her work look for the message of Namjoshi’s work and whether they agree with it. Namjoshi’s fables, written mostly in the late 1970s and the early 1980s tapped into a popular trend among feminist writers to rework old tales in ways which reversed the patriarchal messages (see also Sara Maitland, Michelene Wandor and others) so that for many readers it is the new message
which attracted the initial interest.

Like many migrant writers Namjoshi’s fiction draws on the visual images and the myth traditions of a number of cultures, but particularly the myth traditions of classical Greece. This has left Namjoshi vulnerable to accusations that she prefers the West to the East. This accusation has been extended to some of Namjoshi’s attitudes—she is a sceptic, a questioner, in her poem ‘Rationale’ Namjoshi writes:

Perhaps creation is purely accidental?
Are the stars arranged in sets
Do they come in a jewel box?
If God were a merchant I could deal with Him
And come away feeling pleasantly cheated.
My God is rock-faced. He does not move.
Perhaps if you pushed, He’d topple over.

Namjoshi’s critic Dwivedi (1984), responded;
“She is out to find fault not only with the creation but also with the Creator. I, for one, know several men of eminence who at an advanced age repented for such a malevolent attitude and corrected themselves at long last…Let us hope Namjoshi will also regret her ill-conceived and ill-digested notions of the universe, God and Man at a later stage when she retires from the active service and concentrates minutely on the vital issues of existence. She has, in fact-written another poem—“It’s a Quality of the Gods”—which is simply horrible to think of….’It’s a quality of the gods/To see a creature with its back broken/And be unmoved….’ (Dwivedi, 234).

While Dwivedi lauds those female poets (and his concern is specifically with the femaleness of poets) who describe and accept oppression, he regards as western Namjoshi because she questions why such oppression/repression should exist.
However, while Dwivedi does have a point that Namjoshi often looks to the West for Namjoshi’s stories, if we go below the surface to the structure, the narratology of her tales, Namjoshi’s fables demonstrate a cross cultural dynamic. The how of what she does may be more interesting in this context than the why.

What I want to argue is that there are at least three narratologies underpinning Namjoshi’s prose work: a feminist narratology, a narratology of prejudice, and a traditional Hindu narratology. If we were sure what it looked like, we might be able to identify a narratology of the fantastic (Clute’s grammar of the fantastic (thinning, wrongness, recognition, and healing) do not seem to work Namjoshi’se).

The feminist narratology we can see in Namjoshi’s work deploys the saturnalia and is common to the traditions of many oppressed groups. For a moment within the confines of the story the world is turned upside down. This saturnalia informs the work of Gerd Brantenburg, Sara Maitland, Alison Fell, Sheila Ortiz Taylor and other feminist writers of the mid-1980s, and is evident in sections of Namjoshi’s novels, Conversations with a Cow and The Mothers of Maya Diip. In both of these the heroines find themselves dealing with role reversals in which they take on the patriarchal role. An indication that Namjoshi is uncomfortable with this as a critical approach is that none of her heroines like the oppressor position. However Namjoshi’s response is less the solution than the question. It isn’t so much that she wants to turn the world upside down, as to question the premise that there is a proper way up. A nice short example is Namjoshi’s Cinderella story.

And Then What Happened?
The prince married Cinderella (it pays to have such very small feet.) But soon they started squabbling. ‘You married me for my money,’ was the Prince’s charge. ‘You married me for my looks,’ was C’s reply. ‘But your looks will fade, whereas my money will last. Not a fair bargain.’ ‘No,’ said Cinderella and simply walked out.

AND THEN WHAT HAPPENED?
Feminist Fables (London: Sheba Feminist PublisNamjoshi’ss, 1981. p.121)

The story asks the readers to think about the consequences. The idea of audience as passive, storyteller as active is shaken. What this does is to challenge our idea that we should regard the storying of our lives as powerful. This is repeated in “Complaint”.

Complaint
Two knights in a forest. It’s early in May. Bright sunlight filters through the leaves. A damsel in distress is weeping quietly. One of the knights has abducted the damsel. The other is her lover. The knights are fighting. Her lover wins. But the problem is that the damsel in distress has already been raped. The knight, her lover, is greatly distressed. How can he marry her? He grieves bitterly.

Because of India (London: Onlywomen Press, 1989. p. 80).

In “And Then What Happened” Cinderella does not win, she simply decides the game isn’t worth playing. The damsel in “Complaint” hasn’t yet figured this out. Namjoshi tells us that walking away from the game is actually a very powerful thing to do.

– Extract from Narrative Strategies and Political Resistance in Suniti Namjoshi’s Blue Donkey Fables by Farah Mendlesohn