Review
Haram in the Harem: Domestic Narratives in India and Algeria by Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar
Peter Lang, 2009
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom
Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar's 109-page scholarly study, "Haram in the Harem: Domestic Narratives in India and Algeria," adds a fascinating eighth volume to the Postcolonial Studies series edited by Maria C. Zamora.
Rajakumar, a fiction writer herself, discusses the work of three female Muslim authors who were writing in the middle of the last century, one from Algeria, Assia Djebar, and two from the Indian subcontinent, Ismat Chughtai and Khadija Mastur. She chooses two short stories by each author and compares the authors' aesthetic and socio-political strategies in the context of how the domestic sphere (to which the similarly-rooted words "haram," meaning forbidden or sacred, and "harem," women's quarters, both refer) is affected by a patriarchal culture's appropriation of women's bodies as "sites for national and communal identity construction..."
Mastur's and Djebar's work concerns the Muslim nationalist movements of the Partition-era Indian subcontinent and revolutionary Algeria, respectively, and explores how the failed promise of greater equality after the defeat of colonialism in Pakistan and India, on the one hand, and the widespread confusion and senseless violence that attended the Partition of India on the other, affected both women and men.
Chughtai's work is set in the middle-class North Indian Muslim community of the 1930s and 1940s and explores how the ideal of domestic virtue embodied in the Muslim home, to which women were relegated and controlled while men enjoyed both power and mobility, easily deconstructs itself when power-wielding men and higher-ranking women in the family behave hypocritically, and how lower-ranking women in such families improvise or fail to improvise to meet their own physical and emotional needs.
Ismat Chughtai's story "The Rock" chronicles the transformation of two young, spirited brides into frumpy, docile housewives, each left in turn for younger, svelter and more spirited women. The irony is that the husband and the female members of his family are responsible for the transformations, the first narrated in detail and the second merely implied, as they encouraged the first young bride to eat fattening foods and the husband insisted he "found her pleasing just the way she was, untidy and disheveled." We soon discover in Rajakumar's discussion of the story that his motive is not unconditional love but control, and once he achieves his goal, his subdued wife is discarded for another young woman who resembles the bride the current wife had once been. Particularly painful to read is how the household's female family members gleefully take part in this project.
In Chughtai's story, "The Quilt," a wife whose husband takes his pleasure in the company of his young male students rather than herself finds her own comfort with a housemaid, and the scene of the two women concealed together under the quilt, which is compared to the movement of an elephant that "somersaulted beneath the quilt and dug in," is witnessed by the narrator, who, at the time of the event she later recalls, was a young girl staying with the family for the purposes of feminine behavioral instruction. Although what is happening beneath the quilt is not explicitly described, the story was very controversial at the time of its publication and resulted in an obscenity trial for Chughtai, who was acquitted.
Both Chughtai and Mastur were members of India's Progressive Writer's Movement, but Mastur, writing during the era of Partition, was concerned, in the short stories discussed here, with the effects of violence between Hindus and Muslims on women, who were its greatest victims. Rajakumar quotes a source saying that "Some estimate the number of abducted and raped women around 75,000."
Unlike the other two authors, Mastur chooses the lens of a male protagonist in each of her stories to shed light on how men were also affected by the violence and the conditions of female social and economic dependence that facilitated it. In "They Are Taking Me Away, Father, They are Taking Me Away," a young male aid worker watches helplessly as a young woman is abducted by a gang of men who overpower him and prevent him from helping her. Although he has seen other women abducted before, the sight of this particular woman reaching out her hand to him like a child affects him profoundly. The childlike gesture underscores the conditions of dependence that exacerbate the problem of violence directed toward women during this chaotic time.
The second story, "The Miscreant," introduces a well-meaning young man who has been a friend and protector of his Hindu neighbors in a region that would later fall within the borders of Pakistan, and yet commits a brutal act of violence against those very neighbors when his landlord tricks him into believing that Hindu villagers had abducted his beloved younger sister.
Rajakumar points out the way in which Mastur's strategy of employing male protagonists highlights how both men and women suffer from the effects of women's inequality, particularly in times when the social fabric of a society is torn by forces of political instability outside of individual men's control.
Djebar's two stories, "Days of Ramadan" and "There is No Exile," are set within Algerian homes, one in exile during the war and the other set shortly after the revolution. Both stories center around three sisters and the female friends and family members with whom they interact within their enclosed domestic sphere, each having played a different role during the revolution and each now holding different views on the promise of greater equality for women in an independent Algeria.
Djebar contrasts the attitudes revealed in the voices of mothers, sisters and friends who are either nationalistically idealistic or quietly resigned to the continued status quo for women in the nation with the attitudes revealed in the isolated voices of one sister who refuses to accept the lack of progress and another who insists on grieving openly for a husband lost in the war, refusing to marry without love simply to fulfill her proscribed role as wife and mother.
Reading Rajakumar's thoughtful discussion of these stories, it's hard not to see parallels between the societies that these writers critique and cultural attitudes prevalent in the recent history of Western societies, including the United States. As late as the same era in which these stories were set, women in American society were encountering much resistance as they sought individual identities outside the confines of family life and the home and as they resisted assuming the roles of passive carrier or embodiment of cultural mores and nationalistic ideals that were defined in the public sphere from which they were excluded. The authors of the stories discussed in this volume, through the medium of fiction, advocate for the same sort of resistance.
Melusine's subtitle alludes to the "Woman Question" that was heatedly argued in the 19th century in the United States, and parallels can be drawn with arguments in other societies at pivotal moments in time as well. The universal issue is one of women's struggle for self-determination and mobility, which go hand in hand, and female writers have always been on the vanguard of these movements, wherever and whenever they occur.
This isn't light reading, but Rajakumar's academically precise yet generally clear prose illuminates the stories she discusses within their historical contexts and would make a good addition to any library of feminist literary criticism.
Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar is a writer and educator who currently works and lives with her husband in Doha, Qatar. A scholar of literature, she has a Ph.D. from the University of Florida with a focus on gender and postcolonial theory. She has published short stories, academic articles, and travel essays in a variety of journals and literary magazines. Her website is www.mohanalakshmi.com
