Suniti Namjoshi - The Fabulous Feminist

F eminist Fables was a breakthrough for me. On my sabbatical in England in 197879, I discovered feminismor rather I discovered that other feminists existed. I was only a beginner feminist. I thought a great many of the restrictions on women were absurd and, as a woman, I didnt much like being a second class citizen. The feminists had already done a great deal of analysing, and I read avidly. But I needed to work out things for myself. And now I had confidence. I dont mean the sort of confidence that comes from being patted on the head and told that I matter too. I mean the confidence that comes from knowing that I would be heard and understood.

For a writerfor anyone reallythats supremely important. A poem or a fable exists between the writing of it and the reading of it. If I started out with the feeling that, however careful I was about what I said, it was not going to be understood in the way I intended, then it was almost impossible to begin. But now content and form came gloriously together. If something didnt make sense, I wrote a fable about it. If I thought something was absurd and made a joke, I knew that there were people around who would laugh at it.

Sheba Feminist Publishers, who first published the book in 1981thirty years agogave it the title Feminist Fables. It seemed like a good title, and Ive kept it over the years. (I had called the original manuscript The Monkey and the Crocodiles.) The existing title has the advantage of being firmly feminist, and thats important, I think, especially now that the word feminist has become almost a bad word in the west. It has the disadvantage of making the careless reader think that the fables are concerned only with what happens to women. The fable form should make it clear that they question what happens to anyone whenever theres an imbalance of power. Theres nothing particularly womanly or manly about the mouse in the The Mouse and the Lion, its just a clever little creature who has understood the subtle ways in which might is right establishes itself.

Its not possible to grow up in India without seeing the different kinds of disparities in power all around unless, of course, we choose to blind ourselves deliberately as in The Secret Wisdom. But to vie with one another about which kind of oppression is the most oppressive is, in my opinion, a bad mistake. I saw that happen at the First International Feminist Book Fair held in London in 1984. As long as we think that some forms of oppression are all right or dont matter as much, we dont get to the root of the problem.

Theres one more thing I want to add here. This incident pre-dates Feminist Fables. I think it happened at the college where I taught at the University of Toronto. A colleague said to me sympathetically that the oppression of women in India must be really terrible. I didnt like that and replied fiercely that here (meaning here in Toronto) a persons status depends on one or two factors, but that in India many factors such as caste, class and wealth have to be taken into consideration. There may have been some truth in my reply. What was wrong was my reaction. I didnt like to think of myself as oppressed. What I should have understood was that if half a dozen factors militate against a person, that makes the oppression that much worse. What I should also have understood is that being oppressed isnt shameful, its doing the oppressing that is so very wrong. But that is hard. Language (the words noble and ignoble for example), tradition (the way in which we exalt great military conquerors) and the social hierarchy make it difficult to see that.

If Feminist Fables is about any one thing, then that is what it is about. It uses the very power of language and the literary tradition to expose what is absurd and unacceptable.