Introduction
Suniti Namjoshi (1941–) is one of the foremost queer diasporic Indian writers in English. As Anannya Dasgupta puts it, “Namjoshi’s experience of the diaspora as an Indian lesbian puts her through a threefold marginalization so that she develops what she calls the ‘Asian perspective,’ the ‘alien perspective,’ and, later, the ‘lesbian perspective’ (22)” (Dasgupta 100). Namjoshi was born into a “highly influential Chitpavan Brahmin family of Pune” (Vijayasree 23). As a young adult she qualified for the Indian Administrative Services because it seemed to her that it was her “only chance of being somebody in my own right and gaining some independence from the family” (Namjoshi, Because of India 7). In 1969, she left her job and moved to Canada to pursue a PhD in English literature. She subsequently lived and worked in Canada for several years before moving to the UK, where she currently lives. There are two people she met in the UK whose significance is worth pointing out.
In 1978–79 during her sabbatical in the UK, Namjoshi met Christine Donald who began to “politicize” her. Namjoshi writes of this meeting in one of the autobiographical vignettes in Because of India (78), ruminating, “what isn’t clear to me is why I wasn’t influenced by Feminism earlier” (78). She goes on to say that “I hadn’t properly understood the structures of Western society, or even of my own” (78). This statement suggests that the fact that Namjoshi came to “feminism” late was due to her privileged upbringing, but also due to the fact that feminism in the West, at that time, often meant “white feminism”. The second significant person is Gillian Hanscombe, whom Namjoshi met at the International Feminist Book Fair in London in June 1984. They wrote poems to each other between 1984 and 1986, and these were eventually published in the collection Flesh and Paper (1986). Namjoshi describes this book as “a dialogue” where “two lesbians are trying to understand what kind of sense the world makes to a lesbian consciousness, and in the very process of writing are trying to deal with the fact that language creates worlds” (Because of India 113). Namjoshi and Hanscombe live together in the UK.
Namjoshi’s point about language creating “worlds” is an important one in thinking about the “worlds” she creates. These worlds are, after all, rendered in English. In an interview with Olga Kenyon, published in 1992, Namjoshi is asked about why she did not write in her “mother tongue.” Her answer is illuminating: “It may not be my mother tongue, but I was brought up speaking English, and sent to an English-medium school. I couldn’t write in my mother tongue, even if I’d wanted to, because I’ve only used it for simple conversations” (Kenyon 112). This presents an interesting paradox, an experience that is common for several Indian writers in English: English is the language one is most comfortable in, and yet it is not considered to be one’s mother tongue, despite being the language one thinks and writes in. As Namjoshi puts it in an interview with C. Vijayasree, “The Indian cultural context is extraordinarily dense, but the language one thinks in also carries with it the weight of a strong cultural tradition (and in this case a different tradition)” (Vijayasree 176). This also reflects a divide between the realm of the written and the oral. Serena Guarracino analyses this divide in relation to Namjoshi’s work in the Indian Administrative Service. Guarracino notes that
her inability to read and write in her mother tongue marks the chasm between herself and the people she deals with as Assistant Collector, forcing her to admit the schism between her oral mother-tongue, Marathi, and the languages in which she had been taught to read and write, English and Hindi. As a consequence, in Namjoshi’s early writing the unnamed mother tongue is an impalpable entity, strangled between the two master tongues of English and Hindi . . . . Quite uncommonly for the Indo-English context, here Hindi is the language of authority and exploitation (the language used with servants), while English is the language of socialization and learning: both English and Hindi are experienced as master languages, marking the privileged position not of the British colonizer, but of the Indian government official. (Guarracino 135)
I cite Guarracino at length because of the three important points she makes. First, Hindi and English are acknowledged as “master” tongues. Second, the fact that knowing how to read and write only in the master tongues marks both a position of privilege—caste, class, linguistic—but it also entails a loss, an absence. Third, this absence is an “unnamed” and “impalpable entity,” whose presence lingers in the background. It is worth bearing in mind that the position of privilege shifts as Namjoshi moves into a diasporic space where she is othered—as an Indian and as a lesbian. From this perspective she has created a vast oeuvre of poetry, prose, and other writings. In the rest of this essay, I focus on two main areas of Namjoshi’s oeuvre: her engagement with the western canon through her re-writings of The Tempest, and her engagement with Hindu mythology and the symbol of the cow.
Re-interpreting The Tempest in Snapshots of Caliban and Sycorax
William Shakespeare’s The Tempest was first performed in 1611. Since the 1960s the “colonial implications of the play” have become more and more apparent for viewers and readers (Singh 24). This has led to several postcolonial reimaginings of the play, many of which center the figure of Caliban. Most notable amongst these are Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (A Tempest, 1969) and E.P. Kamau Brathwaite’s poem “Caliban” from his collection Islands (1969), which focus on Caliban as the male colonized subject vis-à-vis Prospero, the European colonizer. In “Snapshots of Caliban,” published in the collection From the Bedside Book of Nightmares (1984), Namjoshi complicates this configuration by “recasting Shakespeare’s character as a Third World lesbian subject. Concomitantly, she reimagines Miranda as a desirous and murderous homoerotic figure and Prospero as the excluded and, finally, defeated patriarch” (Mann 100).
Namjoshi returns to The Tempest in her poem “Sycorax” published in a volume titled, Sycorax: New Fables and Poems (2006). In the “Letter to the Reader” that opens this volume, she describes the poem as follows: “In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Sycorax is already dead when Prospero and Miranda arrive on the island. The Sycorax in my poem is still alive and has returned to the island after Prospero and the others have left. She is still defiant, still fierce but she knows that death is no longer so far away that it need not be thought of” (Namjoshi xi). While “Snapshots of Caliban” focuses on Caliban, Miranda, and Prospero, “Sycorax” centers around Sycorax and Ariel, and only occasionally references Prospero and Caliban (Shakespeare’s characters, not Namjoshi’s). The “Prologue” of the poem “Sycorax” is a powerful feminist critique of The Tempest:
Old women do not die easily, nor
are their deaths timely. They make a habit
of outliving men, so that, as I’m still here,
I’m able to say clearly that when Prospero
said he took over an uninhabited island
save for Caliban and the enslaved
Ariel, he lied.
I LIVED ON THAT ISLAND
It was my property (at least as much
as it was anybody else’s). He
drove me away, made himself king, set up
his props and bided his time.
Now that they’ve gone
I may return, and ask myself, not who
they were, but who I was and what I mourn.
There’s greenery left, a clear stream or two,
and Ariel, perhaps, checking his reflection
in yet another pool. Caliban’s gone,
went with the gods who were only men. It’s
what he deserves. He wanted so much
to be just like them.
What is my task?
Because they’ve gone, must I go too? Take leave
of my senses one by one, or two by two?
The good witch Sycorax has bright blue eyes
and now she’s on her own she may fantasize. (Sycorax 1-2)
The first thing that is striking about this section is the line in all capital letters declaring that Prospero lied when he said that the island was “uninhabited.” In the next line Sycorax claims ownership of the island, following the logic of private property. Yet the text in the parenthesis undermines this and shows Sycorax’s understanding of the limitations of the (masculinist, colonialist) discourse of private property. In the subsequent lines, the speaker critiques both Ariel and Caliban. Ariel is depicted as a narcissist (“checking his reflection” in a “pool”), and Caliban as a “mimic man,” to borrow an expression coined by the scholar Homi Bhabha, or indeed as a failed nationalist, if one were to use Frantz Fanon’s analysis.
The contrast between this Caliban who “went with the gods who were only men” and Namjoshi’s Caliban in ‘Snapshots of Caliban’ is worth highlighting. Each section of “Snapshots of Caliban” is told from the perspective of Caliban, Miranda, or Prospero. Namjoshi’s Caliban in Section V of “Snapshots of Caliban” says “Some of the ‘gods’ want to take me with them. But I no longer believe they are gods. I don’t trust them” (Because of India 90). This is critique enough, but Namjoshi’s poem goes a step further with the last couplet in italics, which is not from Sycorax’s perspective. The question that we are left with as readers is which of Sycorax’s critiques and musings are fantastical? Whose voice is the italicised text? No single meaning is evident. As Vijayasree puts it, “when Namjoshi narrates her tale she does not serve the meaning on a platter to her readers; in fact she does not even believe there is a single authoritarian meaning that a writer can dictate. Instead, she leaves it to her readers to draw their own inferences and arrive at their own decoding of the texts. Namjoshi texts reveal themselves in slow degrees, gradually and gratifyingly. A reader does not work on them; they work on the reader” (Vijayasree 14 -15).
A Lesbian Feminist Vision of the Cow
The cow, as Ruth Vanita points out, “is one of the best-known symbols of India in the West” (Vanita 290). In contemporary India it is a symbol of Hindu India. Remarking on how growing up in a Hindu household impacted her, Namjoshi notes in Because of India, “[o]ne of the unexpected effects of being in Gill’s [Gillian Hanscombe’s] company was that I became aware of just how much I had been influenced by the Hinduism around me while I was growing up, and of the rather subtle ways in which a Hindu background rather than a Christian one shapes one’s thinking” (Because of India 112). This reflection highlights both the impact of Hinduism on Namjoshi, and also that often one understands oneself better in conversation with an “other”—or someone from a different background. In another interview, Namjoshi mentions that in “Christianity you make a difference between animals and human beings – and gods. In Hinduism you don’t have to animate animals, they already have an anima. That changes one’s attitude subtly. I find I’m sometimes talking about cats as if they were people” (Kenyon 110).
The Conversations of Cow (1985) brings together Namjoshi’s attitude towards animals through her use of the most sacred of animals in the Hindu pantheon, the cow. Vijayasree points out that “The Conversations of Cow does not belong to any known genre; it is a novella, a feminist utopian tale, a piece of speculative fiction, a lesbian bildungsroman, all in one. This erasure of boundaries between literary genres is important in the feminist enterprise of negotiating in-between spaces and creating new spaces” (Vijayasree 102). The use of the cow Bhadravati as a central figure, and as the human narrator Suniti’s partner in her journey, allows for the “new spaces” to be created and negotiated. Bhadravati is no ordinary cow—she is a “Brahmini cow,” “an immigrant cow,” and indeed a lesbian cow (The Conversations of Cow 13-14). While it is easy, based on name alone, to take the character of Suniti as a stand-in for the author, Bhadravati could also be seen as a stand-in.
Here it is worth turning to Ruth Vanita’s analysis of the cow as a gendered symbol. At first glance, she points out, the cow seems “to be definitely gendered, pointing towards woman as Goddess on the one hand and woman as exploited subordinate on the other, as well as to the image of Mother India as an undernourished, overmilked breeder” (Vanita 291). She goes on to suggest that:
However, in ancient as well as in modern texts, the cow is as often a site for ungendering as it is for gendering. In Sanskrit, the noun go means both ‘bull’ and ‘cow’; in its generic form, the word, like the English ‘cattle’, is not gendered. In the Vedas, powerful natural forces, like rivers, are figured as cows as well as Goddesses. They are not merely nurturing but also potentially dangerous, and must be propitiated. (Vanita 291)
Namjoshi’s work engages with this more complicated understanding of the figure of the cow. In fact, Bhadravati is in many ways a “stray cow” who has a “liminal status” in modern India “as simultaneously sacred and a nuisance, symbolic of motherhood yet a non-reproductive consumer,” and this, for Vanita, “enables it to cross boundaries, literally and metaphorically” (Vanita 304). This liminality is hinted at in one of the early conversations between Bhadravati and Suniti:
‘What do you live on?’ I blurt it out.
‘Welfare,’ she replies. ‘Not as good as the pickings in India. There one is supposed to be worshipped as a god, not that one is – but the climate is warmer. (The Conversations of Cow 14 -17)
The phrasing “supposed to be worshipped as a god” points to the fact that there may be a disjuncture between the ideal and the reality when it comes to life as a stray cow—one dependent on “Welfare.”
Vanita points out that “Namjoshi’s Cow is a symbol for crossing boundaries of gender, race, nationality and sexuality, because the beast trope already functions in similar ways in both Western and Indian literary traditions” (Vanita 306). Bhadravati is Baddy, B, Bud as the novel progresses, shifting genders, race, nationality, and sexuality. Indeed, at one point, when Bhadravati is Bud (seemingly a white cis man), Bud and Suniti have a conversation about men and women because Suniti believes that men are from Mars. Eventually Suniti asks, “Are you trying to tell me Men from Mars are really women?” (The Conversations of Cow 107). And Bud replies, “Yes. You’ve got it at last” (107). At first read, one might consider this a satirical take down of the self-help book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, but this popular book was published in 1992, almost a decade after The Conversations of Cow. Either way, it seems like Bhadravati, through the many forms she takes, is trying to make Suniti see that some of her long-held assumptions need to be unpacked.
The novel’s ending provides important insight into Namjoshi’s oeuvre as a whole. Cow and Suniti tell each other that they like the other. Cow asks, “‘What? Even when I’m B or Baddy or Bud?’ ‘Even then,’ I reply. But I look at Cow and add quickly, ‘Even then I find you wholly engaging.’ We smile at each other” (The Conversations of Cow 125). Written in 1985, Namjoshi’s depiction of a happy ending for lesbian characters, where different positionalities and manifestations are welcome and not a cause for anxiety, places the author, in many ways, ahead of her time. Perhaps this is why, as Dasgupta points out, “most accounts of Indian writing in English or anthologies of critical essays on this writing either omit Namjoshi or mention her perfunctorily” (Dasgupta 101).
Published Works by Suniti Namjoshi
Fiction and Poetry
Poems. Writers Workshop, 1967.
More Poems. Writers Workshop, 1971.
Cyclone In Pakistan. Writers Workshop, 1971.
The Jackass and the Lady. Writers Workshop, 1980.
Feminist Fables. Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1981.
The Authentic Lie. Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1982.
From the Bedside Book of Nightmares. Fiddlehead Poetry Books & Goose Lane Editions, 1984.
The Conversations of Cow. The Women’s Press, 1985.
Flesh and Paper (with Gillian Hanscombe). Jezebel Tapes and Books, 1986; Ragweed Press, 1986.
The Blue Donkey Fables. The Women’s Press, 1988.
The Mothers of Maya Diip. The Women’s Press, 1989.
Because of India: Selected Poems and Fables. Onlywomen Press, 1989.
Feminist Fables, Spinifex Press, 1993
Saint Suniti and the Dragon. Spinifex, 1993; Virago, 1994.
Building Babel. Spinifex, 1996.
Goja: An Autobiographical Myth. Spinifex, 2000.
Sycorax: New Fables and Poems. Penguin Books, 2006.
The Fabulous Feminist: A Suniti Namjoshi Reader. Zubaan, 2012; Spinifex, 2012.
Suki. Penguin India, 2012; Spinifex, 2013.
Foxy Aesop aka Aesop the Fox. Zubaan, 2018; Spinifex, 2018.
Children’s Literature
Aditi and the One-Eyed Monkey. Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1986.
Aditi and the Thames Dragon. Tulika Publishers, 2002.
Aditi and the Marine Sage. Tulika Publishers, 2004.
Aditi and the Techno Sage. Tulika Publishers, 2005.
Aditi and Her Friends Take on the Vesuvian Giant. Tulika Publishers, 2007.
Aditi and Her Friends Meet Grendel. Tulika Publishers, 2007.
Aditi and Her Friends Help the Budapest Changeling. Tulika Publishers, 2007.
Aditi and Her Friends In Search of Shemeek. Tulika Publishers, 2008.
Gardy in the City of Lions. Tulika Publishers, 2009.
Siril and The Spaceflower. Tulika Publishers, 2009.
Monkeyji and the Word Eater. Tulika Publishers, 2009.
Beautiful and the Cyberspace Runaway. Tulika Publishers, 2009.
Blue and Other Stories. (art work Nilima Sheikh). Tulika Publishers, 2012; North Melbourne: Spinifex, 2012.
Little i. Tulika Publishers, 2014.
The Boy and Dragon Stories (pictures Krishna Bala Shenoi). Tulika Publishers, 2015.
Works Cited
Dasgupta, Anannya. “‘Do I Remove My Skin?’ Interrogating Identity in Suniti Namjoshi’s Fables.” Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, edited by Ruth Vanita. Routledge, 2002, pp. 100-110.
Guarracino, Serena. “Identity, Language and Power in Sunitin Namjoshi.” Muses India: Essays on English-Language Writers from Mahomet to Rushdie, edited by Chetan Deshmane. Jefferson, McFarland, 2013, pp. 134-145.
Kenyon, Olga. The Writer’s Imagination: Interviews with Major International Women Novelists. University of Bradford, 1992.
Mann, Harveen S. “Suniti Namjoshi: Diasporic, Lesbian Feminism and the Textual Politics of Transnationality.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 30, no. 1/2,1997, pp. 97-113.
Namjoshi, Suniti. Because of India. Only Women Press, 1989.
—. Sycorax: New Fables and Poems. Penguin, 2006.
—. The Conversations of Cow. The Women’s Press, 1985.
Singh, Jyotsna G. Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory. The Arden Shakespeare, 2020.
Vanita, Ruth. “‘I’m an Excellent Animal’ Cows at Play in the Writings of Bahinabai, Rukun Advani, Suniti Namjoshi and Others.” Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture. Yoda Press, 2005, 290-310.
Vijayasree, C. Suniti Namjoshi: The Artful Transgressor. Rawat Publication, 2001.
