topics: |  india | gender | history

Nabaneeta Dev Sen: Eroticism and the woman writer in Bengali Culture,
on how the mother tongue imposes constraints, p.297-304

A young, unmmarried girl, Debarati Mitra, wrote a rather beautiful erotic
poem about oral sex in a little magazine.

Her life was made unbearable by comments and rumors.  If she had written the
same poem in English, nothing would have happened.  The mother tongue stands
guard over the woman writer like the mother herself... p.300

	 [I am not sure about the comment about English vs Bengali.  Living
	  in a middle-class Bengali culture, even writing in English, had it
	  been read by her interlocutors, would have elicited considerable
	  comment.  But readership in English is limited, and certainly,
	  fewer mAshimA's get to read it directly, so perhaps the comment
	  would have been more muted.  ]

The contrast ["how the mother tongue imposes constraints] can be
noticed more sharply when a woman writer is bilingual.  Kamala Das
has been writing a lot of controversial stuff, incl narratives
placing herself in her own person in the erotic text; she writes in
English.  Though recognized as a good poet, she has achieved fame
only as a soft porn writer as far as her English prose goes.  But in
Malayalam, under the name Madhavi Kutti, she has produced very
powerful short stories and has won several literary awards and the
respect of her audience.  These two split personalities in Das-Kutti
prove the point ... in her mother tongue, she nurtures the
traditional image of a serious writer and does not try to seduce her
readership...  303
	[Could it be that her English writings were earlier, as is
	often the case with bilingual writers?  needs more research.]

Note: the debArati mitra poem discussed, পৃথিবীর সৌন্দর্য একাকী তারা দুজন (the
world's beauty, all alone) can be found in book excerptise in
debArati mitrar shreShTa kabitA দেবারতি মিত্রর শ্রেষ্ঠ কবিতা
and with translation in the bilingual the unsevered tongue
(tr. amitabha mukerjee). 



Shobha De: in a lit
festival at Melbourne, she drew more attention than Mrinal Pande,
who according to NDS is a serious author, while Shobha de's "forte
lies in soft-porn romances."   SD was also a model and is quite
glamorous, and was billed as the "Jackie Collins of India." 303

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