How Suniti Namjoshi wields the spear and the shield of satire and fables

Mint

01-06-2025

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One of the more enjoyable oddities of postmodern literature is the breathless, single-sentence composition. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short story, The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship was written as one sentence, as were Bohumil Hrabal's novels Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age and Vita Nuova. In Matriarchs, Cows and Epic Villains, an anthology of Suniti Namjoshi's writing, the fable Broadcast Live spans just one sentence of 60-odd words, but ends up unleashing an entire chapter's worth of commentary.
One of the more enjoyable oddities of postmodern literature is the breathless, single-sentence composition. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short story, The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship was written as one sentence, as were Bohumil Hrabal's novels Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age and Vita Nuova. In Matriarchs, Cows and Epic Villains, an anthology of Suniti Namjoshi's writing, the fable Broadcast Live spans just one sentence of 60-odd words, but ends up unleashing an entire chapter's worth of commentary.
'The Incredible Woman raged through the skies, lassoed a planet, set it in orbit, rescued a starship, flattened a mountain, straightened a building, smiled at a child, caught a few thieves, all in one morning, and then, took a little time off to visit her psychiatrist, since she is at heart a really womanly woman and all she wants is a normal life."
With that devastating final clause, Namjoshi indicts decades of popular culture that ran cover for a patriarchal vision of society—where the 'good" woman is 'rewarded" with heteronormative nirvana (societally approved marriage, babies), whereas the 'evil" woman is banished to spinsterhood. The preceding clauses are a broadside pastiche of 'hero narratives", another recurring theme with Namjoshi.
Broadcast Live is a typical example of the author's satirical style, one which has served her well for over four decades now. The fables, poems and stories compiled here have been picked from her collections, Feminist Fables (1981), The Blue Donkey Fables (1988) and Saint Suniti and the Dragon (1993). These super-short entries (seldom over a page or so) make up almost 60-odd pages, while the bulk of the book is abridged versions of two previously published novellas, The Conversations of Cow (1985) and The Mothers of Maya Diip (1989). The latter, a modern classic, is frequently taught at Indian universities.
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In the introductory essay, writer Gillian Hanscombe (who is also Namjoshi's partner) compares Namjoshi's mind to a combination of Jonathan Swift's and Lewis Carroll's. As comparisons go, it's exceedingly apt, since satire and fabulism are Namjoshi's spear and shield—the 'spear" punctures hypocrisy while the 'shield" offers the protection (and plausible deniability) of timelessness.
Case History is a brief but horrific upending of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, while A Moral Tale is a plaintive remix of Beauty and the Beast featuring a lesbian Beast ('That's why its love for Beauty was so monstrous", Namjoshi deadpans). In From the Panchatantra, the brahmin central character (the Panchatantra is believed to have been composed by brahmin scholar Vishnu Sharma) prays until Lord Vishnu appears before him and grants him a boon. What follows is classic Namjoshi, sociological missives wrapped up in screwball comedy.
The highlight of the collection remains The Mothers of Maya Diip (the lightly abridged version here is 120-odd pages long), Namjoshi's allegorical, uproarious novella set in what appears to be a matriarchal utopia at first glance.
Maya Diip, however, is a place that takes convictions to their logical endpoints—male babies are ruthlessly abandoned here and only female babies are nurtured and cared for. All women are divided into grades A, B and C mothers. The island's leader Maya's daughter Asha helms a rebel faction of women and men who oppose the island's discriminatory practices.
The Mothers of Maya Diip is a pointed parody of the novel Herland (1915) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, initially serialised in feminist magazines and only published in novel form in 1979. Herland imagined a feminist utopia where society is free from men and asexual reproduction (via parthenogenesis) is the norm. In her parody, Namjoshi plays dialectic ping-pong, commenting on both the cruelty of patriarchal systems and the limitations of second-wave feminism (especially its laser focus on reproductive freedom). A particularly funny scene involves Valerie, an immigrant from the West (hinted to be American) who has been living in Maya Diip for years. In the following passage, Valerie is trying to describe a patriarchal society from scratch, to somebody who has no conception of what it looks like.
'Ashans in my country have enslaved the Mayans in order to force them to have their babies; Ashan and Mayan babies then belong to a particular Ashan. Think of it this way… Every Ashan thought of himself as a kind of farmer and every Mayan as a bit of land or a field which could be his property. The babies are branded by his specific genes. An Ashan is always the grade A mother, and a Mayan is always the grade B mother... but the Ashan delegates his duties to the Mayan."
Like the short fiction of her exact contemporaries Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood, Namjoshi's fables are premodern literature deconstructed and refashioned as postmodern commentary. This anthology worthy of her 'fabulous" career and a delightful body of work. Topics You May Be Interested In