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A Woman Called Prabha Khaitan. The Art of Autobiography and the Ecriture Féminine

Monika Browarczyk 

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The paper proposes to examine the autobiography of Prabha Khaitan using two conceptual frameworks: of the 'narrative self' theory and the ecriture féminine. I argue that in Khaitan's autobiography the narrative self reinvents her own, individual écriture féminine equipped, somewhat purposefully, with a vague sense of acknowledging woman's voice and her body along the lines of Cixous' reflections. Writing her autobiography Khaitan opts for a narrative strongly associated with agency and subjectivity that recognises female voice situated in the female body. The choice might be considered a subversive practice particularly in the Hindi milieu. Taken as a whole, the autobiography is a digressive and open-ended narrative, characterised by a poetic language abundant in metaphorical images that are open to various readings (and intriguingly, mostly omitted in the English translation). Notwithstanding its lyrical quality, it does not estrange itself from being engaged in the social and the political, either. It raises a dissenting voice by retelling the mythological tales and reshaping cultural images, which in particular are embedded in the dominant discourse about the idea(l)s of Indian womanhood. At times, the narrative self communicates through silences and gaps. 

 

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Women’s bodies, women’s words: the body in situation in Prabha Khaitan’s writings

Alessandra Consolaro

 

Prabha Khaitan wrote often about women, sexuality and the gendered body. She touched sensitive issues such as rape, incest, and psychological abuse in the patriarchal social milieu of the Marwari community she belonged to. Both her autobiography and her creative writing narrate everyday experiences of women's embodiment, providing an intensely personal and painful account of her youth, early womanhood, and the challenges that career orientated-women face. Her thoughts on the gendered body and the self are also informed by a deep concern about the dichotomy between the disembodied subject and the radically situated, socially constituted subject. In her essays on globalization, she suggests that the disembodied ‘I’ of liberalism must be replaced by the embodied ‘we’ of women’s community, in order to resist the challenge of the neoliberal, consumerist, globalized model of economics and society that characterizes contemporary India. In this paper I will focus on three works by Prabha Khaitan – the novel Chinnamasta, published in 1993; the essay Bazar ke bich bazar ke khilaf, published in 2004; and the autobiography Anya se Ananya, that appeared in 2012 – analyzing the body in situation in Prabha Khaitan's writings.

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Prabha Khaitan’s existentialism: a linguistic analysis

Andrea Drocco

 

It is well-known that Hindi becoming, after Independence, the Official language of India was exposed to a strong lexical modernization process due to the lack of specialist terminology. This is true not only for scientific and technological disciplines, but also for other fields of knowledge like western philosophy, architecture, arts and so on. Starting from these preliminaries, the talk presents the results of a research on the linguistic peculiarities of Prabha Khaitan’s production, focusing, however, only on her essays. Therefore, the corpus taken into consideration consists merely of Prabha Khaitan’s texts on feminist themes as well as her works concerning philosophical topics, especially those related to Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Our main goal is to show the neologism and/or paraphrase coined by the author and especially connected with the European existentialism. In particular an analysis of the translation difficulties faced by Prabha Khaitan writing in a language, that is in Hindi, with a totally different cultural and philosophical background with respect of the above said European existentialism, is offered. The data collected enabled us to offer a good amount of examples showing that the main source of Prabha Khaitan’s creativity is Sanskrit, by means of tatsama(s) – even if, sometimes, they have been invested with a modern content – and the fashioning of new complex words out of Sanskrit.

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Humayun Azad: «A palm-tree among the burning sands» of Bangladesh.

Mara Matta

 

I firstly heard the name of the Bangladeshi scholar, poet and writer Humayun Azad (1947-2004) in 2010, when I was in Kolkata attending the presentation of an anthology of Asian women writers held at the Prabha Khaitan Foundation. A contemporary of Indian writer Prabha Khaitan (1942-2008), Humayun Azad had been an estimated professor of linguistics and Bengali literature at Dhaka University, much loved for his own witty writings and provocative poems. He was a prolific scholar and in 1992 had authored a thought-provoking book titled Nārī (woman), which had so much irritated the Islamists and some narrow-minded politicians that, just after three years, the book had been banned. What distressed me the most was to hear that his book had defiantly survived innumerable attacks and been restored on the shelves of libraries and bookstores, whilst his author had not met with the same good fortune. Azad died ‘in exile’ in Munich in August 2004, in what his family and friends still consider ‘mysterious circumstances’. Just a few months before his death, he had suffered an ignominious attack at the hands of fundamentalist thugs who deeply disliked his progressive ideas on women rights and his staunch positions against the politicization of Islam and the co-opting of religion in the political domain. Since 2010, I have felt obliged to know more about this Bangladeshi writer, a man who had shown such amazing commitment to the cause of women to dedicate years of his life and career to a project culminated with his translation of Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in Bengali language (dbitīẏa liṅga). 

This paper aims at highlighting the great contribution of Humayun Azad to the cause of a secular and more inclusive Bangladesh and to discuss its support to gender equality and the idea of ‘an Asian sensibility’ that goes beyond the limiting boundaries of a common sisterhood defined by sex. It was the absurdist stance typical of a stubborn warrior to cross both gender and national boundaries, acknowledging them as abstract constructions that cripple the mind and the life of so many who swear by them, to make of Azad a distinguished man, an exiled forced to live (and sadly die) far from his beloved country, where he notwithstanding continues to stand as a «palm-tree among the burning sands». 

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Translating The Second Sex in Urdu

Kishwar Naheed

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Simon de Beauvoir had been my mentor, ideal and future builder. I read The Second Sex at least six times with the idea to translate it in Urdu. I took two years in selecting and abridging the text. I had three basic point in view before starting translation. Primarily deleting the examples and references to French literature and culture. The reason was that at that time Pakistan was under the extreme religious hold of Zia-ulHaq, who stayed Martial Law administrator for eleven years, 1977 to 1988. He imposed extreme restrictions legally and culturally on women. I braved myself to do the abridged translation in 1981. In the translation I added example of Pakistani culture and behavior, which was almost barbaric in the name of religion. The book was published by Vanguard. Within three months 5000 copies were sold. Interestingly, the readers were 90% students from all over Pakistan. The Martial Law regime took the notice and banned the book, immediately, declaring it as obscene. The book was picked up from all stalls and every province of Pakistan declared as shameful. Warrants for my arrest and registration of legal case was ordered. I had to get my bail, case was fought in the civil court. The exemption to withdraw the case was granted on presentation of Encyclopedia Britannica, where the book The Second Sex was mentioned in the category of Sociology. My translation still stands banned.

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Can One Read Existentialist Ideas in Indian Thought?
Jayandra Soni

Two aspects in the focus of this symposium are “existentialism in India” and a “reflection on the cultural translation of existentialist philosophy”. Both are challenging aspects and on the basis of my acquaintance with classical Indian philosophy, I would like to ask whether one can read existentialist ideas in Indian thought. This will have major implications on the other aspect of the symposium, namely a wide “reflection on the cultural translation of existentialist philosophy”. The term “cultural translation” is very appealing. If there are concepts in Indian thought which approximate those, for example, of ‘being’ and ‘nothingness’, to use the title of Sartre’s influential magnum opus, then there may be the possibility of a “cultural translation”. Just as one can see in Indian philosophy ideas related to epistemology and logic, metaphysics and ontology, I shall argue that we can read existentialist ideas in it as well, so that we shall have to re-assess the implications of the term “cultural translation”. With regard to Prabha Khaitan we can therefore ask whether she in fact imbibed foreign ideas or did native ideas become alive in her upon reading Simon de Beauvoir?

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