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Chapter II

The Politics of Constructing the Self

“ Self” is rather a contested term in the current critical and theoretical

space. The concept of a unitary, linear, fully comprehensible, one dimensional

self is an illusion. The idea of self has always captivated a prime position in

literary creations. Self figures in literature in myriad forms, ranging from partial

to comprehensive glimpses into the self of the writer. Literary works are often

completely devoted to the unraveling of the labyrinths of the self. Testimonies,

memoirs, diaries and confessions generally deal with this central concept of the

self. The literary genre which perceives as its principal task the writing of the

self is autobiography. As this term which is Greek in its origin indicates,

autobiography is self life writing (In Greek autos signifies “self”, bios “life”

and “ graphe” writing).

Human self and human life are multifaceted and cannot be reduced to

strict linear equations. Autobiography, as a genre that tries to capture such

complex, complicated and elusive phenomena called life and self, likewise

cannot be expected to be circumscribed within the four walls of a definition.

To phrase it differently, autobiography cannot be simplified through a

definition. Its patterns change, its formal qualities change, the contours and

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textures change from one life to another, from one self to the other. It is, as

Georg Misch notes in his The History of Autobiography in Antiquity, a unique

literary form:

Autobiography is unlike any other form of literary composition.

Its boundaries are more fluid and less definable in relation to

form. In itself it is a representation of life that is committed to no

definite form. It abounds in fresh initiatives, drawn from actual

life: it adopts the different forms with which different periods

provide the individual for his self-revelation and

self-portrayal. (1951:2)

However, attempts have been made to define the genre, to describe the common

threads to be found in the genre called autobiography. Autobiography usually

denotes the story of one’s life written by oneself. The French theorist

Philip Lejeune, for instance, defines autobiography: “We call autobiography

the retrospective narrative in prose that someone makes of his own existence

when he puts the principal accent upon his life, especially upon the story of his

personality” ( 1989:4). Lejeune identifies four elements constitutive of

autobiography : prose as the medium, real life as the subject matter, author as

narrator and retrospective as the point of view. The Dictionary of Feminist

Theory defines autobiography as a written or verbal personal interpretation of

one’s self (Humm, 2003:16). It is an attempt to make the readers understand

life: “Autobiography is the highest and most instructive form in which the

understanding of life confronts us" ( Dilthey, 1961: 85). Autobiography is a

manner of presenting, understanding and experiencing oneself.

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It enters into and shapes discourse, behaviour, self-perception and political

activity.

It is assumed that the term autobiography was coined by Robert Southey

when he used it in British Quarterly Review for the first time in 1809. But

Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson in their Reading Autobiography :

A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives attribute the first usage of the term to

the preface to a collection of poems by the eighteenth century working class

writer Ann Yearsley (2001:2). Autobiography is read as the story of a deep

down search, an attempt to delve deep into the recesses of one’s life and self,

and to bring them before the readers and to attain a universal quality in the

process. Autobiography is viewed as a genre which makes use of imagination to

search truth, to discover a truthful, honest metaphor of the self.

Self is a multivocal word. Rom Harre, in his “Metaphysics and

Narrative: Singularities and Multiplicities of Self,” observes: “It [self] appears

in personal narratives in at least three psychologically diverse contexts:

perception, reflection, and social interaction” (2001:60). It is argued that

autobiography is an important part of the "narration" of the second

manifestation of self called reflection, and that it is highly dependent on

context. Autobiography is the reflection of one’s self in writing.

Rockwell Gray, in his “Autobiography Now,” presents a comprehensive view

of autobiography:

It can be a modus vivendi, a way of coping with one's life, of

retreating into one's past, or of breaking open one's future. Its

dominant tone may be passive or aggressive, nostalgic or

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prophetic, ironic or sentimental, meditative or pragmatic,

buoyant or melancholic; its mood, indicative, imperative, or

subjunctive. It may contain one or several voices, be written in

first or third person, and be both biographical and

autobiographical at once. (1982:34)

It is fluid and flexible and imbued with complexities and intricacies.

Autobiography is not simple, linear or monolithic.

The subjecthood of the self is the main focus of every autobiography.

The West with its special claim to the celebration of “the self” had instances of

self-writing as early as fourth century A.D. The tradition of writing one’s life

goes back to Plato’s Seventh Epistle where he described a significant period of

his life. The earlier Roman rulers like Lutatius, Catulus and Scarus left behind

some account of their lives, especially military achievements. The genre had its

full-fledged formal inauguration in Saint Augustine’s Confessions.

Roy Pascal, in his The Design and Truth of Autobiography, notes that with the

coming of Augustine’s Confessions European civilization witnessed

“the coming into being of a new concept of human

personality” (qtd in Kumar,2010:13). Augustine and the writers who followed

him like Justin, the martyr, Hilarius, the Bishop of Poitiers, and so on had

written autobiographies with a religious, didactic and evangelical orientation.

The subject still was the self, but they narrated the journey, the voyage of the

self from ignorance and sin through spiritual knowledge to self-discovery and

self-realization. The different phases through which the self passed with the

initial propensity of the flesh and related sins, the moment of recognition, often

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catalysed by a spiritual event or religious influence, the paths of guilt and

subsequent repentance, and finally rejuvenation became the trajectory of these

autobiographical narratives. The exciting spiritual journey with its joys and

agonies, moments of reason and emotion, had been depicted in an emotionally

charged narrative encounter. These autobiographies ended with a sense of

satisfaction, a sense of wholeness.

The significance of Augustine’s Confessions lies not in his personal

encounter with the Christian God, but in the evolution of his Christian self.

Before Augustine’s confessional literature, autobiographical fragments did

exist, but there was no sustained personal life story. The basic pattern adopted

by Augustine, the archetype of a voyage or journey, could be seen in modern

autobiographies too, though the motives and coordinates of the journey differ.

The bildungsroman autobiographies, narrating the growth of an artist or the

ethnographic autobiographies relating the journey, literal and metaphoric,

of cultures and communities are cases in point.

The confessional mode of writing with religious overtones underwent a

change and became more reflective. The movement from religious to secular

autobiography can be seen in Rousseau’s Confessions. Although it is similar to

Augustine’s Confessions in the essential path it undertook, it inaugurated

autobiography as a unique and autonomous genre dealing with its author’s life.

The attempt was to assert the uniqueness of the self, a celebration of its

individuality and autonomy. He tried to bring a balance between his private

self and public self. His autobiography was an attempt to document the

emergence of a modern individuality in him and defining his “self.”

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Rousseau seems to be aware of the fact that his endeavour to write about

himself with scrutiny and self criticism had no precedence: He observed at the

beginning of Book One: “I am resolved on an undertaking that had no model

and will have no imitator”(qtd in Kumar, 2010:21). In its mode of putting his

personal details in secular terms, Rousseau’s Confessions had no model in the

history of autobiographical writings, but surely there were imitators.

Augustine’s and Rousseau’s Confessions have outlined an

autobiographical paradigm of a narrative with its series of events leading to a

climactic conversion in which the mature identity is secured. They provide a

normative guide for Roy Pascal's classic study, Design and Truth in

Autobiography, and have received endorsement in Jerome Buckley's study,

The Turning Key:

The ideal autobiography.. . . describes a voyage of self-

discovery, a life- journey confused by frequent misdirections and

even crises of identity but reaching at last a sense of perspective

and integration. It traces through the alert awakened memory

continuity from early childhood to maturity or even to old age....

And as a work of literature it achieves a satisfying

wholeness. (1984:14)

The autobiographical narrative is envisioned as linear, chronological, tracing

the journey of the author’s life “bios” from confusion and chaos to order and

totality.

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However, the later autobiographies, as James Olney points out, turned

their attention from bios , life, to auto, self:

Much of the criticism of autobiographical mode was directed to

the question of autos - how the act of autobiography is at once a

discovery, a creation, and an imitation of the self . . . the shift of

attention from bios to autos – from life to self - was . . . largely

responsible for opening things up and turning them in a

philosophical, psychological, and literary direction. (1980:19)

The focus on the self and how it is constructed through autobiography engaged

much critical attention during the subsequent years.

The "form," the mould into which the self should be cast is as elusive as

the self which is to be represented. The proper form, content and the “right”

approach to interpreting, analyzing the autobiographical narratives have deeper

implications within the new critical arena. The need to configure new

theoretical frameworks and new reading strategies have engaged the

theoreticians working in the field. "The more the genre gets written about,"

writes William C. Spengemann at the beginning of his own effort to restore a

coherent historical overview, "the less agreement there seems to be on what it

properly includes” (1980:3). It has been variously called: the "unruly" genre,

the "restless" genre, "the most elusive of literary documents” (Olney,1980:3).

The attempts at defining and redefining the very concept and correlatives of the

genre bear testimony to the complexity with which this literary product is

viewed in contemporary theoretical realm. This is evident when Northrop Frye

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classifies autobiography as a subdivision of the novel ( 1957:307). It is also

reflected on Barrett J. Mandel’s comment on autobiography as "literature with

a difference"(Olney,1980:62) This view is inherent in Paul de Man’s argument

that autobiography is "not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading, or of

understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts"(1979:922). He treats

the autobiographical process as a kind of prefiguration.

The term autobiography seems to be incapable of expressing the

multitude of dimensions inherent in it. Michel Beaujour,therefore, displaces the

term "auto-biography" altogether and, after considering such possibilities as

"autographie," "autoscription" and "autospecularisation," posits without

enthusiasm the term "autoportrait"( Abbot,1988:598 ). James Olney, figuring

out the complexity of the genre, has proposed the shelving of all restrictive

definitions of autobiography. He postulates definitions at the level of subgenres

such as “autosociography, autoautography, autopsychography,

autophylography, autoobituography, ... autosoteriography" (1980:63). In this

range of argument, we find at one end those who not only define autobiography

but find in it repeatable narrative shape and at the other end those who contend

that autobiography is inherently indefinable.

Autobiography is basically seen as the history of a person’s life written

by himself. However easy acceptance of this definition becomes problematic in

the wake of new theoretical spaces like poststructuralism, postmodernism,

feminism, deconstruction and so on. None of the terms forming the

definition – history, person, life, self, writing - are any longer essences, whole

and undisputable. The advent of postmodernism and poststructuralism has

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opened up a whole new array of critical discourses questioning the very sanctity

of all these terms, whether it be self, life, history or writing. These are rather

contested terms, fluid and unstable. Their dimensions and orientations change

when put in a wider space of cultural, ideological and structural parameters.

Self is not a neutral, concrete term. The question of how an

autobiography is written is primarily a question of how the self is constructed.

Autobiography is essentially the process by which the writing self looks

retrospectively and brings into existence the written self. Memories are selected

and presented retrospectively to narrate the self. Since the self is constructed in

narratives, using language, the interrelationship and interaction among

narrative, self and language become prominent in any discussion of

autobiography. Postmodernism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism have

cautioned one to take nothing for granted: nothing is what it seems. There is a

politics involved in everything. The selection and combination of memories

and their construction through language make the act of autobiographical

writing deeply political.

Althusser states that subject is a position related to ideology, a position

interpellated by ideology of the representative group. Lacan links subject to the

structure of the unconscious; subject is a position conditioned by the structure

of the unconscious. In textual practice subject is at once the writer and the

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written. Paul L. Jay, in his “Being in the Text: Autobiography and the Problem

of the Subject,” outlines the problem of subject as is awakened by new critical

thinking:

We are accustomed when thinking about the concept of a

thinking or a writing "subject," at once to demystify and

problematize that concept, to understand it as having reference

less to a Natural, privileged, and potentially unified

psychological condition, than to a historically constituted set of

ideas and assumptions whose referents are complexly dispersed

in the very language which seeks to constitute them. (1982:1045)

There has been acute questioning of the nature (or non-existence) of “the self"

and its referent as it is evoked in older religious, philosophical, and literary

contexts. Defining and locating the personal "subject" who is-or is not-the

author of a text, the architect of a deed, or the speaker of a word involves wider

concerns. Autobiography, as the presumed record of self-development of a

centrally placed “self,” becomes philosophically problematic but with great

pragmatic value. It unequivocally leads to further questions concerning the

"subject." Autobiography evolves as a naturally transdisciplinary concern.

The dogmas of postmodernism, including two of its components,

poststructuralism and deconstruction, threaten autobiography to the point at

which its practice tends to become impossible. Postmodernism ultimately

denies the substance of the self to-be-narrated along with the possibility of

expressing it in any coherent form. First, the notion of historical, determinable

truth is challenged. The reality that the autobiography tends to represent is

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denied the possibility of univocal existence. There is no reality but

constructed or construed, and there is no self, pure and solid. In his

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge Jean-Francois Lyotard

defines postmodernism as an "incredulity toward metanarratives"(1984:xxvi).

The metanarratives of autobiography depicting a solitary, sovereign self, which

is essentially individualistic and gendered are rejected.

Postmodernism, with its implications of denial of authority, thwarts the

possibility of an authentic sketch of life. Postmodernism is "a theory based on

the belief that there can be no such thing as a single, or even a properly

privileged, point of view"(Brosman,2005:99). There is nothing called reliable

knowledge, no undisputed history, personal or collective. The notions of

unitary truth and reality are eliminated; representations of them are either

culturally conditioned or "constructed" to the point where they offer no access

to what was previously thought of as reality and truth. Jacques Derrida and

Gilles Deleuze see language as incapable of expressing truth anyhow, even if

"truth" does exist. The endless circularity of reference, mutual dependence of

functions, and other dimensions of undecidability distort the "reality" to be

transmitted and discard any ultimate understanding, any seizure of the self.

Knowledge of the self is not merely imperfect but impossible, since the

self is a collective "construct;" there is no speaker, only the "spoken."

Arguing against the Delphic tradition, John Lahr asserts: "To be human is not to

know one's self…that we confidently broadcast to the world is a fiction. A

jerry-built container for the volatile unconscious elements that divide and

confound us”(qtd in Brosman,2005:97). There is no self to which a text can

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refer. According to Barthes, the "self" is shattered, scattered, decentred, and-at

least in a text-always a "fiction"(1975:176). "If the subject," writes

Henri Mitterand, a Zola scholar, "in his identity, authenticity, homogeneity,

autonomy, is only an illusion, a fortiori all his supposed mastery over his

thought and language is denied" (qtd in Marsh,2003:72). Moreover, language,

as it attempts to record this problematic self, is endlessly auto referential and

meaningless. Autobiography would be only, as James Olney puts it,

"a narrative that pretends to be written by a self-conscious self who is actually

only a linguistic construct"(1980:69). He means that autobiography is a textual

construction of the self.

Autobiography is a narrative of personalized memory. It uses

metaphoric language. Paul de Man, the American deconstructionist, argues that

all knowledge, including self-knowledge, depends on figurative language. So

autobiography produces frictions and figures in place of self-knowledge it seeks

to produce. Autobiography is a manifest form of semiotic structure. He further

explains:

The interest of autobiography, then, is not that it reveals reliable

self - knowledge – it does not - but that it demonstrates in a

striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalisation (that

is the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems

made up of tropological substitutions. (1979:922)

Autobiography, however, is an act of self-restoration, in which the author

recovers the fragments of his/her life into a coherent narrative.

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De Man, sees that the author reads himself/ herself in autobiography,

making himself/herself the subject of self-knowledge. This involves a form of

substitution, exchanging the writing “I” for the written “I.” De Man suggests

that this “specular structure” is interiorized within the text. He points out that

“just as we seem to assert that all texts are autobiographical, we should say that,

by the same token, none of them is or can be” (1979:922). According to him,

the representation of the self through language produces a literary figuration

that can actually disfigure as much as it figures the self in question: it can be

seen to be a “defacement” of the individual concerned rather than an “accurate”

self-reflection. So personalised history encounters the threat of fictionalised

form of narrative. Traditionally it is assumed that autobiography is the objective

representation of the self and presentation of past events. But De Man suggests

that the relation between life and autobiography is similar to that between an act

and its consequences. He explains in “Autobiography as De-Facement”:

We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act

produces its consequences, . . . the autobiographical project may

itself produce and determine the life . . . whatever the writer does

is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture,

and thus determined in all its aspects by the resources of his

medium. (1979: 920)

Contrary to popular belief, De Man asserts that autobiography determines the

life. This is necessitated by the demands of the medium

“self-portrait.”Autobiography defaces itself.

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De Man clearly states the difference between a traditional

autobiographer and a postmodern autobiographer. The determinants of writing

autobiography in the postmodern period constitute the resources and aspects of

the medium. Any autobiographical text is inherently unstable and will undo

the autobiographical model it seeks to establish. In this attempt autobiography

impersonates fictional elements. This is achieved through the defamiliarising

capacity of literary language. In this attempt autobiography impersonates

fictional elements which explains the relation between the signifier and the

signified, the life and the autobiography. In postmodernity, elements of fiction

enter autobiography and makes life writing meta-autobiographical.

De Man views autobiography as a textual production, not a kind of

referentiality in the physical form. He considers it a “figure of reading or of

understanding that occurs . . . in all texts” (1979:922). This essentially

poststructuralist reversal of the signifier and the signified points to the creativity

and performativity of the self in writing. He means that there is only textual

representation: memory and the self are created out of linguistic performance.

So the specular structure of autobiography becomes “the manifestation, on the

level of referent, of a linguistic structure”(De Man, 1979:922).

Saint Augustine’s Confessions, which was the first full-fledged

autobiography in the West, came as early as the fourth century A.D.

However, the tradition of writing autobiographies came into existence in India

only quite late. Banaridas’s Ardhakathanaka, which is considered the first

Indian autobiography, was written only in 1641. The act of writing an

autobiography necessarily entails a respect for individual identity.

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Bhikhu Parekh, in his Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of

Gandhi’s Political Discourse, articulates this precondition:

First, as the story of a unique self, autobiography presupposes a

culture in which individuality is valued and cultivated. Unless a

culture encourages men and women to make their own choices,

form their own views, take risks, look upon life as a journey and

in general to fashion their lives as they please, one man’s life is

no different from another’s … the autobiography is only possible

in a society with a well-developed historical manner of

thinking. (1989:250)

A sense of the self and identity, autonomous and individualistic is a

precondition for the production of autobiography.

Indian society has always been one which submerges individual self to

communal self. Every individual becomes a part of the greater community,

losing one’s individual identity. The traditional Hindu worldview believes that

every individual self/soul is a part of the universal soul personified by God,

who is supposed to be the creator of the universe. There was never felt a need

for the individual to have a separate identity. It might be this mode of the

individual ego merging into the communal super-ego losing its distinct

individuality that came in the way of Indians creating autobiographical account

for so long.

Banaridas wrote his autobiography in Hindi verse and he took the first

step towards the popularization of this genre in India. However, it is with the

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advent of the British that autobiography was established as a regular literary

genre in India. New educational opportunities, new modes of mobility and new

literary genres like novel and autobiography changed individual’s perception of

“the self.” Education made social mobility possible and the need to define one’s

identity outside the parameters of caste and family led many to think

themselves as isolated individuals. They wrote their autobiographical narratives

as the record of their development of individuality. The consciousness of this

new individuality and the loosening of the community bond gave rise to

subjectivity necessary in autobiographies. This changing nature of individual

self in Indian society is outlined by Bhikhu Parekh:

British rule introduced modern individualism and rationalism.

Indians began to question traditional values and practices and to

experiment with new forms of life and thought. Unwilling to

fully embrace the new and unable to break with the tradition,

they became puzzled to themselves. This heightened their self-

consciousness and stimulated self-reflection. They were anxious

to share with others the excitement of their newly found freedom

and the problems it had brought in its train. . . there grew a new

subculture conducive to autobiographical writing. (1989:254)

By late nineteenth century a good number of autobiographies written by Indian

authors began to appear in the Indian literary scene. Most of these authors were

social reformers and public figures. Prominent among them are

Narmada Shankar’s Mari –Hakikat (Gujarati), Narayan Hemchandra’s

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Hoon Pote (Gujarati), Rajnarayan Basu’s Atmajivani(Bengali) and Dadoba

Pandurang’s Atmacharita ( Marathi).

The advent of the twentieth century saw the dawn of an era, which

presented the fertile ground for autobiographical writings. The new political

awakening and upheaval in India brought forth new political leaders on the

horizon. With a new age came an awakening and several kinds of experiments

in the fields of art, architecture, music, dance and literature.

There was an unprecedented spurt in autobiographical writings. Though a

number of autobiographies came to the scene such as Surendranath Banerjee’s

A Nation in the Making(1925), Mirza Ismail’s My Public Life (1954),

Morarji Desai’s The Story of My Life ( Vol I – III, 1974-79), they were more

or less historical in their outlook and sought to present public events. The

autobiographies of Mahatma Gandhi (The Story of My Experiments with

Truth, 1927) and Jawaharlal Nehru (An Autobiography, 1936), go beyond a

sub genre of history and attempt to introspect and reflect on personal dilemmas

and crises. They take to an analysis of “the self” in their autobiographies.

The primary concern of Mahatma Gandhi’s The Story of My

Experiments with Truth was not political but moral and spiritual. His

experiments with truth make his autobiography more individualistic than

socially relevant. Nehru’s An Autobiography does explicate a sense of the self,

but more than the personalized self of an individual, the attempt is to forge a

national self. Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s The Autobiography of an Unknown

Indian (1951) strikes a balance between personal narrative and social history,

between private self and public self.

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The history of autobiography written in the West as well as in the East

is rather a history of male autobiographies and that too of men belonging to the

public sphere and enjoying a prime status in society. This tradition neglects

women’s autobiographies and the autobiographies of the downtrodden. The

determinants of class, race and gender are excluded from the record of

autobiography. The task of the feminist writers and the cultural historians has

been to recover the lost tradition of women’s autobiographies and the

autobiographical attempts of the marginalized. The coordinates of marginality

extend across colour, creed, caste, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, race and class.

The Black autobiographies, the Dalit autobiographies, the gay and lesbian

autobiographies, autobiographies of the disabled, autobiographies of geisha and

sex workers, autobiographies of ethnic minorities and so on attain complex

magnitudes; for, they question not only the hegemonic, heterosexual,

patriarchal, normative regimes but also bring an alternative sense of the self

and identity, worldview and perspective into existence. Analysis of works like

these necessarily makes autobiographical criticism transdisciplinary, drawing

heavily from Cultural Studies, Feminism, Psycho analysis and so on.

Marginalised groups, be it in terms of race, colour, class or gender,

reside in a negative relationship to power. The degree and kind of power and

powerlessness may differ, but they do inhabit structures of power. An

interrogation of the spaces that the subaltern autobiographies inhabit enables

one to see the effect of power on subaltern subjects and the element of

resistance written into them. This makes the subaltern autobiography not

merely a literary act but a political act. Subaltern autobiography is synonymous

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with survival literature. To articulate is to survive. Subaltern autobiographies

are narratives of resistance. This in turn implies a “political” reading of

subaltern autobiography. The questions of the self, representation,

autobiographical truth, autobiographical pact, language, narrative, authenticity

attain ideological dimensions when subaltern autobiographies are concerned.

The state of subordination of a community/group entails that its identity

is conditioned by the dominant community/group. In this context,

Janice Morgan argues: “. . . to be marginalized to a dominant culture is also to

have had little or no say in the construction of one’s socially acknowledged

identity”(Perkins,2000:44). What Valerie Smith speaks about the

African-American autobiography becomes pertinent to all those who occupy

subaltern position and attempt to construct a narrative of the self:

Simply to write the story of his or her own life represent[s] an

assault’ on the line of reasoning that assumes and perpetuates the

construct that African Americans do not live…as fully

imaginative, significant, intellectual, and complex lives as the

dominant American community, ‘since to make oneself the

subject of a narrative presumes both the worth of that self and its

interest for a reader. (qtd in Danahay,1991:67)

While dominant Indian society has identified the marginalized communities

including Dalits, tribals and sex workers as “inferior” and “polluted,” the

subaltern autobiographers “re-write” selfhood, in their description of their lives

and the life of their community. Women, ethnic minorities, people of colour

and so on are not considered by the main stream society as capable of writing a

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life narrative, for that presumes the existence of the notion of autonomous self.

Hence the act of writing autobiography by a subaltern becomes a measure of

resistance against oppression and hegemony. It is an act imbued with political

connotations.

Autobiographies, and especially subaltern autobiographies are conceived

politically, as Antonio Gramsci has pointed out:

autobiography therefore replaces the "political" or

"philosophical" essay: it describes in action what otherwise is

deduced logically. Autobiography certainly has a great historical

value in that it shows life in action and not just as written laws or

dominant moral principles say it should be. (Forgacs,1985:132)

Autobiographies thus call for more complex and equipped critical and reading

strategies. They are not mere explications of the self, but intricate platforms of

political performance. Autobiography  as  a  genre  has  an  important  place  in 

subaltern ideology as it proves that there are many versions of reality: 

Autobiography now has the potential to be the text of the

oppressed, the culturally displaced, forging a right to speak both

for and beyond the individual. People in positions of

powerlessness – women, black people - have more than begun

to insert themselves into the culture via autobiography via the

assertion of the personal voice… .(Swindells,1995: 7)

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Autobiography is considered a channel through which identity can be

formulated:

The idea that autobiography can become the text of the oppressed

articulating through one’s personal experience, experiences

which may be representative of a particular marginalized group is

an important one: autobiography becomes both a way of

testifying to oppression and empowering the subject through

their cultural inscription and recognition. (Anderson,2001: 104)

Autobiography is thus a platform for the exploration and explication of the self.

The subjects of subaltern autobiographical narratives speak from

marginal locations. Discovering new ways of thinking and exploring marginal

locations involve thinking about gender and race as a politics of domination.

In this regard, bell hooks remarks: “Racism and sexism are interlocking

systems of domination which uphold and sustain one another” (1990:59).

Hierarchies of race and gender overlap to reinforce the state of subordination of

the subalterns. The subjectivity of subaltern autobiography is constructed in

the encounter between power and powerlessness, domination and subjugation.

Women, all over the world, have been relegated to the margin, being

treated as “the other” by the patriarchal social order. There has always been a

gender line drawn between “we” the men and “they” the women. This

demarcating line not only divides people into two categories but also implies a

hierarchy. Men are seen as strong, rational and superior, possessing a strong

and unique sense of the self whereas women are considered weak, emotional,

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inferior and not even having a true sense of the self or self respect. Their “self”

often remain effaced or defaced. The boundary between the private and the

public sphere is sharply delineated for them. The feminine self is denied or

subdued. Over the years, a new consciousness of women’s power and the need

to liberate women from the circumscribing notions of patriarchal society have

led to women’s liberation movements. This has resulted, though to a limited

extent, in a new awakening, a new sense of empowerment in women,

encouraging her to articulate “her” story instead of “his” story. Women’s

personal narratives give us the victim’s perspective on the situation of

inequality. The patriarchal society cautions that the story of herself, her

identity, her existence are not to pass on, to remember, to re-vision. Yet the

woman writer tells it, putting a narrative to what has been the un- narratable,

adding shape to the shapeless, forcing the life into written language, taking on

the role of the reporter, teller, betrayer, cannibalist.

The male theoretical positions of autobiography usually neglect

women’s experience. However, feminist scholarship has succeeded

significantly in establishing a new perspective on women’s life writing

practices. Women belonging to different walks of life and different socio-

cultural contexts have, over the centuries, dared to place their private lives in

the public domains. Their narratives of the self offer outright challenge to the

conventional model of the unique and enlightened individual (usually a man)

whose life is worth knowing about because of his exceptional character. This

has necessitated a reframing of previous definitions of autobiography, as

proposed by earlier Western European male scholars like

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George Gusdorf (1956) and Karl Joach(1978). They consider autobiographical

writings the product of a conscious awareness of the singularity of each

individual life and the result of a concept of the unique and autonomous

individual that developed from the European Enlightenment. James Olney,

while contemplating on the engaging aspects of autobiographical writings, has

tried to focus greatly on the maleness. These humanist positions, according

centrality to the human subject, celebrate autobiographies as individual

examples illustrating the master narrative of a supposedly universal evolution

towards clarity and autonomy.

Feminist theory of autobiography is recent, dating from the mid 1980s

with Adrienne Rich’s Notes for a Politics of Location. Where traditional

autobiographical criticism defines “good” autobiography as strong, individual

and representative, feminist theory, in opposition, argues that women’s

autobiographies share gynocentric features. Critics suggest that women’s

autobiographies emphasise the personal over the professional, lack strong

self-images and a firm, linear narrative (Jelinek,1980: 25) . Through life-writing

in a range of forms and media, women can shatter the existing cultural hall of

mirrors that imprisons them and break the silence imposed on them by male

speech. Domna Stanton prefers to call such writings by women that challenge

the male model “autogynographies” or “autographs” (1984). But

Leigh Gilmore coined the term “autogynographics” (1994). The difference is

only a question of nomenclature. Rita Felski has coined the term

“feminist confessional” to describe the sub- genre of autobiographical writing

which presents “the most personal and intimate details of the author's life”

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in order to create a bond between the “female author and female

reader” (Felski,1989: 88). For feminist writers an authentic self-narrative is

possible if they denounce and avoid patriarchal constructs or "narratives,"

characterized by manipulation and aggression so typical of masculine

narratives. Women’s autobiographical narratives should also avoid

conventional language, with its gendered elements and stereotyping. Instead,

women’s autobiography should discover or invent a peculiar feminine voice

that could speak with authority outside of the cultural tyranny exercised by men

in the past.

For the female autograph, who, in the words of Estelle Jelinek, has

always felt herself to be “different from, other than, or outside the male world,”

the boundary line between narrative construction and memory, representation

and reality, fact and fiction has never been clearly delineated (1986: 187).

Women’s autobiographies tend to be less linear, unified, and chronological than

men's autobiographies. The autobiographical works of Adrienne Rich,

Mary McCarthy, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Carolyn Heilbrun are cases in

point. Women's autobiographies are often novelistic, women's novels

autobiographical. On account of the continual crossing of the self and the

other, the continual conversation among the voices, women's writings often blur

the border between the public and the private. Molly Hite's definition of the

genre as “a revisionary activity [which] reinscribes a prescribed subjectivity in

another register in order to bring a somewhat different self into being”

underlines the revisionary agenda of the female autograph (Thomas,1999: 30).

The rhetoric of the female autobiographer inscribes the feminine conversation

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rather than the masculine dialectic. Her story is the timeless, quintessential

woman's story of irreducible and irreconcilable gendered-language limitations.

Women’s autobiography is a form of criticism that subverts masculinist

articulation of the self. Theorising on modern women’s

autobiographies, Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenk write:

The masculine tradition of autobiography beginning with

Augustine had taken as its first premise the mirroring capacity of

the autobiographer: his universality, his representativeness,

his role as the spokesman for the community. But only a critical

ideology that reifies a unified, transcendent self can expect to see

in the mirror of autobiography a self whose depths can be

plumbed, whose heart can be discovered, and whole essence can

be definitively known. No mirror of her era, , the female

autobiographer takes as given, that selfhood is mediated; her

invisibility results from her lack of a tradition, her marginality in

male-dominated culture, her fragmentation - social and political

as well as psychic. At both extremes of subjectivity and

publicity, the female autobiographer has lacked the sense of

radical individuality, duplicitous but useful that empowered

Augustine and Henry Adams to write their representative lives at

large. A feminist reconstruction of women’s autobiography,

against the backdrop of twentieth-century philosophical

questioning of the self, can begin to use autobiography for the

fertile ground it is. Autobiography localizes the very program of

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much feminist theory of reclaiming the female subject - even as

it foregrounds the central issues of contemporary critical thought

- the problematic status of the self. (1988:1-2)

Autobiographies of women give a platform to interrogate the interrelations of

the construction of self and gender, self and representation, self, culture and

society.

Several autobiographers think that the conventional mode of

autobiography is inadequate for the expression of the self in contemporary

times. In this regard, Alison Light remarks in “Writing Lives”:

Much autobiography has been founded on the notion of

confession, but in late twentieth century such a concept proves

inadequate when the writer is the witness to and victim of

traumatic events, like World War II, the Holocaust or the nuclear

bomb, which overwhelm our ability to assimilate them and which

exceed our capacity to understand. Such traumatic histories

cannot simply be incorporated into narratives since they may

only be known by a gap or collapse of understanding but it is

these incoherences and suspension which come to carry the most

significance. (Marcus and Nicholls, 2004: 764)

Conventional autobiographies are confessional whereas contemporary

autobiographies are expressions of traumatic experiences of the individual and

society. The latter have many gaps and voids in their narratives. It is these gaps

and incoherences which make them significant.

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Women’s difference as reflected in the form and content of their

autobiographies requires a different emphasis: “It flies in the face of

conventional modes of representation, producing a multiplicity which cannot be

captured within one and the same, the singular “I” of masculine discourse”

(Anderson,2001:98). Women’s autobiographies open up the question of the

feminine as a challenge to the phallic or masculine order. It resists the

masculine subjectivity which is taken as the norm. By exploring the repressed,

fragmented, inchoate psychic and personal realms, women’s autobiographies

undermine the unity and universality of “I” as claimed by the masculine

subject. Women’s autobiographies inscribe a version of female subjectivity and

difference that challenges the “naive conflation of male subjectivity and human

identity” (Smith,1987: 17). Women’s autobiography challenges the rigidity,

fixity and linearity of the self.

Autobiography has been a major form of working class women’s writing

in Britain since eighteenth century with writers such as Mary Collier.

Margery Kempe is supposed to be the first woman to compose her life story in

English and that story is the earliest extant autobiography in English.

Margery Kempe gave voice to a largely silent and unsung force, the voice of

the middle-class, uneducated woman determined to be understood on her own

terms. Harriet A. Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl(1861) inaugurated

a tradition of American Black women’s autobiographies, grounded in the

experience of slavery and confronting issues of readership and genre.

In India, due to lack of education and the circumscription of rigid

patriarchal society, women lagged behind men for over a century in writing

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autobiographies. It was in late nineteenth century that some upper caste Indian

women started writing their personal narratives–which included

autobiographies, personal letters, diaries, memoirs and so on. The earliest

instances of women’s autobiographies in India are in Bengali and Marathi.

Rassundari Devi’s two-part autobiography Amar Jiban (Bengali, 1868

and 1897), Ramabai Ranade’s Amchya Ayushatil Kahi Athavani

(Marathi, 1910), Binodini Dasi’s two part autobiography, Amar Katha and

Amar Abhinetri Jiban (Bengali, 1912 and 1924), Lakshmibai Tilak’s

Smriti Chitre (Marathi, 1934) are prominent among the early autobiographies

by women. The later autobiographies of prominence include

Ramadevi Chaudhuri’s Jiwan Pathe ( Oriya, 1984). Women’s autobiographies

in India, in its various phases of development, moved from a heavily domestic

orientation in which their lives revolve around their husbands, to a life in which

social and political struggles take on importance. In the later phase, the

autobiographies showed a remarkable interweaving of domestic, personal and

public spheres.

The first autobiographical narrative by a woman in Malayalm language

is considered to be Vyazavatta Smarnakal (1916) by B. Kalyani Amma.

It centres on the agonizing struggle of the narrator, the wife of a renowned

journalist and freedom fighter. Another, Oru Streeyude Mayatha Smaranakal

( Unvanishing Memoirs of a Woman ) (1956) reflects maternal anxieties in the

turbulent period of the second world war in Borneo. Balamani Amma’s

Jeevithathiloode ( Through Life) ( 1969) is an introspective account of a

poetic mind. Lalithambika Antharjanam’s Atmakathaykoramugham

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(A Preface to an Autobiography) (1979) is a balanced account of her domestic

and literary lives. Kamala Das’s My Story inaugurated a new era of women

autobiographical writing in Malayalam for its bold challenge to conventions

in life and writing.

The addition of the coordinates of class, caste or ethnicity to the

subjectivity of the autobiographer creates a rather complex personal and

political space. Men and women belonging to the margins on account of their

class, race, ethnicity and caste, specifically in the Indian context, have a

different story to tell, an alternate picture to unveil compared to their

mainstream counterparts. Their autobiographies are not mere voyages in

discovery of the self, but they become acts of resistance. Autobiographical

narratives become a way of asserting not only one’s self, but one’s presence.

They take on the garb not only of personal narratives but also become political

performances. Literature becomes an expression of racial, sexual and gender

identity. Black autobiography in the West and Dalit autobiography in India

become explications of how race and ethnicity, caste and colour rob people off

their basic dignity and right to lead a dignified existence. These people have

been traditionally subjected to onerous social and civil disabilities. They are

always segregated as the residual category of people and chained to meekness,

passive acceptance and docility. But attempts to revolt and articulate have

always been there. When those doomed to silence dare to speak out they

become truly political acts of resistance. For Dalit writers, autobiography often

constitutes their primary political act of assertion. Thus, for the

Dalit community, like many other marginalized groups, autobiography is not

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simply a kind of literature but is a form of affirmation and resistance in its own

right.

Narrative and autobiography have been used as a means of political

assertion by marginalized groups. The autobiographical narrative is perceived

as the actual site of the power struggle where the voice of the marginalized

individual contests the institutionalized narrative of the dominant group. In this

context, Barbara Harlow observes:

If resistance poetry challenged the dominant and hegemonic

discourse of an occupying or colonizing power by attacking the

symbolic foundations of that power and erecting symbolic

structures of its own—resistance narratives go further still in

analyzing the relations of power which sustain the system of

domination and exploitation. (1987:85)

The subaltern autobiographies narrate the past experiences of oppression and

struggle. But at the same time, they expose the continuation of subjugation,

discrimination and the power structures and belief systems that support the

practice of creating Otherness.

Robert Sayre, in his study of American autobiography, categorises

autobiographers mainly into four: those engaging in a literary consciousness,

those promoting a certain kind of secularization, those writing from the core of

their experiences and those writing along ideological and political

lines (Kumar,2010: 158). The Dalit autobiographers in Indian context leans

heavily on the last two categories. The strength of their autobiographies,

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however, is that they are able to extend the boundaries

further by providing a narrative discourse of an untouchable self.

Hazari’s Untouchable: The Autobiography of an Indian Outcaste (1951) is

supposed to be the first Dalit autobiography. Laxman Mane’s Upara (1997),

D.P Das’ The Untouchable Story (1985), Lakshman Gaikwad’s The Branded

(1998) and Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan: A Dalit’s Life (2003) are some of

the bold attempts in Dalit autobiography to break the culture of silence.

Unlike the mainstream autobiographical tradition giving prime focus to

the personal achievements or dogmas of an individual self, the subaltern

autobiography tends to point out the exclusion of people like them from the

“imagined community” of the nation. These narratives tend to fight against the

communal self of the society that discriminate them. This creates an inherent

narrative tension in subaltern autobiography. The subaltern autobiographers

move away from the non-subaltern tradition in delineating their geneology at

the outset. The narrative focuses on the unveiling of the pain and discrimination

of the past, of unraveling the bias and prejudices burdened on their self.

Subaltern autobiographies are often seen to represent groups, they also provide

an image or symbol; both meanings of representation overlap here, and both

implications remain political. Autobiography becomes a means to reach out to

the community of the oppressed and to create a sense of awareness and sparks

of resistance.

The agenda of the autobiography of the marginalized is not localized

individualism but links the individual to his entire community as a way of

gaining power and support in a group struggle against similarly experienced

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oppression. In this regard, Genero Padilla notes in his “The Self as Cultural

Metaphor in Acosta's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo”:

Unlike the traditional notion that the autobiographical "I" stands

isolated, consumed in scrutinizing an autonomous self, the

fundamental identification between the "I" and the "We" is a

principle of ethnic autobiographical consciousness. (1984:254)

Subaltern autobiographies certainly invoke multiple subjectivities where the

individual ‘I’ is linked to the communal “We.” But an interrogation of the

“representative” nature of the subject in subaltern autobiographies leads one to

encounter the patriarchal powers at play even in Subaltern autobiographies.

The gendered nature of subaltern subjectivity has rarely been explored. The

“We” of subaltern autobiographies often exclude the class of women.

One example is the case of Dalit women, who are almost entirely absent in

Joothan and considerably so in Tiraskrit. Though the protagonist associates

himself with other Dalit friends and the Dalit community as a whole, the “We”

that has come to mean “all Dalits” is also decidedly male. There is silence

regarding the subaltern women’s agency. This is where C.K Janu’s

Mother Forest and Nalini Jameela’s The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

become exceptional. The autobiographies of these subaltern women attain

meaningful proportions. Even the autobiographies claiming to represent the

subalterns are phallocentric, marginalizing the marginalized women.

Mother Forest and The Autobiography of a Sex Worker boldly voice the silence

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of this muted group of women who are the victims of multiple

marginalization/oppression.

The dominant patriarchal social structure associates even the ethnic

“self” with male subjectivity. The complex issue of gender politics becomes

central for ethnic autobiography and representations of ethnicity. Thus,

representing the ethnic subject becomes more complex and problematic when

the ethnic is a woman. Not only the autobiographical subjects themselves, but

the paradigmatic structures for examining ethnic cultures and ethnic

autobiographies have assumed the male as universal subject. Such structures

mask the patriarchal patterns of domination and subordination for most ethnic

females. When the author in question is a subaltern woman, the personal

narratives attain profound political significance. The complexity of subaltern

representation, the contested nature of subaltern identity, and the political

dimensions of subaltern autobiography are aggravated when the subject

position is adorned by subaltern women. They occupy multiple cross points of

marginality. Being a subaltern and a woman is a deadly combination and to

dare to write from such a space itself becomes a deeply political operation. This

is what C.K Janu and Nalini Jameela attempt through their attempts at

autobiographical constructions. The problems of self-construction,

representation, cultural paradigms involved and ideological traces implicated

attain multiple nuances when applied to the autobiographies of subaltern

women. Their autobiographical narratives are useful vehicles for exploring not

only the political dimension of identity construction but also the ethical fabric

of the social worlds in which they emerge.

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Lack of education has been an obstructing factor preventing the personal

narrations of subaltern women. An exception is Bama’s Karukku , a potent

statement of a subaltern woman, which vociferously condemns all forms of

oppression, be it caste, class or gender. However, orally narrated

autobiographies which are transliterated and transformed by others can be

found in Indian literature. Sumitra Bhave’s Pan on Fire(1988), is a

collection of narrated autobiographies of eight Dalit women.

Viramma: Life Story of an Untouchable is another mediated Dalit

autobiography which is significant in the way the text reproduces the Paraya

language to reinvent the Paraya tradition. Viramma’s life history reveals how a

victim of the caste system consciously uses her lower caste identity to her

advantage and to an extent succeeds in it. This is My Story and Song(2000)

by Sarasu depicts the story of a woman crippled by an additional dimension of

physical illness. Saira Banu’s Dupe (2010) reveals the never before said life of

women who act as dupe to the heroine in pornographic films. These

autobiographical narratives raise a whole new array of issues and demand a

novel way of interrogating them.

C.K. Janu’s autobiographical narrative Mother Forest is an attempt from

the margins of society to carve out a sense of the self. The text is the voice of a

community of tribals who are driven to the periphery. They occupy a

completely different social arena, away from the centre. Mother Forest is the

translation of the autobiography of C.K.Janu , the vibrant tribal leader.

Written by Bhaskaran and translated from Malayalam by N. Ravi Shanker, the

story is a saga of the struggle of C. K. Janu, an energetic woman who is

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fighting for her people’s cause. It is in fact the translation of the transliteration

of an oral text. It is the translation of the oral autobiography of C.K Janu as told

to Bhaskaran. The Malayalam transliteration of the oral text titled

Janu: C.K Januvinte Jeevitha Katha is translated into English by

Ravi Shanker, under the title Mother Forest: The Unfinished Story of C.K Janu.

Nalini Jameela’s autobiography, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker, embodies

a community of women, whose very presence is considered polluting the

sanctity of ideal womanhood. The “self” of this community called sex workers

is imprinted with images of the Other. Their very existence is identified by the

sense of Otherness – Other to man and Other to the Malayali female ideal. The

existence of a proper sense of the self is deemed impossible in the case of these

female subalterns. They are the marginalized among the marginalized bearing

the stigmas of caste, colour, gender, class and moreover, morality. The attempt

of these subaltern women to write autobiographical narratives, to construct a

personal narrative of the self is an intrepid feat, attempts that may be the first of

their kind. Being the narratives of subaltern women, and especially by those

women who are illiterate or semiliterate, these autobiographical narratives defy

the traditional concept of autobiography. They refuse to be pinned down to the

theoretical frameworks of traditional autobiographical narratives; by their very

nature they are elusive and enigmatic. The self in question is a fluid matrix,

embedded with equations of power and powerlessness, hegemony, domination

and subjugation.

The autobiographies of C.K Janu and Nalini Jameela capture the

tensions which grow out of a continuous battle between “loss of identity”

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and “assertion of the self”. The subaltern women are one of the most exploited

peripheral groups in society. They live in subhuman conditions, suffer

economic and sexual exploitations, cultural subjugation and political

powerlessness. The autobiographies are constructed by them, as members of

oppressed groups, to attain a sense of identity and mobilise resistance against

the forces of oppression. The autobiographers try to construct a sense of

“the self,” the very fact which was deemed absent or socially conditioned to be

absent as far as the subaltern women are concerned. The narrators boldly

attempt to forge a “Self,” but the self in the autobiography of a subaltern

woman is not synonymous with the notion or representation of the self in

traditional autobiographies. The self here occupies a gravely different cultural,

political, ideological and personal space imbued with divergent hues and tones.

The earlier autobiographical tradition explicated by Confessions and

The Story My Experiments With Truth presented public figures enjoying a

prime status in society. The tension that is ridden in the autobiographical

narrative is often inward. The trauma is internal; it is a reflection of the

pressures of epistemological rendezvous on a psychological plane, be it the pain

of repentance and redemption in Confessions or obsession with truth and

righteousness in My Experiments With Truth. The autobiographical narratives

of the subaltern women, however, expound a tension that is outward. The

tension in the narrative arises out of the struggle of the self against society.

Social purpose rather than individual dogmas attain prime focus in subaltern

women’s autobiography.

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Autobiography is usually defined as a retrospective resurrection of the

past. However, the narratives of C.K Janu and Nalini Jameela focus not on the

retrospective reflection of the past, but the use of the past to lead to a better

future. They are futuristic rather than retrospective. Their autobiographies take

on the form of resistance texts that are future-oriented rather than merely

reflecting the past. The subaltern autobiography is a narrative of pain. This is

the dominating narrative aura in most subaltern autobiographies, especially the

Dalit Autobiography. Omprakash Valmiki begins his autobiography,

Joothan: A Dalit’s Life with an assertive statement: “Dalit life is excruciatingly

painful, charred by experiences. Experiences that did not manage to find room

in literary creation. We have grown up in a social order that is extremely cruel

and inhuman. And compassionless towards Dalits” (2003:vii). Both critics and

Dalit writers themselves describe Dalit autobiographies as “narratives of pain.”

It is pain which strings one narrative event to the next, and it is pain that binds

individual Dalits together into an “imagined community” of fellow sufferers.

The narratives of the subaltern women, Janu and Jameela, are not mere

narratives of pain, but the experience of oppression is transformed into

narratives of resistance. They narrate strength rather than weakness, courage

rather than meekness, action rather than words, resilience rather than pain and

suffering. The experience of oppression does not imprison their selves in

eternal victimhood, but it is used as a weapon to mobilise resistance against

forces of tyranny.

Mother Forest and The Autobiography of a Sex Worker are

significantly different from the autobiographies of other marginalized groups,

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including Dalit autobiography. Dalit autobiographies loom large with a sense of

discontent with the self. The fact of being an untouchable and the consequent

discrimination and agony have left such traumatic scars in the interior

landscapes of the Dalits that they never celebrate their self, their identity. The

continuation of discrimination and oppression demoralizes their conscious

mind. They seem to be insecure throughout the narration of their

autobiographies. In the autobiographies of even the most accomplished Dalits,

this sense of discontent with oneself prevails. They fail to rise to the higher

realm of self-respect, self-esteem and self–celebration. Self-respect is one of the

basic premises of self-celebration. The construction of the self in Janu’s and

Jameela’s autobiographies differs from usual subaltern autobiography in this

sense. They celebrate their “self” with all vigour and vivacity. They never reject

or disclaim their identity but bravely, loudly proclaim it. They revel in their

difference. Their difference from the mainstream society is the root of their

identity and self and they celebrate it. It is the politics of difference, the politics

of subaltern construction of the self that comes to the forefront.

Celebrating the self is equivalent to survival for these subaltern women.

Affirmation of the self through articulation is the only way for them to feel

whole, to feel alive, to retain the sense of pride and dignity. Their articulation is

in the tradition of Scheherazade of Arabian Nights. Articulation, narration

becomes the only tool to survive. That is why the autobiographical attempts of

the subaltern women become survival literature. They fight against all odds, the

inhuman suppression and oppression of society, all attempts to thwart their

sense of the self and existence and find enough courage and strength

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to celebrate their “self.” Their autobiographies become open statements of

rebellion against the hegemonic norms of society. Society wants the subalterns

to feel subordinate, discontent, inferior and thus hate and reject their own

selfhood. This, in turn, is a strategy to cement the mainstream society’s sense of

superiority and self-respect. But Janu and Jameela thwart these expectations

and prejudices and mark a new beginning through their autobiographies. They

not only celebrate their identity and selfhood but also demand others to do the

same. This is evident when Nalini Jameela narrates the incident during the

interview for Asianet News Hour:

Then later when I appeared on Asianet News Hour, there was the

question about what I was doing to end sex work. I replied that

my desire was to maintain it. Many did not like this. But since

this was a live programme, it couldn’t be edited. (109)

She refuses to bow down in shame and promise to alter her ways. Rather she

articulates her stands boldly and demands the mainstream society to

acknowledge sex workers. This celebration, is however, part of their strategy to

survival, survival not only of themselves but also of their communities. The

communal self is narrativised and rejuvenated rather than the individual self.

Janu and Jameela are well aware that the world is halved into “us” and

“them,” into abjects and subjects, as Judith Butler has expressed it:

This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus

requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject

beings, those who are not yet "subjects," but who form the

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constitutive domain of the subject. The abject designates

precisely those "unlivable" and "uninhabitable" zones of social

life which are nevertheless densely- populated by those who do

not enjoy the status of the subject. (1993:3)

As a category of the abject, the subalterns tend to be subject to the moral

imperatives of the mainstream ideology, internalising the qualities that mark

them as the Other. The autobiographical narratives of C.K Janu and

Nalini Jameela, by the end of the autobiographical journey, present a self that

has decided to become a subject, able to open up a space for herself and her

kind, through and because of difference. By disidentifying with the ideal of a

stable, unified and disembodied Platonic or Cartesian subject, and inhabiting a

body that has been socially coded as abject, they learn to turn the abject inside

out. Looking for physical inclusion in the world, they have "amassed an

encyclopedia of exceptionalism for their own use" (Rodriguez, 2002: 210).

Janu and Jameela refuse to be abjects but decide to be subjects.

The autobiographical narratives of C.K Janu and Nalini Jameela involve

not only the construction of the self but also a construction of one's culture.

The Western and Eastern traditions of autobiographical narratives are

essentially the explication of an individual self, bold and sovereign. But the

autobiographical narratives of these subaltern women construct not an

individual self but a communal self. Autobiography constructs a life;

ethnic autobiography constructs a life and a community. They expose multiple

traces of the past in ethnic communities often seen in opposition to prevailing

power structures. They serve as instruments of collective opposition

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to oppressive power and document the effects of long-term struggle on ethnic

lives and communities. As the narratives respond to “the threat of cultural,

social and historical effacement,” these personal narratives often displace the

self-possessed “I” with a cultural “We.” These autobiographies are no longer

versions of individualized unitary self, narrating the events of their lives as in

traditional autobiographies. The self is not that of an “unrepeated and

unrepeatable” ‘I’ but ‘We’(Olney,1980:21). In Janu’s narrative there is a

constant oscillation between the narrative voices “I” and “We”. The voice

“We” pertain to their community, the tribal community in Janu’s narrative .

Janu states:

nobody knows the forest like we do. the forest is mother to us.

more than a mother because she never abandons us. . . when

strangers came we just melted into the forest.(5) [Italics mine]

The self that is created by Janu is not individual but communal. The strong

sense of Adiyar community as a single whole with their strong relation to forest

as their guardian brings in the ethos of the tribal community. In Janu’s

narrative, the narrative voices often merge.

Nalini Jameela’s narrative invokes the collective consciousness of the

community of sex workers and oppressed women. When Nalini Jameela says,

“We demand that sex work be decriminalized” (110) or “I believe that what we

need is not sympathy or compassion, but acceptance” (111) or “When we talk

of work as a profession, that doesn’t mean that we always enjoy doing it” (112)

or “We consider our homes to be the most private of all spaces” (116), she

invokes the community of sex workers as whole. In these contexts, the

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individual self merges with the communal self. The knowledge

of their oppression and needs function as the adhesive bond.

What Stephen Butterfield writes of African-American autobiographies is

equally true of the autobiographies of Janu and Jameela: “ . . . the self belongs

to the people, and the people find a voice in the self”(1974:3). In the

autobiography of the gendered subaltern, the entire life-narrative is based on

the idea of the communal identity.

The autobiographies of subaltern women are often called relational life

writing, for these autobiographies feature the decisive impact on the

autobiographer of an entire social environment such as family or community at

large. The writing subject views and narrates her story from the prism of

intersecting lives. C.K Janu’s autobiography is relational in that her life story is

rather the story of her life in relation to her community. Landscape looms large

as an influential presence and the development of the self of the individual and

the community is an extension of the signifier, the forest.

Jameela’s autobiography places herself in the community of sex workers,

women who are tied by the common denominator of moral degradation and

promiscuity. Relational life writing challenges the fundamental paradigm of the

independent self of traditional autobiography as well as the concept of

monologic representation.

Subjectivity in these autobiographies is complicated by the intricate

connection between the individual self and the communal self. The self that is

evoked is not monolithic but plural. There is a plurality of selves, the plurality

being the outcome of a strong and indissoluble identification with their

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community. The focalization shifts quickly among the individual protagonist,

other subaltern friends, community members and the marginalised community

as subjects in their own right. It can be said that there are innumerable subjects

within the subaltern women’s autobiography, all bound by their identity as the

marginalized and oppressed.

The agenda of the autobiographical narratives of C.K Janu and

Nalini Jameela is not merely the construction of the self hitherto denied to the

community of subaltern women. But issues of politics and power remain as the

subtexts of their personal stories. The forces of oppression, of hegemony and

domination that tend to annihilate the very existence of their respective

communities, are exposed in these autobiographical narratives. Mother Forest

explicates the cunning core of deception that hides beneath the condescending

benevolence of the mainstream society. Rhetoric of development, growth,

prosperity is subverted and the innate emptiness and shallowness of the so

called “development” are exposed. Janu sees the act of homogenization as a

destructive, debilitating act of annihilating cultural variety and multiplicity.

The Autobiography of a Sex Worker, without mercy, pulls off the mask of

hypocrisy from the so called morally conscious elite society. The double

standards of society, the moral hollowness, the pretense and duplicity all come

under sharp interrogation. Jameela’s self-disclosing, candid, direct view of

contemporary life gives her text a verisimilitude rarely found in subaltern

autobiography. The concern with social injustices and oppression gives the

autobiographical narratives a peculiar political edge. They cease to be mere

personal narratives but become ideological and cultural constructs.

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The power of subaltern autobiography’s narrative agenda is its use of the

author’s life-experiences of pain as a means of political assertion.

The cultural aesthetic attains political heights in these autobiographies. By

writing about their own experiences as the marginalised, Janu and Jameela

reveal two objectives in their autobiographies. One is to contest the basis of

discrimination on the basis of race, class, caste, gender, sexuality and ethnicity.

The other is more obvious and it is to expose the reality behind the institutional

narrative that discrimination no longer functions as a significant force in the

public sphere. These autobiographies constitute a challenge to the institutional

narrative by presenting what they claim as “factual” experiences of bigotry,

subjugation and even humiliation. Janu’s autobiography challenges the master

narratives of development that the mainstream society proudly poses. Jameela’s

autobiography exposes the grand narrative of ethical and moral superiority. The

pretensions and the condescending benevolence of the mainstream society form

a simple, magnificent narrative with hypocrisy and hollowness written into it.

These are just facades, the painful truth that underlies them is one of inhuman

discrimination and malicious torment. Elizabeth Bruss's Autobiographical

Acts (1976) recasts autobiography as an act rather than a form. Autobiographies

must be read as acts -acts of self-aggrandisement, acts of vindictiveness, acts of

self-protection-carried out by the authorial subject. C.K Janu’s and Nalini

Jameela’s autobiographies, seen from this perspective, become acts of

resistance.

The construction of the self is invariably linked to the attempt to

preserve landscape for C.K Janu. The self of the tribal community is

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an extension of the land in which they reside. The landscape becomes the

objective correlative of their personal as well as communal self. The attempt to

forge a self through autobiographical narrative is synonymous with the attempt

to protect their land, the mother forest from the clutches of outsiders, the

intruders. Writing is but an extension of the affinity with landscape which is

rather a cultural landscape.

Writing becomes a surrogate sexual body for Nalini Jameela. The

autobiographical narrative of Nalini Jameela manifests the cultural construction

of the female body. Sexuality is seen as an extension of cultural

commodification and the text interrogates how the cultural and ideological

coordinates can attribute negative performativity to the self of a woman. The

self that is constructed through the redemptive act of writing is a bold one,

which refuses to bow down in shame and agony but stands straight

commanding due respect and dignity. The self that is constructed is intended to

inspire those community of women shackled to shame and guilt. The

autobiographical narratives provoke the down-trodden to undertake a

therapeutic introspection of the self and to cultivate new canons of respect and

value. The narratives testify to victory over the humiliations of the past and the

fears and inhibitions of the present: “They put forth the most precious and

hidden source of inner strength that women wounded by life and overpowered

by the strong, have revived, in order to die with dignity, survive with

self respect, conquer without bitterness, and triumph without

bragging” (Poitevin, 2002:182). The endeavour to redeem a voice and to

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retrieve a space and thus regain the positive nuances of the self is clearly seen

in both the autobiographies.

The form that the autobiographical narratives take becomes an extension

of the rhythms and contours of the self they attempt to represent. The subaltern

women lead a fractured existence. They are never allowed to be whole by the

domineering, dominating mainstream society with its moral, patriarchal and

gender biases. The sense of true being, holistic and organic is thwarted. They

are always outside the realm of the normal, the privileged, the preferred.

The autobiographical attempts of these subaltern women imbibe these aspects

of the self in question and become fragmented. Only a fragmented narrative can

capture the nuances of a fragmented self. The self embodied in the narratives

questions and challenges the hegemonic mainstream prejudices in life and

literature. Their life is a challenge to the circumscribing designs of elite society,

so are their autobiographical narratives. Mother Forest and The Autobiography

of a Sex Worker thwart the homogenizing expectations regarding the form and

content of autobiography. They are not full- fledged autobiographies in the vein

of traditional autobiographies. They claim a different platform, a potentially

diverse horizon by being non-linear, ruptured, fragmented narratives of the

self.

The term metafiction seems to have originated in an essay by the

American critic and self-conscious novelist William H. Gass. Patricia Waugh

notes in her Metafiction that since the 1960s, there is:

a more general cultural interest in the problem of how human

beings reflect, construct and mediate their experience of the

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world. Metafiction pursues such questions through its formal

self-exploration… they provide a useful model for understanding

the construction of subjectivity in the world outside

novels. (1984:2)

The autobiographies of C.K Janu and Nalini Jameela are

meta-autobiographical narratives. They are explicitly concerned about the

problems of autobiographical construction. Being the autobiographies of

subaltern women who lack even the potential of linguistic resources to carve a

written narrative, questions of representation and construction of the self are

invariably dragged into the autobiographical premises. The autobiographies are

oral constructions. They are then transliterated into Malayalam and further

translated into English. The oral narratives take a meandering path through

hands with different cultural and ideological connotations to finally turn into

printed pages in English. The narratives go through a process of mediations and

appropriations before reaching the hands of the readers. The final product that

the readers perceive, by its very nature, invites apprehensions regarding the

process of autobiographical creation.

Nalini Jameela, in her introduction to the revised edition of her life

narrative, points to the intricacies of authorship as far as a semiliterate subaltern

woman writer is concerned. She speaks of the many futile attempts at

authorship:

It’s difficult for me to write. Just when I manage to pick up speed

in writing, a letter goes missing. And when I ferret out the letter

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the idea that I was trying to express has vanished. That was the

trouble, in the first place.

. . . I did try to start as he had advised many times, but I couldn’t

move beyond a few sentences.

. . . After this, I got a school child write for me . . . But nothing

worthwhile came out of this. And so it was also

given up.(2005: v-vi)

She realizes that her attempts at authorship are in vain and she readily accepts

when I.Gopinath comes with a proposal to interview her wherein she can

narrate her life story. This means that she can create an oral life narrative

which he will later transform into graphic mould. D.C Books published this

first version of her autobiography, which was a manifestation of her extended

conversations with her editor. The book raised a hue and cry, but more

importantly Jameela herself was unhappy with the form that her life story took.

She felt alienated from her own self as depicted in the book. However she dared

to withdraw the book from the market and with the help of a group of friends,

revised it and produced a second revised edition. The way she responds to the

debate of the fairness of revising an autobiography speaks volumes about the

strong sense of the self that she attempts to carve in her life construct:

I don’t know if there are rules about these things that apply to

everyone around the world. Even if there are, and I happen to be

the first person to change those rules, let it be so ! After all, when

I started sex work, I didn’t go by custom! (2005:vi)

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The rewriting, revision and reinvention of her past history indicate a

sophisticated understanding of the constructed nature of autobiographical

narratives.

Autobiography creates a set of collateral meanings; it is a source for

multiple metareferences. Autobiography stands for presence, space, voice,

persona and text. Paul L. Jay in his “Being in the Text: Autobiography and the

Problem of Subject” remarks: “Autobiography [is a] paradigm for writing as

such; either as the mode of confronting the inaugural gesture of writing

involved in all discourse, or as a privileged mark of the text's

self- referentiality"( 1982:1045). While autobiography constitutes the "venture"

of "a subject in search of identity," the contradictions inherent in such a

constitutive enterprise are inseparably linked to the more general contradictions

inherent to writing itself, where there is always a "radical disappropriation" of

identity by language. The "disappropriation" of the subject's identity by

language in the activity of writing is an extension, a representation, of that

same "disappropriation" as it occurs in the very activity of thinking the "self"

into "being"(Jay,1982:1046). The texts Mother Forest and The Autobiography

of a Sex Worker can be treated as metacommentaries on the act of constructing

the self. It invokes questions regarding the primary relationship between

language and identity, highlighting the literary nature of the work. The

narrator's voyage of discovery can ultimately be read as a coming to authorship.

For these subaltern women, their autonomous identities are confirmed when

they manage to politicize their personal experiences through the publication of

their first book.

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The two texts are complex manifestations of cultural, feminist,

linguistic, ideological concerns. The subjects creating the texts are cross points

of multiple levels of marginalization. The dynamics of race, class and gender

converge to shape the particular texts. There are also the problems of mediation

and appropriation involved in the process of transliteration and translation.

These factors call for a reading of these autobiographical narratives as a

context, “the locus of the complex intersections - at once intergenderal,

intertextual and interdisciplinary - of modern thought”(Durham,1992:1).

Mother Forest and The Autobiography of a Sex Worker combine historical

content and the metafictional mode of writing, a form of writing which, in the

words of Patricia Waugh:

self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status

as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship

between fiction and reality," and, furthermore, such writings

"explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary

fictional text. (1984:2)

The autobiographical narratives of C.K Janu and Nalini Jameela pose questions

regarding the problematic affiliation between representation and reality.

The meta-autobiographical narratives of Janu and Jameela at once

gesture to the limitations of the theoretically naive self-knowing subject, and

the continuing cultural validity of and desire for narrative, identification,

self-expression and referentiality. These narratives demonstrate how the

representation of the postmodern, gendered, semi-literate subaltern subject

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involves an attention to authoriality, to the possibilities of textual

experimentation and to the cultural sites that legitimize the production of

meaning. Rather than just invoking questions regarding the truth of what they

are saying, Janu’s and Jameela’s texts, evoke questions of larger connotations:

questions involving the positioning of the self, cultural space, authoriality, and

the autobiographical process with its appropriation and mediation, ideological

and cultural cores. They lead one to consider the theoretical, cultural and

epistemological issues involved in representing the self. Mere adherence to the

“autobiographical pact,” as envisaged by Philip Lejeune seems insufficient to

articulate the intricate nuances of the subaltern autobiographical narrative .

The texts pose serious questions about the problematic and self-reflexivity of

autobiographical process.

Reading a narrative that explicitly or implicitly tempts the readers to

identify the journey of a female self striving to become the subject of her own

discourse, the narrator of her own story, is to witness the unfolding of an

autobiographical project. The oscillating use of the first person singular and

plural, effecting a potential merging of the individual and communal self, and

the deliberateness with which that "I"/”We” constructs its contours, and

inscribes its position vis-a-vis others and as writing/narrating subject, mark an

undeniable engagement with the autobiographical genre. Although the act of

self-writing is undeniably present within it, it is inextricably linked to the

narration and representation of other subjects, other practices, other events.

These narratives, inherently meta- autobiographical by nature, call for

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a trans-disciplinary analysis. They refuse to be mere literary constructs, but

become cultural platforms.

The autobiographical narratives of Janu and Jameela attempt to reorient

the textual space of autobiographical practice by the kinds of textual strategies

pursued. They refuse to be linear narratives, full- fledged and constituting a

retrospective meditation. They are fractured, analytical and in a way radical in

the liberty taken with language. There is a refusal in the transliterated pieces to

adhere to the grammatical system of language. The voice is polyphonic. The

text is dialogic rather than monologic. The language used is carnivalesque.

The texts depict the dialectic relationship of the subaltern self with an

inhospitable society and the form of the texts evolves with the development of

the self. Together these textual strategies constitute a kind of generic

transmutation of autobiography as a “genre.” These meta-autobiographical

narratives invalidate the circumscribing notions of form and content

constituting a bipolar pair as far as the category called autobiography is

concerned.

Through the fragmented, discursive, meta-autobiographical practices of

Janu and Jameela, the problematical gendered subaltern subject is written into

the autobiographical text as a "disappropriated" subject. In the course of doing

so, they drastically and aptly problematise the very form of autobiography

itself. The postmodern and poststructuralist engagement with the crisis of

subjectivity figures in these works to redefine both content and form. This crisis

is the point of departure from the metanarratives of the sovereign self. It is a

beginning which at once ravages and reanimates the form of autobiography.

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The problematical attempt at self-representation becomes central to both

the conflict and the ideological project of women’s autobiography. They break

both male discursive canons to record the story of their lives: “Recording their

own distinctively female experience, they are secretly working

through and within the conventions of literary texts to define their own

lives” (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979: 87). The autobiographies of Janu and Jameela

take a form that records not only the distinct female experience but also the

distinct subaltern female experience. Their autobiographies are the subaltern

reconstruction of the autobiographical form. These meta- autobiographical

texts self-reflexively confront the process of autobiographical and

confessional narrative. They emphasise the subject in process, while drawing

upon the project of autobiography itself to signify the agency in

self-representation; for self is a process of becoming. The texts deal with both

the ideological voices of female difference and the generic project of

autobiography that is “androcentric.” The subjects being in positions of cultural

and social marginalization, the coordinates of race, class, colour and morality

seep into the narratives.

The self- reflexive manner of writing in the personal narratives enhances

their meta-narrative approach and conveys the questioning of what is fictional

and what is real in history and fiction. Self-reflexive thoughts intrude into the

narrative. Nalini Jameela chronicles in her narrative the two passions that

consumed her life, eroticism and power. The autobiographical narrative

introduces her to a different kind of power, the power of the written/spoken

word. Linda Hutcheon finds that “power is a dominant theme in historiographic

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metafiction's investigations of the relation of art to ideology”(1988:186).

Skepticism about history has brought about "the New Historicism," a new

awareness that history cannot be written without ideological and institutional

analysis, including analysis of the act of writing itself. This is true of

autobiography too; the history of the self cannot be narrated without

ideological implications, especially if the text is a subaltern narrative. The

narratives are so maneuvered that the readers become aware of the process of

writing/creation of the self, while at the same time presenting the social and the

personal in opposition.

Every metanarrative embeds in itself the subtext that interrogates its

conception as well as it constitution. While speaking about the form of

metafictional novel, Patricia Waugh observes:

The metafictional novel situates its resistance within the form of

the novel itself. . . Each metafictional novel self-consciously sets

its individual parole against the langue (codes and

conventions ) of the novel tradition. (1984:11)

Mother Forest and The Autobiography of a Sex Worker show an explicit

concern with defying the traditional autobiographical form. They self

consciously set the subaltern autobiographical form(parole) against the

traditional autobiographical form (langue). The language that is used is a

language freed from syntactical completeness, a language that suppresses

elements that are customary. Max Saunders explains the nature of meta-

autobiographical texts in Self Impression: Life Writing, Autobiografiction and

the Forms of Modern Literature: “[They] don’t just represent their author’s

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experiences . . . explicitly concerned with the autobiographical process, and

the representation of auto/biography”(2010:219). Meta-autobiographies

interrogate the notion of representation. They are concerned with the

self-reflexivity of the texts and the problematic of the autobiographical process.

The technologies of self-representation present in the confession are part of

their attempts to authorize and deauthorize certain identities. The narrative

strategy most effectively presents the polyphonic thoughts of the female

subject. Theirs is an attempt to communicate a subverbal awareness. Each

individual is a self contextualized in a particular moment of history, culture,

social factors, psychological reverberations and so on. The autobiographical

narrative is an attempt to reconstruct the past and, through the history of

remembered experience, forge a new future. As narrative momentum calls

attention to the historicity of remembered experience, so language and imagery

emphasize the core fact: an autobiography is a verbal artifact, a self made out of

words. The cultural riches to be tapped in unlettered lives and untrammeled

subaltern speech are dimensions of private and cultural experiences which often

demand special ways of storytelling beyond the limits of normal historical

narrative. What Patricia Waugh speaks about the metafictional narratives

become true of the autobiographical narratives of Janu and Jameela:

“they explicitly or overtly lays bare its condition of artifice, and which thereby

explores the problematic relationship between life and fiction” (1984:4).

The autobiographical narratives of Janu and Jameela are concerned with

evolving a meta-autobiographical narrative competent to structure a subaltern

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essence. In the process they unveil the essential tension inherent in the process

of creating the subaltern self in an inimical world.

Cultural context seems to influence autobiographical process.

In “The Self in the Text versus the Self as Text: Asian-American

Autobiographical Strategies,” Rocio G. Davis enumerates the specific quality of

the Asian- American autobiographies :

Asian American autobiographies generally highlight the

protagonist’s growing comprehension of the meaning or value

that society places on questions and attitudes about ethnic

differences, historical reconstruction, and the place of their

communities in American societies. This approach

recontextualises earlier notions of both the self in autobiography

and the life writing process, stressing the complex representation

of the ethnic subject’s self-awareness and self-inscription. Issues

of representation in life-writing and its concerns with identity

politics, the rewriting of history and the attempt to claim the

validity of personal and social experience characterize the

narrative strategies employed by Asian-American

writers. (2005: 41)

The narrative strategies employed by ethnic autobiographers like C.K Janu, like

the Asian American writers, show a preoccupation with the questions of

representation, identity politics and the relation between the self awareness and

self–inscription. These strategies make these autobiographies

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meta-autobiographical, concerned with the process of autobiographical

creation.

Texts like Mother Forest and The Autobiography of a Sex Worker in a

true meta-autobiographical mode, “challenge the boundaries of traditional

autobiography by blending diverse formal techniques with increasingly

complex questions about subjectivity, self representation, and the process of

signification” (Davis, 2005: 42). In these texts the autobiographical practice

often becomes a point of interrogation. Sidonie Smith suggests that

autobiographical practices can be taken up as occasions to “critique dominant

discourses of identity and truth-telling by rendering the ‘I’ unstable, shifting,

provisional, troubled by and in its identification”(1998:40). The engagement

with the act of narrative evolves into a strategy that blends selfhood and writing

to stress evolving subjectivities, challenge contextual authority or claim agency.

The confessional genre, as the subaltern women employ it, becomes a

narrative strategy for the gendered subaltern’s self-representation. In this

context, the text is a system related to a value system: for a “genre is not only a

signifying system, but also a signifying practice and means by which the

text employs narrative structure to emphasize certain values over

others” (Cohan and Shires,1988:78). The narrative is used to construct a

subaltern female subject and to establish the authority of the subaltern female

perspective. Narrative is an expressive embodiment of one’s experience, a

mode of communication, and a form for understanding the world and ultimately

oneself. In subaltern autobiography narrative becomes performance. The

narrative embodies the performativity of the subaltern self in writing.

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The meta-autobiographical subaltern texts become performative acts , where

saying something is also doing something, thereby challenging the traditional

ideas of the self in autobiography. In this regard they are examples of activist

writings. The text is a representation in which memory and self are created out

of linguistic performance.

Autobiography is traditionally considered the true account of a person’s

life, narrated by the most authoritative of all persons - the subject him/herself.

But this alleged authority is challenged by the current critical theory and value

is attributed to the act of writing as a constitutive part of narrative subjectivity.

In this context, Rogio D. Davis remarks:

The self of the text frequently becomes the self as the text –

the narrative strategies used reflect particular forms of perceiving

and/or performing subjectivity. Selfhood in life writing is thus

understood as a narrative performance and the text often exhibits

the writer’s process of self-awareness and struggle for self-

representation through narrative structure itself. (2005:42)

The self evolves from one of the constituent elements of the text to text itself.

Narrative becomes an ideologically laden site implicit with the politics of self

construction.

The narrative is the site where the self finds a voice of its own. The

specific textures and patterns of the self with its specific ideologies and agenda

get reflected in the narrative. The narrative structure and the narrative voice

mirror the self in creation. They also embody the tension that is inherent in the

self or the tension involved in the self’s engagement with the outside world or

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even with the very textuality of writing. The narrative parameters employed in

the subaltern autobiographical metanarratives, with their emphasis on narrative

incoherence, denial of hegemonic patterns, non linearity and so on testify to the

power politics of the subaltern self. Mother Forest and The Autobiography of a

Sex Worker are concerned with evolving a self-referrential narrative voice.

Mythopoeic strategies are employed to effect this. The narrative voice

sometimes defamiliarises itself and tends to be impersonal. This is to create the

dialectic between the individual self and the communal self.

Autobiography is a platform for the exploration and explication of the

self. But for this to be true the narrator should be the one taking up the

responsibility for the narration about oneself. In this regard, Peach observes:

Autobiography is one of the strategies by which women can take

responsibility for their own sense of self in a restricted and

restrictive environment or milieu, challenging the traditional

appropriation of women’s lives and histories by men.

Self-making is an essential element in women’s

autobiography. (1998:133)

These positive performative allowances of autobiography become problematic

in the case of Mother Forest and The Autobiography of a Sex Worker, for the

authenticity and purity of the texts are under question. C.K Janu’s and

Nalini Jameela’s autobiographies undergo a process of appropriation and

mediation in their metamorphoses from oral narratives of a semiliterate

Malayali subaltern women to English translation.

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Mother Forest and The Autobiography of a Sex Worker, being oral

narratives transliterated into Malayalam and then translated into English, raise a

whole new array of problems related to the construction of the self and

narrative voice. The self of the narrator passes through the filters of mainstream

consciousness and what is received is rather a residue coloured by a different

set of perceptions and ideologies. The narratives being subaltern texts are

populated by sighs and silences, nuances and fissures rather than the explicit,

the overt and the obvious. The true manifestation of the self is in these gaps, the

vacuum. This is where the text achieves its wholeness, essence. The oral

constructs by their very nature communicate the fissures. But when they pass

through the consciousness of another person belonging to a totally different

social sphere and mental makeup, they tend to get lost. The omnipresent

absence fails to convey its strength, allure and enigma. This, in turn, affects the

true realization of the self of the subaltern text. The narratives raise queries on

the nature of subaltern subjectivity as represented in mediated pieces. The

subject of mediation and appropriation achieve grave dimensions when the

narratives are those primarily engaged in the construction of the self and

subjectivity.

The publication industry is controlled by the social and cultural elites.

When the oral narratives of unsophisticated subaltern women get published

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they undergo a sea change both politically and culturally. Philip Lejeune’s

observations on oral autobiographies is important in this context:

. . . the network of communication and printed work . . . is in the

hands of the ruling classes and serves to promote their values and

their ideology. Their autobiographical narratives are not written

only to “pass on memory.” They are the places where a collective

identity are elaborated, reproduced, and transformed, the patterns

of life appropriate to the ruling classes. This identity is imposed

upon all those who belong to or are assimilated into these classes,

and it rejects the others as insignificant. (1989:198)

The attempts of the semiliterate subaltern women to construct a narrative of the

self, in their transformation to graphic mould, become assimilated into the

ideology of the ruling class. The paradigmatic associations stay unfocused,

always remaining as the Other. Since the narration draws on two sets of

narrative conventions - those of orality and writing - the resultant text is

dialogic. The transliterated pieces of the oral personal narratives of subaltern

women explore representation of female subjectivity and the politics of

textuality. The narrative tends to mislead one into taking it for granted. In this

regard, Susie Tharu notes in her “Oral History, Narrative Strategy, and the

Figures of Autobiography”:

Actually, fictional narrative often draws on the apparatus which

autobiography, especially oral autobiography has so immediately

at hand to create the illusion that it too is a neutral vehicle of

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meanings pre-existing in the world. This illusion is . . . common

to all narrative in our time, and is ideological. (1986:182)

The autobiographical narratives of Janu and Jameela are ideologically

constructed pieces filtered through mainstream consciousness. A close reading

immediately posits the problem of the ideological positioning of subaltern

subjectivity.

In meta-autobiographical narratives like that of Janu and Jameela ,the

reader is constantly made conscious of the problematic deployment of “I.”

Problematising the narrative voice of the personal narratives thwart the attempt

to voice feminine experience relegated by patriarchy to the margins of

discourse. The assertion of subjectivity marks an attempt to situate the subject

in a discourse of truth and exposes ideologies of gender and class that suppress

the subaltern women’s speech. Such texts suggest “the generic contract [that]

engages the autobiographer in a doubled subjectivity—the autobiographer as

protagonist of her story and the autobiographer as narrator” (Smith,1987:71).

The transliterated pieces of personal narratives problematise the subjectivity of

the autobiographer as narrator. The authenticity of the narrative voice is

suspected when the oral autobiographies pass through the hands of many a

mediators.

Omprakash Valmiki writes: “Dalit readers had seen their own pain in

those pages of mine”(2003:vii).On this Surajpal Chauhan comments: “I realized

that only those who have also felt the pain of Dalits can

understand”(qtd in Kumar,2010:198). For the non-Dalit reader, this pain and

the social reality it exposes means something different all together—shame,

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accusation, and hopefully an invitation for change. In the case of oral

autobiographies it is doubtful, if the listeners who take upon themselves the

production of an authentic life script share this phenomenon of pain, the

unifying, uniting pain that helps them partake the veins of the narrator’s self.

Or, they may, like the non Dalit readers, see an altogether different

paraphernalia, one which cringes with shame, spits accusation, and pathetically

hope for change. Those belonging to the centre may not be able to perceive the

margins without being obstructed by the screen of their own cultural and social

conditioning.

An important feature of the autobiographies of the marginalized groups

is the difficult struggle these writers confront to achieve the right to speak.

Sidonie Smith’s work on women’s autobiographies has noted the necessity for

the author of a marginalized group to renegotiate narrative authority of

autobiography, which has been originally defined and continually disciplined

according to the interests of the dominant (in this case, male) community. More

than anything else, the “right” or “ability” of the marginalized group to write

literature comes under immediate contestation, and subaltern women writers

have likewise been forced to fight for the right to speak as well as to redefine

the boundaries of what can be said.

The marginalized writers venture to negotiate the challenge of securing

narrative authority by emphasizing the ‘experience of discrimination’ and

‘subaltern identity’ as two necessary criteria for both writing and critiquing

subaltern autobiography. The immediacy of experience and the

poignancy of the sting confer narrative authority on the subaltern writer.

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Autobiography is an especially valued form of subaltern literature, since unlike

poems, novels or short-stories, it can only be written by a subaltern. It is

through the politics of identity that the subalterns have—at least for the genre of

autobiography—successfully re-negotiated narrative authority.

Besides giving entry to the public space through identity-based narrative

authority, autobiography provides a space for the subaltern writers to regain

control over the constitution and meaning of subaltern selfhood. Autobiography

serves as means for subaltern writers to reclaim narrative authority over the

construction of the subaltern self. Subaltern identity confers on the

autobiographer a kind of uncontestable authority to speak. However, this

uncontestable authority to speak as such is problematised in the case of oral

autobiographies like Mother Forest and The Autobiography of a Sex Worker.

Being oral autobiographies transliterated and then translated, the narrative

authority is a contested space with ideological underpinnings. These

meta-autobiographical narratives embody the problematic status of the subject

in a self- reflexive text.

Actual experiences from the past and the verbal

design to recreate and pattern them correspond to the strongest

emotions and moral, social and cultural orientation of the living subject.

Language unites all aspects of human nature in tropes or figures.

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In this regard, Albert E. Stone notes in his discussion of Black autobiography

in “After Black Boy and Dusk of Dawn: Patterns in Recent Black

Autobiography” :

Each remembered life has its own special pattern, at once real

and symbolic, which forms a picture of the past and a blue print

of a future. Many perplexing problems of authorship, audience,

and authenticity may be clarified by discovering and interpreting

the metaphoric patterns creating the autobiographical

self. (1978:31)

This becomes problematic in Mother Forest and The Autobiography of a Sex

Worker as the metaphoric patterns of subaltern self and experience are

structured by people who remain alien to subaltern ethos by inhabiting a

different socio-cultural space.

The present critical theories of autobiography are largely unable to

address many of the complexities that the dictated autobiographies present. The

critical corpus largely tend to establish traditions and patterns, group and

categorise. There is rather a codifying impulse which often simplifies or ignores

essential intricacies, or perhaps idiosyncrasies of the construction of the self in

dictated autobiographies. As self-created text or text written by the subject

himself or herself, has ostensibly defined the field; functioning as both model

and sign, it has remained invisible. There seems to be an essential failure on

the part of the critical field to retool, to refigure, to deal with the problems

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raised by dictated autobiographies like Mother Forest and The Autobiography

of a Sex Worker. They demand and examination sensitive to the peculiarities of

their formulation.

In order to construct effective analytical paradigms for dictated

autobiographies, one must read the silences, the fissures, the disjunctures and

the moments of upheaval the method of composition necessarily creates.

The subaltern texts call for a luxuriating in textual absences. Instead of reading

these works as cohesive unities, as self-created texts, analysis must address the

complex dynamics of collaboration and co-authorship. Assuming an

unproblematic one dimensional existence of such texts necessarily assumes as

well a unanimity in thinking for both the dictator and the writer.

Mark A. Sanders points out the peril in this assumption in his “Theorizing the

Collaborative Self: The Dynamics of Contour and Content in the Dictated

Autobiography”:

It necessarily entails the assumption that the dictator and the

writer approach the process of composition with similar if not

identical notions concerning narrative form, voice, content, and

the ostensible meaning of the text. This is a precarious stand for

the writer and dictator arrive with a vast array of distinctive

assumptions about process and product. They engage in a

dynamic and often conflictive creation process, one which

produces a text that does not necessarily resolve tensions or

correct dissimilarities, but instead both imbibes and embodies

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them, often seeks to mask them, but ultimately relies upon them

as essential sources of meaning. (1994:446)

This suggests broader conceptual differences between the ways in which both

reality and experience are rationalized, then in turn communicated. There is a

double ontological displacement that occurs as the subject of perception is

perceived, and then represented. This becomes a crucial one for the status of the

subject in orally constructed and dictated autobiographies like Mother Forest

and The Autobiography of a Sex Worker. These works offer a way to open up to

critical scrutiny the process of transformation of the narrated life to inscribed

text.

What Arnold Krupat says about Indian collaborative autobiographies in

his “The Indian Autobiography: Origins, Type, and Function” is significant for

oral autobiographies like Mother Forest and The Autobiography of a Sex

Worker:

Indian autobiography is a contradiction in terms. Indian

autobiographies are collaborative efforts, jointly produced by

some white who translates, transcribes, compiles, edits,

interprets, polishes, and ultimately determines the "form" of the

text in writing, and by an Indian who is its "subject" and whose

"life" becomes the "content" of the "autobiography.”

. . . I may now state the principle constituting the Indian

autobiography as a genre as the principle of bicultural composite

authorship. There is an actual doubling of the "sender" and of the

cultural "code" in Indian autobiography, and this complication in

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the production of the signifier serves to complicate the

relationship of signifier to signified. (1981: 23)

Mother Forest and The Autobiography of a Sex Worker can also be seen as

specimens of bicultural composite authorship, for they are the products of the

collaboration of people belonging to different cultural and social platforms.

The relationships between the signifier and the signified are further complicated

in such narrative constructions.

Before content encounters narrative form, its origins in oral discourse

necessarily assign it qualities capable of creating and transmitting meaning in

its own terms. The act of oral communication, as Walter Ong points out, by its

very nature is one entirely different from a literary or written act, and perhaps

one embodying nuances entirely irreconcilable to those of the literary process.

Orality is defined by its very temporality: ". . . sound exists only when it is

going out of existence"(1982:32). Therefore, its limited duration stands in

marked contrast to the relative timelessness of written discourse. Ong goes so

far as to reject entirely the term "oral literature" precisely for this diametric

opposition (1982: 10). Simply put, "the word in its natural, oral habitat is a part

of a real, existential present" (1982:101). The orally constructed personal

narrative begins to embrace a new content in the very act of embracing a new

form.

In dictated autobiographies the salient elements of narrative become

significant. For in a culture where ideas cannot exist in or be preserved in the

visual domain of the written word, like that of the tribal culture, memory, both

individual and collective, serves as the sole repository of history and symbolic

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meaning. It is this memory that formulates the sense of individual and

collective self. What and how experience is preserved requires a particular

emphasis. The what and how are markedly different between the written and

the oral traditions. Therefore the two sustain tensions which generate essential

meaning for dictated texts. Since the self is constructed in the narrative, the

meanings perceived and generated can alter the very dynamics of the self in

question. Self can only exist conceptually as a representation. The narrative

form reshapes events and content into familiar generic structures. Narrative

ostensibly serves as "extended metaphor." It does not merely reproduce the

events it describes; it tells us in what direction to think about the events and

charges our thoughts about the events with different emotional valences. The

necessary "motion of tropes" disappropriates the identity of the subject, taking

what is "given" and making it into something inextricably "invented" and

"projected." The inherent contradictions of the autobiographical enterprise itself

is that their own past identities can become disappropriated by the very texts

which are to mirror them. This becomes especially problematic in oral

autobiographies of subaltern women. The autobiographical narrative does not

image the things it indicates; it calls to mind images of the things it indicates, in

the same way that a metaphor does. There is a covert politics inherent in the

narrative form.

Both the works , Mother Forest and The Autobiography of a Sex

Worker, reveal the critical politics inherent in collaborative production. What is

lost is the requisite agency which defines the autobiographical act. There are

certain questions of history, truth, and memory that need be explored in

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collaborative autobiographical productions – questions regarding the choice of

stories that get told, the truth that is heard and the selection of memories.

The “autobiographical pact,” that Philip Lejeune speaks about, the contract

made by the autobiographer vis-a-vis his readers that guarantees the work's

authenticity, is problematised in dictated autobiographies of ethnic origin. Until

critics begin to address the complexities of composition and ideology of form,

these texts will remain marginal, and the vision of autobiographical acts will

remain distorted. On the other hand, attention to contour and content promises

to open new critical vistas. By attending to the politics of constructing the self,

alternative visions for the rhetorical self may be discerned. The

autobiographical narratives of C.K Janu and Nalini Jameela become

meta-autobiographical for the intriguing questions they raise on authenticity,

authorship, construction of the self, narrative, the nature of collaborative

identity and so on. The semiliterate or illiterate subaltern narrators lack the

linguistic resource to make explicit comments on the autobiographical process

as such, but they lurk as an unignorable presence within the text, between and

beyond the lines, in the gaps and fissures so to speak. The texts prompt the

readers to explore the intricacies embodied in their own creation.

The autobiographical narratives of the subaltern women C.K Janu and

Nalini Jameela call for a need to locate such texts within the specific historical

and cultural moments of their production and, additionally, to attend to the

current historical/cultural moments that inform their reception. They also

exemplify the need for learning to read the strategies of resistance in the

subaltern orally- dictated literary text in order to adequately or accurately read

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or interpret the text. They have brought text, body, subjectivity and power into

tension; they have narrativized ethics; they have reimagined and remapped the

territories of abject selfhood, and, in the process, they have expanded the

boundaries of the autobiographical genre to the utmost limits of writing in the

first person.

Mother Forest and The Autobiography of a Sex Worker are purposeful

deflections from the identities attributed to certain categories of people by an

ideological system. These texts, being meta-autobiographical, do contest the

process of autobiographical construction and problematise the subjectivity of

the text. Not withstanding this, the narratives are bold explications of the

courage and spirit of the oppressed, marginalized women. They challenge the

existing sanctioned and legitimated cultural performances of identity. Through

narrative interventions, these women contest oppressive identity performances

and highlight the temporalities and spatialities of marginalized identities. They

attempt to negotiate the textual terrains to carve a strong sense of the self. There

is politics written into the construction of subaltern self. The politics inherently

is one of challenging the hegemonic norms and offering resistance in

indisputable and valiant terms.