Indira Goswami: Life, Narrative, and Social Change

Indira Goswami (1942-2011)

Malashri Lal 

A personal recollection 

I

n preparing for this essay, I sifted through some earlier notes and chanced upon a beautiful letter that Indira Goswami had written to me from Guwahati, her hometown, saying Neel Kanti Braja (Serial 1976. Book 1982) or The Shadow of Dark God (1986) — the novel I will be discussing — had been named as one of the best novels written since India’s Independence. She wanted to share her joy and creativity— we had been friends and colleagues at the University of Delhi since the 1990s. I mention this letter to centre-stage the significant place this book holds in her oeuvre as it is a masked autobiography of the young Indira, a grieving widow in 1969 in the temple town of Vrindavan. Much later, the famous novelist Indira Goswami, lovingly called ‘Mamoni’ or ‘the dear one’ by her followers in Assam, had a different appearance. The first impression upon seeing Indira Goswami in the 1980s was one of bedazzlement. A resplendent woman wrapped in an elegant red saree bordered in gold caught the eye. A cluster of listeners clung to her words. The soft spoken creative writer, Indira, would be addressing the causes of the marginalized and the disadvantaged. She spoke about the misguided youth in Assam, the widows of Vrindavan, the women labourers in industrial units. In her person, Indira seemed clad in an aura of genteel privilege. Her dark eyes were intense with passion; her mobile expression and modulated voice entered into the crevices of suffering of the weak and the dispossessed. There was commitment and conviction — she saw social evils as few women of her class did. As she said, “I try to write from the direct experiences of my life. I only mould these experiences with my imagination.” Indira Goswami, to my mind, interrogates several facets of women’s empowerment in India. Foremost among these are attitudes to the girl child, marriage and widowhood. Indira’s life maps crucial transitions. 

Biographical determinants 

Born in 1942 to Umakanta Goswami, she had the good fortune to receive a high quality education in Shillong. Married at a young age to Madhaven Raisom Ayengar, an engineer, she enjoyed happy matrimony for only eighteen months. Then tragedy struck. Ayengar died in 1967 in a car accident in Kashmir and Indira found herself mentally and physically destabilized. In a moving autobiography, Adhalekha Dastaveja (A Half-Written Autobiography), published in 1988, Indira recalls how she shut herself in a small room in Goalpara and contemplated suicide, and how her only sustenance was the memory of a carefree childhood and the letters of her father. In other words, the privileged past seemed over and widowhood had cast a dark shadow on Indira’s self image even more than on her external circumstances. In some confusion she accepted a suggestion to choose a life in Vrindavan, the most traditional destination of bereft Hindu widows. It is not that Indira was without other possibilities. She recounts in her memoirs that two paths were before her: she could have proceeded to London, “that land of ancient Western tradition and culture” or she could move to Vrindavan, “the centre of ancient Hindu tradition and culture.” It is important to remember that English education for women from upper class families in India had brought an easy familiarity with the British models of education and women’s lives. Widowhood was no stigma abroad, and a foreign locale could have, in a sense, “liberated” a Hindu woman from the stranglehold of orthodoxy in India. However, Indira went instead to the land of Braja (of the novel’s title) or Vrindavan.  

The widow’s dilemma 

Was this the right “choice” or was it imposed by a powerful internal monitor called “patriarchy”? Indira spent two years (1969-1970) amidst the Radhaswami sect of   widows in Vrindavan, entering their fold as a compassionate member but also as a researcher. The ensuing novel, Neel Kanthi Braja (trans. by Prafulla Kotoky as Shadow of Dark God, 1986), is an amazing narrative combining fact and fiction, autobiography and reflection.  Indira Goswami introduces the novel saying, “I have tried to show how the mental and physical state of a young widow takes a different shape and how this change affects her life after her widowhood.” Saudamini, the protagonist, is a thinly disguised nominee of the author. She volunteers to take on severe deprivations of the body, a sort of self purification by which needs are so reduced that confrontations with life’s compulsions become inevitable. Despite caring parents, and a supportive community at most times, Saudamini agitatedly probes and digs as deep as possible into the meaning of widowhood. She can barely remember her husband, she now has a Christian admirer she rather likes, but parental approval and social sanction will never be granted for an interreligious relationship. The father, an idealistic doctor, and the mother who is mentally unstable, have brought Saudamini to Vrindavan to witness and accept the traditions of Hindu widowhood.  This is the crucial point to remember about the novel’s theme. Neel Kanthi Braja is about social attitudes and the inner consciousness of a woman who has been brought up to believe that widowhood is somehow her “fault” or her “destiny, and that she should undertake “penance.”

The symbology of Vrindavan: Radha and Krishna 

The mystique of Braj/ Vrindavan is lodged in the legend of Radha and Krishna, the divine couple who are celebrated for their eternal bond though it is outside marriage. Radha is, in fact, married to another person, so her love for Krishna is ‘illicit’ in secular terms.   While the God Krishna is a key figure in the epic Mahabharata, 3rd century BC, and the enunciator of the famous message of the Gita, Vrindavan is associated with his childhood and youth. My research published in the book Finding Radha: The Quest for Love documents the evolution of the romantic pairing of Krishna and Radha which is based on the 12th century poem Gita Govinda by Jayadeva. Lyrical and visual, the poet attributes engagingly human qualities to the divine pair and celebrates erotic love as a manifestation of unconditional surrender. Critics read this as the indissoluble union of the body and soul wherein the erotic is raised to a transcendental plane.     

Why did Vrindavan become the main refuge of widows, primarily from Bengal and neighbouring states? The widows of Vrindavan are the eternal Radhas, seeking the companionship and protection of Krishna, the compassionate one, the sakha or friend. The geography of Braj with its innumerable temples to Krishna and its highly ritualistic practices give the widows a source of subsistence livelihood, the sense of belonging to a community, the hope of being saved from the lecherous eyes of men, and, in death, the expectation of being liberated from the cycle of Karma.  The elaborate mythology of Radha’s life, her family, her friends or gopis and their antics of amorous play with Krishna are chalked through the sacred geography so each woman is hypothetically surrendering to the all encompassing divine love of Krishna. It’s interesting to note that the impact of Jayadeva’s poem was so great that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and his followers in the 16th century virtually recreated Braj bhoomi on the ruins of the Mathura devastated by the Moghuls as the novel also relates. 

Indira Goswami both accepts this mythology and also debunks it without losing a spiritual connect with the worship of Krishna. The tragic gap is between the imagined Vrindavan and reality of experience.  The protagonist in the novel, Saudamini, accepts, analyses and finally rejects the construction of the widow stereotype—this is Indira’s message—and it is also Indira’s story. 

The modern relevance 

The message pertinent to the empowerment agenda may be read through the tripartite presentation of three women in the novel: Saudamini, and her acquaintances Shashi and Mrinalini. Shashi is an orphan street child who embodies the neglect of girl children in India and the fear of violence that perpetually haunts them. Even today the subjects of female foeticide, skewed sex ratio between boy and girl babies at birth, the education gap, the early marriage and multiple pregnancies continue to be widely discussed. Indira Goswami’s street child Shashi grows into an attractive woman and chooses to “protect” herself by becoming the mistress of a temple priest. In the community, she is derided for accepting this option in preference to ‘suffering’ the fate of widowhood. That Shashi suffers more severely through the loveless attachment to an impotent priest and secretly harbours lesbian desire is sufficiently built into the storyboard but seldom highlighted. To me it is important that Indira in 1976 had empathetically portrayed such emotions well ahead of their utterance in public space in India. Deepa Mehta’s Fire came twenty years later in 1996 and was visually explicit about same-sex love leading to much controversy and violence in cinema halls. Mehta’s next film, Water, appeared even further in time, 2005, and resorted to stereotypes of Hindu widowhood placing the story in Banaras, another refuge for widows. Indira Goswami had nuanced the widow’s deprivations of body, passion, emotion, and woven it into a perceptive text much ahead of the rest. 

Saudamini’s other companion is Mrinalini, daughter of a temple owner who has fallen upon poor days due to mismanagement of his fortune. Here again is a topical theme—that of a woman’s economic dependence on the father and her subjection to his ill founded financial decisions. The temple is sold off—the scion (there is no female equivalent to the word!) of an ancient family is brought to penury through no fault of hers. Today, India is speaking about capacity building for women to become wage earners and entrepreneurs so they can take independent decisions. I emphasize that Indira Goswami speaks of the politics of social construction even when she is composing what appears to be material from her experience of a cultural milieu. It is not a personal widowhood that comprises the substance of her novel, but the attendant layers of this life-condition for various women. 

Indira Goswami’s novel is highly relevant today as the problems continue. A country report presented recently by social activist Meera Khanna says, “Every fourth household in India has a widow. According to the 2011 census, the number of ‘Widowed’ persons, mostly females, is more than 44 million in the country.” Moreover, according to Khanna, “Socio cultural ramifications of patriarchy decimate widows in India into social non-entities. They are socially invisible, culturally marginalised and very often economically deprived. This is possibly because in India, as in many parts of South Asia, widowhood is viewed not as a natural period in the life cycle of a woman, but as a personal and social aberration, to be devoutly wished away. Which is why the traditional Hindu blessing given to girls and women is “Sowbhagyavati bhava” (may you be eternally married). This attitude to a great extent governs the social, cultural and even economic implications of widowhood.” 

A widows’ home today in Vrindavan : Ma Dham  

Vrindavan is even today a site of gender discourse and hence I link Goswami’s narrative to what I observed during research visits to an ashram called Ma Dham (The Abode of Mothers). The Guild of Service has created a place for elderly widows abandoned by their families and tried to rehabilitate them by giving them the dignity of a place of their own. We addressed each woman as “Ma”/Mother, and asked a few questions. Almost all the women said they had been brought to Vrindavan by a “caring male relative” and then left with a promise that they will “soon be called home.” The invitation to return never came. In this period of timeless waiting, the fortunate ones discovered the collective identity of Ma Dham, and found their individual talents and spaces. A vignette stands out in my memory.  One Ma who looked close to eighty was asked if she would sing for us, “the visitors from Delhi.” As she hobbled up from her seat and gradually straightened her curved back, I wondered why we were putting her through this display. A faint tune emerged from her wizened lips and soon gathered strength and melody. Her hands started moving to the music, her body turned to dance postures, and in a few minutes, the music and the gestures had transported us to the world of spotlights and dance halls. Clearly she had received training-taleem—in these genres of entertainment. Whom had she sung and danced for? In return, what favours were given and under what terms? These were research questions, unanswered and futile. We saw before us that Vrindavan still beckons widows, still offers refuge. But there is a difference. Civil society organizations are aware of the plight, and are active in bringing much more than sustenance to the widows: self worth and belonging. 

Social Change in her other novels 

Indira Goswami’s personal narratives and her fiction offer a carefully drawn continuum of social change. Goswami’s novel Chinnamastar Manuhto (trans. by Prashant Goswami as The Man From Chinnamasta, 2006) is worth considering in this context if only because the title in English draws attention to a male centered tale. Read it and one finds the core in the man’s devotion to the Goddess Kamakhya enshrined in her famous temple in Guwahati, Assam. According to popular mythology, this is one of the holiest of the shakti peethas (powerful spots) where an intimate part of Goddess Parvati’s dismembered body is lodged. By tradition, Kamakhya is all powerful—a contrast to the helpless widows of Vrindavan. The Goddess demands blood. Animal sacrifice—frequent and ceremonial—soaks into the temple grounds. Maddened devotees smear the blood on their forehead and dance in frenzy. This is Woman’s other Avatar—the commanding authority. Indira Goswami places the story in the 1930’s but the sociological implications are absolutely current. Patriarchal traditions have often got away with justifications about oppressive gender practice by claiming that “women are worshipped as goddesses”, so “what is there to complain about.” The tribute to the pedestal and the brutality at home are the contradictions that show up in social space all the time and have led to the widespread protest against domestic violence.  Indira probes the causes, the rituals, the unquestioned “beliefs” which perpetuate oppression. 

Who is the man from Chinnamasta—a wandering jattadhari with matted locks who tries to stop the animal sacrifice and arouse a more sensitive conscience of co-existence? Indira’s research into history and ethnography showed no religious sanction for the blood rituals. She was appalled by the orgies of the flesh and the gory celebrations. The gentle author and the social activist came together to craft a novel that is a page turner. The distance between religion and ritual is subtly debated. The polemics are so embedded that one reads for story but takes away a message of respect for an environment of which a woman, Goddess Kamakhya, is the agent. Again I am amazed by Indira’s foresightedness. Ecofeminism, Green Peace and Animal Rights are relatively new slogans. 

The cultural history of Assam is Indira’s constant interest. Another famous novel The Moth Eaten Howdah of the Tusker (1986, English translation 2004) is set in Kamrup district. Again the main character is Giribala, a Brahmin widow who speaks of her inner debates on liberalism and orthodoxy as she observes the transitions in society. Feudal power is on the decline but the Satraps or landlords do not wish to yield to change. Opium intoxication, corruption and decay seem to pervade all aspects of the land. The widow’s viewpoint is an unusual approach that Indira tends to use and the moth-eaten seat over a majestic elephant becomes the emblem for the dissolution.   

Public action 

The politics of literature was not merely in Indira’s works but was transferred to action quite unusually. In 2005, she accepted the role of Mediator between the armed militant group, United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA),  and the Government of India. Deeply respected for her integrity as a writer and a social thinker, she was able to convince the opposing parties to form a People’s Consultative Group, or a peace committee. She was henceforth known widely as an Ambassador for Peace and given an international award. 

In Delhi too Indira Goswami had  been engaged with civil concerns. When the anti Sikh riots brought the city to shame in 1984, Indira’s personal and professional life was caught in turmoil. Indira was teaching at the University of Delhi and lived in Shakti Nagar which became a highly disturbed neighborhood. Her novel The Pages Stained with Blood captures the brutality and the distrust in the cityscape where the fugitives and the perpetrators of crime are difficult to distinguish. To understand the complex nature of mercenary incentives for crime, Indira even visited the infamous GB Road and interviewed the sex workers.  

Indira Goswami, a composite feminist 

There are many more aspects to Indira Goswami’s ‘womanism’ but instead of entering details let me, in conclusion, sketch a pattern. As a young woman she found tragedy and pain whereas she was born to happiness and privilege. Performing an act of self-withdrawal, she came out stronger with the realization of a map of social problems relating to women. Her tools for engendering social change were the written word, and later, the spoken address in public arena. I don’t mean to codify Indira Goswami’s creative journey for no gifted writer ‘plans’ a path as such, but for the readers and critics, a pattern stands out discernibly. 

To me, Indira is a composite writer endowed with a remarkable felicity of language and expression. Says Indira, “The language, to me, is a velvet dress in which I endeavour to cover the restless soul in its journey through existence.” The restlessness springs from an urge to speak out her commitment to the causes of equity and justice. No wonder then that the Ramayana, that epical tale about moral dilemma, should attract her as the platform for contemporary debates. In Vrindavan she had bought a massive volume of Tulsidas’s Ramayana which inspired her comparative study of the 11th century Assamese Ramayana by Madhava Kandali.  Goswami’s views published in Ramayana from Ganga to Brahmaputra have been expanded by many seminar presentations. Around 2005 when Namita Gokhale and I were working on our book In Search of Sita, Indira Goswami generously shared her thoughts on the Assamese Ramayana and spoke of how  mythological women shaped current belief systems. As I have affirmed at many forums, India has living mythologies; the old stories get adapted to prevailing conditions and are retold with a twist. 

The common thread in Indira Goswami’s immensely diverse and rich oeuvre is the concern for women. In her person and in her work this is echoed multifariously. Despite the complex interstices, I see no contradictions—only a holistic expression of India’s many challenges to women’s empowerment and a gifted writer moulding them into creative form.  She received the Sahitya Akademi Award (1982) and the Jnanpith Award (2000), the highest honour in India for literary writing, yet she remained grounded to the principles of compassion that she had embraced in her earliest works. The “half- written autobiography” remained unfinished as Indira Goswami passed away in 2011.   In one of the last interviews recorded, Rajiv Mehrotra brings up the topics of spirituality, pain and writing and Indira Goswami says with her candid charm, “Suffering is inevitable for a successful writer…If I were to write an epitaph for myself it would be ‘Here lies a humanist’.”  She saw women not as a limited category but as key participants in the journey of a developing nation.  I would say that for Indira Goswami, a humanist and a feminist were identical

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Author's Note
This essay was first presented in the web-lecture series on “Women's Writings in India: Issues and Perspectives” 2021,  organised by Fauzia Farooqui, South Asian Studies Program, Princeton University and Rekha Sethi, Translation and Translation Studies Centre, Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. It also draws upon my tribute in Indira Goswami: Passion and the Pain, ed. Uddipana Goswami. Guwahati: Spectrum Publications, 2012. 

Malashri Lal, Professor in the English Department (retd), and Former Director of Women’s Studies and Developemnt Centre at the University of Delhi, has a  specialization in  literature, women   and gender studies. Her sixteen books include  Chamba-Achamba: Women’s Oral Narratives (2012), In Search of Sita (2009, 2018), Tagore and the Feminine: (2015), Finding Radha  (2019), and  the most recent, co-authored with Namita Gokhale, Betrayed by Hope: A Play on the Life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (2020) . Malashri Lal is currently Member, English Advisory Board of the Sahitya Akademi. In a voluntary capacity she continues to assist women’s empowerment initiatives.  

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