Title: The Second Wife and Other Stories
Publisher: Om International, 2022.
Price: INR 300
The Second Wife and Other Stories by Nandini C Sen is a rich storehouse of eleven stories. Sen understands the importance of the category of gender, caste and class and engages post- structurally, psychoanalytically and culturally. The problems depicted here are specific to women in India and its culture. The stories draw us in debate, they hint, they show, but do not at all strive to educate or moralise. They investigate the possibility of a meaningful inclusive world.
To give a glimpse of the experience one is in for, the stories “The Performer”, “Nabonita”, “The Second Wife” and “Deliverance” may be picked up to demonstrate the play of sexual politics.
In the story, ‘Performer’, we meet Sameer, Nira’s husband, a stereotypical product of patriarchy, who could not imagine that a wife and a mother may have her passions other than the specified household work. Nira’s assertion of selfhood is quiet and dignified as is her friendship with Javed, a man from a different class and religion. Sen’s handling of Nira is extremely mature with the character resonating upper class metro city women and their travails. However, her quiet ‘rebellion’ is hers alone and speaks volumes.
In the story ‘Nabonita’, Sen obliquely stresses the importance of good education – the only recourse for breaking the glass ceiling. Nabonita’s coming into her own is both tragic and powerful, her revenge wrecks her as much as it wrecks her rapist. Initially, she is devastated, gives in to the situation, but deep inside, her conscience lacerates her and she wants to avenge her violation. As Smita in Mridula Garg’s, ‘Kathgulab’, Nabonita is not traumatised by any feeling of guilt. Here Sen deliberately frees women from the guilt that they suffer from acts of violence such as rape and battering. According to Foucault, this is a ploy that patriarchy employs to appropriate the female body. Nabonita is not ashamed, she has been cheated, assaulted and she musters the courage to retaliate and leaves the Datta Chaudhury’s mansion in the night to make her own destiny. When Nabonita says that maids in the kitchen, the daughter-in-law would testify against him, Sen hints of sisterhood, sorority, a way to combat patriarchy and create an independent sub-culture.
The title story ‘The Second Wife’ works through juxtaposition. We meet two sisters Champa and Bela. In the life story of Champa we see all the ills of a patriarchal society- her early marriage, husband a master, where it’s a woman’s fault to not able to give an heir to the family. A helpless and a lonely soul, Champa is unable to stick to life and dies in her prime. Her younger sister, Bela, is forced to take her place in the same house-hold. But she is totally opposite to Champa. She is not a slave to her husband, she plans not to conceive, just rear her sister’s daughters, reads in her spare time and eventually leaves the oppressing confines of the household to participate in the national movement. In the story, ‘Deliverance’ Jyotsna too, after failed suicide attempts, learns to fight oppression and gathers courage to file a police complaint. Drawing from Ambedkar, Sen subtly shows that education is the only way out that can empower women to fight their own battle.
In a very powerful story ‘Lipstick’, we meet Malati, who learns to face reality and comes out of closet to accept her son Vinay’s transexuality. Sen begins the story with a powerful metaphor, where she wants LGBTQIA+ community to be like a tree with its own roots that can’t be hacked and not a creeper that needs support to survive. Malati decides not to “feel scared of what people might say about her or Vinay…she was a strong woman” Stories like this point towards a more emotionally open future where acceptance is organic.
In ‘Thammi’, the narrator reflects on the life of her Grandmother Thammi. The narrator had beautiful memories of the time spent in Rasoolpur during her childhood where her grandmother ran an NGO to help the needy and the destitute and “was a mother to many in that village”. Her mother disliked that Thammi treated her son and grandchild at par with children of the house helps. But after Thammi’s death, things take an unforeseen turn as the narrator sees her mother effortlessly stepping into her mother in law’s shoes and becoming a messiah for the needy. Through her character, Sen paves a way for women to come out of their closed thinking and look around in their immediate society to make a difference. Sen, here breaks the hegemony of mainstream western feminist composite discourses that bracket problems of third world women from their limited point of view. Sen’s characters are unique in being rooted to its cultural space and for creating strong feminine bonds cutting across class and caste.
Sen creates strong women akin to authors such as Shivani, Amrita Pritam, Ismat Chughtai, Mridula Garg and such like. Like Mridula Garg, Sen wants women to be free to make their own choices. For her even men need to be liberated from the patriarchal mode. The stories invite self-exploration, they question and strive to find a space of their own. A space where there is no attempt to secure rights within the existing society, that is with the symbolic order, nor a space to stress the difference between men and women, but a new space where difference is the norm, a society where there is a meaningful inclusion, where sexual identity is unfixed, always in process and always incomplete. This is the space where the notion of femininity and masculinity is challenged, and it is here that the future of feminism lies. It is a theory of ‘active becoming’ that allows one to transgress and ultimately exit from the entire dialectical frame of opposition of the majority versus minorities.
Sen’s stories have a broad span ranging from mythology to intersections of caste, class and gender. The language is simple and the hidden cadence holds you in spell so much so that it is hard to put the book down once you start reading it. This emphasizes the fact that the plot is tight and the author knows her craft. This is a new fare on the stands that truly walks the talk for inclusivity and cultural changes in 2022 – a must read.
About Author
Nandini C Sen teaches English in Bharati College, Delhi University. She was Fellow at the prestigious Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. She is the proud recipient of the Charles Wallace Fellowship for Academic Research in London, the Ambassador for Peace Prize for her work towards educating slum dwellers and the Write India award for her creative writing. She writes on Diaspora Studies, African Studies and Comparative Literature. Some of her academic publications include The Black Woman Speaks: A Study of Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta (2019), Through the Diasporic Lens Volumes 1&2 (2017 & 2018), Mahasweta Devi: Critical Perspectives (2012). Sen is a keen observer of the society and a social commentator. Her short stories have been featured in literary journals such as The Elusive Genre and The Muse. She has also been featured in the Asian Collective of Short Stories and the Australia- India collaboration titled The Glass Walls. Her recent book, The Second Wife and Other Stories (2022) is a collection of critically acclaimed feminist stories.
Works Referred:
Under Western Eyes: Feminist scholarship and Colonial Discourses by Chandra Talpade Mohanty
An Other Space: A Future for Feminism by Jane Moore in New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts. Ed Isobel Armstrong Taylor and Francis Group
Dr Vandana Agrawal
Associate Professor
PGDAV College
