The Global Journal of English Studies I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN : 2395 4795

The Global Journal of English Studies I December 2016 I Vol. II, Issue IV I ISSN : 2395 4795

Bakhtin’s Dialogue and Resistance as seen in Meena Kandasamy’s novel The Gypsy Goddess

Vaishnavi Upadhyaya

Research Scholar and Adhoc Lecturer School of Languages, Gujarat University, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, .

Abstract

India is a land of many cultures, religions, regions, and sadly castes. Caste is seen as both the most archaic and the most contemporary reality of India. The recognition of caste as not just a retrograde past but an oppressive past reproduced as forms of inequality in modern society requires therefore that we integrate questions of caste with those of class and gender. It was only in the post-independence era that some educated untouchables, who became aware and gained modern education, realized the need for an alternative mode of thinking and launched literary movements leading to awakening of women and the problem of their absence in the literary field of India. In this context I choose to work on the novel titled the Gypsy Goddess published in 2014 by Meena Kandasamy. Meena Kandasamy is a poet, writer, activist and translator. Her work maintains a focus on caste annihilation, linguistic identity and feminism. I plan to use the tools given by Mikhail Bakhtin to deconstruct the caste and gender structure and build dialogue among the varied voices. Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (November17,1895- March7,1975) was a Russian philosopher, Literary Critic and Semiotician. In his large corpus of work, Bakhtin introduces the concepts of Dialogism, Heteroglossia, Polyphony, Chronotope, Carnival and many others. In the research paper I propose to explain his theories and show how they are aptly applicable to Dalit women’s literature by citing them in the text.

Keywords : Mikhail Bakhtin, Dialogism, Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

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Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language. Bakhtin wrote during the darkest years of recent Russian history, the decade following 1917, when the country suffered from effects of lost World War I, Revolution, Civil war and Famine. In the spring of 1918, Bakhtin like many others, sought relief from the chaos that followed in the immediate wake of the revolution by going into the country districts where food and fuel were more abundant. He ended up first in Nevel, and then in Vitebsk. In both the places, he quickly became a member of a small group of intellectuals who feverishly indulged themselves into the debates, lectures, demonstrations, and manifesto writing that characterised life at that extraordinary time. It was in this atmosphere of immense intellectual and political intensity, that Bakhtin sought to think through for himself some of the problems then of most concern to philosophers such as Dialogue with self, art and responsibility, heteroglossia, polyphony and novel form as a discourse. During this time Bakhtin wrote and published under the names of his friends, P.N. Medvedev and Voloshinov. The first work that he attempted to publish under his own name was Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics in 1929, but was soon arrested for underground activity and was exiled to Kazakhstan. The following decades in thirties he wrote something in the order of nine large books on topics as major and varied as Freud, Marx and the philosophy of language. Most of these manuscripts were lost and misplaced during forced moves. Some were delayed in publication for 41 years due to burning and closing of publishing houses and some like that of Rabelais and his world which he wrote for doctorate degree were charged as too aberrant for publication due to its emphasis on sex and body functions and his doctorate was denied. Bakhtin became head of the Department of Russian and World Literature in 1957. Bakhtin moved back to Moscow, where he lived until his death in 1975. He was not reborn until the eve of his retirement from academic life when soviet literary scholars again took interest in him. This revival led to the publication in 1963 of the second edition of the Dostoevsky book, thirty- four years after the first. The reappearance of this book, followed in 1965 by Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais, brought him into rapid prominence. Later The Dialogic Imagination was published in 1975, the year he died.

Bakhtin’s works and his ideas gained popularity after his death when the archives were made available to public, and scholars and students realized that most information provided by Bakhtin was false or sometimes skewed by his own self.

The Dialogic Imagination is a compilation of four essays concerning language and the novel: "Epic and Novel" (1941), "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" (1940), "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" (1937–1938), and "Discourse in the Novel" (1934–1935). It is through the essays contained within The Dialogic Imagination that Bakhtin introduces the concepts of heteroglossia, dialogism and chronotope making a significant contribution to the realm of literary scholarship.

The Novel to which I look up to cite his philosophy in application is titled The Gypsy Goddess, an intriguing name, given by its author Meena Kandasamy. She is a poet, an activist, novelist a writer. Her work maintains a focus on caste annihilation, linguistic identity and feminism. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch (2006) and Ms Militancy (2010).Her first novel, The Gypsy Goddess was published by Atlantic Books (UK) and HarperCollins India in 2014. She was a British Council - Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Kent and a Visiting Fellow at Newcastle University in 2011. In 2009, she was a writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program

The Global Journal of English Studies I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN : 2395 4795

(IWP). She has held writing residencies at the Hong Kong Baptist University, Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) and the University of Hyderabad. She has co-authored (with M Nisar) a biography of ’s foremost Dalit revolutionary , and previously, she edited ‘The Dalit’, a bi-monthly English magazine. She holds a PhD in socio-linguistics from , and dabbles in political & literary translation.

The Gypsy Goddess depicts a massacre from history which was not been given its due attention and justice. Meena Kandasamy determines to rewrite it but not in a crude and cruel manner, rather she would like to express it and make it a literary piece of work. To state it in point blank manner it is based on a massacre that took place in the village of Kilvenmani on Christmas day, 1968. 44 Women and children were burnt alive at night and no justice was gained by the people of the village. Taking up such a heartbreaking historical truth Kandasamy is very conscious writer who is aware of the form in which she chooses to write and how she plays with. She gets very intimately close with reader so as to not withhold anything within her. It is a sharp authorial voice, parodying at times, giving history and background so that we understand it correctly.

Novel is in close proximity with the reader and social media has very well helped the writer to become a friend. Passing remarks to Facebook and Twitter makes we feel that we share same jokes: “And how can I go ahead with the story when the first line itself has not instantly received a hundred thousand likes?” (Kandasamy.14)

She even suggests fitting it in a Twitter or compressing it in a Sixty-Second Sound bite. But how can we even enter in this heart of Darkness.

I feel as a Reader that she draws us like a Mother draws a child- she will teach the reader to learn as the story unravels. She says:

“How far away from me can you stray? This is a joint venture. We collaborate on the critical condition that we do not abandon each other.” (Kandasamy.32)

It is set in State , Tanjore District, Nagapattinam Taluk, in 1968. Month is Markazhi, that falls between mid-December to mid-January. This serves as Chronotope for the novel. Bakhtin explains forms of chronotope. Chronotope literally means time space. Artistic chronotope is such that Spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible, likewise space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes artistic chronotope.

The novels time and space completely agrees with the context and time space in which Bakhtin lived. In fact one who is unknown about the chronotope can easily assume that Meena Kandasamy’s debut novel The Gypsy Goddess was written by a winner of the USSR State Prize in Literature and Arts and published sometime in the late 1970s or maybe even earlier. The subject matter – the massacre of forty– four old Dalit labourers and their families by henchmen employed by upper caste landlords - is definitely a topic that would have fitted in within the milieu of Soviet literature. At that time, Bakhtin was talking about Dialogue in a manner that would break monolithic caste and class structure. His theory has been born out of the milieu of serfs fighting landlords in Russia, protest seasons and tools of carnival,

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demonstrations are used to showcase and deconstruct the tyranny of the rulers.

According to Bakhtin, I quote, “the study of verbal art can and must overcome the divorce between an abstract “formal” approach and an equally abstract “ideological” approach. Form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is social phenomenon- social throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning” (Bakhtin. 259) by this he means that the verbal art should not be different from or separate from being formal and ideology based. That our day to day utterance and speech, stylization of speech types, the parodic travestying, the word in the process of meaning making is on constant act of dialogic atmosphere. Thus response and understanding become vital to it.

Indeed as Bakhtin says “any concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it was directed already as it were overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, enveloped in an obscuring mist…. It is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgements and accents.”(Bakhtin .276)

In The Gypsy Goddess the emotions of the untouchables, these peasants who suffer through famine, hunger, injustice, who are made naked, beaten up, raped, molested, harassed, tortured, their word is directed towards its object of attaining justice after taking to strike they enter a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, other words of the Landlords who decide not sanction any of the demands of peasants and decide to treat them with harsh actions.

Another word or discourse in the novel is of Communism, it teaches the people and opens their eyes, gives them the strength to defend themselves, makes them realize their own power, tells the importance of devoting time for the cause of revolution. They provide courage in the face of danger and for this they pay heavy price. Death is often the prize if a communist was discovered by a landlord and public disgrace if he was discovered by police. The Pamphlet by the Marxist party discusses victorious agreements in their struggle. Kalappal Agreement fixed the daily wage at two measure of paddy and opened the door to an increase in the harvest wages.

It further talks about how land in Tanjore is monopolized by few individuals. It shows favouritism of the government on the sides of landlords. There are some shades of anti-development in it. For instance communists don’t like that tractors would be employed on fields or pesticides be used in the name of green revolution. They condemn the insecticide polydol due to which many peasants die. They think and I quote: “America is interested in the Green Revolution because it seeks to prevent the Red Revolution.”(Kandasamy.93).

DMK government’s chief minister Annadurai, had come to unveil the statue of Vengadangal Naidu, a landlord infamous for his atrocities against women and the untouchable castes. So they are clearly in favour of Landlords because they get funds from them. Throughout the Pamphlet there is so much of restlessness and rage and they swear to ban PPA.

All these points of view, weaves in and out of complex relationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects yet a third group like a word trying to attain meaning, and all this may crucially shape discourse, in the form of revolution in our novel. It may leave its trace in all its semantic layers, a revolution that is to change the system in all layers, may complicate its expression and influence its entire

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stylistic … the living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment, in our case the murder of Sikkal Pakirisamy, a communist leader in a socially specific environment of oppression on labourers, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, like GopalKrishna Naidu, Ramanuja Naidu, Sheshappa Iyer, Nandan, Maayi and many more. They are woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue. After all, the utterance arises out of this dialogue as a continuation of it and as a rejoinder to it.

Dialogism is the characteristic epistemological mode of a world dominated by heteroglossia. Everything means, is understood, as a part of greater whole-there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others. Dialogue and its various processes are central to Bakhtin’s theory, and it is precisely as verbal process that their force is most accuretly sensed. A Word, discourse, language or culture undergoes “dialogization” when it becomes relativized, de-privileged, aware of competing definitions for the same things. Undialogized language is authoritative or absolute.

Regarding Poetic discourse Bakhtin claims that “the language of lyric poetry, is unitary and monologic: only one voice, the poet’s, he argues, is to be heard: his poetry, Bakhtin writes, is the "pure and direct expression of his own intention" (Bakhtin. 285). In the same manner Meena Kandasamy as an author befriends the reader and starts sharing her “Notes on Storytelling.” It has a Background both to the form in which she writes and also to content, on the topic on which she is writing, I can find these words of Bakhtin very appropriate when she starts talking about her prose and compares the history of Novel to a Child artist soon forgotten, a Rebel, a dubious philological commentator. Then how novel grows as a dialogic form and she comments thus:

“Centuries later dedestructionists would study this phenomenon and tweet their findings- poetry: fucked up by flattery and falsehood: Prose: proved talk is not cheap, turned purple, never got rid of its inclination to comment.” (Kandasamy.12)

Moreover, given the dialogic nature of language, Bakhtin stresses that the writer necessarily writes with, among other things, the point of view of potential readers in mind: the "contradictory environment of alien words is present to the speaker [or writer] not in the object [being described], but rather in the consciousness of the listener [or reader], as his apperceptive background, pregnant with responses and objections" (Bakhtin.281). Every "concrete act of understanding . . . assimilates the word to be understood into its own conceptual system . . . and is indissolubly merged with the response, with a motivated agreement or disagreement" (Bakhtin.282). It is towards this "alien conceptual horizon" (Bakhtin.282) that the speaker / writer must orient his discourse in an attempt to "get a reading on his own word" (Bakhtin.282).

In this line of thought Meena Kandasamy expresses her concern in the novel regarding the responses of readers, other writers and critics, to make sure she is given justice and her meaning gets across the readers she incorporates a question answer form, a kind of interview within the novel. In which she asks questions to herself about not following chronology of events and standard narrative format to which she replies thus “if the reader wants a straight, humourless version of the events that surrounded the single biggest caste atrocity in India, she will read a research paper in the Economic and Political Weekly or a balanced press report …. Or Academic treatise like “Rural Change in Southeast Asia’…A reader cannot

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challenge what she does not comprehend. Beyond history lessons she will find herself gravitating towards twisted tales. Hence this rabble-rousing. Hence this troublemaking. This craving for unintelligibility is a curse upon the post-colonial reader who seeks me out. And I write for readers.” (Kandasamy.70) She also asks question like Should we wait for a better writer to tell this story, and answers such questions well saying yes and no, and that now that she wants to tell the story and that there are other stories waiting to be told, that we can now move away from questions so that she can address her readers. Such fantastic dialogues, which are many dimensional, are etched in The Gypsy Goddess.

The novel is multi-voiced. There is not one character narrating the story. We get the opportunity to hear many voices in first person. We hear our Authorial voice giving us background, the voice of landlords through petition and that of communist through a pamphlet. We hear Sheshappa Iyer, a woman and a legal advisor, she shares experience with GopalKrishna Naidu. We hear Ramalingam speak of the massacre in detail in one line which runs through many pages, we hear small boy Nandan witness the dreadful happening. There is a doctor and an Inspector General Mahadevan who speak in their Professional Jargons. The language of PPA shows how neat their purposes are and we as reader if we are aware of the Background we want to mock at it:

“The increasing agony faced by the landowning mirasdars has forced us to create The paddy Producers association and the aim of our organisation is two-fold: to liberate the agricultural coolies from the wicked company of these dubious leaders; and to create a relationship of mutual goodwill and understanding between the landowners, tenant farmers and the agricultural coolies who play a crucial role in Rice cultivation.”(Kandasamy. 4)

Heteroglossia is social diversity of speech types within a single language, and if the novel incorporates more than one language than the hybridity of meaning making. Thus when Meena Kandasamy says that Novel: Tamil in taste and English on tongue or For the sake of clarification, its English is Taminglish. Throughout the novel the two languages function and interact to choose the right word to express the exact meaning of that Tamil word. We come across lot of Tamil words and even if we don’t know the meaning we can understand them because the English used is almost in the same tone, speech words of Tamil language. To try and come near to authenticity of experience expressed in mother tongue.

It is through this diversity of voices and concomitant speech genres i.e. the "internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects" (Bakhtin.262), each of which correspond to the ideological perspective of a particular class, enters the novel. The novel's centrifugal dispersion (as opposed to centripetal unification) is what constitutes its "dialogisation" (Bakhtin.263).

As different from Heteroglossia, Polyphony means many and phonic is a musical term meaning sounds or voices, thus we have so many points of views and so many characters’ narration makes the novel truly polyphonic in nature.

This novel, according to me is the first one to incorporate so many other genres into it. It begins with a Petition, Letters, Dramatic scenes, Dialogues, Pamphlet, Short story, Lyric and an Interview. Thus it stands very much accurate in the lines of Bakhtin’s theory. According to Bakhtin:

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“The novel permits the incorporation of other genres both artistic (inserted short stories, lyrical songs, poems, dramatic scenes) and extra-artistic (everyday, rhetorical, scholarly, religious genres and others). In principle, any genre could be included in the construction of the novel, and in fact it is difficult to find any genres that have not at some point been incorporated into a novel by someone. Such incorporated genres usually preserve within the novel their own structural integrity and independence, as well as their own linguistic and stylistic peculiarities…if all these genres, as they enter the novel, bring into it their own languages, and therefore stratify the linguistic unity of the novel and further intensify speech diversity fresh ways ” (Bakhtin.321)

In the novel, after the death of Sikkal Pakkirisamy, There was a rally to pay homage to his death. It was a demonstration held by agricultural workers and more than 3000 people attended it. The murder of the comrade Sikkal Pakirisamy proved to be a flashpoint for the tragedy that followed. Labourers decide to be loyal to communits and fight landlords for their rights. Women like Paappa, Thangamma, and Rasathi take the lead and decide to stand in the favour of those who will protect their honour and respect. In this regard, Kandasamy writes :

I quote “ Carrying the tales of their cunts and their cuntrees and their cuntenants, women cross all hurdles, talk in circles, burst into tears , break into cheers, teach a few others, take new lovers, become earth mothers, question big brothers, breathe state secrets, fuck all etiquette and turn themselves into the truth-or-dare pamphleteer who will interfere the frontier. And in the rap-as-trap times, they perceive the dawn of the day and they start saying their permitted say.

So, when there is an old landowner who is a bad money lender, they don’t sit still, they start the gossip mill. And it is the holy writ: women don’t crib on shit,’cause they don’t ask for it. The Logic is clear: he looked for trouble, now they will burst his bubble. They bitch without a hitch; speak non-stop like monsoon frogs. Then they plot their fool proof plan, they make their effigy man. This is how the season of protest began.” (Kandasamy.67)

Gossip mill used against land lord, turns out to be a tool used by women to deconstruct their hegemonic rule. Here, all the negative attributes given to woman, are artistically used as a tool and are portrayed in different, correct and constructive way.

For the word is, after all, not a dead material object in the hands of an artist equipped with it; it is a living word and is therefore in all things true to itself; it may become anachronous and comic, it may reveal its narrow-ness and one-sidedness, but its meaning-once realized-can never he completely extinguished (Bakhtin.419)

Thus when women take to protest there is no looking back, due to this the series of events takes place in such a manner that on 25 December 1968, 44 Dalit women and children who tried to get themselves in the hut in order to save themselves were burnt alive by a mob of hundred men. This led to the living in the village go mad. The dead started living in them. Maayi, a significant old women in the story, whose short story had been incorporated in the previous chapters, tries to hold people and helps them to hold themselves. They are not able to gain justice; rather they are jailed and punished.

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Amidst all this tragedy, some lives move on. The nature has its own ways to do justice. In the epilogue in the strange manner, we the reader or the author go to the village to meet Maayi and other people. We decide to meet Gopalkrishna Naidu and he is murdered. We don’t know how. There is the supernatural element of Goddess Kali and their feast of Sakkarai Pongal along with the story of the gypsy goddess, it is the story of this woman who died and become a cult goddess, may be it is justice undertaken by her. I quote : “ The novelist, ill at ease, wants to teach a lesson to the village. In one stroke, he elevates the seven condemned women and their children into cult goddess…. They say their first prayers. Misers come to ruin, thieves are struck blind, wife-beaters sprout thorns, rapists are mysteriously castrated, and murders are found dead the following morning, their bodies are mutilated beyond recognition.” (Kandasamy.45)

All the fiction’s artefacts used in this novel- lining, holing, filling, mixing, planting, staking, topping, weeding, watering, manuring, threshing, winnowing- are borrowed from a peasants paradise. Here Stories grow like haphazard weeds. Here ideas flow like Rain through leaky thatched roof.

Thus the novel The Gypsy Goddess stays alive within with all its heteroglossia and its polyphony and dialogue.

References

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin.ed. Michael Holoquist and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holoquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Print.

----. Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics. Ed. And trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 184-5. Print.

Holquist, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.

Kandasamy, Meena. The Gypsy Goddess. New Delhi: Fourth Estate, 2014.Print.

The Global Journal of English Studies I December 2016 I Volume II, Issue IV ISSN : 2395 4795