ININ SEARCH SEARCH OF OF KASTURBA KASTURBA AN AUTO/BIOGRAPHICAL READING OF OF THE MAHATMA AND HIS WIFE A MONOGRAPH __________________________________________________ LAVANYA VARADRAJAN (RESEARCH ASSOCIATE) UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF PROF. MALA PANDURANG (IN-CHARGE, GANDHIAN STUDIES CENTRE) UGC RECOGNISED GANDHIAN STUDIES CENTRE SEVA MANDAL EDUCATION SOCIETY’S DR. BHANUBHEN MAHENDRA NANAVATI COLLEGE OF HOME SCIENCE MATUNGA, MUMBAI 2017 Cover Designed By Mr Shravan Kamble, Faculty, Dept. Of Applied Arts, SCNI Polytechnic Printed By Mahavir Printers, Mumbai 400075 Published By Seva Mandal Education Society’s DR. BHANUBHEN MAHENDRA NANAVATI COLLEGE OF HOME SCIENCE (NAAC Reaccredited Grade “A” CGPA 3.64/4) UGC STATUS: COLLEGE WITH POTENTIAL FOR EXCELLENCE (CPE) MAHARSHI DHONDO KESHAV KARVE BEST COLLEGE AWARDEE SMT PARAMESHWARI GORANDHAS GARODIA EDUCATION COMPLEX, 338, R.A. KIDWAI ROAD. MATUNGA, MUMBAI 2017 ISBN 978-93-5258-741-2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My sincere gratitude to Dr Shilpa P Charankar, Principal & UGC recognised Gandhian Studies Centre, Dr. BMN College of Home Science, Matunga, for giving me the opportunity to pursue this study on Kasturba Gandhi. My deepest thanks to Prof. Mala Pandurang for her patient and painstaking guidance through the course of the research and writing of this project. A heartfelt hat-tip to Rajeshwar Thakore, whose passion for learning, and meticulous proof- reading skills, especially during the early drafts, helped this study immensely. This project would not have been possible without the literary resources available at the Mani Bhavan Gandhi Sangrahalaya Library and Mrs Vidya Subramanian, Librarian Dr. BMN College of Home Science. To both, my sincere thanks. CONTENTS Chapter I 1 Introduction: An Overview of the Framework of 1 the Study Chapter II 2 A Woman Imagined: Examining Kasturba’s 16 Presence/Absence in the Auto/Biographical Texts Chapter III 3 Public vs. Private: An Analysis of Kasturba and 58 Gandhi’s Domestic Universe Chapter IV 4 Multiple Subjectivities: A Close Reading of 105 Biographical Elements on Kasturba 5 Conclusion 152 6 Bibliography 159 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: AN OVERVIEW OF THE FRAMEWORK OF THE STUDY 1.1 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY This study attempts to address the following objectives: To examine auto/biography as a problematic genre in its representation of ‘factual information’ on the life of Kasturba Gandhi To scrutinise the presentation of facts about Kasturba, in Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, as also a selection of biographies / memoirs on Gandhi that feature Kasturba as a key player To study how auto/biography as a narrative form attempts to locate the principal subjects of this study, namely Kasturba and Gandhi in a specific socio-cultural, historical and political context To investigate the difference in approach by male and female biographers/memoirists in addressing the presence/absence of Kasturba in biographical narratives through a close reading of pertinent passages in the texts chosen for this purpose To assess auto/biographical literature selected for this study and its representation/construction of Kasturba Gandhi through a feminist lens 1.2 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF THE STUDY Before we undertake an analysis of the representation/construction of Kasturba Gandhi in a selection of auto/biographical texts, it is important to outline the two key perspectives through which we will be examining Kasturba and Gandhi, the subjects of this study: namely a critical study of auto/biography as a genre, and feminism. The focus on auto/biography as a narrative idiom owes itself to the idea that auto/biographical literature is a popular form that facilitates crucial links between the readers, and the subject(s) it attempts to document and, in the process, construct. These links enable readers of auto/biographical writing to arrive at a rational, consistent and definitive image of the subjects they seek to uncover. “Life Histories” have a “wide, if not universal appeal” according to David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn, in the introduction to Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography and Life 1 History (Arnold and Blackburn 1). Such life stories may be told in order to “entertain or admonish us, to encourage emulation or inspire repugnance and fear” (1). Arnold and Blackburn further believe that the desire to publish a life history, as a matter of fact, rests within us all, making it all the more accessible and popular as a literary genre. In her book, Missing Persons: The impossibility of auto/biography, Mary Evans says that while we are accustomed to classify autobiography as non-fiction, it might be more useful to view it, instead, as a “mythical construct of our society and our social needs” (Evans 1). These social needs, she goes on to say, stem from the “compelling wish of many people to experience life as an organised and coherent process, in which rational choices are made” (1). It is important here to offer a distinction between auto/biography and memoir as literary idioms. While the two terms are often used interchangeably in common parlance, an auto/biography is typically defined as the “story of a person’s life written by that person” or by “somebody else,” whereas a memoir is a “written account of somebody’s life, a place or an event” (Oxford English Dictionary 88, 138, 959). The former, by definition, is expected to cover a gamut of substantive experiences of a particular subject, typically tracing a significant growth curve from birth all the way to a point of maturity in terms of age and station in the subject’s life, while the latter can choose to focus on a specific period or aspect in a subject’s personal history. Ian Jack views the autobiography as a “record of accomplishment” written by “all kinds of people, more or less famous” (Jack 1). The ambition of the memoir, on the other hand, is “to be interesting in itself” (1). Propelled by the desire to be thought of as “literary”, it borrows, what Jack calls, “the tricks of the novel, of fiction” because it does not wish to merely “record the past,” the memoir wants “to recreate it” (1). This distinction is vital to the study at hand, because we have chosen to include memoir within the ambit of our scrutiny of auto/biographical writing, owing to the paucity of material available on the principal subject, namely Kasturba. Each idiom comes with its own tools, and is defined by the subjectivities of their authors in different ways. Auto/biographies locate their subjects within, what Evans refers to, as “a particular zeitgeist” (Evans 12). This allows readers to understand and appreciate them as products of a particular time and place in history, as also the specific socio-economic, political and cultural milieu that informs their personal narratives. To that extent, auto/biographies are often largely viewed as quasi-historical documents. Arnold and Blackburn say that life histories, more importantly, have an inherent and wide appeal because they “straddle the elusive divide between personal narrative and objective truth” (Arnold and Blackburn 4). Auto/biographical writing, therefore, has been premised upon on two consistently overarching assumptions. The first is that, far from being a fiction that merely seeks to entertain, it is a “meaningful exploration of life” which is invested in bringing to the fore 2 “emotional and social realities” that would otherwise “elude identification and explanation” (4). The second assumption is that it is an integral source for understanding the emergence of “the modern sense of self, of individualism and self-consciousness as opposed to collective identity” (5). Evans equates the telling of a life in a documented form with a verbal exchange of information that highlights our fascination with the lives of others. What prevents auto/biography from being reduced to the status of the “literary equivalent of gossip,” she declares, is that it is “generally assumed to aspire to some version of absolute and inclusive truth” (1). Such truth is also approached by the average reader, as unmediated and unvarnished by the subjectivity of the narrator of the life story, whether in the form of a direct, first-person telling, or through the perspective of a biographer. And it is such an assumption that this study attempts to challenge. Evans says what constitutes an essential ingredient of autobiography is “individual terror at the thought of dying without a written record” (Evans 2). It is then a literary genre that she views as coeval to literate societies which are innately driven by a desire to record their ethos. And yet, she also points out, that individual accounts have been written into oral histories, fairy stories, folk tales, mythical legends and nursery rhymes, all of which have elements of auto/biographical narratives in them. Evans also refers to a “steady production” of autobiographies and biographies through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which are organised as “moral tales,” with the subjects “overcoming specific hardships or illnesses, living through difficult times, or finding personal happiness…” (2). This is a vital aspect of the writing of a life history, because in locating its subjects within specific contexts, and also using them as vehicles through which a reader can identify aspects of his or her own life, auto/biography as a narrative idiom is shaped automatically within the decisive parameters of what Evans calls a “moralistic genre” (84). It also embodies, in some measure, the qualities, albeit in non-fiction, of the classic bildungsroman. Jessica Geva draws our attention to the idea that, in contemporary criticism, there is a tendency to conflate autobiography with confession. Individuals “who opt for the poetics of autobiography to portray their literary subjectivity,” she says, “commit to its confessional injunction to tell all and examine all” (Geva 1). As a corollary, she posits that “autobiographical reticence” contained in a “deliberate privileging of particular life-writing options” could be construed as “intentional literary self-effacement” in a bid to avoid “self- examination and self-recognition” (1).