Sigmund Freud once said that not to know the past is to be in bondage to it, while to remember, to know, is to be set free. Writer Meena Kandasamy knows her past; it is the ink in her pen, the fire in her bones. Her maternal grandparents were lower-caste shudras and her father came from a landless family. Her parents’ anti-caste activism gave Kandasamy a deep understanding of the caste and gender inequalities that fracture our society, and her writing is soaked in it. Her debut collection of poems, Touch (2006), for example, was themed around caste and untouchability, and her second collection, Ms Militancy (2010), was “an explosive, feminist retelling/ reclaiming of Tamil and Hindu myths”.
Described by The Guardian as “one of fiction’s most fiery and unclassifiable polemicists”, Kandasamy was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 2022, and was also awarded the PEN Hermann Kesten Prize for her writing and work. Here, she writes about the magic and mayhem of being a woman writer.
Looking back after nearly a quarter century, with the benefit of both hindsight and nostalgia, I think the decision to become a writer was the most courageous thing I have ever done. Writing came from some loves (the passion for the written word, the almost-naive commie belief that ideas can change the world, my teenage admiration for the utterly broken, glamorous lives of artists). Writing also came from absent futures, as a creative response to constraints, to the realisation that I could not choose the revolutionary life, could not be a guerrilla somewhere, could not organise people by the thousands. Writing happened because I was a girl with very strong opinions. Writing also happened because I was helpless to the news-cycle around me―the late 1990s was a time of radical liberation movements in some parts of the subcontinent on the one hand, and of extreme mass violence against dalits; massacres like Melavalavu, Bathani Tola and Laxmanpur Bathe were the headlines we would wake up to.
To lead the life of a writer has been most exhilarating, empowering, adventurous, and rewarding. Beyond my wildest imagination, I have felt cherished and loved in a way that I cannot come to terms with. There is an inexplicable magic in the extremes of living conditions that I can access and bear witness to, the extremes of emotions that the life of the mind allows me to mine. I may have chosen this path with passion and the undeniable, irrepressible enthusiasm of teenage, but I stay on this path at 40, filled with overwhelming gratitude.
For every single instance of a vitriolic troll directing abuse at me, I have been bombarded with fan mail and love. Some of my more explicitly feminist works―Ms Militancy and When I Hit You―have touched people’s lives. When someone decides to challenge parental authority or chooses to leave an abusive relationship, they write to me. I am dumbfounded, I have no words to respond. It is a love that I cannot reciprocate. So, in the face of that immense beauty and grace of what writing can achieve, I look at the misogynist backlash as the insignificant trash-talk that it is. More men than women have written to me about witnessing their sisters, mothers, friends and co-workers caught in the turbulence of violent relationships. They say that they encouraged these women to leave because they read my novel and realised what women had to endure. Writing allows you to access a place in other people’s lives that is incredibly private.
When I moved back to India four years ago, after having lived abroad for about a decade, I realised that there was something about being a woman writer in India. You are not just read, you are ‘consumed’. To learn, to visit, to immerse in multiple lives; to live with integrity; to be true; to give enough of yourself away―you embrace absolute vulnerability as a way of life so that people can put their faith and trust in you.
The flip side to this transparency is the heavy emotional price-tag―there are no boundaries, your intimate life is analysed en masse. By putting yourself out there, you are also inviting society’s never-ending judgment upon yourself. In a caste-ridden, patriarchal society, this judgment is never kind. This is a road of no-return; turning a recluse overnight is not a solution. When I saw the very public life of Kamala Das I felt that was an exception; I was so wrong.
“Develop a thick skin” is utterly absurd advice―what makes someone a writer is their heightened sensitivity. I think that women who enter the writing world will need to build a community of women and men who will hold them up with fierce love. I often console myself that although I have had to abandon the instinct for self-preservation, it is compensated by the enormous responsibility placed on me. As writers, we are laying claim to intellectual space. This is an act of militancy and this is an act of resistance against the structural violence that has always denied this space to us. We are doing this in a society where women are reduced to objects, where women were told to listen and obey, not to speak, theorise and rebel.
We were born into a society that was deeply broken, unequal and hegemonic. Caste and patriarchy are built on the fundamental premise that people are inherently unequal by birth. To challenge that outright is never going to be easy. The overarching structural violence of our time―capitalism with its facade of choice―also presents an almost insurmountable challenge. The market’s eagerness to commodify us as its it-girls play out only as long as our politics remain palatable enough. Otherwise, we are deemed too dangerous to be distributed. This process, of becoming a sell-out in order to be sold, is a containment strategy that seems to silence our radical edge. When we as women write into a casteist, patriarchal, capitalist society built to silence us, we are not only creating literature, but we are actively dismantling the very structures of power that strive to keep us silenced. We write because silence is impossible.
What do we want as women writers? We want to be heard with an open mind. We want to be not censored. We want people to engage with us at the level of ideas, without reducing the discourse into character-assassination and slander. We want the dignity that every human being deserves.