Indian women of flesh and blood

Women from the Indian subcontinent are often portrayed in film and novel as strong but feminine, conservative in many ways, deeply devoted to family, silent sufferers, subject to the whims of their men, yet often with a quiet power. Such characteristics are easily turned into cliches, and many novelists from the subcontinent and elsewhere have done so. Yet many of these characteristics are indeed typical of women from that part of the world, and not many novelists have been able to give their women personalities that show through the stereotypes. Shauna Singh Baldwin's recent book of short stories is a welcome move in that direction.

"English Lessons and other stories" is Shauna Singh Baldwin's second book, a collection of fifteen short stories that revolve around Sikh women in three different countries -- India, Canada, and the United States. They range from a 10-year-old girl in Indian Punjab, through mothers whose children are studying abroad, to young immigrants in Canada and the US, to an elderly lady in a retirement home in Canada.

Ms. Baldwin was born in Canada, grew up in Punjab, and studied in the United States. Given her background, it's not surprising that several of the stories deal with Indian immigrants in Canada or Indian students in the U.S. The stories move easily between India and the western world, with many major characters being either immigrants to the US or their parents still living in India.

The mother-daughter relationship appears in 'Simran', which is told from two perspectives -- the anxious Indian mother whose daughter is studying abroad, and the daughter's fellow student in the U.S, a Pakistani Muslim. The daughter's own point of view is told only by inference. Some readers may complain that the mother's angle is told with less sympathy -- there is affection and understanding in Baldwin's depiction of her anxiety about her child, but the story nevertheless demonstrates the essential lack of trust that is at the root of this mother- child relationship. 'Toronto 1984', told in similar vein by a mother and daughter, is tense in its pressures of conformity within the home and racism outside. The young woman must wend her way between insensitive colleagues and a traditional mother to find her own identity.

The loneliness of aging and dying in an alien land -- an unusual subject for a young writer -- is tackled with sensitivity in 'Jassie', which won the Writers Unions of Canada's Short Story Prose Competition for Developing Writers. Jassie is an elderly Sikh woman in an American retirement home, surrounded by people who have little understanding of her traditions, while she has as little knowledge of their society and history. In spite of this apparently unbridgeable gap, 'Jessie' helps her American room-mate come to terms with death.

Young women immigrants -- some married, some single -- feature in several stories. 'Devika' and 'Montreal 1962' are excellent in their description of the married women who stay at home all day, creating a miniature India for their husbands to come home to. In India, women at home have an endless circle of other wives, shopkeepers, children and bustling life outside their doors -- in North America, they are frequently isolated in apartments where the neighbours are unknown and travel is impossible without a car. The routines of their days are beautifully woven into the deeper story of how the foreign world outside their doors impinges on these women.

The longest and most haunting story in the book is 'Family Ties' a story of the India-Pakistan partition. The narrator is a girl of about ten, and the story will remind many readers of Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India with its child's perspective and setting. The similarity, however, is only superficial. Baldwin's story takes place in 1971, and the child is learning about her father's Partition experience from a distance, with the imperfect understanding that all of us born after 1950 must share. Although the accounts of Partition, the violence on both sides of the Indo-Pakistan border, and the slaughter of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh are well known in fact and fiction, this story brings home the fact that women are the greatest sufferers in such ethnic wars, and are frequently pawns in the battles where humiliation, not just murder, is the ultimate goal.

Baldwin has a real gift for descriptive writing, and the stories often dwell sensuously on sensations, smells, and sounds. A simple description of washing becomes a metaphor for cultural strength:

"I placed each turban in turn on the bubbly surface and watched them grow dark and heavy, sinking slowly, softly into the warmth. When there were no more left beside me, I leaned close and reached in, working each one in a rhythm bone-deep,as my mother and hers must have done before me, that their men might face the world proud. I drained the tub and new colours swelled -- deep red, dark black mud, rust, orange, soft purple, and jade green."

A woman in Toronto dreams of Delhi: "Maybe the sun had already risen at home -- it rises so early in summer -- and then street vendors would be crying their wares with dust-parched throats, stripping tar off sun-baked streets with their worn cycle tires. There, scooter-rickshaw drivers would be squinting into sun-mirages." My personal favourite:

"Gayatri had been cocooned in a sulk for two days now. She wore it, look by look, spining it slowly, clenching its threads around everyone, ominous and accusing."

History features prominently in the thoughts and actions of the character -- in particular, the border carnage during Partition in 1947, and the massacre of Sikhs in India following the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984. It is a little surprising that the Sikhs in this book seem far less conscious of the recent years of Hindu-Sikh trouble in Punjab, of Indian troops storming the Golden Temple in Amritsar, or the Khalistan movement.

In contrast to the delicacy of some of the stories, 'A Pair of Ears', about an elderly woman and her devoted servant, seems overwrought. One is tempted to speculate that the author is more familiar with the middle-class Indian world than that of the poorer people, and thus writes better about the former. 'Lisa' is somewhat condescending towards its American characters, who come across as flighty, gullible, and superficial. In contrast, Janet in 'Nothing Must Spoil this Visit' is far better drawn. However, these are minor flaws in a delightful collection, and the warmth of Baldwin's writing will appeal to many readers.

This review was first published in India West, Aug 1996. Reproduced here with permission of the author

Book Description: Passionate stories dramatise the lives of Indian women from 1919 to today, from India to North America, and from the closed circle of the family to the wilderness of office and university.