"It was the moment when his beard scratched her cheeks and his falcon eyes looked directly down upon her, held her eyes until he must have seen how very small his face was, how very tiny, reflected in her gray eyes. And in that long, long moment, she knew Sardarji expected her to lower her eyes before him."

Satya recalls, in Shauna Singh Baldwin?s book What the Body Remembers, the single moment when she knew what her husband wanted but that she could never do: lower her gaze in front of him. It is this quality of hers to look him in the eye and tell him the way it is that also eventually separates him from her. That and the fact that she could not bear him a son.

With the 1947 Partition of India as the backdrop, WTBR is a loving portrait of the Sikhs - the community of people from the Northwest corner of India. Baldwin has used research and her own experiences as a Sikh to draw the three main characters: Sardarji, his wife Satya, and her nemesis Roop, the young girl Sardarji marries secretly so she could give him a son. They linger in your mind long after you close the book. Using minute layers of details of Roop?s life as the ground, Baldwin has drawn Roop?s character, her longings, her fears, her courage, and most importantly, her endurance. Satya and Roop, the two women married to Sardarji, so different in their personality and character, yet live under the same fear and belief: the fragility of their security. From different levels of prosperity and status they each see with clarity the ease with their lives can be blown all away at the slightest show of free will, of disobedience. It is a story lived by many women in all cultures. The Sikh women in Baldwin?s story surprise us with the strength they show in adversity, the way they bend without breaking when their world falls apart and reshapes in permenantly altered states.

An exile in home and country

This is a story about estrangement and division -- political, personal, and metaphysical. Roop, one of Bachan Singh's three children, and the more beautiful of his two daughters, is born in the Punjabi village of Pari Darvaza -- the Doorway of the Fairies -- circa 1921. Bachan Singh, who becomes a widower, is a man of genuine standing in the village, but of modest means. Roop, born into a Sikh family of dependents and servants, receives the benefit of a school education and some religious training, but sees that it's a man's world, and that it's on her brother that all her father's ambitions are concentrated. Paraxodically, for a girl who's raised to fulfill the role or a traditional woman, she's pampered as well, perhaps because she is beautiful; thus, she is taught few of the household skills that other girls are expected to have. Roop's little secret, known only to herself and her father, is that she is deaf in one ear, a condition that an English doctor in Lahore diagnoses but cannot cure.

Roop turns 16; her older sister, and her brother, by then in the Amry, are already married; and a marriage proposal is brought for Bachan Singh's younger daughter from the most influential person in the village, Sardar Kushal Singh. But it is not an alliance to one of his sons that Kushal Singh proposes, as Bachan Singh had expected, but to the immensely powerful executive engineer in Rawalpindi, referred to most often in the novel as Sardarji. Bachan Singh hesitates; Sardarji is much older and already married, albeit to the childless Satya. This, then, is the reason for the proposal; Sardarji wants a child -- indeed, a son.

Roop's response is a study in naivete as well as the instinctive shrewdness that characterizes her in the novel. She has no reservations about the proposal, and persuades her father to accept; no qualms about the unusual, and the slightly dangerous situation she might be entering. She is certain, as many in her situation might be, that this marriage is her passport to a world otherwise unimaginable to her, convinced, as not everyone might be, that she will bring the first wife, her new "sister", around to some sort of peaceful co-existence. A wedding takes place, but what is scrutinized in this story is not a wedding between a man and a woman, but between a feudal and a secular, modern way of life. The novel explores the self-division that exists in India in which feudal and secular values try to make a place for each other, much as Satya and Roop do in their husband's house. It is a self-division that leads not only to the particular neuroses of the marriage, but culminates in the political violence of the country's partition that will come later.

Satya, the first wife, is not susceptible to Roop's charms. Her contribution to Sardarji's life and affairs is great, a fact she is not about to forget. Her inability to produce offspring is not the only reason that her relationship with her Oxford-educated husband has soured; she has an unsparing tongue, and as if Baldwin had momentarily lost her grip on the frame of reference such a woman as Satya would have, can occasionally sound like a post-colonial feminist in a suburban Canadian university. Yet it is not Sardarji, with the contradiction of his externalized expertise and conventional patriarchal beliefs, who represents, as he thinks he does, a new progressive era for India. It is Satya, with her bitter refusal to compromise what belongs to another [...?..] Thus, she is the only one of the principal characters who must resign her part from the story, and who, as if in rebellion against the world she inhabits, must die before the novel ends. (It should be mentioned in relation to Satya's outspokenness that most characters have names that are a comment upon them, in the tradition of fairy tales or Elizabethan allegories. For instance, one of the meanings of "Roop" is "physical beauty", and "Satya" means, simply, "truth".)

Before Satya dies, however, she does everything she can to disrupt Sardarji's second marriage. First, she insists upon adopting Roop's first-born, a daughter, and then the second, a son, as her own; Sardarji is oddly powerless before these demands.

The final chapters deal with the partition of India and the characters uprooting from a part of Punjab that has suddenly become Pakistan. The story unfolds in the mode of the 19th-century novel, but it is a mode that, we realize once more, is quite capable of accomodating the atmosphere of the fairy tale and the myth; whoever said the 19th-century novel was "realistic" or "naturalistic" must have had a very strange idea of reality.

Baldwin does very well to make the two women and their family her main focus, rather than the history of events leading to partition and independence. This narrative about fathers estranged from daughters, mothers from sons, husbands from wives, becomes a metaphor for the turmoil and flux we call history, without always speaking of that history directly. The story of what marriage means to a conventional Indian woman is, here, told as a story of exile and being uprooted -- Roop leaves one "home" and goes to another; and for both Roop and Satya, the meaning of "home" is a constantly evolving and fraught one that exists on the interstices of the familiar and the strange.

This, too, mirrors the other theme in the novel without having to address it directly; the meaning, with changed boundaries and politics, of "home" and belonging; the constant endeavour, in exile, to belong somewhere. When history does enter the novel, Baldwin introduces it expertly; in the conversations about politics and industrialization that Sardarji has with his English colleagues; in descriptions of the colonial spaces in which Sardarji lives, works and moves about, and which Roop finds so extraordinary. The last chapters about the actual upheaval of India's partition are admirably controlled and manage to avoid the luridness of Hollywood -- probably because Baldwin, a Montreal-born Indian now living in the United States, is unobtrusively but deeply, conscious of the fact that the trajectories of lives, with or without such upheavals, are always cruel, unexpected, and shocking. This is a novel whose many themes and characters have been orchestrated, for the most part, with great confidence and without sacrificing complexity. It is an impressive debut.

This review was originally published in the National Post, Canada, on 25 Sep 1999. Reproduced here with permission

No bugles have ushered in Shauna Singh Baldwin. No gavels have fallen to settle contending bids for her manuscript in the west. In fact there's been none of the now accustomed hype to pave the way for this Canada-born Indian author. But Baldwin's first novel, What the Body Remembers, is a book to take note of -- perhaps more than any of the books that have been celebrated recently. Here, finally, is an Indian writer in English who does not seem an outsider to her own story; an author who writes with unusual immediacy and emotional intimacy with her material, and who rarely wavers from her absorption to glance at or make concessions for an audience, western or otherwise.

At the heart of What the Body Remembers -- a powerful saga of a Sikh family set against the Independent movement -- are three unforgettable characters. Sardarji is a figure of transition, a man typically caught in cleft world. A kindly zamindar from Rawalpindi with a degree from Balliol in engineering, he reads The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, builds canals that criss-cross the Punjab, makes energetic blueprints for a modern India on his Underwood typewriter, and leaves the running of his vast estate to his wife, Satya, and his manager, Aziz. Yet, when barren Satya cannot give him the son he yearns for, at 42, Sardarji takes Roop, a 16 year old girl from Pari Darvaza, a tiny hamlet in his jagir, as his second wife. Sparking off a sly, taut, cruel battle for supremacy between the two women of which he is largely oblivious, though it leads to the death of one of them.

Baldwin is a masterful storyteller and though the idea that men look at women "only from the corner of their eyes" underpins her story, Satya and Roop are not clotheshorses for feminist statements. They are complex, shaded and resonant with ironies. Satya -- a woman born before her time into a feudal patriarchal world, fatally unable to lower her resolute grey eyes in front of a man -- is a burr in Sardarji's side. A woman whose quarrelsome, mocking intelligence he seeks out, rejects, then misses with an ache when he can no longer have it. Roop, on the other hand, is the perfect foil -- Sardarji's "little brown koel," a woman so ornamental she is like an irritating itch. But it is a measure of Baldwin's mastery that we never forget that this Roop is but a sad parody of the feisty girl who once roamed her father's haveli in Pari Darvaza without fear of consequence. A girl in whom poverty, fate and personal ambition have pared down to being little more than a vessel for Sardarji's seed, but who struggles for greater self-expression.

Though it's these three and their movement towards reconciliation that rivets the story, the canvas of What the Body Remembers also takes in the sweep of history from 1895 to 1948, the years through which India hurtles towards the terrible moment of Partition. Using Vayu, the wind, as in innovative literary tool, Baldwin brings snatches of political developments in far away Delhi, Bihar and Bengal into her story. Echoes of Jinnah, Gandhiji, Tara Singh and Nehru texture the lives of Sardarji and his family and those at Pari Darvaza with a latent, national tension, imbuing their personal lives with intimations of the great convulsion that is to come.

When it does come, Baldwin's portrayal of Partition is made even more poignant and horrific because she has earlier detailed the old, syncretic rhythms of life with such warmth and flavor. As the country catches flame in the background, she plays out the myriad betrayals of Partition on a constellation of richly individualised characters: Bachan Singh, Roop's father, Mani Mai, her Muslim maid in Rawalpindi; Abu Ibrahim, a pir in Pari Darvaza; Huma, his daughter with whom Roop played kikli as a child; and Kusum, Roop's dutiful sister in law who cannot bring herself to say nahin-ji to her elders even when they hold a kirpan over her submissive neck. These are the people who carry within them the fierce pride and prejudices of their communities, the people who've lived together in harmony for centuries but who kindle to hate and madness like tinder because they carry within themselves the burden of historical memory, or to use Baldwin's powerful metaphor, the burden of 'what the body remembers.'

Unlike Hiroshima, the Holocaust or even the Vietnam War, it is a weary truism that Partition is a hugely neglected area, an emotional black hole glossed over by history and ignored by Indian writers. Baldwin's What the Body Remembers is a small but important reparation of that. Marvelously, also, her novel is layered both with a palpable Sikh ethos as well as western, cosmopolitan lifestyle; imbued with fragments of conversation in Punjabi and snippets of song and prayers. Thus, barring one weak link where Baldwin tries to depict Sardarji's dual cultural inheritance by creating Cunningham, the Englishman who lives inside his head, What the Body Remembers is a triumphant and fascinating example of a bilingual sensibility which has successfully and convincingly translated itself into English. Perhaps for the first time. Read this book.

Song of the Body Electric

The years maybe a speck in the course of human history but if they happen to be watershed pre-Partition years, they can leave a lifetime of memories. Appropriating the concept of collective consciousness, one can say this book culls the "Sikh memory", memories which make the community react the way they do to Partition. But What the Body Remembers is not just about a dispossessed and displaced community caught at the crossroads of history. It is essentially about women, written by a woman who has very strong beliefs. And the women in the novel are not only products of their own memories but also that of everywoman's.

Partition explodes into the novel towards the end. Before that, the narrative seamlessly moves between the world of Pari Darvaza, the gateway to the world of fairies, and the haveli of Rawalpindi. The world is changing outside the village of Pari Darvaza. But there is very little impact on Roop, the village girl. She is too busy anticipating her own kismat to be troubled by the outside world. Her small universe is peopled by a collage of characters -- Revati Bua, Gujri, Papaji, Jeevan and Madani. No one rebels in Pari Darvaza. In this world of strict social norms Roop unquestioningly follows the rules as she prepares to be the wife of a rich man. Her kismat says she will marry a rich man and she does not go against the grain. There is, however, a twist in the tale: her husband turns out to be her father's age and she is his second wife. The three voices in the novel -- those of Roop, Satya and Sardarji -- observe their world, observe each other, ruminate and act. In the process they reveal themselves to the reader. A single event finds new meanings when viewed through three different pairs of eyes. There is also an "English" point of view, that of Cunningham's, Sardarji's alter ego, the epitome of analysis and pure reason. But of all the voices, it is Satya's which is the strongest.

The most riveting character of What the Body Remembers is Sardarji's first wife Satya. A woman who has never lowered her eyes in front of her husband. She is 42, her husband's age. Still beautiful, the tragedy of her life is that she is barren, reason enough for her husband to marry a second time. But this is not so simple or clear-cut.

Sardar marries again not only to continue the family line, but also because he needs to assert his "superior" masculinity over someone who will tell him the things he wants to hear. Satya is his true match, but she keeps deflating his ego with the rapier thrust of her reason. She wants to walk next to him, not one step behind. She is all-consuming burning passion. Her jealousy, her love, her anger, her feelings, her music, her views on life, all stem from this passion. She ultimately invites death, as she knows that sometimes it is in death that a woman gets what she wants in life. In her case, it is her husband's attention. It is a passionate end to a passionate woman. But Satya's story does not end there. She lives through Roop as the Choti-Sardarni finds her way through the pogrom of Partition.

As a woman reader one is tempted to read this book as a feminist treatise -- as an assertion of the woman's spirit, aptly portrayed through a disembodied voice that initiates and concludes the book, sometimes also floating in and out of chapters. More so because one realises that Satya's voice is the voice of Everywoman.

On the directly allegorical level, Roop is beauty and Satya, truth. The pitfalls of using allegories are many. Unless handled skillfully they can degenerate into simplistic morality tales. Singh Baldwin avoids this by displaying a superb control over her characters. These are flesh and blood people with flaws. Despite her name, Satya has no qualms about plotting and planning Roop's ouster from Sardarji's household or in taking away Roop's daughter, only to return her once Roop gives birth to a son whom Satya wants for herself.

Roop is a study in contrast. Beautiful and young, she realises she is a mere vessel through which Sardarji will prolong his bloodline. Always in fear of being driven out of his household, Roop teaches herself to be the model wife as one who speaks the "git-mit" talk (English). It is only after Satya dies and the carnage of Partition begins that Roop sheds the role of the silly girl-wife that she was pretending to be and develops into a woman. In spite of that, Satya haunts the pages of the book voicing the eternal truths of a woman's heart. There perhaps couldn't be a better way for the writer to make her presence felt in the novel. And perhaps it takes a woman to understand this book best.

What the Body Remembers is also the Sardarji's story. If Roop and Satya dominate the world inside, Sardarji's is the world outside -- the world of dams, English education, British bureaucrats and their scornful attitude towards Indians. His is the world where the seed of a new India lies dormant. Events that condition India's history flit outside the walls of Sardarji's haveli. But gradually the characters inside are swallowed by the horror and swirl of the outside world. Baldwin is the sort of writer who does not leave too many stones unturned for the reader. Often dramatic, she believes in making statements, some of them of a political nature. Her sarcasm is biting, specially when she goes on to describe the leaders who shaped India's destiny, be it Gandhi, Nehru or Jinnah. In this context, the reader senses the author depicting Partition from the point of view of the Sikhs, a warrior class trying hard to make sense out of a world where there is no "izzat" for the values they have grown up with, a community which by the stroke of a pen is uprooted from everything they called their own.

It is a book that makes the reader feel for and empathise with its characters. Baldwin's work is a minor masterpiece where nothing is superfluous. Her narrative effortlessly conveys several strands of thought and carries a kind of descriptive power that is rare. The book is really about what the body remembers -- as a community, as a human being and most importantly as a woman.

Book Description: A novel set around Partition and three characters: Roop is a young girl who is to become the second wife of a wealthy Sikh landowner, Sardarji, whose first wife Satya has failed to bear him children. Roop believes that she and Satya, still very much in residence, will be friends. But the relationship between the older and younger woman is far more complex. And, as India lurches toward independence, Sardarji struggles to find his place amidst the drastic changes. What the Body Remembers is at once poetic, political, feminist, and sensual. It was awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize for best book from the Canada/Caribbean region, and longlisted for the Orange Prize in fiction.

Real Audio of Shauna on the Diane Rehm Show, 4 NOv 99.