A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." So said Virginia Woolf in 1928 in A Room of One's Own. It was Woolf's belief that all literary production was sustained by the availability of leisure, privacy and financial independence. It was the lack of these conditions, Woolf had persuasively argued, that killed women's creativity. But did it, really? I have often pondered on this question while translating The First Promise, a novel by Bengali writer, Ashapurna Debi, whose centenary year this is.
Ashapurna's writing career began in 1936 when she published a short story titled 'The Wife and the Beloved'. She continued to write until her death in 1995 producing a profusion of novels, short stories and stories for children. She won the Tagore Prize in 1966 and the Jnanpith in 1977 for her novel The First Promise astonishing achievements for a writer who never went to school. Nor were there teachers who came home to teach her, for her conservative family did not even believe in tutoring the girls at home.
Ashapurna learnt the alphabet at a very young age by listening to her brother recite them aloud. Encouraged by her mother, she started writing and at the age of thirteen, published her first poem. Her marriage at age fifteen was not unexpected given her traditional background. None of this thwarted her creativity for she wrote and soon gained acceptance and appreciation among contemporary writers.
Unlike her modernist contemporaries though, Ashapurna wrote about the domestic space that she was familiar with for she believed that this space was no less significant than the public world.
History, she wrote in her Preface to The First Promise, has invariably overlooked the dynamics of the domestic world which broke and built its occupants again and again. She captured this world, tellingly through the actions of her characters, through what they said or left unsaid, ignoring the arrogance of critics who called her a 'kitchen writer' identifying her with the world she wrote about.
Reflecting on her writings at age eighty two, she wrote in an autobiographical piece, "Since I write about what is most familiar to me, day to day experiences in middle-class homes, my readers feel that what I write about is very close to their experience, and want to read more and more."
I never had the opportunity to meet Ashapurna, but I have often wondered how she managed to be so prolific despite being a homemaker. Her publisher tells me that she never missed a deadline. She must have been among the few Indian writers who bought a car with her earnings in the 1970s, astonishing when you think that she wrote only in Bengali, never had astronomical advances paid to her nor an international market in which to peddle her writings.
When I talk to her daughter-in-law Nupur Gupta, I learn that Ashapurna never did have a special room to write in. She preferred to write, stretched on her bed, flat on her stomach, balancing her writing pad on a pillow in front of her.
Perhaps she never believed that she needed an exclusive private space in which to write; every so often she would raise her head from her writing to instruct the cook or the maid. She wrote surrounded by the hubbub of everyday life, absorbing its aromas and using all the resources that this world held out to her. Perhaps, she did not want a room of her own that would isolate her from the heartbeat of life itself.
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