The perfect Women’s Day read: A new novel in Marathwadi dialect that draws from the author’s own unwavering belief in equality.
An illustration by Anwar Husain in the auto-biographical novel by Dr Sunita Borde, a history professor at a Sangli college. The novel follows the protagonist’s determination to get an education despite circumstances piled against her
Facts contribute to fiction. Fiction, in turn, shapes a better understanding of the narrator, who draws on facts. Just as it happens in the case of the newly-released novel Findri (the unwelcome, unwanted girlchild) by Dr Sunita Borde. Written in the vibrant Marathwadi dialect—a glossary indeed eye-opening for the Marathi language speaker—the fictional account borrows heavily from the author’s personal struggle, which started from birth in a Mahar family way back in 1976. Findri is the step-back-to-take-stock space for Dr Borde. For the reader, it is a means to empathise with, and celebrate toiling women who defy caste, class and gender norms; many of whom go unsung, unwritten about, unmentioned in Women’s Day wins.
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Findri, the protagonist raised in an unimaginably unfair exploitative social order, rises as a winner, an Ambedkar scholar, an award-winning author-poet who now heads the History Department at Sangli’s C B Shah Women’s College. Dr Borde’s PhD research revolves around India’s Five Year Plans seen through the prism of women’s progress; her MPhil subject is Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar’s worldview on religion. Be it fiction or research-based writing or verse, she mirrors the realities of our times. “Findri is not just my story, but a bouquet of women’s voices, which hope to create a world in which a newborn girl is naturally entitled to respect and human rights.”
Dr Sunita Borde’s autobiographical novel, Findri, comes alive in the Marathwadi lingo. Pic/Shrikant Chavan
Findri (Manovikas Prakashan, R350) is an inspiring story of Sangeeta Narwade’s determination to continue her formal schooling amid penury and opposition from her alcoholic wife-beating father. Sangeeta’s childhood is marked by physical punishments, hard labour, hunger pangs, intermittent breaks in elementary schooling and the lack of a reliable father figure. It is only after her dogged mother and grandmother risk life and limb, does Sangeeta get to complete her matriculation. Before a crucial exam, the father throws her books in the well; he robs the girl’s first earning, which came from daily wages at a railway route construction site; he criminalises her desire to study.
Protected from the irate father who prefers her dead than educated, the girl relocates to her maternal grandmother’s village; she seeks shelter in boarding schools and girls’ hostels, though each experience demands adjustments with new social mores. Her first baapcut (bob cut) is a logistical convenience to suit outstation student life. Despite risks and expenses, her mother is desperate to push Sangeeta out of the hadool (Mahar Watan land with clusters of households, treated as untouchable, characterised by below poverty line life), while she steels herself from within to take on constant confrontation with the patriarch at home.
A sketch by Anwar Husain in Borde’s novel
Dr Borde serves a true slice of Marathwada (Dalit) life in a lingo that springs from the soil. A roasted onion sauteed mutton preparation, distinctly black in colour, detailed by a Mahar matriarch tickles the reader’s olfactory sense. Each alternate page treats us to hot bajri bhakris made on the earthen mud stoves in villages of the Vaijapur taluka. It is interesting that indigenous cuisine flourishes despite impoverishment. Women are the engines of the underprivileged, but enterprising kitchens, where children have to be fed amid meagre resources. Nutrition and palatability have to be negotiated every day in the context of a budget that is always tight. In a telling episode, Sangeeta wonders how blood often gushes out her wounds, when her stomach is never fully filled.
Vibrant exchanges bring to life the weekly bazaar in Borgaon and Vaijapur. Colourful ribbons, local confectionery (godi shev), toys, floral maxi frocks, nose studs (murni), raw mangoes—myriad attractions of pre-teen school life are etched effectively, only to underline the lack in the lives of young budding girls who are burdensome to their families. For anyone who is aware of the mofussil boarding school milieu in Marathwada and Vidarbha, Findri does a marvellous job of depicting its salient features—shared washrooms, canteen politics, unironed uniforms, locked tin trunks, annual picnics, bunpao-bananas, cold water showers and morning assembly. At one point, Sangeeta keeps a thorn in her notebook, as circumstances don’t allow rose petal memorabilia.
One gets to meet Dr Ambedkar quite often in Dr Borde’s novel. His ideological impact reflects in the confidence of ordinary women who feel empowered by merely quoting his progressive views. Even in daily customs, such as gatherings in which married women call out their husbands’ names (ukhana) aloud, he is an electrifying metaphor. The novel is set against the backdrop of the 1989 political movement of renaming the Marathwada university after Dr Ambedkar. As one unlettered woman’s limerick goes: “Idyapeeth getavar babacha naav/Naavasathi zhatala runk ani raav” which translates to “Babasaheb’s name on the university gate/ The rich and the poor both have worked hard for it.” The author and her protagonist both gain tremendous sense of self from their stay on the BAMU campus. Her pride in BAMU’s transformative power reminds this columnist of media students and faculty hailing from the university’s journalism department who have later contributed immensely to Indian journalism.
Findri ends on a positive note. The author is not just a professor of history in senior college, but writes copiously in different genres. Her anthology of children’s stories is due in April this year. Her father is no more, but he died a reformed person, a believer in women’s education. The mother lives to see Dr Borde’s progress and her marriage with Dr Santosh Khadase who is a professor of political science. Most importantly, she is witness to the hope and possibilities in her daughter’s life; a scenario she had never visualised a few years ago.
Sumedha Raikar-Mhatre is a culture columnist in search of the sub-text. You can reach her at sumedha.raikar@mid-day.com
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