Sitting in Chairs
Extract from Vaidehi’s introduction to Gulabi Talkies, the new Penguin translation of her short stories.“When I was young, girls did not sit on chairs. Those who occupied chairs, and read the newspaper, were men. We sat on the floor to read and write. My eldest sister was considered very clever. The founder of the Hindu Elementary School, Headmaster Bantwal Raghunatharaya, had had a desk-bench made for my sister, perhaps to encourage other girls to follow her example. There was only one such desk-bench in the classroom. It was there even when I went to school, much to my pride. Everyone wanted to sit on it, but it was the class toppers who were given that special honour…
While the girls studied to whatever level they were permitted, and then got married, the boys went away to study to Mangalore or Madras. They used to come home for the holidays, and we felt they had attained heights we would never attain. We treated them with a mixture of fear and respect. My eldest brother studied literature, and became a lecturer in a college for a while. When he came home, it was as though all the English dramatists and poets came with him. In the eating room, he would recite from the English plays, and we would gaze at him open-mouthed. We couldn’t understand any of it from the words, but sought to make sense from his intonation and gestures. For a woman of the house to speak English was considered a mark of arrogance…”
Here is an online translation of Gulabi Talkies (The Penguin collection has a different translation by Tejaswini Niranjana).
Quite possibly community specific tradition.
Comment by dude — September 9, 2006 @ 6:56 am
Penguin is moving into Hindi language publishing and Indian regional languages as well. I think the results have been brilliant. The whole concept can prove to be a major boost for Indian writing.
meanwhile, Thanks for this :)
Comment by Truman — September 9, 2006 @ 4:22 pm
Amazing - by your writing style it would appear that you have managed to fight beyond your established expectations. It would appear that you now have a chair of your own.
Comment by Mick Gordon — September 9, 2006 @ 5:34 pm
I love this image of the eldest brother as a receptacle of the whole of English literature.
Comment by nmj — September 11, 2006 @ 1:09 pm
Great image on the Indian culture and social rankings. I am shore that you have your own most deserved chair of honor now. Great story!
Comment by flower — September 11, 2006 @ 10:24 pm
Is that picture from a Van Gogh painting?
Comment by Aditya — September 12, 2006 @ 7:35 am
Is that picture from a Van Gogh painting?
Comment by Aditya — September 12, 2006 @ 7:35 am
You lived in the best of times, you lived in the worst of times, etc. etc. :-D (Ravaging Dickens - I’m no lit student.)
Comment by Mukta — September 12, 2006 @ 12:51 pm
We may not be too far spatially, but experientially we may as well inhabit different planets. This is what I felt when I read Uma’s blog. Uma writes of a small town somewhere not too far from Mangalore and Madras (because the boys from her family came to these two cities for higher education).I belong to Chennai myself and it is fifteen years since I completed my college. I cannot recollect even palely experiencing anything similar. So does the experience have to do with small towns? Not always. I have known many girls/women who hail from small towns like Chittor and Aragunda in Andhra Pradesh who went to achieve what they wanted in life, there was no gender bias. Strange that in a world that is shrinking we are distanced so much by our experiences.
Comment by Uma Gowrishankar — September 13, 2006 @ 7:58 am
no posts for five days..what’s wrong?
Comment by kuffir — September 14, 2006 @ 5:56 am
Chairs are not for girls
“When I was young, girls did not sit on chairs. Those who occupied chairs, and read the newspaper, were men. We sat on the floor to read and write. My eldest sister was considered very clever. The founder of the Hindu Element …
Trackback by Harvesting others' thoughts in my kitchen garden — September 15, 2006 @ 2:00 am
er, people, I think Vaidehi’s written this, not Uma.
n!
Comment by neela — September 15, 2006 @ 6:35 pm
Sorry for the delay in replying to the comments. My computer had crashed… Just to reiterate that this is an extract from an essay by Vaidehi, as I’ve pointed out in the post.
Comment by Uma — September 19, 2006 @ 4:59 pm
Thanks Neela and sorry Uma - I got it all wrong. I should have paid better attention. I get it now - Uma has extracted from Vaidehi’s essay. Nevertheless my comment remains the same.
Comment by Uma Gowrishankar — September 20, 2006 @ 6:13 am