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The twelve stories in The Owl, the River and the Valley offer insights into what it means to be an oxomiya nari or the Assamese woman. Written in Assamese by Arupa Patangia Kalita and translated by Mitra Phukan, the collection is a marker of the politics deeply embedded within the cultural and social ethos of the state finding resonance through the lived experiences of women. The characters, ranging from the lowest rung of society to the highest sanctum of class and caste privilege, find themselves immobile, reiterating patriarchy’s ironhandedness of never allowing free will. The stories come together to build a tapestry of domesticity that is mundane, jarring and at times, ruthless. There is an undercurrent of urgency in the narrative that is both poetic and sensitive.
Similar lives of dissimilar women
The story titled “Rajmao,” (or the queen mother) is an ironic take on surrogacy. The protagonist finds herself victimised twice; the onslaught of poverty and the commodification of her body. In a world tarnished by capitalism’s greed, this story comes closer to “Maloti’s Dream” where Maloti toils hard, acutely aware of her limitations but with the unassailing hope of seeing her daughter become an engineer. In both stories, the women erase their own needs to see their progeny successful. The lack of wealth takes a different colour in the story, “Yellow Flip Flops,” where Reboti, the poor daughter-in-law of an otherwise wealthy family dwells on the fringes of her family’s discarded charity and is berated as she desperately looks for a missing pair of flipflops.
This plight of lack suffered by the poor women is matched by the plight of abundance experienced by the privileged lot. Kalita’s aristocratic women uphold another disturbing aspect of patriarchy. The two protagonists in “By the Clock” and “Reins” are women who have no complaints against the patriarchy that denies them agency. They are well provided for, so much so that they do not even go shopping for themselves. But the luxury of inaction is a cruel reminder of how agency is snatched from women regardless of their position. It is only by enabling patriarchy that they ultimately become conscious of their own needs, which comes following the deaths of their husbands.
“Daughter of the Dark Memsahib” and “Anita’s Journey through Life” present another pitiful glance at womanhood. The former, set just at the turn of India’s independence has as its protagonist a daughter whose parentage raises questions of morality. Her dubious parentage that leads to her ostracization shows how a woman’s identity is an extension of her bloodline which cannot be redeemed. In “Anita’s Journey through Life,” this ostracisation is self-inflicted. Both protagonists suffer the consequence of desiring more from life. Helen desires a man whose upper caste family refuses to acknowledge her as the possible daughter-in-law of their household, while Anita’s desires transform into an obsessive hedonism over the materiality of her marriage trousseau that eventually ruins her life.
“Tangle” and “Ausi or Hausi” revolve around the theme of female relationships. The protagonists of these stories are two maids, tormented by poverty, who form relationships with the women they work for. While jealousy and spite define this equation in “Tangle,” the maid’s boundless admiration and her master’s respect towards her form the binding force in “Ausi or Hausi.”
Another interesting aspect of Kalita’s writing is making her women characters exist beyond the realms of reality. The grandmother who becomes a goddess in “Afternoon Grandmother” or the widow who turns into an owl in “The Woman Who Became an Owl” highlight the politics of policing women’s bodies for nefarious causes. Despite living harmless lives, these characters become the talk of the town for reasons as superstitious as they are sensational. The collection winds up with the story, “Water is with Child” indicating the presence of an impregnated river. One soon realises that it is a tale of belief and the many dreams held by the residents around the mighty Brahmaputra. The river, it is seen, is full of stories – of loss and gain, courage, and diffidence, real and fantastical.
The domesticity of the uprooted self
One of the crucial themes flowing seamlessly throughout the stories is the theme of displacement; forced and voluntary. The destruction of floods coerces people into building precarious lives away from their roots. Migrants are barely welcomed and pushed to obscure corners of livelihood. Kalita’s characters function in backdrops that are perilous and ephemeral. The other form of displacement occurs when women are wedded into families, usually not of their choice. In any case, the identities these women are born with wear off and they are defined by their relation to others. Most of the characters Kalita writes about are addressed as somebody’s wife or mother. These characters lose their maiden names but acclimatise themselves to their new identities. Displacement is then not only material, but also metaphorical.
Arupa Patangia Kalita’s women are lonely individuals who navigate through life with the assurance that loneliness is a woman’s prerogative. The isolation is never deliberate, but just as is the case with displacement, it depends on the patriarchy that makes them. Women suffer from the absence of men as much as they do in their presence.
Another key feature of Kalita’s writing involves her varied use of gustatory references. Part of domesticity demands that the women feed their families and Kalita’s writing poetically details the recipes of several Assamese delicacies and it is in cooking that a woman truly excels. If a character starts out as pampered, time and circumstances force her to wear the kitchen inside out. Mitra Phukan’s translation of these details provides the same sensory realisation thereby evoking similar feelings.
In her translator’s note, Phukan writes about the need to become an “emphatic translator,” who is not at the mercy of the writer but also conscious about the “flow” of the original. Regardless of the many hurdles that can easily ruin a translation, Phukan uses language consciously in the narrative. She calls her choice of words “political” when she translates several words phonemically. For instance, instead of calling the five Pandava brothers from the Mahabharata “Pancha Pandav,” she calls them “Poncho Pandob,” or writes “riksha” for a “rickshaw.” Phukan also does not italicise Assamese words which is how she attempts to challenge the asymmetrical relationship that Assamese shares with English.
Arupa Patangia Kalita’s imagination is unparalleled in Assamese literature when it comes to producing fictive replicas of real humans. Her stories, rightly well-known for their ingenuity, are also suggestive of her incisive knowledge of the common Assamese woman. Her stories are never verbose or exaggerated. In fact, one can readily attest to the fact that her stories merge to testify to the timeless tales of women’s afflictions and raise pertinent questions about morality, agency, and misogyny. It is in the intersections of these concerns that the contemporary woman can be situated.
Anannya Nath is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya Adarsha Mahavidyalaya-Behali.
The Owl, the River and the Valley, Arupa Patangia Kalita, translated from the Assamese by Mitra Phukan, Penguin India.
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