Copyright © 2016 by Laxmi Parasuram.

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CONTENTS

Preface

Foreword

Home

Lead, Kindly Light

America! America!

Melting Pot

The Horror!

Return Home

Glossary

PREFACE

PURSUIT OF FREEDOM depicts the story of a journey in search of FREEDOM in all its ramifications from the perspective of an Indian girl. This journey is undertaken by Maya, a girl born in a remote village in Kerala, when people had heard only about political freedom from colonial rule. Maya’s journey for freedom reaches out for more complex perspectives since it starts from pre-independent India and concludes in the modern age of rapid social changes including human rights, democracy and globalization.

Maya’s initial struggle for freedom is against her own family, their feudal high caste rules and norms as well as patriarchal authority. As she rebels and leaves her family she is exposed to different ways of life amidst different people at different periods. Her escape from home was in search of education which she was denied, and from an arranged marriage which she refused. The impact of Gandhi and Freedom movement, the evils of caste rivalries as well as feudal and communist ideas filter through her mind in her determined rebellion against all forms of established ideas.

Maya apart from being an individual also becomes a symbol for her country that has been going through varied experiences, changes and influences during these years. Her journey undertaken to challenge rigid traditionalism and colonialism leads to a sense of egalitarianism, globalization and an understanding of true freedom. While in America, the land of Freedom and Democracy, an exposure to diversity and multiculturalism turn into agonizing factors to create a sense of cultural disorientation. Her American Dream of Freedom and Equality can no longer be accepted in simple faith, and the ideal of a Melting Pot of differences cannot be validated as reality

The story is told through other people’s perspective, particularly in the beginning, since the social framework that Maya rebels against has to be presented through different participants. Ammalu and Velayudhan who work for the family give their impressions as onlookers, and Sekhar, the center of patriarchal power, dramatizes Maya’s story until her escape from home bringing significant details. Later sections are more focused on Maya herself and her psychological and spiritual struggles. The turmoils within her mind between India and America, faith and doubt, reality and illusion are projected through her varied experiences. Sister Sacramenta in the second section acts as a caring mother and a beacon of light to Maya’s confused mind. The use of flashbacks in the American sections emphasize the cultural contrasts in Maya’s experiences.

The American Dream that valorizes the idea that one can totally unburden oneself from the past and lead a life free from all social pressures, influences and dependencies is examined in the book through personal experiences. It is not the achievement of freedom, but a personal sense of the widening gyres of freedom that the book brings to the readers.

Since the first section of the book is located in Kerala in South India a few ethnic words from the local language, Malayalam, are used and a glossary is attached to give English equivalents.

Laxmi Parasuram

Prof.of English and

American Literature (Retd.)

An M.A. from Bombay University and a Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky, Dr Laxmi Parasuram’s experience of the academic world spans 25 years as a Professor of English in India. She is the recipient of both British and American awards, including the Visit award from the British Council and Fulbright post-doctoral Fellowships from the U.S. She is the past President of the Indian Association for American Studies and has contributed several papers on American Literature studies in India. She has also edited a volume entitled American Literature and Culture and written a critical book on Virginia Woolf called Virginia Woolf: the Emerging Reality. As an Inner Wheel member of the Rotary Club of South West Calcutta, she has written its history. She is also a member of the Rotary Club of Calcutta South City Towers. Her first novel published in 2003 is Entrapped in Academia. An active member of Soroptimist International, she has served in local and national committees of this global association for professional women.

TO AMERICA WITH LOVE

So free we seem, so fettered fast we are

Robert Browning

We, and all others who believe as deeply as we do, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.

Franklin D Roosevelt

Professor Robert Hamburger teaches Creative Writing and American Literature at New Jersey City University. He has twice served as a Senior Fulbright Lecturer in India. His six books cover a variety of genres: oral history, personal journalism, biography, travel memoir, and fiction. His most recent works are A Passage Through India {Spuyten Duyvil Press, 1998) and Shiraz (XOXOX Press, 2006)

FOREWORD

The year is 1940 and colonial India is in the throes of transformation. Inspired by heroic leaders and blazing rhetoric, the freedom movement has taken root throughout the land. But what does this mean for twelve year old Maya, the spirited Kerala girl whose life we follow in Pursuit of Freedom? Change is in the air -there is talk of Gandhi and of throwing off the British yoke - yet Maya remains ensnared in age-old forms of bondage that predate the British presence and will extend well into decades of Indian nationhood. A mere child, Maya is expected to passively accept the arranged marriage her parents have selected for her; she is expected to accept a future built upon the mysterious (to a prepubescent child) duties of sexual submission, childbearing, and housekeeping; she is expected to understand that for girls there is no point in hoping for more than a rudimentary education; and she is expected to submit to the stern wisdom of the Bhagawat Gita that joy and sorrow had to be accepted in the same spirit.

These are the overwhelming obstacles that young Maya faces. Yet a fierce spirit of independence, or rather, of self-preservation, compels her to rebel. Against the massed forces of tradition, religion, and parental authority Maya is thrown back upon what the Quakers call her inner light to guide her. Is she strong enough to forge a life of her own choosing? And at what cost? These are central questions that drive Laxmi Parsuram’s compelling narrative: at once a poignant study of an individual life, as well as a challenging examination of the obstacles to women’s freedom that remain embedded in Indian culture to this very day. Here is young Maya reflecting on her situation after she has rebuffed her parents’ first attempt at marrying her:

"So that guy who stared at me and glued his eyes to my face will not marry me! Should I rejoice at this news or shall I join my mother and Ammalu and be sorry for myself No! I do not want to get married and if they start with another proposal I will not agree. But my father! He will stop me from going to school just to teach me a lesson as he says. Then what will happen to all my plans to study and earn my own living?

Why do you want to earn money? they ask me, your father has more than enough. He will hand you over to a husband who can keep you in style and give you all you need. Study and earn money! Is that what you want? Do you want to look for a job as a clerk or nurse and do some dirty work all day? You don’t know what men outside can do to you. Better submit to what your own family asks you to do… (43)

Given these formidable obstacles, Maya’s journey to liberation is lonely and psychologically painful, but her resolve is strengthened by a handful of teachers and allies she encounters. When she trades her gold bangles for the opportunity to study Hindi, her teacher, Vasudevan Nair, explains that enlightened members of his caste believe in full equality for women, including property rights and civil rights. In fact, it is their custom for the man to marry into his wife’s family. Women marry according to their wish… Marriage is not compulsory, (74) he tells her. Here is a vision of freedom that addresses Maya’s innermost promptings. When Maya questions him about the power of religion, he replies, I am not superstitious. I don’t see God in a stone. (74) However, Maya’s tutelage is brought to an abrupt end when she joins her teacher at a day-long gathering of Hindi scholars and students. Her father gets wind of her transgression and puts an abrupt end to her education.

With her father blocking her path to enlightenment, Maya falls into a deep depression. If she cannot live by her own aptitudes and desires and dreams, what is there to live for? She begs her father to send her to a convent school, a request that outrages him and leads to a brutal beating. With all hope gone, she seizes a kitchen knife and implores her father to relieve her of her suffering: You brought me into this world unasked for, and you have fed me on shame and anguish all my life. Take away my life now since I don’t care to have it any longer. (94) Yet it is this very moment of resignation that liberates her. Sekhar, her father, sees that custom and paternal authority have no power to break his daughter’s will. Our whole world is turning topsy-turvy, he discovers, and this girl, the wildest of my own seeds, challenges me and threatens to make me feel like a woman … (95) Here, at this crucial juncture, the hand of authority, the hold of custom, melted away into the thin air of uncertainty … (96) and he consents to her convent school education.

Convent school, with its separation from Maya’s contentious home, its freedom from caste, and its husbandless woman teachers, offers a measure of relief - but it is not the oasis she dreamed of. The school welcomes non-Catholic students, yet it still imposes a strict examination of conscience on the young girls. The school’s relentless moralizing leads to inevitable disciplinary problems. A careless girl deposits a bloody menstrual rag in the toilet and is so upset with her supposed sin that she vows to go home and get married. In her moral instruction class, Maya is informed that only God can bring real happiness. When Maya pragmatically proposes that many people are quite happy without God, that they are content eating, drinking, playing and earning money (112) she is instantly marked as a troublemaker. Maya is also troubled by occasional accounts of love and physical desire. After her harrowing resistance to child marriage, there is no place in her thoughts or actions for gestures of affection. She recoils at her friend, Theresa’s, physical overtures and is utterly baffled by her declarations of love. Not surprisingly, the convent sisters’ promise of God’s love is equally unattractive. I want to be free, Sister, Maya declares. I want to be able to earn my own living, live in a real world without being always told what I should do and how I should always be grateful and obedient. (135) As her sojourn at convent school draws to a close, Maya reflects It was not like this before. I had an excess of self-confidence but now it is as though I am being dragged through a process of uncertainty and helplessness. Would you say that I have only to pray and keep quiet? (149)

Now, Maya’s journey brings her to an American university where she pursues her studies in the socially permissive environment of the land of the free. With half the planet separating her from the confining strictures of India, it would seem that at last Maya is free to be herself and follow her own. But nothing is simple. Maya is utterly unprepared for the casual sexual mores of Greenwich Village, the warnings about V.D., or an offhanded classroom lecture on Hemingway in which her teacher expounds on that great machismo of a writer [who] was good at hunting and at f…ing (161) Is this the freedom she fought for at such great cost? Maya retreats into literature. Books had now become more real to me than my own life that had shrunken to the size of the crumpled face of a clock (171). Her Indian classmate, Pankaj, the child of a conservative Brahmin family, falls in love with an American boy; her American classmate, Judy, falls in love with an Indian boy - and Maya is equally confounded by both these relationships. In America, almost everyone spoke of love and frequently fell into it, she reflects. But little has changed since her convent days. In one of the novel’s most memorable passages, Maya expresses her dread of the sexual obligations she associates with love.

I could not even say the word LOVE… it stuck in my throat and pulled down my tongue … it made me look pink and awkward … it had something to do with the flesh I hated and felt apologetic about, it resembled the long red dripping tongue of cows licking the gummy, hairy back of new-born calves, the roguish eyes of bulls turning to hazy red as they wagged their stiff tails trying to caress and mount the backs of she-animals with throaty, husky moos and hoarse breathings (l 85)

Not surprisingly, Maya feels revolted by her classmates’ glib responses to Whitman’s bold emphasis on the link between bodily and spiritual freedom. When I read poems I get carried away by the ring and movement of words… their pitch and evocative quality … the truth of their claims and splendid associations … but here in America to be an academic is to analyze, rip apart and generate sexual explanations. I must confess that I am unfit for such operations … am I being forced to change to remake myself? (203) Life in America appears to offer free living and freedom of expression, but Maya sniffs the poisonous fumes of conformity and digs in her heels. And how truly open-minded is America? When Maya nervously agrees to join a Pakistani boy at an offcampus bar, her adventure ends when a bunch of men taunt them as blackies trying to ape the west and beat up her escort.

America is tainted for Maya. She peers through the veil of America’s self-congratulatory image to gaze upon its unsavoury, unspoken reality. As she puts it, the American Experiment remains the greatest human effort to liberate humanity from the intrusions of the truth of [the] human condition. (227) The outbreak of the Bangladesh War draws Maya back to India. Her parents are aging, her beloved servant is dead, her siblings have slipped into jobs and marriage, and the tempo of village life has forever changed. I had a hazy feeling that I had not left America, she muses. Our old country was remaking itself along modem lines … when the old giant heaves itself out of its long slumber it will surely wear an American overcoat… (233). So for all her struggles, after years of tenaciously defending her innermost being, Maya remains embattled. Her situation is reminiscent of those lines in Matthew Arnold’s great poem, Stanzas From the Grand Chartreuse, where the speaker positions himself:

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,

The other powerless to be born,

With nowhere yet to rest my head ...

Maya’s struggle continues. But if there is no happy ending to her embattled life, there is the precious certainty that she has defended her integrity against overwhelming forces. To call Laxmi Parasuram’s heartfelt narrative an important feminist text would be merely stating the obvious. One can surely view Maya’s story as an illuminating examination of the fissures that opened in Indian life at the time of Independence - and their immense personal consequences. But above all, Pursuit of Freedom, is more than a women’s novel or an Indian novel. It is a richly imagined and deeply felt testimony to the timeless human impulse that informs all our lives: to find some measure of freedom from the shaping powers of country, custom, religion, and family.

Dr. Robert Hamburger

Professor of English:

New Jersey City University

HOME

Life is not that which one lived, but that which one remembers and how one remembers to tell it.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I

MAYA 1940

They are coming to see the girl today, said Ammalu, ‘they’ meaning two women from that far-off town, Tiruvananthapuram, (the capital of old Travancore state) and ‘the girl’ meaning me. They will be accompanied by two or three men from the family and the young man who is looking for a girl to marry, she added.

This group of five whose arrival was being proclaimed by Ammalu seemed to be like headhunters (weren’t they in fact woman-hunters!) and the girl they were planning to hunt happened to be ME! As soon as I had heard Ammalu, I crawled noiselessly under the cot in the vast store room in our sprawling house.

Maya! Maya! I could now hear my mother’s faint cries and these were soon taken up by others in the family. Was it Ammalu again or was it Kunji now adding her shrill voice to my mother’s? Mayakutty! Mayakutty! shouted Kunji, our old maid servant, a haggard old woman, in fact, but who still had a piercing voice. Ammalu, of course, was much younger, our cook and virtual mother, and the chorus of their calls for me came to me in waves over the pickle jars behind which I crouched. Where are you? Come and dress up, girl … they are coming to see the girl!

I was getting somewhat choked up under that cot. Sacks full of rice and lentils were stacked up behind me and I had folded and thrust my heavy bottom in between two bags of lentils. The tall jar of pickles in front kept me fairly well hidden. I kept mum and controlled my breath.

Mayakutty, where are you? I could now hear Velu coming nearer. He said something to my mother and started moving the pickle jars. Before he reached out for my shrinking body parts, I jumped out and lay exposed on the floor.

She needs to be thrashed someone shouted. Don’t, don’t, my mother was pleading.

Let her not start crying now … on this auspicious day. I shall get her ready before they come.

So I was dragged to the bathroom and Kunji poured mugfuls of hot and cold water upon me and started scrubbing with a fibrous sponge (I knew where it came from … from that tree at the back of our house I used to climb… they were dried pods that came very handy to scrub oneself…) Wrapped in a long towel I was all ready to be made up as a possible bride… my hair pulled left and right and dabbed with coconut oil… kajal applied around my eyes to make them doe-like, kumkum on my forehead and yards and yards of silk around my body. I wiggled and writhed, but was soon turned into a doll willy-nilly.

II

MAYA

They were watching me closely as I entered the front room with my head bent. I could see the red tiles under my feet with the corner of my eyes. Someone pushed me down to take a seat on the floor.

Conversation went on around me and I could hear that it was all about me.

She is now in Class 5, my uncle was saying, She is always at the top of her class.

Has she learnt some music? Some cooking?

I don’t think she has any interest in music … Well, as a family we are not much into music and that sort of thing …

"What