Manjula Padmanabhan

“My essential position is that I do not set out to write within an ideology.”
– Manjula Padmanabhan    

Prefatory Notes  

Manjula Padmanabhan (b. 1953) is a noted playwright, fiction writer, cartoonist, journalist, and artist. She handles many genres at the same time with competence. In 1997 her play Harvest was awarded the Onassis International Cultural Competition Prize for Theatrical Plays in Greece. Manjula Padmanabhan writes on issues of broad social concern and prefers not to limit herself to feminist issues. The list of her plays includes Lights Out (1984), The Artist’s Model (1995), The Sextet (1996), Harvest (1998), Hidden Fires (2003). She wrote an interesting travel memoir Getting There (2000), two novels: Escape (2008) and The Island of Lost Girls (2015). Her short stories collections include Hot Death, Cold Soup: Twelve Short Stories (1996), Kleptomania: Ten Stories (2004), Three Virgins and Other Stories (2013). She is the creator of the cartoon character Suki, currently appearing once a week in Business Line, a Chennai-based newspaper.

The Interview, 21 January 2018    

Rachana Pandey: Let me start with the same old question. How do you take up the word “feminist”? You say you prefer not to be called a feminist in one of your interviews. Do you believe that the idea of feminism is homogeneous, essentialist and partial? In your semi-autobiographical book Getting There (pub. 2000), you wrote,
 

“At eighteen, feminism caught up with me. It forced me to realise that there were problems far worse than being frizzy-haired, bespectacled and fat. It enlarged my horizon of conflicts. It gave me a sense of community and purpose. It gave me a point of view and a vocabulary of complaint. It empowered me to buy my own contact lenses. … But for all that it did for me, feminism could not give me a reason to live beyond thirty” (64).

Manjula Padmanabhan: Honestly, I don't think about feminism very much anymore. In my view, it's become one of the (many) ways in which people discriminate against one another. Feminists can be extremely vicious towards other women. So ... you know ... what's the point of being feminist if women can't even be civil, sympathetic and generous to one another?

I think it's important to look beyond gender and beyond body-based boundaries. We need to find a higher definition of self.

RP: How do you define ‘self’? There has always been certain conflict between self-definition and socio-cultural approval.

MP:    I feel it's not productive for me to define basic terms such as "self". Some words need to be understood at face value. I try not to repurpose ordinary words to mean something different from their common definition. I think you can assume that I use "self" in a standard and straightforward manner.

RP: How do you take “Indian Feminism”? It has long been an issue of discussions and debates among Scholars and academicians in India. 

MP: It's not something I think about. I am a writer and artist, not an ideologue. When I'm writing, I'm not fretting about how my work will be dissected by scholars or other ideologues. I am only thinking of the work itself. I can force myself to wear filters such as "feminism" or "Leftism" or "environmentalism" while looking at my work – but I honestly don't think it's what I should be doing. I do not set out to write within an   ideology. 

RP: In one of your interview with Parshathy J. Nath you asserted that “In a certain sense, we are all experimenting with sexual/social borders with every choice we make – whether it is to wear bindi or use contraception or to eat garlic and eggs” (2016). It is quite empowering conception. Can you please explain it?

MP: It was an attempt to show that seemingly innocent choices – such as using garlic as a cooking ingredient– are loaded with political and social meanings. Some of these are conscious choices, but many are not.

RP: How does a personal choice like wearing bindi become political? The feminists’ maxim “personal is political” struggles to answer such everyday questions related to the conflict between the self (masculine, feminine, third gender or any such otherness) and the society. In fact, anything political affects the personal lives too.

MP: So far as I know a bindi is a facial mark associated with Hinduism. Even though millions of women wear a bindi as "make up" rather than as a religious identifier, there is surely an underlying assumption that it connects the wearer to Hindu cultural norms. In that sense, wearing or not wearing a bindi becomes a political statement. This seems so obvious to me that I'm a little surprised at the question.

RP: Gender discrimination in India is clearly visible as far as women’s participation in the public spaces is concerned, especially after dark. The mass molestation case on New Year’s Eve in Bengaluru in 2016¹ is one of the examples. How do you react hearing such news (as your first and very powerful play Lights Out is one such result of the real      incident you had read in a newspaper!).

MP: I didn't read about it in a newspaper – it was narrated to me by a witness to a gang-rape. That's why it was so shocking to me. 

Women participate in gender discrimination too. For instance, the preference for having sons and being extremely respectful towards the men in the family and bringing up their sons to be disrespectful towards women including towards their own mothers – all of these are forms of gender discrimination that women practice. In my view, women need to examine their own contribution to discrimination against their own sex as one of many steps towards creating a more caring and compassionate society.

RP: According to Susan Brownmiller, if all women “are not victims of actual rape, they are all victims of the threat of rape” (qtd. in Freedman 66) and the case of Leela in the play Lights Out exemplifies the situation that she was not concerned with the rescue of the rape victim but to get rid of the frightening screams and secure herself.

Yet the position of Bhasker and Mohan is even more questionable as they were insensitive towards the rape victim throughout and they tried to justify the gang rape by       calling it a religious ceremony and the extreme physical violence as part of an exorcism.   Is it a cultural way to accept and normalize violence against women?

MP: Susan Brownmiller's statement may sound profound but, in my view, it really isn't. For instance, anyone might get cancer and perhaps die. The threat of cancer is real and we're all victims of that threat. In a similar sense, there are millions of potential threats out there. But so what? Being alive involves accepting the constant threat of death. It would      be idiotic to spend one's life shivering under the shadow of this or any other generalized threat.

I reject the notion that there's a special doom called "rape" hanging over the heads of all women. I know that many women think there is. I know that rape is believed to be so awful that we're not allowed to imagine what it might be like to recover from it. In my view, however, that's masculine propaganda. To think that way is to succumb to the myth of male power. In order to fight the power of that myth, we have to stop believing in the power of rape.

Taking this idea forward to answer the next part of your query, about accepting and/or normalizing violence against women, I would say that the desire to "stop believing in the power of rape" is embedded in my work in a way that makes the query irrelevant. LIGHTS OUT was an experiment in that direction. Susan Brownmiller's statement suggests that the fear of rape is so deeply entrenched that no woman can escape it. I can only shrug and say "I disagree".

RP: Your plays reflect women’s social positioning in the post-1980s. Gender roles have always been staged from the advent of the tradition of theatre in India but according to A Mangai “self-conscious staging of gender” actually started in the 1980s. Do you believe that through writing, you are in a way pushing the gender-based/biased socio-cultural boundaries?  

MP: May be. I think it's possible that I position myself a little differently compared to my contemporaries. I grew up away from my home-culture and by the time I returned to India, my consciousness had set in a mold that was not (and is not) wholly Indian. I don't think of myself as Indian or even as a woman – even though I know, OF COURSE, that the world sees me within those two definitions. It's not easy for me to respond to such questions.

RP: You have successfully worked in many genres like drama, short stories, novels, graphics and many more. How do you find writing a play different from other genres?

MP: I am much more conscious of the "audience" when writing a play. I read out the script to myself again and again in order to confirm that the dialogue is fluent and feels good on the tongue.

RP: You have written plays basically for proscenium theatre thematically located in urban Indian social setup. How do you see the site-specific theatres?

MP:  I've not had the luxury of planning plays for different types of theatre. I write in the hope that my scripts will be performed but I rarely expect to interact with a group of actors or to make decisions about the physical stage.

RP: Do you agree that the purpose of a play is not only to entertain people but to establish a dialogue with the society? How can the space of theatre become participatory for rethinking gender identities? Do you find yourself influenced by Brechtian theatre?

MP: Definitely "yes" to the first point: to establish a dialogue with society, while also holding their attention for the period of the performance is my entire aim. The second point is not central to the way I think. To the third point, my answer is "no" but only because I haven't read many plays nor have I seen a great deal of theatre. I enjoy the medium because of the few plays I've seen/read and at some point in my life began to think that I would like to use the medium for sharing my views on reality.

RP: Finally, would you like to speak on the recent virtual campaign #MeToo²?

MP: It's been extremely important as a way for millions of women to find their voices. At the same time, it's very sad to see how much farther we all need to go before we achieve an acceptable level of "fairness" between the many constituencies of human existence.
 

Notes

1. Women were allegedly molested on New Year’s Eve after 11 pm on Bengaluru’s famous MG Road in 2016 despite the fact that 1,500 policemen deployed in the area.
2. Social activist Tarana Burke created the phrase "Me Too" or #MeToo on the Myspace social network in 2006 as part of a grassroots campaign to promote "empowerment through empathy" among women of color who have experienced sexual abuse, particularly within underprivileged communities. On October 15, 2017, actress Alyssa Milano encouraged women to speak up and share their personal stories, using the phrase to reveal the extent of problems with sexual harassment and assault by showing how many people have experienced these events themselves.

References

Freedman, Jane. Feminism. New Delhi: Viva Books Private Limited, 2002. Print.

Mangai, A. Acting Up: Gender and Theatre in India, 1979 Onwards. New Delhi: Left Word Books, 2015. Print.  

Nath, Parshathy J. “Parshathy J. Nath talks to Manjula Padmanabhan shortlisted for The Hindu Prize." The Hindu, 3 December 2016. 1-4. Web. 4 December 2016.

http://www.thehindu.com/books/books-authors/I-create-mental-films-of-the-story-Manjula-Padmanabhan/article16755122.ece.

Padmanabhan, Manjula. Lights Out. Body Blows: Women, Violence and Survival. Calcutta: Seagull books, 2000. Print.

---. Getting There. London: Picador, 2000. Print.