Poem review of my late mother

Agony in aristocratic location








By Sangita Rayamajhi





I turned the pages of a slim volume titled Joonle pani polchha (Even the Moon Sears) and was struck by a few discoveries. This is a collection of poems plus one story written by a woman of the aristocracy named the late Rajya Laxmi. The book that opens with a very eloquent photograph in the first page puts history and agony, masked prestige and torturing existence of aristocratic women folks together.

This woman whom its editor/publisher and well-known curator Sangita Thapa touchingly describes as a loner in her aristocratic location appears standing in the photograph that exposes either a mask of the polity that hides this woman's visage or puts a unique semiotics of silent power balance. She stands in the photo that features famous littérateurs Vijaya Malla, Madhav Ghimire, Baburam Acharya, Balkrishna Sama, BP Koirala, King Mahendra aka MBB Shah, Gobinda Bahadur Malla Gothale, Rashmi, perhaps the daughter of Balakrishna Sama and others. What is she doing there? I turned the pages and began to read. The poems meet you head on with a painful urgency that doesn't permit you to stop until the last page.



This woman poet is representative of all those silent women of the aristocracy who have been married into similar aristocracies in Nepal or Rajput gharanas, or to Maharajas and sons of Maharajas in India and compelled to preserve a tradition and maintain a legacy. Many a story has been written about these women thrown into very, very male dominated family structures. The unwritten ruling is they should not speak. The untold miseries suffered by these women are buried under cover of brocades, sequins, silver, gold and diamonds.



Keshavraj Pindali's novel Ekadeshki Maharani or the Maharani of a certain land is the most telling account of the sufferings of such a woman. Rajya Laxmi's hard existence and her disillusionment with life itself is reported by the editor. The poems speak of that agonizing loneliness.



We talk all the time about the subaltern woman, who cannot represent, who cannot speak. But what do we say about these women within aristocracy or rather women existing within the framework of the patriarchal fantasies of aristocrats? Do they speak at all? Do they have a voice? Gayatri Spivak Chakravorty's essay "can the subaltern speak?" applies to a woman of the aristocracy too. But Rajyalaxmi's silent speech is inscribed in these poems rescued by the editor/publisher.



I stare down at the picture. A big silence emanates and hangs on with ominous foreboding between the picture and the poems. I turn the pages one after another, 'Even when alive/ like a corpse I got tossed /when deep I sank into my grief/ on the funeral pier I happened to burn.' (My translations). She is troubled, traumatized, struggles to find a voice, and as Sangita Thapa says'...this woman who braved so many obstacles..." is to me the representative voice of the women of her class. The images are of lost dreams, decay, funeral presentiments and the unfairness of her situation.



And I wonder, as to how this woman moved within the circle of those littérateurs! What was her identity? And it is at this point I ask again, can a woman of aristocracy speak? They are made to dress, talk, eat and behave differently from the other women. Their tradition, their history as gleaned from stories I have read is one long unbroken chain of betrayals. Do these women then silently suffer for fear of bringing down shame upon themselves or upon their privileged class, because upon them men have placed the obligation of preserving tradition? When Rajya Laxmi wrote poems "in scraps of paper, which she would hide inside a cigarette box, under her mattress or in the cracks and crevices of the wall," did she ever think her voice would reach out to the public? There are, women's struggle and women's struggle, without any particular frame of reference. But this woman's struggle is not to come to terms with her reality, neither is it to change the world around her, but simply to say, 'Like the shadows lost with the setting sun/my mind has vanished in the darkness of my grief' (my translation).



This poet's struggle parallels the struggle of Muma Hajur of Abhi Subedi's play A Journey to Thamel (my translation) who says, "I used to feel like climbing on to the roof and firing shots at my own fate." That silent woman Muma Hajur could at any time be Rajya Laxmi, this poet who struggles between desire and the desired. She pains because of the indifference around her. These poems are tortured images of the little cocoon she lives in. She writes in order to vent her feelings, that claustrophobia she suffers from. Her pain relived again and again in her poems echoes the sentiments of poet Sylvia Plath who committed suicide in 1963.



Will the male world acknowledge the struggle of this woman? Her art which so nakedly brings out her pain and struggle be considered an important work, as important as the works of art that grow out of men's lives? I wonder! Rajya Laxmi was a member of the Royal Nepal Academy? But male photographs on Academy's wall do not feature her. Can we speak for the agonizing existence of a woman of aristocracy even as we speak for the subaltern?







Posted on: 2008-02-27 21:37:58 (Server Time)