Rereading Shauna Singh Baldwin’s debut novel from 2000, ‘What The Body Remembers’.
Shauna Singh Baldwin’s debut 2000
novel What the Body Remembers has all the ingredients of a literary blockbuster – romance,
history, suspense, and political intrigue. Its themes are as relevant today as
they were two decades ago or in British India in the first half of the 20th
century.
Shauna Singh Baldwin : While the world is being ravaged by a deadly virus, natural disasters, and social upheaval, I decide to turn to my favorite companions for solace.Since
I am writing about this book during an ongoing pandemic, I must not forget to
mention the eerie coincidence of infectious diseases that also play a cameo.
What
the story reveals
The book begins
with the birth of a baby in India under British rule at the turn of the 19th
century. The baby, a girl, despite all the rituals and prayers offered in the previous
life, laments her fate. After all, to be born a woman in this world meant to be
resigned to one’s kismet.
What follows is the story of two women who on the surface, could not be
more different. There is Satya, the grey-eyed 42 year old wife of the wealthy,
Oxford-educated landowner known as Sardarji. She is fearless,outspoken, and
refuses to lower her eyes when she looks at her husband. Shrewd and practical,
she runs his business affairs efficiently despite the fact that she cannot do
the Git-mit Git-mit talk, that is to say, speak English. However, Satya has a
bigger problem; in all her years of marriage, she has failed to deliver a
child.
The Anglophile Sardarji wants sons
who “will start a clean race...a new race from the Best of Both Worlds.” Unbeknownst
to Satya, he marries a young village girl and brings her home to his haveli in
Rawalpindi. His new bride’s name, Roop, means physical form, but also refers to
beauty. If Satya’s fate is to speak the truth, Roop’s fate is to use her body
to deliver babies. “Learn what we women are for,” her grandmother had told her
when she was a child witnessing her mother give birth. “Learning,” said Gujri,
the maid who helped raise her, “is just remembering slowly, like simmer coming
to boil.”
While the novel alternates between
the perspectives of the two women, it is Roop’s life we follow more closely
through the years. We watch her grow up in a village with a charming name –
Pari Darwaza, or the Doorway of Fairies. Roop is beautiful even as a little
girl, beautiful enough to be vain and long for a life of luxury. But she is
deaf in one ear, a disability she promises to keep a secret. Her father is poor
and her options, limited.
To save the family from ruin, she is married off at 16
to the powerful Sardarji who is 25 years older. When he gives Roop her first
presents – dazzling gold jewellery that once belonged to Satya – Roop is
mesmerised. But what she doesn’t understand yet is that in this marriage, she
is destined to be Choti Sardarni – the second, younger, less important wife.
And yet, it is her bedroom that Sardarji goes to at night. Satya hears his
footsteps, and when she learns that Roop is pregnant, she asks herself – “How
to bear this?”
It is impossible to pick sides. I found my
sympathies oscillating between the two women. Whom to root for? The strong-willed
Satya who has been betrayed? Or the innocent and submissive Roop, whose
father’s parting words were “Above all, give no trouble”?
It
would be very easy to make the two female protagonists foils to one another,
diametrically opposed like night and day. But What
the Body Remembers resists that impulse. Both Satya and Roop are
complex women who constantly defy readers’ expectations. It might seem like
they are victims in a relentlessly patriarchal world, but within their limited
powers, they do exert agency to survive in ways that impact one another’s
lives. Satya’s “jelsy” drives her to acts of unimaginable cruelty. Roop’s
suffering leads her to connive in a manner that will bring not only revenge but
tragedy.
If this were merely a story of two Sikh
wives set in colonial India, it still might have been a highly enjoyable novel,
but would not be the tour de force that it is. WTBR blends
the intrigues of the domestic tale with one of national turmoil in the years
leading up to India’s independence. As Roop and Satya move towards an
inevitable collision, India hurtles towards the great tragedy of 1947 – the
Partition.
Since I am writing about this book during an ongoing pandemic, I must
not forget to mention the eerie coincidence of infectious diseases that also
play a cameo. First, there is the plague that killed Sardarji’s mother while he
was away in England. When all her servants and relatives ran away for fear of
catching the disease, it was Satya who stayed to tend to her till the very end,
an act for which she received no acknowledgement from her husband upon his
return. Then, later in the book, Satya’s cousin, the ill-fated Mumta, is struck
with tuberculosis, and tries in vain to cough away from those around her so
that she does not spread the disease to anyone. Although fleeting, these events
were a bizarre echo of these times.
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