Popular culture the world over refers to motherhood as the ultimate destination for women. Amma, maa, mata, ammi, mom, mother, maa-ji, aai, mummy-call her by any of these names, she is expected to respond immediately... with love, concern, care. Schooled by tradition, internalized conditioning and familial expectation, she hardly departs from this expected response. What does this word mean to people who have gone through the experience? Is motherhood really the gold standard for women it is assumed to be? Apart from being the most glorified and celebrated word in our cultural history, is mother also the most abused?
The Oldest Love Story, a collection of essays, addresses motherhood through the prism of personal experiences. Some of India's celebrated writers - Kamala Das, Shashi Deshpande, Nabanceta Dev Sen, C.S. Lakshmi, Vaidehi and a rare gem by Mannu Bhandari star in this extraordinary collage. These writers introspect with admirable honesty their experience of mothering and the price demanded by years of giving Many others including Shabana Azmi, Chitra Palekar and Saced Mirza - explore their relationship with their mothers to provide a holistic understanding of the complex phenomenon of motherhood.
Maithili Rao drifted into writing on cinema after a stint as lecturer of English. Hobby turned to passion and she focused on the representation of women in her decade-long column 'Images of Women' in Eve's Weekly. Her 2015 book Smita Patil: A Brief Incandescence (HarperCollins) was translated into Marathi. Her new book Millennial Women in Bollywood: A New Brand? (OUP) is due in 2022. She has written for national and international publications and contributed chapters to many books, including Encyclopaedia of Hindi Cinema, Stardom in Contemporary Hindi Cinema, The Man Who Spoke in Pictures and Madhumati.
Rinki Roy Bhattacharya was born with cinema in her veins. Her father, celebrated auteur Bimal Roy, travelled with Rinki to Oxford for her graduation. But she decided to elope with her father's assistant, Basu Bhattacharya. Love triumphed and higher studies. were cast aside. Entirely self-taught, managing family life while assisting her husband at work, she learnt journalism hands-on. For over five decades she contributed prolifically to the Indian Express, the Times of India, Filmfare, Telegraph, Hindu. Most Indian print media carried her byline on art, cinema and cultural features.
After chasing deadlines for almost fifty years. Rinki branched off to edit books on her father's cinema and women's issues with equal conviction.
I am delighted to add a companion piece to my dear colleague Maithili Rao's elaborate introduction to The Oldest Love Story. The anthology is in fact a continuity after the enthusiastic response received for an earlier collection. I edited that at a time I was passing through a particularly dark phase. My unexpected rejection as a practising mother was intimidating to say the least. I felt no one wanted me, nor cared, least of all my children, who had become young adults overnight. An experience likely to knock down the bravest of mothers. For a long time, I hung around like a solitary note after the orchestra had stopped playing. There was no encore.
It made me curious about other women, particularly mothers. Did they feel as lonely, rejected, unwanted as much as I did?
Unable to resist the temptation of exploring this uneasy feeling with contemporary women friends closer to my age, thinking perhaps they would take a sharper look at the phenomenon, I decided to invite some of them home, disguising it as a tea party. Among those who attended were practising journalists, writers of repute. Women who enjoyed distinct identities.
Strangely, I did not have to say a word. Apparently, all of us were going through a similar sense of loss. Or should I call it bereavement? At one point I wanted to burst open that closed door to encounter what is routinely accepted in the West as an empty nest. That stage when children, like birds, simply fly out. From that tea-party meeting, some of the women promised to articulate their experiences. This was the auspicious start to my first collection on motherhood.
In her introduction, Maithili Rao explores the nuanced autobiographical essays by our contributors. She has discussed a few essays we retained from an earlier collection. I fondly recollect how the collection grew and salute that work. Our current collection engages multiple genres. We found profoundly evocative essays. And I agree entirely with Andrea O'Reilly that motherhood needs a feminism of its own. Needless to say, we do not require validation from western theorists where motherhood is no longer a burning issue for women.
Undeniably, for many women motherhood remains the oldest love story of their lives. Many women suffer as a consequence - and they are doomed to suffer agonizing separations when their children leave home, at times, never to return, nor look back. Yes, women have been trapped in their mould as mothers since time immemorial. In most cultures, motherhood has been perceived as women's ultimate, if not, only, destination. Populist culture has deified motherhood to death. Take, for example, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's iconic Vande Mataram. The reverent lyrics hum in the air now with a threatening edge... or the symbolic chanting of Bharatmata Ki Jai with its definite Hindutva colour being raised as a political slogan. These socio-cultural practices in India have enslaved women for generations. What escape route is open to women in such a claustrophobic environment where motherhood rules? Indeed, it thrives, and is culturally imposed on us.
As an art critic I remember discovering the mother and child image feature frequently in art collections. Surprisingly, the mother and child image reasserted itself in the works of male painters. One of them is celebrated painter Jamini Roy who enjoys a cult stature. We selected Roy's luminous impressionist study to adom our cover. At times these mother-child images resembled mythical beings.
This anthology brings together many distinct voices that have made this journey into my first country. Mostly as daughters - with the exception of Saeed Mirza and Amit Chaudhuri- and a few as mothers birthing their children into this primeval territory. Established writers from English, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Bangla and Marathi, as well as discoveries of our own, tell authentic stories with rare integrity. They ask questions-not rhetorically but organically, rising from individual circumstances. They question the received wisdom of idealized motherhood - as daughters and mothers - with honesty. The answers are never final, often leaving us teetering on the edge of ambivalence. In these answers are embedded stories of joy and poignancy, courage and support, sorrow and fortitude.
This collection does not flaunt a feminist manifesto - academic or polemical. Nor are they made to fit a theoretical straightjacket. There is no looking to western academics for current theories to validate personal experience. Motherhood has become passé as a subject for White academics while women of colour find agency through motherhood. Andrea O'Reilly, the theorist who birthed 'matricentric feminism', argues that it is high time that motherhood has 'a feminism of its own. Every culture has to define feminism on its own terms based on lived experience and civilizational past. Looking for validation from theorists of the West is futile but comparisons and finding commonalities are exciting. Michelle Obama has described herself primarily as a mother. Vandana Shiva, the eco feminist, advocates with great passion that women identify themselves as prakriti, and thus, reclaim ancient wisdom. Feminism has grown into a gigantic tree branching out into many schisms.
For us, as editors, authenticity of experience is the touchstone. Feminism is implicit in these essays as assertion of women's strength; as an experiential subtext, a thread that connects memory with critique of patriarchy that stultified and sometimes snuffed out the aspirations of our mothers. These essays negate the stereotype. Stereotypes deviously creep into our subconscious, subvert resistance, penetrate our pores, and trigger our responses, both individual and collective. The essays acknowledge the presence of stereotypes while subverting them with warmth, admiration, - humour and often the disconcerting clarity of unsparing honesty.
Until women learnt that it's alright to question received wisdom and voice their doubts, fears and disappointments, motherhood was the Untouchable, beyond scrutiny. It was, and is expected to be, the most important event in a woman's life, a life-changing experience that she is expected to negotiate intuitively, drawing from genetic wisdom supposedly inherited, implanted in her psyche from girlhood.
It is not surprising that there are more essays on mothers and fewer on being mothers. From the luxury of being in the present, recollecting the past is in a way easier because distance gives a degree of objectivity to counter nostalgia's comforting warmth. Writing about being a mother is probing a continuous process that is being lived. It demands a degree of introspection that can be daunting.
The stories in the collection portray women 'in the round', as individuals who are placed in a particular time and place. All are distinctly personal- and the personal is political, as it always has been. is, and will be.
Book's Contents and Sample Pages
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