JOIN USRivers of Flesh: The Prostituted Woman
Edited by Ruchira Gupta
Speaking Tiger
2016, pp 272, Rs 315
Rivers of Flesh, subtitled The Prostituted Woman, is as distressing as it sounds. There are 21 translations from 12 Indian languages, exploring the lives of trafficked females.
What leaps to the eye and makes you buy the collection is the shared platform of the most well-known regional Indian writers — Amrita Pritam, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Indira Goswami, Ismat Chughtai, J P Das, Kamala Das, Kamleshwar, Munshi Premchand, Qurratulain Hyder, Saadat Hasan Manto...
Hence, you wait with bated breath for stories that surprise you and stand out. And you do get them — insights into a good cross-section of women from various regions who are pinned down yet are valiantly battling socio-economic imbalances and oppression. Stories are translated from Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Assamese, Malayalam, Urdu, a collection of diverse tongues.
Indeed, there is a sense of rawness to the stories. You find a lot of conflict and brutality in them, some of them close to the bone. Yet, they are all translations, and they seem closer to documented, recorded narrations, transporting the reader to the events, even the feelings, but not so much the sensibility of the original stories. You do not slip into the characters and feel the smells and sounds of the original world if you are forced to read them in a language that is twice removed from the situation, ambience, behaviour, as well as idiom.
Hence, while the tawdry air, seedy poverty and cheapness seem real, there is an air of melodrama that is rather cinematic. Some of the descriptions take you to a few Indian film scenes: ‘Jugnu’s face was covered in a layer of cheap powder, the same powder had formed thin white lines around her neck. There were dots of blood which had dried on her lips. Earrings ogled like toad’s eyes, her hair was drenched with oil, the pillow was filthy and the bedsheet like crushed jasmine. A peculiar odour filled the cramped room. In a corner, an earthen pot of water was kept with a mug; in the same corner lay some rags...”
After a while, you get the feeling that the plots are predictable, with the women trying to battle the known issues — poverty, age, disease, conformity, birth into a family of prostitutes and prostitute mothers... they represent pastiches of India that share the familiar, underlying human innocence, vulnerability and suffering.
The characters show flashes of courage and strength in the face of oppression. At times, the women seem to be in a self-pitying mode, while at other times, the author, or perhaps the translator, tends to overwrite the descriptions that show the rotting underbelly. For instance, God Forsaken by Siddique Alam, translated from the Urdu by Javaid Qazi, describes a market scene: ‘Here, all the over-age whores, the young women who were yet to get into the racket, defunct pimps and idling johns, would cluster around in a motley crowd. Here, a cool breeze would course its way through the narrow alleys. People would spit or direct jets of betel-stained spittle at the walls. Or they would listen to the harangue of some petty politician...’
The narratives begin to wear out the nerves, and tend to undercut the feelings of empathy they are supposed to evoke. The strength of the stories lies not so much in the narrative but in the stories and plots themselves. For instance, River of Flesh by Kamleshwar revolves around Jugnu, who is hit by a dark, horrifying life of servitude, disease and pain. Ismat Chughtai’s The Housewife is all about a saucy woman who wants to avoid traditional roles and prefers freedom. Heeng-Kochuri by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay explores a boy near a red-light area who discovers the seamy world to which he is exposed all the time. Premchand’s Murder of Honour narrates a stunning, nerve-racking episode of cruelty, while Kamala Das’s A Doll For the Prostitute Child is a heartbreaking story of a child.
Hence, if you overlook the clichés and focus on the sincerity of intent, if not approach, Rivers of Flesh is a good collection from activist Ruchira Gupta — well worth a read.