Of dollar dreams - a feminist reading. Review on Dollar Bahu - Sudha Murthy

Popular; translated into different languages and media, claiming to provide an insight into the entangled – to use a hazy euphemism- connections between NRIs and the Is who aspire for the N.R. status; authored by a woman (from the abstract third world that has been raking Bookers by the dozen) and intended to give “an imaginary story…so real to reality”; it was like a destructivist’s…did I say that? I meant deconstructivist’s dream come true. But dreams- of dollars or the Mecca of money America – are uneasy phenomena that carry the burden of a confused psychoanalysis, and hence I decided to wake up. Consequently (as a consequence of something or the other) I changed gears and decided to, instead of approaching a text with a pregiven set of ideas, ideologies, tools and conclusions, set out to explore it with a Reader’s Response with a gendered hue. So armed with nothing but a 70 mm microscope and a feminist lens, I started reading Dollar Bahu, and found in its repetitive familiarity, a relationship so complex (as opposed to complicated ala deconstruction) and so surprisingly new – for myself, for myself, I make no claims at identifying novelty for others – that I stopped and thought and mapped a triangulation that I had not yet experienced in my modest reading career. And instead of damning myself with an eclectic employment of post-everything conceptual claptrap, I decided to geometrically construct this triangulation of my experience within the novel, with the north star of a feminist ideology, guiding me through the oceans of my own experiences.

I“The sum of the square of the lengths of the two sides of a right angled triangle is equal to the square of the length of the hypotenuse of the triangle.”

My fifth standard Maths Teacher.

For simplicity’s sake – and also because I am not exactly sure what a Scalene is – I shall structure a right angled triangle, plotting upon the hypotenuse (wasn’t this the name of some scientist or something?) the notion of narrativity. I use narrativity to mean exactly what I want it to mean – neither more, nor less. And you, unlike the people in wonderland must not as me ‘why?’ it’s a long tail.

Narrativity, the way I look at it, is where the gender of a tale – any tale, is located. I use narrativity, not to imply an engendering of a text, but as a physical location that makes the manifestation of the gender within a text possible. Let’s see if we can make it more comprehensible. Every text has a voice. A voice necessarily evokes a body. The body is inevitably a gendered body (because encrypted in a language) and it is this body and the linguistic narration that it performs, that gives and determines the gender of the text ini action – the narration.

And on this hypotenual narrativity, I first try to figure out the fleeting and transfiguring gender mechanisms of tale telling that I found of great interest. I want to argue, with some examples from Dollar Bahu –it is beyond the scope of this essay to go into any detailed analyses of anything, at best I can only indicate at something larger than what I am unfolding – that the gender of the text – and it is a changing gender – lies in the very way it exists, as also in why and how it exists this section is devoted to tracing the shifting gender patterns that evolve in the way the text is structured, presented and understood and to show how fiction is engendered not by merely looking at gender roles and positions but by the way of narration.

I place narrativity on the hypotenuse, because as I shall demonstrate in the last section of this essay, Narrativity becomes a larger process that restructurates itself in a continuous motion, to realize the other two elements of fiction – Readership and characterhood – into something entirely different, if not unexpected.

The ambitious, almost epical scope of the novel is immediately localized and warped by its narrativity. What could easily have been a transnational text, describing people, cultures and places, instead unfolds in a domestic set up that is shifted from one place ot another. Written in the contemporary postmodern unstructured polyphonic times, it remains surprisingly Austenian in its conception of a small canvas – a couple of families and what they do; what they don’t. The narrative is certainly of a valorized domesticity, where a middle class, ‘cultured’ family in India becomes the center of attention, when one of the members decides to go the USA and realizes his dollar dreams.

The novel opens on a railway platform- something that I still associate with the Raj, and this to me was a very striking thing – the railway platform, in an urban space is one of those carnivalesque places where anything can happen. The platform is also a space of permanent crisis, where all categories collapse as strangers become members of a Satreian seriality or a temporary community. To open the narration on the railway platform is to already foreground the process in which the novel is to proceed. Within the chaos, confusion, excitement and paranoia of the railways, there is still a domesticity as individuals concern themselves with food, sleep and small talk. The narrative, feminine and interested, even on the train, with the concerns of home and living, rather than those of adventure and survival, already lends to the text a female voice. Even as we see the first few chapters through the central consciousness of Chandru, the voice that makes itself heard is certainly female. Chandru’s stay in Dharwad crosses with Vinu’s songs and the novel becomes certainly female.

However back in Bangalore, in Chandru’s parents’ house, there is an ambiguity in the narrativity. While the family is clearly a patriarchal setup and the assessment of Girish is through the well educated, sensitive father – Shamanna, the emotional elements are the ones we experience with Gauramma, the mother. The rift is so clear in the narrative voice that throughout the rest of the novel, we can identify these two voices pitted against each other. However, the narrative is not just divided into this male-female dichotomy. Were it so then it would have fallen dull on its face. The most exciting thing about the narrative is the continuous paradox within which it lives, often modified by irony the rational, practical, working man Shamanna, instead of his appreciation for a liberated, enlightened progress, shows a hermeneutic humanity that allows him to see through the façade of affluence. On the other hand, the emotional, economic household manager Gauramma, falls more in the strain of a pre-progressive pro-capitalist caricature.

With Chandru’s moving away to America – and a particularly margin America (to coin the barbaric paradox), Nebraska – there is an expectation of a new voice. However, the voice that opens the novel, even as it undergoes an ironic modification, does not change and the experience is novel we have, from within a scientific US setup, a voice from India that changes with time but still remains Indian. It does not become an emasculated voice of power but remains – to risk an Orientalist stereotypification- ‘Indian’ in its essence.

This is a clear indication of how a translocation of geographies is not to expect a transfiguration in the voice of the novel. In fact the steadiness of the narrative ad shifting genders of the narrator, make the novel reading a richer, if not a better experience.