Manish Prabhakar Singh

Research Scholar, H.N.B Garhwal University, Uttarakhand, India

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Abstract: Malika Amar Sheikh’s I Want to Destroy Myself (2016) is an autobiography of a woman in a society barricaded by caste, religion and even gender where writing itself becomes an act of self-inscription in a language and especially, the culture that tries to silence the marginalized narrative. Her autobiography is a depiction of the Bombay of poets, activists, prostitutes, and warriors, as well as the unvarnished account of a marriage and a woman and a writer seeking her position in a man's world.

Originally written in Marathi as Mala Uddhvasta Vhaychay (1984) and later translated into English as I Want to Destroy Myself by Jerry Pinto, it narrates the struggle in her life signifying the visibility of patriarchal hegemony. The text not only depicts the feminine sensibility but also constructs the idea of self and identity making the text act as a feminist testimonial. With this ‘othered’ identity, it becomes the projection of what the patriarchal culture wants her to be. The narrative brutally exposes her husband's, families, and society's hypocrisy, showing a woman's multiple collection of silent sufferings.

The paper will delineate with the available scholarship the subtle nuances of her struggle in search of her own self. The paper aims to explore the gender issues and narrative voices and to analyze and evaluate the image in a social context. It will focus on how the self is represented which leads to shaping one’s identity and defined by memories with diligent recourse to textual analysis.

Keywords: Self, Identity, Memory, Struggle, Liberation

Paper

Malika Amar Sheikh (born 16 February 1957) is one of the most powerful literary voices hailing from Maharashtra and has carved a niche in the annals of Indian writing. A major Marathi women writer, She has received critical recognition for her poetry collections that includes A Lover Made of Sand, Metropolis, Seasons of the Body and When the Lens of Being Human Changes. Her works of fiction includes There was a Mouse, Who am I? The Story of a Tree and a biography of her father Sahir Amar Shaikh titled as The Song of a Storm. She displays herself to be a meticulous artist in every genre conceivable, having dabbled in poetry, short stories, and essays.

The genre of autobiography or memoir is rarely practiced by Indians as compared to that of poetry and fiction. Malika Amar Sheikh's autobiography, Mala Uddhvasta Vhaaychay ('I Want To Destroy), was originally published in 1984, and it sparked a literary explosion in Marathi literary world. It received widespread acclaim and yet swiftly faded away. It went unnoticed for several years until Jerry Pinto was introduced to a copy and decided to translate it in 2016. Yet, in English, she has resurfaced, furiously and intentionally reflecting on her experience, without discriminating between the personal and the political. She was barely thirty years old when she penned down the struggle in her life signifying the visibility of patriarchal hegemony. The text not only depicts the feminine sensibility but also constructs the idea of self and identity making the text act as a feminist testimonial. She presents the naked picture of her true self with brutal honesty and no concealment of unpleasant experiences, as is typical in most autobiographies. For her, writing was a form of self-expression. She not only portrayed the social realities of her society, but also the struggles of being a woman. Her reflection is self-reflective depicting the struggles and for them having their own identity which is influenced by the social and cultural structure. The subject/self in autobiographical writing is no longer removed from the historical, social, and political context. Instead, it gained flexibility and space at the foreground of literary criticism. In the genre of literary critical discourse, autobiography plays a significant part. According to Raj Kumar,

the emergence of the selfin an Autobiography is the making of the author. portrays the memory of her heart with authenticity and intensity of the impressions of the truth sketching her own self at a very intimate and personal level.

However, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue that “women’s autobiography is a privileged site for thinking about issues of writing at the intersection of feminist, post-colonial, and postmodern critical theories”. Women's life stories are symbolic attempts to break through the barrier of silence erected by their historical and cultural legacy.

I Want to Destroy Myself is an odyssey of self-exploration portraying the struggle which helps her in carving an identity for herself. It creates narratives of trauma and courage, and invent new female subjectivities. Her transformation from a happy child to a revolutionary lady is a voyage of self-discovery and self-realization. She highlights in her narrative,

I want to destroy myself ―I want to dissolve in it

She displays her frankness, her absolute lack of hypocrisy, and her strong sense of self.

Unless and until a woman breaks free of the shackles of shame, hesitation and martyrdom, her suffering, her pain are either ignored or taken for granted ...

She writes,

And a society which condones taking a woman's suffering for granted, can never give her anything apart from plaudits, sympathy and utter ruin ...

Shaikh mentions her marginalisation in her marriage, for she was always at the receiving end of emotional and physical abuse, Dhasal’s sexual liaisons with prostitutes, his disregard for domestic responsibilities, and an extremely condescending attitude towards her. Jerry Pinto, the translator of her autobiography, painfully observes:

There is a section [in the book] in which Malika Amar Shaikh, not yet twenty, finds herself with a baby in a rented room in Lonavla. She has no household help. Her only companion is a male chauvinist who, as an Ambedkarite has probably followed Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar into Buddhism, but cannot help quoting Hindu scripture at Malika. Her husband vanishes for days at a time, haring off to Pune and leaving her alone. [...] And then she discovers that her husband has infected her with a venereal disease.

Born to Shahir Amar Shaikh and Kusum Jaykar, the author's communist revolutionary parents, who did not choose to identify themselves in their political and personal travels via boundaries of caste or religion, she grew up in the same way, without knowing what it was like to be defined by religion or caste. She was raised in an influential milieu during a pivotal period in Maharashtrian politics: the 1960s. She grew up reading literature ranging from plays to poetry since she was a young child. Malika, who was an ailing child, was pampered by her father, a famed Marathi folk singer and trade union leader. She was enrolled in school despite the fact that she was a sickly child from birth. The doctor had informed her parents that she shouldn't cry till she was fourteen years old. As a result of her lonely existence as a sick child, she began connecting with the literary heroines of the novels she read, as she recounted in her autobiography. Her poetry was her sole expression. She wrote her first poem when she was seven years old.

Hirve, hirve gawat, phule bhovti jamat

Jaate mi, maaghaari yete mi…ramat, gamat

(In the green green foliage, the flowers dance

There will I follow; there will I prance.)

As a pampered child, Malika in spite of her health issues sketches a joyous phase of her life. She paints her childhood with colours of brilliance, full of life, and with no worry at all.  As Jerry Pinto writes,

Malika Amar Shaikh is describing the Garden of Eden that was her childhood.

The outside world was never hostile to her, but she was being exploited and abused by the reality sheconstructed for herself. She attempted to share her inner anguish and fury with the world through this hard-hitting narrative. The genuine struggle in their lives began with her father's untimely demise.  She writes 'With Bhai's departure came the days of darkness,'She discusses her father's unexpected death and the impact it had on their family. She describes that particular phase of her life which hit her family quite hard. Their lives seemed like a stage where the show had ended, or a desolate theatre after the audience had left. The home felt like a place with four walls with the colours of joy fading from their life. Her mother suffered from nervous breakdown. She had become a cipher of her true personality. Nobody understood her mother's grief and sadness.

As a child, she was fascinated by womanhood, as well as the interactions that form between men and women. She documents her openness which is quite often not associated with topics such as menstruation and feminine hygiene. She writes that how she feigned ignorance and put on an innocent expression when her elder sister explained it to her. She bares her own self and portrays her curious nature as teenager when she writes

How odd I felt, how different inside…My own body was new to me. My eyes, my lips, over all of me a new set of sensations. And the bit below my waist seem fatigued. It was all new and I was excited…

So, when Namdeo Dhasal entered her life with his crudeness and liveliness, she was completely enchanted. Dhasal had previously published Golpitha, his debut collection of poems that catapulted him to the forefront of Marathi poetry. Shaikh describes him as "masculine, maverick, sensitive, a poet to love and to love me." The romanticism of the occasion swept her off her feet, and she impulsively accepted to marry Dhasal at the age of seventeen, despite her elder sister's fierce resistance. She was too young and at the same time, there was socio-economic difference. When Namdeo invited her family to his house, they were quite horrified. She was little bit upset by the physical limitations and living circumstances of a chawl but that didn’t shocked her at all.

I was in my own world but Aai and Didi were horrified. That such a cosseted child should come to a place like this to live seemed incredible to them. And then our cultural backgrounds were so different. What if he were a poet? And much more of the same.

Namdeo Dhasal's family, too, was culturally and educationally distinct from Malika's family. He was a Mahar by caste and the only child of ignorant parents who couldn't tell the difference between good and wrong. His flaws and blunders were overlooked and, at times, encouraged. As a passionate revolutionary, he was always ready for any conflict, which was seen as a remarkable attribute of persons throughout the Dalit Panther movement.

Her family consented to a June 1 wedding date, despite the fact that they had just met three months prior. By then, Shaikh writes, she had already lost her virginity to him. "It's fun to do it before the wedding. Afterwards, it becomes a matter of routine" she says Dhasal told her. And one night, after taking her out for a movie and a supper and giving her first taste of alcohol, Dhasal asks, ‘Giving?’ ‘What?’ Shaikh responds. “'Your womanhood.' And before I could answer, he had his hand over my mouth." It hurt so much, Shaikh reports. "I wondered how anyone could get any joy out of this circus... But I liked surrendering my body to the man I loved." This early encounter not only sets the tone for their marriage but also raises an impertinent question about consent. Dhasal coerces her into having intercourse with him before marriage, and she experiences nothing but misery. She purposefully blurs the line between consenting and forced intercourse, allowing readers to question if she was raped or not.

Namdeo knew it would be difficult for her to live in that ‘terrible neighbourhood’ and so he rented a house in Bandra. They were married at her home as it was a marriage without any kind of trumpet to boast of. When Malika relocated to Pune with Namdeo, she voiced her dissatisfaction with the party workers always congregating in the house, resulting in a lack of privacy for a newlywed couple. These vestiges of Malika's recollections show that she was married to someone who was born and raised in a totally different milieu. After shifting to her new home, she sheds light on the idea of sexual relationship and how a woman loses herself in the constructed reality of marriage. "Home," however, is precisely what the women lose, as they travel as a wife to a foreign location, there to begin a new life.

On their wedding night, "[u]ninvited, a whole lot of Namdeo's friends, poets, party functionaries and the like came over". Shaikh's duty was to keep the tea pouring because the visitors never seemed to depart. Dhasal, a dynamic presence, never gave up the life he described in Golpitha, the prostituting, brawling, and carousing, even leaving her afflicted with venereal illness:

On both sides of my pubic area, boils erupted. Pus began to form inside... My body filled me with revulsion now.

She also presents instances of the suffering of Namdeo’s mother and in a way highlighting the Dalit female experience which quite often do not find their own voice. In a way, she paints the struggle of silent suffering which could be seen through the life of Namdeo’s mother. She instils a sense of female solidarity by challenging the patriarchal system, which confines women to responsibilities that are limited to the domestic environment, preventing them from leaving the home to help other women. Both of the women in Namdeo’s life do a lot of sacrifices. The society eventually becomes accustomed to this pointless sacrifice. It becomes second nature. By pointing it out, she narrates the struggle for equality which is required in different phases of development. In a way, her narrative is trying to transform the perspective of the women and the kaleidoscopic lenses through which she sees, hears and analyses issues that affects her. The narrative is not about a single subject, but rather about a collection of women narrated via the female narrator's voice. This collectivity, or what Bakhtin refers to as the "heteroglossic" element of women's autobiography, provided women autobiographers with a sense of empowerment.

Malika Amar Sheikh pens down her dark period of despair after her marriage to Namdeo Dhasal. She writes it with a very clear voice and not concealing her true opinion. With his active political exploits, ranging from the founding of the Dalit Panther group to his searing poetry that broke new ground in Marathi literature, Dhasal was one of the most lauded personalities on the scene. His poetries foregrounded the condition of Dalit women as a sex-worker or an oppressed mother but he oppressed and marginalised his own wife. She'd weave a narrative that depicted the man's dynamism, egoism, flaming brilliance, tenderness, and philandering in all of its ugliness. She powerfully problematises and interrogates numerous inconsistencies in her poet-activist husband's allegedly revolutionary beliefs, who was willing to go to any extent to aid or support his family, friends and connections from Kamathipura, and his party comrades, but was notably apathetic or even antagonistic to his own wife's fundamental needs.

If there were no money for a political programme, our tape recorder, my ornaments, would all end up with the Marwadi […] he owed everyone and I was caught in the trap of his indebtedness

She even mentions the Dhasal's complete lack of emotional empathy for her as a husband. Malika, who became a mother at a young age, received no sympathy or support from her husband. She quite bluntly portrays the idealistic worldview about ‘motherhood’ created by the patriarchal society. She strongly comments on how she cannot feel eternal love for her child after enduring aches that almost kill her while suffering from labour contractions that leave her practically comatose. She refused to have any more children as she didn't want to put up with such agonising bodily suffering when Dhasal didn't seem to care. Namdeo, an altered individual, became a male chauvinist, an absent husband and father who indulged in drinking, womanising, and violence. Namdeo grew increasingly unpleasant as the days passed; he would beat, brawl, and abuse her on a daily basis, acting violently. She had sketched the image of a man who had enticed her with his idealism and then done everything he could to ruin her dreams after marriage. He had abused her and attempted to separate her from her only son. In a poem addressed to Dhasal, This Loneliness, Like That Of An Outcast, she answers to him in comparable physical terms, telling of her disenchantment with their connection, her loneliness in juggling both the yearning for company and the demands of maintaining a household, and her sense of being oppressed.

Malika was fragmented and felt powerless due to violent acts of Namdeo. Namdeo's attitudes regarding women were also apparent in how he treated Malika after their son was born. He ceased sharing his personal and political life with his wife and was rarely at home, virtually totally abdicating responsibility for his son's upbringing to Malika. She deliberates,

My mind, my body, my spirit were devastated. Each moment was like a death.

Her road to self-liberation began with her rejection of the notion of males as supreme authority. She confronted him because he used his patriarchal power to remove her from her child. This was the worst he could do to a mother. She fought back against the brutality inflicted on her by her spouse.

After three or four years of torture, I decided to overthrow those inhibitions, to do away with my shyness and sacrifices. I had not slept well in years. There was a poisonous reality standing in the middle of my life with its arms stretched out.

She fought back against the brutality inflicted on her by her spouse. She battled for herself; she fought alone against the patriarchal hegemony. Her struggle against oppression and quiet suffering ended with hope and optimism. It was a difficult decision for her to remove herself from her child, but she had no choice but to do so in order to establish her dignity. In frustration and misery, she endured many restless nights without eating, but she never considered violating her self-esteem and returning to her husband.She writes,

Not just Namdeo, the social system in which we live was also responsible for what I had to suffer.

Her narrative about Namdeo’s politics echoed the concepts of ‘masculinity’ that prevailed within the Dalit Panther Movement in the 1970s. As Sharmila Rege in her 1998 lecture in Pune titled, A Dalit Feminist Standpoint says:

Even though the Party played an important role in the context of the Dalit question, their inclusivity towards Dalit women’s voice in their politics was non-existent and women were only looked at in the roles of ‘mothers’ and ‘wives’.

Shaikh is able to separate the many sides of Dhasal without portraying him as an evil – yet she plainly exposes his underlying dishonesty, pointing out how his principles seldom coincide with his deeds. She is very resentful of how he treats her and expresses her anguish and desire for vengeance. She presented her narrative of struggle and pain but Namdeo, to his credit, supported her right to voice her mind and present her own truth. There is some artistic dissatisfaction, but she recognises Dhasal as the superior poet. She is not furious with Dhasal; she is unhappy with herself for allowing herself to be engulfed by love. As she puts it, this is a narrative of defeat. But it's also a narrative about overcoming adversity through survival to achieve what appears to be success.

Portraying one’s own struggle is never an easy task, but bottling it within does more harm and damage.  She describes her journey to discover her own self, from naïve passivity to revelation of her true identity. Identity as a notion is founded on one's experience of oneself in connection to others, as well as identical values and cultural manifestations that lead the identity to be formed. It is a significant declaration of self-identity, with the realisation that storytelling can be a liberating and healing form of expression. She describes writing as a therapeutic process helping her to heal and at the same time letting her to self-reflect. In an interview to Mithila Padhke, she says:

I need to express it immediately, or I don't feel at peace. I cannot keep it all bottled up inside. I react very quickly to things. You can say this might be a sort of self-defence mechanism that I have ... If I hadn't written about what was taking place in my life at that point of time I would have suffocated. Writing is my means of expression. Like I smile, cry or sing, 1 write. It is part of me.

Jerry Pinto in his translator’s note writes

It is customary to say that one has enjoyed the process. I did not enjoy translating Mala Uddhvasta Vhaychay. It would often leave me feeling somewhat in danger of collapse

Her writing is basic, fragmented, and bordering on didactic. Nonetheless, her autobiography is significant for confronting the most fundamental issues about women's rights and women's writing, ones that have been forgotten in the stagnation of arguments. The self-portrait that develops is vivid to some part since the husband and wife's lives are frequently tightly linked. The self-portrait was drawn with honesty, humility, and courage. To summarise, the narrative is notable for its intriguing self-portrait, and image of her husband, captivating narrative approach, and unartificial dialect.

Works Cited:

• Anderson, Linda. Autobiography (The New Critical Idiom) Routledge, 2021.
• Chitre, Mihir. “Interview: Malika Amar Shaikh.” Hindustan Times, 4 July 2020, hindustantimes.com/books/interview-malika-amar shaikh/storymFFW3ttjiykate3wR49tIM.html Accessed 23 April, 2022.
• Dasgupta, Shougat. “The Past as Present.” India Today, 26 Nov. 2016, indiatoday.in/magazine/leisure/story/20161205-i-want-to-destroy-myself-malika-shaikh-shougat-dasgupta-829934-2016-11-24. Accessed 26 April, 2022.
• Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (Reading Women Writing). 1st ed., Cornell University Press, 1994.
• Kumar, Raj. Dalit Personal Narratives Reading Caste, Nation and Identity. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010.Print
• Mohanty, Subhalaxmi, and Prajna Paramita Panigrahi. “A Tale of Self Exploration and Silent Suffering: The Memoir of Malika Amar Shaikh.” International Journal of English: Literature, Language & Skills, vol. 9, no. 4, Jan. 2021, pp. 97–102, ijells.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/January-2021-.pdf.
• Phadke, Mithila. “The Woman Who (Once) Wanted to be Destroyed.” Voices, 2011, pp. 10–13.
• Rege, Sharmila. “710 Sharmila Rege, A Dalit Feminist Standpoint.” India Seminar, 1998, https://www.india-seminar.com/2018/710/710_sharmila_rege.htm#top. Accessed 29April, 2022.
• Sheikh, Amar, Malika. I Want To Destroy Myself. Trans. Jerry Pinto. New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2016.
• Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiographies. Minnesota Press, 2010.
• Smridhi, Suyashi. “Book Review: I Want To Destroy Myself By Malika Amar Shaikh.” Feminism In India, 19 Apr. 2021, https://feminisminindia.com/2019/04/02/i-want-to-destroy-myself-malika-amar-shaikh/. Accessed 25 April, 2022.
• “Book Review: ‘I Want to Destroy Myself’ by Malika Amar Shaikh.” The MCH Blog, 3 Apr. 2019. https://themchblog.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/book-review-i-want-to-destroy-myself-by-malika-amar-shaikh/ . Accessed 25 April, 2022.