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○//。
A JOLIITTI OI O
MI9 N.
Published by Women's Edu
 

ender Studies
Jume 2001
Caiol & Research Centre

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Board of Directors : Ms. Anberiya Haniffa
Ms. Bernadeen Silva Dr. Kumari Jayawardena Dr. Radhika Coomaraswamy Dr. Selvy Thiruchandran Dr. Malathi de Alwis Ms. Rocky Ariyaratne
*
Editor : Selvy Thiruchandran
Typeset, layout and Cover design: B. A.Sunanda Seeli
Nivedini - Vol.9 No.1
A journal published by the
Women's Education and Research Centre
No.58, Dharmarama Road,
Colombo 06. Sri Lanka. Tel: 596826/595296 Fax : 596313
ISSN 1391 - 0027
(O Copyright 1996 by the organisation of Women's Education and Research
Centre
No.58, Dharmarama Road, Colombo 06, Sri Lanka.
No part of this journal may be reproduced without permission from the publisher except for review purposes.
Letters may be addressed to WERC, Women's Education and Research Centre No.58, Dharmarama Road, Colombo 06, Sri Lanka.
(e) -- WERC
Women's Education and Research Centre

T MÉS SS ve Of Over Νίνβαίνυί
tS dedicated to the Wew or of Dr. Mavuo Yavut scard VC VC. Wuttu. time activitist wyn o fol gynt аOаіи.st Lијиstice OotM perSovval avud Social.

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Nivedini Vol. 9. No. 1 June, 2001
Contents
A note from the Editor
Motherhood as A Space of Protest: Women's Political Participation in Contemporary Sri Lanka
Malathi de Alwis
The Family and the Household of the Females in War Time Eastern Sri Lanka - ARE THEY DISINTEGRATING OR BEING RESTRUCTURED?
Selvy Thiruchandran
Fairy Tales and the Concept of Femininity
Neshantha Harischandra
Dreams Unlimited: The Make-Believe World of Advertisements
Uma Chakravarti
Book Reviews 'Images" - Yolanda Foster "Blissfully" Carl Muller

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A note from the Editor Nivedini in a New Frame
We have been publishing Nivedini from 1993 and have brought out 14 issues (including 2 double issues). Nivedini was the outlet and the communicative arm of Women's Education and Research Centre. Nivedini has always remained within a specific ideology of feminism with an orientation towards multi disciplinary focus taking into its fold various lines of thoughts pertaining to democracy anti-racism, with a commitment to Marxism. Issues relating to gender and class, gender and caste, gender and nation, gender and ethnicity were constantly engaged in as aspects, within a dynamic process of widening the understanding of the complex interactionism that takes place within the concept of gender.
As an outcome of the recent South Asian Conference held in Colombo on the theme of "Past in the present: "Gendering' Generations across Geographies' organised by Women's Education and Research Centre, there has
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developed a slight change in our vision. We have decided to have an editorial board with women representating other South Asian countries who would perform meaningful roles in enhancing the quality of the Journal.
But Women's Education and Research Centre will still remain the publication agency of Nivedini. We have decided to share responsibility and accountability of the contents of Nivedini. Whether we should retain the name or even change the name of the journal will be decided by the editorial board shortly. Our next issue will reflect the change of our vision.
However, we expect to remain within the boarder frame of our ideological commitment to the cause of social transformation and consciousness raising through research while subverting mainstream oppressive theories and practices.

MOTHERHOODASA SPACE OF PROTEST: WOMENSPOLITICAL PARTICIPATION IN CONTEMPORARY SRI LANKA
*Malathi de Alwis
This paper was originally published in Appropriating Gender: Women's Activism and the Politicization of Religion in South Asia eds. Amrita Basu & Patricia Jeffrey. London/New York: Routledge, 1997.
The research on which this paper is based was made possible with grants from the MacArthur Foundation (administered by CASPIC), the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (University of Chicago), Class of 1905 Fellowship (Mount Holyoke College), and infrastructural support from the ICES, Colombo, for which I am most grateful. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Senior Research Colloquium on Violence, Suffering and Healing in South Asia held at the Department of Sociol

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ogy, Delhi University in August 1993 and at the conference on Appropriating Gender: Women's Activism, and the Politicization of Religion in South Asia held at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in September 1994. The comments and suggestions that I received at both venues have been invaluable and I extend my sincere thanks to the participants and most specially to my discussants Patricia Uberoi and Tricia Jeffrey, the latter being a most sensitive and patient editor as well. My thanks also to Uma Chakravarty, Mary Hancock, Pradeep Jeganathan and David Scott for their critical comments on various versions of this paper, Mangala Samara weera, SLFP MP for Matara who made time to speak with me on many occasions, and Sunila Abeysekere and Kumi Samuel of INFORM for sharing their confidential files and filling in many details of the early days of the Mothers' Front.
I am especially indebted to Dr. Manorani Sara vana muttu and many other women who wish to remain anonymous who willingly shared their tales of despair and anger and whose courage has been an inspiration to me. I dedicate this paper to them.
D the years 1987 to 1991, Sri Lanka witnessed an uprising by nationalist Sinhala youth (the JVP) and reprisals by the state that gripped the country in a stranglehold of terror. While the militants randomly terrorized or assassinated anyone who criticized them or supposedly collaborated with the state, the state similarly, but on a much larger scale, murdered or 'disappeared' anyone they suspected to be a 'subversive' which in
cluded thousands of young men, some young women and several left-wing activists, playwrights, lawyers and journalists who were either monitoring or protesting the vio
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5Motherhood As a Space of Protest:
lation of human rights by the state. Bodies, rotting on beaches, smoldering in grotesque heaps by the roadsides and floating down rivers, were a daily sight during the height of state repression from 1988 to 1990. It was in such a context that the Mothers' Front, a grassroots women's organization with an estimated membership of over 25,000 women was formed in July 1990 to protest the "disappearance' of approximately 60,000 young and middleaged men. Their only demand was for 'a climate where we can raise our sons to manhood, have our husbands with us and lead normal women's lives' (Island, 9 February 1991). The seemingly unduestionable authenticity of their grief and espousal of 'traditional family values provided the Mothers' Front with an important space for protest unavailable to other organizations critical of state practices.
The Mothers' Front phrased their protest in a vocabulary that was most available to them through their primary positioning within a patriarchally structured society-that of motherhood-which I define here as encompassing women's biological reproduction as well as their interpelation as moral guardians, care-givers and nurturers. While I am fully in agreement with the argument that maternalist women's peace groups project essentialist views of women that re-enforce the notion of biology as destiny and legitimize a sex-role system that, in assigning responsibility for nurture and survival to women alone, encourages masculinized violence and destruction (Enloe, 1989; Hartsock, 1982; Houseman, 1982; Lloyd, 1986), I think we need to consider carefully the reasons why 'motherist movements' (Schirmer, 1993) adopt the strategies they do, and what effects they have. In light
1 The Mothers' Front has been inspired by and shares much with similar
organizations in Latin America, but I want to highlight here the impor
tance of historical and material specificities rather than make comparisons between different movements.

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of such a project, I would like to consider here, the contingent usefulness of maternalized protest at a particular moment in Sri Lankan history. However, such an attempt at a positive reading cannot ignore the complex interplay of power within this space that also re-inscribed gender and class hierarchies and re-inforced majoritarian ethnic identities while those of minorities were erased.
Though the Mothers' Front's agenda remained very limited, its few, brief, and spectacular appearances on the Sri Lankan political stage nevertheless placed a government on the defensive, awoke a nation from a terrorized stupor and indelibly gendered the discourses of human rights and dissent. It also created a space in which a much larger, non-racist, and more radical movement of protest could be launched to overthrow an extremely repressive and corrupt government that had been in power for 17 years, at the General Elections of August 1994.
Due to spatial limitations, my article will only concentrate on exploring how the Mothers' Front created a space for themselves within a predominantly patriarchal political landscape by articulating their protest through an available, familiar and emotive discourse of motherhood. While this space was mediated by a powerful political party that was also predominantly male, Sinhala and middle class, I would like to suggest that the repertoire of protest employed by these women, albeit under the sign of the mother and mainly limited to tears and curses, were the most crucial components in an assault on a government that had until then held an entire nation to ransom on the pretext of safeguarding the lives of its citizens. It is in this sense that I assert the contingent value of the Mothers' Front's repertoire of protest.

SMotherhood. As a Space of Protest:
The Mothers' Front
Tears...are common to all. Yet, there is nothing more powerful on earth that can wring tears from others than a mother's tears (Lankadeepa, 28 June 1992).
The first branch of the Mothers' Front was inaugurated on 15th July 1990 in the southern district of Matara, a region severely affected by 'disappearances'.2 The meeting was held under the auspices of Mangala Samaraweera and Mahinda Rajapakse, members of Parliament representing the main opposition party-the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) from Matara and Hambantota respectively. The meeting was attended by 1500 women from the Matara district who elected office bearers from among themselves to coordinate the work of the group. They decided to work out of Mr Samaraweera's home in Matara as the climate of violence warranted some protection for the women and as the majority of them were severely traumatized: "At that time we were like children constantly needing to be told what to do. Sometimes I would come away from one of our meetings not remembering a single matter that was discussed noted one office bearer. Within six months,
2 On May 20th 1990, the Organization of Parents and Family Members of the Disappeared (OPFMD) was formed to do similar work among the families of 'disappeared' trade union workers and left-wing activists. This group was closely aligned with Vasudeva Nanayakkara, opposition MP and politbureau member of the left-wing NSSP (Nava Sama Samaja Pakshaya). They rarely received as much publicity as the Mothers' Front but they supported the Front and joined their rallies while members of the Front often participated in their rallies (see fin. 10 for example).
3 Mr. Samaraweera reports that a branch office set up independently in
Welligama (in the Southern Province) was attacked by thugs.
The event of 'disappearance' not only inscribed the minds of the families with anguish but also turned their bodies into ciphers of agony. Most families of the 'disappeared seemed to suffer from trauma-related neuroses; children who stopped speaking, old and young women who complained of memory loss, fainting spells, seizures, weight loss, severe chest pains etc., and fathers who died of sudden heart attacks.
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branches of the Mothers' Front were set up in ten other districts (often under the patronage of an SLFP MP of that area) and the Front's membership increased to 25,000 by 1992. The majority of these women were from rural and
semi-rural areas and of the lower and lower middle classes, acquainted with much poverty and hardship.
Initially, the Front's focus was mainly regional and it made little headway, except in compiling systematic and extensive documentation about the 'disappeared from each district. Visiting police stations, army camps and local government offices with these lists and petitioning various state institutions and officials for information produced few results. The women often viewed their reception at such institutions of power with a certain resignation and cynicism, tolerating politicians who promised the earth when canvassing votes but refused to give them the time of day once in power and accepting that the everyday provision of state services was often contingent upon one's wealth and status. Yet, what fueled their continued pursuance of such activities and an increasing anger at being thwarted was an over-riding confidence that their 'disappeared' was alive and should be sought urgently before his trail would grow cold. No amount of persuasion would sway them from this ceaseless search except the actual display of the body. As one mother eloquently pointed out to me, "I gave birth to that boy. Surely wont I sense it if he dies?' The first seeds of protest were sown in such moments of stubborn refusal to give up hope, to concede failure. The 'absence of bodies' noted Jennifer Schirmer, creates a "presence of protest' (1989:5). By early 1991 the Mothers' Front was to 'show its muscles' (Island, 27 January 1991) by targeting its protest on the epicenter of power-the capital city of Colombo-and capturing the attention of the entire country.
On February 19th 1991, the Mothers' Front organized a massive rally in a suburb of Colombo. Clad in white and
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SMotherhood. As a Space of Protest:
holding photographs and pieces of clothing of their "disappeared, thousands of these chronic mourners' (Schirmer, 1989: 25) mobilizing under the sign of the mother demanded that a nation not forget them or their 'disappeared'. The rally also commemorated the death of well known actor, newscaster and journalist Richard de Zoysa who was abducted, tortured, murdered and dumped upon the beach by a para-military squad the year before. Richard de Zoysa's mother Dr. Manorani Saravanamuttu, who had publicly accused senior police officers in being involved in her son's abduction (and had then to flee the country for her own safety), also returned to the island at this time and was invited to serve as the President of the National Committee of the Mothers' Front. The Front portrayed itself as a grassroots movement of mothers who had dedicated their lives to seeking their 'disappeared' with the support of the SLFP (because of the threat posed by the government). The mothers' seemingly conservative and apolitical rhetoric as well as certain unorthodox avenues of protest that were subsequently employed by them, made a counter-attack by the state especially difficult and complicated. Unable to contain the Mothers' Front through the usual practices of authoritarian control, the state was constantly placed on the defensive-countering the Front on their terms rather than its own. Such a counterpoint took the form of counter-rhetoric, counter-rallies and counter-ritual.
CoUNTER-RHETORIC
As in the case of the Madres of Argentina or the GAM (Mutual Support Group for the Reappearance of our Sons, Fathers, Husbands and Brothers) of Guatemala, the rhetoric of protest used by the Mothers' Front too can be read as confronting a repressive state by revealing the contradictions between the state's own rhetoric and practices. By appealing for a return to the 'natural' order of family and motherhood these women were openly embracing patri
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archal stereotypes that primarily defined them through familial/domestic subject positions such as wife and mother. However, by accepting this responsibility to nurture and preserve life, which is also valorized by the state (de Alwis, 1994), they revealed the ultimate transgression of the state as well for it was denying women the opportunities for mothering through a refusal to acknowledge life by resorting to clandestine tactics of 'disappearance' (cf. Schirmer 1989: 28). The Sri Lankan state's major rhetorical counter to such implicit accusations was very interesting. On the day the Mothers' Front organized their first rally in Colombo, President Premadasa acknowledged that he sympathized with the mothers whose children have been led astray by designing elements. Many now in custody are being rehabilitated" (Daily News, 19 February 1991). In a similar vein, Ranjan Wijeratne, Minister of State for Defence pontificated: "Mothers are not expected to stage demonstrations. Mothers should have looked after their children. They failed to do that. They did not know what their children were doing. They did not do that and now they are crying" (Daily News, 15 February 1991). In both statements, there is an overt suggestion that these protesting women have not been 'good' and 'capable' mothers but the President's statement goes one further and suggests that because of this, the state has taken on the responsibility of motherhood by rehabilitating these children so the mothers should have no reason to protest but rather, should be grateful to him and to the state for taking on their rightful responsibility. By also focusing on "rehabilitation', the President carefully circumvented accusations of the state's complicity in 'disappear ances' and arbitrary killings.
Several government ministers also used various rhetorical ploys to slander the Mothers' Front; their most vociferous critic being Ranjan Wijeratne, the Minister of

5Motherhood As a Space of Protest:
State for Defence. He denounced the movement as being 'subversive,' 'anti-government' (Daily News, 14 March 1991), "against the security forces who saved democracy' (Daily News, 23 February 1991), threatened to 'get at the necks of those using the Mothers' Front' (Island, 20 February 1991) and stepped up police surveillance of its leaders (Sunday Times, 29 March 1991). The SLFP was also consistently accused of trying to use the Mothers' Front to further their power by both the governmentowned media and various government ministers (Daily News, 19 February 1991, 23 March 1991; Sunday Observer, 24 February 1991). The central thrust of the rhetorical responses of the state attempted to undermine the primary subject position of these women by suggesting that they had not been "good' mothers while also attempting to question their credibility by insinuating that they were mere puppets of a political party which was using them for its own ends.
Counter-rallies
The state attempted to disrupt the first Mothers' Front rally by banning demonstrations and creating an atmosphere of distrust and panic with suggestions of possible bomb explosions and a LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) infiltration of Colombo. However, when the Mothers' Front organized their second rally in Colombo a month later, the state implemented yet another countertactic under the aegis of the First Lady, Hema Premadasa. While the Mothers' Front organized a rally to commemorate International Women's' Day on March 8th 1991, in one part of the city of Colombo, the government organized a massive counter women's rally in another part of the city by bussing-in women from various Seva
5. When Wijeratne was killed in a bomb blast in late March 1991, many Front members and SLFP organizers directly connected his death with the efficacy of their collective protest.

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Vanitha6 units affiliated to government departmentsespecially the armed forces. While the Mothers' Front mourned the 'disappearances' of their male relatives due to state repression, the state-organized women's rally mourned the deaths of their male relatives who had been killed by the JVP in the south and Tamil militants in the north and east of Sri Lanka. The state-owned Daily News carried an entire page of photographs from the state-organized rally while no mention was made of the Mothers' Front rally (Daily News, 9 March 1991).
In July 1992, the United National Party (UNP) government even inaugurated a UNP Mothers' Front in the Gampaha District, the stronghold of the Bandaranaike clan and thus synonymous with the SLFP. At its first meeting, the only female Cabinet Minister in the government, Health and Women's Affairs Minister Renuka Herath, categorically claimed that "it were the children of those mothers who slung photographs and marched, who killed the children of you innocent mothers' (Divaina, 27 July 1992). She promised to provide financial support for the members of this Front and to erect memorials to their children's bravery; two and a half years later these women were still waiting to see these promises fulfilled.
Religious Rituals as Resistance
The practices of the Mothers' Front that most unnerved the government, especially the President who was known to be an extremely superstitious man, was the skillful use of religious ritual as resistance. As Marx has so perceptively pointed out, religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress' (quoted in Comaroff, 1985: 252).
6 All wives of government officials and all female officials must join this national social service organization which replicates the hierarchical structures of government in that the President's wife is the leader, the Cabinet Minister's wives are below her etc.
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Most families of the 'disappeared' were intimate with such manifestations of religious distress which ran the gamut from beseeching gods and goddesses, Saints and holy spirits, with special novenas (Catholic masses), penances, offerings, donations, and the chanting of religious verses over a period of months, taking vows, making pilgrimages and performing bodhi pujas(offerings to the Bo tree), as well as resorting to Sorcery, and the placement of charms and curses on those deemed responsible. The SLFP first realized the powerful potential of such publicized' religious practices when members of the Mothers' Front participated in the SLFP-organized 180 mile long Pada Yatra (march) to protest various government policies and human rights violations, in March/April 1992. The absolute abandon and passion which the mothers displayed as they broke coconuts and beseeched the deities to return their sons and husbands and heaped curses on those who had taken them away, at the Devinuwara and Kataragama devales (temples), even surprised the SLFP organizers of the Yatra and provided tremendous photo opportunities for the image-hungry media men (e.g.. Divaina, 4 April 1992). The President apparently took this collective and ritualized display of ill feeling personally: on the advise of his Malayalee Swami, he immediately participated in a counter ritual in which he was bathed by seven virgins ! While Sirimavo Bandaranaike (the Leader of the SLFP) publicly linked the two events at the second National Convention of the Mothers' Front on June 23rd 1992, her daughter Chandrika Kumaratunga suggested that the mothers' curses during the Pada Yatra had effected the sudden and much publicized disclosures by former Deputy Inspector General of Police, Premadasa Udugampola, who was the mastermind behind the paramilitary hit squads that terrorized the southern and central provinces of Sri Lanka at the height of the JVP uprising in 1989-91, at the same meeting.
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The ritual of religious resistance that received the most publicity and generated much comment was the Deva Kafinalawwa (the beseeching of the gods), which took place in the afternoon of June 23rd 1992. The Mothers' Front specifically picked this day for their second National Convention because it was President Premadasa's birthday and co-incided with the commencement of his extravagant brain child-the Gam Udawa(village reawakening) celebrations. Not surprisingly, therefore, many of the wrathful speeches made at the Convention focused on his autocratic style of governance (he had just foiled an impeachment motion against him) and megalomania. Afterwards, the SLFP provided lunch to the mothers and bussed them to the Kalliamman Kovil(Hindu temple) at Modera. On arrival however, the mothers were greeted by the locked gates of the kovil and a battalion of policemen standing guard. Not to be deterred, SLFP MP Alavi Moulana, instructed the first group of mothers to break their coconuts outside the kovil gates. Almost simultaneous with this and the loud chanting of 'sadhu, Sadhu' that rent the air, the gates were hastily opened by a somewhat chagrined senior police officer though access to the inner sanctum was still denied. The small kovil premises soon became packed with weeping and wailing mothers many of whom boldly named President Premadasa and cursed him and his government. Asilin, one of the mothers who was also a neighbor at the time, was chanting over and over again: Premadasa, see this coconut all Smashed into bits, may your head too be splintered into a hundred bits, so heinous are the crimes you have perpetrated on my child.' Another mother wept saying: "Premadasa, I bore this child in my womb for ten months, may you and your family be cursed not for 10 days or 10 weeks or 10 months or 10 years or 10 decades but for 10 edins."
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The passion, the anger, the pathos, the power, of these weeping, cursing, imploring mothers riveted an entire nation. Not only did these mothers make front page news the next day and for much of that week but their display of grief at the Kalliamman Kovil was a constant topic of discussion for several months and spurred some alternative as well as mainstream Sinhala dailies and Sunday editions to begin a series of articles which focused on the individual stories of the families of the 'disappeared'. An editorial warning issued when the Front was first begun now seemed prescient: When mothers emerge as a political force it means that our political institutions and society as a whole have reached a critical moment—the danger to our way of life has surely come closer home' (Island, 20 February 1991).
Counter-rituals
To ward off the mothers' curses President Premadasa sought refuge in an elaborate counter ritual-the Kiriammawarungé Dané (The Feeding of Milk Mothers) an archaic ritual that is now connected with the Goddess Pattini.7 On the day of his birthday/commencement of Gam Udawa and the Mothers" Front's Dewa Karinalawwa at Modera, on June 23rd 1992, he offered alms to 68 (grand)mothers (Silumina, 28 June 1992) and at the conclusion of Gam Udawa and another Dewa Karinalawwa organized on a much smaller scale at Kalutara (South of Colombo) by the Mothers' Front, on July 3rd 1992, he of fered alms to 10,000 (grand)mothers while the North Central Provincial Council Minister for Health and Women's Affairs, Rani Adikari, chanted the Pattini Kañinalawwa to bring blessings on the President, the armed forces and the
7 For a brief description and analysis of this ritual see Gombrich 1971, and for
a discussion of its origins see Obeyesekere 1984 especially pp. 293-6.
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country (Daily News, 7 June 1992).8 Though the commonly held belief is that Pattini is predominantly a guardian against infectious diseases, she is also the 'good mother' and ideal wife whose chief aim is to maintain a just and rationally grounded Society' and can thus be read as a counterpoint to the goddess that the Mothers' Front appealed to-the bad mother" and evil demoness Kali who deals with sorcery and personal and familial conflicts (Gombrich & Obeyesekere, 1988: 158-60).
It was not only President Premadasa who was disturbed by such rituals but even the urbane Minister of Industries, Science and Technology, Ranil Wickremasinghe warned: "If your children have disappeared, it is alright to beseech the gods. After all if there is no one else to give you Succor it is fitting to look to one's gods. But if one conducts such Deva Kannalawwa's with thoughts of hate and revenge, it could turn into a huniyam (black magic) and backfire on you' (Divaina, 13 July 1992). Ironically, despite such dire warnings and counter-rituals, President Premadasa was blown to Smithereens by a suicide bomber before a year was out. A few days after his death, a beaming Asilin came to see me with a comb of plantains (considered to be an auspicious gift): He died just like the way I cursed him' she said triumphantly.
Tears and Curses
The complicated interplay between the Mothers' Front and the state operated upon a common terrain that took for granted the authenticity and efficacy of a mother's tears and curses. Though the state could retaliate that
8 However, this is not the first time the President has publicly participated in this ritual (e.g., Lankadeepa 1/13/92 & Island 3/22/92). Nevertheless, the repetition of this ritual within such a short period and on such a grand scale suggests it was not mere coincidence. The ritual is usually performed with just 7 (grand)mothers and the chief (grand) mother rather than a politician leads the chanting.
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SMotherhood. As a Space of Protest:
these women were not "good' mothers or that they were the pawns of a political party, it could not deny the mother's right to weep or to curse for after all that was what was expected of women. Rather, when these women wept or cursed en masse and in public it became an embarrassment for the state which then attempted to organize its own Fronts of weeping women or to counteract the Mothers' Front's curses through the deployment of even larger masses of mothers to participate in counter rituals. In a context of violence and terror, it were the tears and curses of the mothers that finally stirred a nation and shamed a government.
However, it is also important to bear in mind that tears and curses differed in signification. While a mother's tears were a familiar, emotive trope in literature, songs, films etc., as well as public practices of grieving such as funerals, her curses were a familiar yet less discussed practice that was mostly restricted to the private, religious domain. While the SLFP had cleverly manipulated the emotive power of tears at the Mothers' Front rallies that they organized, it was the spontaneity of the women themselves, during the Pada Yatra, that suggested an alternative/parallel avenue of protest that was not merely emotive but powerful-in its staging as well as in the ferocity of its call for revenge. The presumption inherent in a curse that it could bring about change through the intercession of a deity also complicates efforts (for a believer such as the President) to stall such changes for they now transcend the human. The use of curses as public protest and religious ritual as resistance not only had no precedent in Sri Lanka but it could also circumvent emergency laws enforced by the state that were applicable to standard forms of political protest such as demonstrations and
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rallies. To have banned people's right to religious worship on the other hand, was something even an autocratic government which repeatedly defined itself as one that had the best interests of the populace in mind, would not have dared. It is not that the government did not toy with this idea. After all, the gates of the Kalliamman Kovil remained locked when the Mothers' Front first arrived and the alternative media was quick to highlight such attempts at a blatant and very public violation of human rights (Aththa, 24 June 1992, Divaina, 6 July 1992).
For the members of the Mothers' Front however, weeping and cursing was nothing new. The only difference now was that the gaze of an entire nation was upon them and the focus of their wrath/protest had shifted from the local to the national. From such a perspective one could also point out then that despite their participation in a mass movement, their agency continued to be limited to tears and curses. It was quite common for politicians at the Mothers' Front rallies to exhort the mothers that it was time to stop weeping and move beyond' while at the same time, congratulating them on how successful their curses had been by crediting them with bringing upon the sudden disclosures by ex-DIG Udugampola, the unnerving of President Premadasa and even the death of Ranjan Wijeratne, Minister of State for Defense. This particular circumscribing of the mothers can be chiefly attributed to the fact that these women had merely exchanged one
Besides their efforts to ban demonstrations in February 1991, the state also attempted to ban and later curtailed a protest march of the Mothers' Front organized in Kalutara on July 3rd 1992 (to co-incide with the end of the Gam Udawa) by forbidding the Front to carry their banner and insisting that the women walked in single file. As a news report pointed out, there were as many policemen as were mothers (Divaina 7/4/92). On World Human Rights Day-November 11th 1992, a sit-down protest organized by the Organization of Parents and Family Members of the Disappeared (OPFMD) and joined by some Mothers' Front organizers like Mahinda Rajapakse, was tear gassed and baton charged by the Riot Squad leaving several of its leaders injured (Island 12/11/92).
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5Motherhood. As a Space of Protest:
structure of power that was riven with gender and class inequalities, for another. Socialized within a society that defines women primarily through familial subject positions such as wives and mothers, these women may have nevertheless managed to both mobilise, and transcend these categories if they had chosen to organise themselves as the Mothers' Fronts in the north and east had done (see below) and the Madres in Argentina continue to do. Mobilised and funded by a group of men who also happened to be representatives of a powerful political party, these women were never pushed to break out of their gender. and class stereotypes or to form links with other women's groups.
Sri Lanka Freedom Party and Male Orchestration
On an everyday level and in organizing rallies and rituals, the financial backing and infrastructural support of the SLFP were crucial. The Mothers' Front women elected their own office bearers and ran their regional offices relatively autonomously, but remained under the control of their respective SLFP MPs, who provided much of their funding and office space. The SLFP coordinators of the Front (such as Mangala Samaraweera) set the agenda for rallies planned in Colombo, handled the advertising, sent out invitations and hired buses to transport women from various regions of the country. As a professional dress designer, Mr. Samaraweera was central in designing the Mothers' Front logo, the Sinhala letter 'M' containing a mother cradling a baby. He also openly acknowledged that he was instrumental in identifying the Front with the color yellow as it was not identified with any Sri Lankan political party and because it echoed the yellow ribbons that symbolized hopes for the return of the American hostages who had been held in Iran. His office drafted petitions for the Front-demanding the appointment of an independent commission to inquire into “disappearances, calling for the state to issue death certifi
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cates and to compensate the families of the 'disappeared'-and organized the lobbying of key government departments to bring these demands into effect.
However, it was the events that were held in Colombo that made visible the SLFP/male dominance of the Mothers' Front in the most blatant fashion. This account of the 19 February rally in Nugegoda (a suburb of Colombo) is especially telling:
Most of the people on the stage, in the shade, are men, with perhaps two or three women visible. 10 Most of the mothers, dressed in white, are seated at the foot of the stage in the sun. As the meeting starts, the press, cameras, videos spill onto the stage...sometimes even blocking the microphone and the speaker...the disrespect for the speakers is more apparent when a mother' is speaking...About twenty women's testimonies were interspersed among the politicians' speeches, which often took over fifteen minutes, to the five minutes the women seemed to use (Confidential Report, INFORM: no pagination).
Though representatives of other opposition parties had been invited to speak, they were a mere 'smattering compared to the SLFP MP's 'jostling on the stage' who in their speeches were hell bent on making it a party political rally' (Confidential Report, INFORM). Even the two leading women in the SLFP, the party leader Sirimavo Bandaranaike and her widowed daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga were obviously not committed to the Mothers' Front; their late arrivals and early exits from the meet
10 Mahinda Rajapakse did make an effort to rectify this gender imbalancehalfway through the meeting, but since the stage was already very crowded, few women took up his offer (Confidential Report, INFORM, no pagination).
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ing annoyed many mothers who had hoped that these powerful women would be more 'approachable'.
Unfortunately, no attempt was made to rectify the errors of the previous year at the second National Convention which was held indoors and drew a more modest crowd on June 23rd 1992. Once again, the stage was predominated by males mainly representing the SLFP. Of the 20 speakers, only 8 were women, of whom 4 represented the SLFP. This gender imbalance created a marked spatial hierarchy that was completely contradictory to the goal of a national convention where one would have thought that at least once a year, these mothers would get an opportunity to come to Colombo-the seat of power-and to speak, and the politicians and concerned citizens would listen. On the contrary, what occurred was that the politicians on the stage spoke and the thousands of women seated below listened and wept and wailed almost on cue. However, there were a few instances where women exceeded their roles as listeners; when women's wailing drowned out the voice of a speaker or a woman was so moved by a speaker that she insisted on sharing her own tragic story or another demanded that she be allowed to come up on stage and hand a petition to Chandrika Kumaratunga while she was giving her speech. Yet, the majority of women felt that at least this part of the meeting had been an useless exercise. As one woman noted rather cynically, 'at least this year they gave us a free lunch packet.’
These women's disillusionment with the SLFP-organised meetings and rallies not only stemmed from a frustration at being marginalised but also from a certain impatience with the use of such orthodox forms of political protest where 'one politician after another either tried to absolve himself of blame for having participated in similar kinds of repression in the past or who attempted to blame the state for all ills' (views of some Mothers' Front
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members from the Matara District). While the SLFP went to great lengths to build an anti-government coalition by incorporating the participation of various political parties, progressive religious dignitaries and specific interest groups such as those representing the Organisation of Parents and Families of the Disappeared, the Organisation for the Disappeared Soldiers in the North-East etc., the majority of the mothers viewed such attempts as mere political ploys. The only worthwhile participation they were involved in they felt was when they were able to collectively beseech the deities on behalf of their 'disappeared' and call for the punishment of the perpetrators of such crimes. For someone like Asilin, who may never see her son again, the knowledge that she may have had a hand in the death of the President was indeed a powerful weapon in the hands of the weak.
Class Domination
The only woman who rose to national prominence as a spokesperson for this movement, along with Mangala Samaraweera and Mahinda Rajapakse, was Dr. Manorani Saravanamuttu. There were several reasons for this and they all hinged on her class position and social status. Dr. Saravanamuttu, a Scion of a prominent Tamil family in Colombo had married into an equally prominent Sinhala family-the de Zoysas. Her single progeny from this marriage-Richard-was a popular public personality as an actor, broadcaster and journalist. Divorced from her husband for many years, she supported herself through her extensive medical practice as a General Practioner. Her ancestry, professional status and stately and dignified bearing afforded her much respect among all ethnic groups in middle class Sri Lankan society. She was transformed into a public personality when she courageously pressed charges against senior police officers for murdering her son and an entire nation's sympathy was focused on her when many moving photographs of her grief
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stricken face watching her son's burning pyre were published in local newspapers. When she had to flee the country because of threats to her life, she was also embraced by an international community concerned with issues of human rights.
Dr. Saravanamuttu's main link with the rest of the women in the Mothers' Front was the searing pain of loss and grief that she shared with them. Yet, here too, she counted herself more fortunate than them: "I am the luckiest woman in Sri Lanka--I got my son's body back' (Amnesty Action, Nov/Dec 1990). Dr Saravanamuttu was conscious from the outset about the chasm of inequality that divided her from the other mothers; they could not afford to flee the country when their lives were threatened, they were not fluent in English or literate enough to file habaes corpus reports...the list was endless. But what the mothers appreciated about Dr. Saravanamuttu was that she made it clear that she genuinely cared about them and constantly tried to form bridges of friendship and support. Her speeches often uttered in faltering Sinhalese or simple English, always directly addressed the concerns of the mothers present-cautioning them to remain as 'watch dogs' of all political parties including the SLFP, reminding them that they were not alone in their grief but that Tamil women in the north and east too suffered like them as did women in far away Latin America, and sharing with them the news that women across the globe had pledged their support to the Mothers' Front. When she realized that the mothers had been sidelined at the February 19th rally, Dr. Saravanamuttu quietly left her seat on the stage and mingled with the women below (Confidential Report, INFORM, no pagination). Herindividual mission to fight her son's murderers in court was also articulated as a battle waged for all mothers: 'most of them don't have the means to obtain justice. But I have the means and the Social position. I'm doing this for every mother in Sri Lanka who has lost a son' (Amnesty Action,
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Nov/Dec 1990). Unfortunately, Dr Saravanamuttu's overtures were not sufficient to shatter an entrenched class and patronage structure. When the mothers sought the help of their MPs, they were following a familiar route of patronage that exists between politicians and their constituencies; the people vote for the MP and expect him/ her to look after them. Even if this system may not often work in practice, it is always a last resort in the face of despair. As Mangala Samaraweera noted, in his father's day, people would line up outside his office requesting jobs, while in his day, people lined up outside his house asking him to find their sons and husbands (Lankadeepa, 28 June 1992).
Erasing Tamil Women's Agency
It was also extremely unfortunate that the SLFP in their efforts to build an oppositional coalition against the government through the Mothers' Front rallies in Colombo, did not make a sustained effort to form links with minority ethnic parties or organisations except for a token representation from the Eelam Peoples' Revolutionary Front (EPRLF). The most glaring absence of all was that no member of the original Mothers' Front which was begun in the north of Sri Lanka in 1984 and later spread to the eastern part of the island, was invited to speak, or even mentioned as providing inspiration for the Mothers' Front in the south, at any of the southern Mothers' Front meetings. In fact, when I questioned Mangala Samaraweera on the Front's antecedents, he promptly mentioned the Madres of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina whose strategy of marching with photographs of their 'disappeared', he had introduced among the Sri Lankan women as well. I found it quite astonishing that he did not think it worth mentioning that there had existed a group with the same name in his own country, . Thus in a seeming move to internationalize the southern Mothers' Front, its organisers were completely erasing the agency of
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5Motherhood As a Space of Protest:
Tamil women not just from their memory, but from the memory of an entire population in the south of Sri Lanka. In fact, it was another Sinhalese gentleman, Gamini Navaratne, the former Editor of an important English weekly in Jaffna-the Saturday Review, and one of the few Sinhalese civilians who chose to remain in the north during the height of the Civil War in the 1980's, who attempted to set the record straight, albeit in a somewhat skewed fashion (Island, 3 March 1991). In his article, Mr Navaratne disputed the claims made by the organisers of the southern Mothers' Front that it was the first of its kind in Sri Lanka' and reproduced an article he had written in 1984 reporting on the first march organised by the northern Mothers' Front to protest the arrest of over 500 Tamil youths by the Sri Lankan state. Unfortunately, he trivializes the agency of Tamil women by portraying himself as the instigator and ultimate hero of this protest campaign.
The northern Mothers' Front, like its Southern counterpart, was mainly active only for about two years.11 l towever, unlike the newer Front, it was controlled by and consisted of women from all classes who mobilised mass rallies, and picketed public officials demanding the removal of military occupation and protesting against arrests. Not only the spirit, but also the enormous numbers that they were able to mobilise, spoke loudly of the high point to which such mass organisations, especially of women could rise' (Hoole et al., 1990:324). The northern Mothers' Front also inspired Tamil women in the east to begin their own branch. In 1986, the eastern Mothers' Front took to the streets with rice pounders to prevent a massacre of members of the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO) by the LTTE (Hensman, 1992: 503). In
11 l gratefully acknowledge the help of R. Cheran, Sarvam Kailasapathy and
Chitra Maunaguru in writing the following section.
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1987, one of its members, Annai Pupathi, fasted to death to protest the presence of the Indian Peace Keeping Forces (IPKF). She was subsequently immortalized by the LTTE (it was common knowledge that the LTTE had forced her to keep at her fast) who now offer a scholarship in her memory. It was finally the increasing hegemony of the LTTE and their suppression of all independent, democratic organisations that did not toe the line', that pushed the Mothers' Front in the north and east into political conformism and lost it its wide appeal and militancy. It became another Y.W.C.A"; its central structure which was mainly made up of middle class women finally confined its activities to works of charity (Hoole et al., 1990:324). Many members also migrated abroad or to Colombo.
Several of those in Colombo continue to work with southern feminist organisations with whom they had always shared close ties as members of the eastern and northern Mothers' Fronts. These women were thus an available resource that the organisers of the southern Mothers' Front chose to ignore with the exception of one instance-Ms. S. Sujeewardhanam from Batticoloa was invited to be part of the presidium at the first National Convention of the Mothers' Front on February 19th 1991, along with Dr. Manorani Saravanamuttu (Colombo) and Ms. D.G. Seelawathi (Matara). In contrast to the huge open air public rally which was held later on that day and attended by over 15,000 people (which made it one of the biggest public gatherings in this country in recent years), the first National Convention of the Mothers' Front was much more focused on procuring international support and was ateended by over 100 foreign invitees representing embassies, NGO's and the press. It was thus in the organisers' interest to create a good image which proclaimed that the Mothers' Front was not anti-government but pro-peace, and more importantly, that it was being run by women from different ethnic groups and classes. Much concern was also expressed about the plight of the
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5Motherhood As a Space of Protest:
mothers in the north and east of the country and the need to form branches in those regions as well (Confidential Report, INFORM: no pagination). The organisers had dispensed with such rhetoric, however, by the time of the second National Convention. Only two out of the 20 speakers mentioned the suffering of Tamil mothers and with the exclusion of Dr Saravanamuttu, no Tamils were given an opportunity to address the gathering. The absence of Tamil or other minority participation in the Mothers' Front meetings reduced the possibilities of launching a more integrated, national protest campaign that could have also gained much from the experiences of Tamil women in the north and east of the Island.
Conclusion
The members of the Mothers' Front were not motivated by ideology but rather by circumstance to participate in a protest campaign against the state. Despite repeated assertions that they were not political or anti-gov'rnment, the Front generally identifies representatives of the state as perpetrators of 'disappearances' and the President, the Supreme repository of state power was the key target of their curses. Indeed, the fact that the main opposition party-the SLFP was coordinating this organisation removed all doubts that the Front would be anything but political or uncritical of the government. However, the political participation of so many women articulating a specific subjectivity i.e., motherhood, had been unheard of until the Mothers' Fronts in the north and east took to the streets in 1984 and 1986 and the Southern Mothers' Front went one further and demonstrated their despair and anyer through public, collective, ritualized curses. Despite the limitations inherent in the identification with the fanin ilial and the nurturant, and the mobilization of feminized repetoires of protest such as tears and curses, these women did manage to create a space for protest in a context of terror and violence. In fact, the contingent
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power of their protest stemmed from their invocation of 'traditional' sensibilities and the engendering of emotional responses by presenting themselves before a government and a nation as grief-stricken, chronic mourners for their 'disappeared' whose only resort now was to beseech the deities for justice. Ironically, in a time where the protesting voices of several left-wing, feminist and human rights activists had been silenced with death, it was the mothers' sorrowful and seemingly apolitical rhetoric and practices that nevertheless alerted a nation to the hypocrisy of the state.
The Front's politicisation of motherhood by frequently linking it to a discourse of rights and dissent (cf. Schirmer, 1989: 26) was continued to its full realization through the campaign strategies of SLFP politician and Prime Ministerial candidate Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, at the 1994 general elections. Herself a grieving widow and mother, she cleverly articulated the mothers' suffering as both a personal and national experience; she too 'sorrowed and wept' with them but also made it clear that she was capable of translating her grief into action, of building a new land where 'other mothers will not suffer what we suffer'.12 Ironically, Ms. Kumaratunga's embodiment of these grassroots women's suffering also usurped their space of protest; the materiality of their lives was sacrificed for an election slogan. What has become of these thousands of women ? Have their lives changed significantly with a more progressive government in power? The new government has appointed three Commissions of Inquiry to investigate the 'disappearances' and killings that occurred during
12 Excerpted from Ms Kumaratunga's final advertisement before the elections
that was published in both Sinhala and English newspapers.
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1988-1991.13 We cannot yet predict what concrete measures will transpire from these hearings. Maybe these women will receive individual hearings, another chance to demand that the perpetrators of violence be brought to justice. Maybe their 'disappeared' will be restored to them. Perhaps they will receive financial compensation, although that would be extremely meager in comparison to all that they have lost, sometimes even their sanity.
It also remains to be seen how their involvement, however liminal, in a protest campaign has changed their lives. While the majority of women who were part of this movement had been relegated to the home' and the margins of an increasingly militarized society throughout much of their life, the Mothers' Front did provide them with some opportunities to air their grievances and anger in public fora and to create strong networks among themselves. Several groups of these women have now formed links with feminist groups and other NGOs who are providing them with trauma counseling and help with establishing self-employment projects. Yet the numbers are minuscule compared to the thousands of women and their families across the country who continue to grieve and to bear the livid Scars of a nation-state that has blood on its hands.
13 While the previous government did appoint a commission to investigate 'disappearances' due to intense pressure exerted upon them by the Mothers' Front as well as international human rights organizations, it empowered this commission to only look into such events that occurred from the commissions” date of appointment-January 11th 1991-rather than during the height of the repression in the south-January 1988. The commissions appointed under the new regime while rectifying this error continue to ignore the atrocities that were perpetrated in the north and east by the previous regime by not being empowered to investigate 'disappearances of Tamil youth under the guise of the Prevention of Terrorism Act from as far back as 1979 (cf. Pravada, Vol.3(10), Jan/Feb 1995).
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References Cited
Comaroff, Jean. 1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
de Alwis, Malathi. 1994. 'Towards a Feminist istoriography:
Reading Gender in the Text of the Nation," Introduction to Social Theory eds.Radhika Coomaraswamy and Nira Wickremasinghe. Delhi: Konark Press:86-107.
Enloe, Cynthia. 1989. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
Gombrich, Richard. 1971. "Food for Seven Grandmothers: Stages in the Universalization of a Sinhalese Ritual," Man, Vol. 6 (1): 5—17.
and Gananath Obeyesekere. 1988. Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.
Hartsock, Nancy. 1982. "Prologue to a Feminist Critique of War and Politics," Women's Views of the Political World of Men. ed. Judith Stiehm. New York: Transnational Publishers.
Hensman, Rohini. 1992. “Feminism and Ethnic. Nationalism in Sri Lanka,' Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 1 (4): 501-6.
Hoole, Rajan, Daya Somasunderam, K. Sritharan and Rajani Thiranagama. 1990. The Broken Palmyra: The Tamil Crisis in Sri Lanka -An Inside Account. Claremont, CA: Sri Lanka Studies Institute.
Houseman, Judy. 1982. "Mothering, the Unconscious and Feminism,' Radical America, No.16, Nov-Dec. 1982.
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Lloyd, Genevieve. 1986. "Selfhood, War and Masculinity," Feminist Challenges. eds. Carole Pateman & Elizabeth Gross. Boston: Northeastern University Press: 63-76.
Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1984. The Cult of the Goddess Pattini. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Schirmer, Jennifer G. 1989. “Those Who Die for Life Cannot be Called Dead: Women and Human Rights Pro
test in Latin America,' Feminist Review, No. 32, Summer 1989: 3-29.
1993. "The Seeking of Truth and the Gendering of Consciousness: The CoMadres of El Salvador and the CONAVIGUA widows of Guatamela" VIVA: Women and Popular Protest in Latin America. eds. Sarah Radcliffe and Sallie Westwood. London & New York: Routledge: 3064.
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The Family and the Household of the Females in War Time Eastern Sri Lanka - ARE THEY DISINTEGRATING OR BEING RESTRUCTURED?
Selvy Thiruchandran
Wars all over the world have left scars, both in the minds and bodies, of people. Generally research on postwar situation tends to overlook gender related dimensions. This research paper attempts to identify some of the gender-related problems. An additional perspective that enters the research is the inquiry on the role of the State or rather the complicity of the State in creating coercive patterns of governance. The point that we drive is that state terrorism or any terrorism has specific patterns of affecting men, women, and children with adverse results in different ways.
The female-headed household is not a new phenomenon in Sri Lanka. Women have been widows, deserted and separated throughout history. They have become the de-facto heads of the family, though kin groups, both maternal and paternal, give them the necessary support and sustenance, both financially and
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emotionally. What is new to Sri Lanka is the dramatic increase of female-headed households in recent years.
The strict conceptual division of the family and the household as sites of an ideological reproduction and structural functioning unit, respectively, is abandoned in deciphering the process of the female as heads of these institutions. They are conflated for a comprehensive and total analysis without subjecting functions, roles and experiences to fragmentation, which would lead to partial or compartmentalised views. The collapsing is essentially desirable.
Feminists have seen the family as a site of oppression (Barret, 1980: 153, 187, 211). Within the family there are various levels at which the oppression of the women is constructed and various levels at which it takes place. Patriarchy as a system of male domination and control of women by men becomes operationalised through the system of the family and household. The patriarchal household organisation has also an ideological site of femininity construction in the family. This construction assigns the so called feminine qualities such as passivity and emotions connected with motherhood. Women's subordination then takes various forms such as exploitation within the family and household. In the domestic mode of production in the household, women do the household labour and childcare on demand, not fixed by hours or time allocation. The domestic labour debate has documented in detail the types and kinds of the exploitative system to which the women as wives and mothers are subjected to (Wally Seacombe 1974, Maxine 1979). The overall sense of responsibility that the women are socialised to accept child care and domesticity have clear exploitative patterns. Servicing and nursing as feminine roles have kept the men out of childcare responsibilities. Besides these, there are other factors which would necessarily subordinate women in the sites of the family and household. The
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control of women's fertility and sexuality and the economic dependency of the women further, contribute to her secondary status. The performance of wage labour whereby a wife earns supplementary income invariably is controlled by the bread winner-husband due to the ideological base that controls the women as men's possession.
To understand the various dimensions of the women's oppression within the family, one has to successfully divorce the concept of family from a natural pre-given entity and regard it as a Social unit. Such a process should also lead us to reject the functionalist and reductionist view of sociologists and Marxist feminists. Marx has argued for the naturalness of the family unit based on the biological differences between men and women (Barret 1980 : 189). Engel's reworking of the problem of the family brought into focus the private property relations as the base for the creation of gender inequality (Engels 1972). Engels hoped that the family considered the private realm as responsible for the creation of private property. That expectation that gender inequality will cease to exist when the particular relations of property ceases to exist has been proved wrong. This has not happened. Talcott Parson (1956) fitting the family into the functional needs of the contemporary society has also been criticised. Marxist feminists have seen the family as satisfying the needs of capital - that at the economic level the housewives' labour reproduces the labour power of the worker and at an ideological level it reproduces the relations of dominance for capitalist production (Seccombe 1974).
There is no doubt that women's subordination is constructed within the family through an ideology and her exploitation is realised through the functions she performs as a housewife which in fact is labour. The children are cared for, food is cooked, the house is cleaned. This labour process is couched in an ideological baggage as maternal and motherhood service and sacrifice. This is
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very much the picture in the working class and peasant households where the women have no power to hire the Services of other men and women. Domesticity and motherhood keep her at home with no remunerative jobs. She is mostly dependent economically on the breadwinner. If she does earn a "supplementary wage' the power to control the wages earned by the women usually rests with the breadwinner male. The partnership was formed Supposedly on trust, love and romance and of mutual help, reciprocity and of a principle of sharing but usually the burden is unshared. Domestic violence from wife beating to rape do occur within the site of the family/household.
The fact that she is economically provided for leads to the misconception that she is given some sort of protection as well. The construction of femininity as weak, docile and passive has rationalised the protective role as an essential function of the breadwinner husband. She is both socially and physically "protected". The sense of possession by the man becomes the nexus for offering protection. The whole process takes place within the realm of the privacy concept and private area. The space is the home/house. However, the construction of femininity as a Social process is not confined to the home alone. The Society watches it, exerts pressure on its rules of adherence. Socially acceptable norms of the family then become part of the Social process and within these norms, the feminine norms are more oppressive. Silence, obedience, passivity, control of speech, chastity, Virginity, fidelity are gendered norms, the violation of which may be met with severe punishments ranging from Social ostracism, divorce, desertions, separation, wife beating.
In short the household is managed by the wife with primary responsibility for child care, the care of the sick, old and disabled, and services for the husband. These forms of labour are collapsed into an ideology of family and within the vocabulary of love, romance, emotions,
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sacrifice, duty, obligation, thriftiness, good conduct. Mary McIntosh's terminology of "family/household system" (1978:155) can be more appropriately used to understand women's position. McIntosh describes the family household' as a system in which a number of people are expected to be dependent on the wages of a few adult members, primarily of the husband and father who are the "bread winners", and in which they are all dependent for cleaning, food preparation and so forth - unpaid work chiefly done by the wife and mother (The Welfare State and the Needs of the Dependent Family' in Fit Work for Women, p 155, quoted in Barret 1980: 211).
The pattern of the general household described above is not however common to all historical periods. Various deviations existed both in the family ideology and in the subsistence of the household. The Tamil kutumba ideology more or less fits into the above description at the level of this particular class of women we are analysing. The kutumba ideology in Tamil does not differentiate between the material relations of the household from the ideological construction of family. In fact the kutumba concept is couched in various codes, which would also encompass the Western concept of household and the family. Functions, duties, obligations, expectations, and aspirations which are needed for the maintaining of the household are effectively, inseparably and totally combined with the ideology of love and other emotional systems of thought designated under service, sacrifice, nurturing motherhood, and sexual service. In fact, segregation of a household concept from the concept of the family or vice versa becomes impossible in the Tamil social formation.
The wife, mother is central to this system. Mary McIntosh captures this reality partially in compiling the two terms, household and the family. The Tamil kutumba concept is even more descriptive and exhaustively so.
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Despite the general pattern of oppression being the same, there were a few redeeming factors in the way the household and families operated in Trincomalee. The women talked of the former times before they were displaced and deprived of the husbands' partnership as "peace time arrangements". Despite the fact that the arrangements heaped a heavy sense of responsibilities and arduous hours of labour, the help extended by the members of the joint/extended families have reduced the physical burden of household and child care. The unmarried younger sisters, sister-in law, brothers and parents and mothers in law were helpful in child care activities. As they are fond of small children they spend a lot of time with them. It is a community characteristic that Small children and babies are fondled and played with by the immediate members of the family and the neighbours. This gives the mothers the time to attend to their personal needs such as baths, enjoying a meal etc. in peace. The mothers and mothers-in-law of the women helped them in the household chores during their free time. Washing clothes, pounding rice, cooking the meals are the occasional help they gave the busy housewife. Though this is not to be taken as a rule, this happened as a pattern in most households. Where women's mate selection was not approved by the parents, they lived in isolation, not able to break the barriers created for them by their parents. The sanctions created by parents of either party are not generally violated by the kin group members so that for long periods the couple had to stand alone and struggle. The wife/mother in such cases suffered alienation in addition to the general pattern of oppression. The women weighed the pros and cons of peace time and war time household. They certainly did not subscribe to an idea of the household family system as a haven in the heartless world (Christopher Leach,1977) but talked of the situation where there was no want or starvation. Though they ate last and sometimes little they had something to eat. They
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also said that psychologically the presence of a male adult provided them with both mental and physical security and protection. The authority of the husband/father kept the children within codes of discipline. "Of course much to my dislike the children were terrorised and often beaten, mostly the boys'- was how a woman described the authoritarian male attitude of the father. The women also referred to the family household system as a site of cooperation and provided joint space for collective endeavours such as celebration of festivals and performance of religious rituals.
In the final analysis this vision of the household was an emphatic version of the household being a maternal site which satisfied emotional and expressive needs under the authoritarian role of a benevolent despot. However, they were great ambiguities which need to be clarified and identified. This phraseology and vocabulary betrayed the socialisation pattern to which they were subjected. The male headed household system was no doubt able to contain upheavals, temporary dislocations such as major illness, deaths, family and kin group feuds. While talking of the good things of good old days, they are also giving a value ridden privilege to the concept of the family as having satisfied their major personal needs. At the same time the women did confess that the good things happened within a lot of unpleasantness. Alcoholic husbands' indifference, violence, neglect of household duties and children's welfare, husband's temporary "illicit" love affair which caused a lot of misery in the family, interference by the mother-in-law and the fatherin-law demanding the son's earning, drop out of children from school, their indiscipline, debts, illness were sources of serious disruptions in the family. By way of conversations the women have confessed many a time to the many disruptions in the family, but the overall impact of the male protection has coloured their vision especially at a time when it is being missed by them. Besides, the
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provision of material needs, i.e. food, clothing and shelter by the breadwinner is the base on which the entire emotional and expressive needs are seen as fulfilled. The economic dependence of the former times is now not in operation, but the women miss it now.
The deprivation the women suffered while being under a male breadwinner/head of the household and under their own headship are different, but they do suffer under both systems and the reasons for their suffering are different. The male headship gave a moral protection and provided a mechanism of continuity. Morally and psychologically the women were socialised to accept and regard as a privilege, male protection and the male's breadwinning role. Former male headship has provided the material needs and has extended the material needs to provide Social Security and protection and has created conditions of authority which contained the children and socialised their behaviour. The main beneficiaries of the male headed household system were the men/husband/ fathers who earned the bread and in exchange got a series of advantages and benefits. The material structure of the male headed household is largely responsible for the dependency of the women/wife which in turn has heaped a Series of the burden of responsibilities. With the removal of the male breadwinner from sight-the dependency status has been removed, but the ideology of the family of domesticity and motherhood continues - and has heaped a tremendous responsibility on the female heads.
With the disappearance of the husband, the economic dependence on the husband and the source of material organisation of the household also has disappeared - but the ideology of femininity, responsibility for domesticity, motherhood continues. She had to become the source of material organisation as well now. A few of them were earning a Supplementary income, but this income earning even when it is the major breadwinning income was ideo
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logically considered supplementary income and their wages were consequently depressed. The privileging of masculinity in the household arrangement though oppressive to the wives within the household, masculinity by itself was not totally abhorred by the women during their partnership. The bread-winner role was found to be hard and the working conditions were harsh for them. Because of their class location capital has created exploitative working conditions as 90% of the men/husbands within the sample were not in lucrative jobs or business. Anyhow they were able to provide for their families.
Masculinity does not always function independent of the other social issues. The masculinity which was ascendant in the home family structure within the conjugal relationship of the male headed household was anyhow a subordinated masculinity in the power relations in the particular mode of production in the class location. The struggle to which the men/husbands as breadwinners were subjected to was hard, competitive and exploitative. The women/ wives were aware of the struggle the men had to put up with. This is also one reason why they privileged the male bread winning roles. The men were conceptualised as economically productive, caring for the family and for efficient handling of the social world. The non-egalitarian marital relationship is obscured in the constructions they made of men as resourceful, efficient, protective and powerful. Within these constructions which are gendered, they saw the household arrangements as natural and rational and in a way rationalised the unequal power relations as legitimate. While conceding that the unequal power relations led to oppressive living arrangements they explained that economic resources which are essentially their responsibility had to be prioritised and therefore men's power over the rest of the assets took the form of an agency. The agency was valued despite the knowledge of their own subordination. In
38

The Family and the Household of the females
class terms understanding this phenomenon was not too difficult. It has evolved on them as a common sense knowledge when they compare the present situation of poverty and lack of economic resources which has reduced them to poverty levels which are worse. The position that we are trying to explain here is not to concede to a conceptualisation that females are culturally prepared for powerlessness (Lips 1994:90). Class hierarchies have constructed notions of female powerlessness in terms of actual and lived social reality. Further discussion on the series of deprivations which the women experienced can also lead us to a notion of a powerful the masculinity. This has to be understood as class phenomenon which has gender implications or a gender phenomenon which has class implications.
The male provider gets all the recognition within the scale of power and privilege not merely because of his masculinity but because of his ability to generate income and resources and provide for the family. The women's notions of high value placed on their former partner is precisely due to this. They explained this present socioeconomic deprivations on this rationale. This however obscures their own gendered positions which are socially marginalised and constructed as less able to generate income. The hegemonisation of the male bread winner role and the devalued role of women bread-winners cannot however be explained as the most natural thing but the socio-economic implications has to be comprehended. This study has to constantly take note of the class and gender perspective as necessarily intertwined.
Economic determinants are crucial in the formation of social attitudes. As far as the women are concerned even these familial attitudes have been shaped by the economic factors. The women have understood their present situation and their understanding has the stamp of the economic reasoning.
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I can't even feed the children properly. My son had to give up schooling to earn a living so that we Won't starve.
I am suffering without money to buy food clothing and for the education of the children.
I have to be the bread winner, without a male support and what I earn is not enough.
I have to undergo all the financial problems single handedly
The problem is economic - no help.
The problem of poverty is great. I am totally disillusioned, frightened of the future.
When I think of the present state of affairs I think we (those whose husbands are killed in the war) will die of hunger. There is no future for me.
Demeaning experiences, humiliating existence to be dependent. In this wretched world poverty causes misery to the poor people like me. When can poverty be eradicated? I have to stop my fourteen year old son who is a good student from school to take up his father's profession (Barber).
The women who were in similar state of poverty had to value the male bread winner's role together with the privileges the status brought to them and to the family. This is despite a large number of husbands having been violent. But those who have been deserted (eight) those whose husbands have committed suicide (seven) had different sentiments and the sentiments found harsh expresS.O.S.
Why should we worry about him and feel unhappy. He died on his own due to his foolishness by drinking poison. He did not care for us. How many
40

The Family and the Household of the Jemales
are shot at, stabbed, shelled? Those deaths have to be sympathised with but not the death of an irresponsible father and husband.
This is wisdom of a woman whose husband committed suicide.
He beat, me scolded me, never cared for me. Took another wife and deserted me and my six children. I don't want him even if he comes back.
He drank and drank wasted his money. I suffered
due to humiliation. He became violent towards the children and now he has left us. We are worse off economically. But to be without a husband is better than having a bad husband.
Male headed household as a rule did not provide the women/wives the comforts and happiness along with economic well being. Only ten women out of the sample of hundred had no complaints of the husbands in terms of providing companionship, physical help and childcare sharing. Other than the deserted, murdered and those who committed Suicide the eighty four households were in some form affected, some very badly. Incompatibility, petty quarrels, domestic violence, problems caused by mothers in law, were mentioned very frequently but since they were not major problems they did not cause complete breakdowns. However, except for the fifteen wives who had no repentance about the disappearance of the spouses all the others said that they were seriously affected by the death of the spouses.
Economic reasons have caused the various constructions. However, cultural conditioning both at the social level and at their own personal private familial level has had its own impact independent and not independent of economic factors.
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A further point emphasised by the women was the vacuum created by the removal of the masculine figure. This masculinity has protected the feminine sexuality from the "wolves". They were not approached by other men, because they were "owned and possessed" by their husbands. They are now seen as sexual objects and available because they are not protected by the privileged masculinity. Even an older woman, mother, mother in law staying with them did not prevent the illegal trespassing of other men into the household space.
The next section will now deal with the actual Socioeconomic reality of the households which are headed by the females. Situations which the women face, problems such as the economic and social survival patterns with their coping mechanism, are dealt with under separate sections, though the inter-linkages of one to the other should really become the focus of the problem with which we are concerned.
Part 11
The Social Psychological Dimension of the Problem and the role of religion
The manner in which the husbands died impacted differently on the women. This section discusses the emotional conditions of the women. The women have lost the "heads of the household' under various circumstances. This study takes the view that whatever the circumstances which caused the deaths of the husbands, the women, by virtue of their singleness are subjected to various types of deprivations, socially and economically, and are affected mentally too. That the levels of the impact vary according to the manner and circumstances under which their spouses died cannot be denied.
Of the twenty-nine women who said that their husbands had "disappeared", twenty women said that they
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The family and the Household of the females
felt that their husbands were alive and that they were waiting for them to return. That they have not seen the dead bodies or performed the last rites has created peculiar reactions leading to a miserable situations. It was difficult for them to believe without any tangible proof that the husband are dead. These women live in desperation believing now and then that they are alive and dead. Between hope and despair, they vacillate. They often spend sleepless nights. During daytime they are not sure whether to behave as widows or "auspicious housewives' with the attendant behaviour. Their main worry is that they should conform to social expectations of which they Were not Sure.
The United Nations Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances has reported that during the course of the year 1991 they had recorded over 12,000 cases of disappearances in Sri Lanka. The state of emergency and the Prevention of Terrorism Act under which prolonged and incommunicado detentions are carried out are still operative. Most of these who were detained were killed and their bodies disposed of. The number of disappearances should enumerate the dimension of the problem not only politically but socially. The negative impact it has created on the households discussed here is merely the tip of the iceberg. That the 12,000 and more families (the number would have increased over the seven year period) would have suffered the same problems is a sad realism. The magnitude of the problem even without the exact numbers can be visualised.
For those who have accepted the death it is easy to manage the situation. Five women said that their husbands were killed by the militants (one by EPRLF and the rest by LTTE). Those who said that their husbands were killed by unidentified persons (4) were perhaps afraid to say that they were killed by the militants as they would be construed as making an official statement against the
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Nivedini armed groups of which they are mortally afraid. These nine and another fifteen women more overtly expressed disgust and anguish and gave expressions to the feeling that the cult of violence, whether from the state of 'other quarters", destroys the human ethos and that it was the helpless poor women like them who suffer the most.
Forty-two women's stories were that their husbands were killed by the Sri Lanka State, the Police, the Army, Navy and the Indian Peace Keeping Force (01 only). The fishing community in the village Sally was subjected to random killings in the sea by the Navy. In these cases the women were blatantly critical of the state. Knowing fully well that I belong to the same ethnicity as theirs they have no inhibitions in being open, free and expressive. They were critical of the cult of violence, the word vanmurai(violence) was often mentioned as unjust, unethical, and irreligious. kadavulukku etkatatu. The state apparatus collectively referred to as the "Sinhala' agency was found to be unjust as it was accused of being indiscriminate, not knowing the Tigers from the "ordinary citizens". The women claimed that their husbands were the innocent victims. "Don't the soldiers know that the Tigers are armed and do not roam about earning a livelihood'?. That most of the killings in 1990 June, after the attack of the Uppuveli Police Station were revenge killings and that the people were terrified and ran for shelter trying to escape the wrath of the soldiers. The intensity of the shelling and shooting, were all recollected by the women who vividly expressed now and then the fear that the recorded conversations might be politically implicating. That their names will not be revealed had to be constantly reiterated. The violence, whether of the Tamil militants or of the state, was treated as detrimental to the political ethos, while the social problems the women and children face were seen by them as central to their living.

The Family and the Household of the females
Female-headed households were created by the desertion and separation of spouses and by the natural deaths of the spouses. Those who deserted the wives did So for the sake of other women; since they were not subjected to legal separation or divorce proceedings initiated by the husbands, they were not entitled to maintenance. These women, seven in number had different feelings. Though all of them felt cheated and betrayed, the levels of anguish expressed were different. A few were angry and made no attempt to hide their feelings.
'When I became sick and weak he left me.'
"He was having an "illicit affair with a woman I tried to correct him but he was adamant. Men want 'fresh flowers' all the time, they don't realise that as wives and children they have a duty by us.
Having no claims to any compensation, not having brought their case within the ambit of law which is supposed to recognise their maintenance needs, these women are the poorest. Neither the NGOSnor the state paid them any attention as they were not victimised by war violence. The fact that they were also victims of another type of violence needs to be recognised. One woman said thus:
"In a way I am happy to be separated as my husband is an alcoholic. While I was with him, I never had peace. He beat me, shouted at the children. The children never liked him because they never got affection from him. He was only a source of income and now I am deprived of that"
She used the following proverb to convey her dilemma: "The dog has gone, so have the ticks."(translation) The "dog" is the husband and the "ticks" are the beatings and the violence she suffered. The "dog" protected her
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5Nivedini anyway while it was with her. Naayaum Pochu, tellum Pochu is a Tamil proverb that I learned from her.
Others blamed their "karma" and were not very vociferous in their expression. They have accepted the tragedy as part of their lives.
The wives whose husbands had committed suicide (four in number) said that they couldn't forgive them. They had no sympathy for their deaths. On the contrary they felt their husbands were selfish and had not cared enough for them and the children. Two of the men were also alcoholics.
The forty-two women who lost their spouses due to direct confrontation by the Sri Lanka Army and Navy and the IPKF, either on the sea or on the ground, claim that their husbands were innocent and had nothing to do with any anti-government terrorism. They were civilians minding their business of doing a job and providing for the family. They were killed/shot at/ shelled as an act of retaliation and revenge when the militants attacked the state apparatus. A few of them were shot during sea operations, when they were accused of withholding information about LTTE. These men happened to live near the police station or LTTE targets of attack. During these attacks people fled from their houses and came back to find the bodies. The scale of violence was described in detail, accompanied by sobbing and crying and sending the children away so that they would not hear the story. The level of their traumatic experience was evident. These women used terms and terminologies which betrayed a high sense of alienation. In the language was embedded protests. They referred to themselves as alien to the Sri Lanka
polity:
"Tamil enrapadiyal" (because we are Tamils) they killed us.'
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The family and the 9Household of the Females
"Neenkalum Tamil endrapadiyal" (because you are a Tamil) you can understand our feelings."
In their sense of frustrations and anger they equalise the entire Sinhala population in Sri Lanka, with the Sri Lanka Army. I tried to convince them that the Sinhala people were not the same as the Sri Lanka Army. So intense are their feelings that I feel many people like me have to meet them constantly to convince them, and this is a sad state of affairs for this could very well become the breeding ground for further militancy. In fact one mother told me that her son - 10 years old - had vowed to kill his father's killers.
Within the structures of inequality the female-headed household is merely a part. It intertwines with other types of inequality. In their own perceptions the women consider themselves as members of a subject nation, subjected to political domination. In fact there are other subjections also. In class terms they are dominated by the upper class. As women they are also subjected in gender terms to patriarchy. This multiple domination and the combination of the structures of inequality have differential impact according to the contexts in which they faced domination. As heads of the house-hold they have to confront not only economic but also social challenges and problems connected to their gender belonging. At all levels simultaneously or at each level separately the women face the unequal distribution of life chances (Anderson, 1996: 729). Gender, race and class co-exist and should not be treated independently but as intertwining (Collins 1996).
Seven deaths have occurred by natural causes, one husband was murdered and one died in an accident. The wives were able to accept these deaths as part of their karmic evolutionary process. Those women whose husbands had died of natural causes remained the most
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calm. Their attitude was that they are compelled, under the circumstances, to accept the course of nature. Death, they said, was unavoidable though it has spelt many deprivations for them personally.
In the study of the female-headed household, the differential impact the death has left on the women is a significant variable to assess the attitudes of the women and how they have reacted to the termination of the
partnership and the implications it has for their future life.
The expressions of rebellious sentiments and the messages of protests serve to dispel another myth of the passive and silent women. These women did not feel powerless when we talked to them. They had an identity and self-perception which betrayed a high sense of their personal worth and individual capacity for political discourse. Both feminist and other sociological constructions often denied associations of women with images of authentic power and potency (Elshtain, 1987:78).
Despite the historical oppression, second-class citizenship and political victimisation, their voices were loaded with the power of protest and rebellion. Women's social and economic powerlessness does not necessarily lead to powerless women; does not necessarily make them inarticulate. The voices of these women were resonant with a sense of authority - a quest for justice and for a sane political order. The concept of women's agency as actors and not as passive receivers needs to be emphasised again and again in a study of this nature as what we are concerned about is a transformative process of female leadership in the households. Women's agency has to be first recognised as part of any human being's capacity and ability to initiate change. Women as agents under certain circumstances are little recognised (Eduards, 1994:181). The need to treat them as full agents for change has its im
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The Family and the Household of the females
plications for policy matters in the future - when this phenomenon of the female-headed household in Sri Lanka is given weightage in government planning.
Under the uncertain living conditions one would expect an excessive involvement in religion and rituals, but the situation here presents an overall ambivalence. Unhappy, insecure, uncertain and subjected to various deprivations the women have little or no avenues for relaxation. Except for the maternal kin group and the neighbours the women had no one with whom to interact. Social intercourse was very limited, and funerals seem to be the only social function they attended. Since most of the children are very young, the mothers could not see them as companions. Under the circumstances and as is commonly the case, the women would have turned to religion for solace. Woman is, it is assumed is close to culture. They are said to be the keepers of culture and tradition in general, and the closest to religion. However, this picture was not uniformly present among our subjects. Religion was found to be on the fringe of their lives. We could identify three strands of opinions, and what is even more significant is the casual manner in which most of them expressed their responses.
Women whose husbands have disappeared were intensely religious, going to the temple, taking vows, doing poojas, consulting the astrologers and conducting poojas on the advice of the astrologers. They said religion was immensely useful. Those whose husband died due to natural causes and those whose husbands deserted them and took new wives, were moderately religious and found mental peace in going to the temples.
"I got peace of mind; I feel happy; it breaks the routine”
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Most of those whose husbands were killed by the Sri Lankan soldiers, the Indian Peacekeeping Force, the militants and unidentified persons, were in the category of becoming atheists and expressed overt resentment. Dissatisfaction, depression and helplessness have reduced their faith in an Almighty. Some of the women whose husbands disappeared were also in this category. The first group in various ways said
I pray for my husband's soul.
I do the annual rituals. I pray for mental peace, I get satisfaction and solace. I feel relieved giving vent to my feelings. go to the temple on Fridays or to the Pansala on Poya Days,
I get Athmashanthi (peace for the soul). I go to the pirith. I give dana in my husband's name. I have no other hobby hence I go to listen to religious discourse (pirasangam).
The second group was not very enthusiastic about talking about religion. It seemed that they indulged in religious practices with or without any faith as a routine practice. They did not show interest in talking about it but dismissed the topic casually as if religion was not a major thing in their life.
The third category was even more interesting. They were plainly antagonistic to religion. Eleven women in various phrases and words have rejected religion as of no use for this life.
I have no interest in religion
I have no faith in god. I even hate the mention of the word "god".
I don't do any pooja.
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The Family and the Household of the females
We are suffering. God gave us this miserable life. Let him change our course of life first."
Why should I worship? I hate god.
After my husband's death I don't go to the temple.
God has given up on us. How long can we suffer like
this? I think those who worship god most suffer the moSt.
Ever since he disappeared (for the last six years.) I have stopped the pooja and going to the temple."
I do not go to the temple. I do not like to go.
Thinking that my husband will return I went to the temple regularly, all in vain, for the last five years. I have now given up. Now I like to feed the poor, that gives me satisfaction. Religion? I have no interest."
There were seven Buddhists in the refugee camp which is officially referred to as the Welfare Centre. The state wants to emphasise the concept of welfare in it. However, it is popularly referred to as the Refugee Camp. The structural functioning of this place and the manner in which the displaced people are confined to one place have the characteristics of a camp.
The Buddhist women remain religious in their outlook and practice various rituals.
"We go to the Pansala, give dana on Poya days. We also benefit from the educative process - from the pirith.”
They assert that they derive peace of mind by doing these. Three of them visit the Hindu temples also on Fridays. The dana and the prayers are mostly in relation to the dead or disappeared husband. With strong belief in rebirth they pray that if the husband is dead he should
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Nivedini be born as a man. If he were to die he should die peacefully in the next birth. They believe that violent deaths cause restlessness in the soul. The other important factor in the religious experiences of the women is the presence of the priests both in the rituals at home and in the Pansala such as the pirith and the dana. The interaction with the priests has to some extent contributed to the alleviation of their sorrows - the human presence in the search of the sacred has some meaning to them. This was totally missing among the Hindus. The interaction with a Hindu priest in the religious practices if at all, is there only in the temple and in a very abstract and distant form. They are not in the form of a personal religious discourse. In both the temple and the Pansala the women pray for the welfare of their dead husbands. The affirmative belief in rebirth, it appears, has kept them steady psychologically. Their religious involvement is more intense and ritual oriented.
As outlined in the methodology, this study goes beyond statistics and models and tables. The emphasis we place on understanding the world from the point of view of those with whom the researcher is in dialogue has to be reiterated even when the religious experiences and their approach to religion are studied. Each of these women's experience as knowledge or as background to knowledge and the socio-economic and political conditions as they see it are treated as not only valuable but unique. And this knowledge I call unique because this pertains to the knowledge of the most marginalised and the oppressed from the position of class, gender and ethnicity. Occasionally the caste dimension can also be included.
While most of the women saw a meaning in religion and in performing rituals, a striking feature is the absence among these people of the new religious movements based on bhakti or on the cult of personal gurus. The conversion to spirituality or to the guru cult has not
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The Family and the Household of the females
emerged in the conflict-ridden Society of these women in Trincomalee. In urban centres this new cult has got women together at Bhajans and prayer meetings and social service with a religious orientation. One would expect that the war situation and the unstable political climate would normally help the emergence of such new movements based on personal god and charity missions, helping the poor and the needy with a religious orientation. These women did not feel that there was a need for it. Even more intriguing is that the "heartless world" and the intensely suffering conditions of life have not made some women resort to the "opiate" experiences as Karl Marx would argue. On the contrary the women have abandoned the opiate but have realised the “heartless” world and rejected religion per se. A Catholic woman saying "it (death) happened to my husband who was not only innocent (of terrorism) but also deeply religious and intensely god-fearing (paya bhakthi), why should I worship god any more" is typical of the rejection of the opiate even in a heartless world. The emergence of anti-religious feeling in contemporary society has even challenged the social science theories (3).
Unlike in Trincomalee the women in Amparai did not see religion as serving any purpose and there was a general disinterestedness in religions among both the Tamil and Muslim communities. But there are women who said that they pray and seek Solace, or like one woman who said,
You can't tell every thing to the children, not even one's mother, but to god I tell and get consoled. In a way she is telling us that she has no friends companions whom she can trust. Perhaps, after the death/disappearance of the husband she is talking confidentially to a god.
There are some who said that doing rituals and worshipping god brings peace of mind. One woman said
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When I am too worried and unable to act, I pray and I feel better. I get inner strength.
But the majority of the Tamil women did not show any interest in religion and rituals. There were women who said one needs money even to be religious - when we heard it for the first time, we felt that it was a strange confession. The second and third time we understood what they meant. Engaging in religious activities, going to the temple, praying, means spending time. They have to have money not to work, so that they can find the time to do them. Second - being religious means doing rituals/ puja, giving money to the temple priests, buying rice, coconut, camphor, this means spending money. They have no extra money other than to buy things to eat and wear. Hence religion is relegated to an area as not of priority under the circumstances. Three women were so angry with the conditions of their life and perhaps with god, for not giving them money that they did not say that they pray for the peace of mind. They have relegated religion completely to the realm of rituals, as if religion is rituals per se.
There are women who did reject religion as of no use to them. There are seven such women who showed antireligious feelings.
What is the use? .
Who wants It?
Why waste time?
I have given up. I simply have forgotten religion in my present worries I can't pray. I have no peace of mind.
One need not elaborate on these but one woman's statement needs to be commented as she indulges in a logical argument of being disappointed with religion.

The Family and the Household of the females
Those days I was religious. I used to miss one meal, go to the temple, pray and used to be a vegetarian on Friday. But now, after my son's death I even eat fish on Friday.
As someone who is used to the Hindu Tamil culture this was a piece of shocking news. The Tamil Hindus are vegetarians on Friday and they observe "purity" on that day, have a bath after washing the kitchen, miss the breakfast, go to the temple do the puja and are on a vegetarian diet the whole day. It is observed like a penance. Even if all of them don't observe the day in this order they do observe vegetarianism and temple visits. This woman's violation of this practice is indeed a protest against religion, god and the rest of the Hindu beliefs.
The state of ambivalence is even more confounded among the Muslim women. There was a total disinterestedness in their talk of religion. They do pray, but not to strict rules. They said they have no time to pray five times a day. They are preoccupied with problems. They did not say that religion was of no help to them. Neither did they say that they found religion helping them to tide over their worries, unhappiness and even the traumatic conditions. However, the Muslim women as a whole did not express any anti Islam sentiments or speak againstreligion per se.
There is a great deal of evidence for escapism and meaning constructions of an interesting nature. Women have even given up their traditional religion in seeking peace of mind. There doesn't seem to have been any organised conversion campaign for material gains. Conversions seem voluntary from people to people without the active participation of the priest. Priestly intervention has taken place only after a willingness was shown voluntarily. This needs to be researched more on a wider cross-section of the people as these findings are
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based on the fifteen women who have become Christians (thirteen Anglican and two Catholics).
All of them referred to themselves as "converted Christians' 'converted Catholics' or as itai Kala Vetam. Itai kala vetam literally means interim Christian, but what they meant was that they were not "born Christians." They wanted to convey the fact that they were converted to Christianity. This phrase had an implication to further explain or say why and how they became Christians. They implied that Hinduism has no meaning or has failed them. "I am peaceful now." When the woman said this she emphasised the word now and continued to say that she pours out her worries to God.
Some of their confessions are recorded here in their own words
"I was very depressed, then I was converted I got peace of mind. When I read the bible I get mental peace. I go to Mary to pray.’
"I got ill. I had to be operated on, someone told me Jesus will cure my illness. Then she prayed, I got well. Since then I changed my religion. I have a lot of peace of mind now.”
"After my husband's death I was so depressed. I stopped going to the temple. Father (priest) came and prayed, I got better. I go to the church and I have peace of mind now.”
"I was deeply worried. I go to Church and complain to god a lot. I feel he listens. Then I go home and read the bible.’
"I go to the Church. I cry a lot there. I feel better. I feel light. I get peace of mind. I feel my husband is alive somewhere.'
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"Though a converted Christian I go to the Hindu temple as well."
"Depressed" and "unhappy" (Manachorrvu, tunpam, tuyar"), I was "ill" (Suhaenam), "drowned in worries" ( tunpattil altiruntom), are expression of both mental and bodily disorders. Conversion or the induction to the new faith has brought them new avenues, to be released from their affliction. While making a statement that one religion which has distanced them from personal interaction has failed them, they are making use of the therapeutic content of the other religion. The presence of the "father'(the priest) and the social interaction he has with the depressed and the sick have helped them immensely. Neither the bhakti cult of the Hindus nor the Guru cult of the new religions has reached these people who are on the margins both socially and economically. Their only outlet has been reaching out to another faith, which has shown them a way.
On another level this whole process of religious experiences has clearly made a case for, the need for a psychological approach to the problem of depression. Professional counseling is the need of the hour, irrespective of whether religion or religions have met their needs.
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Fairy Tales and the Concept of Femininity
*Neshantha Harischandra
O nce upon a time, a mother sat by her little daugh ter's bedside, relating the story of "The Sleeping Beauty"
A hundred years later, a mother sat by her little daughter's bedside, relating the story of "The Beauty and the Beast' ...
A hundred years later, a mother sat by her little daughter's bedside, relating the story of "Snow White"...
"... And Prince Charming married Snow White, and carried her off to his castle, and they lived happily ever after,' concluded the mother, in the true tradition of all good mothers.
"But, Amma," said the little girl. "Did Snow White know about Prince Charming's earlier marriage to Cinderella?'
She Read for her B.A.(Honours) and M. Phil degrees at the University of Peradeniya. She is a lecturer in English at the University of Ruhuna.
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JairyTales and the Concept of Jemininity
This last-mentioned little girl, one can be assured, did not live in that dubious period we can brush off casually, as "once upon a time", but right here in the twentieth century. (It would never have occurred to the earlier little girls to question why the male heroes were always Prince Charming, while the females had distinct names, as well as distinct personalities.) We might even venture a step further and predict that this little girl may grow up to be a feminist - that species which, like witches or goblins or gnomes, kept themselves hidden away in forests or caves for a number of centuries, and made their existence known only when they felt comparatively safe from being seized, thrown in the dungeons, banished, or burnt at the stake. For who, other than an evil spirit, would dare question the morality of a time-honoured fairy-tale, and spoil its beauty by casting a gloomy spell over an otherwise happy ending at a wedding between two young lovers?
But, as fairy-tale lovers instinctively know, good comes out of evil - it is always so. If a wicked witch had not cast a spell on the handsome prince, and turned him into a repulsive beast, Beauty may never have found her true love. If the evil stepmother had not poisoned Snow White, her prince may never have come across her. If Hansel and Gretel had not been deserted in the woods, they would never have become rich. So, a little spoiling of the enchantment of these long-loved tales, too, may, hopefully, have Some positive outcome.
Nobody seems to know the exact origins of fairy tales. They, too, seem to have originated in that timeless period of the once-upon-a-time of their subjects - and the place - "a land far away." Some early stories such as those found in The Arabian Nights, hark back to the 8th century (Bettelheim, 28). The Cinderella motif was present in China in 9 A.D. (Bettelheim, 236), as well as in ancient Egypt (Bettelheim, 269). Snow White seems to have been
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around as far back as 17th century Italy, as "The Young Slave" in Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone, while Sleeping Beauty is seen as Talia in his "Sun, Moon, and Talia" during that same period, and then, in France, in Charles Perrault's "La Belle au bois dormant" in 1697, and again in 18th century Germany, as the Grimm Brothers' Briar Rose, before she made her way to England, in her present form, in Robert Samber's Mother Goose Tales (Bettelheim, 220, 227). All throughout, fairy tales, too, had their own evil stepmothers and fairy godmothers - the pedantic scholars who banished them to the cinders as being stupid, absurd and frivolous, versus the true intellectuals who realized their value. At a time when fairy stories were the most popular form of children's literature in England, Mrs. Sarah Trimmer of The Guardian of Education (1802), condemned these stories for their violence and general absurdity (Ousby, 172). Yet on the other hand, those like Charles Dickens (Ousby, 173)) and G.K. Chesterton (Bettelheim, 23) championed the cause of these tales. It is mainly thanks to Howard Pyle, a revivalist of fairy tales, that they were able to enter the 20th century at all (Bettelheim, 24).
Changes in history, too, had its impact on fairy tales. When printing became popular, the hitherto exclusively oral tradition of fairy tales gave way to books, and later, illustrated versions. Courtiers altered their original forms and presented them at the royal courts, to cull favours from their kings. Then, in the 20th century, they went through the innumerable mills of professionals, theorists and scholars, and were polished up, almost beyond recognition. Psychologists, not content to limit their analyzing and dissecting to the minds of living human beings, turned their ink-blot scalpels on our favourite fairytale heroes and heroines, in a bid to see how their minds worked. Educationists, inspired by these profound psychological theories, prescribed the telling of fairy tales as a tonic to enhance children's morality and personality, as
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well as their creativity and vocabulary. Filmmakers exploited fairy tale themes to set box-office records. Advertisers used fairy-tale characters to sell their products. When working women started looking upon the television set as Mother Substitute, producers saw fit to keep children entertained with dramatized fairy-tales - some even went as far as bringing Snow White into 20th century New York, in the comedy, The Charmings. - And Feminists took one look at all these and declared themselves horrified at the sexist overtures in the presentation of fairy-tale plots and characterizations.
Were raconteurs of classic fairy tales male chauvinists, and if so, how far have they succeeded in confining and controlling women, through their stories?
It may be of interest to note that all classic fairy-storytellers whose identity we know, are males. This is not surprising in itself, since, in those days, almost all writers of repute were male. Legend attributes The Arabian Nights to Scheherazade, newly wed wife of King Shahriyar. Legend also tells us that the Grimm Brothers collected some of their stories from an old woman. But as far as documented facts go, the tellers of classic fairy tales were males, without exception. And they do not seem to have had any scruples about making the best of their opportunities, either, to portray women according to their own whims and fancies. The saddest part of this is that women themselves seem to be unaware of this gross injustice done to their image. When Edgar Rice-Borrouhgs depicted Africans as primitive Savages, and Tarzan, the White Man, their godsend to educate and "civilize" them, Africans protested vehemently. Indians were quick to take offence at E. M. Forster's patronizing attitude towards Indians, depicted as lazy and unreliable, in contrast to Mrs. Moore and Richard Fielding, their stereotypical would-be liberators, in A Passage to India. We, in Sri Lanka, argued against Leonard Woolf's portrayal of the
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inhabitants of The Village in the Jungle, as violent enough to kill a helpless deer, and cause the death of Hinni Hamy, as opposed to the compassionate, and only white character in the story - the judge. Today, if a television drama so much as hints at a derogatory delineation of a certain race, religion, or profession, the next day, newspapers are full of complaints by the "injured parties". But whenever women cried out against the fact that it was a man who woke Sleeping Beauty from her passive sleep, or that it was a man who freed Cinderella from the clutches of a wicked stepmother, jealous stepsisters, and a miserable life by the cinders, were they given the same kind of hearing, even by their own "party'? No, what women seem to have done, is to passively accept these sexual stereotypes as their role models, - and out with the heads of those rare "hyenas in petticoats' who strayed away from these prescribed roles.
I am not sure how far the psychological interpretations of fairy tales had to do with the recent mass revival of classic fairy tales - especially in the film industry. It is not for nothing that the last decade of the 20th century was dubbed "the Golden age of Animation" (Cole & Martha, 52), and that the majority of the films under this category were classic fairy tales. In 1989, The Little Mermaid earned $84 million. In 1991, Beauty & the Beast outgrossed the former by $50 million. Walt Disney Productions' present manager, Roy Disney, feels it fully worth to spend an average of $40 million on such films (Cole & Martha, 53/4). All this goes to show that the romance of fairy tales has survived the test of technology and modernization.
1. "A hyena in petticoats" was a term given to Mary Wollstonecraft, by Horace
Walpole.
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Yet again, it is a sad fact that the recent psychological interest in fairy tales, which helped a lot in bringing back these stories to the library shelves and homes, were created by males. Freud, we need not even go into at this stage. As far as feminists are concerned, he has been long established as a male chauvinist, with out-dated interpretations. But even the more "modern" analysts of the psychological aspects of fairy stories, have overlooked - or chosen to overlook - a considerable amount of sexist propaganda prevalent in fairy tales. Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, sees the philosophy behind fairy stories, as "The mighty hopes that make us men" (Bettelheim, 28). This, in itself, can be seen as a Freudian slip. The book, as far as I see, is an exposition of the importance of fairy tales in developing the male personality, and subjugating the female. In fact, Bettelheim is an apologist for the male chauvinism found in fairy tales: m
Recently it has been claimed that the struggle against childhood dependency, and for becoming oneselfin fairy tales is frequently described differently for the girl than for the boy, and that this is the result of sexual stereotyping. Fairy tales do no render such one-sided pictures. Even when a girl is depicted as turning inward in her struggle to become herself, and a boy as aggressively dealing with the external world, these two together symbolize the two ways in which one has to gain self-hood; through learning to understand and master the inner as well as the outer world. In this sense, the male and the female heroes are again projections onto two different figures of two (artificially) separated aspects of one and the same process which everybody has to undergo in growing up..." (Bettelheim, 228)
2 Bettelheim borrows this phrase from A. Tennyson's In Memoriam LXXXV.
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But nowhere does this eminent author explain why it
is always the male who represents the outer (active) life, and the female, the inner (passive) life. Why are giantkillers and dragon-slayers males, and Swooning individuals females? Why, for instance, was a male, never the symbol of purity?
Fairy tales, all over the world, irrespective of culture, creed or religion, depict females in connection with "purity". Scheherazade of The Arabian Nights saves her life, as well as the lives of all other females in the land, because the king found her "chaste and tender, wise and eloquent" (Dawood, 239). Here, as the raconteur of a thousand and one tales, it is obvious that Scheherazade would have been "eloquent", but even then, the first "virtue" that comes to the king's mind as a reason to spare her life, is her "chastity".
In Western fairy tales, too, we see this aspect. Not only are fairy-tale heroines overtly or covertly portrayed as being "pure", but also their very names emphasize this fact. In 'Snow White', the heroine has three colours to her personality, for, says tradition, her mother wished to have a child 'as white as snow, with cheeks as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony' (Disney, 251). But it is her whiteness (purity) that gives her name, and thus, the title to the story. It is also interesting to note the circumstances that led to this wish. The Grimm Brothers' story tells us: -
Once upon a time, in the depth of winter, when the flakes of snow were falling like feathers from the clouds, a Queen sat at her palace window, which had an ebony black frame, stitching her husband's shirts. While she was thus engaged and looking out of the window, she pricked her finger, and three drops of blood fell upon the snow. Because the red looked so well upon the white, she thought to herself, "Had I now but a child as white as this snow, as red as this
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blood, and as black as the wood of this frame!" Soon afterwards, a little daughter was born to her, who was as white as snow, and as red as blood, and with hair as black as ebony, and thence she was named "Snow White"... (Grimm, 250/51)
Why did "the red ... (look) ... so well upon the white'? It is what every girl is geared to think of as "well", and what every husband, mother and mother-inlaw wishes to see - the drops of red blood on the white bridal cloth, testifying to her "purity". In other renderings of the story, too, blood always falls on something "white". In some Italian versions, (snow being rare in many parts of that country), the blood falls on milk, white marble, or white cheese (Bettelheim, 199). In Walt Disney's version of Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the queen pricks her finger while embroidering, and three drops of blood fall on the "white linen" (Disney, 109). This comes even closer to the virginity test, the needle pricking the finger to produce blood being a covert allusion to the penis piercing the vagina. And this instance is always followed by a "reward" - the baby. Thus, it is "chaste" women who are "rewarded" with the gift of children.
In "Cinderella", it is an etymological error in the translation, notes Bettelheim, that ended up with the Grimm Brothers' Aschenputtel and Perrault's Cendrillon, becoming Cinderella, in English (Bettelheim, 253). The French word "cindres', means ash, and not cinders. Whereas ash is the purest of all substances, being the residue of complete combustion, "cinders" is the dirty remnants of incomplete combustion. Furthermore, Cinderella, as all children know, lives by the fire. Here, fire, too, stands for "purity' - virginal purity, for thus Cinderella is associated with Vesta, Virginal Goddess of the hearth (Bettelheim, 254).
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In "The Princess and the Pea", the allusion to "purity" - synonymous with "virginity'- is the underlying central theme. The prince travels far and wide in search of a "true princess", (the "true princess", here, of course, being an allusion to the "virginal bride") but finds none, for the prospective brides are either too short and fat, or too tall and thin, or whatever else that differs from the conventional concept of "beauty". One rainy night, a young woman seeks shelter in the castle, declaring herself to be "a true princess". She seems to have all the qualities of a "true princess", for she is beautiful, but is she what she claims to be? The queen, to test the veracity of the girl's statement, places a small pea under 55 mattresses and 55 bed-sheets. Only if she can feel the pea under all these, is she a "true princess". This comes very close to the virginity test, for it is the queen/mother-in-law, who implements the test on the princess's/bride's first night in the prince's/husband's home. Next morning, when the queen asks the girl whether she slept comfortably, the girl complains that she did not get a wink of sleep, because something was pricking her. The jubilance on the part of the queen, and the celebrations that follow this ungrateful comment, may remind one of the celebrations after the showing of the bloodstained bridal cloth. What is more, the pea is preserved in a glass casket in the museum, as a testimony to the "genuineness" of the royal bride. This is reminiscent of a certain custom in royal families, as given in Isek Dinesan's short story, "The Blank Page", where royal brides' bridal cloths with the bloodstains were exhibited in glass cases for all to see. In the story of "The Princess and the Pea", one can only say how well for the princess, not to have been a modest girl, but to have declared herself "a true princess' first thing upon entering the threshold of a palace, or too grateful to her hostess's hospitality, or well-mannered enough to complain of a discomfort in the bed given her.
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It is discouraging to note how psychoanalysts seem to have down-played the genderization of fairy tales, thus ignoring the extent to which their morals point at teaching the "virtues" of "purity" to the girl child. For instance, let us consider a Grimms' fairy tale which Bettelhheim analyses in the context of teaching autonomy to the child. As it is a lesser-known tale, Bettelheim's summarization of the story is given below:
"There once lived an old queen whose husband had died many years ago, and she had a beautiful daughter.... When the time came for her to be married and the child had to travel into the alien country,' the mother gave her precious jewelry and treasures. A chambermaid was assigned to accompany her. Each woman was given a horse to ride on, but the princess horse could talk, and was named Falada. "When the hour of parting had arrived, the old mother went into her bedchamber, took a small knife and cut her fingers until she bled; then she let three drops of blood fall onto a white handkerchief, gave it to her daughter and said, Preserve this carefully, dear child, it will be of great service to you on your trip. " After the two had been traveling for an hour, the princess got thirsty and asked the maid to fetch her some water from a stream in her golden cup. The maid refused, and seized the princess' cup, telling her to get down and drink from the river; that she would no longer be her Ser Vant.
Later on, the same thing happened again, but this time as the princess bent over to drink, she dropped and lost the handkerchief with the three drops of blood; with this loss she became weak and powerless. The maid took advantage of this and forced the princess to change horses and
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dresses, making her swear to tell no person at the royal court of this exchange. On arrival, the maid was taken for the princess-bride. Asked about her companion, she told the old king that he should give her some work to do, and the princess was assigned to help a boy tend geese. Soon afterward the false bride asked the young king, her betrothed, the favor of having Falada s head chopped off, because she feared the horse would reveal her evil deed. This was done, but the horse's head, thanks to the pleading of the real princess, was nailed over a darkgateway through which the princess had to pass each day when she went out to tend the geese.
Each morning as the princess and the boy with whom she was herding geese passed through the gate, she greeted Falada's head with great Sorrow, to which it replied:
"If this your mother knew, Her heart would break in two.'
Out in the pasture, the princess let her hair down. Since it was like pure gold, it tempted the boy to try to pluck some out, which the princess prevented by summoning a wind which blew away the boy's hat so that he had to run after it. The same events were repeated on two consecutive days, which so greatly annoyed the boy that he complained to the old king. On the next day the old king hid at the gate and observed it all. In the evening, on the goose girl's return to the castle, he inquired what these things meant. She told him that she was bound by a vow not to tell any human being. She resisted his pressure to reveal her story, but finally followed his suggestion to tell it to the hearth. The old king hid behind the hearth so that he could learn the goose girl's story.
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After this, the true princess was given royal garments, and everybody was invited to a great feast, at which the true bride sat on one side of the young king, the pretender on the other. At the end of the meal the old king asked the pretender what would be the right punishment for a person who had acted in a certain way - and he described to her the way she had in fact behaved. The pretender, not knowing she was found out, answered: ' 'She deserves nothing better than to be stripped naked and to be put into a barrel studded inside with pointed nails; and two white horses should drag it up street and down until she is dead. It's you, said the old king, and you have found your own sentence, and thus shall it happen to you.' And when the sentence was carried out, the young king married his right bride, and both ruled their kingdom in peace and Sanctity.” (Bettelheim, 136/7)
In his analysis, Bettelheim stresses repeatedly that although the protagonist in this version, and many others parallel to it, is a female, the moral applies just as much to the boy child, as to the girl (Bettelheim, 138/39). This degenderization of the story ignores several markedly "feminizing" aspects of the tale, were it read from the point of view of instilling the importance of "purity" to the girl child.
In "The Goose Girl", when the time comes for the daughter to be married, the mother gives her several parting gifts - obviously her dowry - her precious jewellery and treasures, a chambermaid, a horse, and a handkerchief with three drops of blood in it. Although Bettelheim draws attention to the latter gift by mentioning a German version which is titled by it - "The Cloth with the Three Drops of Blood" - he merely sees it as a symbol of sexual maturity (Bettelheim, 139), whereas its allusion to the
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bridal cloth as proof of a wife's virginity, is hardly likely to be missed by the general reader. Remark, too, the manner in which the mother makes this gift, and the words with which she presents it to the daughter. She goes to her bedchamber, takes a small knife, and cuts her fingers until she bleeds. This may be meant to recall the queen's own first night as a bride. Thus, this gift is the "gift" of "chastity" a mother passes on to her daughter. (Traditionally it is considered the mother's duty to preserve the daughter's chastity). The queen's parting words to the princess are: "Preserve this carefully, dear child, it will be of great service to you on your trip." What leads to the loss of the handkerchief, says Bettelheim, is the princess' 'carelessness' (Bettelheim, 139). Read from a feminist critical point of view, this "carelessness" takes on a different connotation from what Bettelheim means (immaturity). What the loss of the handkerchief may suggest is that, at some stage between the girl's leaving her parental home and entering marriage, she was 'careless' enough to lose her virginity. For it is when the princess, having got down from the horse (discarding her mother's values), and bends down to drink water to satisfy her thirst (stoops to giving way to temptation) that the handkerchief (virginity/purity) gets lost. With the loss of the handkerchief, says the story, the girl becomes "weak" - so much so, that the servant (the princess' baser instincts, or, in other words, her id), gets the better of her. On arrival at the groom's palace, she is not recognized as the bride by her in-laws. This is how a bride unable to prove her virginity is received by her husband's relatives. (From the status of bride/princess, she is demoted to being a servant/goose girl). What is more, the usurper-bride causes Falada to be beheaded. Falada's voice of woe is seen as the mother's grief and accusation at her lack of autonomy (Bettelheim, 140). If so, the horse stands for the mother. At a bride's inability to prove her virginity, it is the mother who is persecuted the most. Falada being beheaded is the ultimate symbolism of that persecution.
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Thus, the underlying message in Falada's words of woe is: It is the prompting of the girl's id (losing her virginity) that caused the punishment of the mother.
The princess who has thus "fallen' due to her "carelessness" has to be restored to her original position - otherwise this would not be a fairy tale. Her redeeming actis to resist another male's passes. The boy the princess is made to work with is given as a symbol of the girl's immaturity (Bettelheim, 140). Yet, one could consider him a Symbol of the malesex, instead. Thus, the girl's resisting his advances in preventing his cutting a lock of her golden hair (and golden hair has definite sexual connotations) is the act by which she redeems herself, for it is this resistance that brings the king/father-in-law to spy on the scene, which, in turn, leads to the girl's restoration. It is worth noting that, on being asked, the girl refuses to reveal the story, saying she has been bound by a vow. This questions the autonomy Bettelheim attributes to the story. If her remaining silent, as he says, is a proof of her moral virtue, (Bettelheim, 140), it is also an indication to her lack of autonomy. Silence as a "quality" of "femininity" is also hinted at here. Even the idea of relating the story to the hearth has to be suggested by the king/patriarch. It does not occur to the girl of her own accord. In this sense, the male as Superior in intelligence and rescuer of the passive female victim is reiterated. It is also interesting to note the object to which the king asks her to relate the story - the hearth. This suggests a confession/beseeching, to the virginal Goddess of Purity. Thus, the princess' restoration has a lot to do with her purity.
What Bettelheim uses as an example to a story that teaches a child the achievement of autonomy, instead, can be read as a moral lesson a mother instills on the girl child: that purity is the best "dowry" a woman can bring her husband, as well as the most important asset in her journey through life.
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In fact, that the teaching of autonomy to girls is far from the fairy storyteller's mind, is seen by the association of "purity" with "passivity". "Good girls' tell the fairy tales, are "always beautiful". And "beauty", is associated with "desirability' by the male. Thus, the female is seen as a sex object. The prince has only to cast one glance at the girl, to fall in love with her, because of her beauty. In this instance, the word "object' is apt, because the woman does nothing active towards being "desirable". When Prince Charming falls in love with Snow White, she is in a death-like sleep in a glass coffin. When Prince Charming falls in love with Sleeping Beauty, she has been sleeping for the past hundred years. It is the prince's sexual advances (his lifting the coffin in the former, and kissing in the latter) that awakens the women. "We should be wooed, and were not made to woo," says Helena, of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Another underlying message is, "Every girl must await her male counterpart, always her better, to 'activate’ her". r
In one of the earliest versions of "The Sleeping Beauty", Basile's 'Sun, Moon, and Talia", the prince (who, in this story, is actually a king), not only falls in love with Talia while she is in her famous sleep, but also cohabits with her. Nine months later she gives birth to twins, and suckles them, all in her sleep. In this story, the king is already married, and thus Talia is adroitly made guiltless of adultery, for she does not actively participate in the sexual intercourse. Thus, the "pure" woman is passive not only during the first kiss, but also throughout the whole sexual act. This is in keeping with the Victorian convention of sexual frigidity in women being considered a virtue. In those days, even physicians such as Dr William Acton, looked upon sexual frigidity in women, as "normal" (Freedman, Kaplan & Sadack, 2494).
It is a matter of interest to note that, in this and all other versions of "The Sleeping Beauty", the cause of the
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heroine's sleep, is her pricking her finger with a spindle. Bettelheim sees sexual connotations in the distaff, when Sleeping Beauty asks the old woman, on her fateful 15th birthday, "What kind of thing is this that jumps about so funnily?" (Bettelheim, 233). But his association of the distaff with the penis ends there, when in actuality, the girl, after pricking her finger, falls down unconscious. This is yet another covert allusion to how women ought to view the sexual act, as well as anything that was even remotely connected with it. It was the "proper" thing, for "ladies" to "swoon", at the sight of anything "unladylike" - and "unladylike", very often, meant matters pertaining to sex. (This aspect is humourously satirized in the 1976 film, The Slipper and the Rose: The Story of Cinderella, where a "suitable" bride swoons at the mere sight of Prince Charming's portrait. Earlier on, the king gives, as one of the "qualities" of a bride-to-be, her "swoonability". "Ladies swoon; that is expected of them".)
Yet another sexist stereotyping of the female in fairy tales, is the other extreme - sexuality - as symbolized by the colour red. Thus, the dual personality of the woman is polarized in these two aspects, which goes further towards defining her as a sex object - her "purity' for the benefit of the male, whose inherent right it is, the use of an object 'new' and "untouched", at one end, and her sexual desirability, at the other. In "The Little Red Riding Hood", the girl is identified by the colour of her cape - thus no wonder a "wolf" is tempted to "eat" her. Here, the symbolism is simplistic. "Wolf" is a term given to sexually violent men, and "eating", to "ravishing" (as in the common Sinhala sexist term for females, as 'food' (kaema). What the storyteller seems to imply, is that it is the fault of the girl for being sexually attractive, and hardly the fault of the man for seducing/raping her; for
3 In some versions it is the sixteenth birthday
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killing to eat is not going contrary to the Laws of Nature for wolves.
In "Snow. White", the heroine's personality is bifurcated into the colours white (purity), and red (sexuality). And it is her sexuality that gets her into trouble four times. It was because Snow White started surpassing her stepmother in beauty, that the queen wanted the girl dead, in the first place, which resulted in Snow White being left in the woods. An early version even hints at an incestuous relationship between Snow White and her father, hence, a more overt reason for the stepmother's jealousy (Bettelheim, 200). Later, the queen, on learning about her stepdaughter's whereabouts, comes to the dwarfs' cottage thrice, disguised as a peddler. The first time, Snow White is tempted into letting the woman fit her with stay laces, and the peddler/queen ties them so tight, that Snow White falls down unconscious. Thus, it is Snow White's desire to be sexually attractive (slim) that brings about her "fall". Later, she is tempted into having her hair combed, and, again, the comb pricks her unconscious. This, too, is because of her desire to appear beautiful (Bettelheim, 211). The third time, she is tempted by an apple. Here, the implications of sexuality is not as apparent as in the two previous instances, yet it is significant that it is the red (poisonous) half of the apple that she is lured into eating. Here, the peddler eats the white (unappetizing) part, and is safe; Snow White eats the red (appetizing) half, and falls down unconscious. The positive side of sexual attractiveness is when Prince Charming sees her beauty, and carries her off. Here, Snow White does nothing intentionally, to become sexually attractive.
Another emphasis on women, as denoted by their very names, that also gives the titles to the stories, is beauty: "The Sleeping Beauty"; "Beauty and the Beast". We are told that Cinderella is beautiful; that Snow White is beautiful; that Beauty is beautiful. What is more, we
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are told that they are so because they are "good". And the foils to these heroines - Cinderella's stepsisters, Snow White's stepmother, and Beauty's sisters - are either ugly, or not as beautiful as our Sugar-sweet heroines, because they are "bad". Some may well argue, that these are merely symbols. But these symbols themselves are an indication to society's value system. What defines the "beauty" of these virtuous maidens? Until recently, all illustrated versions of fairy-tale books portrayed heroines with golden, or at least blond, hair, unless specified by the story to the contrary. (ex:- that Snow White in "Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs', and Rose Red in 'Snow White & Rose Red", have black hair.) In a popular televiSion dramatization of a German fairy tale, "The Singing Ringing Tree", a beautiful princess is turned ugly as a punishment for being wicked. One of the changes in this terrible metamorphosis is that her golden hair turns black.
Very few women who desire tiny - or, what is popularly called "dainty" - feet, are aware of the origin of this concept. One of the earliest extant versions of the Cinderella motif, as stated earlier, appears in China, and it is in this version that the fitting of a shoe as a means of selecting the bride appears for the first time (Bettelheim, 236). According to Chinese culture, tiny feet went handin-hand with desirability. All little Chinese girls underwent the torture of foot-binding by their "far-thinking" parents, who wanted to secure husbands for their daughters in later life, for, the "daintier" a girl's feet, the "worthier' she is, as a wife. But the origin of this custom of foot-binding was to ensure that girls would not be able to run away from their parents, or elope with an "unsuitable' lover (any lover, for that matter), and especially, as wives, escape from their husbands if it be the men's whim to beat them. Thus, what initially started as a form of mutilation in order to satisfy the male ego, in time, turned into a quality coveted by the very victims themselves. Here, we see how misleading culture can be, for, as far as
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science goes, matters should be the other way around. Medical science hints at a connection between small feet and complications during pregnancy and at childbirth. If such were proved, any "rational" man, in selecting a bride, would do well to take a look at the woman's feet - and choose a girl with larger feet!
It was only recently, and that, thanks to the influence of the Women's Movement, that these heavily stereotypical portrayals showed signs of changing. Now, "the good and the beautiful' are not confined to blondes, nor are they necessarily of the Barbie-doll-figure type. Beauty, whose hair used to be blond up to the late 1960's, acquired brown hair for the first time, in her reincarnation as Belle, in the Walt Disney animation Beauty & the Beast, in 1991. Whereas earlier, her "ugly' sisters had dark hair, in this version, the village dames who are forever Swooning over the pseudo-hero Geston, and are clearly Belle's inferiors, have blond hair. Cinderella, who was painted with blond hair in the Disney film of the 1950's as well as in the Ladybird book of the "well-loved tales' series, among other noted versions, was played by the brunette Gemma Craven, in the 1976 film The Slipper & the Rose, and appeared again in 1984, in The Fairy-Tale Theatre, when the dark haired Jennifer Beales gave life to a very modern Cinderella.
Another interesting point to note in the changes in the concept of beauty is the skin-colour. Until very recently, "beauty" was synonymous with "fairness" - and that, in turn, with "femininity'- thus, the term for females, which is supposed to be complimentary - "the fair sex". The wicked queen in "Snow White" asks the mirror, "Who is the fairest of them all?" In a number of fairy tales, there are references to "the king and his fair queen" (All italics mine). In the Grimms' fairy tale "The White & the Black Bride", an angel punishes one girl for her wickedness by turning her black and rewards the other for her kindness
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by turning her white. (Again, if anyone argues that black and white are merely symbols for evil and good, respectively, and have nothing to do with the concept of beauty, let them take note that in Africa, before the arrival of the White Man, God was portrayed in black, and the Devil, in white). In the early sixties, a reputed Sri Lankan ballerina was turned down at the audition for the role of Sleeping Beauty at the London Ballet Theatre, because the producers thought a dark-complexioned Sleeping Beauty would not be readily received by the audience. In this instance, it can be argued that, although all fairy tales occur in "a land far away", and that there is no telling whether this land is a Western or an Oriental country, all traditional versions have depicted the story in a Western setting, and therefore, the audience would be justified in expecting a white Sleeping Beauty. But when it comes to "Aladdin & His Wonderful Lamp", although it is obvious that the setting for the story is a country in the Orient, where the majority of women are dark-complexioned, all versions of this tale in picture books and films portrayed a fairskinned princess as the lady whom the hero wins. It is for the first time that Princess Jasmine is given a dark skin by her animator in the Walt Disney production of Aladdin (1992). In fact, this young lady's evolution as a character is much more than just skin-deep. She has come a long way, not only from her earlier counterparts, but also from her other Western friends. She does not swoon, weep, or hide, when her lover fights with the villains, but actively joins in the fray. She can use a pole deftly to jump from one building to another, and at one point, runs away from home - which used to be the exclusive privilege of males. If at all earlier fairy-tale heroines had to leave home (apart from marriage, of course), it was not of their own choice, but because they were forced to do so. Snow White is deserted in the woods by a hunter; Rapunzel is banished by the witch to a land far away. Even her revolutionary attempt to elope, is foiled by her "womanly" slip in reveal
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ing that a prince comes to see her. Most significant of all is Princess Jasmine's retaliation to her father's proposal that she be given in marriage to the "best suitor". Her declaration, "I'm not a prize to be won" (Aladdin, 1992), puts to shame, all those heroines saved by their heroes from giant-killers and dragon-slayers, and as a token of the king's appreciation, given away in marriage to them; especially the Princess Who Could Not Laugh, in "The Golden Goose", who is given away as the promised prize to Simpleton. (In fairy-story tradition, Simpleton is the stupidest son in the family). Here, nobody seems to see from the princess's point of view. The tragedy of a young and sensitive princess wed to a menial just because of her father's whim to marry her off to the first person who makes her laugh, seems to be utterly lost on the listener/ reader/audience.
Another important "virtue" that went hand-in-hand with "femininity", was the woman's role as wife in marriage. Thus, apart from being a sex object in bed, she also had to be an accomplished housekeeper. What children are supposed to like in Cinderella, is the fact that she does all the housework. What endeared Snow White to us is her going down on her hands and knees, scrubbing floors at the orders of the queen. Later, she wins the hearts of the dwarfs, mainly because of her housekeeping abilities. What put Beauty above her sisters is the fact that, while they moped around at the loss of their father's fortune, she did all the housework uncomplainingly. But we see nothing of her housekeeping abilities in the recent Disney film, Beauty & the Beast. Whereas three decades ago she helped her father by being "a good little cook, a good little housemaid, and a good little washerwoman” (Southgate, 6), today, when she runs off from Geston, saying she has to "help her father", it is to assist him in his scientific inventions.
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The scope within marriage, too, has widened for today's fairy-tale heroines. They are no longer content to confine themselves to the roles of homemaker and kitchen queen. Earlier on, Snow White was carried off to the Castle of Dreams; Cinderella came to live in the Royal Palace; but Belle, looking on at women washing their husbands' clothes and pushing several babies in a perambulator, sings, "There must be more than this provincial life", and later, turning down Geston's proposal, "I want more than provincial life - I want adventure." (Beauty & the Beast, 1991). What this decade's Aladdin promises his future wife is not a palatial bedroom and a kitchenful of slaves, but "a whole new world". (Aladdin, 1992).
While such positive changes in the delineation of women is laudable, nevertheless, it is disheartening to see that some feminists have taken their case a little too far. Let us take the area of the Ladybird Series, for instance. Children of a generation ago were treated to the enchantment of the illustrations of those like Eric Winter, and these pictures had a lot to do with the magic of fairy tales, which were a major part of their childhood. But today's Ladybird reader is deprived of that magical world. If Prince Charming were to see today's Cinderella, as pictured in a recently published Ladybird book, he would run a mile. While undue stress on beauty may be detrimental to the image of women, and the value formation of children regarding females, that does not mean one should deliberately present a hideous-looking Cinderella, for, after all, beauty, and the appreciation of beauty, are positive aspects, and no feminist, however militant, can defy this truth. It is only when beauty is encouraged to be looked upon as a commodity, that one ought to protest.
How far, exactly, have we come, from the earliest days of fairy stories, in the depiction of female characters? To illustrate this question further, let us take the bestloved of all fairy tales - Cinderella.
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One of the earliest known versions of the Cinderella motif is a story by Strabo, where the beautiful courtesan Rhodope's sandal is carried away by an eagle, and dropped on the Pharoah (Bettelheim, 276). He is so taken up with the sandal, that he looks all over Egypt for its owner, so that he may wed her. Thus, the woman's individuality is made negligible, in this important decision of selecting a bride. All versions of the Cinderella story have the fitting of the shoe/slipper as the deciding factor in such a crucial matter as a marriage. In the Scottish rendering of "Cinderella" - "Rashin Coatie" (1540), the stepmother cuts the toes of her daughter's foot, so that she may fit the slipper, and thereby, win the prince (Bettelheim, 260). This is repeated in the Grimm Brothers' "Aschenputtel" (1888), where the stepmother advises her elder daughter to cut off her toe, for, she says, "... if you are queen, you need not go any longer on foot" (Grimm, 119). The implication is, "Marriage is worth everything - even a bodily mutilation.' What is even worse is, that the prince - the "symbol" of true love - actually carries away the impostor, thinking her to be his beloved. It takes two birds to point out his error to him:
"Backwards peep, backwards peep,
There's blood upon the shoe;
The shoe's too small, and she behind Is not the bride for you."
(Grimm, 119)
If not for the timely intervention of the birds, the prince may very well have married the wrong girl, and, for all we know, lived "happily ever after" with her!
4 Consider the barbarous custom of clitoridectomy that still prevails in some parts of the world, where mothers insist on having their daughters undergo this operation so that they may be "honourable" wives to their future husbands.
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In Perrault's version (1691), the prince does not even go in person, looking for his life's love, but gets it done remote control, through another (Bettelheim, 252). What is more, before Cinderella is presented to the prince, the fairy godmother comes and transforms her rags into beautiful clothes, thus preventing the prince from seeing her as she used to be (Bettelheim, 252). Even at the ball earlier on, when Cinderella is warned by the fairy godmother, to return before midnight, it is because the magic ends at the stroke of twelve. Thus, Cinderella, by running away before the twelfth stroke, tries to prevent the prince from seeing her in her rags. This aspect makes her no better than her stepsisters, who try to cover up their true characteristics in order to win the prince.
Yet, later storytellers seem to have understood the true romance of a man falling in love with a woman irrespective of her external appearance. In a television drama of the mid-seventies, The Three Gifts, Prince Charming first sees, and falls in love with, Cinderella, when she is in rags. The ball is just a contrivance of Fate to have the two meet again. In a later version, The Slipper & the Rose (1976), too, he first beholds her in her tattered workingclothes. In fact, the first time he sees her, he takes her for a servant girl. In this version, the prince, on learning the whereabouts of his lost love, does not send someone else to bring her, as his earlier counterparts saw fit to do, but goes to her himself, and carries her off to his palace, rags and all.
In other areas of her personality, too, Cinderella has made progress. Perrault endowed his Cinderella with the 17th century virtues of a woman. Passive and all-enduring, she never so much as complains about the menial work she is made to do in her own home. Even in the end, she wishes her stepsisters well, and goes as far as procuring matches for them from the royal court! (Bettelheim, 252). It is Perrault's version of Cinderella's personality
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that Walt Disney chose for his film (Bettelheim, 252). She has more virtue than intelligence - which goes conveniently well with society's expectations of women. In Perrault's rendering, she does not even seem to know her own mind. Even the fact that she wants to go to the ball has to be told her by her fairy godmother. When Disney's Cinderella is told to bring a pumpkin, says Disney's Giant Book, she " ...did not understand - but she brought the pumpkin' (80). For the model woman is supposed to obey, not to understand.
But Cinderella has progressed a few steps when she reappears in the 19th century, as the Grimm Brothers' Aschenputtel. Here, Cinderella not only knows that she wants to go to the ball, but makes herself so bold as to ask permission from her step-mother, to attend it. When she is set impossible-seeming tasks to do, like picking a tubful of lentils from the ashes, Cinderella does so, not merely because her stepmother tells her to do so, but because she is promised permission to go to the ball, if she finishes in time. Thus, Aschenputtel has a purpose for her labour, apart from that of obeying for obedience's sake. At the ball, too, her pleasure is not restricted to a particular time. She can stay for as long as she likes. This Cinderella, to some extent, also takes the initiative in asserting her sexuality, instead of waiting passively for her prince, as she did two hundred years ago. Bettelheim sees sexual connotations in the slipper, which, in some primitive cultures, stood in the same stead as the wedding ring (Bettelheim, 269). In Basile's "The Cat Cinderella" (1636), the slipper magically darts forward to fit itself onto Zezolla's foot (Bettelheim, 246). In Perrault, (1697), the gentleman dispatched to find the lost bride-to-be, puts it on her. But Aschenputtel (1888), takes the slipper offered by the prince, and puts it on, herself.
In the 20th century, Cinderella is in the process of steadily becoming the New Woman. Although Disney's
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version of Cinderella is based on Perrault's, in some aspects, she is more forward now. In earlier renderings, when the stepsisters have failed the "shoe test", it is always the father who, on being questioned whether there are no other young girls in the household, remembers his daughter in the kitchen, and escorts her to the parlour. But in the Disney film, (the father is dead, anyway), once she overhears that the Duke is coming to find the owner of the shoe, she goes to him herself, without being asked tO COme.
When she comes to the 1970's, in The Slipper & the Rose (1976), Cinderella has shed much of her earlier sugar-sweet passivity. At one point, she tells her stepmother to her face, that she hates her, and that her father never really loved her. Even then, her self-assertion comes only halfway. In this version, the kingdom is threatened by outside invasion, and the only solution seems to be the union of the prince and the princess of the two countries. After all the trouble the prince goes to, in seeking out Cinderella, and bringing her to the castle, at the mere request of the Chamberlain for her to leave the palace that very night, and live for the rest of her life in exile, so that the prince may never find her, she meekly follows his orders. One may argue that what she did was a courageous self-sacrifice for the sake of her country, but if so, she should have remained in exile. But later, when the fairy godmother informs her that the prince is about to marry another, and tells her to get ready to take that other woman's place, she does that, too, thus, not only putting her country in danger, but also disrupting a holy marriage ceremony, by walking across the aisle in full bridal attire, making the Princess Celina swoon for the second time in the film
Cinderella is steadily in the process of coming into her own in the 1984 production of the story's rendering in The Fairy-Tale Theatre. She has a sense of humour unseen in
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her predecessors. She is rebellious, and sometimes so strong in her remarks against her stepmother, that, at one point, she has to be checked by the fairy godmother. But, for all that, she loses none of the charm that endeared her to millions of children through the generations. Neither is her femininity put in question when, defying all fairytale tradition, she initiates the first kiss with Prince Charming.
At the dawn of the millennium, it is heartening to see that the latest version of this all-time epitome of femininity comes a step further in the yet-to-be-released film when, for the first time in fairy-tale history, we have a black Cinderella, whose shoe size, I hear, is a comfortable 7 (Watch Out, 13)
And thus sighs the Feminist, in relief. And lo and behold! She suddenly finds herself transformed from the wicked witch, into the fairy godmother. All her earlier struggles against Society's conventions have not, after all, been in vain. It was fully worthwhile, she says, looking fondly upon Belle and Princess Jasmine, her earlier experiences of being labelled and persecuted.
But can she take her leave now, content at having given the world a new concept of femininity? Maybe not, till the day someone creates a version where the heroine need not necessarily be a beauty to fulfill herself, or have marriage as the inevitable conclusion to the story.
"All these are merely symbolisms," argues the Pedantic. "One must not take them too literally." But that does not leave off the fact that beauty and marriage are emphasized as essentials that every woman should strive for. However much fairy-tale heroines have been "liberated" in recent times, it is still a fact that producers and animators of fairy tales are males, with the sole exception of . Whitney Houseton, who is one of the executive producers of the forthcoming film on Cinderella. Maybe if more
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women came to the fore, the fairy-tale heroine may not necessarily have to be beautiful to achieve her full potential, and be able to find herself without the help of a Prince Charming.
Only then, can the Feminist/Fairy Godmother vanish into thin air, satisfied with having completed her mission of helping the girl child come into her own as an individual, so that she may take her rightful place on an equal plane to that of the male in Society, and live - with or without him - happily ever after.
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Works Cited
Aladdin Dir. Ron Clements & John Musker, Lyrics Tim Rice, Walt Disney Productions, 1992.
Beauty & the Beast Dir. Danny Troob, Lyrics Howard Ashman, Walt Disney Productions, 1991.
Beauty & the Beast Retold by Southgate, Vera, Ladybird Series, 606D, Wills & Hepworth Ltd, Loughborough, 1968.
Bettelheim, Bruno The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning & Importance of Fairy Tales England, St Ives: Clays Ltd, 1976.
"Black beauty" Watch Out 6 June. 1996:13.
Cole, Patrick E & Smilgis, Martha "Aladdin's Magic" Time International No 45, November 9, 1992.
The Completed Illustrated Works of the Brothers Grimm. U.K.: The Bath Press, 1994.
Dawood, NJ, trans, The Thousand & One Nights. Ed. E. V. Rieu. Harmdondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1956) Rep 1961.
Freedman, Kaplan & Sadack Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry The Williams & Wilkins Company, Baltimore, 1975.
Ousby, Ian The Cambridge Guide to English Literature, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
The Slipper & the Rose: The Story of Cinderella Dir. Brian Forbes, Paradise Productions, 1976.
Walt Disney's Giant Story Book. London, Walt Disney Productions, B P C Publishing Ltd, W 1, 1969.
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Dreams Unlimited: The Make-Believe World of Advertisements
Uma Chakravarti
mong the most important shifts that have occurred in the electronic media since the days when the state owned Doordarshan was the sole player in the field is the centrality of advertisements, i.e., the presence of the market in dominating the images and narratives that are put out in its many programmes, whether news, chat shows or serials. Once the government stopped financially supporting the Doordarshan, advertisements began to make their presence. Those of us who have watched the many avatars that the TV industry has undergone in the last two decades will recall the slow entry of ads, first at the beginning and end of the programme, and then more pressing in terms of its capacity to determine the unfolding and timing of the programmes themselves. Privatisation, liberalisation and globalisation have vastly enhanced the dominance of advertising in TV programming and this has had serious consequences for viewing and shaping the reception of messages put out on the electronic media. Since ads are about goods and goods are about
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who can buy them the vast majority of Indians are in reality excluded from the workings of the market even as they are incorporated in other ways. The ads therefore target the 20% of the Indian buying public although it is questionable whether this proportion of people can actually buy many of the goods being advertised on TV. Nevertheless, given the power of the market to sponsor progammes and the fierce competition that exists between the private channels to capture viewership, which in turn is linked to the rates paid for the display of the ads, we have a vicious circle at the centre of which is the market.
Given these factors it is not surprising that all the private nationally operating channels have the same biases in terms of class, caste, gender and region with their focus on urban India and the celebrated 200 million buying public whether it is in terms of targeting the ads, serials or other shows. The naturalising of this segment of India, standing for the whole of India, is marvelously brought out in the Kaun Banega Crorepatiad; Amitabh Bacchan's punch line for participating in the show is: agaraap 20 hazar ke hisaab se kamete ho, kitne saal lagenge ek Crore kamene mein-dus saal, bees saal? Pachas saal lagenge; lekin yahan issi samay, pachas minute ke andar ek crore kamasakte ho! This is a statement that has relevance only for a tiny fraction of our people in terms of earning capacity-how many earn 20,000 a month- but it plays on the dreams of everybody else who is watching, or is waiting in line to be among the watchers. And that is the only other India that the market wishes to target
The only time the real other India comes into focus is in the news during election time or in the form of disaster stories-natural havoc, or class, caste and ethnic violence. But before anything sinks in this reality too is immediately overlaid by the glossy urban India via the mandatory commercial breaks which must go on regardless of the tragedies that the news might fleetingly bring to the
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consciousness of its viewers; 'commerce is clearly above tragedy' and the ads impose their own reality as the camera cuts from the particularities of a tragic event-be it drought deaths, cyclone havoc or violent killings- to the universality of consumption desires. What does this do to our sense of comprehension? Does the other India register even when the camera does focus on it when every two and a half minutes or so our senses are invaded by the ubiquitous lure of goods? Can the electronic media, under the power of the market, communicate the enormity and the complexity of the experiences that people and regions are undergoing in our country?
Given the importance of advertisements in shaping TV viewing and the manipulation of our ways of thinking-and buying-it is important to try and examine the unstated and stated assumptions of the advertisements. Among the most striking features in this segment of programming is the shift that has occurred in portraying women: whereas earlier women were almost invariably used instrumentally to sell goods, many of which they did not use (and this type of ads continues even today) now women are being targeted by the market directly. Further, they are being targeted not merely as consumers of goods but as desirers and active buyers of goods. This was evocatively depicted in the saucy mobile phone ad where a glamorous but completely confident single woman, played by Kavita Kapoor the now famous other woman of Saans, in an expensive restaurant demolishes the confidence of a sophisticated-but decidedly middle agedexecutive type by apparently mistaking him for a waiter; as he moves from his table to hers having misread herseductive conversation with an unknown male on the tiny Nokia, hidden within the palm of her hand, as an invitation to join her she makes her point by firmly stating one black coffee please!' The image of the successful woman whose confidence lies in her ability to be the discriminating buyer grants a new agency to women which is a new
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creation heralding the gender friendly globalised market. New relations are thus being made between consumption, pleasure and culturally specific notions of femininity;' in this context Malini Bhattacharya has persuasively argued that the image of the new woman in advertisements has wider meanings than the mere act of her buying a particular consumer item, and is linked to wider national and international economic processes: it serves the function of demonstrating the vibrancy of the market when even women, and now children, have been drawn into its grip.
A number of changes can also be discerned in the orientation of the ads. Initially women had figured in the ads as buyers mainly in the area of domestic goods; this was particularly so in the celebrated war for possibly one of the largest markets between companies in the soap/ detergent ads. The early ads varied in terms of the constituencies they were targeting: for example the lower middle class investment in family honour at the time of the milni during the reception of the baraat was built into the narrative of a husband's impending humiliation, clad as he is in a yellowing shirt. The husband takes out his frustration by shouting at his wife. Matters are rectified by the miracle wrought by the relevant detergent in the very next frame; the wife has upheld her husband's honour so it is she who gets to wearing the pagri that the men sport at the time of the reception of the baraat as the visual fades out at the end of the clip. The wealthier middle class was represented through the clever ad in which the credit for the choice of the detergent, made by the daughter in law-against the opinion of the mother in law- is appropriated by the mother in law in the famous 'tum hum aur wheeel/rin/surf (I can't remember which), kya team hai. The message in all the ads was that the smartness of women lay in their ability to get the best bargain, typified in the Lalitajiads put out by Surf. These ads, and the war between Surf, Rin and Wheel, continue to play out the
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theme of the smart woman whose pride lies in the startling whiteness of her family's clothing but the narratives of whiteness are also subtly changing. On the one hand the wife's choice of detergent leads to better finances for the household, enhances the husband's image in the office and makes for happiness in the family; once the wife chooses the right product the husband's shirt is so dazzlingly transformed that his boss, who never noticed him before, now not only notices him but also straightaway gives him a promotion and a posting abroad; the wife's low self esteem, a consequence of the husband's depressive state of mind, because of being ignored by the boss, thus gets its own required boost. All in all, the market has effective solutions for every situation ranging from stagnant careers to the ups and downs of everyday marital relations! On the other the hand dazzling white makes for a better-dressed careerwoman herself as she storms into male bastions: A woman's confidence, as she steps into a meeting filled with male executives as their boss, is propped up by, or perhaps even contingent upon, the dazzling whiteness of her Sari. One ad that plays on the emergence of the new woman shows a woman prancing about in a dazzling white naval uniform but what is left subtly unstated is whether it is her uniform or her husband's that she is play acting in; the image is left open ended for the viewer to fill in-thus satisfying both constituencies, the working woman in a newly opened field of work and the full time housewife' for whom a career is still in the realm of Secret desire. And finally, the realm of desire itself is very cleverly played out by linking adolescent love with whiteness of the clothes-a smart move with something as mundane as washing powder-in one ad a young girl's blue streaked School shirt leads to her humiliation as boys chortle 'Onile dhabbo wali' to her on the school bus. When mother sorts the problem out with the correct washing powder the boys sing a chorus to welcome her into the world of male attention with the jingle
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'aja Sawariya, aaaaaa!" In another ad a young girl seeking to be noticed by her secret love wears the same blouse her sister wore when her jijaji first noticed her; of course the blouse's yellowing condition is first miraculously restored through the use of the right washing powder. The blouse works its magic and the boy notices the girl, and even drops her back to her home. The point to note however is the gendered nature of the ad where it is men or boys who must notice girls (otherwise they will just sit on the shelf) which is the underlying motif in both ads: it is explicitly stated in the second, jiji apne kya kiya jisse jiju ki nazar tum parpadi.' We can see that while the ads have become trendier their ideological bases have remained more or less the same.
The range of ads beamed on TV now also indicate that the field for buying has been vastly extended beyond detergents, cosmetics and the kitchen-the longstanding domain of women's goods-to other objects but that they are still centred on the home, the special domain of all women, whether in careers or not; ads of high class plumbing have moved from thieves stealing the stunning faucets to the more trendy depiction of a beautiful wife, whose sole occupation seems to be to shop, seductively pleading over the phone (we may note that the sequence is also enacted by the actress playing Manisha in Saansthe seductress par excellence by now) with her harried and hardworking husband while he is busy at work. Another ad for expensive plumbing fixtures has the young and attractive wife of a very tubby husband packing to leave home; the husband throws things at her for her to take away along with herself in an angry fit but all ends well as the husband lets drop the crucial information that he has got her what she was fixated on-the beautiful taps. Both ads norm the male as the earner/provider and the female as the non earning but persistent consumer of goods; the latter ad also makes domestic violence a humourous playing out of everyday domesticity and in
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any case the market has quick fix solutions for every marriage whatever be its apparent ills.
The appearance of the new working woman and/or the assertive woman who knows what she wants is one situation where role reversals are brought in but always with a dose of humour; husbands now either make the tea for the working wife (on the whole working women are rare in ads), or claim to do so, as a necessary element in the new man's ability to please and care for the woman in his life so that power relations within the home are shown to have dissolved (these would be regarded as the gender friendly ads!); in these ads husbands are either charming fools who are caught out lying because the wife is so smart (as in the Duncan Tea ad where the husband cannot say how much tea he used) or they are appliers of soothing balm upon the fraying nerves of their hysterical working wives, via the hot cup of tea. The role reversals however only go as far as making tea, or using the washing machine to atone for clumsy actions (one even featured Kapil Dev)—all of which are designed to make the wife happy but ensuring that this is done without too much exertion; as one husband puts it endearingly kuch paane ke liye kuch dhona bhi padta hai, you have to wash a little if you want to gain a little! Only in one ad does the husband attempt to make something as basic as a chapati: the rest of his family watches with dumbstruck awe his attempts to bring perfection (an attribute which is the monopoly of the male, naturally) to the making of the roti. It is clear that no one will have dinner that night so it might be better for mama to deal with the chapatis if life is to proceed normally.
Two ads which have appeared on the TV screen recently are interesting in terms of the way gender sensitive ads are working to both recognise women's labour and to reconsolidate the sexual division of labour with men, whether seen or unseen, bringing in the income and
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women slogging at home. Both ads are about backache, a natural consequence of the heavy labour women put into running, maintaining and refurbishing the household. In the first ad the husbands sisters have just been on a visit (a stressful experience is implied) and the wife moans about her aching back; while the husband is in the frame it is the adoloscent daughter of the couple who responds to the mother's disrtress recognising that she is bound to be in pain as she has been standing and slogging all day; it is the daughter who then applies the balm while father says,''sach, ek beti hi ma ka dard samajh sakti hai," exonerating himself from any responsibility to either reducing his wife's labour or even engaging in the minimum labour of applying the balm. In the second ad the ideological message is even more direct: married daughter is home on a visit; as she collapses into a chair she cries, ah meri kamar Mother is very concerned and asks the daughter how she is treating it and finding that all that daughter can mamage is to lie down for a bit mother takes over by applying Move. The ad dissolves on the lines exclaimed by mother,'na baba na! Kamar dard mein no laparwahi: kamar fit to parivar fit.' Of course it is the woman's back in good condition that keeps the household going and we are not going to have any change in that, Move or no Move. -
The adaptation of ads to local specificities' is very evident in the incorporation of the parents-in-law into the family ads; the typical Indian household shifts from the joint to the nuclear depending upon the particular conSumer item being marketed; kitchen goods in particular often play on the mother-in-law-daughter-in-law relationship often seeking to subvert, through its images, the power of the mother-in-law; the crucial alliance that leads to success is between the clever daughter-in-law and the gender friendly maker of goods; no woman's movement is necessary in India to counter the power of the motherin-law as the young wife has now been emancipated by
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the market! Just recall the very clever visual of the daughter-in-law dancing in the kitchen to music playing through her headphones while the mother-in-law reels off a list of forty odd masalas for her to grind from the next room-all quite unnecessary as we have MDH masalas to take care of dictatorial and demanding mothers-in-law. The market provides ingenious ways by which a bahu can be free as well as please the SaaS (or her son as the case may be when the mother in law is not actually in the home as in the Everest Sambar Masala ad) while making sure that the market keeps the sexual division of labour, and the ideologies that go with it, intact. A recent ad on the print medium plays out the Saas-bahu theme, suitably and patriotically located around the Kargil war which ensures that the atta is as well checked out as the various checkpoints worked in Kargil. This is really stretching the mother-in-law- daughter in law theme to giddy limits.
While the mother-in-lavis oftena fixture in the visuals suggesting that the traditional Indian household is part of the contemporaneous present the ads also norm the nuclear family unit as father, mother and son; this is the new Indian (hindu) household, a complete unit itself; these ads are too many to enumerate and go right across from items like cars to a very tender depiction of a father and son in an ad for ICICI mutual bonds. Accompanying messages that go with this happy trio are images where the object of the nurturing mother is mostly the son, (D'Cold-mummy sab band band, sundrop oil; huggies nappies; Bournvita, Complan, Aqua Guard where mama makes sure that her son grows up to manhood drinking clean water, Mosquito repellents etc etc. etc) very rarely a daughter. Visuals dwell lovingly over cooing mothers whether the product is digestive water, baby powder, nappies, or decongestants. A Huggies nappy ad is very telling: two mothers of coincidentally two little Sons lavish tender loving care on the lights) of their lives by speaking of the marvels of Huggies! It is as if baby daugh
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ters aren't being born, or if they are, they do not require baby powder or gripe water or Huggies as they come packaged to survive without mother's loving touch. Daughters appear only to extend messages such as the washing of pretty clothes (Whirlpool Whirlpool-you and Whirlpool: the worlds best homemakers!) in what have been called the cutified ads, in the context of women focussed goods like washing machines, micro wave ovens, refrigerators or even Pilsbury Atta; when they appear daughters usually feature along with a son not instead of him. If one absorbs this along with the new phenomena of the routinisation of the amniocentesis test among the middle classes, even at the time of the first pregnancy to ensure that the first-born is a son, and the census data which shows that the sex ratio has fallen well below 900 to 1000 males in certain districts/states of north India, the implications of such norming is far from idiosyncratic-it is sinister.
But the seductive power of images is such that while Some of these messages may be working to create, or reinforcing, stereotypes at the sub conscious level at the conscious level we are merely responding or absorbing the narrative created by the ad; take for example the ads targeting children-mainly male children. The intention is to create both an immediate demand and a hooking into the product for the future. While some of these are 'funny' like the brattish boy who claims that his mother has a continuous refrain of na na for everything the brat wantsexcept of course milk chocolate, which she is happy to give him- others are extremely subtle and creative in communicating the message without ramming it down the throat of the viewers. One such is the very well crafted and beautifully enacted Mc Donalds mein hain kuch baat ad. Which parent will not be moved by the agony of the parents in the ad who watch their son freeze on stage, unable to utter a word. Papa is not only marvelously understanding he can restore the child to his normal high spir
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ited unself consciously performing self. The viewers are moved, McDonalds is happy but is that all? The beautiful relationship is the creation of the father, the boy's confidence restored is also the masterly work of the father and the appreciative attention for the charming boy in the restaurant is led by the male manager of the place while the women including the mother occupy the backdrop. Is it accidental that the broken self-confidence of the boy can only be restored by the innovative actions of the father, here depicted as taking him to McDonalds? After many viewings of the same ad I continued to be moved but I was also left wondering at its subtle messages.
And finally if one goes by the ads of today the debate on the existence of two India's has now been decisively resolved, as there is only one India as far as the private channels go-a vibrant, rich and glossy urban India. Undeveloped, rural India has disappeared and in its place we often have a transformed ethnicised 'countryside' where the only structures are havelis set against a desert backdrop and the only people are beautiful women in diaphanous clothing or men in Digjam or Siyaram Suitings. The phenomenon of Indian women hitting the limelight as the world's beauty super power, as Ms Heptullah put it on behalf of a gloating 'nation', has been fully incorporated into this ethnic India via the Lara Dutta Siyaram ads-shot in advance of the Miss World contest and in anticipation of her winning-coming home to Siyaram' says the accompanying jingle suitably. Occasionally you may get a turban clad dehati, a comic figure for the most part, using Bharat telecom to connect with his son, who has already been absorbed into urban India, or a camel riding man exhorting the viewer to join the Cadbury chocolate eating fraternity but that is the extent of the countryside in the world of ads. It appears that nobody washes clothes in rural India-not even those colourful turbans that we see in other ads; somehow such themes do not seem to make good copy. In sum rural India on ads is invariably
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Rajasthan in keeping with its tourist value for foreigners. Perhaps in the view of the market the urban Indian is as much a foreigner in India as the foreign tourist who will believe, or want to believe, that village India is only peopled by heroic Rajput men and beautiful Rajput women who have successfully bridged the tradition-modernity divide, always of course retaining what is best in Indian tradition-its chaste women a la the heroine of the popular film Des Pardes. One can then conveniently forget the reality of rural India with its caste, class and gender violence: its Bathes, and Bhanwari Devis which do not even register in the consciousness of our TV viewing consuming elite, or such embarrassing politicians as Laloo Yadav, who does register but whom glossy urban India and the metropolitan media hates with a passion it normally does not display for anything or anyone else, except of course for Mayawati Images that stay in the consciousness of this class are those of happy families, a happiness that is the result of the market catering to their every need and their every desire whether at the conscious or sub-conscious level.
The happy family ads, a running theme of the ads, are exemplified in the new preferred setting for ads-that greatest of all family occasions-marriage, set always in a north Indian household; the copy for these ads was provided by that famous 'shaadi video' film Hum Apke Hain Kaun! with its unending round of festivities around marriage. The fourteen Songs and dances have set the tone for the marriage context ads-selling from Pan Parag in the “chummi de do' among dancing baraatis, to Leher Bhujia (kya karen control nahi hota hai), and VIP suitcases with its complement of NRI gum chewing son and "mom dad ki pasand" desi bride who transforms into a sexy leg revealing companion in keeping with NRI locations in the west, and finally to the khane walo ko khane ka bahana chahiye singers and dancers in the Cadbury Chocolate ad. Whatever Indians sell and buy that great Indian institu
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tion, the arranged marriage, celebrated through song and dance is intact: we may desire the goods multinationals provide but we have our own unique culture premised on the Indian family. While some of these features are merely Suggested through a series of ads one recent ad explicitly articulates the tenderness and purity of the relationship in an arranged marriage; it is interesting that the De Beers diamond ad begins with a direct allusion to an arranged marriage in the husky voice of the wife-hame aurone baandha, par na jaane kab voh rishta mein badal gaya- with the visual now focussing on the child of that union, which naturally is the occasion for a De Beer diamond solitaire, both of which work to transform the arranged marriage into a love marriage'. The profit driven highly transnational market is eminently capable of adapting to local specificities providing the reassuring touch of Indian culture to an otherwise global setting. The viewers can thus be located both here and in the unspecified west, at least in practical terms vis a vis their choice of goods and more generally vis a vis the realm of desire. The dual location, one step here and another one there is best captured in an ad for viewing Star World: a pretty young thing is at the centre of a party in a restaurant/five star hotel, or expensive home surrounded by high spirited, trendy, Screaming young men and women. There's only one cloud on the horizon of the Miss pretty young thing-what will she do for entertainment- now that I'm going off to the US, as she coyly puts it 2 Never fear-she'll have the real thing in the authentic US locale in the company of Ally McBeal, Baywatch and what else have you. The market clearly has dreams for everyone even if it doesn't have solutions for most of their real needs.
I cannot help returning to the theme of who precisely is the target for all these ads and the closed circuit system in which the relationship between the market, the products, a lifestyle, and a viewer are tied together. Should I
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be looking for representations of the concerns of real people (like working women performing a range of functions in a range of social locations) or the other India in the programmes when the media, both print and TV, have already successfully erased the existence of the other India. The Smart young men of post globalised India: chartered accountants, executives, independent businessmen, students and such others-just watch them on the various quizzes with bumper prizes; they can answer questions on cricket, films, finances, European currency, cars and suchlike, but when it comes to Indian history or politics (who is the longest ruling chief minister?) they don't know. You need hardly be surprised that a very smart young man did not know the meaning of of the word dalit. Dalits do not occupy their world: Cielo's, mobile phones, De Beers diamond's do. Dreams unlimited but for whom and to what end?
*I am grateful for the material on tapes provided to me for viewing by the Centre For Advocacy Research, Delhi and the inputs of the research team at the Centre.
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Book Reviews
Thiruchandran, Selvy (ed.) 1994, Images. Karunaratne & Sons Ltd., Colombo
"I think we are beginning to realise how much terror lies at the heart of the paradise of communication'
Images is the result of a multi-lingual media-monitoring committee that was set up by the Women's Education and Research Centre to monitor the print and visual media for s set period. The book shows us that the media is promoting a myth. A myth is not defined by the object of its message or meaning but the way in which it is used to convey certain types of general concept. In contemporary media images women are either homemakers or seductresses. The multiplicity of women's experience is whittled down to an essentialist binary opposition. This means that the media forms part of a process of ideological naturalisation of social and sexual relationships. The media wields this ideological power because it offers a range of programs/texts but the assortment is something in which the consumer/viewer has little choice.
The message is that the media are the message. Reality vanishes in an endless spiral of simulacra (Baudrillard, 1981). Landscapes are replaced by mediascapes. The body is invaded by signs written on it by the restless forms of advertising and publicity, which present us with selves we can or cannot present in real life.’
1. Baudrillard, J(1987)Forget Foucault Forget Buadrullard, p. 105Semiotext(e)
New York
2 Lieteke Van Vucht Tijssen. "Women Between Modernity and postmodernity" in Turner, B (ed) 1990 Theories of Modernity & Postmodernity p. 147-163
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Selvy Thiruchandran's introduction urges us to look at the media as a signifying system in which women function as a sign. I said earlier that the media is a myth but we must remember that the material of myths pressuposes signifying consciousnesso Semiology postulates a relation between two terms a signifier (soundimage) and a signified (concept). The third thing, the sign is the arbitrary linkage between the concept and the image. The political significance of the arbitrariness of the sign is something which feminists should consider. Imagine an advertisement producer wishing to convey the concept of femininity for a new soap product. The image of a mother (a beautiful lady with long hair) and her daughter washing their hands, after completing the washing up comes to mind. The analyst will distinguish between the meaning of the image - mother and daughter engaged in blissful domesticity - and its form as a signifier, for femininity. The ordinary viewer however may not respond in either of these ways. The image may be treated as the embodiment of femininity, which will be experienced through, or embodied in this image. The signifier woman, is different from the sign since the sign only offers one aspect of the signifier. But in contemporary media discourse in Sri Lanka it is the sign of woman - either homemaker or seductress which predominates.
When people actually think about the world in terms of signs then there are problems. A sign builds on a value system or a dominant norm or social practice in a period of history, a country or Social group. It is the assumed, created or mythic connotations of woman which become the sign whereas her real signification is marginalised. This is dangerous since the media only promotes certain roles for women, reminds the audience of these roles and then
3 For a full discussion of this please read Barthes, Roland (1972) Muthologies,
Trans. A. Lavers, Johnathan Cape, London, p.109-131.
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imposes these roles on us. In this way the media acts as an ideological channel for re-inforcing the status quo.
The Frankfurt School in a critique of the culture industry pointed out that in modernity the world becomes more what is immediately given in experience. This means that a distinction between surface understandings and depth understandings evaporates. Appearance becomes constitutive of existence. Whilst those living in liberal democracies assume that they have rights and freedoms, in practice, these are severely circumscribed by the power of the ruling class, in Marxian terms, whose values and interests are perpetuated by the mass media and the “culture industry”. Through the media the concept of the new is increasingly chimerical. The Frankfurt School criticised popular culture, the media in particular since it was not democratic but a form of "stylised barbarism'. Walter Benjamin felt that the cinema captures the human incapacity to return the gaze: the eyes have lost the ability to look or, as James Baldwin would write, "the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness". Douglas Kellner offers a richer description arguing that it is better to see popular entertainment as a complex process of contrast moments of desire and its displacement, anticipation of hope and its repression - access to society's dreams and nightmares. It is simultaneously an ideological celebration of the status quo and utopian moment of transcendence.
I felt that of all the articles in Images, Mala de Alwis article captures the ambiguity of the culture industry. Mala focuses on Sinhala formula films, recognising their high popularity. She draws on the work of Laleen Jayamanne to point out the predictable "scenes of attraction'. The social context in text in which the films are
4 Baldwin, James "Sonny's Blues", Penguin 1995 edition, London, p3.
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viewed is recognised as part of courtship ritual in Sri Lanka. Yet Mala shows that the content is also important. Her aim is to understand the sociological formations of gender identity and gendered subject position through a post-structuralist feminist reading of Socio cultural construction. She also makes use of Connell's discussion of a "gender order to explore how gender identity is formed. Connell stresses the need for an historical analysis and an analysis of the institutionalisation of interests-class, gendered and ethnic. This is a "process' approach which treats the state and economic development as a "thing" which enables a focus on social practices which produce and reproduce Social structures.
Connell's approach looks at how female marginalisation is sustained by micro-level social practices in everyday life, which through their repetition produce and reproduce gender relations in everyday life, at home, at work, within the state and other social institutions. This allows an insight into how gender roles are actually maintained at a practical level and the mechanism whereby roles are assigned to a particular gender. In the context of the cinema hall, girls are brought drinks and snacks and play a passive role in relation to their "boyfriend'. As in the films, the girlfriend is his love interest, a cause for display.
The cinema appropriates objects, turns them into images and wraps them in connotations and reasonances that are to be collectively understood. But certain images dominate over others. In Sinhala cinema it is the "hypermasculinization of toughness and dominance" which predominates. Mala shows us that this image is expected in a discussion of Madhusamaya, a film which was unpopular with the audience. Unpopular because impotence was a theme. This highlights the fact that it is masculinity or the "male gaze" which is catered to: through film. Or in Laura Mulvey's words "in-built patterns of
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pleasure and identification impose masculinity as a point of view; a point of view which is also manifest in the general use of the masculine third person".
Mala notes that Sinhala audiences remain "hooked' on the more cliched formula films because they epitomise the articulation of heterosexual desire which forms the bedrock of patriarchal society. The formula films also provide action and romance, escapism. The Frankfurt School would probably comment that formula films'popularity stems from an atrophy of independent critique. Mala suggests that a form of resistance may be to watch counter-hegemonic films which offer different subject positions for women. But how popular are these counter-hegemonic films? Mala also reminds us that the audience is capable of a "nuanced" reading. This means that it is not easy to condemn formula films outright. As Kellner notes the consumption of popular culture is about hoping for more and yet being offered the status quo. Whilst people can "read" formula films in numerous ways there is no doubt that the majority offilms only offer a certain subject position for women which contributes to the ideologicalisation of "essential” sexual differences. Neluka Silva's article on advertising in Sri Lanka is further evidence of the limited subject positions offered to women through the media.
Images offers us interesting articles on the content of the media. However, the articles in the book fail to analyse why it is that our age has become the "age of simultation" in which the sign becomes more real than the reality. In the media the idea of woman and her role in society is predominantly articulated in reference to her past. The appeal of the past is obvious. It is safe. The past provides comfort when the present only offers the capacity to change. What is needed is an analysis of the link between the configuration the media has assumed and so
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cial and economic changes leading up to this. Images plan for action includes lobbying newspapers and conscientizing journalists. A very important proposal is to provide an alterriative media by women's groups. In order to offer new images for women I also think it is crucial to play subversive games with traditional codes. The photography of Cindy Sherman being a Western example. Women artists and performers should transgress the boundaries of what woman is and offer us multiple and complex conceptions of social identity. After all identity is "production", which is never complete and can be reconstituted. This of course is not enough. Media expansion is linked to an increasing market-dominated commodification of images. Metaphors of society as a cybernetic-code driven by images (Baudrillard, 1984) represent an evolutionary leap in the production process. The regulation of consumption and production of demand have become so important that their production system - advertising and the image is transvalued from a derivative to a primary condition of social maintenance. The power of signs then becomes a representation of an historic shift in the weighing of internal elements in the means of production.
We need to recognise that social relations and structure are incorporated into the circulatory dynamic of images. The invasion of Star TV into TV owning Sri Lankan homes also brings with it lifestyle advertising as its popular psychology. The Images committee recommends that efforts be taken to break the male monopoly in the media. This is crucial. In order to challenge gender hierarchies in
5 The artist explores narrative form and investigates the way we read situations when cued by location and character types. Krauss, Rosalind, & Norman Bryson. Cindy Sherman 1975 — 1993. New York:Rizzoli, 1993
6 Wexler, P. "citizenship in the semiotic society". in Turner, B. (ed) 1990
Theories of Modernity & Postmodernity p 164-175.
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advertising, TV and media production we will need to challenge existing social relations, in particular the fact that it is men who own and control most of the distribution of resources.
Yolanda Foster
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Nivedini Blissfully Eva — “Kindling fancies into poesy”
"Blissfully.” By Eva Ranaweera - 32 poems, Hitech Prints, 2000 KAO
It was John Clare who wrote of the poet "Kindling fancies into poesy' in his beautiful poem. "To the rural Muse.' Thank God Eva Ranaweera did not have to wait 150 years to have these, her newest collection, published. Poor John Clare had to do just that. Blissfully, too, Eva has again shown a positively youthful delight in poetry, much like what Masefield admitted to when he said that delight in poetry is strongest in youth.
Eva Ranaweera is a woman of deep emotions. To truly know her work is to read her with eyes purged by the euphrasy of understanding. I feel, personally that there is no form of authorship in which the pains are so great. Admittedly, it is hard to sell verse" but Eva, with her mansions full of inspiration and her rooms full of a signal art of verse structure, has always earned praise, recognition and careful attention.
I have been, at times, forced to accept (pretty enough) the works of amateur versifiers people who demand publicity. No spirit touches of them and, God knows, they wouldn't know the slopes of Parnassus even if they slid down them on their adequate backsides. Eva is different. In "Blissfully" I find I can hardly keep pace with her stride. She certainly knows how to beat out her music, whether it is Singho's soldier son standing in line, tin plate in hand, for his ratio of army food, standing in line, to be a bloody gulp of terrorist food too. This is the sort of appropriate expression that Eva excels in. There is always that perfect felicity of phrase:
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wounded rotting in the desert awaiting hospital trip fed on rise and sand sand and rice and dhal, dhal, dhal, Singhos ruralson.
There is none of that distastefulness of solvenly, unacceptable verse. Lately, and sadly, we have had surfeit of miserable poetasters who, as was once said "... sacrifice the sentiment to sound /And cut truth short to make a perfect round."
After all, let the old rhyming structure go hang. The expression of imaginative truth in any form is poetry, and we feel the hot fervency as Singho's son, “enemy surrounded sing song mosquito in ear ... buried his face as bullets whisked from gun..."
Are we not ransacking our villages to feed the Tigers? In "Blissfully", Eva has not only weighed the meanings and qualities of the words she chose, but had also combined them so realistic, yet so uncommon a manner, that even the thought of being "given away" screams the question. Does my father really love me? Who gives away Someone he loves? Are all the diamond earrings, bangles, necklaces, Saripins, cottage and bungalow given to demonstrate love? Who really cares what darling daughter thinks... what can she think? Why, her father has even taken her name away from her. Suddenly, we see the harshness of the worlds common voice but cleverly softened by the list - the detailed dowry, the price of sacrifice. This poem, "My listing", shows strength of a rare order. And yet, how ordinary it all could be. Give-away parents, given-away daughters. Is this so extra-ordinary? Millions give away, millions are given away.... even the priest at the altar asks: "who gives away this woman?' and the father says that first "I do." But Eva has treaded
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SNivedini this field and made of this thought a flower. Here lies true
sensitivity - as if suddenly she has sung the one true song millions did not care to sing.
There are many I know who tell me they do not care fair poetry. It's a sort of unexplored country to them. They think poetry too "sentimental' - no appeal to the practical. Well, there is sentiment, surely. Take Eva's "Remembering You". Where, she asks, does remembrance hide? Ah, déjà vu, what jogs memory? Is it that our world moves jet-fast today and we have neither time nor patience for that 'buried niche of time'?
Somewhere, Love lies buried too and there are those starless sea-nights and the wind that canters up the steep Sigiri rock. Love is a great diarist. Old, yellowed pages, maybe, but memory embraces the essence of all the arts and the aureole of each. This is why Eva's lines glow so:
remembering you, just remembering fragrantly and life running contentedly murmuring like a purring cat up and down within the same format
What I find in this slim book is life's great fact of periodicity. It's like the swing of the Earth through space - as complex as the suicide brother in "The Rebel"; regular and rhythmic as, "Sri Dalada Sri".
Long ago, philosophers called the manifestations of poetry the pulse of the universe. May be this also contains that spirit of periodic recurrence - a spirit that Eva has found and joyfully brought to the fore. We find this in "Travelling with a picked-Up Girl" the rain, raining as only the rain will raising the puddles of life's frustrations, of human bewilderment, so tiresome when even talk becomes a drizzle, damp, clammy, joyless.
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It is the vision that takes precedence. No easy thing, this, to perceive a poet's vision. "The mute" is not complex but underscores realities that shock: realities created by passion, character and action. Here is poverty power interpreted at first hand - a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" as Wordsworth put it. True the emotions could be recollected in a later, quieter time, but as the saga of Leela and Joseph is played out, the quietude disappears and the emotion begins to exert again.... and again:
Joseph who sent Leela into a noiseWilderness to rattle tin cans hears grief words bashed her nightly and kept the nut Smile hidden within
This collection of poems perceived, then recollects. Every one holds an individual point of view, true, but each is a sort of stir-fry of the heart, not really generalised from personal experience but a true embodiment of abstractions.
It is sometimes difficult to review a book of poems. One needs to acquire the poet's stand-point and even forfeit one's own individually. But Eva Ranaweera has, most blissfully, gone her way, done it again her way and with the strength to stand proud and say, "this is my way."
Blissfully, I accept, for I am quite content-keeping faith with Maya on agentle bridge between self and self rocking happily
blissfully.
Carl Muller (Courtesy the Island.)
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