‘Kalindi’: This 1930 novel recognised the rights of women and their power to dismantle caste

In 1912, the very year Shridhar Vyantakesh Ketkar completed his PhD in sociology from Cornell University on America’s east coast, another Indian, Har Dayal was drawing attention in California in the west for his radical writings. It was sheer coincidence; I was reading Ketkar’s novel Kalindi in Shanta Gokhale’s easy-paced, lucid translation – and simultaneously trying to understand Har Dayal’s roving, multi-faceted, political life.

Har Dayal was among the founders of the Ghadar Party in the US that advocated a mass uprising in India against British rule. In October 1912, after resigning from Stanford University where he was professor of Indian philosophy and Sanskrit, Har Dayal drafted his “anarchist’s creed”. It advocated, among other things, an end to private property, a commitment to science and rationality, and equality among people, regardless of differences among them. It also spoke against institutions such as marriage, that perpetuated the “enslavement of women”. A new society, Har Dayal advocated, would be created on the basis of friendship between men and women.

Two of a kind

In Shridhar Ketkar’s novel, written in 1930 – originally titled Brahmankanya in Marathi – friendship and its equivalents, empathy and mutual understanding, emerge as a bridge of understanding between people divided on the basis of gender, caste, and community.

It is friendship, Ketkar suggests, that leads to new formulations of society and everyday living. In the absence of societal support, Ketkar believed, it is friendship that provides support, helps transcend old ways of thinking, and shows new ways forward. Ketkar and Har Dayal, both born in 1884, never ran into each other. Ketkar left the US around the same time as Har Dayal. Unlike the latter who remained in “exile” in Europe for most of his life, Ketkar returned to India, where he pursued scholarly interests.

Like Har Dayal, however, Ketkar was committed to egalitarianism, to creating a society devoid of differences, whether from birth – as ordained by caste – or property. Caste was a special preoccupation of Ketkar’s; his PhD thesis was on the history of caste in India. Caste, he understood, bolstered by brahmin domination and the prevalence of patriarchy, stood impervious to reform and any attempt to change. Individual acts of resistance achieved little in the absence of wider support and acceptance.

Through his novel, Ketkar attempted to show how radical acts of transgression, or individual attempts
to act against accepted trends can turn out incomplete, even self-serving, and in the final analysis, tragic. In this instance, it reminded me of UR Ananthamurthy’s celebrated Kannada novel, Samskara, where the death of a brahmin, a renegade within his community, leads to a questioning of norms and rules.

Radicalism to Ketkar was not a one-act performance or egotistical act, but a lifelong crusade to reform society. That acts of rebellion can isolate an individual is something Appasaheb Dagge, a prominent brahmin of Pune, learns to great bitterness when he marries Shanta, a non-brahmin, born of a woman who was herself the mistress of a prominent man. The Prarthana Samaj, a reformist organisation that spoke up for inter-caste marriage, and widow remarriage, is absent in its support.

Rebellion and its consequences

Appasaheb’s solo act of courage, the “self-sacrifice” that Appasaheb hopes will make him a revered figure, however, makes for all kinds of confusion for his family – especially his older daughter, the eponymous Kalindi of the novel, and his son, Satyavrat. The isolation, and the gossip about them has made them virtual “outcasts”. Appasaheb’s children are also not accepted into the echelons of brahmin society. Despite this, Appasaheb will not countenance Kalindi marrying someone eligible, for his mother was once a “dancing girl”. Pushed into a corner, Kalindi opts for someone eminently unsuitable; she becomes mistress to a man, Shivsharan, a smalltime merchant.

Kalindi’s rebellion isn’t an impulsive act. Her leaving home, and becoming someone’s mistress, doesn’t indicate an impetuousness, or her loose morals, as she says in an exchange with her brother, Satyavrat. But it was the only step left her owing to society’s hypocrisy. Born of a non-brahmin mother, the brahmins wouldn’t accept her or her siblings, and since caste decided marriage, she would never, contrary to her father’s hopes, find a brahmin husband. If her father had been a true rebel, he would never have turned down the young man’s proposal.

In her response to her father, Kalindi says:

“Who can say whether you married Aai out of a liberal impulse or a desire for fame? As it happens, your children’s status does not come from the nobility of your intentions. Your generosity did no harm to you but it has greatly harmed your children’s future. In what way did you suffer for your liberalism? Only to the extent that priests would not officiate at your ancestors’ death rituals. But you remained a brahmin, your status intact. And what are we?”  

This episode, right at the beginning of the book, will soon bring about tumultuous transformations in the family. The drama builds up slowly though. The consternation at Kalindi’s “elopement” emerges as discussions between Kalindi and Satyavrat, in exchanges between Kalindi’s mother Shantabai, and her grandmother, Manjula, and, in Kalindi’s own reflections. It is caste that decides whom one can marry, Kalindi understands, and in her case, born of a marriage that is not accepted, for all reformist-talk, this leaves her nowhere.

Shanta Gokhale writes in her introduction that much of Ketkar’s didactic style turned his readers off. The novel in original had long passages detailing, among other things, a story that appeared in a magazine, a scholar’s own treatise, and a new labour theory, as propounded by one of the characters. As translator, Gokhale explains she trimmed these passages considerably, and this, as well as the shorter chapters, make the novel soon pick up pace. The style is very much of a novel of the 1930s, but the themes and its treatment, as in this translation, make it quite contemporary. What gives this work a modern day appeal are its spunky, spirited women characters, Kalindi, Esther, and Kalindi’s younger sister, Usha.

Friendships matter

The ostracism Kalindi is subjected to, following her decision to be Shivsharanappa’s mistress, her self-imposed isolation and later abandonment by Shivsharanappa, lead Kalindi to take life into her own hands. She does her own breaking away, but this time, she finds support, in the form of friendship. First in the form of an old schoolmate, Esther Killekar, and then a young man, Ramrao Dhadphale.

These friendships help Kalindi get a job in Mumbai, far away from the gossip circles of Pune, and then understand in various ways, how society around her is shaped. For example, the cleavages in the Bene Israeli community to which Esther belongs. The enduring poverty of workers that is in contrast to their employers, the textile mill owners, whose wealth derived from credit, are insights she gains from Ramrao. She also understands that the choices a woman makes are not born of independent will, but pre-decided, in many instances, by her family’s own circumstances.

Through these insights, Ketkar shows how individual acts, and lives, have wider societal level connections and consequences. The steps she takes, the friendships that sustain her, are how Ketkar believed, caste could be dismantled. Not with a revolution, or even a radical breaking away, but a new sense of morality, and a recognition of women’s rights, the choices they make, especially if they opt to live life as single mothers or by following a profession of their own choosing. And this thought is, as one realises on reaching the novel’s end, revolutionary in itself.

Vajinath Shastri, the irascible, wise professor to whom a distraught Appasaheb finally goes for
advice, has this to say:

“…all religious rules have been made by men who belong to the class that provides for its women. Why should they be imposed on all other women? Seventy five per cent of women in this country work to earn bread for their families. To inflict on them rules meant for the remaining twenty five per cent is sheer injustice. ..Women made the nation. They were the nation, not men. If the greater part of the male populace were to die, women would still ensure the continuance of future generations of human beings, using the men that remained.”  

Kalindi{Brahmankanya}, Shridhar V Ketkar, translated from the Marathi by Shanta Gokhale, Speaking Tiger Books.