‘Maria, Just Maria’: A defiant story of female madness with a wicked sense of humour

Madness has always been threatening to those who imagine themselves sane. In his Madness and Civilization (1961), tracing the history of the institutionalisation of insanity, Michel Foucault wrote of the “ships of fools” of medieval Europe – carrying madmen away from the city, getting rid of the contagion of their abnormality: “It is for the other world that the madman sets sail in his fools’ boat; it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks. The madman’s voyage is at once a rigorous division and an absolute Passage. In one sense, it simply develops, across a half-real, half-imaginary geography, the madman’s liminal position on the horizon of medieval concern (…) the land he will come to is unknown – as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him.” Foucault’s madman is non-conforming and non-compliant; the outlier, pushed to the margins of society and community; subject, for his dereliction, to disciplining and control.

Reformulating madness

In synergistic symmetry with Foucault, Sandhya Mary writes the story of Maria, in Maria, Just Maria, who, by her own admission, has become mad “without a clear and concise reason.” An inmate at a psychiatric hospital where the narrative opens, Maria had stopped speaking after the death of her grandfather, Geevarghese, her Appachan, father figure, best friend, and emotional anchor. Her refusal to speak or to participate in social rituals of grief and loss, pushes her into what those around her deem madness. Since the beginning of the medical discourse of the mind, madness has often been imaged as a “female malady”, ranging from hysteria to irrationality to simply being “overly emotional”. Mary’s non-conformist women, with Maria at the forefront, re-formulate madness, becoming, as Thomas S Szasz has posited in Ideology and Insanity, women who refuse to “accept with resignation the insignificant identity of a domestic slave, as (t)he(i)r “normal” counterpart might”. Maria’s madness, far from being debilitating, becomes, in the words of the author, a celebration of everything “not normal”.

That the narrative is suffused in Maria’s subjectivity is evident in clever narrative choices like chapter titles. Kerala, the setting of the novel, is “Maria’s Land”, a complicated place where people love talking politics and the most important “national festival”, is the elections. Subversively tongue-in-cheek, Mary describes the overt political awareness of people, engrossed in arguments over “the military coup that happened in some faraway country they had not even heard of before. And as democracy progressed without major hitches in their own land, they craved the refreshing feel of autocracy.” Little Maria’s Kerala is the Kerala of toddy shops, incessant political debate, growing Communism in the wake of the excesses of the Emergency, close-knit communities, and complex family dynamics. As she grows up, her worldview expands outside of the state into an awareness of what it means to belong to an oppressed people, to be a Third World citizen whose country has no money to expend on the destitute, no great leaders to fight the cause of the downtrodden, no gods who side with the poor and the vulnerable over the rich and the powerful. Class and gender iniquities exist all around Maria, colouring the world around her, seeping into its pores.

Maria’s early childhood is spent in Kottarathil Veedu, the home of her grandparents, Geevarghese and Mariyamma, with an interesting mélange of residents. There is her great-grandfather, Kuncheriya, obsessed with ensuring his place in heaven in the afterlife, a distant, dependent, great-aunt, Anna valyamma, four of Geevarghese’s twelve children, all with very different and often-conflicting personalities, and Little Maria’s continually philosophising dog, Chandippatti.

Almost tangible memories of ancestors hang in the air of Kottarathil Veedu. Maria has grown up on stories of Chirammel Kathanar, priest and extraordinary magician, and Geevarghese’s grandmother, Mathiri, known for her strange and accurate prophesies, and her garrulous parrot, Ammini. Alongside, are two unlikely “minor” characters. Visiting people in their dreams to alleviate his boredom is the patron saint of the region, St George the Martyr, known to his people as Geevarghese Sahada, after whom Maria’s grandfather was named, in contravention of the family’s patronymic tradition. There is also Christ himself, Karthav Eesho Mishiha, who first visits Maria to offer advice and then begins to drop in every so often to have soul-searching conversations with her. This fascinating cast of characters blends the real with the fantastic, with just a smidgen of the phantasmagoric, pushing the narrative into the same liminal space that Maria’s madness occupies, one where what is real can only be defined experientially.

Acknowledging madness

A conversation between the author and the translator forms the most apposite appendix to the novel where Sandhya Mary and Jayasree Kalathil talk about the politics of madness. Representations of madness in literature have usually been from an ableist perspective. Maria, Just Maria, in a radical departure, tells the story from the point of view of a woman who acknowledges her own madness, and does not ascribe it to grand tragedy or a sudden rupture of reason. With great skill and sharp humour, Sandhya Mary flips the lens on madness, seeing it as just another version of normalcy. Maria wants happiness. At age six, she is taken away from the only home she has ever known and “returned” to her parents and siblings, to whom she always remains an outsider.

She attempts to find happiness in love and in marriage and fails. Walking out of her marriage in pursuit of happiness is one of the many “signs” of madness her family and friends identify in Maria. Her attempt to safely take Geevarghese from this world into the promised Other, depositing him into the custody of the intimidating Mathiri valyammachi, as per her Appachan’s wishes, shows her the finality and the meaninglessness of death, intensifying her grief. Her behaviour, consequent on this loss, her refusal to speak, her withdrawal into silence, are all marked as aberrations that lead to her institutionalization. Madness, the author seems to say, is more about how society treats those who deviate from the norm, than about the individual themselves.

Maria’s search for herself, for “just Maria”, takes the form of telling her story, enmeshed with the stories of other members of her family, and often turns into a quest for various forms of justice. Mathiri, the other madwoman in Maria’s family, separated from her by a few generations, learns her letters late in life, from her grandson, and begins to “rewrite” the Bible, all over the walls of the house with pieces of coal. Mathiri also tells deliciously subversive stories, mixing elements from the Bible, the Ramayanam, the Mahabharatham, and folklore.

Words – prophetic, spoken, written – become Mathiri’s weapon of choice. Maria’s aunt, Neena, carves out her own space, at Kottarathil Veedu and in her marital home, making herself a “room of one’s own”, in defiance of societal expectations. A grown-up Maria, negotiating the perils of living in the city, outside of the safety of home, is overwhelmed, incessantly, by the fear of rape and the threat of violence performed by men on women’s bodies.

Jayasree Kalathil’s translation replicates the disruptive madness of Maria’s mind in the structure of the prose. There are chronological disjunctions, plot ruptures, and repetitions that destabilise conventional norms of narrativisation. This is a defiant story of madness that breaks your heart, just a little bit, right before it makes you chuckle at a pettily vindictive patron saint or a talking dog past his prime. The dedicated reader will also be rewarded with a very satisfying tying of loose ends in the enigmatic last line of the novel. Maria, Just Maria, is that promising debut novel you cannot not read.

Maria, Just Maria, Sandhya Mary, translated from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil, HarperCollins India.