What happens when a woman wants to go on exile? The word has gravitas, the kind of seriousness that one-way tickets don’t. We have romanticised the word slightly – political and spiritual exiles live at the top of the hierarchy in our imagination. But we’re also aware that all of us are exiles in some way or the other. To be in love, for instance, is to be in a permanent state of exile, for the need for union cannot ever be fulfilled completely, no matter what the quotient of togetherness. We are exiles from home in our offices too, or in cars and buses, where we live amphibiously, an in-between life of exile. The workplace – particularly the corporatised nature of our lives – allows temporary exilic status, with its genres of leave (‘Casual’ leave always makes me laugh).
And yet, when I mention the word, isn’t it a man that you think of? Why is the category of the exile so exclusively male in our imagination? I think of Siddhartha, leaving wife and son, and walking away from bed and nation, and metamorphosing into the Buddha. What if Siddhartha’s wife had decided to do the same? I think of William, leaving wife in Stratford-upon-Avon, and, again after spiritual and intellectual alchemy, turning into Shakespeare in London. Virginia Woolf, in imagining the conceptual category of ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’ to point out why the forces of history did not allow the creation – invention – of the woman writer, also based her argument around the same question: Would Shakespeare’s sister have been allowed to abandon husband and children for the purposes of realising her talent and ‘genius’, if she had any?
On International Women’s Day, the question manifests itself in many ways. There’s the suspicion about the single woman traveller – why is she travelling alone? Why is the woman in the restaurant by herself? There are the repeated phone calls from home, particularly the domestic machinery, when a woman takes a temporary exile in a beauty salon. Hilarious, true, but how many fathers or husbands have had their work interrupted by a child asking where a missing sock of a pair might be?
Banwas, the Hindi word for exile, carries in it the history of this journey – living in the forest, the imagined alchemy that such a life is expected to bring. Imagine this – Sita choosing a life of exile. To imagine Rama volunteering to accompany her as Sita did is to stretch the elasticity of our imagination. Why is a woman not allowed to explore the possibilities of the life of an exile? What happens if she decides to leave home and family without explanations as so many men on the spiritual quest are known to have done? And, if she did, why do such women remain outside the records of history? If they do at all, they are embalmed with a higher calling: the figure of Mirabai has been romanticised in such a way, of course. Lal Ded, the Kashmiri poet, was less fortunate: she was pronounced mad. Madness or promiscuity – our socialised imagination seems to be able to only allow only this to the woman-in-exile. I am thinking of the earliest novels in the English language: Robinson Crusoe lives by himself on an island, does not miss sex or country; Moll Flanders makes a career of her promiscuity as it were. Both the novels were written by the same man, Daniel Defoe, and they offer an easy example of how differently the man and woman outside the house were imagined. Is it a cute accident, then, that the category of the ‘Angel in the House’, said to be a Victorian invention, continues to dominate our moral imagination?
In making Kobita, a fifty-four-year-old woman, leave home to explore her instincts of kindness in my novel Missing (Aleph, April 2018), I wanted to explore what happens when a woman is outside the house, the speculation, the gossip and news, and the various kinds of tremors that such a desire on the part of the woman sets off. For, in my understanding, our first epic, The Ramayana, was an imaginative record of what happens when a wife goes missing – how do we know whether Sita was abducted or went with Ravana to explore a new life in a new land? As I write this, limiting myself to the poetic possibilities of exile still unavailable to a woman, the news on the car radio reminds me why there is such fear and tentativeness about allowing a woman to go out to explore the world – chances are she’d be found dead before she’s found her spiritual sur.
Sumana Roy’s first book, How I Became a Tree, a work of non-fiction, was published in 2017. Her first novel, Missing, will be out in April 2018.
