Eccentricity as feminism

 The first time I read Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, I knew nothing about its author, so I had the incredible experience of coming to this short novel in a state of innocence. I was wholly unaware, for instance, that Carrington had been a painter, that she spent most of her life as an expat in Mexico, and that in her youth she had been in a relationship with Max Ernst, one of the greatest surrealists. But the anarchic tone and perverse nature of this little book made a powerful impression, one that has never left me.

There are two qualities in fiction that I find particularly astonishing and moving: open-endedness and wild metaphysics.

The first quality is structural. Open-ended books intentionally leave themes and ideas unrestricted, rendering them a little blurred. They grant us wonderful space for making our own surmises, for seeking associations, for thinking and interpreting. 

This interpretive process is a source of great intellectual pleasure, and it also acts as a friendly nudge toward further prospecting. Books of this sort have no theses, but they arouse questions that would not have occurred to us otherwise.

To my mind, the second quality, wild metaphysics, touches on a very serious question: Why do we read novels in the first place? Inevitably among the many true responses will be: We read novels to gain a broader perspective on everything that happens to people on Earth. Our own experience is too small, our beings too helpless, to make sense of the complexity and enormity of the universe; we desire to see life up close, to get a glimpse of the existences of others. Do we have anything in common with them? 

LEONORA CARRINGTON. PHOTO: EMERICO “CHIKI” WEISZ. COURTESY OF NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS.

Are they anything like us? We are seeking a shared communal order, each of us a stitch in a piece of knitted fabric. In short, we expect novels to put forward certain hypotheses that might tell us what’s what. And banal as it might sound, this is a metaphysical question: On what principles does the world operate?

I think that this, in fact, is exactly where the difference—so hotly debated in my own literary era—lies between so-called genre and non-genre fiction. The true genre novel presents us with recognizable perspectives, using a ready-made world that has familiar philosophical parameters. The non-genre novel aims to establish its own rules for the created universe, sketching its own epistemological maps. And this is the case whether the book is a love story, a murder mystery, or the tale of an expedition to another galaxy.

The Hearing Trumpet eludes all categorization. From its first sentence on, it presents an internally coherent cosmos governed by self-generated laws. In doing so it passes disturbing comment on things we never stop to question.

*

In the patriarchal order, on reaching old age a woman becomes an even greater bother than she was when young. Just as patriarchal societies think up and organize thousands of norms, rules, codes, and forms of oppression to keep young women in line, they treat old women (who have lost their alluring erotic power) with a similar degree of suspicion and aversion. While maintaining a semblance of sympathy, members of such societies endlessly dwell on the former beauty of older women with a certain covert satisfaction, pondering the effects of the passage of time. Further marginalization is achieved by pushing them into social nonexistence; they are often financially impoverished and stripped of any influence. They become, instead, inferior creatures of no concern whatsoever to others; society does little more than tolerate them and provide them (rather reluctantly) with some sort of care.

This is the status of Marian Leatherby, the ancient narrator of The Hearing Trumpet, as the novel opens. She is full of life but hard of hearing. And she is doubly excluded—first as a woman, then as an old woman. Essential to her character is a quality she shares with the novel as a whole: eccentricity (eccentricity being one of the modes allowed to an old woman when she’s not playing the role of a kindhearted granny). Indeed, casting a deaf old woman in the role of narrator, heroine, and governing spirit, and populating a book with a group of odd old ladies, indicates from the start that this novel will be a highly eccentric, radical affair.

Things that are eccentric are by definition “outside the center”—outside long-established norms and all things regarded as self-evident, on the beaten path. To be eccentric is to view the world from a completely different perspective, one that is both provincial and marginal—pushed aside, to the fringes—and at the same time revelatory and revolutionary.

The Institute, or care home, where Marian is sent by her family, is run by Dr. and Mrs. Gambit. It, too, is eccentric, comprising a series of bizarre dwellings—shaped like a toadstool, a Swiss chalet, an Egyptian mummy, a boot, a lighthouse—impossible and absurd, straight out of a Bosch painting or some oneiric funfair. 

But here eccentricity can be seen as emblematic of the oppressive, patronizing, and infantilizing attitude we take toward old people. The word gambit is derived from the Italian word gambetto, literally “little leg,” which also turns up in the phrase dare il gambetto—to trip up, or to plot against. The Gambits are the hypocritical, pretentious representatives of an equally hypocritical society, and their methods are summed up by the expression “for their own good.” The Gambits always know what is proper and healthy for their wards, submitting them to an ill-defined psycho-pedagogical doctrine not unlike the one embraced by followers of Rudolf Steiner. The most comical example of this ideology are the “Movements,” perhaps a nod to the Gurdjieff movements, that the old ladies are obliged to perform on a daily basis.

The Gambits’ mission involves constant observation and judgment of their residents, another feature of the vague, quasi-religious concept of self-perfection bordering on sadism with which they indoctrinate their charges. As Dr. Gambit tells Marian:

Reports in your particular case show the following list of interior impurities: Greed, Insincerity, Egoism, Laziness and Vanity. At the top of the list Greed, signifying a dominating passion. You cannot overcome so many psychic deformities in a short space of time. You are not alone as victim of your degenerate habits, everyone has faults, here we seek to observe these faults and finally to dissolve them under the light of Objective Observation, Consciousness.

The fact that You Have Been Chosen to join this community should give you enough stimulation to face your own vices bravely and seek to diminish their hold over you.

Behind the Gambits’ beneficence lies a quite specific economic motive. Yes, the Gambits make money from the old people they claim to perfect. In fact, they do not operate out of a sense of mission at all but in order to make a living. In invoking the sin of Greed, Carrington reminds us of the deeply hypocritical connections between religious institutions and economics.

Another of the novel’s eccentrics is Carmella, the heroine’s great friend, said to have been inspired by Carrington’s old friend and fellow painter Remedios Varo. Carmella has been allowed to retain some influence in the world because she is a rich old woman, and there’s nothing people respect as much as money and those who possess it. As a result, Carmella enjoys unquestioned power to make things happen. Her appearances at the dreary Institute are dramatic; her ideas are absolute, steered not by reason but by imagination and a different way of thinking. In her character eccentricity is elevated to the rank of Goddesshood.

*

In the early sixties and into the seventies, Leonora Carrington was active in the women’s liberation movement in Mexico. She was notorious for designing a poster depicting Adam and Eve offering an apple to each other. Similarly, in The Hearing Trumpet, Carrington reclaims and inverts traditional, foundational stories, in the process creating one of the most original feminist texts ever written. The book contains the quintessence of feminism in a narrative that is subversive and surrealist in its invocation of an unconventional metaphysical order. The Hearing Trumpet forthrightly introduces eccentricity into the feminist debate as a perspective that’s a legitimate alternative to the patriarchal one: whatever is eccentric is Goddess-like in spirit.

In our age, the Goddess was expelled from the center long ago by her “Sterile Brothers” (as Carrington calls them); her kingdom is now in the provinces of perception. Nevertheless, the Goddess will always be present wherever the binaries—either/or, native/foreigner, black/white—beloved by the Sterile Brothers are exposed as limited. Theirs is the simplest and crudest way of organizing a complicated world, of achieving power over it. By their logic, to fit a too-tall patient to a too-short bed, one should cut off his feet, not seek a longer bed.

I consider Goddesshood to be womanhood deepened and expanded by the manifold treasures of culture and nature. The Goddess is a powerful archetype, and her very existence is pure provocation to a patriarchal structure. No wonder that in many parts of the world women are made to cover their faces and bodies. Women’s physiology—which would seem to be the most natural thing in the world, like their corporeality—is always a problem, something not to be discussed. Civilizations might be described by the mechanisms they have invented and implemented to control Goddesshood.

When womanhood demands what it is owed—recognition of its strength and power, of its very Goddesshood—it is banished to the cellar, imprisoned in the dungeon. Deprived of contact with consciousness, it loses its ability to speak and can only “murmur”—as the Grail murmurs in The Hearing Trumpet. It becomes imprecise and blurred. It is unable (or unwilling) to use the awkward, refined patriarchal diction, essayistic flights, virtuoso sentences, and nonchalant musings on art so prized by the arbiters of culture, high above the dungeon of the despondent Goddess. Its language is coarse and irreverent, not at all adapted to people’s typical perceptions but wild, laughable, eccentric, untamed. It is often perceived as incomprehensible, and as a result it is sometimes judged as kitsch. Kitschy and lacking taste—a charge that is so often flung at women. Apparently Joseph Conrad said that the best criterion for the quality of a book is that women don’t like it—because women can only like bad literature. Well, I have to admit that I like what Conrad wrote very much. Sincerely.

All right. So be it. Kitsch is our ocean. All those cyclical processes, menstruations, and recurrent migraines. Mumbo jumbo, healing herbs, and infantile trust in the power of nature. An unhealthy love of animals, sentimentality, the feeding of stray cats. Being overprotective, poking one’s nose into everything. All those flowers in little pots, all those little gardens, the hollyhocks, the rags, the lace, the stitching, the knitting, the romance novels, the soap operas, “women’s literature,” “emotionality,” the accusation of mental weakness that has been pressed on us for centuries. 

The reservoir of misogynist scripts is immense and seemingly bottomless. In modern times, in a thoroughly patriarchal world, we can only talk about the Goddess ironically, winking like the Abbess in the painting that hangs in the Gambits’ dining room, and with a hidden smirk, half serious, half mocking. Having been actively displaced and ridiculed for thousands of years she can only express herself in this covert way. It’s worth pondering how many subjects related to women’s experience have been marginalized, derided, ridiculed, or altogether displaced. For hundreds of years women have been raised within misogynist, patriarchal religions that openly discriminate against them to some degree. They take part in cultures that are never fully theirs, or that are even in outright opposition to them. From youth, women are drip-fed doctrines that position them as inferior, weaker, less capable, or in some other way handicapped. They grow up in a mist of ubiquitous misogyny, often veiled and not fully self-aware, which is intrinsic to culture, language, images, interpersonal relations, history, and economics. It is only in the last few decades that the real story of women, marginalized into near nonexistence, has patiently tried to break free. And when it emerges into the appropriated world, it can find itself at a loss for words.

*

Leonora Carrington recognizes this subversive, eccentric position of womanhood. In both her painting and her writing she has a marvelous way of subscribing to André Breton’s belief in the need to align art with alchemy or occultism. She makes liberal use of our European esoteric imaginarium, while avoiding the pompous solemnity that often accompanies it.

The Hearing Trumpet is a hermetic text; it refers to things that are hidden, displaced, and forgotten. In order to be fully interpreted it requires from the reader a certain familiarity with its allusions, even as it mocks this sort of competence by pulling all sorts of striking and astonishing tales from its trunk of wonders.

The Abbess’s winking eye should be immortalized on every future cover of this book; it should become its hallmark, as should Marian’s deafness. Together they comprise a set of instructions for approaching the novel. At the very beginning of the book, Carmella gives Marian a hearing trumpet, which miraculously allows her to be selective about what she hears. The winking eye is telling us to place everything in inverted commas and to trust the “as if ” on which myth and literature rely. From here on we shall follow after Leonora like this—with one eye winking, mischievously, kitschily, taking everything that she serves up to us at face value.

And she serves up a lot—the book is a true carnival. At the moment the Winking Abbess is identified as Doña Rosalinda Alvarez Cruz della Cueva from El Convento de Santa Barbara de Tartarus—onto the stage of The Hearing Trumpet steps the Goddess. From this point on, the borders between reality and fantasy, the solemn and the absurd, the sublime and the ridiculous dissolve into the surrealist tissue of the novel. History opalesces with pastiche, and the book meanders down multiplying paths of references to esoteric pop-cultural texts, stories about the Holy Grail, the Knights Templar, and Mary Magdalene, and to a whole host of alternative histories of mankind that folk strains of religions have been playing with for a long time.

The story of the Winking Abbess is the story of the Holy Cup containing the elixir of life, which has been stolen from its rightful owner, the Goddess (who appears here under various guises), by “sterile” monks and hidden by the Templars in the cellar of their monastery. Only a woman is capable of extricating this genuine treasure, though the Templars do not seem to know this. Generally speaking, the chief adversary of both the Winking Abbess Doña Rosalinda and Marian Leatherby is Christianity—for the former it is represented by the Templar order and the ruthless bishops, and for the latter by an oppressive New Age Christian mentality of pointless self-denial and external control.

The tale of Doña Rosalinda’s mission to rescue the Grail is a series of fantastical and unexpected adventures. It is at the same time a story of repossession, of an anti-Crusade that restores the correct order in a fraudulently appropriated world. In this story within the story, Carrington produces a wonderfully comical parody mimicking those mysterious texts found in jars in the desert, such as the discovery at Nag Hammadi in 1945, which undoubtedly reinvigorated the religious imagination of secularized twentieth-century man. She makes copious reference to figures and names from the Gnostic treatises, including the Pistis Sophia.

The curious and patient reader will detect some surprisingly erudite references not only to Gnosticism but to esoteric religious syncretism of all sorts, both ancient and contemporary. Such a reader will take note of the name of our abbess: Doña Rosalinda della Cueva (from the cave), Abbess of the Convent of Saint Barbara of Tartarus, is associated (fittingly in the light of her further adventures) with the mysterious, powerful figure of Barbarus or Barbelo, who resides in—naturally!—“the depths of Pleroma” (to use the Gnostic term mentioned in the Apocryphon of John). Barbelo is the first creative force, hers is the womb of the world, she is the prototype for the Shekhinah and Sophia in one. 

She appears as a bearded female figure, the Mother-Father, and as Anthropos, the first hermaphrodite. As if in answer, Carrington seeds The Hearing Trumpet with characters of fluid gender—a bearded woman, a cross-dresser, a transsexual. Amid the several bizarre figures of earthly provenance in the book the reader will also find the character Taliessin, a figure taken straight from Welsh mythology. He is the Goddess’s messenger and the first man to be endowed with the gift of prophecy; here we meet him as an immortal postman.

What’s more, The Hearing Trumpet is a thoroughly surreal work, written oneirically—in other words, quite devoid of consistency or strong connections between cause and effect. There is certainly no gun hanging on the wall here, so there’s no reason to expect it to go off in the final scene. Things happen rather as they do in a dream, with sequences of events emerging subtly, arising from remote associations. When she is first mentioned, the sister of Marian’s friend Marlborough is a cripple; later it is suggested that she has two heads, and when she finally appears at the end of the book, she is neither a cripple nor two-headed, she simply has the head of a wolf! This kind of alternative causality doesn’t detract from our experience of the book one bit; instead it illustrates the process by which Carrington produced the novel, layering successive ideas, one on top of the other. As the narrative self corrects, it is a sheer pleasure to follow the mysterious flow of the unfolding story.

*

In old age a person becomes eccentric. This appears to be a natural law of development, once adapting to society is no longer essential, and the paths of the individual and the community start to diverge. Perhaps old age is actually the only time in life when we can finally be ourselves, without worrying about the demands of others or conforming to the social norms that we have been constantly instructed to follow. At last the adolescent obligation to belong to one group or another ceases to apply.

That is why the philosophy of eccentricity expressed in The Hearing Trumpet is connected with age. It can be treated as a special message from the old to the young, going against the current of time. We must do eccentric things. Where everyone is doing This, we must do That. While the whole center is noisily establishing its order, we shall remain on the periphery—we won’t let ourselves be drawn into the center, we shall ignore it and surpass it.

Thus eccentricity is posited as a spontaneous, joyful rebellion against everything that’s established and regarded as normal and self-evident. It is a challenge flung in the face of conformity and hypocrisy.

Ultimately, The Hearing Trumpet is a book that brings great delight. Let us enjoy the opportunity to share in this wild tale about an old lady who couldn’t go to Lapland, so Lapland had to come to her.

—Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

 

Olga Tokarczuk is the author of nine novels and three short story collections. Her novel Flights won the 2018 International Booker Prize, and she is the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones is the 2018 winner of the Transatlantyk Award for the most outstanding promoter of Polish literature abroad. She has translated works by several of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and writers of reportage, as well as crime fiction, poetry, and children’s books. She is a mentor for the Emerging Translator Mentorship Program and former cochair of the Translators Association of the United Kingdom.

From The Hearing Trumpet, by Leonora Carrington, published by New York Review Books this month. Copyright © 2021 by Olga Tokarczuk; translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

(Source: The Paris Review)

Shanti: The iconic woman character from DD’s 1994 series that redefined Indian television

 One cannot really talk about women empowerment in Indian television without referring to the super hit series called Shanti - Ek Aurat Ki Kahani that was aired on Doordarshan in 1994.

We live in an era of web series and OTT platforms that provide fresh content, with intelligent plot lines and modern characters, almost every day. When Netflix’s Indian-origin film Bulbbul premiered in June, many raved about the lead character, played by Tripti Dimri, of a female vigilante who is bold, flawed yet progressive.

But bold female characters are not new, especially on Indian television. One of the most iconic characters had emerged in 1994, in the super-hit TV series called Shanti – Ek Aurat Ki Kahani that was aired on Doordarshan.

The Mandira Bedi starrer is remembered as one of the first daily TV soaps in an era when cable television had just entered India, giving Doordarshan stiff competition from channels such as Zee and Star Plus that also brought in contemporary, urban dramas centred around strong female characters.

Tara (1993) on Zee was another popular series that was broadcast in the afternoons, another novelty at the time.

Illustration: Ramandeep Kaur | ThePrint

Bold female protagonist

Shanti, played by Bedi, centered around an aspiring investigative journalist who worked hard to succeed in a man’s world. Over the course of the series, the lead character develops into a complex, multi-layered and flawed protagonist.

The story revolves around Shanti’s revenge on two men who had raped her mother. She uses her profession as a tool to unravel the crime committed on her mother ‘Tulsi’, played by Mohini Sharma, and seeks amends for the injustices done to them.

She enters the lavish ‘Shanti’ mansion where the male antagonists — Kamesh Mahadevan, played by Yatin Karyekar, and Raj ‘G.J.’ Singh, played by Amar Talwar — live with their respective families, on the pretext of writing a biography about the two men.

The story reveals how her mother was raped by the men while she worked as a labourer during the construction of the Shanti mansion.

Directed by Adi Pocha and produced by UTV Software Communications, the series had around 780 episodes.

Bedi, who after the success of Shanti became famous for her stint in cricket anchoring, became a household name in the 1990s.

In an interview to the Hindustan Times in 2016, Bedi said that her role as ‘Shanti’ made her a stronger person. “Shanti was a strong woman who stood for many things. I would find myself standing up for the rest of the unit when the food served was bad. Shanti made me a stronger person,” she had said.

Reeta Das, a Mumbai-based film student told ThePrint, “Bedi did a fantastic job playing the lead. It was so melodramatic and suspenseful that, as a child, I would keep wondering how it would end and if Shanti would get justice.”

“At a time when all female characters were only portrayed as being extremely submissive, Shanti waged a war against a family far more influential than she was. She was like a rebel who wouldn’t follow the rules. This kept us, as audiences, waiting to see how the plot would turn in each episode. The best part was how things were revealed through the lead character,” Das added.

A family show

The series that remained popular through the early and mid-1990s is still remembered across generations. Not surprisingly then, the Star Plus channel had aired it again 15 years later, in 2009.

“It’s been over 25 years since Shanti was aired on Doordarshan. Growing up in a middle class family, we didn’t have cable TV or colour television at that time. But that didn’t take away the urge to watch Shanti. Every day after school, my sister, mother and I would watch it while eating lunch, since it was aired in the afternoons. It was a complete family show full of emotions — revenge, love, sadness etc,” Delhi-based entrepreneur Arpita Singh told ThePrint.

Talking about the popularity of the show and her role in it, Bedi had also said how in Sri Lanka she is still remembered by the name ‘Shanti’.

(Source: The Print) 

Feminize your canon: Alice Dunbar-Nelson

 In April 1895, the up-and-coming poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, whom Frederick Douglass had dubbed “the most promising young colored man in America,” saw a poem by a young writer, Alice Ruth Moore, accompanied by a photograph in which she appeared stylish and beautiful. He wrote to her immediately at her home on Palmyra Street in New Orleans, expressing his admiration, and they began an intense epistolary courtship that lasted two years. Six months in, Paul was declaring. “I love you and have loved you since the first time I saw your picture.” He called Alice “the sudden realization of an ideal!” She combined beauty with literary talent and the feminine accomplishments appropriate to an upper-class young woman of the day: “Do you recite? Do you sing? Don’t you dance divinely?” They modeled themselves self-consciously after Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, another pair of lovers and writers whose romance began by letter. Paul referred to “This Mr. and Mrs. Browning affair of ours,” and Alice, after they’d married, reflected on her role as a wife who was at once muse, colleague, and practical support: “We worked together, read together, and I flattered myself that I helped him in his work. I was his amanuensis and secretary, and he was good enough to write poem after poem ‘for me,’ he said.” The Dunbars embodied the aspirational ideal of the educated, cultured African American, allowed access to the white halls of fame and power as long as they were willing to remain, flattened and fixed, in the roles of representatives of their race.

Such a role did not allow for physical passion and disorder. When the couple met in person, the refinements of their written courtship became scrawled over with violence. In November 1897, in what Paul described as “one damned night of folly,” he raped Alice, leaving her with internal injuries. Five months later, the couple eloped. The marriage lasted four years, and ended as violently as it had begun, with a drunken beating. Alice left, and never returned. Paul tried to woo her back with letters, but she answered only once, with a single word delivered by telegram: No. When he died of tuberculosis in February 1906, at the age of thirty-three, she found out by reading a notice in the newspaper. Yet despite their estrangement, Alice worked hard after Paul’s death to keep his reputation and his work alive, reading his poetry in public and, in 1920, editing The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer, a hefty anthology of “the best prose and poetic selections by and about the Negro race,” including many selections by Paul, but also her own poetry and selections by writers from James Weldon Johnson to Abraham Lincoln, with the “Caucasian” writers denoted by an asterisk. (Alice’s portrait, rather than Paul’s, appears as a frontispiece.)

ALICE DUNBAR-NELSON

Brief though it was, Alice Moore’s marriage to Paul Dunbar has tended to overshadow her achievements as a writer, even though she outlived him by three decades and married twice more. For many years, according to Katherine Adams, Sandra A. Zagarell, and Caroline Gebhard, the editors of Recovering Alice Dunbar-Nelson for the Twenty-First Century, a 2016 special issue of the women’s literature journal Legacy, her marriage was “the only thing making her visible and the primary thing obscuring her from view.” That ironic combination, a spotlight partially covered, is a fate she shares with many talented wives of famous men. The variety of names she adopted—Alice Ruth Moore, Alice Dunbar, Alice Moore Dunbar, Mrs. Paul Dunbar, Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Aliceruth Dunbar-Nelson, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson—reflects the basic tension between a woman’s marital identity and her declaration of herself as an author. Highly educated, with a strong belief in her own talent and determination to make her own living, Dunbar-Nelson was a New Woman, that protofeminist figure who dominated American culture at the turn of the twentieth century, yet she also recognized and embraced marriage as essential to a woman’s social standing. “It is not marriage I decry, for I don’t think any really sane person would do this,” she wrote in “The Woman,” a story in her first collection Violets and Other Tales, published in 1895. But despite this declaration, the same piece contains voluminous arguments in favor of the single life. Critics who have wanted to pin her down to one identity, one genre, or one set of beliefs about race or gender, have struggled to do so. Appreciating the variety of her work requires a nuanced attention to the many layers of her life.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson was born on July 19, 1875, in New Orleans. For a writer who otherwise documented her life meticulously, and whose diary, correspondence, and reams of unpublished writing exist in an extensive archive, she was mostly silent about her early life. In one letter to Paul, her distress is palpable when he presses on the sore point of her origins: “Dearest—dearest—I hate to write this—How often, oh how painfully often, when scarce meaning [to] you have thrust my parentage in my face.”

As a light-skinned Black woman operating within the blunt racial binary of post–Civil War America, that silence signifies both shame and strategy. In her hometown of New Orleans, Dunbar-Nelson had a third option for a racial identity. Before the Civil War, the city’s population was divided between whites, enslaved blacks, and free gens de couleur, light-skinned Creoles of French or Spanish descent, who were a powerful and elite social group. This was the identity Dunbar-Nelson claimed for herself, and the figure who dominates her early short stories. She likened the “true Creole” to “the famous gumbo of the state, a little of everything, making a whole dilightfullly [sic] flavored, quite distinctive, and wholly unique.” It was also a status that carried little weight outside New Orleans, in a world where the color line was brutally policed. In several stories, Dunbar-Nelson explored the anxiety of passing and the pain of colorist prejudice. Her short story “The Stones of the Village,” dramatizes the bullying and exclusion that her light-skinned hero endures from both the black and white boys of his village. 

But instead of trying to claim a place among his own people, the boy decides to pass as white. The story traces his Dickensian journey from his grandmother’s village to a job working for an elderly book dealer in New Orleans, and then via a legacy in the old man’s will to college, law school, and eventually marriage to a white woman and a position as a respected judge. Throughout his career his fear of being exposed drives him to overt and virulent racist treatment of “Negroes.” Eventually he learns that an up-and-coming African American lawyer knows his true identity but agrees to keep it quiet in exchange for fair treatment in court. Her unpublished story “Brass Ankles Speaks” hews closer to Dunbar-Nelson’s own experience, narrated by a speaker who describes herself as “white enough to pass for white, but with a darker family background, a real love for the mother race, and no desire to be numbered among the white race.” Her anger throughout the piece is directed at darker-skinned Black people who tease and ostracize her, resenting both her ability to pass and her decision not to.

Eleanor Alexander, the author of Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow, a biography of the Dunbar marriage, detects in Alice’s status anxiety and her flashes of contempt for her much darker husband an attitude of internalized racism, or at least classism and colorism, that caused her to distance herself from the designation “Negro.” But other critics make the point that she proudly declared herself a “race woman” and that her identity as African American was never “masked” or concealed from readers. “This is a writer who embraced and labored incessantly on behalf of black people, including herself, and understood that work to require an interrogation of belonging—a refusal to make a piety of it,” write Adams, Zagarell, and Gebhard. Dunbar-Nelson grew up in an era preoccupied with questions of racial belonging and definition, which included a campaign to capitalize the word “Negro” as a question of dignity. She seems, however, to have resisted the idea that race was reducible to labels or symbols, exploring it instead as a variable, and highly individual, lived experience.

According to Alexander, although Dunbar-Nelson saw the category “Negro” as denoting a formerly enslaved person and thus distanced herself from it, her own family history was more closely embedded with slavery than with free Creole society. On the scraps of evidence afforded by birth certificates, name changes, and city records, Alexander pieces together the origins of Alice Moore as the daughter and granddaughter of women who were formerly enslaved. Her father’s identity is uncertain, as is the question of whether he was married to her mother, or whether Alice and her older sister had the same father—either way, he was not part of her life. Alice’s mother, Patsy, and grandmother, Mary, worked as servants and washerwomen, as many Black women did: part of a huge labor force that helped clean and clothe the upper classes. Together they made sure that Alice and her sister, Leila, were shielded from this work and kept away from their employers’ homes—a common protective strategy by servants, who knew the sexual exploitation and violence that routinely went on in those homes. Instead, Patsy and Mary worked to consolidate a class status for Alice and Leila by giving them an education they themselves had not received. Alice was first sent away as a young teenager to Southern University in Baton Rouge, and graduated from the prestigious Straight (now Dillard) University in New Orleans in 1892 with a teaching qualification. 

Teaching offered a route into elite society for African American women, who dominated the profession (in Washington, D.C., a few years before Alice moved there with Paul, women made up more than 80 percent of the city’s Black schoolteachers).

Alice’s first book was published in 1895, when she was barely twenty years old. Violets and Other Tales was a multigenre collection of poetry, stories, sketches, and essays rooted in New Orleans Creole society—“pieces of exquisite art,” as Paul, who was courting Alice when the book was being published, described them. Its reception in the press is a reminder of how absolute the division was at this time between works by Black and white artists. In the African American press, the book and its author were effusively praised, as much for what they represented—the “best of the race”—as for the specifics of the work. The Daily Picayune, the city’s white-run paper, denounced it as “slop”—which Gebhard argues was punishment for “having crossed the color line by presuming to submit it for review at all.” Interestingly, Dunbar-Nelson used the same pejorative years later when reassessing her early collection, which is undeniably sentimental, as was the style of its era. But its themes would linger into her next, and today best-known, collection, The Goodness of St. Roque, and Other Stories (1897), even though she left New Orleans for good the following year at the age of twenty-one.

In 1897, Alice moved to New York City, where she worked with writer and activist Victoria Earle Matthews at the White Rose Mission, a settlement home for working-class Black girls on East Eighty-Sixth Street. She continued to write, working on an unpublished collection of stories about the new community in which she found herself. She was a clubwoman, the main arena for African American women’s activism at the time, and an active supporter of women’s suffrage. In 1902, when her marriage to Paul Dunbar ended, Alice moved to Wilmington, Delaware, and began to work as a teacher at Howard High School, where she had an intimate friendship with the (considerably older) school principal Edwina B. Kruse, one of several important relationships with women over the course of her life. She stayed at Howard until 1920, when she was fired for her political radicalism. For Dunbar-Nelson, teaching was both a creative outlet and a form of political engagement: she wrote plays for her students to perform, and shared with her friend W.E.B. Du Bois a belief in the transformative power of the classroom for African Americans, and the importance for Black children of stories that centered Black characters—lamenting in her essay “Negro Literature for Negro Pupils” that “for two generations we have given brown and black children a blonde ideal of beauty to worship, a milk-white literature to assimilate, and a pearly Paradise to anticipate, in which their dark faces would be hopelessly out of place.” In her diary, which she kept daily for most of her life, she also recorded less lofty reactions to the daily grind of the classroom, as in this outburst from 1897: “Exhausted? I feel like a dishrag. 62 untamed odoriferous kids all day… Fiends, just fiends pure and simple.”

Throughout her time in Delaware, Dunbar-Nelson’s activism continued. She wrote for Du Bois’s The Crisis on women’s suffrage and became a field organizer for the campaign in Pennsylvania. In 1916, she married Robert J. Nelson, a journalist and politician, and together with him edited and published a progressive newspaper, the Wilmington Advocate.

In her diary, she also detailed the romantic relationships she had with women, including the Los Angeles–based activist Fay Jackson Robinson and artist Helene Ricks London, in entries that are sometimes tortured, but often frank and celebratory. They reveal a woman who, in private, was not afraid to cast off the constraints of respectability. In 1928, she described an evening with a group of women who were, like herself, married clubwomen: “We want to make whoopee… Life is glorious. Good homemade white grape wine. We really make whoopee… Such a glorious moonlight night.” Selections from her diary were edited and published in 1984 by Dunbar-Nelson’s literary champion Akasha Gloria Hull as Give Us Each Day, a landmark in Black feminist literary history and a vibrant glimpse into the writer’s inner life, now unfortunately out of print.

In the twenties, the cultural and political explosion of the Harlem Renaissance swept Alice Dunbar-Nelson up in its trail, even though she had not lived in New York for many years and was still based in Delaware. Her poetry, much of it written earlier, was rediscovered through its appearance in journals and collections like The Crisis, Opportunity, and the 1927 collection Ebony and Topaz. She was friends with most of the leading lights of the era, especially Du Bois and the poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, but she had her differences with them, too. She critiqued the novelist Jessie Redmon Fauset’s generally well-received novel Plum Bun, rejecting the “injudicious laudation” that she worried was coming to a Black writer purely on the basis of race. She wanted a bigger frame, and laid claim to a white literary canon that was as much her heritage as any other, writing a scholarly dissertation on Wordsworth, with whom she shared a love of nature. One of her best-known poems celebrates the natural beauty of a violet in nature by contrasting it with the artifice of its copy in an urban setting, where the idea of the flower calls to mind: “florists’ shops, / And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine; / And garish lights, and mincing little fops / And cabarets and songs, and deadening wine.”

Despite her early reputation as a poet, during the twenties Alice Dunbar-Nelson found her voice more and more as a journalist. She wrote a syndicated column, Une Femme Dit, and contributed a wealth of reviews and essays to newspapers and magazines. She was an in-demand speaker and although she was rarely paid well for it, she recognized the importance of maintaining a public profile against the twin forces of gendered and racial erasure. In her diary she was open about her constant struggle for money, lamenting in 1931: “the depression hit my royalties!” But she also blamed herself for her inability to find a stable footing in a field dominated by white men. Her work was so often uncredited, unpaid, or both. “Damn bad luck I have with my pen,” she wrote in her diary. “Some fate has decreed I shall never make money by it.” Yet in her energy and appetite for life’s pleasures, from the literary to the human to the natural, Alice Dunbar-Nelson celebrated beauty and freedom to the end of her life. Thanks to the scholars who’ve fought to resurrect her legacy, she may finally have the broader recognition she deserves, as a prolific, politically engaged writer whose poetry is only the beginning.

(Source: The Paris Review)

Mrs America: A smart take on the blind spots of 20th-century feminism

The Emmy-nominated series brilliantly depicts the women’s liberation movement of the Seventies and its critics, but the heroes and villains are not so clear-cut, says Fiona Sturges

There’s a moment in the television series Mrs America when the journalist and feminist campaigner Gloria Steinem makes a late-night phone call to Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique. Friedan’s book argued against the post-war cult of the housewife and lit the touch paper for feminism’s second wave in America. In the series, Friedan and Steinem are at loggerheads. Friedan can’t stand Steinem’s softly-softly diplomacy and is irked by her prettiness; Steinem isn’t a fan of Friedan’s bull-in-a-china shop tactics. “Every time I reach out to her, I pull back a bloody stump,” complains Steinem to a colleague. But then she is reminded by a fellow campaigner, Natalie Gittelson, that “we get to do what we do because [Friedan] risked everything. So before you tell her what she can and cannot do, consider just saying thank you.” And so, a few days later, Steinem picks up the phone and does just that. “I don’t know if I ever told you,” she tells Friedan, “but your book changed my life.”

Cate Blanchett stars as anti-feminist campaigner Phyllis Schlafly in the BBC drama ( BBC/FX/Sabrina Lantos )

Mrs America is a stylish ensemble piece about the struggle for gender equality in the Seventies that was thrown into focus by the equal rights amendment (ERA), a proposed change to the constitution guaranteeing equal rights for women (spoiler alert: it was defeated). Along with Steinem and Friedan, the series also highlights the achievements of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress, and Bella Abzug, a lawyer and social activist who went on to lead Jimmy Carter’s National Advisory Committee for Women. As Mrs America tells it, their biggest opponent was Phyllis Schlafly (played with starchy brilliance by Cate Blanchett, who has been nominated for an Emmy for the role), who mobilised housewives and the evangelical right to do her bidding. It also proved a handy peg on which to hang her own ambitions as a political activist. Defence was her passion – though, in those days, no one wanted to hear a woman talk about that.

Schlafly is a formidable rival, a sharp-elbowed bigot in twinset and pearls who fetishised domesticity and motherhood, despite having outsourced it in her own home to a black housekeeper. When, in Mrs America, one of her fellow anti-ERA activists reveals she is a member of the John Birch Society, an anti-communist group with alleged ties to the Ku Klux Klan, she smiles benignly and replies, “That’s your right, and I think maybe you should just keep that to yourself.” On hearing of secretaries being sexually assaulted by their male bosses on Capitol Hill, she shrugs and says they must be “inviting it” since “virtuous women are rarely accosted by unwelcome sexual propositions”.

Just as compelling as the gulf between Schlafly and the women’s liberation movement, however, is Mrs America’s depiction of the competing agendas of feminists. Race is a grave blind spot among the white, middle-class campaigners who habitually talk over their black peers. When Margaret Sloan-Hunter, the only black writer at Steinem’s Ms magazine, pitches an idea during an editorial meeting about tokenism in the workplace, her co-workers stare blankly at her. “You’re not saying you feel like that here – look at our latest issue!” says one editor, waving a cover image featuring a black woman. Steinem soothingly adds that Sloan-Hunter should speak out if she ever feels overlooked because of her race, ignoring the fact that she just did.

Rose Byrne as Gloria Steinem in ‘Mrs America’ (BBC/FX/Sabrina Lantos)

The term intersectionality hadn’t been invented in the Seventies, though the hierarchy of privilege on display is jolting in its familiarity. So too the factions – black vs white, young vs old, gay vs straight, working mothers vs stay-at-home ones. Such divisions have always been there, though today they are amplified and heightened by social media to the point where resolution, or even a calm conversation, can seem impossible.

In Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, the author Helen Lewis looks at the victories secured by 19th- and 20th-century British feminists that we now take for granted, among them the right to divorce, vote, study at university, work, consent to sex, abort babies and escape male violence. “Progress erases struggle,” says Lewis, noting how much of their work is forgotten, along with the opposition they faced. The women who brought about change, she points out, were often bloody-minded, defensive and mean-spirited. They were, to use today’s parlance, problematic. But to expect ideological perfection from our feminist forebears is to wish for the moon on a stick.

Betty Friedan could be narcissistic, judgmental and petty. She famously called lesbians the “lavender menace” and wanted to exclude them from the movement. She also had a hell of a temper, as evidenced at a public debate with Phyllis Schlafly where, after being goaded about her divorce, she yelled: “You are a witch! God, I’d like to burn you at the stake.”

Every political cause has its heroes and villains, though Mrs America expertly depicts the grey space between them. It shows how movements rise up through desperation and the desire to do good, but how stubbornness and self-interest are often vital ingredients in getting stuff done. It shows how marginalised people routinely fail to notice those more marginalised than themselves, and that humans are infuriating and complicated. Rather than dismiss those feminists who battled for the freedoms we enjoy today, we need to acknowledge them, understand them and learn from their mistakes.

‘Mrs America’ is available to watch on BBC iPlayer

(Source: Independent)

Why women make better crisis leaders

While many countries continue to grapple with escalating COVID-19 outbreaks, two have declared theirs effectively over: New Zealand and Iceland. It is no coincidence that both countries’ governments are led by women.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her Icelandic counterpart, Katrin Jakobsdottir, have both received considerable — and well-deserved — praise for their leadership during the COVID-19 crisis. But they are not alone: Of the top 10 best-performing countries (in terms of testing and mortality), four — Estonia, Iceland, New Zealand and Taiwan — have woman leaders. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen have also been commended for their pandemic leadership.

Women account for less than 7 percent of the world’s leaders, so the fact that so many have distinguished themselves during the COVID-19 crisis is noteworthy. But that’s not all. Some of the worst-performing countries are led by unapologetically old-fashioned “men’s men.” Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s entire persona channels a retrograde masculinity and a patriarchal view of women. Accordingly, he has called the virus a “measly cold,” boasting that he “wouldn’t feel anything” if infected.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and other female national leaders have received high praise for their leadership during the COVID-19 crisis. | BLOOMBERG

In the United Kingdom — which has recorded the most COVID-19 deaths in Europe — Prime Minister Boris Johnson also has a history of sexist comments. Like Bolsonaro, Johnson’s first instinct was to minimize the threat COVID-19 poses, though he changed his tune after being infected and ending up in an intensive care unit.

It’s the same story with U.S. President Donald Trump. A leader who came to power gloating about powerful men’s ability to assault women sexually — which he and his supporters dismissed as “locker room banter” — Trump has often worn his misogyny like a badge of honor. He, too, has consistently downplayed the COVID-19 crisis, focusing instead on “making China pay” for allowing the virus to spread beyond its borders.

Just as leaning into masculine stereotypes seems to correlate with poor pandemic responses, many observers seem to believe that woman leaders’ success may be rooted in their traditionally “feminine” qualities, such as empathy, compassion and willingness to collaborate. Forbes called Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg’s televised address to her country’s children an example of the “simple, humane innovations” that are possible under female leadership.

This reading is outdated, reductive and simply wrong. Trump and his ilk may act tough, but ultimately their leadership is an incompetent charade of bluster, vacillation and self-aggrandizement. High-performing female leaders, by contrast, have been resolute, assessed the evidence, heeded expert advice and acted decisively.

Following the mantra “go hard and go early,” Ardern imposed a strict lockdown four days before New Zealand’s first COVID-19 death. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen introduced more than a hundred public health measures in January — when the World Health Organization was still casting doubt on the possibility of human-to-human transmission.

If traditionally “feminine” traits don’t explain female leaders’ strong performance in times of crisis, what does? The answer may be related to the path women take to power, which is generally more demanding than that faced by men. In particular, it may be linked to the “glass cliff” phenomenon, whereby women are more likely than men to be appointed to leadership positions that are “risky and precarious.”

Research into the glass cliff began with the finding that, before appointing men to their boards, companies in the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index typically experienced stable share prices. Before appointing a woman, however, those same companies often experienced five months of poor share-price performance. Another study found that companies listed on the U.K. stock exchange tended to increase gender diversity on their boards after experiencing big losses.

A similar tendency can be seen in politics. Margaret Thatcher became leader of a Conservative Party in crisis and prime minister after a “winter of discontent.” Archival analysis of the 2005 U.K. general election found that female Conservative Party candidates tended to contest seats that would be significantly more difficult to win (judged according to their rival’s performance in the previous election).

Ardern also got her break by being thrust onto a glass cliff: She became the leader of New Zealand’s Labour Party in 2017 after poor polling forced her predecessor to resign. A mere two months later, she became the country’s youngest prime minister in 150 years.

According to the researchers, the glass cliff may appear because organizations are more willing to challenge the status quo when the status quo isn’t working. The visible difference of having a woman in charge could also reassure stakeholders that change is happening. As for the women, they may be more likely to accept leadership positions in times of crisis because they have fewer opportunities to reach the top. They can’t simply wait for an easier post to open up.

Regardless of why it happens, the fact is that by the time a woman reaches the heights of corporate or political power, she is likely to have overcome massive hurdles. With men, that is possible but far from guaranteed. Johnson (who was fired from multiple jobs for lying) and Trump (with his meticulously documented history of business failures, including several bankruptcies) never seem to run out of second chances. These leaders’ paths to power are characterized more by plush cushions than glass cliffs — and it shows.

While many factors are shaping outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic, leadership is undoubtedly one of the most important. It should surprise no one that, by and large, it is the leaders who have already had to prove themselves who are the most effective. That very often means they are women.

(Source: JT)

10-yr-old student earns praise after refusing to answer ‘offensive’ math problem about girls’ weight

In a picture of the answer shared online by the proud parent, Rhythm encircle the question and wrote "what!!!!" adding that, "This is offensive. Sorry I won't right [write] this it's rood [rude]."

A fourth-grade student from Utah is winning hearts online after she refused to solve an ‘offensive’ maths problem that asked students to compare girls’ weights. Her answer on the worksheet refusing to solve the sum stating her reason and a note to her teacher explaining her concern are going viral.

Rhythm Pacheco is winning hearts online after standing up for things she strongly believes in.

Rhythm Pacheco, a Grant Elementary School in Murray, recently was given a homework where a question involving body-weight of girls made her uncomfortable as she thought it was very rude. The problem read, “The table to the right shows the weight of three Grade 4 students. How much heavier is Isabel than the lightest student?”

In a picture of the answer shared online by the proud parent, Rhythm encircle the question and wrote “what!!!!” adding that, “This is offensive. Sorry I won’t right [write] this it’s rood [rude].”

The 10-year-old also went ahead and wrote a note to her teacher explaining why she couldn’t answer the question. “Dear Mrs. Shaw, I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t think that math problem was very nice because that’s judging people’s weight. Also, the reason I did not do the sentence is cause I just don’t think that’s nice. -Love Rhythm”

Speaking to Today, her mother Naomi said, “Rhythm’s dad and I were extremely proud of Rhythm for listening to her gut instincts and standing up for what is right. Rhythm’s teacher was so responsive and handled the situation with such care. She told her she understands how she would be upset about this and that she didn’t have to write out the answer.”

People on social media praised the little girl for “standing up for the things she believed in”, while a few others lashed out at the publishers who curated the assignments.

“I was shocked… I was shocked, honestly,” Naomi told Fox News about the homework question. “I feel like it’s such an irresponsible way to teach children how to do math,” Naomi said.

\After the girl went viral and it raised concerned among many parents online about the kind of questions through which children learn these days, Eureka Math, the company that provides core educational materials to the girl’s school district, released a statement regarding the questionable math problem.

“User feedback is a vital part of our culture; we are grateful to receive constructive feedback from students, teachers, and parents alike,” said the statement. “We apologize for any discomfort of offense caused by the question. Please know that we will replace this question in all future reprints, and suggest that teachers supply students with an appropriate replacement question in the interim.”

(Source: The Indian Express)

Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam took on adultery way before Supreme Court did

Abrar Alvi’s 1962 film Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam made way for a fearless and gutsy Meena Kumari.

After 158 years, adultery is not a crime in India anymore. ‘Husband is not the master of wife’ the Supreme Court said while dumping the colonial-era law. Bollywood director Abrar Alvi dared to question this feudal notion of marriage over five decades ago in his black and white classic Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam.

Based on Bimal Mitra’s Bengali novel Shaheb Bibi Golam, Alvi’s ‘much ahead of its time’ film is about ruins – a system, a haveli and a marriage. Every question that the film’s main protagonist, Meena Kumari, asks is a dart thrown at the institution of marriage, family, patriarchy and the zamindari system.

The film begins with the shot of a haveli in ruins. Wandering through the ruins in Calcutta, a middle-aged architect Bhootnath (played by Guru Dutt), recalls he had been here many years ago looking for work.

The haveli belongs to the Choudharys, a family of Bengali zamindars, where a younger Bhootnath began to observe the degenerating lifestyle of the elder and the younger zamindar. One evening, he gets to meet Chhoti Bahu (Meena Kumari), wife of the younger philandering zamindar Chhote Babu (Rehman) – the most stunning scene in the film (appearing at the 50th minute in complete disregard to commercial considerations).

His first glimpse is of her bejewelled feet. Beautifully lensed by the great V.K. Murthy, the scene opens with a PoV shot of Bhootnath who walks into the room looking at the chequered black and white floor. As he answers her questions, he looks up to see her face. From that majestic close-up of Kumari’s eyes, she holds the audience in what is remembered as one of the greatest performances ever put on Indian screens.

She lets him in on a secret, an intimate reality in her marriage, as well as the lives of the women in the haveli. “The days are for sleeping, but the nights here are for staying awake and keeping others’ awake.”

Hinting at the humiliating sadness that she carries within her – something she says men and most women will not understand — Chhoti Bahu asks him to bring her Mohini Sindoor (vermillion). She hopes it will bring her luck and strengthen her hold on her marriage and her husband.

In the song, Naa jao saiyaan, she boldly demands sexual fulfilment from her husband – an audacious demand for not only the women in the haveli, but also for Bollywood heroines of the time. Sexual expressions were reserved only for the vamp in the cinema until then. After all, we are told that the women in the haveli have only one activity to busy themselves with – buying jewellery.

In the middle of all this loss and longing, Bhootnath and Chhoti Bahu discover a form of an unconventional friendship. He is able to provide her with the kind of emotional intimacy which she seeks from her husband but doesn’t find. The film doesn’t name this relationship. But in the feudal haveli, even a platonic relationship is frowned upon.

The Chhoti Bahu tries everything – from the special sindoor to alcohol – to draw her husband’s wavering attention and to prevent him from going out every night. But the strength of her tragic character is only matched by the decadence of her husband, a symbol of the feudal society under the colonial rule. Into this unravelling world walks in Bhootnath, an educated middle-class youth.

Their unusual friendship comes to an abrupt end when they leave at dawn in a horse cart to visit a sadhu in the city. In her drunken drawl, she says to him nobody understands her the way he does. But the patriarch of the family sends his goons to attack them.

For a long time, it was speculated that the 1962 film was actually made by Dutt. The fact that it did have many of the legendary filmmaker’s stylistic flourishes have only kept the speculation alive. However, Dutt only produced this marvel, five years and two classics after Pyaasa.

In the end, Bhootnath finds the ‘ruins’ of Chhoti Bahu in more ways than one, rounding up the film’s circular tale.

Each actor in the film brought alive the turn-of-the-century clash between a feudal, patriarchal society and a new meritocratic order alive on screen. A star in her own right by then, Waheeda Rehman even took a secondary character just to be part of the film.

The timeless score by composer Hemant Kumar and lyrics by Shakeel Badayuni (both not the first choice) gave Alvi the sweep to create his edifice. The three Geeta Dutt songs – Na jao saiyaan, Koi door se awaaz, Piya aiso jiya me – remain as memorable as ever.

The character of Chhoti Bahu was seen as a gamble for Meena Kumari given that the traditional representation of an Indian woman up until that point was of a virginal woman. A woman who could drink herself to self-destruction? That was a complete no-no.

The subtle dismantling of that legacy by Alvi, who allowed his character in Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam the space to breathe even in a bad marriage, remains the film’s greatest contribution to Hindi films.

(Source: The Print)