Ashapurna Devi’s novel Mittirbari (The House of the Mitras) is set in north Calcutta and is about a joint family that lives in a huge sprawling building. A symbol of the decadent middle-class life in undivided Bengal, the house is situated on a small street.
The street “had an older name, but recently, in anticipation of the independence of the country, some eager neighbor-hood boys have ….renamed it…. to make sure that India’s freedom struggle was helped a few steps of the way.”
The once spacious house marks a synechdocal relationship to the nation emerging from the throes of colonial rule. In the backdrop of the Calcutta riots, the changes taking place within the family are momentous. The two spheres, public and private, enmesh and entangle to such an extent that many of the inmates of Mittirbari are sorely tested.
Ashapurna Devi. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The ongoing clash of old and new values is symptomatic of the times. The lives of the inhabitants of Mittirbari revolve around cycles of eating, sleeping and quarrelling. In such a family, the act of widowed Umashoshi drinking tea during mandatory fasting is seen as a monstrous crime. Orthodox rituals permeate every aspect of this Hindu family, but the novel represents much more than the clash of tradition and modernity. Set in 1946, when the failure of the Cabinet Mission Plan is making headlines, Ashapurna Devi’s novel is a look at the times when momentous changes are taking place in the social, economic and political life of Bengal.
In the novel, both men and women encounter these changing times with bewilderment or unexpected strength. The joint family system clashes with a new individualistic sensibility. When newly married Surekha decides to attend a political meeting, her transgression creates consternation. Yet, the transformations of the age are too powerful to be ignored. Human society must refashion itself to take up the challenges. As Surekha says, it is the ability to accept others who are different from oneself and to learn from the young that are the hallmarks of the changing times.
In a violently rioting city, the very house of the Mitras, symbolic of an older way of life, is under attack by a mob. This brings unexpected saviours to the forefront, people who show a reserve of strength and fortitude. Shuddho, the wastrel of the family, takes up a bamboo staff to guard the main door. He urges the women to stand beside him:
“Shuddho said angrily, ‘Nobody will go away. Why should women be different? God has given them arms and legs….bring out your knives and scissors, your boti and your pestle, and stand here.”
Furniture shops destroyed during the violence in Calcutta in 1946. Credit: oldindianphotos.in
The belief that both men and women are to be the new citizens, marked by new responsibilities, makes the novel an exploration of the possibilities of freedom in the emerging nation-state. Yet this allegory of freedom is both incomplete and unfinished as far as the women of the novel are concerned. Ashapurna Devi’s ironic depiction of domestic life in Mittirbari is not based on the large political upheavals of the 1940s but on their subtle effects on the lives of the characters.
The riots are the outward manifestations of far deeper changes taking place in society. Postcolonial modernity blows away the cobwebs of tradition-bound lives and profoundly changes gender relations. The new age is acknowledged in the way the women respond to some of its pressures: to the newer sexual, political and familial norms that seek to bind or enable them. The daughter of the house, Umashoshi, who works in the household for food and shelter, also searches for the meaning of freedom.
“Did Umashoshi know the meaning of freedom? Yes, she knew it with certainty. It was the availability of food and clothes; when you spent money, that is, a reasonable sum of money, you would be able to buy things at the market…..”
By foregrounding individual female desires, Ashapurna Devi probes how the trauma of the times is re-inscribed into their selves. The novel interrogates the meaning and range of freedom in the context of women’s subjectivities in a society that sees them as harbingers of change yet exploits them sexually and psychologically. Ashapurna Devi’s text places the political reverberations as seismic changes in the social and familial life of the city.
The times may be out of joint but it will bring in a new order, both in the world outside and within the family. Yet this vision is constantly negated and fragmented by the failure of the characters to achieve any closure on their quest for self-independence.
Also read: Memories of 1946 Great Calcutta Killings Can Help Us Understand Violence in Today’s Bengal
The riots bring life in the city to a standstill; Calcutta is no longer recognisable.
“Have a thousand lightening struck the city? No, not from the sky – from the caverns of hell have come thousands of monsters! Mad, hungry from ages and aeons ago! It seemed a thousand-headed serpent was walking about, biting, spewing venom, and splitting the dry earth into pieces. Its poisoned breath was evident everywhere! ….Their sharp claws and teeth will tear asunder all – civilization, beauty, self-control, society and family as well as tradition… and culture. They will shake the very roots of human life to send us back to prehistoric times. There is another name for that – a communal riot.”
This novel does not stop at the depiction of the breakdown of human society through violence; the riots give rise to its opposite. In language that almost becomes allegorical, the riot is used as a discursive tool to explore a momentous time when all that the violence destroys will have to be created anew. When Surekha refuses to go back to the old conservative household, her father tells her that human society is marked by creative effort:
“Nothing is impossible to man. Men who built the pyramid were the same who destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The question is how we are using force, if we are using it correctly or not.…”
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The violence of the riots is anticipated by another violence that lies at the heart of the Hindu joint family. It is gendered violence that is the result of deep-seated psychopathological patriarchy drunk on power.
In the novel, the riots are a manifestation of this desire for power over the other. The text is an important aesthetic intervention to understand the family as a site of ideology formation and identity construction. The necessity to redefine power relations within and outside the home becomes the most important aesthetic impulse of the novel. This is a commensurate aesthetic project within a free India that will also construct a secular space of freedom for all people.
This is a reworked version of a chapter in The Partition of Bengal: Fragile Borders and New Identities (CUP, 2015) by Debjani Sengupta.
Debjani Sengupta teaches at the Department of English, Indraprastha College, Delhi University.
