What happens when the marginalised are oppressed, not by the empowered, but by the marginalised themselves? This is a question one is provoked to ask on reading a new paperback edition of the memoir I Want to Destroy Myself by Malika Amar Shaikh (Speaking Tiger), translated from the Marathi original, Mala Uddhvasta Vhaychay, by Jerry Pinto.
In his translator’s Introduction, Pinto admits that “I did not enjoy translating [the book]. It would often leave me feeling…in danger of collapse.”
‘I Want to Destroy Myself’, Malika Amar Shaikh, Translated by Jerry Pinto, Speaking Tiger, 2016.
Malika Amar Shaikh is the daughter of a Muslim father and Hindu mother. (There was no ‘Love Jihad’ when her parents married). However, she is better known as the wife of the iconic Dalit poet, Namdeo Dhasal, founder of the Dalit Panther movement in Maharashtra in February 1974. The movement drew its inspiration from the Black Panther Party of America, founded in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, to protect black people from police brutality, and give them land, bread, housing, education, clothes, justice and peace.
Although not a Dalit but a communist by way of political belief, Shaikh was drawn towards the Dalit Panther movement and its founder, Namdeo Dhasal, whom she describes as “extraordinarily good-looking compared to the men around him, a rough sort, tall, thin but with a strong body.” She waxes eloquent about his chiselled body, his “laughing eyes that seemed capable of love,” and his self-confidence.
Shaikh’s feelings were reciprocated by Dhasal. Soon, marriage was on the cards, with Dhasal telling Shaikh, “If you won’t marry me now, I’ll marry someone else.”
And so, Shaikh and Dhasal got married in June 1974.
It wasn’t long, however, before the honeymoon was over. Much more committed to political activism than to family life, Dhasal turns out to be the archetypal male chauvinist who resorts to heavy drinking, wife-beating, wife-swapping, adultery, and so on, even as he remains jobless for extended periods of time. Shaikh is even compelled to trade her gold bangles and earrings to finance her husband’s nefarious activities. The man with the sculpted body and booming laughter now becomes an “authoritarian despotic personality.”
Around this time, Shaikh gets pregnant and gives birth to a son, Ashutosh. But this does not impel Dhasal to change his ways. The domestic violence continues unabated. This is how Shaikh describes it:
“…he would beat me. The tears would follow.
“One night, he came home drunk and demanded that I get up. He abused me once again. Something snapped in me and I got up and hit him across the face. He hit me back and then muttering to himself, he went off to sleep.”
Things get so bad that Shaikh attempts suicide and becomes murderous (“I wanted to gash and score him with my nails. I wanted to empty an entire revolver-barrel of bullets into his chest.”)
About the most troubling part of Shaikh’s narrative is when Dhasal tries to rob her of her child. This can immediately be read in terms of Adrienne Rich’s seminal essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” where Rich, citing Kathleen Gough, lists eight characteristics that make men the oppressors they are. And one of these characteristics is, “To control or rob [women] of their children.”
Now Dhasal does exactly that “when Ashu (Ashutosh) was eight months old [and he] picked him up and walked out of the house,” even as Shaikh was lying in bed with a bleeding nose after Dhasal “had just finished with hitting me.”
These attempts to separate mother and son continually recur in the book. Shaikh laments: “He had snatched away my child and I could do nothing confronted with his patriarchal prerogative. All the way home, I wept.”
In the end, Shaikh is so desperate that in a conversation with her lawyer, she says: “I’ll claim he isn’t the father. Then I’ll get my child back, won’t I?”
But the lawyer cannot guarantee Shaikh that she would get her child back even if she made such a claim.
Namdeo Dhasal was born in close proximity to Mumbai’s infamous red-light district, known as Golpitha. In fact, his mother was said to be a sex-worker. Thus, visiting prostitutes isn’t new to Dhasal, but it results in Shaikh contracting a venereal disease. She writes: “On both sides of my pubic area, boils erupted. Pus began to form inside. The pain got worse but who could I tell…I was beginning to feel dizzy almost every other minute. I had no energy. I began to run a fever and lose weight. I recognized the symptoms. This was one of the gifts Namdeo had given me, a souvenir of his days with prostitutes.”
After his extra-marital affair with an Air India employee, Dhasal’s adulterous tendencies resurface when he bluntly tells Shaikh, “I won’t make any attempt but if I get a chance [to have another affair] I won’t let it go either.” He adds: “You are my only wife. But there will always be many women.”
I Want to Destroy Myself shares intertextual similarities with several canonical literary works. Shaikh’s life with Namdeo Dhasal recalls the marriage of the African-American Cholly and Pauline Breedlove in Toni Morrison’s classic novel, The Bluest Eye. Cholly is portrayed in the novel as a beast who rapes and impregnates his own daughter, Pecola, leading to her insanity. (On the basis of Shaikh’s portrayal of him, one wonders what Dhasal would have done if they had a daughter, rather than a son. Black and Dalit men are often said to avenge their exploitation at the hands of white and upper-caste men by cruelly taking it out on their hapless wives and children).
Then there is a passage in Shaikh’s memoir that instantly reminds one of the poet Kamala Das. She says: “But love was something for which I had an endless desire. I wanted more; I wanted love with commitment. I wanted someone to love me alone.”
I began this review by asking, what happens when the marginalised are oppressed, not by the empowered, but by the marginalised themselves? That is what happens in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The animals on the farm start out with the dictum, All Animals are Equal. However, the pigs Napoleon and Snowball (representing Stalin and Trotsky), cunningly change that to, All Animals are Equal, but Some are More Equal than Others. Namdeo Dhasal, a Mahar by caste, certainly comes across as more equal than his non-Mahar wife, Malika Amar Shaikh.
How does one assess I Want to Destroy Myself overall? The title assumes significance in the context of a passage on page 140, where Shaikh writes: “The habit of loneliness is difficult to form so I formed others. I began to drink beer. I began to smoke cigarettes. I neglected my diet and drank tea instead. All day tea; at night, beer. I had subconsciously decided to destroy myself.”
Although Shaikh says, “To write an account as I have is supposed to be an act of shamelessness,” the book is actually a metaphoric act of militancy and rebellion, the author’s own sense of failure and defeat notwithstanding.
It is really the following passage that honestly sums up the nature of the book:
“I sometimes feel afraid of my own militancy. What do I really want? What is it that keeps me fighting although I have no weapons in my armoury? Where did this rebellion come from…This rebellion, this existential angst, this suffering, how long will it last? What do I want?”
R. Raj Rao is the author of several novels, short story and poetry collections, and nonfiction books. His latest novel is Mahmud and Ayaz.
