Silent Historiographers: Memories of Struggle, Scripts of Resistance
Romita Choudhury
Abstract
Women’s experience in mass movements has been largely historicized from a contributory perspective. Little is known about how women’s participation has redefined politics and political organization. In this paper I argue that women’s testimonial can be approached as a significant effort towards a feminist historiography that goes beyond conventions of truth, authenticity, and representativeness, and engages with the question of how to confront the subject of history. The postcolonial woman intellectual’s role as the consciousness through which the testimonies are made to enter discourse is, thus, of utmost importance.
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The itinerary of testimonials reflects, to a certain degree, the journey of postcolonial cultural production from the ex-colony to the metropolis, both arriving through cultural exchange routes that straddle a number of different forms of economic and political
"global" transactions, the testimonial narrative’s admission into institutional practices has been far more resistant. Like the experience of migration that has become the allencompassing sign of different colonial histories, so the testimonial has acquired a representational agency as genre of the third world subaltern. Like the postcolonial voice that finds authenticity in figures of dispersal and hybridity, under the sign of multiculturalism, so the testimonial narrator enters the increasingly internationalized academic institution as signifier of "a transcultural politics of coalition with the subaltern” (Williams 226). Both are subject to homogenization as a result of their position within a largely recuperative discourse of inclusion and reterritorialization.
Mapping the paradigmatic convergences and differences between narrative forms originating from postcolonial spaces is not the purpose of this discussion. Rather it aims to draw attention to the possibilities in testimonials to strengthen the decolonizing vein in postcolonial critique. The questions testimonials raise about representation, for instance, resonate with critical issues postcolonial literary studies faces today. With the problematization of its familiar markers--language, nationalism, modernization, and cross-cultural identity, to name a few—postcolonial criticism has opened on to vastly indeterminate terrains of cultural and historiographical critique, grappling with ideological specificities of representation. Consequently, the strategic self-positioning of the representing subject has acquired greater focus than the catalogue of oppositions, such as tradition and modernity, city and country, language and identity that defined
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postcolonial writing (particularly in English) in the post-independence decades of the fifties and sixties. Colonial discourse studies in Africa, India, the Caribbean, and other postcolonial formations are shaking the ground on which English studies stands, feminist historiography is interrogating nationalist interpretations and resolutions of the "woman question," and postcolonial critics in different disciplinary sites are deconstructing the elite cosmopolitanism of intellectuals in their representation of "third world" subalternity.
Testimonials are significant and valuable to postcolonial criticism because they contribute to this discursive upheaval through accounts of political and social struggles, which can reveal, in their representation of gender and class, the suppression of subaltern voice not only in traditional historiography but also in people-centered Marxist histories
(Prakash 1994). Testimonial criticism, like postcolonial studies, has challenged its own agendas of otherness. The genre’s defining characteristics, such as the reliability of the witness, lack of bourgeois aspirations, collective voice, communication leading to action, in other words, being “by nature a protean and demotic form,” as John Beverley has described it, have become less persuasive than reflections on the relationship between history and the first person narrator, the academic institution’s assumptions and expectations of what testimonials should do, what excisions and reinscriptions take place to enhance the comprehensibility of testimonials, and finally how it may infiltrate the agendas of undifferentiated third worldist feminism. Not only do the elements of oral history, autobiography, ethnography, confound generic boundaries, but also the heterogeneity of ideologies of resistance with its specific moments and locations of history problematize notions of third world subjectivity. The negotiation of silence compels a close and careful reading of the process of retrieval of subaltern voice and, most importantly, decoding subaltern history within the text of subaltern “experience” continually destabilizes the meaning of the narrative.
The impetus for this study springs from a polyphonic testimonial called We Were
Making History: Women and the Telangana Uprising . In this testimonial, women who participated in the armed peasant revolt of Telangana, from 1945-1951, speak of their memories, telling their interlocutors what most histories of the movement do not. The tellers range from landless labouring women to college lecturers, from members of landowning families to those have lived most of their lives as bonded servants, from women who were already grandmothers when they joined to those who were only twelve or fourteen. Like many testimonial narrators, these women speak of their experiences as members of armed squads and other collective forms of local resistance, the dangers of performing as couriers, carrying weapons and secret messages, the risks they took to feed, shelter, and protect male activists and leaders, the dedication with which they served as teachers, doctors, and cultural workers during various stages of the movement.
Although numerous accounts of the Telangana movement celebrate the participation of women though the hardships of guerrilla resistance, the ideological challenges posed by their participation in the discourse of resistance has largely gone unrealized. Needless to say, once the movement was called off, the lives of these women faded into the walls of the house.
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Who were the interviewers? The editorial group that led the interviews with the
Telangana women activists and supporters belong to a women’s collective, called Stree
Shakti Sanghatana, based in Hyderabad, now one of the Telangana districts in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. The Sanghatana has been engaged in research and activist work in female infanticide, dowry killings, rape, shelter, and women’s health; with its limited resources, it has responded to such large scale crises as communal riots and the Bhopal industrial devastation. As one of its founding members explains, the organization’s work has led towards “evolving a style of political practice that is responsive to the specific nature of women’s oppression . . . not only to fight the enemy out there, but address the capillary forms in which power is rooted in the everyday world and through which its reproduction is guaranteed” (Kannabiran and Shatrugna 26).
The editorial framing of the testimonial is an example of rupture within unity, not in the sense of individual utterances against a larger discourse of representation, but in the effects of narration. The representation of subalternity in the book takes place both through the women who fought in the Telangana movement and the feminist scholars who draw upon women’s revolutionary experiences as the basis for new knowledges; both make sense of the experiences from a number of different vantage points. At certain moments the encounter is between intellectual and subaltern, at other times between two intellectuals, and yet again between theorists and practitioners. As the editors say,
“Writing [the book] has been a process of discovery: not only of the limits of traditional historiography, but of the possibilities that emerge as we recentre our scholarship” (32).
That this trajectory of the testimonial is only one possible direction, albeit a necessary one, that cannot but foreclose another, is articulated by one interviewee’s reminder to the editors. Says Mallu Swarajyam: “We also thought there should be a women’s history . . .
. My life never gave me the chance—to listen to the radio, to read books, to take up pen and paper and write. I worked twenty four hours in the field . . . There were days when I did not even get the daily paper. Days when I was underground in the dark! What can I write? . . . None of us wrote. Who else will write? It is because we could not write that it came to you” (252). In Swarajyam’s reminder, one can glimpse the exclusions that border the privileging of “experience” in the genre of testimonials. In referring to the many histories that have vanished without a trace, Swarajyam does not seek to commemorate the many individuals who stood against the army’s brutal repression, but of the specific forms of domination and resistance that can no longer be explained or understood. She speaks of the Telangana movement as also being a movement for linguistic autonomy, of religious freedom, educational rights, “which taken to the villages . . . was transformed into an anti-landlord campaign” (233).
Although testimonials with their narration of experiences of repression represented by a witness and participant are defined by their immediacy, their deep traces of trauma, and the struggles of memory, testimonials have also variously interrogated the how and the why of exposing the wound, of turning the experience of violence into words. This interrogation has widely been translated as the unrepresentability of trauma and
“language fail[ing] in the face of trauma” (Gilmore,
The Limits of Autobiography:
Trauma and Testimony 6). The Telangana women’s response to questions about their treatment at the hands of the landlords destabilizes the interviewing group’s assumptions
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about the narratives of “victims.” They do not speak much about “forced labour and the cruelty of the landlords, about purdah and rape” (29). In fact, women who were old enough to have lived through the worst part of the feudal regime cannot or will not speak of these experiences. Says Golla Mallamma: “We suffered a lot. Do you think I remember? Look, if you want to help us--help us. Now I am sixty years old. Do you hear? . . .Do you know? How to tell you? So many generations—we can’t tell you” (63).
Golla Buchamma puts it like this in her seven-line testimony: They burnt . . . they killed .
. . they raped . . . what else can I say? It’s the same story. Do you think we can tell our story? No, we don’t know how” (64). The question is, are the women refusing to confront their traumatic memories? Or are they refusing the objectification and spectacularization of the horror of repression? Is it the fear of betrayal in telling the past which the women themselves have described as a “magic time?” Their demand for redress would seem to displace the abjection that would inevitably attend the unsublimated narration of stories of rape and torture. At the same time, how can the narratives press upon the limits of traditional historiography which has never approached the Telangana movement with a feminist political consciousness? Which has been silent on those very experiences of the women that the women themselves are resisting telling.
The immediacy of WWMH is further thwarted by its distance from the peak of revolutionary activity. In an important way WWMH is about the aftermath of the movement. The accounts of the women revolutionaries about the lives they led after the movement was called off, even in their brevity, capture the intellectual and emotional devastation that followed. The painful sense of emptiness seems never to have faded from their memories. It exists in a diffuse, non-definitive dimension, compelling and assisting the editors to move beyond the immediate narrative situation: “We can . . . hear the questioning, the wavering, even the outright rejection of explanations as we read against the grain of the text’s volubility and listen for the gaps, the hesitancies, the silences, the evasions (32). The feminist interviewers have asked for the life stories of the women in the Telangana movement, “with the emphasis that has come out of their experiences, but they are made aware that the emphasis has been determined by “centuries of silence”
(27); they have noted contradictions in many of the major statements, but they have not been able to get their interviewees to address them. The testimonial narrators have shown in their silence and their speech the persistence of many of those structures of oppression that are still unspeakable, within the space of patriarchal political culture, sometimes literally asking their interviewers “to switch the tape recorder off as the ‘still unmentionable’ question of women’s politics were discussed” (28).
The discourses of trauma and testimonials have established direct linkages, particularly in testimonials’ purpose of creating a narrative space for the wounded subject to speak of her pain and thereby confront the silence imposed by inaccessibility to discourses of self-representation. However, the historiographical and transformational value of traumatic memory is assessed largely on the basis of terms set by an academiccultural discourse itself situated within a nexus of power, desire, interest that is part of the institutional home of the testimonial. This is where testimonials move and breathe.
Anthologies of testimonial criticism, such as The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and
Latin America (1996), Teaching and Testimony: Rigoberta Manchu and the North
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American Classroom (1996), and The Rigoberta Menchu Controversy (2001) show that the contestations over testimonials take as their starting point not so much the history of the testimonial subject as the methodologies of the academic discipline, much like the debates over the provenance of the Subaltern Studies Group. Even the most trenchantly argued replies to the neo-conservative attack on Menchu’s intentions seek to legitimate their arguments by proof of their experience and expertise in Latin American Studies.
Robert Carr points out, the “standard operating procedure to assume an easy metonymic relation between the subject of testimonial and the ethnic group from which he or she comes,” elides the particularities of the political and cultural location from which the voice of testimonial speaks (Grewal and Caplan ed. Scattered Hegemonies:
Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices 157). One such particularity, for example, is Menchu’s address to the divergences among her people, among all poor
Guatemalans: I must say it’s unfortunate that we Indians are separated by ethnic barriers, linguistic barriers. It’s typical of Guatemala: such a small place but such huge barriers that there’s no dialogue between us” (143).The barriers among Indians that Menchu talks about is likely to remain in place long after the period of revolutionary struggle has passed. Their part in the making of subaltern history in Guatemala is no less significant for that, perhaps even urgent in the context of aboriginal peoples’ struggle for economic and political rights.
Differentiating between historiographical and psychoanalytical or literary representation of trauma, Dominick LaCapra concludes that “Writing about trauma is an aspect of historiography related to the project of reconstructing the past as objectively as possible without necessarily going to the self-defeating extreme of single-minded objectification that involves the denial of one’s implication in the problems one treats”
(LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma 186). Does this mean that the questions that stall testimonials at the checkpoint of disciplinary correctness are different in historiography than they are in literary theory? That issues of authenticity, spokesmanship, representativeness, proximity, clarity, symbolism, can be surrendered to the right kind of interlocutor in interpreting the historical events through the experience of trauma? LaCapra proposes that the truth claims of the historiographical must be conjoined with the literary one in order for trauma to push the limits of narrative possibility, bringing forth the full impact of its hybridity: “Writing trauma [unlike writing about trauma] would be one of those telling after-effects [that] involves processes of acting out, working over, and to some extent, working through in analyzing and ‘giving voice’ to the past—processes of coming to terms with traumatic ‘experiences,’ limit events, and their symptomatic effects that achieve articulation in different combinations and hybridized forms” (186).
For the feminist collective looking to the memories of militant subaltern resistance for an other women’s history, giving voice to the past of revolutionary struggle is not possible without reading the present which is the primary focus of retelling the past. The
Telangana women reveal multiple levels of trauma. As labouring women under the
Nizam’s regime in colonial India, many were targets of brutal physical oppression.
Protected by the Crown in return for military and judicial control, the Nizam ruthlessly exploited the peasantry. Forced labour was common, food taxes were exorbitant and
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eviction of cultivators through corrupt means was a means of keeping tenants from owning land. The Communist Party called for armed struggle. Village defence squads were formed. The resistance turned into a guerrilla movement in early 1948. The movement spread to over 4000 villages. Village administrative committees were formed that abolished slave labour, cancelled unpaid debts, transferred full tenancy rights to tenants, and redistributed thousands of acres of land. The potential of the movement to seriously upset class relations was felt not only by landlordsand their mainstay, the
Nizam, but also by the national government that came to power with independence in
August 1947. When the Nizam refused to join the Indian Union, the army was sent to overthrow the Nizam. Once the Nizam was subjugated, the army turned its attention to the communist-led peasant movement. This opened a new chapter in the repression of the people. The severe terror that followed was no less brutal than that inflicted by the
Nizam’s paramilitary organization. About 50,000 peasants were arrested and detained.
Thousands of activists were killed in repeated police raids. In 1951 the struggle was called off.
It is not in the context of these kinds of oppression alone that the women speak of their bodies. They speak also of the pain and loss experienced in their relationship to the Party.
Trained in self-defence, fighting in guerrilla squads, traveling long distances alone at night, as messengers and transporters of weapons, administering medical aid, attending political meetings, organizing various oppositional activities, the women seemed to have embarked on an altogether new life. Yet, women were a problem. Their accounts of their lonely, secretive battle against entrenched family and sexual ideologies constitute their sharpest and most agonized critique of the movement leadership. Forty years after their involvement, the women recall vividly the hope and the power they felt in belonging to the organization, yet to most it is as if there were “no past, no future” (Razia Begum 179).
Acchamamba was expelled from the Party on charges of sexual misconduct; Kamalamma had to give away her child at six months; Pramila Tai had to arrange for her own shelter while underground. In attempting to bring together what the women meant to the
Telangana movement and what they could have meant, had the leadership confronted the gendered ideologies underpinning the struggle for social change, the Sanghatana members recognize their own subjection to patriarchal discourses. In that coterminous that disjunction, lies the main pedagogic dimension of the testimonies. From envisaging the project as an “analysis of the role of women in the Telangana movement [whose] life stories . . . were to be part of [their] data,” the interviewers gradually move towards reflecting upon the unspeakability of their own socialist feminist practice: “its secret languages, its silences, its unarticulated values . . . even the needs and desires it still nourishes, the substratum of fear and ambition it draws upon” (30). The linking of the testimonials’ muted subversion of the patriarchal script of representation in revolutionary political practice with the struggles of the feminist collective sounds a note of mutual crisis. As the Sanghatana members confront their assumptions of women’s lives as axiomatic knowledge bases, so the self-representations of Telangana women revolutionaries reveal traces of dominant discourses. The interview ethics of the editorial group may create the ideal environment of oral exchange, but will not in itself radicalize the testimonial or turn it into an lineage for socialist feminism today (30). In the form of the book and its substantive address to audiences such as us, the conversation returns to
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the historians and their move towards disentangling sanctioned memories, hidden conventions, reinvented identities in order to launch a women’s history.
As the writers discover, their own discursive practices do not inherently produce the kind of women’s history that would be able to speak for the movement as a whole. The range of testimonies has taken the collection beyond the framework of “compensatory history,” which sees its task “as having to locate, and place alongside the great men of history, the great women who had been left out” (19). However, they find it considerably more difficult to move beyond the pattern of “contributory history,” which shifts from documenting the achievements of notable women, to describing and assessing the quality and extent of women’s participation in [social movements]” but still regards them as contributing to something that exists/existed independent of them” (20).
The ideology of contributory women’s role is not easy to dismantle. If feminist historiography is to address the ways in which experiences are explained, it must, in the words of Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, be prepared to “engage with its own presuppositions of an objective gender-neutral method of enquiry as well as the social moments and movements it sets out to represent” (
Recasting Women 26). The testimonial challenges a number of categories inherent to historiography, chief among them the position of historian to the movement she represents. The trauma of subaltern women’s resistance particularly within the awareness of the impossibility of gaining subjective control over its effects compels not only the re-imagining of the subject of history but also tracing its formation as subject.
Speaking of the intractability of the female subaltern subject in postcolonial spaces,
Gayatri Spivak positions the female subaltern as a discursive production:
The question is not of female participation in insurgency, or the ground rules of the sexual division of labour, for both of which there is “evidence.” It is, rather, that, both as subject of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant. If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even in more shadow. (Nelson and Grossberg, Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture 271-313).
The effacement of the female subaltern has been explained as double displacement in postcolonial readings—displacement by colonialism and patriarchy—but the itinerary of the female subaltern that Spivak delineates is covered, written over by discourses of colonialism, imperialism, culturalism, negotiated independence, and hegemonic discourses of history and identity. The role of the postcolonial intellectual as investigating subject is particularly significant here: “[i]n seeking to learn to speak to
(rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject of the subaltern woman, the postcolonial intellectual systematically ‘unlearns’ female privilege” (295). What would it mean to unlearn privilege or learn privilege as “disablement”? For Spivak it would mean the production of a “testimony of the women’s voice-consciousness,” which would not be ideology-transcendent or “fully subjective, of course, but it would have constituted the ingredients for producing a countersentence” (297). Can those who engage in the testimonial project author this countersentence?
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I will not try to answer this question yet, but end by reiterating that the socialist ideology through which the feminist intellectuals try to make sense of “ordinary” women’s lives is not enough to unravel the political, social, and cultural arrangements that ensure the exploitation of women. WWMH tries to go beyond the retrieval of
“authentic” voices by emphasizing the heterogeneous and fragmentary nature of the statements, begging the question of how and why hegemonic ideologies become naturalized, shaping even the counterhegemonic environment and the practices within it.
As such it directs us towards the reformulation of truth claims—from the realm of verifiable reality (what really happened) to possible reality (what didn’t or could have happenened).
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Carr, Robert. “Crossing the First World/Third World Divides: Testimonial, Transnational
Feminisms, and the Postmodern Condition.” Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and
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Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony . Ithaca: Cornell
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Kannabiran, Vasanth and Veena Shatrugna, “The Relocation of Political Practice—The
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“We Were Making History”: Women and the Telangana
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