Neech
Summary
Neech is a story about Sultana, an upper caste woman who was
a teacher in a college and Shyamali, a lower caste woman who works as a nurse
for a child in the house next to Sultana’s. Sultana is instantly drawn to
Shyamali from the time she sees her because Shyamali is this gorgeous,
confident and carefree girl who seems to be making her place in a man’s world.
She doesn’t bow down to the rich and plays with children in a carefree way. Sultana
finds out that Shyamali had left her husband because he did not treat her well
and was having an affair with Ram Avatar, a watchman who belonged to the higher
caste. Sultana is asked by her cook not to interact with Shyamali because she
is from a lower caste and also because he believes that it is immoral of her to
be involved with Ram Avatar. Sultana scolds the cook and dismisses these
thoughts but because she has been brought up in a traditional set up to believe
that women from lower castes are characterless she can’t help but wonder it
that is in fact true. Sultana goes through this dilemma a few times but she
convinces herself out of her traditional thoughts. She later finds out that Ram
Avatar is being thrown out of his job because the community thinks he should
not be with a woman from a lower caste. When she tries to speak to Ram Avatar
and Shyamali about it, they don’t open up to her because they think she won’t
understand. Sultana gets upset about the fact that both Ram Avatar and Shyamali
think that just because she comes from an upper class she won’t be able to
understand their troubles. She takes this up as a challenge and prepares
herself to go and speak to Ram Avatar’s employer to not fire him, so that she
can prove to them that she does understand and really wants to help. However,
as Sultana is getting ready to speak to Ram Avatar’s employer she finds out
that Shyamali has left Ram Avatar and run away. Sultana gets extremely angry at
Shyamali and goes back to thinking if it is true that women from low caste
can’t be trusted.
A few days later Sultana finds Shyamali on the street and
confronts her about her actions, it is then that she finds out the Shyamali had
left Ram Avatar because he kept accusing her for the loss of his job and Shyamali
thought that if she had not run away she would have to hear this for the rest
of her life. Sultana is left speechless when teary eyes Shyamali asks her to
give Ram Avatar her good wishes. The story ends with Shyamali smiling at
Sultana as though telling her that she had finally understood her.
Reflection
After reading Neech for the first time, I was most drawn
Sultana’s character because I could identify with her on many occasions. Sultana
was this confused woman who had been brought up to believe some ways of the
world, for instance – low caste women have lose moral values. However, being an
educated woman she was also exposed to the progressive view that all these
stereo-types were not true and being born in a particular class or caste did
not determine anything about a person. It seems that Sultana really wants to
believe what her education has taught her and not what she has learned from her
ancestors / community. But, there are many occasions in the story where Sultana
is shown doubting her educated self and wondering if it is true that low caste
women are of lose morals. Every time Sultana has such a doubt she almost forces
herself to believe that such thoughts are not correct and that she should not
be thinking like that.
I feel that Sultana is almost in awe of Shyamali and in some
ways she wants to become like Shyamali. She thinks about how Shyamali is
comfortable about being herself in front of other men and how she is okay with
living alone without a husband. The character of Sultana reflects some aspects
of the author’s life as well. Sultana and the author are both educated women
who seem to be spending a lot of time alone because their husbands are away. Also,
the author through Sultana’s character brings out some of her (probable)
initial struggles and frustrations about when people whom she wanted to work
for did not believe that she could understand their problems just because she
belonged to some other strata of the society. Sultana seems to be going through
similar struggles and I think at some point most of us, especially people in
our college, have gone through (or probably will go through) such situations as
well.
Our group also discussed the possibility of Sultana being
attracted to Shyamali, and herself not being aware of her feelings. This was an
interesting aspect because I hadn’t thought about this when I first read the
story. After our discussion when I went back to the story and read it from this
perspective it seemed quite possible, firstly, because from Sultana’s
perspective Shyamali’s beauty has been described in great detail, secondly,
because Sultana is angry at Shyamali for leaving without informing and even
though it seems that she is angry because Shyamali left Ram Avatar, it is also
possible that she is angry because Shyamali left her, and thirdly (and I may be
reading a lot between the lines) because the author was a contemporary of Ismat
Chughtai, who probably was one of the first women authors in India to write
about lesbianism, and she wanted to subtly write about the theme. However, it
is also possible that the author did not even think on this line and because we
are now at a time where homosexuality is being talked about so openly that the
thought about Sultana being lesbian came to our minds.
On the other hand I interpreted Shyamali’s character as this
confident girl who took charge of her life and did not take any non-sense from
anyone. She had left her husband, in a time when such a thing was almost
unheard of, because he apparently ordered her around, and was making a living on
her own. She had the nerve to say something like that her husband was dead for
her at a time when husbands were almost worshipped. She was beautiful and mischievous,
which adds a slight touch of innocence in her character. She played with
children without a care of what the world would think and as the author says,
she looked like a princess from the Ajanta caves. I thought of Shyamali’s as a
sorted girl who knew exactly what she wanted out of life until we discussed
about this during the Literacy Circle. One of the members pointed out that
maybe Shyamali was not all that sorted and maybe she was actually pretty
unsure, confused and insecure about life and that is why she kept running away
from troubles instead of confronting them. For instance, it seems that she left
Ram Avatar because he had started blaming her for the loss of his job but if
she was in fact in love with him then she could have spoken to him about this
instead of leaving him, maybe she didn’t really love him and took this as an
excuse to run away. But then, towards the end of the story she does ask Sultana
about Ram Avatar’s wellbeing with teary eyes. I haven’t been able to take a
stand on this but it sure does add another layer of depth to Shyamali’s
character.
We thought that the other characters, the cook and Ram
Avatar, were rather straight forward and did not merit too much attention. We
did speak about Ram Avatar and whether he was in fact in love with Shyamali or
was he just infatuated to her, but there was not much evidence to dig out to
support either of the ideas.
More than the story I was fascinated by the author’s
background. We can tell that she her education, upbringing and experiences have
made her a progressive thinker who challenges the stereotypes prevalent in the
Indian society at her time. In the short write up about her before the story it
is said that she was mostly found writing stories with a cup of chai in one
hand and a cigarette in other, this short description also gives us an idea of
kind of person she would be. She was married to Sajjad Zaheer, who himself was
a Marxist and a revolutionary and spent most of his time away from home.
‘Neech’ seems to reflect some aspects of her life and I
won’t be surprised if this story was an episode from her early days, where she
was in place of Sultana aspiring to become Shyamali. The lines, “The cobwebs of
inherited belief confused her. Had she accepted principles of equality merely
to convince others? Had she learned principles by rote without assimilating
them?” probably reflect Razia’s personal dilemmas about her beliefs.
It is also important to look at the story at face value
because it seems to be giving a very straight forward message about the kind of
social restrictions, ideologies and mind-sets prevalent in India. The name of
the story, Neech, suggests that it might be a caste based story, which it is,
but I think it is also as much about women empowerment as about caste issues.
Being a woman of a lower caste in India is as Neech as it gets and I guess the
title refers to that and not just a caste divide. Razia’s take on feminism
seems to be that women should take charge of their lives in a patriarchal
society and not depend on men. Her description on marriage being nothing more
than legalized prostitution, her idea of women getting out of marriages, having
relationships seems to defy all social norms. Even though it was written for a
society of the 60s and 70s, the story is even relevant today as it was then.
I think the entire exercise of Literary Circles was very
interesting and it enabled me to develop my understanding of the text and also
exposed me to views which I hadn’t conceived on my own. I realised that as a reader
we bring our own ideas and perceptions to a story. The best example of this was
our discussion about homosexuality where in some people were not even willing
to consider it as an option where as some were almost convinced that the story
was about hidden sexual preferences.
In a classroom setting I think there needs to be a lot of
background (prep-work) work before we introduce children to Literary Circles.
Maybe we should have some teacher facilitated literary circles to start with
and then let the children manage them on their own. We need to build a culture
of talking and sharing freely without worry about being judged. In a school
setting in India, children are generally not encouraged to share what they
think about the story so many times they end up telling what they think the
teacher wants to hear. Nonetheless, I
think literary circles can work very well even for young children and introduce
them to the concept that people can make different meanings from the same text.
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