What the Body Remembers (Between the Covers Collection)

Rating:
Summary: The trauma of Partition
Review: Beginning in 1928 and referring back to the memories of the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, Shauna Singh Baldwin's Partition-novel _What the Body Remembers_ integrates the political history of India, especially the effervescing religious factionalism, with the personal histories of two Sikh women--riddled with as much anxiety as the national history.

The novel offers a sensitive vignette of displacements, refugee dilemmas, and dispossessions interlaced with the specifically gendered violence performed on the bodies of women-drawn from recent feminist research studies. Notably, the story brings together women from Punjab and Bengal-the two provinces that were divided in 1947-fleeing from Lahore and places both in a situation of equal vulnerability on grounds of gender more than religion.

Besides the Partition atrocities that constitute the epic of the modern Indian nation-state, the novel touches upon various other subjects of topical interest: the socialization of young women, the devaluation of women in marriage as baby-making machines, the maltreatment of girl-children, the unlivable situation between co-wives, and the problem of dowry.

The characters of the men in the novel merited some more elaboration. The end seemed a little rushed. The Epilogue, however, is superb. The almost-clinical prose multiplies the psychological trauma of the event. As a narration of Sikh histories from the last few decades before Indian Independence, and especially the histories of women caught in the violence of Partition, Shauna Singh Baldwin's novel is a valuable addition to the growing literature on the Partition of India.

Rating:
Summary: Stylistic Weakness
Review: I think that this novel would have been greatly improved by reduction from 500 - plus pages to 300 or fewer. I appreciate that the author is trying to convey both the political background to the Partition, and the treatment of women in a patriarchal society, as well as telling the story of certain individuals. However, I often found the long-winded narrative tedious,and the references to a multitude of named characters highly confusing. Unlike many other Indian novels I've read, this one did not capture my imagination. Characters were not realized in depth, atmosphere was lacking, and plot was flat. It doesn't begin to compare with Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things", a novel that stayed in my mind for weeks.

Rating:
Summary: What The Body Remembers
Review: Ms. Baldwin's evocation of Punjab in the 1930's is so realistic one's throat becomes parched reading her brilliant prose. This novel is a story of the complicated interrelationships of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim families whose centuries-long guarded yet mostly peaceful co-existence is shattered by what is the violently-birthed beginning of the state of Pakistan. Ms. Baldwin's characters, particularly Satya, the first wife, and Roop-bi, the young, second, childbearing wife, are so real, one awakens surprised to find oneself not living near the cool storerooms of the mansions of the rich.

As political intrigue, the tale also regales. The perilous journey thousands of families were made to take, based on religious differences (the state of Pakistan is Muslim) leaves the reader fearful for the protagonists lives as they pretend to be faithful servants of religions they've only observed.

Satya, the Urdu-speaking barren first wife, is almost palpable. Her character would be played on American television by no less than Susan Lucci. She's Machiavellian to the core. She seethes with hatred when her husband brings home a teenage bride from a poor family to bear an heir. She plots revenge. How she obtains it is one of the most shocking and pitiful scenes in modern women's literature.

Roop has her own secret to keep, which, if revealed, would make her "unmarriageable" and a permanent burden on her family. She is aware that her husband gives her his first wife's jewels as presents and that her sole reason for being brought into a feudally-bourgeoise existence is for the fruit of her loins.

From my perspective, the men in this book almost don't count. They plan water irrigation systems, they hate each other's families, they rape and kill their perceived enemies, they are brutal and dense.

The portraits of Satya and Roop-bi alone (and the peripheraly historical Ghandi, referred to by an endearing nickname) is worth spending the three days nonstop it will take you to read.

Rating:
Summary: The Body Remembers Pain
Review: What the Body Remembers falls into the genre known among my friends and I as "awful/wonderful." "Awful/wonderful" books tell painful truths in such a compelling manner that the reader greedily ingests them, even aches for more. This book, with its no-holds-barred tale of the treatment of women in India, whether Muslim, Hindu or Sikh, can be painful to read--but it's impossible not to. Of all the novels I've read by and about Indian women's lives, What the Body Remembers was by far the most disturbing. And yet I was sorry to close it after reading the last page--it was throughly engrossing, and as fascinating in its way as Memoirs of a Geisha. I highly recommend it.