Listen o listen:
Hark this tale of Khanaa
In Bengal in the Middle Ages
Lived a woman Khanaa, I sing her life
The first Bengali woman poet
Her tongue they severed with a knife
Her speechless voice, ‘Khanar Bachan’
Still resonates in the hills and skies
Only the poet by the name of Khanaa
Bleeding she dies.
– (Khanaa’s Song from Kathamanabi, Mallika Sengupta, translated by Amitabha Mukherjee)
Khanaa, the first Bengali female poet expounded on farming practices and astrology. Legend has it that she was the daughter-in-law of Varahamihira, the illustrious mathematician and astrologer of Chandragupta Vikramiditya’s court. But so sharp were her insights that she could eclipse Varahamihira’s calculations as well. Result: Her tongue was chopped off.
Chopped off tongues, silenced tongues, tongues pincered by familial pressure, societal obligations, sanctioned gender roles…
If one were to embark on a quantitative research on the number of tongues that have been torn off or silenced, would the count reach the moon and go beyond into some black hole? Science says that a healthy human ear can detect sound waves within the range of 20 and 20,000 hertz. But what waves do silent screams send? What ripples do they cause? Do these ripples die out to give way to more ripples? Can they be detected and recorded?
I
Flavia Agnes recently wrote in a magazine, in light of the Delhi rape, that an n number of gender sensitisation workshops haven’t borne any results when one looks at the royal reluctance of police to lodge FIRs in cases of rape, dowry and other abuses. A friend in Delhi, who often conducts these workshops, says that the police may not always be hostile to presentations on gender but often at the end of the workshop, their fatherly/brotherly instinct takes over! They would rather advice the woman to go back home and talk it out with the husband than bring charges of abuse! Ghar ka sawal hain…ghar tutna nahi chahiye… And yes, the advice is not always ‘benign’. But then, custodial rape and intimidation can be topics for several essays and cover stories.
So there you go, tongue! Rein yourself in… do not wag too much. The balance rests on you.
But the tongue is not always obedient. Mathura, Bhanwari Devi, Soni Sori, Mukhtaran Mai, Malala… the list goes on. New case studies for new amendments, laws, committees, ordinances… studies that all feed into and from one old story, the story of the woman and her definition and role.
Go back a few thousand years to Ovid, Vatsayana, Ved Vyas or a few hundred years to Shakespeare. From Philomela to Katherine Minola… the story of how and why the tongue needs to be cut off.
A little branch in Metamorphoses is about the tongue. Tereus saved Athens from ignominy and in gratitude, the king; Pandion gave his elder daughter, Procne to him in marriage. Procne missed her sister, Philomela. So Tereus went back to fetch her. But nobody knew that Tereus loved Philomela. Now what is a man’s love without unfettered lust, without the power of domination? So he took Philomela to the woods and raped her. Betrayed by her brother-in-law, she cried,
“You’ll pay my score one day. I’ll shed my shame
And shout what you have done. If I’ve the chance,
I’ll walk among the crowds: or, if I’m held
Locked in the woods, my voice shall fill the woods
And move the rocks to pity.”
Result: The fate of Khanaa
A little pause here before another literary classic is invoked. In the days, when I still lived in a joint family of sixteen people, my newly married kakima was often a butt of ridicule and a subject of hushed whispers. She sprinted up and down our steep staircase, sometimes making a thudding sound. She had a voracious appetite. When we all to sat for dinner, she kneaded the rice into balls and slipped them into her mouth. When she cooked, she tasted the gravy for correct proportions of salt and chilli powder and if it tasted well, she used to click her tongue. Between lunch and dinner, you could find her chewing on dairy milk, chomping cream crackers and puffed rice… A woman, was she? Or as my aunts insinuated, a boy who was born a girl or a girl who did not become a woman. Where was that slowness of gait, that self control, that grace while eating, the shyness…. And then the blasphemy of tasting food even before it was served? An aside here: I loved eavesdropping; I still do… what does that make me? A childhood story that still remains with me, talks of tongues chopped off little boys and girls because they had dared steal food from a big merchant’s house (Leela Majumder’s Ahididir Bondhura). That was the price for greed, for gluttony and here was a married woman!
Can you recall the number of films or stories that document/portray/ the journey of a girl into womanhood? And if the journey is not smooth, the man who tames the shrew? Yes, there goes the classic Shakespeare, Taming the Shrew. Let’s note a conversation between Katherine and Petruchio:
P: Come, come, you wasp, i’faith you are too angry.
K: If I be waspish, best beware my sting.
P: My remedy is then to pluck it out.
K: Ay, if the fool could find where it lies.
P: Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting? In his tail.
K: In his tongue.
P: Whose tongue?
K: Yours, if you talk of tales, and so farewell.
P: What, with my tongue in your tail?
The verbal duel, the latent sexual tension soon gives way to Petruchio’s mission to womanise Katherine and Petruchio comes off with flying colours for it is the same Katherine who radiantly says at the end of the play:
“Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou lies warm at home, secure and safe,
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience,
Too little payment for so great a debt.”
Or think Tagore’s Samapti (though this text isn’t as unidimensional as Taming but the co-relation between acquiring femininity and a fulfilling conjugal life still continues to be problematic), later filmed by Satyajit Ray or countless other films… Sometimes a sharp tongue silenced by an overwhelming kiss and sometimes by motherhood. All the verve Gone with the Wind?
A bachelor is perhaps a Don Juan but a spinster is Miss Havisham. The bitter lady, with the tongue dripping acid… how many times have we heard or read stories of lonely women, not finding husbands because they were too coarse… or the unmarried woman leader whose sexual frustration makes her spew venom at the opposition and screw up the state’s future? But then again, if the leader is too fashionable, the newsprint will be consumed in dissecting her sartorial sense…
“Go back a few thousand years to Ovid, Vatsayana, Ved Vyas or a few hundred years to Shakespeare. From Philomela to Katherine Minola… the story of how and why the tongue needs to be cut off.”
II
Now, what is a piece on the tongue, if it doesn’t talk of kissing? Surely, it’s not the exclusive preserve of the French. The exchange of saliva, the hungry biting of your partner’s tongue and lips or gently licking the lips, teeth and the tongue… the kiss. But then, why just the kiss? The tongue demands the taste of salt on every tissue, the mustiness of the down, the little hollow here and the protuberance there… (Did someone say that there is a prize for the worst written sex in a book?). Think that commercial for a bourbon biscuit where the cream rolls on her tongue and she makes orgasmic sounds of joy… but that was only a biscuit.
Can the woman or the man satiate the hunger of her tongue? Let it be a battle… a hungry, no holds barred battle. Who comes on top? Which tongue emerges satiated? Doesn’t matter, so long as she doesn’t keep it coiled inside…
PS: The piece doesn’t even talk of Kali in her resplendent nudity and a bashful tongue that hangs out, her position in Tantra and so on. Have we completely realised the potential of the woman’s tongue?
