Jharna Choudhury
Jharna Choudhury is a Ph.D. Research Scholar, from the
Department of English, Tezpur University, Assam. She is currently working on
her thesis, “Spectres of the Corporeal: The Grotesque Body in Contemporary
Fiction”.
Abstract
The exaggerated bodily
perimeters with the poetry of ugly bridges the collective thought of variegated
cultural worlds. This paper talks about death and femininity through the
botanical reincarnate of the flesh, the grotesque trope and the metaphor of
dismembered body. The ancient oral folktale “Tejimola” has been chronicled in
early twentieth-century development in literature, a rendition of the Assamese
writer Lakshminath Bezbaroa in his book Burhi Air Xadhu (Grandmother’s
Tales). This version is a regional configuration of the physical grotesque
of Northeast India’s folktales, which has a resonance of the Cinderella
narrative. “Tejimola” has been a part of popular cinematic adaptations over
time. The feminine, the mother/stepmother figure, her maternity and
metamorphoses are associated with the bizarre image of food, as a catalyst of
annihilation and renewal. Through the banquet imagery of Mikhail Bakhtin’s
reading of Rabelais, discussion of “literary death” (Sander L Gilman), re-presentations
of dead bodies (in Elisabeth Bronfen and Elizabeth Grosz), this paper
observes the cultural implications of hunger, orifices and body fluids in the
Assamese folktale context. The subjectivity of the victimized female does not
die with death; she is rather agential through her own elegiac songs. The use
of literary devices manipulates the body horror of dismemberment, pertaining to
the degree of reception of the audience/reader. It is in death that the
feminine breaks the constraints of body boundaries, undertaking newer
embodiments in earthly, unearthly sources, being the architect of her
origin.
Keywords: Assamese folktale, Tejimola, Grotesque aesthetics, Dismemberment
metaphor, Female Body
The
noticeable oppressed motifs and the popular stepmother tale-specimen has given
a fair amount of light to the Assamese folktale “Tejimola”; mostly, as a
rendition of oral literature connected to the world-wide Cinderella cycle. The
authorship of such narratives has always been in question due to the identity
politics of the tribal and non-tribal groups and the language variations.
“Tejimola” came to the fore as a children’s tale; chronicled from the oral
tradition to Assamese literature in the collection of stories “Burhi Air Xadhu”
(1911). The title establishes the grandmother as the storyteller of the
Assamese household. Under the tutelage of the writer of humour, Lakshminath Bezbaroa
(1864-1938), this collection of stories could finally give shape to the
folklore of Assam and open ways of connecting to the North-Eastern Indian
folktales, “tribal” Indian folktales and the corpus of work done by Bopp,
Herder and the Grimm brothers. Bezbaroa, in his Preface, mentioned that
folktales are significant cultural indicators; and Tejimola’s narrative undoubtedly
preserves social issues like polygamy of merchants, infant deaths, trade
travels, stereotype of stepmother’s jealousy, domestic violence, socially
accepted magic realism and riddles from the dead people. In contrast to
the discourse of passively dead female corpses, this paper renegotiates the
idea of femininity and death in terms of resurrection (as in Toni Morrison’s character
Beloved, Sylvia Plath’s "Lady Lazarus", Gabriel
Garcia Marquez’s Melquíade),
grotesque plantation of the human body (as in J.M.Coetzee’s character Michael K,
who plants the ashes of his dead mother) and posthumously active (as in Addie
Bundren, in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying). Such dynamic
iterations of corpses who self reports the unsaid story of his/her death or
reappears as an absent/present body, gives a novel dimension to the aesthetics
of the corporal as hyperbolic, grotesque and uncanny.
The phrase “grotesque aesthetics” is
an oxymoron in itself. While the word grotesque is connected to the elements of
gross, excess, ugly, repulsive, horrific and gothic, the word aesthetics mostly
imply the philosophy of the beautiful. In the book On Ugliness, Umberto Eco rightly states that ugliness and grotesque
are polysemic in nature and on being revisited they are seen as constructions
of “socio-political criteria” (Eco 12). In the very heart of the collection
“Burhi Air Xadhu”, is the metaphor of ecdysis or molting like that of the snake,
a rather “ugly” conceptualization for children stories. Bezbaroa’s Tejimola,
the coming of age protagonist, is killed by her stepmother, pounded into pulp,
under the rice pounding “dheki” (manual grinder-like instrument). Her renewal
happens in agrarian forms: types of vegetable, fruit and bird; common to the
Assamese culture. Like molting, Tejimola changes her skin. Similar affinity is
found in the other stories of the same collection, where the story “Tula and
Teja” has bodily transformations from a woman to a tortoise, trees and bird;
Panesai is hatched from an egg and becomes a duck, Champavati’s husband is a
god reincarnate as a snake, Ou Kuori is a girl inside the shell of an elephant apple.
The exterior body peels off, breaks, or is burnt with the story progression.
The identity of the flesh is bizarre as well as culturally rooted.
Moulting is the inception of the dismemberment metaphor. Elizabeth Grosz saw
such types of bodies as “not only inscribed, marked, engraved, by social
pressure external to them but are the products, the direct effects of the very
social constitution of nature itself” (Grosz x). It is however difficult
to make a clear cut distinction between the types of body metaphors, as source
domain or target domain, employed by Juliana Goschler in her essay “Embodiment
and Body Metaphors”. The metaphoric mapping in Tejimola is such that the
distortions of body leads to comprehension of the cultural life, which makes
the metaphor source domain, but when the vegetal nature of Tejimola leads us to
her human body, then the metaphor turns into target domain. Here, one domain is
interconnected with one another, slipping inside, like a möbius strip
(Elizabeth Grosz), or one domain mapped onto another (Goschler).
In A
Handbook of Folklore Material of North-East India, the narrative of
Tejimola appears as a wonder tale. This version is extracted by the writer
Birendranath Datta, from J.Barooah’s book Folktales of Assam (1963).
We can loosely divide the story in the following structure, with the purpose of
locating the types of dismemberment:
a)
the exposition: includes the
death of Tejimola’s biological mother, the hatred of her childless stepmother,
who saw Tejimola as a rival of love for the father figure (the merchant);
b)
the social obligation of the
father as the breadwinner, his merchandise, trade travels and a prolonged
departure, separation from the most beloved daughter;
c)
stepmother’s scheme of ill-treatment,
fault finding, which leads to the final plan of murder to eschew Tejimola’s
upcoming dowry;
d)
the pretext of the friend’s
marriage: Tejimola’s escape from her stepmother’s cruelty for few days
parallels the ball motif in the Cinderella cycle;
e)
the role of dress: the best
garment is used as an alibi to attack the victim Tejimola, in this case, “a
lovely silk riha and fine silk mekhela and a gold-embroidered khonia
wrapper” (Datta 240),which is folded into a parcel with a mouse and a handful
of embers inside;
f)
discovery: the shreds of the
garment shock Tejimola, and on her return after the wedding, she is brutally
beaten up for the loss;
g)
the body violence magnifies when
she is being dragged to the assigned place of death, the rice pounding dheki,
the symbolic guillotine;
h)
the rhythmic supply of paddy in
the hole is disturbed and the stepmother pounds Tejimola’s body parts one by
one, leading to dismemberment and demise;
i)
hiding of the dead body: her pulp
was accumulated and hidden in the eaves of the rice pounding shed, and she grew
back as a pumpkin plant, discovered by a beggar woman; she re-grew as a
shaddock tree, discovered by the cowherds, then into a lotus plant/water-lily
in the river to be discovered by the boatman and her returning father;
j)
the validation of truth: Tejimola
transforms into a bird (myna) and validates her truth by eating her father’s
chewed areca; then she submits to the comforting cage of her father;
k)
back at home, the confrontation
begins; through magic, the father transforms Tejimola into a human again;
l)
the merchant drove his wife away,
and in some versions asked her to walk a thread on top of a well, where she
falls and dies owing to her falsity.
In the
line of thought of Edwin Sidney Hartland’s (in The Science of Fairytales)
idea of märchen
and Dean Thompson’s motif index (in Motif Index of Folk-Literature),
well known Assamese folklore researcher Prafulladatta Goswami (Ballads and
Tales of Assam) remarks of the tale as “a world where birds and beasts think
like men and where things change their form whenever it is necessary” (Goswami
84-85). The dismemberment is widespread in the twelve points we have structured
in the tale. To reconfigure the body as the centre of ideas and not a dualistic
compromised “other” of the mind, Elizabeth Grosz overcomes the “common
metaphors that have been used to describe the interactions of mind and body,
metaphors of embodiment, of containment, machine metaphors, two-sided coins,
hydraulic models” (Grosz xii). The use of the dismemberment metaphor aligns
with Grosz’s use of Lacan’s möbius strip, a model where body and
mind are both integrated with the other. The narrative of Tejimola begins with
her separation from the maternal body leaving her with her father. Her
stepmother intervenes with hatred and jealousy, causing a filial dismemberment
of the original structure. The separation, which was at the behest of a psychological
conflict, turns physical with the departure of the merchant father. This builds
the ground for inflicting torture. The stepmother, shown as a villainous
character (in the surface level), plots against the victim girl, commanding
Herculean household tasks, and in the real sense of the term breaks her back
with sticks and brooms. Popular cinematic representation of the story in Kothanodi (2015 feature film, based on
renditions of Tejimola, Champawati, Ou
Kuwori and Tawoir Xadhu) has developed a catalyst to
instigate villainy in the stepmother. This catalyst figure is a grotesque body
type, sometimes an old hag with a hunchback, sometimes a ghostly forest figure
with carnal traits. It is an inclusion to the oral narrative and Lakshminath
Bezbaroa’s story. However, we cannot totally neglect the fact that
Tejimola’s mother is a foil to the innocent and complacent nature of her
daughter, and such female with agency have often been shown in a dangerous
light in fairytales (Christy Williams). It is
only through the grotesque trope which has historically challenged authority
(king, dictators) and literary canon that the marginal women in the story
partake in an active role.
Tejimola
is not an isolated being, detached from societal communications. She confides
to a friend about her problems. But it is her friend’s marriage and the
consequent lack of proximity ordained by the patriarchal set up that is to
eventually isolate her. With marriage comes the question of inheritance of the
mother’s clothes. Riha, mekhela and khonia are garments
that embody this aspect. In Tejimola’s case, her stepmother lends her the
traditional garments with malice. Tejimola, on reaching her friend’s house opens
the parcel to find dismembered pieces of clothes. In this context, the sheds of
clothes appear as a dismemberment metaphor, a prolepsis to her body decadence. Dismemberment
is a signifier which has plural significations in a socially constructed
feminine world; exemplars being clitoridectomy or clitorectomy, female
fetishization, which shreds the body with biased interests in specific body
part (mostly sexual organs). However, in this text Tejimola is a prototype of
dead women speaking back to claim one’s already dismantled stature as a
confined woman in the house, thereby posthumously claiming mobility. To quote “these
dead women, at least the more literary ones, constitute a tradition sin which
writers address pressing social issues that refuse to stay dead” (Norman 1). In
Tejimola’s story, it is the patriarchal kinship structure, hierarchy, land
rights and the confinement/unspeakability of women.
In the
essay, “Representing Dead and Dying Bodies”, Sandra L. Gilman explores two
types of death; one, when aesthetics disbelieve the reality of death and
preserves the body through literature and art, the other being the Hellenistic
tradition that de-aestheticized death with realism. When we talk about the material body of
Tejimola, although there is a portrayal of body horror in her dying, she undergoes
a type of literary death, preserved in amber of words, through Bezbaroa’s work.
To quotes, “Literary death is in truth a denial of death” (Maude et al. 151). The
death of Tejimola ensue multiple metamorphosed body types. A significant thing
to note here is the attribute of fluidity and mobility explored by these new
metaphors. The pumpkin plant which is the first manifestation of Tejimola after
death is a creeper which has some agentiality on its own accord. Like the
pumpkin, the shaddock fruit, the second manifestation of Tejimola, has a
similarity of form. The texture of the outer cover differs from the inward
flesh, analogous to the human form. The body fluids ooze on being smashed. The
third manifestation of the dead woman as the lotus, floating unfixed in the
river, is a testimony of her liminality. The regulation of these three
metamorphosed feminine bodies is incomplete without the perspective of the
stepmother as the “other” creator, integrally involved in the process. The
dismemberment metaphor connects the two obvious women in the story: Tejimola
and her mother, the one who endures and the perpetrator (always debatable)
respectively. The stepmother dislocates Tejimola from her roots, in any living
form, forcing her to recreate her own body. Like Frankenstein’s monster
Tejimola’s body is resurrected not only in corporeality, but also in the act of
reading the story again and again, or recreating it in film, poetry (Nitoo
Das’s “Tejimola”, Uddipana Goswami’s “Tejimola Forever”) and fiction (Aruni
Kashyap’s His
Father’s Disease). “Whether heralded or denied,
this notion of a death denied through the act of reading is the lynchpin of
literary deaths” (Maude et al. 155). The unending interpretations of the story
makes Tejimola’s body a palimpsest of its own kind.
If the
structure of the house is the location of Tejimola as a woman, her dead body is
continually distanced from it. The stepmother performs as a synergist, while
Tejimola transfigures her fluids into other kinds. From the interior of the
house she is dragged away to the point of death (the dheki house), from there
she is hidden in the “eaves of the rice pounding shed” (Datta 241). The sight
of the creeping pumpkin plant shakes the conscience of the stepmother. “The
merchant’s wife understood what it was and went with a knife to the spot and
cut the plant off, root and all, and threw it away in a remote corner of her
garden” (Datta 242). Tejimola’s subhuman identity is expressed in language as “it”
a thing, waiting for a cut. The brutal act of the knife causes a second death
to Tejimola. She then physically moves away from her house to the garden area,
transforming into a juicy shaddock, as if sexually tempting the cowherds. The
stepmother then “went to the spot and uprooted it completely and threw it into
the river” (Datta 242). The river is the farthest location from the house, in
the storyline. It is the exterior where Tejimola is pushed to. Soon “in one of
its shallow pools, it rested as a lovely water-lily” (Datta 242). Rest here
essentially means a grave. “If you be really my own Tejimola you will appear as
a myna and chew the areca on my left hand...The lily at once transformed into a
myna” (Datta 243).
The
analogy of women as the embodiment of food has been a part of Assamese
folktales, analogous to the folktale literature around the world. The grotesque
nature of feasting is latent in Bezbaroa’s story. Elizabeth Grosz insists on
avoiding a metaphor which implies a structural homology or
one-to-one-correlation. Instead, meanings should be plural, twisted, ambiguous.
The treatment of Tejimola can be related to the role of the banquet by Bakhtin;
to do so the feasting images need to be extended in the following manner of
meaning-making:
a)
the beggar woman wants to eat the
pumpkin also becomes the beggar woman wants to eat Tejimola;
b)
the cow herders want to pluck the
shaddock, cut it open and relish; this implies the sexual interest of the cow
herders, where the fruit resembles a woman with body fluids;
c)
Tejimola transforms into a myna
bird and chews on the areca spat out by her father; a view of ejection which hints
at Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel images of feasting at one’s own body
fluids.
Tejimola is seen as an essential property/object of love to her father,
and hence his own self, whose proximity is culturally defined by this image of
ingestion. This can be related to the latent carnivalesque of the lower strata
of society. It is their act of feasting, which mocks the established order of
edible and inedible food. In this case, there is a parallel mockery of the
animate and inanimate body of Tejimola. To quote, “food images are connected
with those of the body and of procreation (fertility, growth, birth)” (Bakhtin
279). In folktales, according to Bakhtin, death is not the end of the story,
but it has the potentiality of new beginnings, in this case, hinted by the
banquet imagery. If we consider the dismemberment images of the beggar woman
devouring Tejimola’s dead body or the cow herders relishing her, the story
reconstructs itself into newer models of anthropophagus and necrophiliac
individuals. Such type of imagery is relatable to the body-oriented metaphors
like “the rhizome, assemblage, machine, desire, multiplicity, becoming, and the
Body without Organs (BwO)” (Grosz 167). It re-centres the location of death,
making it multidimensional. Recent developments of vegetal intelligence in the
field of botany, performance studies, culture, hermeneutics talk about the
somatic being, recreating its rhizomatic thread; theories forwarded by M.Marder,
T. Morton, A. Olsen, M. Hall, L.Irigaray, M. Gagliano, D.Chamovitz, etc. They
see the plant-being (in our case Tejimola) as instinctive, self-created, with
negative and positive gravitropism (D. Chamovitz), with judgement of thinking
(Marder draws from Hegel), capable of adapting and resurrecting. However, when
the vegetal becomes corporeal in effect, the addition and deduction which goes
into the picture of the human anatomy gives rise to a spectral grotesqueness, a
flesh drama. The aesthetics of blood is a development streamed from Bezbaroa’s Tejimola-tale
which has been taken up by feminist endeavours like the “disposable theatre” by
Kankhowa.
The
intensity of grotesque is manipulated in the cinematic representations of
“Tejimola”. In the oral narrative, the grotesque is created by the use of
words. It is true, however, that bodies in pain have an inexpressible quality
to it when it comes to adequate disclosure (Elaine Scarry). In the case of
cinema, the use of profound colours, their symbolic dimensions provoke
meanings. Tejimola’s pain has taken the visual effect of the contrast of red
trickling and flowing in the white colour (of the rice flour), followed by an
earthy combination of brown and green. In cinema, the stepmother’s villainy is
also regulated by the performance and direction. While the Assamese VCD film
starring Barsha Rani Bishaya, showed the stepmother engulfed in guilt and pain
after her act of torture, weeping with a hand on her chest on the death of her
daughter, the recent adaptation Kothanodi
(2015) shows the mother in a fit of schizophrenia, taken by the madness of
laughter, leisurely burying the body. This minute difference has a lot to do in
comprehending the effect of dismemberment on the executer herself. In the first
case, the sight of broken arms, the spillage of blood sends a shock wave,
furthered by a reckless escape from the event, trying to erase the body
totally. The latest film, however, puts it differently, where the stepmother,
in a more carnival spirit admires her exploit. This aggravates the impact of
the dismantled body.
The
Assamese culture portrayed in the story “Tejimola” is phallocentric in nature.
There is a hierarchy in human relations, where the master-slave or
dominant-submissive binary persists. The problem is evident in the lack of
security faced by the stepmother in the structure of the family. In some
versions, she is shown to be threatened by the overarching masculine presence
of her husband, often beaten, ridiculed, undermined for being childless.
Bezbaroa’s children tale filters out such details. The stepmother uses the same
tool of power, and revokes in a dangerous way (like in a revenge drama),
harming her husband’s precious Tejimola. Although the resurrected body of
Tejimola is seen as uncanny and fantastical in nature, the critic Norman Brian
argues, it is through speech that the posthumous woman, asserts her rights,
previously denied to her (Norman, 4).
Tejimola
dies multiple deaths. However, she asserts her life through elegiac songs. The beggar
woman is taken aback by the words: ““stretch not thy hands nor pluck a pumpkin-
thou strange beggar woman, my stepmother did crush me for the silk clothes and
it is I, Tejimola”” (Datta 242). Again, she warns the cowherders saying:
““Oh, my brothers dear, cowherd boys of the village, neither stretch your hand
nor pluck the fruits- return home- it is I, Tejimola who am buried here crushed
to death by my stepmother”” (Datta 242). The song also reached the ears of the father,
this time Tejimola yearned saying: ““Father dear, neither stretch your hands
nor pluck the lily. It is I, Tejimola who was crushed to death by the stepmother
only for the silk clothes”” (Datta 243). The silk cloth becomes a significant
aspect of the metaphor map in the story. It turns out to be a “source”, and the
body of Tejimola the “target”, the characters (beggar woman, cowherders,
boatman, father) are being led to, and in fact the readers as well. But,
Tejimola’s self-articulated mourning, makes her own body a metaphor (source
domain), leading to the cruelty of her stepmother (target domain). Goschler
says, “The difficulties increase in emotion metaphors where it is hard to
decide what is source and what is target domain.” (Goschler 47).
The
structural division of the story of Tejimola, extracted from the written and
oral record, have enabled us to evaluate the matrix of body horror. The
dismemberment metaphor highlights the female body of Tejimola, which is seen at
the threshold of life and death. She is the nodal point where nuances of
Assamese culture, fatal causes of murder, forms of vegetal reincarnate
meet. In the variegated written versions
and cinematic representations, a sort of narrative manipulation occurs, which reshapes
the body of Tejimola. The equation of the narrator and the narratee keeps on
changing: sometimes between the grandmother and grandchildren in storytelling
methods, or teaching in a classroom situation, also in communication of
characters and readers, or performers and audience on a stage/cinema, thereby making
Tejimola’s dismembered body an elastic metaphor. There are layers of
dismemberment which are projected in adjacent objects as well, like shredded clothes
and physical distance from the frame of the house. Tejimola is “re-presented”
in the story, and her death is a literary death that allows her to speak from
the other end of the world, return and resume a new life, eschewing all
possibilities of finality and non-being. Bezbaroa’s character has the abject
quality that Julia Kristeva insists as one who “disturbs identity, system, order”
(Kristeva 4), in the process of dying and resurrection. Lisa K. Perdigao’s
monograph titled From Modernist Entombment to Postmodernist Exhumation: Dead Bodies in Twentieth-Century American Fiction (2010) discusses
the difference between the modern burial/ entombment of the dead body and the
postmodern exhumation (excavation) of the corpse. In that line of thought,
Tejimola is a sheer exhumation. She is excavated and uprooted within the
textual frame, creating a grotesqueness, exquisite and aesthetic in nature. Tejimola’s body is a text in
itself, with
body inscriptions, loaded signification, signifying a breakage from
the traditional setup of the Assamese society and nonnarratibility as a woman. In
correlation to the grotesque aesthetics, which “subverts our categorical
expectations concerning the natural and ontological order” (Caroll 308), the
corporal in Bezbaroa’s text escapes the limitations of bodily matter. Tejimola
straddles the boundaries of real and hyperreal/magical and stands out as
architect of her origin. Intertwined
with the dismemberment metaphor(s) within the text, her body renegotiates the linear
aspect of death and femininity, through its interpretative textual openings.
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