MEET THE WRITER
‘I’m a happy old girl’: The Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 80th birthday interview
Scholar, writer, translator, opinion-maker. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who turns 80 on February 24, in conversation with Anjum Katyal.
Anjum Katyal
Feb 24, 2022 · 11:30 am
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. | Naveen Kishore.Deconstruct this: The date is 26 January, Republic Day in an India celebrating 75 years of freedom from colonial rule. I am in Kolkata, the hometown of Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, renowned “post-colonial” scholar, who lies in bed in a New York City hospital, where she is recovering from knee replacement surgery.
We interface through a computer screen. Over the standard blue (global) hospital gown is draped a beige hand embroidered (very local) shawl gifted to her by the Block Development Officer, Rajnagar district, on the border of Jharkhand, where the schools she works with are located. Behind her, erasing the generic banality of the hospital backdrop, is imposed a digital image of one of those very school buildings, her chosen location of desire.
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In this dramatic setting layered with signifiers she prepares to mark her imminent 80th birthday with, as she says, the first of many celebrations, this conversation. “You are the first person with whom I’m celebrating that I’m turning 80! Basically,” she says, “what makes me very, very happy is that I have lasted this long. You know, normally I don’t like birthday parties. But this time I’m giving myself a birthday party, and I think that’s appropriate: 80, I think, is a nice round age. So that’s where I am.”
We decide to meander virtually, side by side, down the long and winding road of a life fully lived, following its twists and turns and unexpected detours, pausing at milestones marking experiences and memories. As she says, “I think we can be free and easy, you know – you move me along and I’ll move you along”; and that’s how it goes.
I was just thinking, this is being done on Republic Day, fortuitously enough, and you are five years older than our Independent India. A pre-Midnight’s Child, as it were...shall we start there? With your childhood?
My childhood, I now realise, looking back, was really perfect in every way. A very loving family. My parents were so devoted to their children. Bernard Williams has this concept called Moral Luck. I really feel that having such parents was my Moral Luck. Anything that I achieved in my life was a result of being so beloved in my childhood.
My childhood was also the end of the extended family, right? My mama bari (Jnan Majumdar’s house) was really also our house. I was born in Boro Mama Pratul Majumdar’s house, 6 Ironside Road, which is now Jnan Majumdar Sarani. My grandmother, Dudun, Rasheshwari Devi, was there, as the head of the family. It was really quite a wonderful thing.
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The other day, Christmas day, I called my sister and I sang to her – “God rest you merry gentlemen” – because both of us needed comfort and joy. After that we fell into a song which my grandmother, who went to Christchurch school, learnt, and that we sang a lot, which was kind of changing us into children who were under the guidance of a fearsome god, very different from the way our family was.
Ours was not a religious family, at all. I mean we had pujas here and there but it wasn’t a religious family. But here was this song – “Sabodhaan, chhoto haath, ja dhoro” [Be careful what you grasp, little hands]. And my sister and I, on Christmas day, she in Delhi, I in New York, start singing this song, which goes back 100 years. In a sense, all of this is my childhood.
And then, of course, came Independence which, for us, was riots and the end of the famine. The famine was technically over, but the technical end of a famine is not really the end of a famine. Unfortunately, my experience of Independence is riots and famine. They were so vivid and violent...
I remember you saying that your father, who was a doctor, had helped out during the riots – is that an accurate recollection?
Yes, it is. My father flung open the gates so that all of the Muslims from what is now called low income housing but was really a bustee, came into our house. It was quite a small house, so I remember being absolutely crowded, the women and children downstairs and the men upstairs on the terrace.
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My father was a completely nonviolent man, who had never shot a gun. But for some reason a double-barrelled rifle belonging to Hadu Mama (Rajen Majumdar, later the Mayor of Calcutta), was lying in our house. And my father was upstairs with this rifle, which he didn’t know how to shoot, saying, “As long as Pares Chakravorty is alive, no one will touch you.” This was more of a symbolic gesture –
But very important.
Very important.
We wander on to the formative experience of school. First there was Diocesan Girls’ School, “a fantastic experience.” It’s only natural that, as a dedicated teacher herself, it is the women teachers, whom she recalls with fond respect and admiration, who have stayed in her memory.
I was just reading a piece which is really about Binoy Majumdar, but talks a little about me. And it keeps describing me as a “convent girl”, which is completely different from being a Dio girl. It was not a convent. All our teachers were Bengalis, Christianised subalterns.
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I think my parents were very smart in acknowledging that these folks would be extraordinary teachers. As they were. For them, to be teaching these upper caste Hindus and well placed elite Muslims was an unusual thing, and they taught like there was no tomorrow.
When I look back – I have been, after all, a teacher now for many decades – I recognise how extraordinary they were as teachers, how much of their life depended on teaching well. And Miss Charubala Das, who was our Principal, becomes more and more my role model, with her huge whistle at her waist, with which she would call the school together. She was just amazing. Diocesan was an experience that went a long way towards making me what I am. I say, often – Dio made me.
And then, Lady Brabourne College. We couldn’t get into Presidency in our first year, it had to be third year. After our lot graduated it became open to women from the first year. Brabourne was also a fantastic experience for me because all the teachers were inspired women teachers. But the one who really stood out for me was Sukumari Bhattacharjee. She taught us English. Later in life she taught Sanskrit.
You know, she couldn’t be awarded the Ishan scholarship in Sanskrit, because she was Christian, Seventh Day Adventist. And so, as a kind of gesture of scorn, she got a second Ishan scholarship, this time in English! I will never forget the experience of learning English from a woman who, first of all, was a great, confident, and completely uncaring beauty. Her beauty was absolutely striking but what was even more striking was that she didn’t give a damn. You could tell that she was completely uncaring about her exterior. It was all about the interior life.
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And it was Sukumari-di who sent me off to debate, in 1956. She said, I don’t know if she can debate, but she speaks English very well; send her. And so I went to Presidency College and to everyone’s surprise, I won. I was 14. I remember winning this huge coffee table book. And I remember hugging it. And I remember getting off the bus at Ballygunge Phari, and talking to myself, saying, “Hee hee! First hoyechhi! I came first!”
Later I was told that someone who had followed me, because he wanted to find out where I lived, saw me hugging my book and muttering to myself in great joy (laughs). Those were such beautiful days.
Her experience, as a teenager, of the premium educational institute of the time, Presidency College, was mixed. Serendipity and happenstance, as we shall see, recur often along the road of her life, inflecting the path taken. Studying English at Presidency is one of these instances.
I was a science student, I wanted Physics honours. I passed the Physics entry exam, but failed the Math. So I couldn’t get in. Well, I thought, I’ve come first in English in Intermediate. They can’t refuse to take me in English. So English, which stood in for Sukumari-di, also stood in for me! I got into English Honours and realised, just two weeks into class, that it really was my subject.
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Who are the teachers you remember from then?
Well, of course, Taraknath Sen. I have just written something about him. Everybody adored him. But the fact of his having nothing but scorn for that Cold War ideology of Intentional Fallacy, so that no one actually stood for what they were writing – I don’t think we understood it. I’ve just re-read some of his writings, and I realise what an unusual man he was. He really taught us to read, in many ways.
And then there was Subodh babu, Subodh Chandra Sengupta, an intellectual who drew in Sanskrit stuff with his Bernard Shaw and so on. And there was Amal babu – Amal Kumar Bhattacharji – we didn’t call them dada then, they were all babu. And Tarapada babu – Tarapada Mukherjee – who taught Shakespeare extraordinarily well.
Yet, the warming memory of these excellent teachers is marred by another aspect of that otherwise great institution, where she was enrolled from 1957 to 1961, from the age of 16 to 19. A teenager from a loving family and nurturing schools, she found herself facing the negative implications of being female.
Presidency College was very important for me, but unfortunately it was also a place that brought in, for the first time, gender contempt. Over and over again I was made to feel that the teachers loved me because I was good looking, but the really brilliant person was SS, another student, male. I had never encountered this at home. My mother herself was a thorough going intellectual.
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But Presidency College made me so intellectually insecure – and I still have that insecurity. It’s absurd – whether I’m good or bad I can’t say, but there’s no reason for me to be insecure! Yet I am. I haven’t been able to get over that one.
I am curious about her college years in the US, starting in 1961. What was campus life like for this young woman from Calcutta? It was a compelling time: John F Kennedy had just become President. The Civil Rights movement was gathering momentum, and school and college campuses were at the heart of the struggle over racial de-segregation.
International tension was rife: The Berlin Wall was being erected, the Bay of Pigs incident occurred that year, American military presence in Vietnam was building. All in all, one would have thought, it must have been quite a stirring period for a bright young woman like her. But – “You know, it wasn’t,” she says.
It was four years before Lyndon Johnson opened up the immigrant quota and alien registration, etc. There was no tradition of so-called cultural difference. There were no novels beautifully written by immigrants about how they suffered etc. Novels, after all, establish structures of feeling, as Raymond Williams would say. And so I went in thinking I knew everything. I’d read Time Magazine! I had no problems at all. I was all of 19 years old.
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More happenstance – or, if you prefer, Moral Luck – follows, steering her in the direction of what is to become her scholastic future,
