Australian Women's Book Review Volume 14.1 - School of English ...

Evoking/Invoking India
The Anger of Aubergines. By Bulbul Sharma. North Melbourne: Spinifex, 2000.
Goja: an Autobiographical Myth. By Suniti Namjoshi. North Melbourne: Spinifex, 2000.
Reviewed by Alison Bartlett.
These two books from the independent Australian feminist press, Spinifex, are
by Indian writers. The first, by Bulbul Sharma, was originally published two
years earlier by the Indian feminist press, Kali. The cover image of a gorgeous
plump aubergine lying on a piece of gold embroidered red silk is richly sensual
and immediately desirable; it evokes a material and gourmet India instantly
recognisable to Westerners through the fabric of women's traditional saris and
their food. Women and their food are at the centre of this series of short stories,
and Indian recipes are included at the end of every story. The book is a fabulous
idea, and splendidly marketed to attract English readers. The back cover is
suggestive about its concerns: 'Food as passion, a gift, a means of revenge, even
source of power. … Women weigh up the loss of a lover or the loss of weight;
they consider whether hunger and the thought of higher things are inextricably
linked; they feast and crave and die for their insatiable appetites.' And the stories are suggestive of all
these things, and replete with the waft of ginger, the hiss of cardamon seeds thrown into hot oil, and the
zing of lemon zest mixed with freshly crushed coriander. Despite all these ingredients, however, the
stories seem never-endingly depressing and oppressive. In them, the women compete with each other to
cook meals for males; women wait to be married or wait to be told they are separated (and continue to
cook for the husband); women are plumped up 'like a pregnant cow' or are made to fast to mourn the
loss of a husband. Men are central while women wait around/for/on them, and mothers are the worst
women of all and won't let go of their sons. It seems familiar ground for Indian writing, even with the
evocatively sizzling spices. Perhaps this is Sharma's paradoxical critique of Indian patriarchy wrapped
in the aroma of its exoticised food. While readers are being sensuously seduced, the relationships for
women are sickening. Perhaps this is a deliberate undermining of traditionally Western associations of
India as the spice culture, as the exotic other, while its politics and social relations remain unstintingly
repressive. Ultimately, however, any desire for the delights of this book were overridden by its
oppressive preparation and serving for me.
Entering Suniti Namjoshi's Goja is like falling down a rabbit hole into completely
unfamiliar territory. Subtitled An Autobiographical Myth, it reflects on the life of
privilege of an Indian noble who goes to the West, becomes a poet, a lesbian, an
academic. Goja is the servant who cared for the baby/child subject, and who forms
a nexus around which the narrator's guilt/questioning of Indian class relations
revolves. Goja becomes a fantastical creature of myth, continually questioning and
challenging the author in her own terms: 'You want to de-glamorise power,
Sweetie, you'll first have to deconstruct it within yourself.' The other dominant
figures are Goldie, the narrator's aristocratic Indian grandmother, and Charity, a
confused and hybridised result of Indian Catholic boarding school. Namjoshi
writes: 'My mind is a hodgepodge of Greek myth, Hindu experience and Christian words; but I have
understood that Charity is neither the daughter of suffering, nor of joy. She has a human face. Blake
understood it all along.' Blake understands quite a lot in this book, as the narrator constructs herself as
26