Not a Home: Hindi Women Poets Narrating “Home”

In 1864 Ruskin presented his lecture “Of Queen’s Gardens” at the Town Hall in Manchester. In it he pictured women as passive, self-effacing, pious, graceful, having the natural perfection of flowers. Their “garden”, bounded by walls, was the home, which he described as “the place of peace, the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division”. For Ruskin, Woman was a synonym of home: “[a]nd whenever a true wife comes, this home is always round her. The stars only may be over her head, the glow-worm in the night-cold grass may be the only fire at her foot, but home is wherever she is”.1 About a century later white feminism2 identified home as the major site of women’s oppression, where women had no choice but to suffer in Betty Friedan’s words “the problem that has no name”3 and live a life of domestic slavery. Friedan’s dismantling of perfect domesticity as the female version of the American Dream was taken up by the socialist feminists of the late 1970s who saw the family as “the site of women’s labour in the reproduction of the capitalist system”.4 Feminism’s problematization of patriarchal notions of “home” resulted from its attempt to undo the equation of women with Woman, Ruskin’s “Queen of Gardens”. Feminist critics, like Kate Millett5 and Germaine Greer,6 argued that the male imagination typically forced representations of women into crude stereotypes, most often those of virgins or whores. Julia Kristeva asserted that Woman in all her incarnations – the Virgin, the self-sacrificing Mother, the chaste Wife (as exemplified by the Virgin Mary in Christianity, or Sita and Savitri in Indian mythology) and their dark twin – the evil, lustful, cunning and untrustworthy Whore (mythologized in the Hellenic Pandora, the Christian Eve, the Jewish Lilith, the Indian Durga) was a construct that Not a Home