My Four Enemies by Urmila Pawar (Analysis)

 

My Four Enemies

by Urmila Pawar

(Analysis) 

The story, “My Four Enemies”, a dalit narrative, is written in the first person and is autobiographical in nature. The term ‘dalit’ was first used by Jyotiba Phule and later popularized by Dr. Ambedkar. The Dalits were designated as untouchables according to the caste system of Hinduism, and the word, in Marathi, means ‘broken’. They fall outside the pale of the four castes in Hinduism. Although the Constitution of India has formally abolished untouchability, in practice dalits continue to be subjected to discrimination. “My Four Enemies” expertly captures this.

A simple short story, its simplicity reveals the impressionable child behind the narrative voice, who is a victim of caste discrimination. The child identifies four principal enemies who thwart her: her father, her mother (Aai), her brother and her teacher.

What all of them have in common, as far as she is concerned, is a heavy, punishing hand. “Father was a school teacher and like all teachers of his generation, he was very good at beating”. A few pages later, recounting the disturbing episode of Ulgavya, she states, “I wanted to ask mother, but that meant telling her about bunking school and sitting in the temple, and then Aai would certainly give me a sound thrashing, and my enemy number three – my brother, would also assist her in that”. And the fourth enemy whom she describes as a “fire-breathing devil” is also a ‘thrasher’ like her father, only worse. “My father would thrash me only when I did not study, but Harlekar Guruji would punish me even when I

studied”.

There are, besides, “petty” enemies as well: those who discriminate against her on the basis of caste: “’Go away or you will touch us!’”. They seem petty to her only because they do not appear to interfere in her life so much as those whom she lives with. But the story overtakes the child’s perspective, to show how these “petty” enemies are responsible for giving her a childhood marked by deprivation. Her struggle is in fact against the larger social framework, but with the innocence typical of a child, she sees herself as struggling against her family, who are actually working overtime to help her find a respectable identity in society.

Themes and Issues

“My Four Enemies” foregrounds caste and gender in its themes: the former overtly, and the latter more subtly. The child narrator is a victim, in particular, of discrimination on the basis of caste. Caste is represented in the story as an overwhelming pillar of the social structure, and it is woven into everyday life in insidious as well as disfiguring ways. Since the story makes its point largely through events presented, we get an unfiltered view of the injustice of caste oppression. And bias in the presentation is perforce reduced to a large extent, by virtue of having a child narrator. When bias is present, it reflects innocence more than anything else. This will be discussed at greater length in the section on Narrative Technique/Style.

The intersection of caste and gender also nuances “My Four Enemies” in various ways. There are times when caste and gender combine to oppress the underprivileged, as in the case of Ulgavya, which I will comment upon in greater detail a little later. At other times, caste and gender seem to follow independent trajectories of oppression. All through this struggle, however, the voice of the child narrator remains lively.

Caste

Caste is an over-riding concern in the story. In her comprehensive study on dalit writings, Rege points out that dalit life narratives are a distinct genre in themselves, and the first-person voice, the “I” in these writings, does not refer to an individual so much as a community. Thus, an entire community speaks through an individual’s voice, investing the writer with the authority to represent the experience of a caste. Rege states, “Dalit life narratives are testimonios; acts testifying or bearing witness legally or religiously. A testimonio is a narrative in book or pamphlet form, told in the first person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events he or she recounts and whose unit of narration is usually a ‘life’ or significant experience.

“My Four Enemies” finds its feet within this genre. This form of writing invites new ways of perception and interpretation, particularly in the relationship between self and community, and the reach of the choric voice. It is also a comment on the role of writing as resistance, and not mere representation.

Over and beyond the little girl’s preoccupation with her principal enemies, we see the society that she is a part of, in the incidents she recounts in passing. They are lost in the more intense experiences she lives, but their presence in the story suggests that they form a routine part of her experiences. After her father’s death, her mother sometimes sent her to deliver baskets to her clients. The people I delivered the baskets to were the type who would make me stand at their doorstep. They would sprinkle water on the baskets and the winnowing baskets that I was delivering before they touched them, and would drop money in my hand from above so that they should not touch me. Such behaviour would astonish me. If their hands were to touch mine, would they turn black or would they be scorched? All this aroused a sense of shame in me if a child from my school was present in the house. This feeling of disgrace was worse than death.

The poignancy of this passage comes largely from the unsparingly objective nature of this articulation, as well as the way the child asserts her spirit through and in spite of the experience of humiliation.

Feminist Concerns

Rege further adds that “These dialectics of self and community assumes further significance in dalit women’s testimonios for, situated as women in the community, they articulate concerns of gender, challenging the singular communitarian notion of the dalit community”. “My Four Enemies” may not be overtly feminist, but it does foreground the social experience of a woman, Aai, and of the little girl, who is the narrator-protagonist. The formidable Aai becomes an agent of transformation in this girl’s estimation of the people around her, especially Aai herself.

If we are to read this story in the light of Urmila Pawar’s interview in SPARROW, we find that her mother was an important figure for her, a figure whose importance in shaping her life she recognized only late in life. The story seems to mark a turning point in the way her mother changes in her perception, from enemy to friend. The last sentence of the story reinforces this newly forged friendship on the part of the narrator: “But a more significant event was that I now started looking up to my mother as my strongest support and my life got a new direction”. The ‘epiphany’ on which the story ends is a feminist one.

Feminism – in theory and critical practice – has grown along the way from being a critique of patriarchal modes of representation and endorsing of women as authors, to arriving at the recognition of the heterogeneity of female experience. It has moved from documenting white, heterosexual female experience to including race and class in its identity politics.

In “My Four Enemies”, caste severs, but gender seems to forge alliances for the little girl. Besides the ending which helps the little girl see Aai as a friend, in her recollection of her late father, there is no mention of his discriminating between son and daughter. He insists that all his children, irrespective of gender, be educated. Recounting the fate of her older sister, the little girl declares, “How much had he wanted my elder sister to study! It was beyond him to teach her and therefore, he had sent her away to some other people so that she could study. But she was rather dumb, and she was married off”.

Possibly, gender differences are submerged by the overwhelmingly oppressive burden of caste and class, as we see in the following excerpt about the father:

“When father came home, he would make us sit down to study in the dim light of the lantern. We would sit with our heads bent over our books till our necks would start aching. If we did not study, we would be badly beaten up and our stupid mother would watch us being thrashed”. Notice the replacement of the “I” by the “we”.

Caste and gender are conflated, ironically as well as subtly, in the description of an event beyond the little girl’s grasp, yet disturbing enough in what she understands of it. On days that she skipped attending school, she would sit in a temple, where the priest sometimes distributed prasad. To her, he looked like God: “He was a well-built, tall and fair man who looked like the marble statue of Ram. He had black hair and black eyes and the soles of his feet were pink. He wore a janeyu – the sacred thread – on his bare chest and a red tilak on his forehead”. The last sentence lays to rest any doubt one may have about his upper caste identity. One day, she was playing with some others in the temple and the priest had kept them waiting for a considerable length of time. “After a long time, the door opened and Ulgavya, a girl of Kambati caste – a backward caste – came out. She was crying and looked terrified. The pujari came out behind her, and sent us packing without giving us any prasad. I don’t know why, but after that I was frightened of the priest. Why was Ulgavya weeping?”.

This disturbing incident however occupies a marginal role in the story. The ending, which stays in the reader’s mind, leaves a more lasting impression of woman empowered. When Aai encounters Harlekar Guruji and warns him not to beat her daughter ever again, she is clearly at a disadvantage. The schoolmaster is initially arrogant, but Aai is unfazed. The little girl even notes that “Aai was using wrong grammar”. Yet, Aai speaks without any hesitation, while it is the erudite master who stutters on encountering the mother’s righteous indignation. In an event replete with humour, irony and power-play, Urmila Pawar shows woman power despite all odds, leaving the schoolmaster to beat a hasty retreat. And finally, the role of weaving. Weaving, traditionally, has been identified as a part of woman’s space. Weaving tapestry, weaving stories, they are both part of the woman’s domain. The word ‘distaff’ in fact refers to the female branch of family. The word literally refers to the staff for holding wool or flax used in weaving. This symbolic convergence of woman and weaving is achieved in Aai, who is shown to be weaving baskets endlessly in the story. The narrative foregrounds this image of her and encourages a feminist slant to the interpretation of this story.

Education

The need for education, a desperate need, forms the core of “My Four Enemies”. The little girl’s father was a schoolteacher, though all she can gather from this fact is that her father can beat, and beat very well too. “He did not only hit, but as soon as he started on the job, he would lose all control”. So much does education matter to him that he also hit his nephew in the nearby village, despite the boy’s mother stating that it was no matter whether her son studied or not. On his deathbed, he would insistently tell his wife to “educate the children”, an order that she follows at all costs.

The little girl uses a telling simile to show her father’s commitment to education: he urged people to study just as a doctor would prescribe medicines. This comparison underscores the way studying seems as unpalatable as taking medicine, and also the way it is as imperative to health and well-being as taking medicine is. After her father’s death, it seems to the little girl that her mother has taken over her father’s role as teacher. “It seemed to me that mother was very fond of emulating father’s role as a teacher”; “But she was always hectoring us like a teacher”; and, what is interesting, “Ma believed that if knowledge had to be acquired then I had to take the beating that went with it. She had seen my father hit his students”.

The little girl’s brother, her enemy number three, is also fixated (as she perceives it) on her going to school and getting educated. It is an older Urmila Pawar who recognizes that to her family, education was the lifeline that would raise them above the barriers of caste. In the overwhelmingly oppressive caste-determined scenario, education is perceived as one, possibly the only way out. “My Four Enemies” ends on a note of irony and triumph. When the little girl’s teacher discriminates against her, Aai, her mother sees him as having failed in his role as an educator. She confronts him on the road, to the amazement of her daughter. Though the teacher begins arrogantly enough, he is reduced to stammering by Aai, who, despite her wrong grammar, manages to intimidate Guruji with “see from now on even if you lay a finger on this girl, then I will see how you pass on this road!”. Describing Aai’s pose, the little girl says she was “like a mother reptile with her hood spread out, ready to strike!”.

Aai’s idea of education has a clarity that enables her to believe that even a teacher may need to be taught what is right and what is wrong. We find here that not just education, but even the idea of education and the expectations associated with it, are empowering. The intertwining threads of caste, gender and education come together here.

Narrative Technique/Style:

The most important aspect of a short story or a novel is its narrator. Unlike, say, drama, fiction is always mediated through the point-of-view of a single narrator, so that who tells, is almost as important as what is told. Three broad categories might be identified here: the Omniscient narrator who knows all, the Third Person narrator, and the First-Person narrator. The First-Person narrator may not be all-knowing, but s/he has the advantage of directly impacting the reader by enabling easy identification with the narrator. Also, the use of the First Person makes possible an immediacy of effect, and helps the reader suspend disbelief not just willingly, but effortlessly.

“My Four Enemies” is narrated in the First Person by a little girl. It recounts her experience of childhood and a significant event that radically changes her perception of her mother. The ending of this story is extremely effective for this very reason, as it brings the protagonist narrator to the realization, which comes to her as a revelation, that her mother is not the enemy she had supposed her to be, but her friend. As with most child narrators, a gap in comprehension is generated between narrator and reader. The child observes everything but lacks the experience and maturity to interpret all her observations accurately. The child’s innocence gives the reader greater freedom and license to interpret, as we see in the event with the temple priest and Ulgavya.

The child becomes a glass through which we see reflected not just her, but also those whom she represents. Smarting from incidents that left her humiliated because of her caste identity, the child would resolve not to go to school afterwards, especially if one of her schoolmates had been witness to this humiliation – indeed, often the humiliation was inflicted by the very family of the schoolmate. But Aai would somehow read her mind, she says, for as soon as she went back home, Aai would bribe her with some jaggery, asking her to go to school and promising her money for gram when she returned.

The mother’s desperate attempt to keep the child going to school is self-evident, to the reader at least, but not to the child, who puts a different construction: “I always believed her, but she was a liar” (304). This kind of split perspective is a significant part of “My Four Enemies”, and enriches the text by layering it. Also, the reader understands fairly early what the child does not; that her parents’ excessive disciplining comes from their anxiety to give her an empowered adulthood. If at all we do wonder whether the mother is cruel and harsh, the child’s supplying of detail such as the fact that the mother was endlessly, tirelessly weaving baskets, or that when the child fell ill, “she would caress me and the touch of her hand on my forehead was so gentle and soft” are self-explanatory. Similarly, when the little girl prays to God not to send her father home, she has no idea of the enormity of what she is asking. The reader has, and this adds the dimension of poignancy to the story.

Yet (and herein lies the skill of the author) the child is not so young that she cannot understand discrimination. Harlekar Guruji’s tool of supposed chastisement, where she is concerned, is caste-based oppression. Without ever stating it in so many words, the child shows how this man of education treated her: with injustice. Cleaning the school compound fell to the lot of the classes in the school by turns, but when it came to her class, only this child was asked to clean it. On this particular day, it was not even the turn of her class, and yet here was Harlekar ordering her to clean the compound, claiming that Aai’s cow Kapila dirtied the place as always. Recounting the incident scrupulously, the child nevertheless does not have the vocabulary to capture her situation, but we as readers know that what she was facing here was discrimination, unfair and cruel.

There are other instances where the child’s voice endears, even reaches out to move us with emotion. Witness the conflict in her mind: on the one hand, she is eager for Aai to reprimand Guruji, on the other hand, she is ashamed of her mother’s torn saree, her inelegant wearing of the saree, and her unkempt hair. The child’s innocent desire that her mother be like the mothers of other children has been wistfully expressed even earlier in the story: “Once in a while, the children passing by on the road would stop to watch her weaving her baskets. They would stare at her and I would be embarrassed. Their mothers were beautiful – wore fine clothes and jewellery, with enchanting smiles on their faces and there was my Aai – always irritated and annoyed with me…”.

An advantage of having a child narrator is that she does not hide her biases, and so it is easy for the reader to look beyond them. The experiencing ‘I’ is the child’s voice, which overwhelms the adult, narrating ‘I’, the latter making her appearance very sparingly, thereby contributing to the powerful impact of the child’s voice. A typical example of the experiencing ‘I’ would be the use of the adjective ‘stupid’ for the mother in the sentence: “If we did not study, we would be badly beaten up and our stupid mother would watch us being thrashed”.

One of the rare instances where the narrating ‘I’ intrudes is in the very last sentence of the story, to register the change in the relationship between mother and child, and the dawning of understanding in the child. It is a coming of age in a very powerful sense.

Another instance is the beginning, where the author explains what brought her to writing the story in the first place. Rather than occupy extra-textual space like an interview or a journal, the circumstances under which “My Four Enemies” came to be written, is a part of the story itself. This technique effectively blurs the line between story and real life, a device that belongs to the repertoire of realism in the novel. “My Four Enemies” however is not a realistic piece of fiction, it belongs to the genre of autobiographical narrative; it is a testimonio.

In the first sentence, the author tells us that she was commissioned to write a piece for children. A task that she found difficult, and yet before she knew it, her “childhood caught hold of me by the neck. Not only did it catch me by the neck, but it also swiftly turned the time back”. The gradual replacement of the older woman by the child becomes evident in the next paragraph which begins: “When I was young, I took all older people to be my opponents. Perhaps all children feel that way. But my enemies were of a different kind”. Hereon the child takes over and the adult disappears till the very end, as already pointed out. As an autobiographical story, the narrative uses anecdotes to build interest. Urmila Pawar in a moment of self-conscious narration, remarks while drawing her father’s character-sketch: “I remember another interesting anecdote about him”. Anecdotes also help in illustrating character, working more effectively than mere description.

The presence of the child’s voice through the story gives it freshness and charm, occasionally reflected in the language, privileging the child’s idiom: “He looked like the demon hiding in the moon when he was angry with his black and white glaring eyes”.

The tone of the narrator is comment-worthy, being very informal. The child’s transparency is self-evident, and she naturally, and periodically, includes the reader in the course of her narration: “Oh yes, I was telling you about Aai asking me to deliver baskets to her customers” (303). The use of questions as a stylistic device also serves to strike a rapport with the reader. Having painted her father in black and-white, both literally as well as symbolically, she asks, “Now tell me why did I need any other colour?”. The use of Marathi words like ‘kokum’ and ‘dhaktya’, and culture/region-specific references like ‘Satyanarayana Puja’, contribute to local flavour in the story.