Venkatraman, Padma - Climbing the Stairs

[oyceter]

Vidya is fifteen and dreams of going to college, but she's afraid she'll be married off. But soon, tragedy strikes as her father becomes more and more involved with the Indian independence movement, and she and her family are sent off to live with her paternal grandfather. There, the women are separated from the men, and Vidya's life is so limited that the only freedom she can find is in the library upstairs. And life gets even more complicated as Britain calls on Indian volunteers to help fight the Axis powers.

This reminds me a lot of Keeping Corner in how it deals with the ideas of Indian independence, feminism, and Hindu philosophy, although I think Keeping Corner did a better job in terms of execution. This book combines many interesting elements but is ultimately less nuanced than I would like.

First is that Vidya is the only woman with agency in the book. Her amma is fairly peripheral to the plot, as is her friend Rifka, and all the other women and girls are shown as evil (periamma, her cousin, her teacher, her other aunt) or ineffective (her third aunt). This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that many of the men in this book are the ones who end up helping Vidya—Raman, Kitta, and thatha. And they're the ones Vidya talks with the most about her future hopes and dreams; they're the ones she engages with on issuees of feminism and oppression.

My other issue is the portrayal of the US as a fellow British colony and possible ally. I have a very hard time accepting parallels between the US Revolution and the Indian independence movement. I don't know that much about the Indian independence movement, but I feel it is not particularly flattering to draw parallels between it and a revolution that started mostly for the purpose of financial benefit and the protection of rich white guys' profits and property. I am, of course, heavily influenced by Conquest and Octavian Nothing in this reading, but that is why I have a problem with the image of the US as a potentially safer space for Indians. I also hate that Vidya's protests that the US didn't treat American Indians well (understatement!) and kept slaves, and that they were countered in a sentence or two with "No country is perfect. And they emancipated the slaves!"

That said, I was glad that the book grounds Vidya's growing feminist consciousness in Hindi roots and in the Indian independence movement, and that even though her relatives are sexist, we also get to see a flip side in her father.

Comments

[evilprodigy.livejournal.com]

My other issue is the portrayal of the US as a fellow British colony and possible ally. I have a very hard time accepting parallels between the US Revolution and the Indian independence movement. I don't know that much about the Indian independence movement, but I feel it is not particularly flattering to draw parallels between it and a revolution that started mostly for the purpose of financial benefit and the protection of rich white guys' profits and property. I am, of course, heavily influenced by Conquest and Octavian Nothing in this reading, but that is why I have a problem with the image of the US as a potentially safer space for Indians. I also hate that Vidya's protests that the US didn't treat American Indians well (understatement!) and kept slaves, and that they were countered in a sentence or two with "No country is perfect. And they emancipated the slaves!"

Oy. Rose-colored glasses, to say the very least; it always is a bit frustrating and discrediting when people attempt to draw parallels between the independence movement of a people from a colonizing power and the secession movement of a sector of a colonizing power from the rest of the colonizing power, which is basically what the American Revolution was anyway.

[oyceter]

Siiiiigh, yeah. And I would have been much less irked by the comparison had they not brushed off things like slavery and American Indian genocide!

[keilexandra]

Interesting indeed. When I read this, I had a niggling uncomfortable feeling at how Vidya suddenly accepts Raman even though his male protectiveness remains unchanged. But on a visceral level, I connected so much with Vidya that I can overlook philosophical quibbles.

And I found the optimistic view of the U.S. curiously similar to the typical Chinese viewpoint--it's a golden land that can do no wrong.

[oyceter]

Darn, I totally forgot to write about how I liked the way Vidya first reacts to Raman's offer at the end, because a) it wasn't following the standard YA romance tropes and b) Vidya was right, but how I was a little sad by the way Venkatraman undercut it a little in the ending.

And I found the optimistic view of the U.S. curiously similar to the typical Chinese viewpoint--it's a golden land that can do no wrong.

I see this in some ways but not in others... like, I do think most Chinese immigrants I've met have an optimistic view of the opportunities they have here and the life they can make for themselves, but I also think most of them that I've talked to are pretty cognizant of all the forces allied against them, from language proficiency to the generational gap with their children to being away from their family to the racism in society.

I know a lot of people who ended up moving back to Taiwan during the recession in the late 80s in the US because they basically knew there was only so far they could go in a US company, and I suspect the same happens for immigrants of other countries as soon as those countries try enticing them back.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I suspect that there were much more recent, and strategically and tactically relevant, models that Indians could look to - e.g., (on the basis of conference papers I've been to touching on the subject), Ireland, and the British suffrage movement (went to a particularly interesting session once on the movement of the concept of the hunger strike between these)

[oyceter]

*nods* I am sure that is the case, although I suspect even if they had that in the book, I would have been a little grumpy, just because the narrative of so many revolutions against colonizers is such that they say the revolutionaries take from European movements. Which I am sure is factually correct, but I also feel that it is used to take away from the portrayal of agency of the POC revolutionaries (there's usually very little written about how POC revolutionaries draw from each other, at least in the fiction I have read).

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Very true - there was a lot of intersection between all these movements (I am currently reading big fat bio of Edward Carpenter who was like Clapham Junction for intersecting causes c. 1900) - also suspect I am being v Anglocentric and underestimating influence of Italian Risorgimento, Russian thinkers like Tolstoy, Kropotkin, etc, on early C20th movements for liberation and social reform.

Also that 'ideas from outside' thing is so often used as a put-down: even if there is influence from elsewhere it is usually that it resonates with or articulates existing issues. Am currently also reading book on how Our Bodies Ourselves was translated/adapted/used as inspiration in different cultures...

[oyceter]

*nods* I also want to know more about non-European influences, because that's a huge gap in my knowledge that I am trying to fill.

Also, very yes to how people adopt influences and transform them.

[ms-treesap.livejournal.com]

That's a shame- I was really intrigued by your first few sentences :( It doesn't sound like it's worth the effort to reserve/buy, although I will try it if I see it in the library.

[oyceter]

Yeah... it's interesting but I wouldn't buy it. On the other hand, I definitely rec Kashmira Sheth's Keeping Corner, which is about an 11-year-old widow in the 1910s and does better with the incorporation of Indian-based feminism and the Indian independence movement.