“Close Distance”: Class and Intimacy in South Asia

Maryam Mirza, Intimate Class Acts: Friendship and Desire in Indian and Pakistani Women’s Fiction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016. 191 pp. $45.00.

In a powerful photo series, “Close Distance” (2013), Bangladeshi photographer Jannatul Mawa employs a simple device: she asks middle-class urban housewives and their housemaids to sit together on the drawing room sofa, a space usually forbidden to housemaids who may clean the furniture but typically not sit on it. The resulting photographs reveal with startling effect the social distance that exists between mistress and housemaid, even as they are unified by the space they occupy on the sofa and, by extension, the middle-class household. Like Mawa, Maryam Mirza is interested in the particular and sometimes peculiar forms of intimacy and distance that characterize cross-class relations in South Asia. In Intimate Class Acts: Friendship and Desire in Indian and Pakistani Women’s Fiction, she brings together a set of ten Anglo-phone novels by Indian and Pakistani women writers to ground her inquiry. While Arvind Adiga’s novel The White Tiger (2008) and Daniyal Mueenuddin’s short story collection In Other Rooms Other Wonders (2009) have attracted much acclaim for their explorations of class relations in India and Pakistan, especially how these exist at the intersections of feudalism and globalization, Mirza’s attention to women writers widens the scope of critical interest in novels about class, allowing us a glimpse into the relationships between women and girls in the novelistic worlds she explores.

Intimate Class Acts joins an interdisciplinary field of scholarship that foregrounds the dissident potentials of friendship, while also pointing to its limits, as seen for instance in Leela Gandhi’s Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (2006) and Elora Chowdhury and Liz Philipose’s edited volume Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism, and Transnational Solidarity (2016). Mirza’s introduction quickly details the postindependence economic trajectories of India and Pakistan and the specificity of domestic servitude in South Asia, which forms the backdrop of the majority of interclass relationships in the novels she examines. No surprise, for as Mirza explains, the middle- to upper-class domestic household is one of the few spaces of sustained inter-class contact in India and Pakistan. Existing South Asian scholarship on servitude in postcolonial societies, particularly work by Ambreen Hai, Raka Ray, and Seemin Qayum, forms an important part of the theoretical scaffolding of Mirza’s book, and she advances this scholarship by her close and sustained exploration of how “cultures of servitude”¹ shape cross-class intimacies in complex, power-laden webs of affection, friendship, sex, romance, and abuse.

The book begins with two chapters that explore female friendships across class and age. In chapter 1, Mirza considers the friendship between an elite female child and a housemaid in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man (1988), Rukhsana Ahmad’s The Hope Chest (1996), and Moni Mohsin’s The End of Innocence (2007)—a selection that reflects Mirza’s commendable attention to less discussed texts, in addition to better-known ones. In all three Pakistani novels, Mirza explores why friendship bonds that were possible in childhood do not survive into adulthood and how socioeconomic hierarchies upend conventional South Asian age hierarchies. In Ahmad’s The Hope Chest, for example, the scene of children’s play is revealed as a site of labor for the maidservant’s daughter, Reshma, whose hunger pangs distract her while she plays with the upper-class child, Shahzadi (Mirza 12). Reshma also spends much of her time assisting her mother in housework or the care of younger siblings; here, Mirza shows how the experience of childhood is determined by classed access to leisure, pleasure, play, and freedom from adult responsibilities.

Friendships and solidarities between adult women across class lines are equally difficult to sustain, as Mirza suggests in chapter 2, which focuses on Shashi Deshpande’s The Binding Vine (1993) and Thrity Umrigar’s The Space Between Us (2005). Umrigar’s novel perhaps best illustrates the frequent disingenuousness of middle-class claims of cross-class friendship. As Mirza shows, the friendship depicted in the novel between the upper-class Parsi employer, Sera, and her Hindu maid, Bhima, is no match for the bonds of hetero-normative kinship that reproduce class and caste orders, no matter how internally violent they may be. Sera is beaten by her husband, and her son-in-law Viraf impregnates Bhima’s granddaughter, yet Sera sides with Viraf, even as her daughter Dinaz walks out on Viraf in disgust. Notwithstanding Sera’s benevolent claims that Bhima is “like one of the family,” it is Dinaz who becomes the true agent of solidarity. Her affection for Bhima enables her to do the right thing—a suggestion toward the novel’s end that solidarity is not impossible, but a political choice. Sexual violation appears as a plot point in both novels and Mirza expertly unpacks how it at once posits the possibility of women’s cross-class solidarity and reveals repeatedly the failure of that possibility. In The Binding Vine, the employer, Urmila, grapples with the conjugal rape of her mother-inlaw, while the maid Shakuntala watches over her comatose daughter, Kalpana, after a brutal rape. The common fate of rape in these women’s lives might have bound them in solidarity, but Mirza notes how such solidarities are often compromised. As she argues, “both Urmila and the text impose a class-based silence on Shakuntala,” insofar as the novel’s first-person narration is reserved for Urmila in a gesture that Mirza calls “narratival subordination” (57, 56).

Cross-class heterosexual romance forms the core of chapters 3 and 5, which might have been conceptually better paired together, rather than interrupted by chapter 4. In chapter 3, Mirza examines Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) and Kamila Shamsie’s Salt and Saffron (2000), attending to the novels’ figuration of the family as a conduit of class ideology. Mirza returns to some key debates around Roy’s novel, including the depiction of the Paravan Velutha’s body and the refiguration of the family as imagined by the upper-caste Ammu. The novel’s memorable depiction of the relationship between Baby Kochamma and her maidservant Kochu Maria, while not directly discussed by Mirza, is of particular relevance to her explorations of intimacy and may be taken up by others in the future. Mirza champions the tragic ending of The God of Small Things over the “happy ending” of Salt and Saffron, where class differences are resolved by the lovers’ refuge in elite spaces outside South Asia.

Chapter 5 breaks newer ground as it focuses on cross-class romances inflected by nation and race in novels by Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us (1985) and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006). Whereas much of the critical reception around Desai’s novel has read it as a narrative about classed asymmetries on a global scale, Mirza sheds fresh light by turning to the intersecting class, regional, and national tensions shaping the relationship between the central romantic couple, Sai and Gyan. Mirza rightly problematizes the version of cosmopolitanism often hailed in that text, interrogating Desai’s caricatured rendering of the Nepali Gyan’s investment in Gorkha nationalism. As Mirza argues, “because the Gorkha community’s discontentment is tied in with its socio-economic marginality, . . . rejecting its territorial nationalism ultimately also eclipses the need to address class inequalities through collective action” (132). Throughout the monograph, but perhaps with particular effect in this chapter, Mirza deftly captures the class differences that exist within as well as between the subaltern and master class. In The Inheritance of Loss, Sai hails from a family on a downward class trajectory, while Gyan’s is somewhat upwardly mobile. Thus it is possible, as Mirza notes, for Sai to be ashamed by the sight of Gyan’s house, even as she herself lives in a once majestic but now crumbling house owned by her grandfather (117). A similar complication of class hierarchies is evident in the relationship between Rose and Ram in Sahgal’s Emergency novel Rich Like Us—the lower-class Englishwoman speaks English in a Cockney accent, while the urbane, university-educated Ram’s English is impeccable, and he often corrects Rose’s grammar. Later, Ram falls in love with an aristocratic Englishwoman, Marcella, whose class identification with the racially other Ram overrides any racial identifications between Rose and Marcella.

Chapter 4 explores sexually exploitative and predatory relations between male employers and female employees. Revisiting the novels by Roy (God of Small Things) and Umrigar (Space Between Us) that appear in earlier chapters, Mirza also brings Brinda Charry’s The Hottest Day of the Year (2001) into the mix. Here, in attempting to articulate the complex dynamics depicted in these novels of sexual predation, manipulation, and coercion by often older male employers, combined with the confusing desires of the women employees themselves in the scene of “seduction,” Mirza coins the sticky category of “post-sex rape” to describe the callous male employers’ later behavior (95). This is a category that raises serious questions about the relationship between sex and rape in the context of unequal power dynamics; about the temporality of consent; about the relationship between rape and other forms of sexual violation. In short, it calls for deeper theorization than is offered in the chapter. Mirza’s formal observations are more on point: for example, she notes that Maya’s account of the sexual encounter is offered in third person, thereby “authenticat[ing]” her account over Viraf’s dismissal of her testimony (94). Another notable observation is the use of pregnancy as a plot point in both The Space Between Us and The Hottest Day of the Year: by opening up the possibility of biological connection between classes, pregnancy functions as a threat that must be contained.

Chapter 6 provides an excellent examination of cross-class dialogue between characters speaking in non-English languages, as is usually the case, given that English is spoken largely by an elite minority in South Asia and tends to be a marker of class. The “translation” of non-elite characters’ speech from South Asian languages poses a particular challenge for the Anglophone writer. Mirza identifies and compares two writerly strategies that are each bedeviled by different problematics: in “translating” subaltern non-English speech, writers resort to either a “staged” version of Indian or Pakistani English, or to “neutral” English. The first strategy, Mirza shows, entails the use of code-mixing (that is, adding words from regional languages), superimposing the grammatical structure of non-English languages onto English, or interspersing grammatical errors in the speech of subaltern characters. Although Mirza appreciates that these strategies are a function of the realist sensibilities of the texts that employ them in the interest of foregrounding the linguistic diversity of cross-class milieus, her analysis also reveals slippages that indicate the ways in which elite sensibilities persist in these texts at the level of language. For example, in The Space Between Us, Mirza points to the introduction of grammatical errors into Bhima’s speech while Sera’s is relayed in standard English, even though the characters are speaking in Hindi, a language that for the upper-class Gujarati Parsi woman Sera is more likely a third language, while likely being a language more in use by the servant, Bhima. The second strategy of using “neutral” English, Mirza argues, comes with its own problems: in Mohsin’s The End of Innocence, which is set in Punjab, the use of “neutral” English glosses over the linguistic distinctions and hierarchies among non-English languages (Urdu, for example, holds a higher social value than Punjabi within the novel’s rural setting). While noting these pitfalls, Mirza also offers astute examples of how either linguistic strategy could be mobilized to mark social distance rather than producing the subaltern speaker as infantile or naïve.

The conclusion offers a defense of the realism favored by most of Mirza’s selected writers. Pointing to the sustained thriving of the realist mode in South Asian Anglophone literature alongside other experimental modes of narration, Mirza observes that “it is the women writers who have favored realism” (159). That is largely true of Mirza’s corpus, and she forcefully challenges the privileging of non-realist forms of narration in much postcolonial criticism, inaugurated in 1981 by a then-justifiable but since-oversized attention to the novels of Salman Rushdie and to magical realism as a mode of representing postcolonial lifeworlds. Disputing feminist evaluations that see realism as symptomatic of a conservative unwillingness to transgress patriarchal ideologies, Mirza insists that “realist novels by women writers do have the capacity to contest patriarchal oppression” (160). She points, for instance, to the use of the child narrator in several novels, where the distance from adult worlds signals a distance from dominant class ideologies, even as she warns against the putative “innocence” of the elite child narrator.

The framework of intimacy that anchors Intimate Class Acts successfully highlights the complex modes of relationalities across class that are so particular to South Asian societies. However, Mirza’s discussion of friendship and/as intimacy in the introduction relies awkwardly on Euro-American scholars and writers such as Michel Foucault and Louise Bernikow, leaving uncited an entire domain of South Asian queer scholarship that might have helped her theorize and contextualize intimacy in South Asian contexts more deftly. Queer studies scholars such as Shohini Ghosh, Gayatri Gopinath, and Naisargi Dave have explored the gendered and often flexible boundaries between friendship and (queer as well as heterosexual) love, as well as the ways in which these ideals manifest quite distinctly in South Asia. Yet Mirza draws instead on Foucault’s observations: “[w]omen have had access to the bodies of other women: they put their arms around each other, kiss each other. Man’s body has been forbidden to other men in a much more drastic way” (qtd. in Mirza xxvi). In South Asia, as even the most casual observer would vouch, this is simply not true, and physical intimacies between male friends are far more easily—and indeed publicly—expressed than in the West, although in urban centers, such intimacies may be largely discernible among men of a lower socioeconomic class.

Intimate Class Acts nevertheless provides a much-needed intersectional examination of class in contemporary South Asian literary fiction. One of the most interesting aspects of Mirza’s analysis is her attention to how aesthetic hierarchies of beauty intersect with hierarchies of class, gender, and age. In The Hope Chest, Mirza unpacks how Reshma’s light skin and beauty allow for class mobility via marriage, but also marks the end of her childhood as she is forced to care for her husband’s children while herself a mere child of fourteen. In The Inheritance of Loss, as Mirza notes, Sai falls in love with Gyan, who, as she learns, comes from a background that doesn’t “match Gyan’s talk, his English, his looks, his schooling” (qtd. in Mirza 117). In Umrigar’s novel, Maya, the maid Bhima’s granddaughter, is struck by Viraf’s smooth back as she gives him a massage, a back that to Maya looks “as unthreatening as a loaf of bread,” in contrast with the bodies of men in the slums where she lives (qtd. in Mirza 94). Here, as Mirza observes, the perceived physical beauty of the male employer, along with his Westernized and lighthearted manners, are eventually contrasted with his behavior, as his speech turns crude following the sexual encounter with Maya. In The God of Small Things, Roy’s depiction of male beauty is conveyed, as Mirza notes, via descriptions of the dark-skinned body of the Untouchable tragic hero, Velutha. Through these authors’ work, Mirza effectively points to how South Asian appearance norms are marked in indelible but usually unspoken ways by the material realities of class and caste.

Mirza’s monograph confidently lays the ground for future projects that may be built upon the frameworks she provides. In the conclusion, Mirza raises the question of how foregrounding the category of the “male writer” might make visible an altogether different set of preoccupations around the intersections of class and gender in South Asia than the ones revealed in her book. Queer intimacies—briefly discussed in Tabish Khair’s foreword to Mirza’s monograph vis-à-vis Ismat Chughtai’s iconic short story “Lihaf” (The Quilt, 1942)—are another avenue for further explorations of cross-class intimacies. In sum, Intimate Class Acts will be of interest not only to scholars of postcolonial literature but also to feminist scholars interested in the intersections of gender, class, caste, and nationality.