The Bamboo Queen By Abani Kumar Baral

Translated by Anjali Tripathy

Abstract

Editorial Comments

Samrat Sengupta

Associate Professor, Dept. of English

Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, India

The present issue of Sanglap is housing the translation of the Odia short story “The Bamboo Queen” by Abani Kumar Baral, an academic and creative writer from Odissa with a Marxist orientation. The story deals with the complex question of caste, class, gender, and the crisis of subaltern women belonging to the community of nomadic acrobats, performing feats on the streets and roaming from place to place. The women playing on bamboo sticks and swinging freely above the ground, as represented in the story, suggest the ambiguous spatial relationship they share with mainstream society and their precarious existence. The game is supposedly a surviving trace of performative cultures that predates literacy and connects with other nomadic communities of the world, like the gypsies who roam from place to place and lack a permanent foothold in the mainstream sedentary society. The homelessness of this community in the story takes a more complex turn when we see the predicament of women from this community. Women, as such, are always and already loosely connected to their home and society in a patriarchal culture, and in the story, we find the three sisters, Jhampa, Labanga, and Sita, being forced to perform their feats before the male gaze for the livelihood of their parents. Their loose attachment is evident from the language in which the protagonist of the story, the middle daughter Labanga is described as performing balance on the Bamboo stick – “she sits with swinging legs, singing as if she is the daughter of the sky.” Her scene of unbelonging and unstable relationship with the earth is evident. Incidentally, the act of balancing is also significant since a woman is forced to strike a fine balance in society for survival; like the sisters had to bear with men trying to touch their bodies and still perform in a smiling face, they had to perform for the livelihood of their parents without much complaining. The natural state of unbelonging of this nomadic community described in the story as living “in tents in mango groves, under big trees or verandas of small schools” gets doubled when it comes to women who cannot even belong fully in a personal relationship. The objectification of Labanga is manifold. Not only do the outsiders who watch her performance subject her to their sexualised male gaze, but she is also used as a source of income by her own father by showing her body in tight clothes while performing, thus relying upon her physical charm. In the story, we see that she cannot have faith in any man on earth and have a stable relationship. Even her romantic relationship with the orphan drum player boy (Dinu) of her performance team is ambiguous and unstable as a sense of impermanence pervades her vision as she cannot rely on any men. She remains the queen of the Bamboo, on which she dances with the chanciness of falling and swings in a dangerous way. The language of the story is, at the same time, realistic and symbolic and suggests a sense of pervasive instability for Labanga. The wandering boy Dinu who lacks a fixed religious or caste identity, fails to be a dependable companion for her. The sense of a subaltern woman dazed by her double marginalisation of the outside mainstream community that objectifies and sexualises them and the patriarchy within her own community in intimate spaces and relationships makes her permanently groundless and precarious. The wandering community performing on bamboo sticks is found across India, and this story, in translation, can find similar resonances across the different regions of the country. The translation can also be a general commentary on subaltern women in India and their nature of alienation in mainstream society as well as within their own families and community.