I think that one way that the short stories look at poverty is as an unknown, a dark continent if you will. It is mysterious, mystified and even alluring. In Ruskin Bond’s The Night Train at Deoli, poverty is even a place and a stop on the train. I am not saying that this is a failing though the works. Rather I am observing it as only one part of a greater whole. Also I think it says as much about me as a read as the texts themselves.
The germ of this idea came to mind during our discussion of Masud’s Sheesha Ghat when someone said perhaps on of the reasons the story was confusing was the ability to portray poverty is somehow limited. The texts’ narrators always seem to be looking for poverty. In A Horse for the Sun, Murthy is returning home and one aspect of his encounter of poverty is as a dialog trying to synthesis the material conditions of poverty and behavior that furthers them with Venkata’s contentment and spiritual richness. Ultimately the only way to finish the story is with the description of a moment of spiritual transcendence of the material circumstances. There is a similarly motif of poverty as the unknown in Lakshmi’s Gifts. Here main character is researching the lives of poor women one thing the story centers around is a sense of difference and the narrators inability to understand the woman she is visiting.
Poverty is a lack and moreover a constant lack that pervades the everyday. Therefore it is very hard to write without comparing to the wealth, power and luxury that is on the other extreme. Poverty seems to be written as a snapshot like O&A portrayal of women washing dishes in sewage water or shanty town or poverty is portrayed as an abuse such as the oppression or suffering of the poor. At least these are the ways authors have seemed to drive the point of poverty home, to make it noticeable. This notion would explain why a year of the narrators life goes by with so little description in Sheesha Ghat.
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I had not really stopped to think about the concept of "poverty as an unknown." It's very intriguing. It is very true that when we read something that is considered and exposé on poverty, we look for the absolutely terrible. I think this is why visions of women washing clothes in sewage water or physical, sexual, or emotional abuse of the impoverished catches our attention to a higher degree than a girl selling baskets at a train station. A majority of the writers and readers of these works have no idea what it is like to live in the slums, so it really is unknown to us. And because it is unknown, it is hard to find anything that is not horrible associated with poverty.
ReplyDeleteDo you think that to these authors poverty is unknown because they have not experienced it? I read the bios for the authors and they all seem to be educated and part of the middle class. (Swarup also fits into that category)
ReplyDeleteI think that if these authors lived the experience of poverty they would be able to portray it in a better way that isn't obscure or unknown. To me this pattern of an unclear description of poverty comes directly from the author's real life experiences of seing poverty in that same sense, unknown.