The furore over the proposals in January 2021 by the Government of Madhya Pradesh, a state in the Republic of India, to ensure the safety of working women by having them register at a local police station and then be tracked, has thrown up important questions about gender roles, sexual politics, and the idea of technocratic solutions to the chronic social problem of women’s safety in India (para. 4). While many women supported the proposals, others expressed worry at the potential surveillance by a paternalistic state; some others expressed anger at the responsibility being shifted from male assailants to working women, criticizing the proposals as having a post-facto character that essentially admits inability or unwillingness to prevent assaults from being carried out in the first place . While others proposed that a social education of gender equality was more than ever necessary, some remarked that a feminist Hindu religious education could be drawn from a lost culture of deifying women and goddesses that ancient Hindu texts testify to . Indeed, this latter opinion draws its power from a paradox that many observers often remark on: that of a vibrant tradition of worshipping Hindu goddesses co-existing with a terrible record of violence against women in a Hindu-majority country . There is thus a tension between the understanding of Hindu Goddesses as feminist icons and their inhabitation of what seems to be a deeply sexist and misogynistic culture. This tension is complicated further by the way feminist debates on technoscience reframe identity and culture; both utopianism and dystopianism in Science Fiction seem to pinpoint the possibilities of redefining the female body as a gesture towards a posthuman world that may or may not live up to its promises. In this paper, I will weave together these different strands of thought into intersections between postcolonial and feminist posthumanism, and from those intersections unpack the conversation on posthumanism in Giti Chandra’s SF short story “The Goddess Project”.
The most explosive cultural commentary on the above tension has been in the visual domain; in October 2013, the “Abused Goddesses” campaign, by the Mumbai-based agency Taproot, featured Hindu goddesses as victims of violence. Nkoyo Edoho-Eket notes that it was a response to the gang-rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey that received high media coverage and led to protests all across the nation. The images were accompanied with a caption that noted “Pray that we never see this day. Today, more than 68% of women in India are victims of domestic violence. Tomorrow, it seems like no woman shall be spared. Not even the ones we pray to.” (qtd. in Edoho-Eket). Edoho-Eket argues that this aesthetic of humanizing the deities also served to provoke conversations on a previously untouched territory-the fetishization inherent in the particular discourses of deification of femininity that occupy major cultural roles in Hindu lifeworlds across the nation. This discourse can be traced to the popular representations during British Rule of the “Bharat Mata” (Mother India), or the nation feminized as a goddess, oppressed by British colonial dominance. Tanika Sarkar argued that such depictions juxtaposed a glorious past with a fallen present: “the mother is the archetypal helpless female victim, the ‘Bharatmata’ painted by Abanindranath pale, tearful, frail. Early nationalist poetry struck a note of deep gloom and mourning around this figure.” (2012). The figure was also considered an icon of inspirational strength for the freedom struggle: “In the cultural context of Bengal the nationalist cult of the Mother…emphasized the female principle as Shakti or the source of strength…a certain concordance came to be drawn between the mother goddess…and the mother country.” (Bose 7). At the same time, Sugata Bose observes that Hindu goddesses had been historically handpicked to represent virtues expected of a woman: these goddesses “were often distinguished by high learning, wisdom or other accomplishments that were tempered by devotion to their husbands as well as the desire to not outshine them.” (7). Rishiraj Bhowmick explains that this contradiction “created a heavy and possibly illogical burden on the Bengali women to be both assertive, educated but remain a docile housewife, birthing soldiers for the national cause as their own goddess did.” (9). A case can then be made for the Bharat Mata itself being a problematic construct that occludes the otherwise unaddressed questions of gender inequality, misogyny and patriarchal stereotypes of femininity that still permeated the culture that venerates the nation as the divine feminine ; this would be one possible explanation for the paradox that had been cited at the beginning of this essay.
It can then be seen that depictions of goddesses attempt to inscribe an “essence” of an emulatory femininity that is unquestionable and abstract (like the way early nationalist poets exhorted Bengali women to emulate the domesticated, maternal ideal of Bharat Mata, as Sarkar shows), carefully occluding how femininity itself is a discourse that is an assemblage of multiple practices and codes of social, racial and cultural behaviour. Hence, veneration of goddesses (Hindu as well as non-Hindu) as feminist icons cannot proceed in an ahistorical space that simply sees in them a humanist potential, an aspiration, an ideal to satisfy. This is because of two reasons: first, Donna Haraway proposes that the totalizing nature of such essentialization of femininity carries troubling connotations of imperialism in denying difference : “There is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices.” (155). Secondly, critics such as Rosi Braidotti point out how humanism itself depends on a definition of “human” that is androcentric-where women across cultures had been historically excluded from the rights and privileges that are part and parcel of Enlightenment humanism . Aino-Kaisa Koistinen and Sanna Karkulehto thus argue that “feminist posthumanities can be described as a re-negotiating of “the human” in a manner that questions humanist hierarchical conceptualisations of the term, while it also brings to the fore the materiality and vulnerability of human existence and ethics in terms of nonhuman existence.” (para. 5).
It then begins to appear that the previously mentioned proposals by the Madhya Pradesh Government for ensuring women’s safety not only turns their bodies into nodes of information in a network of surveillance on the movements of women across the state, but also, in the proposal to install panic buttons in public transports, genders the technology of transportation inevitably: even in a bus, the female body is declared as an exception from the norm of the “human”; unlike male bodies, female bodies are expected to learn and acclimatize themselves to panic buttons as a part of daily life. In this configuration of the position of the female body in a social system, the use of technology can be argued to then invest in what Haraway had called “the informatics of domination” that denies agency to the female body (13). The patrimonialist state’s androcentric humanism then invests in the same language of male saviourship that had been institutionalised in the politics around Bharat Mata. This paper, in aligning itself to feminist posthumanities, proposes a starting point for a posthumanist understanding of goddesshood: simply, as a discourse of the limitations and the possibilities of the body that possesses a kinship with the non-human already, because of its historical exclusion from humanist parameters. Thus, my argument moves away from theological parameters of shakti to a posthuman attention to the body that “embodies” that shakti. To follow such a strategy would thus mean a sensitivity to the possibilities thrown up by modern technological reconfigurations of the body. In Haraway, it is thus the figure of the cyborg which supplants the goddess: “It’s not just that god is dead; so is the ‘goddess’. Or both are revivified in the worlds charged with microelectronic and biotechnological politics.” (162, emphasis added).
It is this notion of goddesshood that Giti Chandra’s “The Goddess Project” both alludes to and interrogates. Chandra’s short story is set in a dystopian India with a fanatically misogynist regime that pursues a project of de-professionalizing women and freely sanctions all violence against them. Female technocrats take refuge in clusters and use microchip technologies to supplement and treat victims of this violence through prosthetics and microchip technology that could ameliorate post-traumatic disorders. Remarkably, these cyborgs do not, in the vein of Haraway, transcend a male/female binary; instead, they reinscribe femininity as a technological realization of mythical narratives of goddesses. Hence, they decide to use nationalist mythologisation of the divine feminine itself in order to try to culturally affect a change in the fanatic regime: “Yeah, they love their goddesses, it’s like the country itself…well, considering they want all women to be like goddesses…so, we thought if real goddesses…And then they would see, wouldn’t they?” (228). Thus, they move into designing female-cyborg hybrids with superhuman capabilities, whose powers and appearances come to resemble Hindu goddesses, with their purpose of protecting and avenging victimized women. However, this proves counterproductive, leading to almost a genocidal war against women, because of the failure to understand the actual problematic postcolonial patriarchal culture that deifies female deities: “But soon after the goddesses were commissioned and manufactured, nobody thought so many women would have to be killed just to get rid of the goddesses.” (229). In short, the regime considered them not as revered goddesses but as illegitimate, uncanny abominations.
Accordingly, in the story, Durga Ma, one of the first three cyborgs manufactured, specializes in combat, and trains Ta’Ki, a next-generation cyborg specializing in assassination. Like a combat unit, other cyborgs had their own specializations; Ma Sara, one of the original trinity, weeps tears that turn into precious stones, and trains B’Har Atma, whose singing has healing powers. Both parties rescue Lakshmi, the last member of the original trinity, who had been somehow imprisoned and tortured, and has been protecting a little girl called Jai. It is Lakshmi who reveals their origins, and how propaganda had cast them as abominations and turned the conflict into a war of species, human against the posthuman: “They came for us…that day when riots had been put down with actual guns and the sarkar was looking for someone else for the men to rage at. And the rumours were already there.” (233). The warehouse of the Goddess Project had been found, and the girls sheltered over there were branded and almost burnt alive as bait for the cyborgs. The ensuing battle and the Great Fire erased their history, with Lakshmi being the only person capable of remembering it. This influx of new ontological doubts deeply unsettles the other two senior cyborgs, especially Ma Sara, who had operated on a self-understanding as a righteous goddess in a faithless world: “‘Lakshmi, we are not’…“androids”! We are- hum to deviyan hain …we always have been.’” (232). It becomes an existential question for the cyborgs, as they come to terms with the fact that the identity of divine femininity they so self-consciously inhabit may be a part and parcel of the same culture that they battle.
While debating on how they gained the ability to mentally hear cries for help, Sara grimly suggests that the summons were conveyed through the brands that each girl in the warehouse during the Great Fire had received at the hands of their torturers. The mystery of the brand is solved when the next-generation cyborgs are all arranged by the goddesses in a line: their individual names come to form the sentence “Bharat Mata Ki Jai.” (Victory to Mother India) (235). Deeply unsettled by this, Durga Ma tries to deny it and attribute the power of mentally hearing summons to old narratives about deities possessing similar powers (234). Lakshmi, however, is aware that the names of the three surviving next-generation hybrids (B’Har Atma, Ta’ki, Jai) come from the fact that they were named after whatever was left of the brand on their skin after they were rescued (235). Their identities are erased, colonized and then rewritten ironically by the anticolonial nationalist figure of the Bharat Mata. Lakshmi rises to this challenge by arguing that this still did not diminish their agency but only increased it further: “They did not know what they were creating when they did it, but we know. We know what we have made of ourselves, the goddesses we have made of ourselves. It is our brand now.” (235). Chandra ends the story on a note of ambiguity: on one hand, Lakshmi proposes to resolve the problem by wresting the meaning-making of Mother India from the misogynist ultranationalist regime; she proposes to “embody” this nationalist divine feminine as an insurrectionary ideal, as opposed to the essentialized and abstract signifier of the Bharat Mata in patriarchal society. On the other hand, it is still a signifier that is invested with the same sense of the divine feminine that could not stop, and even contributed to, the rise of the fanatically misogynist ultranationalist regime that had created the dystopia. The ontological doubts thrown up by the revelation of their cyborg origins, in this case, could be a welcome sense of interconnected, non-binary, meshed identity as opposed to the totalizable, potentially imperialist connotations of goddesshood. The obsessive focus on technoscientific solutions isolates the struggle in the story, creating techno-subalterns in the vein of Md. Monirul Islam’s postcolonial critique of posthumanism’s potential for unequal distribution of technology: “when some people have not been considered and treated as humans [to begin with], posthumanism serves as an alibi for further denial of humanity to these same people.” (122). There is no indication in the story of any non-technologically enhanced female resistance that could have worked in solidarity with the goddess-cyborgs. Along with the investment in the postcolonial discourse of the Bharat Mata, this does create problems for the feminist struggle in the story.
While the feminist posthumanism in “The Goddess Project” does attribute to technology a sense of great agency in a dystopian world of fanatical misogyny, its recasting of cyborgs as goddesses retreats from the possibilities of rethinking gender roles and identities, as well as colonial and postcolonial constructions of femininity. At the same time, we must be careful to acknowledge that in the grim, survivalist horror of the story’s India, there might be little space for something else: whatever agency the Goddesses in the story wrest back by fighting back with their enhanced capabilities is certainly cherishable in a world like that. It can certainly be read as an example of possible imaginative replies to the patrimonial and patriarchal state’s attempted technological solutions to questions of women’s safety, solutions that elide the far more important need to start at the roots of the problem by re-education for gender equality and changing the culture of sexual objectification. It is arguably a lengthy, difficult task but one that combats the issue more comprehensively. Perhaps “The Goddess Project” can be read as a warning to stage more of these debates, and drive home the need for more such conversations and better policies to avoid the potentialities of a dystopia of its kind.
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