Book: BANDAGED MOMENTS: STORIES OF MENTAL HEALTH BY WOMEN WRITERS FROM INDIAN LANGUAGES
Edited by Nabanita Sengupta and Nishi Pulugurtha
Published by: Niyog
Price: Rs 499
There is always a mad woman in the attic. So are her stories, sealed in silence. Bandaged Moments is a powerful anthology that weaves together multiple monologues by women on mental health across 26 Indian regions. Translated into 17 Indian languages, it is an attempt to retrieve such stories from the shackles of repression and erasure. Intimate and confessional in tone, these stories have been fleshed out by not only raw and visceral experiences that the characters endured in their lifetime but also the values of and the truths about India’s socio-cultural fabric.
These voices touch upon various intersecting dimensions of the mental health crisis, ranging from the heteronormative pressures of being a wife and a mother, to the grief on loss and death, to the exploitation of vulnerable bodies steeped in poverty or disability, to the failure of legal and governmental bodies to offer succour to the emotional toll of caregiving. Women are forced to quit jobs, give up on their dreams, sacrifice their lives for children and emotionally unavailable partners only to be mocked at when, years later, they act erratically or spiral into breakdowns. Marriage is often prescribed as the only cure. They are also asked to smile a little more or perhaps stay quiet to preserve family honour. Such pressures destabilise the very core of these characters and, in extreme cases, lead to the core’s overall collapse, creating feelings of alienation.
The anthology is a poetic, painful, and often philosophical rumination on how women have occupied a distinct position in the annals of insanity. Sandwiched between patriarchy and psychiatry, they have been held as an outsider by the rigid values and the prohibitions of Indian society. The book exposes how inhuman cruelties are perpetrated on the mentally ill and how mental illness is deeply embedded in the social and the political structures. Stigmatisation, brutality and terrifying experiences, both within the home and outside it, cause some of the victims to fall prey to disappearances, even suicides. Dismissed as an object of pity or an agent of violent monstrosity, the mad are, more often than not, misunderstood and misdiagnosed, left behind to rot in painful silence or under the scrutiny of the medical gaze.
Some stories locate women’s ‘madness’ in physiological infirmities; others attribute their insanity to irrational minds. But the question that arises is this: is madness yet another patriarchal trope to pathologise and regulate femininity, to define, curtail, and restrict their boundaries? Madness, in these stories, thus acts as a signifier, which positions women as an ill, pathological outsider.
Bandaged Moments eschews a unified, single narrative voice. Rather, what is created is a polyphony — varied tones, rhythms, and cadences that map the unique cultural context of each life. The translations preserve the remnants of the original voices. Some of the narratives also maintain the fragmented mental landscapes and ambiguous endings so as to echo the uncertainty and the disjointed nature of mental distress. Some others underline how women must reject the traits of idealised femininity and utilise their frenzy towards creative pursuit, transcendence, and freedom.
Every woman who writes is a survivor in an insane world. Creativity is the only reasonable response against a society that is so prejudiced. Bringing such stories together could, in fact, be seen as an attempt to liberate the mind from the oppressive constraints of society.
Bandaged Moments is a testament to breakthrough, not breakdown.