Book: Famous Last Questions: A Confused Woman's Investigations Into The Country That Shaped Her
Author: Sanjana Ramachandran
Published by: Aleph
Price: Rs. 899
Annie Ernaux’s The Years was hailed as a memoir that spoke for an entire generation, voicing its collective memory, aspirations, fears and cultural fixations. The Years finds an unlikely successor in Sanjana Ramachandran’s book. Like Ernaux, Ramachandran, albeit less consciously, strays from what is wholly personal while retaining what is intimate, as she documents a generation of urban, educated, middle class Indian women coming of age.
Ramachandran talks about childhood trauma, the domestic abuse she witnessed at home, and the fierce restrictions imposed on her adolescent sexuality while referring to oft-discussed academic and social theories that shaped her subsequent understanding of these events. She also cites examples from the lives of her female acquaintances to illustrate her points. Consequently, the book transcends the outlines of Ramachandran’s own life and goes on to articulate an entire generation of women coming into awareness of the pervasiveness of patriarchal domination. This awareness, shared by women of Ramachandran’s generation as they rebel against gendered expectations of decorum and sexuality, underlines the rift with the previous generation of women who were trained to be selfless and forgiving.
Moments of crisis, clarity or disillusionment in Ramachandran’s life are connected to diverse ideas, from identity politics to Jungian psychology and New Age spirituality. The narrative structure raises an important question: can originality of thought be retained in a world where ideas are instantly expressed and constantly circulated online, invading the generational psyche?
As she grows up, Ramachandran moves away from her “narcissism, win-at-all-costs ambition” and “stifled femininity” to a sort of “psychological wholeness”, a shift that mirrors many modern women’s burnout from hustle culture and their disillusionment with the trappings of liberal feminism and society’s unfulfilled promises of equality. While lacking originality in terms of thought and expression, Famous Last Questions is a powerful demonstration of how the self borrows from the collective.