Women, mental health, and stories across India

For an extremely culturally diverse country like India with so many different languages, customs, taboos pervading its citizens, one common factor that remains consistent in the literature of the different bhasha languages is the miserable plight of women in general surviving often as a subaltern within a primarily patriarchal mental make-up of society. What happens is ostracisation, and to add to that is the madness that expresses itself in different ways as a lived, social, and sometimes even celebrated condition.

The present anthology under review, very well edited by two women who are teachers by profession, is a compendium of stories of women, written by women in 15 Indian languages and three dialects (Marwari, Magahi, and Bhojpuri) that speak of pain, endurance, and everyday negotiations with mental health. Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make healthy choices. Bandaged Moments brings together 26 compelling stories from almost the whole of India, from Kashmiri in the north to Malayalam down south, and from Rajasthani Hindi or Marwari in the West to Assamese in the East.

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They focus on humanising psychological conditions through storytelling, with each narrative illustrating the multifaceted nature of mental health issues, the challenges of seeking psychiatric help in India, along with the redemptive power of a support system (or the consequences when there isn’t one), and the lived experiences of individuals grappling with mental health issues in varied cultural settings. Mental illness is quite a complicated issue and includes anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and schizophrenia, and is therefore bound to shame and silence. The short stories included in this anthology are of different kinds.

Some like Glass Walls (Tamil, and the longest with more than 8000 words) and Flying Fish (Assamese) deal with clinical schizophrenia; others like Story of Laughter (Bengali), The Tale of a Toilet (Kannada), Mind it, Madhuriya! (Magahi), Rx Marriage (Telugu), Convert my Bad Karma to Good (Hindi) treat various kinds of mental health issues that involve going to a medical practitioner or a counsellor. The Malayalam story, Incomplete Pauses, narrates the state of a woman in an asylum and the helplessness that she faces when released. Mental health is also a social issue and involves discrimination, stigma, and silence. When it concerns a woman, it even leads to sexual exploitation. Several stories in this anthology highlight the greater vulnerability of a mentally challenged woman – O my Benefactor (Maithili), Girl in the Dollhouse (Kashmiri, with only 947 words), and Innocent (Punjabi). The Bengali story from Silchar entitled Bleak Noon depicts the figure of a ‘mad’ person roaming about the neighbourhood, and Tajmahal (Marathi) also explores a similar ‘mad’ person one meets at a popular tourist destination like the Taj Mahal. Obsession is another behavioral condition that impacts the mental well-being of the individual. Vicious Cycle (Gujarati), The Smell of News(Malayalam), Breaking Out (Urdu), and Borderline (Bengali) are some of the stories that deal with obsessive behaviour, yet the treatment of the theme in each is vastly different. Crazy River (Odia) is the story of a woman losing her desire to talk due to trauma, while The Shadow (Odia) narrates the gradual degeneration of a woman in terms of her mental health. The Yellow Rose (Urdu) speaks of the isolation that often becomes part of the lives of those who have mental issues.

Again, Beyond the Cruel Times (Hindi) subverts the role of doctor and patient with a tongue-in-cheek humour. Some of the stories are set in urban spaces, some in rural areas, but in all of them we find that the protagonist and other characters reveal an ignorance, an awareness of the problems, a difficulty in understanding how to deal with them, of giving up, of trying to overtly control, of trying to deal with issues through empathy, of trying to bring about an ableist representation as well. In the brief “Note from a Mental Health Practitioner” that serves as the Preface to the anthology, a consultant Psychiatrist, Dr Sharmishtha Chakrabarti, tells us that “mental health is not about madness or insanity, but it is about emotional, psychological and social well-being.

It is estimated that depression and anxiety disorders will be extremely common in the future.” As we read through the stories, we realise that the narratives themselves are layered – they hold sorrow and survival, and at the same time, they show resistance, creativity, bits of humour, and the untranslatable presence of madness in our cultural fabric. Here we must add a note about the translation. Since the volume includes multiple translators, some of them with experience, some occasional translators, some trying their hand at translation for the first time, stylistically the result is not uniform.

But the main thrust of each translation has been to bring the essence of the stories to the fore. In the Introduction, the editors clearly mention that the stories might appear to have jagged edges to the English readers, but some portions of the stories have been deliberately kept so as to prioritise cultural fidelity over linguistic fidelity. Glossaries, endnotes, or in-text explanations have been used, as and when required, to retain the nuances of the source language culture.

This pathbreaking anthology has focused on greater cultural inclusivity and the editors need to be congratulated for the tremendous effort they have made to scout for stories from different parts of India, where despite the base language being either Bengali or Hindi, they have selected multiple stories from these languages belonging to different states with cultural, lexical and usage-related differences, thereby adding more to a really kaleidoscopic representation of the issue of mental health in India. Hope further volumes in the future will help us to understand the nuanced world of mental health better, as till now the taboo that surrounds discourses of mental health also becomes manifold when it concerns women.

THE WRITER IS A CRITIC AND TRANSLATOR, AND IS A FORMER PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT VISVABHARATI, SANTINIKETAN.