Women’s mental illness has always been pushed aside throughout the centuries. Women who stepped outside the norm are labelled as ‘witches’. No matter what the woman goes through, she has/had absolutely no autonomy over herself. A lack of self-worth becomes a potential risk for mental illness to develop. Hence, they were/are called different names, often locked or put in a mental asylum by their near and dear ones. “The broken sheds looked sad and strange:/ Unlifted was the clinking latch; / Weeded and worn the ancient thatch/ Upon the lonely moated grange. / She only said, “My life is dreary,/ He cometh not,” she said; / She said, “I am aweary, aweary, /I would that I were dead!” Like Tennyson’s “Mariana in the Moated Grange”, some women are sensitive receptors who pick up dark signals for the mind to battle. ‘Bandaged Moments’ comprises 26 stories written by women authors from 17 Indian languages, which are ‘translated’, that “depict several issues associated with mental health,” writes Dr Sarmishtha Chakrabarti. The stories in ‘Bandaged Moments’ often explore themes like trauma, stigma, and the lived experience of mental health challenges from a gendered lens. Further, the volume also explores how literary portrayals of mental illness have evolved, from being seen as a petrifying threat (like Bertha in ’Jane Eyre’) to a more complex human experience.
The title is interesting and intriguing. ‘Bandaged Moments’ refers to episodes of fear, suffering, or paralysis, often associated with the soul being distressed and needing to recover. A bandage on a wound heals and also conceals the scars. These short stories are situated at the cusp of what is retained in the mind as disturbing, painful, at a moment when the threads of the mind are tangled by natural and social forces. Through the shifting vocabularies of words, movement, imagery and associations, the narrator in the opening Assamese short story “Ferns in the Moonlight” by Moushumi Kandali searches for the ‘ferns’—“A deep sense of loss grips me. I slump back into the recliner. And I dream—I am surrounded on all sides by ferns. I am looking for something—Flowers of fern? Just one will do. I find none. I go on searching. It starts to snow. In dense flakes. The ferns are buried under it. “ ‘Fern’ is a metaphor of hope, resilience and hidden strength embodied and archived in the narrator’s mind in her troubled time.
“Borderline” is a layered story that deals with OCD and borderline personality disorder. The author Trishna Basak keeps the readers glued till the end with her craft of storytelling and ensures, by the end of it, that no one leaves dry-eyed. “Prabhas had a strange feeling. The sounds felt as if they did not belong to the earth. They were sounds that seemed to come from above, from the moonlight, from the heavens. This Jaba was not his wife, she was not a woman he knew, she was the flower from the celestial gardens”. There is a considerable amount of eerie silence around the mental health of women in India. Patriarchal hegemony has always tactfully kept it under the carpet. The mental health of women is often viewed as a nagging thorn in the throat of Indian civil society. Literature is a powerful tool for understanding and overcoming mental health challenges by providing narrative frameworks for healing. “This book is an attempt towards that direction—to understand the nuanced world of mental health and to create an atmosphere of empathy,” write the editors Nabanita Sengupta and Nishi Pulugurtha in the introduction to the collection. The collection re-defines and re-shapes the role of literature in providing emotional expression, catharsis, and resilience for both writers/translators and readers.
Sebanti Ghosh’s “Hashir Golpo”, translated into English as “Story of Laughter”, takes one to the delicate intersection of the personal and the social through multi-sensory layers of experience. Movement coalesces with imagery, sound and text to make sense of the unsettling presence by recounting the lived history of a woman. Meghna is central to this narrative. She seeks professional help from a medical practitioner, Dr Maity –her mental frame becomes a site of reflection and resistance. At the end, Meghna calls the shots of her life; she stops seeking joy and mirth from outside forces and finds laughter in every fold of life. “Everything was there in the smiles. She decided to go to the laughing club from the next day and practice laughing sincerely. Come what may, she must laugh”. Other stories like “Flying Fish” (Assamese), “Glass Walls” (Tamil) also deal with clinical schizophrenia.
The Malayalam story “Incomplete Pauses” narrates the state of Annamma in a mental asylum and the helplessness she faces when released. ‘Bandaged Moments’ is thus an indictment and a requiem—a reminder that mental health is deeply affected by stigma, discrimination and poverty. The stories slit the fabric of social pretence. Multiple stories in this volume—“The Doll’s House” (Kashmiri), “Innocent” (Punjabi), “O my Benefactor” (Maithili) depict how mentally deranged women have greater vulnerability, which often leads to sexual exploitation. The authors capture a tumultuous moment of churn of these women, and narrate how they become prey in the mouth of the predators that hungrily devour them. The character of Ramali Pagli, in the Bengali story “Bleak Noon” from Silchar, is a familiar scene in localities across the globe. “Ramali Pagli is dancing with her hands held high up in the air at Battala yet again. She halts her dance once in a while to cry, to laugh and to say, ‘I will not spare anyone’.” Bandaged Moments turns a new leaf on the global gamut of feminist writing on madness, from Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Sylvia Plath to present-day South Asian voices.
The editors have done a commendable task by including as many stories in Indian languages –“making it 15 languages and 3 dialects in all. In India, it is not just recognised languages, but even dialects that have a rich linguistic heritage”. The authors have an admirable command over their craft and have once again proven the usefulness and worthiness of the short story as a genre. The translators have deftly maintained the cultural, lexical and usage-related differences and at the same time prioritised cultural fidelity over linguistic fidelity across the length and breadth of India, adding greater cultural inclusivity to “Bandaged Moments”. The volume is a reminder that mental health is an issue that is often determined by cultural constructs. The stories in Bandaged Moments engage, mesmerise, critique structures of patriarchal control in the domestic sphere, and ultimately profoundly disturb and heal the readers, as art is expected to do.
Spotlight
Bandaged Moments
Edited by Nabanita Sengupta & Nishi Pulugurtha
Niyogi Books, 2025
Price: Rs 499, 391 pages