Personal vs political

“Challenge your fate
Toss a coin
Heads means death
Tails means death...”
From Cool-dhan-sakh by Bachchoowalla

In the Sixties and Seventies, the feminist movement coined a slogan: “The personal is the political!” I tried this out on my, now, 17-year-old daughter and though she studies English and politics, she didn’t quite get the meaning of it.

The era in which the slogan was naturally understood has passed.
In the decade in which it was coined, I understood it instinctively — it was a self-evident truth. It meant that the moves and stratagems of one’s personal relationships were in the end part of a larger battle for the equality of the sexes or even part of the eternal war between them.
Those were the decades when the feminists were trying to put D.H. Lawrence behind them, but had, I suspect, read and absorbed everything he’d written and even appreciated his novels as a significant contribution to the records of gender embattlement and warfare. I always took Lawrence to mean that the “war” was on some spiritual plane though it was fought at a visceral level.
Having tried the slogan out on Tir (the above-mentioned daughter), I got thinking about what I now thought of it myself. It meant less to me than it had. I had been reminded of the slogan through a peculiar circumstance: Two weeks ago in these very pages I wrote in this column about the death of Mala Sen, my childhood girlfriend and subsequently my wife for a period. I said I couldn’t bring myself to write an obituary because there was too much to say. A friend of hers, having read the column asked me what I meant by it. I said I meant just that — my over-40-year up and down and round and about relationship and the assessments it generated wouldn’t fit into an obituary. They would merit a “novel”.
“Don’t you dare”, was the response from this friend.
“I might have to dare”, I said. “It’s what I do for a living.”
“Don’t write any rubbish”, was her response in a rather menacing tone.
“The truth?” I asked.
“Maybe not your truth”, she said, “her politics were more important than your personal stuff”.
That was when I was reminded of the slogan and it occurred to me to brandish it. I didn’t.
I know I will write about that phase of my life and times — I have already set out to do it through commissions and compulsions. What shall I say about Mala? Will I use her name? Will anyone care what I say?
One knows that words, books and articles can hurt, especially when they are critical, outspoken and dig up dirt. They can hurt the subject if he or she is alive and friends and relatives if the subject is dead.
One of the earliest models of “Indian” writing that I had was Dom Moraes’ youthful biography Gone Away. I was in college and fascinated by the fact that he had written about his mother’s mental illness and made some rather intimate remarks about his aunt. His cousin later told me that the family, though very proud of Dom’s emergence as a poet and writer, didn’t appreciate that aspect of it.
“The boy shouldn’t have written that”, was what was said by a senior family member.
A roman-a-clef, a novel of the truth, can also wound. A few years ago Hanif Kureishi wrote Intimacy. Its stark, bright, plain yellow cover drew me in. The “novel” purported to be about the lostness of men who grew up in the Sixties, in the era of the personal (read sexual) being the political.
The main character has a wife about whom he is extremely disparaging. The descriptions were, I imagined, cruelly accurate. The narrative was about falling out of love and into disgust. There was a passage which some reviewers found gratuitous but one which may have been brutally honest. It stuck in my mind. The protagonist is making love to his new girlfriend and says that at that moment he couldn’t care if his children, the twins that his wife bore him, were floundering, drowning at the bottom of the Thames. Not nice, but an attempt at brutal honesty and the devil take the hindmost.
I know that if Dostoevsky had written some such thing, it would have passed as a fictional, testing truth. Intimacy, in the days after it was published, was the talk of literary London and the subject of very specific speculation that it was a no doubt intimate but vengeful portrait of Hanif’s wife/partner, the mother of his children.
Biographies are even more tricky. I can point to a couple of famous ones published in the last few years which, despite being authorised and despite the subject co-operating with the biographer, don’t meet with the subject’s approval. It may be that a confession as one speaks it looks very different in cold prose or it may be that a biographer is bound to find information from sources other than the subject.
Is all of it good and necessary writing?
I should confess that months before her death I had commenced writing, in a narrative “novel” form, a book about my London years which inevitably involved Mala, who is, in the work in progress, named as such. For both of us those were political years with a small “p” because we were members of political formations and groups including Leicester’s Indian Workers’ Association, the South Asian London Marxist Study Circle (led by the CPI-M activist and later MP Biplab Das Gupta), the Black Panther Movement UK and Race Today. Very much of our time was given up to political work in the form of talk, talk, talk, reporting, agitating, pamphleteering, attending endless meetings, demonstrations, strikes and court-appearances — both inside and outside the defendant’s box.
Our conversations, agreements and disagreements tended to be about the issues at stake and so the personal was in very many senses political.
Of course that was not all. We had jobs and friends and grabbed some leisure time to go away. There is a sense in which slogans reduce real, multi-faceted, multi-talented and highly individual people to categories of gender and class, a reduction which may on one level be true but subverts, obscures and reduces the real drama of people’s lives.