Quest for Identity and Belonging in Suniti Namjoshi’s ‘The Conversations of Cow’

Pooja P N

Suniti Namjoshi is considered the first openly lesbian writer from India and is known for her feminist and queer rewriting of fables. Namjoshi’s ingeniously witty and unsentimental narrative style is demonstrated best in her novel, ‘The Conversations of Cow’. The story, thematically, explores lesbian desire, the question of identity, and the sense of non-belonging that a third-world queer feminist deals with in a patriarchal culture.

The story unfolds via dialogues between different characters. The dialogical quips, animal characters, and elements of magical realism give the novel a fable-like feel. By juxtaposing what is unreal and fluid, against the real (and arbitrary) world order using magic realism, Namjoshi challenges and ridicules the functionality of the existing cis-heterosexist power structures.

Her quirky, tongue-in-cheek dialogues offer a sense of poking fun at at everyone and everything, from heteropatriarchy to the identity crisis of the lesbian feminist in the novel (named after the author) to the inherent vulnerability and pretensions of having to stick to any identity.

The Story

The novel begins with our protagonist, Suniti, on her knees praying to the Goddess, the Cow of Thousand Wishes. Opening her eyes, she spots a Brahmini cow, Bhadravathi, standing before her. Suniti approaches her and immediately asks her to be her traveling companion. The cow is also a lesbian immigrant from India in Canada, just like our protagonist. She likes her drinks hard and invites Suniti to meet her lesbian separatist friends living on a secluded farm. This is where their travel starts; metaphorically, this also underlines Suniti’s psychological journey as a lesbian. We see Suniti navigate the awkwardness that follows her outsider status and constant feelings of exclusion, which she feels with everyone except Bhadravathi, who she soon falls in love with.

Arguably, the cow represents Suniti’s alter-ego — a Westernized counterpart (she uses Americanisms, as Suniti notes, and has her niche of White lesbian friends) — who fits in deceptively well in a way Suniti does not. She repeatedly refers to Bhadravathi as “Cow” when the latter meets Suniti’s friends over a dinner party. It is as if Suniti is secretly hoping for Bhadravathi to feel out of place and humiliated as a cow — as the one who is different from the party — but only her own ego is hurt.

The Mythology

Namjoshi’s cow draws upon the Hindu mythological cow, Kamadhenu, or ‘the cow who fulfils all desires’ (kama meaning desire and dhenu, cow). Like many Hindu gods, the cow has a thousand names and identities and is fluid in gender, race, and other identities she incorporates. She changes throughout the novel — there is Bhadravatri, the unashamed Indian lesbian Goddess; Baddy, who looks and acts like an average cis-white man; and B, who alternates between soft masculinity and femininity. It is Bhadravathi’s fluidity that upsets as well as attracts Suniti to her.

Bhadravathi not only transforms into different forms but also wields her identities as they suit her. At the core of the novel, Namjoshi toys with the question of identity. Why do we identify ourselves with what we do? Do we stick to identities for the ease of explaining ourselves in society? This is how Bhadravathi reasons with Suniti about her physical transformation into a woman: “It’s usually much easier to explain away a ‘woman’ than to explain a ‘cow’”.

Identity and Fear

Being in a homosexual relationship, especially for a brown woman, comes with the fear of retribution from society as compulsory heterosexuality and cis-heteropatriarchy work with the exclusion of lesbians. Suparna Bhaskaran points out how women’s refusal to partake in heterosexuality or procreate puts them in a Catch-22 situation:

“If you don’t participate in heterosexuality you lose the privileges of being a wife or mother, and if you leave your family of origin you lose the advantages of other male protection — from your father or brother. But if you stay with your family of origin… you are trained to be economically and culturally dependent on male protection” (2004).

Suniti’s fear of persecution is reflected through Badravathi’s logic that both of them would have a better life if she transformed into a man. The first time they go to a restaurant, they get shouted at by the owner for bringing a cow into his property. Later, we see one of Bhadravathi’s lesbian friends advise Suniti that it would not have happened if only she passed as a “Class A” human instead of “Class B”. Her differentiation between the two classes is simple: Class A people don’t wear lipstick, they spread themselves out, stand like blocks, and never smile while the Class B people do the opposite. The cow manifests Suniti’s fear, and after Bhadravathi turns into a man called ‘Baddy’, s/he buys Suniti make-up in an attempt to make her a Class B citizen. Baddy tries to convince Suniti they would be able to have all sorts of adventures if they give away the appearance of being in a heterosexual relationship. They try this out for one evening and Suniti is surprised at how easily people seem to approve of them as a heterosexual couple. However, her conscience pricks her at night. The question that haunts Suniti is obvious:

How can you fit in a society that does not allow space for your queer identity and still be true to yourself?

The rest of the novel unfurls as Suniti quests to figure that out.

Fables as a Feminist tool

If non-conforming women are to be written into existence textually, alternative modes of storytelling and revisitation of the existing myths are necessary. If homosexual women are to be written into existence outside of the periphery of the male gaze and patriarchal discursive practices, newer ways of storytelling and looking glasses become imperative.

In ‘Because of India’ (1989), Namjoshi points out that historically, within patriarchal discourses,

“women are ‘the other’, together with the birds and beasts and the rest of the creation. An identification with the rest of the creation, possibly with the whole of it, would only be logical” .

In ‘Feminist Fables’, Namjoshi revisits myths for their stereotypical and prejudiced representation of women and rewrites them with a feminist as well as a queer agenda. Her recognition of myths and fables as a fertile feminist ground for revision and re-interpretation is shared by writers like Adrienne Rich. Re-writing old stories has been an important feminist agenda as “re-vision” itself is:

“the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering old texts from a new critical direction… for women, [it] is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.” (Rich 167).

A fable is an intersection between the traditional and the universal, a space where the established social structures toy with the unestablished. Fables remain memorable for their animal characters who aren’t bound by the notions of race, gender, nationality, and sexuality. Thus, Namjoshi’s deployment of the fable form to ground her feminist queer ideologies challenges the universality of traditional narratives and opens up space for new conversations. As Ruth Vanita notes, often Hindu gods have “mutually contradictory names” and by placing a lesbian cow goddess in the novel, Namjoshi shows how names, identities, and concepts are “constantly in flux and are only approximations necessitated by and necessary to human communication” (2002). It is because of this fact that the narrator taking pride in the fact that Bhadravathi is a Brahmini cow, in the beginning, may seem outlandish and amusing to the reader while the reader may take a human’s Brahmin identity for granted.

Conclusion

Arguably, identities work to legitimise people and their place in society. Towards the end of the novel, Suniti seemingly does carve out an identity — a literal replica, S2 (who could be another form B takes). S2 is nicer and more confident than Suniti. However, Suniti is not happy with her; she dismisses her as a hypocrite and wishes for B’s return. Here, Namjoshi seems to be suggesting that our identities are not just our projections into the world, but they continuously mould with our changing selves and are affected by our relationships — formed and re-formed through how we relate to each other and ourselves.

There is vulnerability and aloneness in being in love and in identifying as an “Other”; however, there is also freedom and subversiveness in accepting one’s queerness as it is and in understanding one’s identities as non-rigid.

Namjoshi, as a seasoned fabulist, destabilizes and brings into attention the rigid structures of the patriarchal, cis-heterosexist world that refuses to accommodate the kind of feminine fluidity that Bhadravathi flaunts; and does so excellently.

References

Bhaskaran, Suparna. (2004). Made in India Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/national Projects. Palgrave Macmillan, 111–150.

Namjoshi, Suniti. (1985). The Conversations of Cow. Women’s Press.

Namjoshi, Suniti. (1989). Because of India. Onlywomen Press, 28.

Rich, Adrienne. (1993). When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision. Adrienne Rich: Poetry and Prose. A. Gelpi, B. C. Gelpi, & B. C. Millier (Eds.). W.W. Norton & Company, 167.

Vanita, Ruth. (2002). Introduction. Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society. Routledge, 6.