Customer Reviews

What the Body Remembers

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

"It was the moment when his beard scratched her cheeks and his falcon eyes looked directly down upon her, held her eyes until he must have seen how very small his face was, how very tiny, reflected in her gray eyes. And in that long, long moment, she knew Sardarji expected her to lower her eyes before him."

Satya recalls, in Shauna Singh Baldwin's book What the Body Remembers, the single moment when she knew what her husband wanted but that she could never do: lower her gaze in front of him. It is this quality of hers to look him in the eye and tell him the way it is that also eventually separates him from her. That and the fact that she could not bear him a son.

With the 1947 Partition of India as the backdrop, WTBR is a loving portrait of the Sikhs - the community of people from the Northwest corner of India. Baldwin has used research and her own experiences as a Sikh to draw the three main characters: Sardarji, his wife Satya, and her nemesis Roop, the young girl Sardarji marries secretly so she could give him a son. They linger in your mind long after you close the book. Using minute layers of details of Roop's life as the ground, Baldwin has drawn Roop's character, her longings, her fears, her courage, and most importantly, her endurance. Satya and Roop, the two women married to Sardarji, so different in their personality and character, yet live under the same fear and belief: the fragility of their security. From different levels of prosperity and status they each see with clarity the ease with their lives can be blown all away at the slightest show of free will, of disobedience. It is a story lived by many women in all cultures. The Sikh women in Baldwin's story surprise us with the strength they show in adversity, the way they bend without breaking when their world falls apart and reshapes in permenantly altered states.

A wealthy Sikh engineer takes a young village girl as a second wife. His first wife, a fierce, beautiful woman who runs most of his properties, has not given him children. The relationship between these three stretch from the final days of Britain's Indian Empire, through the brutal and bloody partition of India, and into, the reader suspects, the next life. `What the Body Remembers" works on several levels. The characters are fully drawn, and live in a believable, richly imagined. English-minded Sardarji (he even has a name for the little British voice that reminds him what is and is not done) can put aside his European teaching when it suits him to take a second wife. Brilliant and manipulative, first wife Satya is his political conscience and his connection to his ancestral lands. Unformed sixteen-year-old Roop, brought on the scene to produce children, will discover the strength of her weakness and may save her family from destruction following the terrifying birth of Pakistan from India.

As a political lesson, the novel is also fascinating reading. The characters in "What the Body Remembers" are Sikhs, the religious segment left out in the splitting of the subcontinent into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. Who can they rely on when the bloodshed of Partition begins?

This is the kind of book that pulls you in quickly, and does not release you from its spell until the last page. Another wonderful novel about India for those who want to spend more time in the country is Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy"-1,100 pages of pure joy.

There many novels around that cover the same territory as this book: the bloodshed that surrounded Partition and the devastation wrought by the British upon India. There are many other books as well which discuss the experience of Indian women.

This book is interesting because it deals with both of these subjects and from the perspective of two Sikh women. I have many Indian friends and know a little of Hindu and Moslem culture but of Sikhism I was ignorant and this novel has been a ssuperb introduction. The story focuses to a large extent upon the experiences of Satya and Roop, married to the same man. Both of their lives and their happiness are dependent on his and it is interesting to see how the two women manage to carve their own niches within this restriction.

Major themes of this book are jealousy and fear. The fear of men, the fear of one's own body, the fear of strangers and of other religions. Jealousy and avarice too. The opening scene embodies all of these emotions as Satya inspects the young Roop, newly arrived at her husband's home wearing Satya's jewellry. It is a fantastically written introduction. However, despite his insensitivity and self-centredness, one of the wonderful things about this novel is observing the gradual transformation of Sardiji, a traditional and dominant male figure at the beginning of the novel into a thoughtful and generous one at the end. His political and personal journey is directly attributable to the influence, and destinies, of his wives.

This book is not at all formulaic and is a worthy addition to the canon of modern Indian literature. I have read many of these books and, as recommended by another reviewer, this is the best novel about India I have read since A Suitable Boy.

Beginning in 1928 and referring back to the memories of the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, Shauna Singh Baldwin's Partition-novel _What the Body Remembers_ integrates the political history of India, especially the effervescing religious factionalism, with the personal histories of two Sikh women--riddled with as much anxiety as the national history.

The novel offers a sensitive vignette of displacements, refugee dilemmas, and dispossessions interlaced with the specifically gendered violence performed on the bodies of women-drawn from recent feminist research studies. Notably, the story brings together women from Punjab and Bengal-the two provinces that were divided in 1947-fleeing from Lahore and places both in a situation of equal vulnerability on grounds of gender more than religion.

Besides the Partition atrocities that constitute the epic of the modern Indian nation-state, the novel touches upon various other subjects of topical interest: the socialization of young women, the devaluation of women in marriage as baby-making machines, the maltreatment of girl-children, the unlivable situation between co-wives, and the problem of dowry.

The characters of the men in the novel merited some more elaboration. The end seemed a little rushed. The Epilogue, however, is superb. The almost-clinical prose multiplies the psychological trauma of the event. As a narration of Sikh histories from the last few decades before Indian Independence, and especially the histories of women caught in the violence of Partition, Shauna Singh Baldwin's novel is a valuable addition to the growing literature on the Partition of India.

I'd highly recommend this book as a MUST READ!

As the self-proclaimed #1 Shauna Singh Baldwin fan, I may be slightly biased but this book definitely made an impact on me because I thought about the storyline and the characters for days afterward and has made me yearn for a sequel!

Baldwin takes such care in developing her characters and their surrounding environment that the reader is spoiled for other writers!

The only remote drawback/complaint I have for What the Body Remembers, is Satya's demise...she was such a complex woman and provided such spice to the book, that I really missed her after her death!

Otherwise, this book is almost perfect!

The lives, aspirations, compromises, hypocracy, nobility of the many people is depicted in a lush manner. The culture, particularly of the Sikhs from the Rawalpindi area, during the pre-1947 partition days is narrated very well. The Sikh woman's point of view, raised in a joint-family, dowry-burdened context of India, very rare to find in English literature, is a treat.

My one peeve is that the novel gets lost in itself near the end. The self-pity gets to be a bit suffocating, yet the author, bravely, does not succumb to a pat cliche end.

The choice of vernacular lends the honesty to the landscape.

I am lucky enough to be part of the ongoing novel writing workshop where Shauna worked on developing "What the Body Remembers." It's been an amazing experience watching her bring this novel to life. The first time I heard her read the opening sequence, I was knocked out by its emotional power. Shauna is an extraordinarily vivid storyteller. Her words make you feel as if you are standing on a dusty road in India, the sun burning down on you, even when you're sitting in a drafty, slightly musty classroom in a former convent school in the middle of a frigid Milwaukee winter. As someone who's had the honor of getting a sneak peak at this novel - and as a friend and colleague of Shauna's - I highly recommend this powerful, beautifully written novel.

Ms. Baldwin's evocation of Punjab in the 1930's is so realistic one's throat becomes parched reading her brilliant prose. This novel is a story of the complicated interrelationships of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim families whose centuries-long guarded yet mostly peaceful co-existence is shattered by what is the violently-birthed beginning of the state of Pakistan. Ms. Baldwin's characters, particularly Satya, the first wife, and Roop-bi, the young, second, childbearing wife, are so real, one awakens surprised to find oneself not living near the cool storerooms of the mansions of the rich.

As political intrigue, the tale also regales. The perilous journey thousands of families were made to take, based on religious differences (the state of Pakistan is Muslim) leaves the reader fearful for the protagonists lives as they pretend to be faithful servants of religions they've only observed.

Satya, the Urdu-speaking barren first wife, is almost palpable. Her character would be played on American television by no less than Susan Lucci. She's Machiavellian to the core. She seethes with hatred when her husband brings home a teenage bride from a poor family to bear an heir. She plots revenge. How she obtains it is one of the most shocking and pitiful scenes in modern women's literature.

Roop has her own secret to keep, which, if revealed, would make her "unmarriageable" and a permanent burden on her family. She is aware that her husband gives her his first wife's jewels as presents and that her sole reason for being brought into a feudally-bourgeoise existence is for the fruit of her loins.

From my perspective, the men in this book almost don't count. They plan water irrigation systems, they hate each other's families, they rape and kill their perceived enemies, they are brutal and dense.

The portraits of Satya and Roop-bi alone (and the peripheraly historical Ghandi, referred to by an endearing nickname) is worth spending the three days nonstop it will take you to read.

While I enjoyed reading the book, at the end I found it less than memorable. The characters were many but few were developed past the usual. What kept my interest was the fate of all the Punjabi Sikh's for they are for the most part overlooked in this historical tragedy. In my opinion, the best novel on Partition remains Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India.

I knew about the partition of India into Muslim and Hindu states after Independence, but half a world and half a century away from the events, I had no clue about what that actually meant to the people who were living in that part of the world. It's less a novel of plot than of experience, told from the perspective of those who suffer the most when a people is squeezed on the hinges of history. I could not put it down, and I have not had that experience for a long time. I urge anyone serious about stepping beyond the predicability of a novel of plot or relationships to read this book. I cannot understand why it has taken so long for it to catch on in the U.S.