Malati Maithri's “Waves” and how it invites a voyeuristic study of the self through its structure

 

“Waves” and how it invites a voyeuristic study of the self through its structure. 

Malati Maithri in “Waves” masterfully explores the restricting and voyeuristic nature of caste through the construction of a framed narrative. The framed narrative is constructed through the image of the house whose windows open out to the sea, and everything the reader can see is limited by the window-frame. Maithri describes everything going on outside, always drawing attention back to the window, the house, and the sea with the refrain between each new verse of description. This refrain of “This is a house whose windows / open out to the sea.” has damning consequences as she ends the poem with the line “you and I / are fish in a glass bowl.” This image of the poet and reader in the glass bowl shows how the caste system limits its constituents and practitioners from the openness of the sea, limiting them to a space that looks out, and can be looked into; a voyeuristic viewing in which the reader occupies the dual position of being both the fish in the bowl looking out, and the outsider peering into the bowl. 

From here, we can begin to establish an argument that critiques those who study caste and attempt to look into the world of caste from the outside. The first thing to realise here is that there is no “outside” for the reader. No matter how much you try to study and view caste objectively, objectivity and detachment are not possible because as you study caste, you study yourself. The innate nature of caste is that it is inescapable as it is endlessly perpetuated through the rhetoric of socio-economic institutions and ideology. This rhetoric is then constantly interpellated in the form of the self by locating caste within the reader, making them both subject and student simultaneously. 

Thus the self becomes fertile ground as a space to demonstrate a reading for caste. In many of the texts we have read so far, caste has been invoked, given presence, and examined under the light of personal experience. Why is it that we cannot discount the personal when it comes to analysing caste? Not to say that because caste and the self are indistinguishable or indivisible, but what makes their relationship so potent that the personal pronouns 'you' and 'I' have such a lasting impact at the end of ‘Waves’?

To understand this relationship between caste and self, we must examine the dual location of the reader. The self is invoked in Sukirtharani, Kamala Das, and Malathi Maithri’s work. Each time the self is invoked, the reader occupies the dual position of reader and subject with the use of the pronouns “you” and “I” which make up the foreground in many of the poems we have studied in the semester so far. However there is a distinct difference in the way that Sukirtharani and Kamala Das invoke the self when compared to Maithri. 

In the six poems we have read of Kamala Das and Sukirtharani i.e. ‘Playhouse’, ‘Gino’, ‘Castrated Seed’, ‘My body’, ‘A faint smell of meat’, and ‘I speak up bluntly’, the personal is made the subject of the poem in the title itself or very early in the poems through the use of personal pronouns. This is separate and distinct from Malathi Maithri’s verse as while Kamala and Sukirtharani address the self and the personal head-on, Malathi addresses it within the context of the house whose windows open out to the sea. The vivid contextualisation that follows is one in which the self resides, and thus becomes a part of, rather than becoming a subject who is active and in the foreground. 

Throughout ‘Waves’, we see the descriptions of people, events, and senorial experiences all occurring within the frame of the windows of the house that open out to the sea. This establishment of a frame in which the self resides and experiences everything gives the sense that the self is passive, that it can only experience, its attention turned away, its agency limited in the face of its surrounding environment. 

This passiveness changes the nature of the dual position of the self. Whereas the self of “I” and “you” were performing actions and active agents in both perspectives of being reader and subject in Kamala and Sukirtharani’s verse, it becomes passive through the careful use of the very same pronouns within a restrictive and voyeuristic context. Voyeuristic because the events and people described in the verse are witnessed without the knowledge or consent of the witnessed. Thus the self is interpellated as a ghost of a distant present: ever-present, ever-watching. Yet, it remains limited to the confines of the window and the fishbowl. 

The  fishbowl adds an “Inception” like quality to the narrative being authored. While the reader and poet indulge in voyeurism, they themselves become the subjects of voyeurism by themselves through the act of being situated in a fishbowl. To witness and to be witnessed in return, that is the crux of this poem. It becomes the crux as the purpose of the verse is made clear: if you wish to be a voyeur of caste and all that occurs within, then you must be prepared to be the subject of voyeurism itself. Thus the study and interpellation of caste becomes an endless process, by locating caste within the self while searching for it in the larger world.

The sea then becomes the objectivity that we as students of caste all strive towards. Something we witness as fish in a fishbowl, that we dream to reach. The harsh truth being, we cannot ever inculcate that objectivity. By locating caste in ourselves as well as the surrounding environment, we lose all traction in our mission of becoming objective, and then are realised as  subjective. 

This layered study of caste is best captured in the layered meanings of the title of the poem “Waves”. The constant going out of the house, exploring the scenery in and around it, and coming back to the refrain is reminiscent of the movement of waves, the ebb and flow of the waves and tides. This then creates the space for the entirety of the poem to be considered as a layered metaphor by virtue of its structure. 

In the other poems, we automatically orient ourselves in the poet's position, as they can be seen as first-person narratives. This changes in “Waves” as we see the dis-jointment occurring at two levels. The first occurs as we are removed from the setting itself. The majority of the poem sounds like the scene is being relayed to us through a second party as we are constantly told “This is a house whose windows open out to sea”. This metonymic chain allows us the illusion of distance. This illusion is broken with the second level of dis-jointment when the pronouns you and I are used, turning the tables by having situated us in the centre of the action all along and forcing us to revise, realign, and reorient ourselves with the text. Both these levels of dis-jointment throw us off, and informs us further about the functioning of caste.

Here, Maithri intelligently uses cognitive dissonance and dis-jointment on two levels – through the illusion of metonymic distance, and how that illusion is shattered with the use of the personal pronouns at the end. Since our childhood, we are told and taught the rules of caste and how it functions in implicit ways: which dishes to use. We are always told that this happens - a metonymic distancing from caste that runs parallel to the distancing that occurs in “Waves”. Then that illusion is again removed as we find ourselves at the centre of caste and its perpetuation, as this course has been about. We realise that the distance we falsify by saying or thinking 'I don't practice caste or I am not casteist' is just that - a falsity as it is our privileged caste that allows us to think that way. Just because we are bound by a reduced number of rules, does not mean that it was never real. We find ourselves as perpetrators of that same logic, by virtue of our ignorance. It is by making ourselves uncomfortable and disjointed that we realise that caste is inherent to everyone born within it, and that any study we seek to pursue or understand inevitably leads to a study and dissection of the self and how caste operates there.

Maithri expects us to be comfortable in the image of ourselves as passive viewers, which is why the use of personal pronouns at the end is so powerful. We are told that we are just viewing a scene from a window, and then immediately dehumanised into fishes caged in a glass bowl. This sudden change in perspective is the condensation of the journey that one undertakes as they begin to study caste. We read and learn, and understand caste as viewers, interacting through texts and theory and media. The real shift occurs when we start acknowledging caste in our everyday lives, to see it playing out in our relationships that makes our stomachs churn and mind queasy. To know that we are perpetrators is the goal, and passive ones at that. We get to see how our privileged caste allows us the illusion of distance, which is shattered by the realisation that any body born in caste is also its perpetrator, is part of the sea/system of caste. 

By being placed in the fishbowl, both reader and poet become fragmented, refracted versions of themselves as viewers view them through the curvature of the bowl and see a distorted being. The same fragmentation is what occurs as a result of caste. The curvature of caste is such that we can never escape our perspective, only travel along its length but never see the full picture. This is the limiting nature of caste, to have us function within fragments and rules that are distorted and changed time and time again for the convenience of a caste that wishes to exert control, that seeks to and succeeds in establishing a singular perspective as to how the world works. 

That is why the dis-jointment of the reader is crucial when it comes to understanding this poem. The dis-jointment that comes from viewing oneself as never being able to know the full picture, never having all the facts. Something new always lies around the bend of the bowl, and we will always be too preoccupied following the curvature of the present to see it coming. Maithri expects us to walk in with our eyes fully open, draw us in with the voyeuristic imagery of the poem, and then she traps us within the fishbowl. This results in the transformation from being a voyeur within the poem to being the subject of voyeurism within the poem. 

This can again be related to the extended metaphor of “Waves”. The structure and transformation depicts how we pull in and are trapped. How the sea of caste can be tamed, understood, and demystified to be studied for the system of oppression it is. To identify it within the closed system of the ocean that is each individual. The poem, by being visually inviting, draws the reader in and traps them in a visually voyeuristic space i.e. the glass bowl. 

Malathi Maithri, then through the context of a framed narrative masterfully accomplishes in a few lines of verse what would take theorists entire tomes to establish: that caste is inescapable, ever-enduring, and easily located within the self. As students studying caste, any hope of objectivity must be left at the door as at some point or the other, we will have to point at ourselves and study what resides within as well.

References

Das, K. (2004). The Old Playhouse and Other Poems. Orient Longman Private Limited.

Maithri, M., Revathi, K., Salma, and Sukirtharani (2003). Wild Girls, Wicked Words (L. Holmström, Trans.). Sangam House-Kalachuvadu Press.