There is a point where Moushumi is changed in Dipali’s eyes into ‘a soft filtered heroine in a sixties Hindi film she is ‘transformed into another being’. So many Bollywood films begin on the steps of the Mumbai railway station where Moushumi finds herself after fleeing the family pressures placed upon her back home in Calcutta (or should that be Kolkata?). Indeed, this idea of metamorphosis is echoed in the repeated references to film, to actors, to story telling. But it doesn’t matter to her: ‘she too would metamorphose’. Moushumi recognises, however, that while there may be ‘different names’ and ‘different identities’, ‘the spirit of the city has not changed’, something her own family cannot understand about her after her lesbian identity is revealed. The Normal State of Mind is a story of shifts in personal identity and orientation and it is set in a nation experiencing something similar: Moushumi is forced to move to Mumbai, a city that Bhattacharya tells us has reverted ‘back to the original name the natives used to call their city’. And perhaps it’s not just women: the struggle of Moushumi and others like her is bound up with a wider class struggle in a country where ‘rich people’s SUVs ran over homeless people sleeping on the streets’. As Dipali says at one point, ‘a woman always has to lose’.
However, while same sex relationships play a central role in the novel, the book portrays wider issues concerning the lives of women in India, issues that continue to be painfully relevant in 2015.
Obviously, one might be tempted to consider The Normal State of Mind to be a ‘lesbian story’.
She seems to aiming at writing something of a state of the nation novel in which Dipali and Moushumi, the two central characters, act as voices for disempowered women in the subcontinent. The blurb certainly makes it clear that while Bhattacharya tells the tale of two Indian women, there is a wider story here. Susmita Bhattacharya’s novel may have been conceived in Plymouth and Cardiff, but it is set in Mumbai and Calcutta during the social convulsions of the 1990s. Justin Jones casts a critical eye over Susmita Bhattacharya’s novel The Normal State of Mind.
0 kommentar(er)
