It was during the 1970s that Henrik Ibsen was declared a feminist and Nora a feminist icon. She was “the doll” who, along with “the angel”, “the courtesan”, “the shrew”, and “the mad woman in the attic”, formed the spectrum of women characters in conventional novels and plays. Infantalised first by her father, then by her husband Torvald Helmer, Nora gradually grows to understand the social structure of the world in which women are deliberately stunted to ensure they fit neatly into the general scheme of things. Chafing under the knowledge, she wakes up one day certain that only by leaving her husband’s house and “protection” can she hope to grow from pretty toy to self-respecting woman. The argument with which she counters Torvald’s patriarchal ideas following her announcement of her decision to leave is a powerful personal statement coming from a place of experience and consciousness.

Helmer:…This is how you would neglect your most sacred duties.

Nora: What would you consider my most sacred duties?

Helmer: Do I need to tell you that? Are they not your duties to your husband and your children.

Nora: I have other duties just as sacred.

Helmer: That you have not. What duties could those be?

Nora: Duties to myself.

Helmer: Before all else, you are a wife and a mother.

Nora: I don’t believe that any longer. I believe that, before all else, I’m a reasonable human being, just as you are – or, at all events, I must try and become one. I know quite well, Torvald, that most people would think you right, and that views like yours are to be found in books; but I can no longer content myself with what most people say, or with what is found in books. I must think over things myself and get to understand them.

Ibsen did not create Nora out of thin air. Fictional characters are tied to their times by an ineluctable umbilical cord. A Doll’s House was published in 1879. More than a century before, in 1745, Ludvig Holberg, Norway’s most influential essayist, philosopher, historian and playwright, had extended the idea of egalitarianism born of the Enlightenment to gender equality. In the introduction to his book on historical heroines, he famously asserted that excluding women from important offices and activities was like prohibiting people with financial acumen from managing their own incomes simply because they had red hair. Mary Wollstonecraft, the English writer, philosopher and women’s rights advocate, visited Norway in 1759, twenty years before A Doll’s House appeared and found it the most egalitarian and liberal society she had ever encountered. This is not to say that patriarchy had abdicated from the social system, but checks and balances were in place.

It is against this background that Nora found the strength to question the rules of the system and walk out of her husband’s home. The audience applauded the premiere at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen with gusto. A critic writing for The Social Democrat joined in the applause, saying, “This play touches the lives of thousands of families; oh yes there are thousands of such dollhomes, where the husband treats his wife as a child he amuses himself with, and so that is what the wives become…Is there anyone who does not feel that it is this young and delightful young woman’s duty, her inescapable duty, to leave this gentleman, this husband, who slowly sacrifices her on the altar of his egotism, and who fails to understand her value as a human being?”

Only one conservative voice among the critics demurred tentatively, blaming the audience’s enthusiasm on their sentimentality, which “Mr Ibsen is not free from using…to his advantage; but at least it seems doubtful to us, if his latest work, its great technical merit and rich psychological interest notwithstanding, is a step in the right direction or – on the wrong track.”

In England, Ibsen’s plays caused a storm. Only one voice spoke up for him when he was charged with immorality. George Bernard Shaw wrote in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, “The statement that Ibsen’s plays have an immoral tendency, is, in the sense in which it is used, quite true. Immorality does not necessarily imply mischievous conduct: it implies conduct, mischievous or not, which does not conform to current ideals.” This appeared in June 1891.

Even 51 years after Shaw’s statement, current ideals in Maharashtra did not allow a Nora to leave her husband’s home in a Marathi play. Unlike Britain which snootily dismissed Ibsen as belonging to a country of peasants which could be allowed at most to entertain civilised England with Viking sagas and quaint tales of trolls, but not with modern drama for heaven’s sake, Maharashtra saw in him a beacon of the modern world which the university-educated youth of the time wished to enter. Our rich tradition of musical drama would no longer serve to address their concerns and preoccupations. Ibsen’s Nora had to appear on the Marathi stage. Several attempts were made to write a Marathi version of A Doll’s House. Each attempt had to be shelved for practical reasons. Theatre audiences of the times would not have stomached more than the smallest, the subtlest departure from patriarchy’s ideal woman.

In the 1942 play Kulavadhu (A Woman of Good Family), a chaste wife is forced to accept work in films when her husband falls ill and loses his job. When he finds another, it is on a salary that is one-tenth of what she earns. His male ego is wounded. Fights erupt. When she can take it no longer, she decides to leave home, not to make an independent life for herself, but to live with her parents-in-law in the village and care for them. In the patriarchal value system, to be a dutiful daughter-in-law is the next best thing to being a dutiful wife. Despite this, when MG Rangnekar, the writer and director of the play, came home from the premiere at Bombay’s famous Opera House, he found two strangers waiting for him. They had seen the play and were deeply disturbed by the way it ended. They asked Rangnekar anxiously, “Will the wife return to her husband later?”

Nora was a far cry from our reality even in the late 1970s, when we were learning to read images of women in fiction, films and advertising through the lens of “the male gaze”. The idea of how women were objectified for men was introduced by John Berger in Ways of Seeing. Summarising his argument, he said: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at…The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed, female. Thus, she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” Laura Mulvey, the British film theorist and film-maker, developed the idea further, calling it “the male gaze” to critique women’s images in cinema. All this was heady stuff, an all-new way of looking at the women we saw on hoardings and read about between the covers of books. I remember being asked around this time to translate a story by one of our leading short fiction writers and declining the request because I found his male gaze deeply disturbing. Even today I remember his lyrical description of a woman’s fair-skinned upper arm, whose pleasant plumpness was emphasised by the edge of her tight sleeve biting into it.

When I said my lens had expanded to include a feminist angle in the 1970s, I meant just that. Expanded, not reduced. I was not looking for shades of Nora in Emma Wodehouse, Rebecca Sharp, Bathsheba Everdene, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina or Dorothea Brooke. None of the novels that revolved around these women had been written, as A Doll’s House was, with the express purpose of displaying the chains that bound women to their ‘divinely ordained duties’ towards husbands and children while neglecting their own growth as human beings. And yet I suspected there were things that these women thought, did or stood for that had perhaps escaped me earlier but might strike me now as points of interest. But my interest lay equally in all that these novels told me about their world, its mores, its economics, its land ownership, its educational system, its parks, rivers and mountains, its views on science, tradition, culture and the arts, as seen through the eyes and life experiences of its characters. My critical eye differed from that of feminists who had begun to view novels as “texts”. One of them, writing for a leading Bombay daily, reviewed my first novel as a feminist text. It was a hugely favourable review; but I wondered at the end what she had thought of it as a novel.

It is not surprising that I, who love a well-told tale, do not count Laurence Sterne among my ancestors as do some of the biggest names in world literature. Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera count The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman one of the greatest novels ever written. Kundera has said that there are two progenitors of the novel – Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa which has spawned innumerable progeny, and Tristam Shandy which has produced very few but deserves to produce more. I found the novel a trial, and a long one at that, numbering five hundred pages and some. A hundred pages in, I realised there was a way to read it and still preserve my equanimity. I was not to take the world and its problems seriously. Even more importantly, I was not to take myself seriously. I had to let my sense of humour take complete charge, adjust my reading posture from sitting up to reclining and then, yes, then I was ready to enjoy the novel. I did too. It is absolutely hilarious. There are passages I go back to just for the fun of it.

I will say this again. I do not share the regret EM Forster expresses in his famous dictum from Aspects of the Novel, “Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story…and I wish that it was not so.” A recently published book edited by Amit Chaudhuri calls itself Against Storytelling. I will read it one day with as much interest as I would devote to a book about the food habits of armadillos, because one must know how others live. I also grant that armadillos have a right to exist, whatever it is they choose to eat, if only for the variety they bring to the natural world.

Excerpted with permission from Of Ancestors and Friends: A Life With Books, Shanta Gokhale, Speaking Tiger Books.

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