Meena Kandasamy’s scorching 2014 debut, The Gypsy Goddess, explored caste, poverty and violence in southern India. Her second novel tells the story of a newly-wed writer experiencing rapid social isolation and extreme violence at her husband’s hands.
Kandasamy has written about her own marriage for the Indian magazine Outlook in 2012; now, using an unnamed narrator speaking in an urgent, first-person voice, When I Hit You: Or, a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Wife gives us “a woman at whom society cannot spit or throw stones, because this me is a she who is made up only of words on a page, and the lines she speaks are those that everyone hears in their own voice”.
The journey towards that assertion is a tough one. It begins with a stripping of the narrator’s autonomy after her marriage to a university lecturer, Marxist and one-time revolutionary in south India who uses communist ideas “as a cover for his own sadism”. When she moves with him to an unfamiliar city, an assault on her tongue, mind and body begins. The language barrier ensures that in public she can only speak words of wifely domesticity, shopping for vegetables or cleaning products. Her husband manipulates her into the surrender of her email accounts, the suspension of her Facebook page; he polices her mobile phone. Beatings and rapes follow, with everyday middle-class implements weaponised: the hose of the washing machine, the power cord for her laptop. Shame, pride and a society in which everyone from parents to police expects a woman to put up and shut up force the realisation that only she can save herself.
Kandasamy (below) writes with poetic intensity. “Hope prevents me from taking my own life. Hope is the kind voice in my head that prevents me from fleeing. Hope is the traitor that chains me to this marriage.” Yet sometimes this intensity undoes itself: “I imagine my vagina falling out of me like spare change. Not with jingling noises, but in a wet, pulpy, silent way …” Such phrasemaking can risk undermining our empathy.
But even as she is beaten down – as, through Kandasamy’s use of stylistic devices such as repetition, are we – the narrator reflects that every moment has narrative potential. The risk of desensitisation is averted: the novel becomes a meditation on the art of writing about desire, abuse and trauma. She knows that writing can be her salvation – but “how could I open up to strangers who buy the fiction performed for their benefit?” When I Hit You becomes her answer. She includes chapter epigraphs from Anne Sexton, Kamala Das and Elfriede Jelinek (“art creates the / suffering in the first place”), thus linking herself to feminist writers beyond caste, race or culture, even beyond language difference. It’s one way of subverting the argument made by the novel’s abuser that the Indian female writer working in English is akin to a Raj-era whore.
Indeed, in its echo of a canonical title and its shared themes, Kandasamy’s novel has much in common with another recent portrait of the writer as a young wife, Gwendoline Riley’s Baileys prize-shortlisted First Love (Kandasamy tips her hat to Joyce, Riley to Turgenev). Though the abuse Riley’s heroine suffers is primarily emotional, her husband’s verbal attacks on her body, sanity and skills are on a par with those of the abuser in Kandasamy’s book. One almost wants to give When I Hit You to Neve, who, like her unnamed Indian counterpart, is further held in place by her own mother and by social expectations, and say, read this – leave now.
But a specifically Indian form of toxic masculinity is dissected by Kandasamy. A few brief, funny pages sketch a lineage of sexual repression from Gandhi to the current prime minister, to the narrator’s own first love, a charismatic leader who refuses to acknowledge her publicly, pushing her towards marriage with her abuser. Public celibacy is here necessary for saintliness; or as Kandasamy puts it: “to ejaculate was to emasculate”. Regardless of ideology, the Indian politician must appear to be a bachelor, and women must be subjugated.
The book jacket evokes khadi fabric bordered in saffron, something the socially beloved figure of the “good Indian girl” might wear. Open it, however, and a voice emerges that expresses desire, feels pain and has steely courage. It screams from its demure outerwear, refusing to be silenced in its search for love. The reader is left with the impact and implications of that, and the ideal of servile Indian femininity is in tatters at last.
• Preti Taneja’s novel We That Are Young will be published by Galley Beggar in August.
When I Hit You is published by Atlantic. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
