Kiran Keshavamurthy: The Shifting Marginalities of Friendship and Marriage in Sundara Ramaswamy’s Kuzhandaikal, Penkal, Aankal (Children, Women, Men)
In Sundara Ramaswamy’s novel Kuzhandaikal, Penkal, Aankal (1998) (Children, Women, Men) conjugality and family on one hand, and friendship on the other are, relative to each other, both marginal and socially significant forms of sociality. While nonsexual or unromantic friendships between unrelated men and women are insignificant in the novel, same sex friendship is represented as an interstitial relationship that is both of social importance and socially marginal. It is an anomalous relationship: it exists outside the more thoroughly codified social networks formed by patriarchal kinship and sexual ties: it is interstitial in the social structure and therefore more free floating, more in need of labeling and social and ideological definition. Male and female friendships in the novel are a world apart (from each other) and yet are not private; they subsist in the case of some of the female characters in domestic intimacy and serve as emotional recompense to the wife in an estranged patriarchal marriage much to the jealous insecurity of the emotionally distant husband. Male friendships are often based on professional or intellectual conversations, but also provide a privatized (homo)social space where men although initially ashamed or reluctant and proud later become more emotionally expressive about their estranged marriages or familial problems than they normally are with their wives or children with whom they hardly ever share any intellectual or conversational or emotional intimacy.
Friendship in this novel often represents the larger bonds of sociality namely fraternity and conjugality. It often borrows its conceptualization from kinship to gain definition and identification and to socially and emotionally situate it as an image of sociality, human solidarity. These representations seem to exhibit a paradox: although the novel’s textual strategies make kinship and more implicitly conjugality into privileged loci of signification for representing friendship, they also make friendship into a paradigm of sociality.
Conversely some of the few conjugal or romantic and familial relationships in the novel draw on a certain rhetoric of friendship; of an equal companionship precisely to avoid the patriarchal, ritual codifications of kinship and conjugal ties and to offer emotional recompense in this case for the sublimation of (male) sexual desire towards anti-colonial nationalist ends.
Biographical Statement:
Kiran Keshavamurthy is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His Masters thesis, Desire, Pleasure and Cinema: Jeyakantan’s The Construction Worker who went to the Cinema, explores the mediation and circulation of sexual desire and pleasure through the viewing of cinema that undermines any stable opposition between desire and identification in one of Jeyakantan’s early novellas. Kiran’s research interests include sexuality and gender studies in modern Tamil fiction. He is currently writing his dissertation with the support of the University of California’s Regents Graduate Fellowship.
