The sisterhood of subversion

As you read The Gallery of Upside Down Women, it might occur to you that, line by line, it is the world that is upside down, and that the women in question mostly stand straight, and often smile.

- CP Surendran

That their smile is like a knife’s gleam in the dark is what turns them murderously maven; maven in the original Yiddish sense of the word, mevin, one who understands. The women are smiling not just at the inversion of the world, but also at their own isolation of posture and space.

It is in this sense that Arundhathi Subramaniam’s women are feminist. They are not a part of the collective. If it is a sisterhood at all, it is one of subversion. The errant, as they migrate from flesh to the far shore of spirit, are on the whole reconciled to their fated and often sainted marginality.

In her prefatory note, Subramaniam says, “They (the women she writes about) are my improvised family, my upside-down tribe, happy, I think, to belong to anyone who stakes a claim to them.” “Happy” is a rather unusual word to use in this context. But it is a declaration of a disposition whose essence seems to be that the errant will not change. The world must come around.