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Manjula Padmanabhan and the Question of Problematizing Embodied Gender Identity

A Reading of Getting There

SHUBHRA RAY

Introduction

Getting There—Manjula Padmanabhan’s memoir—is about a transitional phase in her life and chronicles a literal as well as a metaphorical journey, in the course of which she mentally traverses a considerable distance from being a woman with zero self-image who goes on a diet to become somebody else, the failure of it, and finally moving on to being a person who is comfortable in her own skin, all in the face of the complete breakdown of her social networks of safety, which had been the hallmark of her existence until then.¹ Padmanabhan’s reaction to what it means to be a woman is one of the themes of Getting There, which, in concentrating on her life between 1977 and 1978, offers insight into the struggles of being her twenty-something self. She is biologically a woman and is heterosexually oriented but refuses to accept the cultural connotations of her gender identity—be it the primacy accorded to reproduction or the devaluation or celebration of womanhood. In this chapter, keeping in mind the unique trajectory that Padmanabhan’s self-expression takes and her process of accepting her body and her self-image, I read Getting There to explore the complicated relation the author has with her embodied identity and the individualistic manner in which she comes to terms with it, sometimes going against hegemonic body perceptions and at other times incorporating divergent feminist insights into the matter.

It is pertinent to note here that Padmanabhan’s struggles of adhering to perceived norms of beauty and gendered social acceptance in the 1970s resonate profoundly with the current Indian cultural milieu, where the emphasis on the normativity of a certain kind of feminine appearance—nonadherence with which often leads to body shaming—has aggravated the anxiety and insecurity of Indian women regarding their bodies in a manner that was hitherto unprecedented. Forces of liberalization and globalization after the 1990s and the Internet revolution leading to ubiquitous social media influence have left women vulnerable to greater surveillance and subject to prescribed injunctions regarding (un)desirable components of their embodied subjectivity. It has been argued that following the institution of neoliberal politics of reform and India’s encounter with global capital, there has been a reification of national and gender identities to establish “India’s independence and cultural difference from the West,” following the perceived loss of sovereignty of the state, in the face of the onslaught of transnational market forces (Oza 2006, 2). The displacement of public anxiety “associated with a globalizing nation-state” onto “women’s bodies” has had far-reaching consequences, where, in legal arbitrations to determine what constitutes the global and the local, “women’s sexual autonomy [is often] designated as foreign to ‘Indian culture’” (24, 3).

This has led to a paradoxical situation over the past few decades where, on the one hand, the Indian woman has been portrayed as an informed consumer with the power of choice (Oza 2006, 18; Kullrich 2019, 270–271; Chakravarty 2011, 407), and on the other, she has been subjected to greater scrutiny and surveillance, in the name of protection of national interests. Globalization has led not only to a burgeoning beauty and fitness industry but also to a proliferation of prejudice associated with overweight bodies. “Slim-body ideals” and “fat-stigmatizing beliefs” have led to pejorative moral connotations associated with obesity, in addition to its medical and economic concerns, even in societies where earlier “fat bodies were reported to be valued or viewed neutrally” (Brewis et al. 2011, 269). The ideal of skeletal thinness—epitomized in skinny models and through “digital modification” of body size—underscores the impossibility of it being attained and leads to dissatisfaction with the body, in perpetuity (Tiggemann 2011, 13).

The situation is even more complicated in India not only on account of the prevalence of similar cultural discourses on embodiment but also because of the excessive importance associated with fair skin, especially by the indices of the matrimonial market. Even though colonization is generally held as culpable for the national obsession with fairness, it has been shown that this preoccupation and the “cultural capital” associated with it have both “precolonial and transnational” antecedents (Vaid 2009, 148, 151). This, in turn, has been built upon by market forces following liberalization, evident in sky-rocketing sales of fairness creams and bleaches (Kullrich 2019, 254–255, 269; Chakravarty 2011, 407). In the case of fair-skin preference, as well, there has been a documented rise in its mention in matrimonial advertisements after the 1980s for the Indian diaspora in the United States. As Jyotsna Vaid establishes, it “is currently close to 25 percent for second generation Indian-American women” (2009, 165). Despite the presence of movements like Dark Is Beautiful since 2009 in India—with its tagline, “Celebrating 1.3 billion shades of Indian”—the idea of inclusivity, as far as beauty is concerned, remains an unrealized project. Rather, as matrimonial columns make clear, “the ideology that fair is beautiful continues to exert a pernicious effect on the self-esteem of women who have been repeatedly reminded that if they are not the former, they cannot be the latter” (165). Padmanabhan’s struggles with her supposed inadequacies based on her appearance, her association of her excess weight with a lack of moral fiber, and her vehement opposition to the idea of marriage because of what it entails for the woman—all point to the relevance that her memoir continues to have for contemporary Indian women as they struggle with prescriptive indictments from various quarters regarding their embodied subjectivity.

Between Struggles and Resistances: The Body Beautiful in Getting There

Right at the outset of Getting There, Padmanabhan talks about her intention of going on a diet. While her family and her boyfriend, Prashant, are skeptical about the need for it, she is adamant about it even while not sharing with them the immediate impetus behind her decision. With the progression of the narrative, it becomes clear that while there is no sudden thrust behind her desire to change her appearance, it is a culmination of the social narratives she had internalized regarding the fate of a woman and the part that perceived beauty plays in the entire process. She discloses that she had felt inadequate all her life—ugly and a misfit—and had grown up believing that romantic love was not her due because of her looks:

One learns that Padmanabhan had been “pudgy and cross-eyed” as a child and “grew frontally” at fifteen and sixteen, all the while struggling with pimples and frizzy hair, and grew to look like an “inverted pear” (2000, 61). As the narrator-protagonist, she had a curious relationship with her body and was shocked to see herself naked for the first time at the age of seventeen—a conscious acknowledgment of the fact that her body had not been a part of her psyche. As she states, it was a surprise for her to see that she “looked remarkably similar” to the other figures that she had seen growing up, even though she did not have the “ideal statistics” (149). She then goes on to analyze that “On the one hand it could mean that I didn’t see myself objectified in the way of nude models in photographs. On the other hand, it could mean that I had been wandering around for years in a body that I inhabited as if it were a fancy dress belonging to someone else” (149). While a keen awareness of not possessing an ideal female body marks much of her growing-up years, the unrequited love that she feels for her teacher when she is sixteen further reinforces her negative self-image. Following the mortification of this one-sided affair—with teenage emotions compounding her angst—she made up her mind to die at thirty to avoid the humiliations that awaited her. By the time Padmanabhan was in her twenties and had met her boyfriend, Prashant, she still held on to these views rather than outgrowing them. She had also created a self-professed artist’s persona, with her hallmark sartorial code being bright clingy clothes, lots of jewelry, and loud makeup.

What is interesting, however, is that despite her low self-esteem, the narrator-protagonist remains adamant about not conforming to the expected norms of her well-heeled, conservative family. Padmanabhan’s close relations are well settled in their respective professions—her father is a retired bureaucrat of the Indian Foreign Service; her brother, Raghu, is a successful corporate lawyer; and her sister, Radha, is a doctor based in the United States. Both her siblings are married and have children—or in other words, are decent, “respectable” people by the standards of middle-class Indian society (50). Within such a class, marriage remains the high watermark in women’s lives despite their professional qualifications and achievements. For Padmanabhan, marriage is an anathema because she believes that one of its main purposes is ensuring the survival of the human species. And, as she makes it clear to the psychiatrist at the diet clinic, she has had a deep-seated antipathy toward children ever since her own childhood. Cooking, housekeeping, nurturing—activities that are integrally connected with the conception of the female/feminine role—do not find favor with her. Ironic and scathing comments about marriage and the supposed fulfillment that women derive from domesticity abound in Getting There. Notable among them is the incisive remark that she makes about the projection of women in the context of domesticity and marriage, by the late 1970s American media, and her inability to belong to such a milieu:

Soap operas like All My Children and General Hospital were a revelation, commerce and monotheism in passionate embrace. The one true god was represented by the loyal, omniscient, omnipotent and dandruff-free husband. Heaven was a place of static-free carpets and gleaming glassware . . . [and women were] priestesses in the church of good housekeeping. . . . Where in this dish-washer-friendly universe in which a woman’s worth was assessed by the sparkle on her cutlery, did I fit? Nowhere. (191–192)

Against this background of sanctification of a certain construct of marriage as natural law, Padmanabhan, with her profession as a freelance illustrator/cartoonist and her boyfriend whom she does not want to marry, stands out as an aberration. There is immense pressure on her to get married, not only from her family—especially her brother, Raghu—but also from strangers like Kamala, who consider her behavior “un-Indian” through a nonresident Indian’s gaze in America (166). In fact, Raghu views her as a weed—he is unhappy with their parents for having allowed her to grow up “unruly and unchecked”—but would have preferred if she had not been allowed “to sprout” at all (47). He terms her behavior and lifestyle as akin to “roaming the streets like a bitch on heat” (50).

While Padmanabhan does not respond verbally to the insults and accusations coming her way, preferring to remain silent rather than getting into a conflict, she continues to live life on her own terms. It gives her immense pleasure to “flaunt” Prashant as a boyfriend, “not a spouse,” as that confirms her view of herself as a “counter-culture revolutionary, living outside the confines of social acceptance” (41). It is against this complicated context of a woman who chooses to live on the margins of social respectability, who reacts to the injunctions placed on her impetuously and yet struggles with an abysmally low self-worth, that Padmanabhan’s desire to diet needs to be placed. As the narrator-protagonist, she is aware that these disciplinary regimes of feminine embodiment have far-reaching implications because they keep women preoccupied with their looks, and yet she embarks on one of her own accord, because of the associations of despair and despondency with obesity in her mind.

For instance, after being berated by her roommate, Sujaya, for not being responsible and considerate, her immediate reaction is not a denial of these accusations but to engage in an extensive act of self-criticism, where her behavioral and mental traits become linked with her physical characteristics. Obesity becomes not only a repugnant bodily trait but also the explanation of several other undesirable qualities in her, including her inability to succeed in her professional life. As Padmanabhan states wryly:

Yes, I was inconsiderate, incompetent and self-indulgent. I was fat after all. I was a person whose intake of fuel exceeded her body’s needs. Fat stored as unsightly wads of flesh was the physical expression of greed, black money in the body’s fuel-efficient economy. Time is also a kind of fuel except that it can’t be stored. Nevertheless, I could feel the rolls of unused hours lying in unsightly heaps across the sagging belly of my days. (45–46)

The yearning to slim down, by inversion, becomes an aspiration for a different life altogether:

The desire to lose weight, I now saw, with my teaspoon poised above the plain white dome of the egg, was really about becoming someone else. Someone efficient and industrious who could fight minotaurs before breakfast, someone who would succeed in her quest to be financially independent and ideologically pure, someone whose illustrations would soon be the talk of the town, be sought after and valued. Someone of consequence, taste and wit. (31)

It is true that becoming attractive is one of the reasons behind Padmanabhan’s decision to diet, and yet due to the complications that were a part of her mental makeup, it would be rather simplistic to reduce her aspiration to merely that. Before going on to discuss how the body or the act of dieting assume an individualistic signification for Padmanabhan, this chapter examines the cultural connotations of female embodiment and femininity in India and their variegated and loaded usage.

At one level, all human beings are embodied creatures—the body is a biological reality and therefore biological differences between men and women lead to differences in female and male embodiment. The body, however, is also a discursive and cultural construct, being situated in and articulated through various sociological, anthropological, historical, medical, and religious discourses. This kind of approach depicts the fallacy of the position that male superiority and female inferiority are based on essential attributes. Biological differences become the basis of a cultural devaluation and stigmatization of the female body. The very fact that women are able, in general, to menstruate and give birth is enough to suggest a potentially dangerous volatility that marks the female body as out of control. In contrast to the apparent self-containment of the male body, the female body demands attention and invites regulation. In short, women are just their bodies in ways that men are not, biologically destined to an inferior status in all spheres that privilege rationality. At the same time, however, that women are seen as more wholly embodied, the boundaries of their embodiment are never fixed and secure. As the devalued process of reproduction makes clear, women themselves are, in the conventional masculinist imagination, not simply inferior beings whose civil and social subordination are both inevitable and justified but objects of fear and repulsion.

The expression of this kind of anxiety about women’s bodies has taken different forms in different cultures—ranging from the celebration of certain bodily aspects to severe repression— and almost all of them are inextricably connected with the idea of the need for regulating female sexuality. In the Indian context, especially within the Hindu religious tradition, the worship of women as the embodiment of Shakti, the strictures associated with the lives of widows, and the stigma associated with menstruation are all manifestations of the aforementioned idea in various forms.²

Such ideas have been widely pervasive and have negatively affected the way women think about their bodies and subsequently their selves. The social constructionist position—a critique of biological essentialism—“emphasizes the view that a woman experiences her body, sexuality and feminine identity as a social being located in a particular cultural setting with its dominant values and norms” (Thapan 1997, 5). Power is exercised in such a manner by dominant cultural tropes and structures that the ideas propagated become internalized, a case in point being the pervasiveness of the idea of the negative status of the feminine body among women themselves. Michel Foucault’s influence has been pivotal in the development of this theoretical perspective, especially his exposition of the workings of power in social processes. Foucault’s (1977, 1990) analysis of the discursive body examines its capacity to be manipulated, molded, constructed, and changed and explains the manner in which the body is invested with different and changing forms of power.

The female body is manipulated and control is exercised over it not only through the discourses of history, religion, or medicine but also through the discourse of ideal feminine beauty, an attainment of which results in the objectification of female bodies. Sandra Lee Bartky and Susan Bordo have critiqued the setting up of normatives that expect social conformity, foremost among them being diet and exercise regimes that are designed to attain the ideal female body size and configuration. With the proliferation of images of women with beautiful faces and figures in print as well as electronic media, “the homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininity” (Bordo 1993, 166) has become pervasive. The sheer number of articles in women’s magazines describing how to dress, apply makeup, and present an appropriate image attest to the fact that there are codes of behavior to which women must subscribe (Greer 1999, 19–32). Moreover, Bordo maintains that through the disciplines of diet, makeup, and dress, women are rendered less socially “oriented” and more focused on “self-modification” (1993, 166). The disciplinary regimes of femininity have political implications because they keep women attending to their appearance, looks, bodily comportment, and image rather than to the material and political circumstances of their lives. What is more dangerous is that these kind of attainments, such as perfect skin, body, or hair, have increasingly come to be projected as integrally connected with the liberation or freedom of women—a matter of choice and not a constriction. The internalization of representations of the female body by women thus becomes fundamental to the formation of the feminine identity. Women not only internalize the overarching gaze of the patriarchal/male connoisseur but also learn to consider their bodies from a position of alterity. As Bartky puts it, “women live their bodies as seen by another, by an anonymous patriarchal other” (1988, 72).

The obese woman attracts greater opprobrium even within the gender-skewed universe of adherence to normative body ideals (Levine and Chapman 2011, 102) because of the association of the “‘fat’ female body as a site of disease and failure” (Murray 2008, 7). Given that obesity has acquired the status of a medical epidemic, the overweight woman is subjected to immense social discrimination, with control being exercised through various disciplinary discourses. Hence, what Murray claims of Western culture is true for many urbanized Indian settings as well:

Living “fat” and female in contemporary Western culture is difficult: we are socialised to be ashamed of our bodies, and to engage in endless processes to alter them, to improve them, to normalise them. “Fat” women are regarded as sexually unattractive, unclean, unhealthy, unintelligent, and unwilling to change. In light of this, “fat” women are treated with suspicion, and often with unabashed hatred and disgust. (5)

Critiques of this marginalization in the West have taken the route of “philosophical analysis” in search of a more “productive, enabling, embodied politics” (181), as well as fat activism—which, in contradistinction to the body positivity movement, aims to foreground the lived experiences of fat bodies—as a way of engaging with the widespread dehumanization that marks their reception (Cooper 2016).

While the negative role of media-propagated images in engendering body image dissatisfaction cannot but be underlined, it has been recognized that “the relation between sociocultural influences and body image” can only be “complex, multiply determined, and bidirectional” with the extent to which an individual internalizes these injunctions, being “moderated by levels of self-esteem (or autonomy), such that women with high self-esteem will be less influenced by societal ideals and pressures” (Tiggemann 2011, 18, 14). Further, the protests against biological reductionism and discursive control have assumed various forms. What is significant is that in consonance with the emphasis on heterogeneity, plurality, and the celebration of differences that has been a hallmark of feminist movements in recent decades, the theorization regarding feminine embodiment has intensified not with the hope of “recovering an authentic female body unburdened of patriarchal assumptions, but in the full acknowledgement of the multiple and fluid possibilities of differential embodiment” (Price and Shildrick 1999, 12).

Ahead of Her Times: Padmanabhan and the Discourse of Female Embodiment

Padmanabhan’s memoir precedes these theoretical concerns and activism(s), but it demonstrates acute sensitivity to these issues and movements. This becomes evident at her discomfort on realizing the extent of the unconscious conditioning regarding women’s bodies that dominates our thoughts: it hits the narrator-protagonist particularly hard when she is shown nude slides of women who had successfully lost weight at the doctor’s clinic where she enrolls. Padmanabhan bemoans, “We are so used to seeing pictures of female nudes who look like articulated dolls that when we see the more typical sort of woman without her clothes on, she looks diseased” (10). This also makes her ruminate on how a debilitating exercise like dieting had been normalized by the multibillion-dollar weight-loss industry and what the business was promising to sell:

Being thin was only one element in a complex mutation. Being sexually available was another. Being obviously wealthy was a third. Poor people, for instance, are thin but that doesn’t make them beautiful. It is the slenderness of those who choose not to be fat that is admired. . . . The glamour is essential. Without it a thin person merely looks poor. (22–23)

Naturally, the practice of photographing patients naked, chronicling the various stages of their weight loss, leaves the narrator-protagonist feeling unsettled:

The prize patient, whose success had seemed so spectacular when she was clothed, looked like a sack of loose brown skin standing to attention when she was naked. . . . Her appearance suggested that she came from a deeply conservative, traditional background, yet here she was, posing naked for a doctor’s unsympathetic camera. . . . Had she agreed out of her own volition or had her husband forced her? Was he in the room with her when these pictures were taken? Had she agreed because she imagined she was making a valuable contribution to a study of weight loss amongst obese Third World women? Had she been convinced on the grounds that she represented that rarest of breeds, a Third World woman who was yet rich enough to have weight to lose? (10–11)

When Padmanabhan is asked to do the same, she refuses. For her, it was akin to relinquishing control over her body, which she was not comfortable doing, despite its so-called unattractiveness and undesirability.

The process of dieting has intended consequences—she loses five kilos in a matter of weeks—as well as unintended ones. During the diet, and especially during her psychological evaluation with Mrs. Prasad, she is hard-pressed to examine her purported ideologies and belief systems. While she had looked down upon her fellow patients at the clinic initially—using epithets like the “latest little dumpling in human form,” among others, to describe them—she soon realizes that it was sheer hypocrisy on her part:

I wanted to sneer at this apparition in female form sitting across the room from me, but Mrs. Prasad’s probing enquiry had shown me that my so-called ideology was thinner than a coat of nail varnish. . . . Would I, too, be weighed down with gold, my face obscured under a mask of rouge and mascara? No! I thought, Never! But I had told Mrs. Prasad that I was fond of jewellery and make-up, and here I was, sitting in the same diet clinic as that other woman, seeking the same goal. How different were we really? It humbled me to realize, not much. (23)

Further, on account of the conflicts that this process engenders with her close relations, especially her brother and her boyfriend, and her chance encounter with Piet—a Dutch man who had come on a spiritual quest to India and was staying at the same paying-guest accommodation as she was—Padmanabhan is forced to reevaluate her life in a way she had never done before.

Padmanabhan had been in a comfortable relationship with Prashant for over two years but had desisted from calling it love, as she did not believe that romantic love was her due. The term was further problematic for Padmanabhan because of its inevitable culmination in marriage, an institution she was not ready to engage with. As she puts it, “The price of romance for heterosexuals is the enormous expenditure of energy and resources which goes into getting married and raising children. If I wasn’t willing to pay the price, then in a real sense, I couldn’t afford to be ‘in love’” (235). Her relationship with Prashant had been sustained as he had been accommodative of her quirks of not wanting to get married and her plan to die at thirty, which the other romantic interests in her life had not been supportive of. Prashant is described as an “exceptionally good natured” person and one who comes close to being as “perfect [a] boyfriend as anyone could hope to find” (60). And yet, after meeting Piet, the narrator-protagonist decides to sleep with him, even while being in a relationship with Prashant.

This emotional transgression becomes a deliberate move on Padmanabhan’s part in her quest for supreme confidence and control over life, which she found projected by Piet. In attempting to emulate Piet, she realized that her notions of sexual fidelity—and, for that matter, everything else—were based on shaky foundations. Padmanabhan hereafter tours America with Prashant but feels guilty all the while for going to bed with Piet in a calculated way—and, in order to stop discussing uncomfortable issues, she continues to eat compulsively, leading to a complete failure of her diet. No doubt it had given her pleasure to flaunt Prashant in the face of familial and social disapproval, but the fact remained that their relationship was based on a reaction. And Padmanabhan soon realizes that Prashant, especially after he wants to be married, is very much a part of the entire setup that she feels suffocated by and wants to escape.

The showdown with her brother, on the other hand, makes it clear to her that the luxuries she had taken for granted—her sister paying for her trip to America, her relatives being there to bail her out from tricky situations, and the social spaces of South Bombay that she has access to—are beyond her capability to create for herself. The price for these safety nets was, of course, the expected pursuit of preconceived notions of her class-based gender normativity, escaping which would require more than mere impetuous reactions:

I had grown up wearing the jewelled harnesses that kept me and others like me in our place within our social class. The only time we ever felt our bondage was when we strained against it in the direction of some forbidden pleasure. But eating frugally had apparently caused a change to take place. I had shed weight, literally as well metaphorically. I was now loose within the harness . . . [and] planned to slip it off altogether. (115–116)

Obviously, such transformations are easier said than done since they entail “reversing the habits of self-indulgence and passivity” (116) that she had grown up with and getting out of her comfort zone. Nevertheless, Padmanabhan’s acquaintance with Piet leads her to yearn for the kind of control and complete responsibility he enjoys—that is, his ability to unmake and remake his life in ways she had never experienced before. After her encounter with Piet, she imagines that she can explore the unexplored if she can be on a sojourn, free of all known faces:

The rest of the narrative of Getting There is about the various adventures she has in America, Germany, and Holland and the insights she gains. Padmanabhan’s transitional state of being, where she feels “like a yolk sac of ideas, not yet solidified into the substance of a living being” (118), makes her look at her dieting from a different perspective altogether, in contradistinction to the gender-defined codes associated with it earlier. She eventually realizes that her attempt at dieting was not the outcome of a desire to match a fictitious ideal. Rather, it had been an attempt to flee her corporeality, in keeping with her death wish: she had felt trapped in her body, and the diet became her way of being liberated. She explains, “I began to feel the way a caged animal might, when it sees that the door to its prison has been left ajar: a soaring sense of my ability to flee the Dungeon of my Body” (27). It is in this light that her provocative statement, “Maybe the desire to diet was actually a yearning to step out of the suit of soft, fat filled female clothes that I had been given to wear at birth” (236), needs to be viewed. Her wish for a different body therefore is not the aspiration for a “superior” masculine identity, since for her the masculine role is equally if not more debilitating, and she claims, “I could easily imagine how violently unhappy I would have been if I had been a man” (236). For the author, her physicality needs to be understood without subscribing to accepted notions of gender, even if she deliberately leaves nebulous the articulation of her gender aspiration.

Conclusion: Body Acceptance in Getting There

Padmanabhan has been categorical in stating—in later interviews as well as her personal correspondence—that she rarely thinks of herself as a “woman”³ and also that she does not like writing from the perspective of the typical victim because she does not believe that chains are a natural condition of womanhood.⁴ But, as opposed to her confident assertions later, in Getting There, her autobiographical persona is at a crossroads. Here Padmanabhan is caught at an intersection of various fragmented identities: the tension arises out of a conflict between the pressure to accept the cultural connotations of gender and an attempt to go beyond it, with her conception of what it normatively means to be a woman and her aversion to it playing a vital part in the rejection of her gendered identity. As she puts it:

I had considered feminism a peg on which to hang my resistance to romance, but Mrs. Prasad, the psychiatrist, with her droopy eyelids and her laser vision, had cut through my flabby rhetoric: she had shown me that much of what I did and said was an expression of non-acceptance of a woman’s destiny. . . . I did not rejoice in any but the most superficial aspects of being female. (235)

The complications and ethical dilemmas also arise because of the peculiar traits of her personality. As Padmanabhan states, “So much of what I had considered problems were instead a kind of frenzy brought by my ignorance about reality. A more robust person would not have encountered even a tenth of my difficulties, or having encountered them would not have interpreted them as difficulties at all” (329).

To conclude, the diet in Getting There becomes a catalyst in engendering certain necessary changes in the writer’s self-perception. The initial success and eventual failure of it compelled her to come to terms with certain unpalatable truths about herself and the abominable way she had treated people in her life because of her impulsiveness. It also becomes clear to her that her diet was not an attempt to attain a preordained body ideal; rather, it was a reiteration and extension of her death wish. Padmanabhan also realizes that she had attached extraordinary importance to other people’s thoughts and had sought approval unconsciously, even when defying accepted norms. In reacting to certain gender-based strictures impetuously, she had not really thought them through, and when confronted with difficulties, she had taken an escape route rather than facing them. However, in Amsterdam, bereft of all physical and social security, especially after surviving an asthma attack in a dark, cold, dilapidated building, while inhabiting a fat and lonely body, “unbathed, penniless, ticketless and visa-free in a foreign country,” (330) the narrator-protagonist realizes that she can be mentally self-sufficient and does not need the crutches of social approval to lead her life. This proves to be a moment of both self-realization and liberation for Padmanabhan as she declares:

For Padmanabhan, then, getting there becomes less about a geographical location and more about a metaphorical journey of reaching an elevated mental state: of intense self-realization, equanimity, and unconditional acceptance of her mind and her body.

NOTES

1. In this chapter, my reading of Getting There is based on the edition that came out in 2000 (London: Picador). In a personal interview conducted in 2004, Padmanabhan had shared that she had intended her work as a memoir but her editor at Picador was apprehensive marketing it as such, because the autobiography of a relatively unknown woman writer would be hard to sell. It was much safer for Picador to bracket Getting There within the categories of travel writing or novel. This kind of a forced categorization as well as the “lowbrow” way in which it was marketed affected the reception of the book (Manjula Padmanabhan, interview with author, April 29, 2004). Getting There was also excised of a large portion of the Holland section of the text by Mary Mount, her editor at Picador, which, if retained, would have rendered the work “solemn and philosophical” (Padmanabhan, interview). Indeed, as a look at the manuscript of the unedited Holland section of the text revealed—Getting There is divided into four such sections: Bombay, New York, Munich, and Holland—it was marked by philosophical musings and greater self-reflexivity (Padmanabhan, Getting There, manuscript, 159–204). A new edition of Getting There (Gurugram: Hachette India, 2020) addresses these concerns: a note by the author mentions that it is indeed a memoir, and the Holland section has additional chapters. However, for the purposes of this chapter, which focuses on her engagement with issues of diet and body image, these revisions do not influence the reading—which is why I have continued to use the 2000 edition.

2. Padmanabhan (1996, 205–229) has a poignant story, “Stains,” on the issue of menstruation and the negativity associated with it. “Stains” can be read as the story of a young African American woman, Sarah, coming to terms with her body. She grows up believing that she is perfectly comfortable with it, but it takes an act of rudeness from her boyfriend’s mother, Mrs. Kumar, to make her realize how far from the truth that is. When she is “made to feel small” for “staining” the sheets, and treated like an “invalid,” she realizes that somewhere in her mind she has internalized the guilt and negativity associated with menstruation. But Mrs. Kumar’s behavior and her own subsequent sense of alienation make her question her conditioning and attempt to come to terms with it as something natural. She begins by paying conscious attention to it and refuses to accept the silence around it. Menstruation stops being dark, dirty, or something to be guilty about for Sarah when she learns to accept her bodily process for what it is—a bodily process.

3. In an interview with Sheela Reddy (2002), Padmanabhan says, “I rarely think of myself as a woman . . . my struggle in the early days was a straightforward essential one: how to be a human being who writes/draws and how to support myself financially.” The statement was made in response to Reddy’s query regarding how the epithet “woman writer” is viewed by women who write.

4. Manjula Padmanabhan, “Re: On Reading Getting There,” e-mail to author, April 18, 2004.

REFERENCES

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