An economist's feminist journey

Book review of The Brass Notebook

Economist Devaki Jain’s much-awaited memoir The Brass Notebook (2020), published by Speaking Tiger, is a deliciously crafted page-turner that brings forth stories and insights from a lifetime of adventure. Most endearing about this volume is the fact that the author does not glorify her achievements or project herself as a hero who fought valiantly against all odds. She writes of being enthralled, heartbroken, afraid and furious. She focuses on reliving her experiences, and letting the reader make of them what they wish to.

The author’s bold critique of the casteist traditions in her family occupies a central place in this book. While she appreciates her father for including her sister, mother and herself “in every part of his life,” which was “quite unusual for girls from orthodox Brahmin families growing up in the 1930s and 40s,” she also discusses how much pain he caused her. She had to get married secretly after falling in love with economist Lakshmi Chand Jain because he was not a Brahmin. On the other hand, her father’s ancestry went back to “the three great rishis, namely Angirasa, Brihaspathi and Bharadwaja, religious savants of the era of Manu.”

Instead of trying to brand herself as anti-caste, or earn brownie points for being a messiah for the oppressed, the author gives a detailed account of what it feels like to live inside the gilded cage of Brahminical supremacy. In her family, proximity to Christians — and, by extension, going to a Christian school — was considered as polluting. “We were not allowed to enter the house proper without first shedding our uniforms, bathing and changing in the bathroom, which we were to enter by the back door,” she writes. Ironically, she even considered becoming a nun. Of course, she hid this aspiration from her family.

She does not paint her father as a villain. She was deeply fond of him, and even regarded him as her childhood hero. He taught her horse-riding, took her swimming, and supported her decision to study at Oxford, but he was not perfect. When she revealed that she had married her boyfriend, her father told her that she was dead to him. His exact words were: “I have cremated you.” As a writer, and a daughter, she is able to convey how he evoked mixed feelings in her.

The author does a marvellous job of unmasking the regressive customs that were followed in “cultured” upper-caste households in her childhood. Some of these continue today. She writes, “My sister had her first menstruation when she was 13 years old and in the tenth standard in her school. It was decided that it was important to celebrate her entry into womanhood.” This meant a period of mandatory isolation. The author was eight years old at that time. She was given leave of absence from her school, and asked to stay with her ‘polluted’ sister in a secluded room for four nights.

The Brass Notebook

Author: Devaki Jain

Publisher: Speaking Tiger

Pages: 232   Price: Rs 599

Their food was “pushed through the door just like they do for prisoners in a jail”. When visitors came over, “the door would be opened and they would peer in to see my sister as the person who had attained puberty. We were like animals in a zoo”. The author recalls another horrifying incident involving Sarathy, “the most enlightened of my brothers”. When she told him about her secret marriage, he took her for a ride in his car, and said, “Jump out of the vehicle; we will say it was an accident.” Knowing about the shame attached to inter-caste relationships, the author also “had to have two abortions, obviously secretly in the course of the year”.

It is easy to talk about systemic violence in theoretical terms, but quite difficult to call out one’s own family. The author of this memoir manages to do that quite effectively. She opens up about being sexually assaulted by her mother’s brother when she was a child left at home to be supervised by him. She writes, “He had just lost his wife, who had died of burns, and was entirely dependent on my parents for shelter and support while he studied for his medical degree. If my father got to know of it, he could have been put in prison, thrown out of the house at the very least. So the women, his sisters and mother, protected him.”

Studying at Oxford gave her opportunities to explore a life beyond this intimate yet cloistered world. Apart from studying philosophy and economics, she got a taste of freedom that involved passionate romances, hitchhiking with friends, and washing dishes at a café to pay her fees. Unfortunately, she also had to put herself together after a harrowing experience of sexual harassment by a professor who began to actively harm her academic prospects because she was not interested in him. Eventually, she moved to Delhi, where she taught economics at Miranda House, Delhi University, became the director of the Institute for Social Studies Trust, and started a new family with her husband and children. 

She is reflective about her evolving journey with feminism. On the one hand, she found the company of male colleagues far more interesting than the women “who talked of children’s illnesses and how they had been awake all night”. On the other hand, she resented not having enough time for research because she was married to a public figure, “who could not be expected to be homebound”. At one point, she told him that she needed a wife “anticipating the needs of others and fulfilling them without resentment”. She even considered having two husbands but rejected it as a silly fantasy. “I couldn’t see myself managing a sane sex life with two men,” she writes.

Though her personal life gets more attention in this memoir — especially because it involves personalities like Vinoba Bhave, Gloria Steinem, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Amartya Sen, Minoo Masani, Iris Murdoch and M S Subbulakshmi — it also gives readers a sense of the author’s work as a ‘feminist economist’. She has been studying how women’s contributions to the economy can be made more visible by moving away from paradigms that do not quantify their work, and has also played a foundational role in creating “a Third World network of women social scientists” called Development Alternatives for Women for a New Era. Her recollections are particularly useful for a younger generation of feminists who are invested in looking at how gender does not operate in a vacuum but intersects with race, class and caste.