The Female Voice: Reinstituting Life*

Introduction

As dusk was falling on the evening of Saturday, 13 December 2025, a news item flashed on my phone that a man with a gun was firing randomly at the campus of Brown University and that the shooting had resulted in two deaths and several injuries. I made frantic phone calls first asking my granddaughter if her elder brother, a sophomore at Brown, was okay (meaning not among those hurt or worse, but unable to actually say these words), then tried to check on others. After sheltering in one of the buildings on campus for the whole night, when the students were cautiously moved to the dorms with the gunman still at large, I called my grandson and asked if he was doing okay (that indefinite word again). He seemed (to me) suspiciously in control, citing 310 mass shootings this year alone, with four or more people killed in each, and 76 school shootings. ‘Somewhere, sometime this was bound to happen’—that was the general feeling. It was the normalisation of such terms as Sandy Hook, and the routine of drills every morning in schools where five-year-olds know what to do in the event of finding a random shooter in their midst in the school, and the calmness of his response that completely unnerved me. Ideas such as pathology producing its own norms, which I knew well, and had placed at the centre of my own work on affliction (Das, 2015), appeared in large letters as they moved through my dreams.

Meanwhile, images proliferated of starving children in Gaza, in Sudan, cities bombed to rubble; images of Muslims attacked, burnt alive, maimed, lying on improvised hospital beds with arms brutally chopped off by ‘a group’ of Hindu men whose individual names were withheld because these might reveal too much about their caste surfaced on Facebook posts. Even writing in this vein creates a nausea in me now because the language has become too standardised, too contaminated by abuse. Its redescriptions, such as casting targeted bombing of schools and hospitals as ‘collateral damage’ itself, feel lethal. Reinhart Koselleck (2020) in his book on possible histories tells us that the disposition to kill should be seen as natural to the human; Cavell, the writer of Emersonian perfectionism, himself calls human life a crime scene and the inhuman as a possibility of the human, not its aberration (Cavell, 1979, 2005). ¹ Together, these writers show the absurdity of a vision that would define anthropology as the science of variation of the ‘human condition’ as if that demonstration would be sufficient to confront new versions of the civilising mission through which Western thought manages to cast historical failures of other societies as their ontological condition, whereas the violence of the West is seen merely as a temporary aberration. I do not look for very subtle formulations of this claim but instead cite the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (2001), who has no hesitation in saying that while there are many cultures whose ‘national literatures’ contribute to ontological pluralism, ‘it is Europe, which alongside its numerous atrocities, invented the idea of “de-Europeanization”, which in turn “represents a victory of European generosity”’. He adds that

Europe has many things to be reproached for, its history has been that of blood and war: but it is also the place where this blood and war have been regretted and constitute a bad conscience, a bad conscience of Europe which is also the return (retour) of Europe. (cited with admiration for Levinas’s modesty in theorising only from what he knows well in de Vries, 2006, pp. 121–122)

I do not dismiss the many philosophical achievements of Levinas, but I also feel a compulsion to ask if we can go beyond an expression of indignation and explore what enables this kind of formulation of European superiority, especially since Levinas can also claim that ‘there is a kind of envelopment … of all thinking by the European subject’ and that he says this ‘without knowing anything of Buddhism’.

Without being able to fully justify the paths I take to address this issue, perhaps because of the mood in which I write, given the moment, I think one aspect of the diagnosis of the arrogance of the claim that all thought is enveloped by Europe, I wager, is that the history of the subject in Europe shows that the modern subject emerges by painful exclusions of certain kinds of negative figures, particularly the criminal and the mad (Foucault, 2003, 2008) through the forms that legal and medical norms take. My concern here is not to trace the slow shifts from the making of the subject through subjection, to that of care of the self, defined as government of self and other, and finally to the culture of confession, as the mode through which the subject emerges. I am interested in another aspect of the problematic of exclusion. A figure that seems to me to be missing in the conceptual formation of exclusion in Foucault is the figure of the woman. I do not mean to say that women are completely missing: They are very much present in the story of the government of the household, but what I mean to say is that they do not have any place in the recounting of the history of the subject. It is as if their confinement to the domain of the household somehow disqualifies them from being protagonists in this history.

Now, it would be obvious that the kind of dividing practices through which the figure of the criminal or that of the mad person could be excluded from the social body could not be applied to women. After all, their participation in the making of life, sustaining forms of life, providing the labour of care for others, is not in question when it comes to what the experience of living, falling sick, meeting the misfortunes of life might be; and one could go further and say that Foucault also encounters the cruelties perpetrated by some women on children in Abnormal (Foucault, 2003), or in what he calls the disorders of the family, as well as the cruelties women are themselves subjected to (Farge & Foucault, 1982). Yet the only move he makes towards the question of subjectivation is to suggest that it is the criminal acts of some women which make them available as subjects for the knowledge projects of psychiatry as a discipline. The only other avatar in which we encounter women in Foucault’s work is in the figure of the hysteric woman, where he argues that the coupling of power and resistance becomes frayed because of the hysteric woman’s ability to continuously produce new symptoms through her excess of expression (Zerilli, 2015).

Thus, two pictures emerge here for what place is made for women in the theory of the subject. The first is that absorbed within the household, the woman’s presence is unremarkable, too quotidian, to be of theoretical interest. The head of the household should learn to govern women as he learns to manage wealth, cattle, and lands, but she seems to leave no other traces in the archive. The second picture is of the woman who has committed a crime (often against children), who remains unintelligible and hence is a subject of interest to psychiatry (Foucault, 2003), or the hysteric who also defies the psychiatrist by her ability to constantly produce new symptoms of her condition (Foucault, 1978). As Cavell had articulated this issue, on one side is the suffocation of the woman’s voice, and on the other side is excessive expression. Underlying both conditions is the evasion of life as it is lived, both when it is being sustained through the labour of women against the many misfortunes and tragedies to which the living are subject, and when the fragile networks of things and people that sustain life get broken, when relations fade, neglect and abandonment seep into the everyday, leading to small and large defeats. My claim is that a response to the violence secreted in everyday life demands that life be reinstituted, but that project leads us, if we are attentive to it, to a radical redefinition of the place of the woman, not as an abstract figure of thought but through singularity of life as encountered in individual men and women.

If anthropology had once prided itself for showing the empirical unfolding of the sheer diversity of life forms that could be again gathered through the application of theory under such abstractions as variations of the same human condition, or the acquisition of culture as ‘second nature’ (see McDowell, 1996, and the critique by Donatelli, 2025), this project could be accomplished only at the cost of imposing concepts from above that masked a pernicious epistemic domination under the guise of theory.

Let me step back for a moment and ask, can we change the ground of these discussions by not so much refuting these arguments and thus placing our faith once again in reason to correct itself, but by asking, what might help us loosen the grip of the demand that we move from the particularity of our encounters with real human beings, to the generality of concepts that can be then stamped with what Foucault (2005) called the Cartesian moment in the career of thought. I am not advocating an escape from reason into some other realm, call it the realm of imagination or emotion, or resorting to sentimentality and nostalgia for times past, but proposing that we arrive at our own inhabitation of reason through other routes. As Jonardon Ganeri (2014a, 2014b) has forcefully argued, once we historicise the forms that reason took in philosophical arguments, we cease treating it as some special movement of the spirit that saw it as embodied in the special destiny of Europe. But whereas Ganeri and his interlocutors look at Sanskrit texts for seeing modes of philosophising and indeed, Ganeri brings to light texts from fourteenth to sixteenth centuries that have not been read, leave aside translated, for 300 years (an intellectual labour I deeply respect), my direction of argument here takes a different path. I strive to make a shift in the weight assigned to the ordinary, especially through the ethics of care and the female voice. How might this shift of attention to the female subject establish different norms on how life is sustained (see Laugier, 2020)?

In a remarkable commentary on the project of anthropology as a description of life as a reinhabitation through a descent into the ordinary (Das, 2007, 2025), the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist (2025) considers the implications of taking ‘life’, not primarily as an object that one can see from the outside as if it had boundaries that separated it from other things in the world, but something we render only through a mode of participation or accompaniment. The passage from my book, Life and words, that he found most compelling for this vision (he calls it one of the peaks of the book), is the following:

There is a complex relation between a life and life so that how one lives in relation to one’s own and others’ deaths turns out to be a project of how one protects not only a form of life over disputations, criticisms, and recognition in the fact of change—but also how one protects the institution of life as lived in the singular. (Das, 2007, p. 92)

For Benoist, this passage should be read in the background of my claim that anthropological work is at its best when it can acknowledge the limits of the knowing subject, and our disappointment with knowledge, or rather our disappointment with a ‘picture of knowledge’ in which the expertise of the anthropologist is laid on the messiness of lives to make it speak to the universalising project of determining answers to such metaphysical questions as ‘what is life?’ or ‘what is the human condition?’. In Benoist’s words:

Something, anyway, may still remain of the philosopher’s arrogance in the posture of the anthropologist: that is to say, the position of the one who knows. The agents do not know why they do what they do and, thus, who they are, but the scientist knows. It is not so much an achievement as a definition. (Benoist, 2025, p. 3)

Although many anthropologists make similar appeals to ‘lived experience’, the next steps they take either lead them into a labour of the negative, or in the creation yet again of new boundaries between ‘experience near’ and ‘experience distant’, ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’, and so on. Underlying both these stances is a masking of the problem at hand, namely, that we cannot substitute our own disappointment with expertise by assuming that someone else, in this case ‘the natives’, would somehow have a better grasp of ‘their reality’. My claim is that attention to the ordinary and the everyday asks for an acknowledgement that in ordinary life people might not act on the basis of anything but fragmentary knowledge; they might not be masters of their situation or have a god’s eye view of the world in which their actions unfold as Austin’s (1961) essay on excuses and Laugier’s (2021) interpretation of the vulnerability of our knowledge show. Yet concepts, that Wittgenstein called ‘humble’ rather than the super concepts that scholars long for, are born and enable actions to be taken within these situations of uncertainty, contingency and the force of sheer accidents. As Wittgenstein famously said, ‘For such is human life!’ (2018, p. 61). It is not a reason for distrusting the work done in the everyday, but acknowledging, that everyday life is indeed lined with scepticism, but that re-establishing life in the everyday is not a matter of a dramatic once-for-all event, but something that is undertaken repeatedly, quotidianly, in the thick of things falling apart as women know. To the poet (Faiz), who bemoans ‘Ik bakhiya udheda, ek siya, yun umr basar kab hoti hai’ [undoing one stitch, stitching another, how can a lifetime be passed thus]—my interlocutors in the field would remind me, if not through words then through their actions, that it was precisely within that mode that life was lived.

Let me step back here and try to decipher why such a vision of life is seen as threatening to so many founding figures of anthropology. Here is Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose majestic work on mythology showed an underlying logic in primitive thought, rescuing it from the charges of emotivism, but of course on condition that ethnography does not cede the task of thinking through myths to the conceptual formations that the natives have of it.

He writes:

We would risk committing sociology to a dangerous path: even a path of destruction, if we then went one step further and reduced social reality to the conception that man—savage man, even—has of it. That conception would furthermore become empty of meaning if its reflexive character were forgotten. Then ethnography would dissolve into a verbose phenomenology, a falsely naïve mixture in which the apparent obscurities of indigenous thinking would only be brought to the forefront to cover the confusions of the ethnographer. (Lévi-Strauss, 1950, pp. 57–58; English translation, 1987)

It is not accidental that in deciphering logical thought in the mythology of the so-called primitive societies, Lévi-Strauss speaks not of ‘life’ but of ‘social reality’, as if reality confronts us from the outside as objective, impersonal, with a thing-like quality standing in a frontal relation to us. The implication is that what we as anthropologists or ethnographers see is reality as something solid, but what ‘they’, the natives, see is only ‘putative’ reality. This adjectival modification of reality is not from Lévi-Strauss but from McDowell (2008), who uses it to say that some experiences, such as feeling wounded by the cruelty done to animals, because for some people animals may feel like companions, are not hallucinatory, but their reality does not qualify as reality for everyone; it is, indeed, their reality, but for purposes of analysis it only reaches the level of putative reality. Social reality then qualifies as ‘reality’ when it stands closest to natural categories, as the concept of ‘second nature’ implies in relation to what is assumed to be ‘first nature’. A recent amicus curiae ² petition filed in the US courts by 40 renowned philosophers argued to the effect that transgender identities were, indeed, fake identities (fake currency, as the petition says) because they departed from the natural categories of male and female.

My own argument on what is at stake, as I hinted in the opening paragraphs of this lecture, is to shift the weight from reality (social or natural) to the hosting of life in defining the subject of anthropology, because it allows me to see how violence and forms of death are secreted within forms of life. Rather than taking ‘reality’ as the object of analysis and then cutting it into ‘social’, ‘natural’, ‘putative’—something that confronts one from the outside, as in the famous wall that blocks you as you try to walk through it as if it were a curtain. Again and again, in the history of anthropology, ‘life’ has emerged as a candidate and then has been set aside in favour of such abstractions as ‘social reality’, or submerged within other concepts such as society as a sui generis reality, through which the anthropologist seeks to tame the challenges posed by the question of how to render ordinary life in relation to the pressures of immediacy and the knotting of different durations present at any moment through memory, imagination, and anticipation. The answer to the challenges of observing and writing the everyday is not to flee from the everyday but to acknowledge the limits of human knowledge and to act, nevertheless.

As an example of the withdrawal from the everyday as a condition for anthropological thought to arise, consider the difficulties that Durkheim confesses to when he seeks to arrive at the notion of collective consciousness by the merging of individual consciousnesses. Although his subject in The elementary forms of religious life is religious life, as the title announces, he cannot quite tame the idea of life within the larger framework of society as a force, sui generis, through which individuals learn moral obligation. Here are telling examples of the elusiveness of life in his writing.

The question for Durkheim, despite his ‘synthesis’ of individual consciousnesses into a single collective consciousness, is that of determining how the individual comes to be attached to the collective. For Durkheim, this attachment to the collective has the quality of a kind of delirium in which women are afforded very little participation (except in the piacular rites that lament the dead). ³ ‘Stimulated by the collective experience of congregating amidst the sacred, participants are “pulled away from … ordinary occupations and preoccupations” and moved to the point of delirium akin to “the religious state”’ (Durkheim, 1995, p. 220). In his work on suicide, Durkheim (1952/2005) makes this exclusion of women from collective life even more explicit: ‘As she lives outside of community existence more than man, she is less penetrated by it: society is less necessary to her because she is less impregnated with sociability. She has few needs in this direction and satisfies them easily’ (p. 215).

‘Penetrated’? ‘Impregnated’? The imagination of the social and the abstract society as sui generis turns out, after all, to be another version of a masculine creation, a sexualisation of the social in language in which women have no position as embodied subjects, except as bodies to be penetrated and impregnated. The quotidian and the mundane, which at one point Durkheim recognises to be necessary for men to endure life [her devotion is indispensable to man to help him endure life (1952/2005, p. 215)], find no recognition at the level of theorising society. This flight from the ordinary and from the mundane activities that sustain everyday life and the soul’s search for its society ⁴ through the labour of care performed by women stands in need of serious correction. And for that correction to occur, the picture of knowledge that permits such language to be used against not only women but also against other modes of subjectivation needs to be not just amended but abandoned. In the last section of this article, I will give one detailed example of the project of what it is to reinstate life in the female voice through the work of one woman writer, such as Krishna Sobti. But first, let me briefly say what I mean by ‘instituting’ life in the work of repair.

In the passage from Life and words with which I began, I speak of how the ‘institution’ of life is sought to be protected in the work ordinary men and especially women do. This repair through reinstitution is not simply restoring ordinary life after its catastrophic destruction by spectacular violence. Instead, it refers to my sense of pervasive violence in human life as not only spectacular and catastrophic but also seeded in the everyday. This means that there is no domain or sphere of life that remains untouched by violence. The work of dalit writers in India and race theorists in the United States has shown that ‘atrocities’ are not necessarily announced loudly. They are instituted as part of learning where you can stand, in which cases you must wait to be addressed, and thus in unremarkable habits learnt through the hierarchies instilled in everyday life (see especially Guru & Sarukkai, 2018). Which are the words survivors of sexual violence refuse to utter because they are the words that were used by perpetrators to mock them? A boycott of a dalit caste in the village need not be announced. Sandhya Fuchs (2024) tells us, as she follows several legal cases filed by dalit activists under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, in the Indian courts. The punishment of a defiant dalit, who had dared to build a small balcony on his house, might lead to an implicit boycott of the whole caste, with every shopkeeper in the village refusing to sell anything to them. These prohibitions are not proclaimed through statements with illocutionary force— pressing the question as to how dalits might bring their own experiences of such exclusions under the legal definition of atrocity. I use the notion of instituting life, not just giving it form, because the restitution of life is not simply a matter of sentiment and emotion within an enclosed domestic sphere; it is a matter of how to describe the ways the singularity of a life extends outwards into rules, prohibitions, taboos that must be engaged in modes that arise from the everyday experience of generating concepts that count for, have meaning and importance for these lives. Simultaneously, each life in its singular ways absorbs the milieu of rules; institutional apparatuses through which different forms of power have shaped its trajectories—a dialogue with the milieu as Canguilhem formulates this issue (see Han & Das, 2015).

Where might we find examples of such a description of everyday life once we have freed ourselves from the snares of the wiles of the metaphysical question ‘what is life?’ by asking instead in what context such a question arises in the singularity of life being lived? I turn to the audacious writing of Krishna Sobti, the famed writer of Hindi fiction, as offering the concepts with which she shows how life might be lived even when it seems to challenge our given notions of reality—and second, demonstrating a body of writing in which the relation to the male voice is recast in such a way that it becomes an aspect of the female voice in a body of writing rather than penetrating it or impregnating it with a dominant masculine voice. The four volumes that I take from Krishna Sobti’s writing are called Hum Hashmat (1977–2019), and I claim that they provide the finest example of a rendering of life that is both a critique of the sexualisation of language and a striving towards a different kind of ‘we’ that does not efface the ‘I’. It is perhaps a version of moral perfectionism in the female voice.

‘हम हशमत’ [We Hashmat]: The ‘We’ in the ‘I’

In her book of literary conversations with her friend and the well-known fellow writer of Hindi fiction, Krishna Baldev Vaid (Sobti & Vaid, 2007), Krishna Sobti has described how one day in her study, as she was writing, she sensed the presence of Hashmat, a male presence, but not with any sense of being alien to her. She explains:

When within the same writer emerge two personalities, two colours, two idioms—I saw this situation when I sensed the presence of Hashmat. I was taking his measure not as of someone else but as of myself. The linguistic idiom through which his visage unfastened was neither new, nor indeed that of a stranger or an outsider. (Sobti & Vaid, 2007, p. 47). ⁵

That Hashmat is not an imaginary figure but a literal presence impresses Sobti, who, nevertheless, allows herself a touch of surprise. As she says, ‘I did not find in Hashmat’s writing anything new or out of the ordinary. His thought was not borrowed from somewhere else, nor were the character of his words alien. Perhaps Hashmat was the form that the many layers of the city took’ (Sobti & Vaid, 2007, p. 48). This was also not a reinvention of Sobti. Yes, there was one event that was wondrous for Sobti, and she expands: ‘With the first line that Hashmat wrote, her writing became different from Hashmat whose letters tilted from left to right, distinct from Sobti’s rather straight fall of the letters’ (Sobti & Vaid, 2007, p. 48).

While I do not have the space within the confines of this article to elaborate all the details, grammatical and aesthetic, that go into the compound word (samasa) ⁶ that I have invented for Sobti–Hashmat, the bold vision of bringing the self towards a completion lies precisely in Sobti’s being able to accept Hashmat in an undramatic way, as if his appearance was as natural and as ordinary as the sun rising in the sky every morning (Sobti, 1977–2019). I relate here three scenes.

First is the scene of Sobti’s writerly self—its finding one aspect of itself in the voice of Hashmat as street orator, whose roughness of voice punctures the pompous prose of the writer-bureaucrat who wants to crush the speech of the ordinary—a mélange of words from Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, old Rajasthani, and Punjabi (Sobti, 2019). While the bureaucratic imagination of Hindi as a national language is to purify Hindi of this mélange of words, sounds, and tones, for Sobti, these admixtures are its lifeblood, received through streams of experiences brought in through the migrant, the refugee, and the foreigner into the texture of Hindi as a living literary language.

Second is a scene in which a character in Sobti flows into Krishna as she is confronted with the normative voice of settled domesticity that casts her as the bearer of unruly desires and despised forms of female speech (Sobti, 1967). ⁷

The third scene is what I would like to call Hashmat’s gift, in which an accidental encounter (imaginary or real, we do not need to know) with a visitor from Lahore (Sobti, 2016a) allows reclamation of a voice lost to Krishna, even if this restoration is momentary—a glimpse of an unrealised possibility.

Hashmat Speaks: The Street Orator

Hashmat’s mode of initiating a critique is to greet his addressee (usually a writer or editor) through terms of address that I heard many times when I was young, during meetings on street corners, in election rallies, and in less refined circles of street-level poets during mushairas (poetry recitations) in the bastis (localities) where part of my childhood was spent. For example, Hashmat might say doston (friends), pyarayo (my beloveds), janab (sir), aji sahib (officer, master, friend), brather (brother with an exaggerated Indian accent, the a stretched out and stressed), followed by phrases that are dripping with sarcasm or affection depending on whether he is addressing an adversary or a friend. The simple but powerful grammatical device of the vocative is one indication we have that Hashmat is a male entity, adept in Urdu, though also proficient in highly Sanskritic Hindi, with words used like stones thrown into some calm waters. Let us savour the first example of Hashmat’s confrontation with Rakesh Vatsa, a politically well-connected Hindi writer whose column urging the purification of Hindi by expelling all words from other languages, especially Urdu and Farsi, was published in the influential Hindi magazine Sarika in 1985. Hashmat’s rejoinder, published in the same magazine, is called Samp ka Pitara (The Basket for the Snake). The use of the term pitara hints at venomous speech (the poisonous bite), the covered basket containing the dangers that can be let loose on the world. This is a small example of how a practice, rather than simply a nominal reference to which one can point, is embedded in the word.

Let us return to the Snake’s Pitara. The first line, the self-introduction by Hashmat, fixes the persona of the addressee (Rakesh Vatsa) more than it introduces Hashmat. The first line by Hashmat is a battle cry:

In the service of the street performer and the crowd-pleaser (majmebaaz) R.V., Hashmat offers his greeting (aadaab). Since by profession you are a street performer, you should have no objections to being called a majmebaaz. You object to this appellation? Never mind, we will call you something else. Rest assured, we do not intend to trouble you or unmask you. Where can we have the audacity to sully your reputation? In your enlightened mind, there burns a 30-volt milky bulb, and here, in our minds, just a bulb with zero power.

The speech of Hashmat here is highly performative and an example of what Krishna Baldev Vaid called a Hashmatayi tukda—an adjectival fragment—another way in which the masculine voice is absorbed as an aspect of Sobti, not by its capacity to penetrate her being, but by giving her voice a different tenor and texture. Hashmat lashes out against R. V.’s mission to purify Hindi. ⁸ How is it, asks Hashmat, that the language of everyday use would suddenly become incomprehensible to the very people who use it? ‘If Punjabi, Braja, Hindi, Apabhransha, have all left their impressions on Hindi and a new ground has given it space to move forward, why is your wrong eye, twitching?’ (aap ki ghalat aankh kyon phadak rahi hai?) The language here is a kind of street oratory often used in parodies of the rich and the powerful in street corner events.

These matters come up in a dialogue between Sobti and Vaid (2007) but remain unresolved. There is Vaid’s insistence that Sobti’s literary language is not the ordinary language of everyday talk, that there is a literary craft there. Sobti, on the other hand, insists that her craft itself is the gift of the swirls of different languages that change and absorb new experiences and that she experiences each word that emerges in her writing as endowed with its own reality, its own costume, its own lineage; each has its sound, its speed, fast or slow, finds its roots as it moves into a sentence, and knocks at the minds and hearts of the reader. ⁹ Words change as new experiences are added: How can we claim, she asks, that Hindi has acquired its final shape?

A compelling example from Sobti is the reference to how different her characters are in each novel, and how much, the little ditties, the snatches of songs or the calls of the hawkers, the water carriers, the kulfi-seller with his starched clothes are different in their cadence, and how they give reality to the city (Sobti, 2018). Some of the floating verses in her novels are what she had heard even as a child and has been unable to forget:

Ek chavanni jai-ram ji ki [A four anna bit for the greeting evoking the name of Rama]

Ek chavanni aadaab arz [A four anna bit for the Urdu greeting—aadaab arz]

This is the Hindi that is honed out of the habit of going out for a morning walk in one of the sprawling Mughal gardens of Delhi, carrying two four anna bits, one for the beggar who greets you with Jai Ram ji ki—hail to Lord Rama; and another for the one who lifts his right hand a bit, gestures to bring the palm towards the forehead but arrests it half way and releases the aadaab arz in the refined Urdu of the old city. Somehow, her voice absorbs the signs she gathers as she surrenders herself to the compulsion of the story that is arising in her. This bundling of habit and the cadence of the words, the mixtures of different languages in her writing, are what she calls her craft. There is an uncanny resonance with Wittgenstein’s (2009) analogy to the city and the multiplicity of language as the condition for speaking of a form of life.

Sobti Meets Hashmat: Inheriting Negation

In introducing herself to Hashmat, thus: A thousand times did we bow before time.

This time, a ‘yes’?

Every time the same voice returns—‘no’.

She comments: ‘Friends, if in our inheritance we received a “no”, then what is to be done?’ (Sobti, 2016b).

My own sense of this inheritance of a negation through which Sobti introduces herself is that it has something to do with how Sobti’s writing emerges. It is only when she recedes somewhat from taking control over her writing and yields instead to a force, a compulsion coming from yet another way of making her hands an instrument for another, that words begin to flow. She writes when there is no option left. She writes, succumbing to a moment that is stubborn in its insistence to be there (honi) (Sobti, 2016b); it installs itself before her and refuses to move, and then, defeated, she picks up the pen. The truth is, she says, that the soul of the writer and the soul of the story both hover around the table. Suddenly you become someone other—each word a body, a soul, a smell. It is your hands that are moving, but you feel the presence of someone other who is writing. If you claim that it is you who writes, the characters line up and warn you: it is not you, Sahib, it is we who are making you write.

The Normative Domestic: The Scene of Reproach

In general, Sobti says she remains vigilant in maintaining a distant civility between herself and her characters. She does not seem to need this caution with regard to Hashmat. Yet sometimes a female character from her novel seems to slip into her life.

I will relate here one example she gives of such a slippage. Krishna was quite aware of how her mode of dressing, or her own visage, set her apart from others. She has been described by some of her biographers as dressing like a Mughal princess: a flowing gharara and tunic with shimmering brocade or silver or gold borders, head always covered with a flowing scarf, huge dark glasses. At least this was the attire she sported (with shoes of two-inch heels) at the time that the incident she describes here occurred—later, when she moved from her Mall Road apartment to Mayur Vihar across the Jamuna at about age 60, she shifted to a self-designed, equally striking but more practical attire. About the incident relating to her character Mitro, she writes:

In a party (in Delhi), reacting to my way of dressing and my gestures, ¹⁰ a respectably married woman hit me with a (metaphorical) flowery stick. With eyes washed in milk, dripping with sweetness, she took my measure with the eyes of a concerned mother, and said in a very gentle voice, you seem to be the kind who is fond of music and dance. As soon as I discerned her meaning (the implied insult), I handed her my own eyes for use as her camera. I meekly submitted myself to the pictures, present and past, that she began to click. That evening, the clearest photograph that emerged was this. I am all decked up, with a surahi (wine jug) decorated with intricate enamel designs (meenakari), from which I am pouring out something (where, do not ask). (Sobti, 2016b, pp. 264–265)

I cannot resist giving a fragment of the scene from Mitro Marjani, which comes closest to the image of Krishna Sobti as a saqi (the wine-pouring female literary figure of Persian and Urdu poetry), carrying a wine jug as the image of Mitro suddenly flashes before us. The kindly woman might not have directly called her style and mode of being as taken from the kotha (the cordoned-off space of the courtesan), but in her dream image, Krishna shows how the image of Mitro was being fused with the image of Sobti. So here is the point of denouement in Mitro Marjani, when away from the conjugal home, Mitro dares to enact the courtesan, and her husband Sardari responds, not by the disciplining of desire he has always tried to impose on her, but by accepting that he could indeed be the one who caused such pleasure to awaken in this earthy beauty. Abandoning the hold of the image of the ‘good’ Hindu wife allows Sardari to experience the life of fantasy within (and not outside) the domestic. Here is a brief snippet from this scene.

Fantasy is not expelled from the everyday nor does it dissolve into the scepticism of the male subject, am I really the cause of this pleasure in this woman? Instead, Sardari learns to trust this fantasy. Sobti has said in an interview that she was disappointed and surprised that Mitro seemed to have accepted the bounds of the domestic as evidence that the author cannot direct where the character will go. True.

Hashmat’s Gift

My last example of a different register of speech from Hashmat is the occasion when, through a chance encounter, he meets Amjad Bhatti, the young editor of the magazine Panj Darya, from Lahore. Through a meandering path that I will skip, Sheela and Hashmat both find themselves invited to the home of Amrita Pritam, where Imroz, her caregiver and perhaps lover, and they spend an evening reminiscing over the city of Lahore. Sobti is present only through the voice of Hashmat—yet it is a blended voice of Hashmat, Sobti, and Krishna.

There are some moments I wish to capture, even if they will appear as just details scattered here and there. Hashmat starts, ‘what timing!’ when Amjad interrupts him, ‘this man (referring to himself, banda) is coming from Lahore, let us talk in our own language’. Imroz stretches the talk, Hashmat Miyan, this man is the authentic Lahori man—today at least let us use our own tongue—talk to him not in Hindi or Urdu, but in Punjabi.

There is, at this moment, the famous silences that Sobti has repeatedly said she wants to preserve in her writing. One assumes that the conversation moved forward in Punjabi (whether in the story or in the actual meeting), but the written account does not bear any mark of that. There is an exchange on popular authors in Pakistan: How has Lahore expanded? Hashmat’s heart started yearning for Lahore—Anarkali, Mall, Jail Road, Nisbet Road—but when he looked at Amjad, there was not even a shade of recognition of this yearning. Hashmat wishes he could have belonged to this generation, with nothing fracturing the old and the new. Hashmat learns that Amjad’s family was uprooted from Amritsar. His grandfather was a famed Sufi poet. On Hashmat’s request, Amjad reads out his own poetry from a diary that he carries with him. This and the other poems he recites are the only strings of words we hear in Punjabi in the whole four volumes of Hum Hashmat. All kinds of talk pervade, letting us imagine the sounds of Punjabi; more poetry is recited. Then, at one point, they return to Lahore.

The splendour of Lahore?

Very much there.

The cool breezes?

They flow as ever, make us well.

And those warm hearts of the Lahoris, brimming with passion?

As always, they are there, Hashmat Sahib.

We (Hashmat) wanted to ask more, but then suddenly the flag of the new nation began fluttering between us.

In utter confusion, Hashmat asked, ‘Are the sarson ka sag and makki di roti there too?

Amjad Bhatti seems to grow ten years older. ‘Hashmat Sahib, what you want to know, I understand well. Let it go. But yes, I can tell you that mustard greens and corn roti are cooked the same way, and smeared with ghee the same way, on that side as on this side’. The last glimpse we are afforded is of Hashmat getting up, shaking Amjad’s hand (this Amritsari-Lahori boy). All right, Your Highness (badshaho), go make your country prosperous. If you can remember, give them our salaam—tell them, there was a time when we too were the inhabitants of that same nation.

Reading this essay, I thought this was the most complex rendering of voice I have seen. Nowhere does Sobti allow her voice to be marked as female, not through grammar, not through any dramatic cues. The encounter in this way is possible because it is Hashmat who speaks. Yet the texture of the text is suffused by the swirling affects of Krishna and of Sobti. Krishna had never allowed herself to speak in Punjabi; Sobti resolutely kept to the half tones of Punjabi but refused to be seen as a Punjabi writer. ¹² Through Hashmat, she now participates in a conversation in Punjabi, though she will not allow her reader to hear the sounds of Punjabi coming through her mouth. We, as readers, do not hear the Punjabi, but we can read the poems aloud and relive the scene of Amjad reciting his poems in Punjabi and, through the mediation of Hashmat, see Krishna allowing herself to participate in a Lahori evening. The last question that stumbles out of Hashmat’s mouth on whether the sarson da saag and makki di roti are made in the same way there as here; it could only have been a woman’s question.

Conclusion

In the recent surge of writing on Wittgenstein and feminism, Laugier (2025) makes an important intervention in arguing that a line runs from Wittgenstein to Austin to Cavell that consists not in applying concepts from ordinary language philosophy to feminism, but in showing how the vulnerability of human action aligns with ethics as the care of the ordinary form of life in both traditions of thought. In the writing of Krishna Sobti and her quiet acceptance of Hashmat as a male presence within her own body of writing, we find her fierce defence of a Hindi energised by many tongues, and her weaving together of domestic, erotic, and political scenes that all demonstrate how the female subject can absorb the masculine voice without being overtaken by it.

It remains for us to ask if anthropology, and by implication social science, can receive this gift of thinking in the feminine mode from literature and thus find a joining of ethics and politics in the reinstitution of life. The female voice in the movement of thought as a descent into the ordinary is not to shun reason but to recognise other paths to it.