Easterine K. Iralu, A Terrible Matriarchy, Zubaan, India, 2007. 314 pages. Rs. 295.

“My Grandmother didn’t like me. I knew this when I was about four and a half.” These are the opening words of Easterine Iralu’s A Terrible Matriarchy spoken by Lieno, the narrator. 313 pages and 19 years later, Lieno has an offer of marriage: “Mother and I found out that this was not the first offer I had had. There had been three others but the boys’ families had gone to speak to my Aunt Bino as was our custom. Each time, she had rebuffed them saying that I was probably too outspoken to be considered as good wife material.”

A Terrible Matriarchy is a girl’s coming of age story and it reminds one of other stories in the genre, Jane Eyre, for instance. Part of why Jane became the eponymous nineteenth century English governess is because Charlotte Bronte picks up the little girl and takes the reader along on Jane’s journey through her trying early years to her maturity into womanhood. This is what Iralu does with little Lieno (short for Dielieno). Unlike the orphaned Jane, Lieno has loving and supportive parents, but like Jane who lives with her Aunt Reed, Lieno is sent to live with her grandmother and help with household chores. And Grandmother Vibano is not unlike Aunt Reed, and the tension provoked by the older women’s obstinacy in both stories sets the direction for the rest of the girls’ lives. But the similarities between the two novels end there — at the level of the initial plots. After that, Lieno and Jane inhabit different worlds. A Terrible Matriarchy is as mid-twentieth century Nagaland as Jane Eyre is early Victorian England.  

ATM is Dielieno’s story. Her Angami name, which translates into “little errand girl,” describes much of her life from age five to twenty-three. But the story is more than Lieno’s. It is about three generations of Naga women: Grandmother, Mother, and Lieno. It is a time of rapid social change. The women’s lives intertwine intimately and contrarily, defining them as individuals and their generational differences.

The tension is most evident between grandmother and granddaughter. Grandmother has lived her life serving the men folk of the clan. Especially because her husband worked for the government and became a person of better means than most in the community, serving and pleasing him seemed a natural way for Grandmother to find her own fulfillment in life. Besides, as a woman in a traditional Angami society, she was expected to meet her husband’s needs. Naga women defined themselves and were used to being defined in relation to their men. There were perks for women who lived in this way — as supplements to successful men. Over time, they acquired a privileged status in the family circle.

Grandmother Vibano has earned this kind of status when the story opens shortly after her husband’s death. As the matriarch of her clan, with her husband’s pension settled on her, she commands deference from the men and the women alike. She’s the granddame among women and, had she known, would have fancied herself the Golda Meir, the Indira Gandhi or the Margaret Thatcher of Naga patriarchy. It’s easy to see why the circumstances that led Grandmother to this privileged position also engendered in her a tendency to dote on males. As matriarch, she can dispense her favors on whomever she liked, howsoever she wanted. No surprise then that she fawns on her grandsons and engineers to take in her niece and granddaughter as boarders for domestic help.

Lieno, on the other hand, being the youngest and only daughter of five children, feels special as the little darling of her parents and brothers. She resents having to leave her family to become “Dielieno” to the clan’s notorious enabler of male ego and spoiler of female confidence and modern education. But as the youngest female of the clan, she has little choice but to obey the wishes of the elders, even if that means being raised on anachronistic standards of female appeal and accomplishment that ignore the inevitable changes taking place in Naga society during her lifetime.   

Lieno’s mother has the unenviable position of having to navigate the troubled space between a stern, old mother-in-law and her bright, no-nonsense daughter. Not much can be expected of her especially given her frail constitution made weaker by the untimely loss of a sickly son and the drug addiction and death of another. Yet it is through this overly sensitive, long-suffering mother that the strength and wisdom of women get passed down to Lieno. It’s the kind of understanding in women that comes from generations of caring for people from birth to death — indeed from before birth to beyond death — and there are several of both in the novel.

Soon after Grandmother’s death, the mother tells her twenty-one year old Lieno: “You mustn’t be so harsh on your Grandmother. I know you were unhappy in her house but she was trying to teach you to become a good woman.” The mother goes on to explain that the reason Grandmother was partial to boys was the males-only inheritance system. It meant “widows without sons lost all their husband’s property to other male relatives,” which left women helplessly intent on marrying men with personal property, and obsessed with bearing male heirs who will care for them in old age. Grandmother saw her mother suffer on account of this custom, the mother tells Lieno, and this, according to her, shaped Grandmother’s thinking about boys and girls for life.

Lieno may not have needed her mother’s help to figure that out about Grandmother, but two other conclusions the mother draws from her narrative of Grandmother’s life are insights that Lieno needed to hear, one despite herself, the other for herself. The first is a comment on the way men generally are: “Men don’t like women who are aggressive and outspoken. They like their wives to be good workers. You are a good worker, Lieno, but you must try to be more docile.” Lieno’s mother credits Grandmother with trying to instill this practical lesson in the young Lieno. The second is a sentiment Grandmother would not have fully shared but which in a way affirms the positions of all three women: “You know that our people say we should love our sons because they are the ones who look after us in our old age. That may be true but for your father and I, it is you, our daughter, who has brought us the greatest comfort. We love all of you equally. You must always know that.”

The reader knows of course that Grandmother would ultimately lose to Lieno if for nothing else than that time favors the young. But in a bildungsroman, the plot is geared by tests of personal strength in an environment of socially accepted morals and values. So it is Lieno’s intelligence and hard work, coupled with her humanity and sense of social justice, which in the end assure her personal victory. Her mother realizes this and confirms Lieno’s coming of age in a personal tribute to her daughter: “I guess she [Grandmother] had grown up to believe that girls were weak and not as good as boys. We were all told that as children. But I know differently now. I am amazed at your strength sometimes, Lieno. The way you took over the household when Pete died. You were just eleven and a half and yet you took over my role in our family so naturally. I can see that women are not weak. They have a strength different from men.” The mother/daughter roles merge here indistinguishably, as does the grandmother’s, since it was at her house that Lieno had learned to take over the care of family so naturally. The point of ATM then seems to be that all three generations of women get to tell their stories.

Grandmother’s story has a straightforward male-centered theme from the past: “In my father’s day, boys never did any work because they had to look after the village and engage enemy warriors in warfare. The household that did not have a male heir was considered barren. They were always in constant danger if there was a war. The women would only have one man to protect them. That is why we love our male children so much and we give them the best of food. And we should.” But this is not all. Grandmother persists in having her beliefs validated even after death. True to her habit of looking to the past, she continues to haunt the tenants of her house from the grave until it goes to the person she willed it to: her infant great grandson Salhou.

Other women’s lives are included in the stories of the three major female characters. Salhou’s mother, Nisano, another long-suffering young wife and widow; Bano, Grandmother’s niece and unmarried spinster and Lieno’s older-sister figure at Grandmother’s place, who served and kept house for Grandmother till her death; Lieno’s best friend, Vimenuo, and her dutiful, caring mother whom Grandmother dismisses as a family with “bad blood” because the father is an alcoholic. These are the Naga girls and women who rise daily at dawn to fetch water, cook, clean, and care for family; who give birth, raise the kids, and mourn the dead and serve the mourners at funerals. They are the men’s caregivers, consolers and teachers; they are the keepers as well as the reformers of the traditional practices that marginalize them, the preservers of social etiquette and the upholders of the community’s virtues. There are women unlike these too, of course, whose stories find a place in ATM, like the neighborhood gossips at the water spot, the unfortunate women at the drinking houses, and smug, petty women of influence like Aunt Bino, who sent away the first three suitors of Lieno.   

There are other Naga themes woven into the lives of the women in ATM. The uneasy co-existence between traditional Naga customary practices and Christianity comes up repeatedly in the Angami ritual of loud dirges at funerals, which are politely but predictably silenced by scripture readings and prayers by local pastors. Christianity’s power over Naga customary practice in the four mourning scenes suggests the inevitable victory of the new order over the old on the lines seen in Lieno’s personal triumph over Grandmother.

Another subject alluded to in passing is the Naga independence movement. Naga nationalism is presented as a male domain. It is borne of a combination of wounded Naga pride and hopelessness in personal life. It’s what happens to impatient, idealistic young men when confronted with abuse of power and hypocrisy in public life. But most of all it is a manifestation of anger and frustration at the human rights abuses on Naga people by the Government of India. Lieno being the curious, principled woman she grows into by the end of the novel, one suspects the subject will figure more prominently later in her life. But up to this point in her experience, ATM is first and last the story of a little Naga girl who grows up to be an admirable and accomplished young woman in the ways that her society in the middle of the 20^th century would allow her to become.   

Lieno’s life is told in an unadorned language that moves because of the power of its evocative simplicity. The narrative tone and imagery fit the manners and imagination of its young protagonist-narrator. Precisely wrought images and snatches of conversation capture and suggest a whole ambience of everyday life in Nagaland. For instance, the following bits of reference that help recreate young Lieno’s daily routine in the reader’s mind: “I heard her [Bano] breaking twigs and blowing on the embers of last night’s fire. We always buried a small burning log in the ash in the hearth so that we could start the fire with it in the morning.” Or the description of Grandmother’s kettle that “was burned pitch-black from the years of being used on a wood fire. It was so old, it was dented in places.” And Grandmother’s well-stocked kitchen where “Dried meat hung from spiked bamboo over the fire.” Or a scene at the water spring that Lieno describes for the reader: “Then I put my pitcher in my basket and lifted it on the higher stone so I could carry it without any help.” And the time Lieno says she could not drink “very hot” tea like her parents always did. “So I took an extra cup and poured my tea into it and then back into my own cup. I did this several times to cool the tea.” Or the observation about how meat cooked and left overnight in the winter tasted best “because the gravy formed a glutinous base which tasted delicious [when eaten] with steaming rice.” Or the attention to detail about women’s ways with clothes at Christmas: “All the girls wore new dresses. Many mothers wore something new like a body-cloth. If it was a new blouse they didn’t quite cover it up with their body-cloth and you could see they were wearing new blouses.”

Nothing significant escapes Iralu’s eyes and memory. All dimensions of experience find their way into Lieno’s story. World War II in Kohima, for instance, as recalled by Lieno’s mother; or dreams, which play a suggestive role in Lieno’s life. And since life is incomplete without the expectation of an after-life, Iralu makes sure to include the return of the dead in the form of spirits and out-of-body visitations to their favorite haunts while alive. If there’s something left to be desired, it might be that Iralu would be as good a delineator of place as of character, or that she would give us more laughter since it’s a staple in Naga social life. There’s only a hint of humor once when Bano bursts into an uncontrollable laugh at the sight of Lieno desperately screwing her head through a sleeve, instead of the neck, of her sweater. But ATM does not need to be funny because little Lieno sings in the pages of the book (like the picture of a singing sparrow that adorns the bottom of every page of the Zubaan edition). It lacks nothing to complete the journey of a girl from childhood to womanhood, which mirrors the journey of a society whose women like Lieno and her mother have helped make the transition from an age of “ a terrible matriarchy” to one of greater possibilities. With young, progressive women like Lieno, Naga families are in good hands, and in Easterine Iralu, Naga women have an unusually clear and resourceful advocate.          

Every society and age seems to have a girl’s coming of age story that captures the society and the time so well that it becomes part of the people’s living memory for good. Antigone for ancient Greece, Jane Eyre for Victorian England, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl for early nineteenth century American south, The Diary of Anne Frank for Nazi Europe, Abeng for postcolonial Caribbean, Nervous Conditions for 1960s Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), The House on Mango Street for Hispanic America, to mention a few. For mid-twentieth century Naga society, Easterine Iralu’s A Terrible Matriarchy could very well be that story. It also has the distinction of being the first Naga novel in English.