Four angry women, in Bengali writer Kabita Singha’s eponymous novel, decide to go “out flying for a whole day” one winter in Calcutta (now Kolkata), most likely in the 1950s. Suman, Bulan, Renu and Chuni are fashionably bedecked as they walk from Dalhousie towards Park Street. On the verge of adulthood, they evoke a lurid curiosity among the public, especially in the men who flock around them. But the girls do not care. They plan to get a drink at the famous Olympia bar (though drinking is forbidden to them), have a hearty meal, and enjoy their outing, come what may.
As they walk down Chowringhee, the women take a nosy uncle to task, mock the young men trailing them, and venture into places where girls from good families should not—at least not on their own. Their adventures are told by the garrulous Chuni, who also offers vignettes into her friends’ pasts. By the end of the novel, the reader has learnt about slices of their lives, the sorrows they nurse in their hearts, and their raging desire for freedom from the fetters of patriarchy, which have doomed them to a future not of their choosing.
This is the broad arc of Four Angry Women, Singha’s debut novel, first published in 1956 and recently translated into English by Shamita Das Dasgupta. Born in 1931, Singha was, until her death in 1998, one of Bengal’s pre-eminent modernist poets, a feminist who showed the way to women writers who followed her.
A broadcaster with All India Radio for much of her life, she married against her family’s wishes, raised children while managing a prolific writing career, but never got her due during her lifetime. When she died in the US while staying with her daughter, the news wasn’t even reported in the mainstream media. Her friends and colleagues learned of her death several days later from notices in “little magazines”.
Yet in the 1950s and 1960s, Singha’s was a distinctive female voice that made itself heard over the chorus of the all-male bastion of poets who were part of a radical literary movement led by the “Hungry Generation”. Indeed, the title of her first novel offered a counterpoint to the now-familiar trope of “Angry Young Man” that the male writers of her time were busy celebrating. Singha’s women are angry, too, but they are better at holding it in. Except for a momentary outburst of violence, Four Angry Women gives a painful, visceral glimpse into what it feels like to be consumed by a silent rage—be it at family, lovers or, simply, society at large.
Even as Singha experiments with the form of the realist novel in Four Angry Women by disrupting the flow of the narrative and digressing into flashbacks, her message remains deeply political.
Chuni, who comes from a much poorer family compared to her friends, acts as a guide into the inner lives of her friends. Sisters Bulan and Renu are in a quandary as their elder sibling’s prospect of marriage remains stalled. Although they do not come from a well-off family, they are picky about the men they want to meet. Bulan, the more daring of the two, strings along an electrician for fun, but snaps when Renu takes a serious interest in him.
Suman, in contrast, comes from an affluent family. Although her parents are separated, each lavish her with all the luxuries she wants. Yet, her romantic prospects remain blighted by her poor judgement of men and her haughtiness, which bursts out in odd moments without warning.
Finally, there is Chuni, the Cinderella among these princesses. She dreams of being rescued by her Prince Charming one day, but until then she must continue to cook and clean for her father and his new wife. She must be the keeper of her friends’ deepest, darkest secrets, their liaisons with various men, and other reckless acts.
Most of all, Chuni must protect the fragile dynamics of class among the group. She remains on tenterhooks for much of the time, her only release being her internal monologues with her mother who is long dead. As she walks the streets of her hometown, Chuni thinks “the city is me—I AM the city.” And indeed, Chuni does act like an expansive backdrop against which the dramas and desires of her moody friends are played out. Like the city, she is a protective, if somewhat unpredictable, guardian angel to her friends.
Somewhat predictably, the four women are trailed by a mixed bag of men, the good, evil and the unremarkable. From an industrialist’s spoilt son to a rebel against the system who lays down his life, they come with different moral compasses. But be it by their fecklessness, or ill-considered reactions, each of them ignites the embers that lie simmering in the hearts of the young girls, as well as in the mind of their creator.
Four Angry Women is unmistakably a young woman’s novel. It’s a jolt to a literary tradition where women, even the most rebellious among them, are expected to abide by rules of decorum. By dispensing with proprieties, Singha gives herself—and the women of her time and future—permission to let loose the “black snake” of anger, which Virginia Woolf described in A Room of One’s Own as being a fundamental conduit for women’s creativity.