The Radiance of a Thousand Suns - Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

A one-liner before I delve deep into this book – I agree with what Gulzar sir has given as a caption for the book ‘Has the radiance of Blood and the Sun’. 

I won this book for posting a comment on an Author live session on Blogchatter – #BlogchatterWritFest – in March 2021. 

While I have read many storylines with a woman as the protagonist (starting with Nancy Drew & Alice in Wonderland, during my school days), this book was completely different to read and connect emotionally as well. In fact, the narrative of the entire masterpiece was so well interwoven from the point of view of different women who had different lived experiences and strong in their own sense of being, to bring about change in the societal narratives, in their own ways. 

I was floored by the author’s take on Violence and Silence in that order while bringing out women-centric narratives on the 1947 partition of India and the 1984 Anti-Sikh riots. Violence always leaves a deep gash not just physically, but also emotionally, that takes probably generations to even become a scar. Healing would take forever, as the grief that violence leaves behind is just too heavy to process and handle any faster. 

In a conversation between a grandmother and a granddaughter (who lost her mother at birth – a story of gross negligence due to misplaced priorities – read the book to know more on this), the grandmother, Biji, talks about a metaphor of all women invisibly pregnant, carrying inside them millions of stories to tell, yet silent and hence yet to deliver. This metaphor was just mind-blowing and so well relatable, especially as chapters unfolded and story after story showed why women chose to remain invisibly pregnant. Even today many of us choose this path for the exact same reasons. Wish it were not so. Reading this book strengthened my resolve to use my voice and writing to break that vicious cycle of pregnant silence and bring out narratives from the point of view of a woman if not for the world, at least to my circle of influence and create a shift in the way things have been traditionally valued and acted upon, some of which are so outdated and devoid of logic. 

The entire book speaks volumes on various coping mechanisms that women have traditionally practiced dealing with violence, trauma, idiocy, and more, of this patriarchally structured society, including memory holes that are so relevant even during the #metoo movement where the trauma of rape, sexual abuse (especially Child Sexual Abuse – CSA) and harassment follows this pattern of a non-event because the society wants to erase the unpleasantness of such occurrences. By making them non-events and not recording them in the narrative of history/news, we, as a society, tend to forget the event completely, a few days (probably months) after its occurrence. This gives rise to invisible people – the unperson – those who were silent sufferers of the traumatic actions meted out by perpetrators (whether it is war or abuse) - one such story is that of Jyot a survivor of both these traumatic incidents. 

I could never relate to the heroic narratives of 1947 and 1984 as part of recorded history, without feeling the pain, suffering, and the feeling of emptiness when the question invariably popped ‘What was the point of all these?’. This book brings to light why I kept feeling that emptiness and why that question kept popping. Despite not being close to the places where these two historic traumatic events happened, it still has a wrenching effect in my gut. I can only imagine how much it must have hurt those who were strongly associated with these events in any form. 

The first few chapters that dealt with the 1947 partition narratives/perspectives, from the point of view of women and girl children were overwhelmingly traumatic to read without breaks. Yet they were descriptive enough for anyone who reads it to see what a woman/girl saw from her point of view. 

This book needs to be read by everyone to understand a woman’s point of view of how it is to be considered as an invisible being or as an object of possession every time a man wanted to prove his superiority! It also would serve well to be reminded that in doing so there is no manliness that is depicted, but only the childish aggression of patriarchy is exhibited, showing how immature the entire concept itself is. Women always bounce back to move on with life irrespective of the bad cards they might be dealt, not by life itself, but by the idiocrasy exhibited in name of patriarchy, religion, caste, gender, race, and more! This proves their high emotional intelligence – either developed by force of situational demands or by design and their ability to heal themselves and the world around them every single time, till it becomes too much for them to bear (the inter-generational trauma - which also is beautifully depicted through the book).

The radiance of the narrative by author Manreet Sodhi Someshwar is blindingly bright to go through all filtered glasses worn. 

This post is part of Blogchatter's #CauseAChatter - #GenderTalks