TW: Mentions of Suicide and Mental health disorders
As Harper Collins presented Instruments of Torture, author Aparna Sanyal commented:
The idea for Instruments of Torture incepted itself into my head some summers ago, while visiting a physical exhibition of medieval torture devices. It stayed entrenched until I got the eight stories firmly on paper. The more I read about the devices’ cruel and unusual histories, the clearer the stories became in my mind’s eye. Often, I get asked how long it took to write this book; let’s just say it has lived in my head for a lot longer than it has on paper.
What do we understand by torture? How does a modern short story explore its metaphorical undertones? How does its medieval-ness incorporate itself into the society that we know and come from? Sanyal’s Instruments of Torture provokes the author to comprehend the discomforts of such a series of interrogations while walking the reader through the very familiar itinerary of the social order that encircles them. What results is an uncomfortable examination of the collective self. Do we as a community welcome and accommodate differences or do we entirely repress and push them away?
Understanding Personalities: Who is the story about?
One of the brilliant techniques through which Sanyal succeeds in interrogating their reader is by evaluating and deciding whose stories to tell. Lies amidst the collection, a baby who is “diagnosed” with dwarfism, a teenage boy unsure of his sexuality, a bold midwife who doesn’t resemble with the customary elegance of a coy and submissive woman, a patriarchally oppressed wife being made to relapse into clinical depression and many more.
Sanyal’s characters are those who have been marginalized, pushed to the very edges of the pompous spectacle of sociological and political propaganda of unity and uniformity. They are those who are differently-abled or non-confirming to the patriarchal and heteronormative standards that we tend to promote as part of the Indian patriotic tradition.
Carefully choosing the literary recounting of the marginalized alongside the memory and data of concrete torture devices, Sanyal’s text demands whether torture is just a vocabulary of indiscriminate devices and mechanisms of physical discomforts or more than that.
The stories here suggest that in contemporary times torture, particularly who gets tortured is also connected with various cultural and socio-political norms and privileges. Differences that are almost unbearable to societal expectations of a uniform standard of existence as well as people who are at the lowest rung in the social hierarchies of cast and class are repressed to the extent that it may provoke the subject into question take their own lives and thus are not less torture-inducing than a certain machinic device built for that very purpose. Of course, the menacing distinction between then and now is that the devices are very well garbed in the rhetoric of customs and tradition.
Of Stories or Incidents: Heard and Unheard
As I carefully flipped through pages, the cited definitions of torture devices fused into a horror that loved ones inflicted upon each other. Parents inflicted on the child; spouses inflicted on one another. Raghu a dwarf child was brutally attended to by his parents. In fear of being jested upon by all her social circle, the mother forces into their skin, not care not love but multiple oily injections, hoping that her child would grow, hoping that they would one day find a suitable bride.
Once an inch tall, she celebrates it through a pompous soiree, unaware of how the same evening her child would jump off a building, listening to an unknown empathetic voice decked with compassionate promises. Shona Pujari from ‘The Pillory’, in grasp of vivid hallucinations and schizophrenia is rendered helpless by her old friend and (later) Doctor Sumeet Chauhan. Sick, she remains within binds, offered conveniently at the altar of fantasies in which Sumeet is seen regaling.
Focusing her discourse on bodies Sanyal also makes an effort to demonstrate how our conditioning and the stereotypes we perpetuate tend to imprison us in our bodies. The poignant tale of Poornima weaved out through the metaphors built around “The Spanish Boot” is such an example.
Poornima who is a spectacularly beautiful woman (according to our far-fetched beauty standards) has been conditioned by her mother into believing in the central importance of her fair complexion and thin waist robbing her of all childhood joys that may have later turned her into a much more mature and compassionate human being. Constantly making efforts to look beautiful for parties, Poornima is in the end trapped in her high stilettos that destroy her opportunity at experiencing pure happiness.
We collectively praise, day in and day out, the apparent progress that we continue to make as a society. Yet beneath our customary laugh, a dehumanizing mechanism continues to flourish that alienates people from access to public spaces making us question the job we are doing of accommodating difference.
Accepting Bodies, Accepting Differences
To the very end of her collection, Aparna Sanyal raises questions. Questions that are quite central to the interaction of bodies, of interacting with one’s own body, of interacting and welcoming difference. While all the way, she tries to build a narrative that focuses on the presence of torture as it exists in contemporary society, the last story in the collection, “The Chastity Belt”, is not only an exploration of this particular concept but also a welcoming celebration of the spectrum that sexuality and the experience of it all can be.
We are acquainted with Amba a midwife, who’s unusually bold in her temperament, making her attractive to the most handsome man of the village, Reshu. Towards the end, of the story, Reshu and Amba are seen interacting in a love triangle of sorts with Reshu being a spectator of Amba’s initiation of lovemaking. Not only does the story continue with the boldness and audacity of a woman but we also see a man who out of extreme devotion towards witnessing this act of love, ends up the one being restrained in the chastity belt of celibacy. Yet the story ends with Reshu sensing a satisfactory feeling out of his decision.
Offering a unique perspective on the functioning of Indian society, Instruments of Torture is a collection that questions the reader in powerful ways, upsetting the notion of chronological progress. Sanyal is an innovative writer with hopeful promises in the face of contemporary political and social scenarios.
The book has been published by Harper Collins India. Follow them on YKA here.