How do you mourn a person you have wanted to meet, because you have known her through her work, but never quite got the chance? I muse as I take a flying carpet ride uptown, expedited by the magical arrival of every train I want so that I reach the Columbia campus just in time. Somewhere near Schermerhorn, I take the wrong turn, get misguided twice, then get into the right building but onto an elevator that refuses to go up, and by the time I finally arrive, Gauri Viswanathan and Meena Alexander have already spoken. As I step into the room, Gayatri Spivak is saying a few words about Meenakshi Mukherjee. It takes me a while to realize that she means to speak later actually, and this is a little pause in between speakers, as memories seem to spill over from whatever she has planned to say when it is her turn. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Robert Young and Gayatri Spivak share their reminiscences. Spivak reads out messages from Probal Dasgupta and Supriya Chaudhuri. Mukherjee’s literary sensibility and the acuteness with which she engaged with a later generation of literary scholars who were more oriented towards theory and social science comes through in what all of them say. Taking issue with the labelling of Meenakshi Mukherjee as ‘pre-theoretical’, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan points out how Mukherjee’s reading of Jane Austen anticipates the argument about Antigua in Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism.
Then everybody in the room is invited to speak in remembrance if they wish. As Rochelle Almeida and others reminisce, among them Mayurika, a former student of Meenakshi Mukherjee, now a researcher at SOAS, one gets a sense of the warmth she exuded all around her. Almeida recalls a chance meeting with Mukherjee at a conference where a long gap in the schedule threw them together, and how Mukherjee was very enthusiastic about discussing her work, while she wanted to talk about Mukherjee’s. Mukherjee had said that she thought from reading Almeida’s Originality and Imitation that it would be by a white Portuguese woman. Mukherjee, then limping badly because of an injury, required assistance in draping her heavy silk sari for the evening, and Almeida goes on to say how she came to the rescue, and how Mukherjee told everyone that she had never ever worn her sari as immaculately and that she looked like an Air India air-hostess because of Rochelle!
Mayurika is the only direct student of Meenakshi Mukherjee among those gathered, and gives us an impression of the scholar as pedagogue—hitching up her sari to sit on the teacher’s desk throughout an engaging lecture… followed by her students to her office where they were welcome at any time… caring to teach them citation styles…. Mayurika’s admiration and reverence for her professor remind me of my professor, Alo Ray’s memories of Meenakshi Mukherjee and Sujit Mukherjee as her mentors. When Mayurika talks about her teacher, it seems as though the same warmth overflows, that I could sense in Alodi towards her teachers as she spoke of them over the phone, long ago in Calcutta.
Fittingly, Spivak commences by recounting how they met for the first time in a Texas locker-room after swimming. Mukherjee recognized her as an Indian woman by the mark of the drawstring of the underskirt on her waist, and they hit it off from there. Spivak doesn't forget to add that this was after she had given Mukherjee’s first book a bad review.
I try to match the overall impression I get of a vibrant intellectual who was also very warm, gave generously of her time, and was ever appreciative of the achievements of younger scholars and her students, with my first encounter with her through her OUP edition of Pride and Prejudice that opened up questions of feminist theory for me, and later on, for my students, when I began teaching in Calcutta. I am carried back to the time when I was thrilled to watch a bunch of impressionable undergraduates getting sensitized into an understanding of the novel where the woman’s perspective was central. It was as though I had handed them a magic wand. As I get up to leave the small gathering, it seems I have come for more than myself.
Then everybody in the room is invited to speak in remembrance if they wish. As Rochelle Almeida and others reminisce, among them Mayurika, a former student of Meenakshi Mukherjee, now a researcher at SOAS, one gets a sense of the warmth she exuded all around her. Almeida recalls a chance meeting with Mukherjee at a conference where a long gap in the schedule threw them together, and how Mukherjee was very enthusiastic about discussing her work, while she wanted to talk about Mukherjee’s. Mukherjee had said that she thought from reading Almeida’s Originality and Imitation that it would be by a white Portuguese woman. Mukherjee, then limping badly because of an injury, required assistance in draping her heavy silk sari for the evening, and Almeida goes on to say how she came to the rescue, and how Mukherjee told everyone that she had never ever worn her sari as immaculately and that she looked like an Air India air-hostess because of Rochelle!
Mayurika is the only direct student of Meenakshi Mukherjee among those gathered, and gives us an impression of the scholar as pedagogue—hitching up her sari to sit on the teacher’s desk throughout an engaging lecture… followed by her students to her office where they were welcome at any time… caring to teach them citation styles…. Mayurika’s admiration and reverence for her professor remind me of my professor, Alo Ray’s memories of Meenakshi Mukherjee and Sujit Mukherjee as her mentors. When Mayurika talks about her teacher, it seems as though the same warmth overflows, that I could sense in Alodi towards her teachers as she spoke of them over the phone, long ago in Calcutta.
Fittingly, Spivak commences by recounting how they met for the first time in a Texas locker-room after swimming. Mukherjee recognized her as an Indian woman by the mark of the drawstring of the underskirt on her waist, and they hit it off from there. Spivak doesn't forget to add that this was after she had given Mukherjee’s first book a bad review.
I try to match the overall impression I get of a vibrant intellectual who was also very warm, gave generously of her time, and was ever appreciative of the achievements of younger scholars and her students, with my first encounter with her through her OUP edition of Pride and Prejudice that opened up questions of feminist theory for me, and later on, for my students, when I began teaching in Calcutta. I am carried back to the time when I was thrilled to watch a bunch of impressionable undergraduates getting sensitized into an understanding of the novel where the woman’s perspective was central. It was as though I had handed them a magic wand. As I get up to leave the small gathering, it seems I have come for more than myself.
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