5 min readMar 9, 2026 07:04 AM IST First published on: Mar 9, 2026 at 07:03 AM IST“But those tools are not our tools, and that business is not our business. For us, those conventions are ruin, those tools are death.” Such are the strange workings of the mind that these words by Virginia Woolf came to me when I heard Hannah Spencer give a short victory speech after being elected to UK Parliament: “I didn’t grow up wanting to be a politician. I’m a plumber. And two weeks ago, during all this, I also qualified as a plasterer… we do things differently here.”Much before I read Woolf’s essay, Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown, I’d encountered the sense of this difference in a film that my father had forced on me when I was in school — Satyajit Ray’s Charulata. Charulata, a young woman married to a busy newspaper editor-husband, gets drawn to her brother-in-law, Amal. He’s a writer, and Ray slyly lets us know what kind of a writer he is — Amal’s work is derivative, his writing is, to put it kindly, bookish. Charulata looks at the world — in what is one of the most famous scenes in Indian cinema, she looks out at the world through a pair of binoculars and slatted windows; she moves on a swing. That movement — that Woolf calls “rhythm” elsewhere — on the swing, in the eyes, from balcony to garden to bed and notebook, that in shorthand we urgently call “life”, is Charu’s subject. Intimidated and bullied by a superior-sounding Amal, she is initially hesitant to share her writing with him. Amal’s writing comes from the library — from imitation, copying a male literary tradition; he’s competitive, and intolerant of her preference for another contemporary male writer. Charu sews and embroiders, plans a garden, supervises the kitchen, reads literary magazines. Charu’s tools are not Amal’s tools.AdvertisementCharu hears a bird call. She writes it down as a report: “Kokiler dak”, the call of a cuckoo. Dissatisfied, she strikes off “dak” and edits it to “Kokiler byatha”, the pain of the cuckoo. She rejects this one as well. Something happens after this — Ray gives us a “stream of consciousness” of Charu’s mind: Images from her childhood, the giant Ferris wheel, a village fair. Woolf, while characterising the imaginary Mrs Brown’s consciousness gives us a similar formula: “Myriads of irrelevant and incongruous ideas crowd into one’s head on such occasions; one sees the person, one sees Mrs Brown, in the centre of all sorts of different scenes. I thought of her in a seaside house, among queer ornaments: Sea-urchins, models of ships in glass cases.”Charu writes this down: “Amar gram”, My village. Rejecting reportage (the cuckoo’s call), rejecting pathetic fallacy and its dependence on sentimentality (the cuckoo’s pain), she brings herself and her community together in the bare bones — and bagginess — of “My Village”. It’s an extraordinary summation of an artist’s ambition — its impulse would drive modernism, particularly Bengali and, I suppose, Indian — modernism (Nandalal Bose, for instance, would record the lives of villagers in Sahaj Path, in his indefatigable postcards and murals, the Haripura posters). It is extraordinary because it stakes a claim to a new history beyond the autobiography available to women — it’s an important bend, from Rassundari Devi’s Amar Jiban (My Life, 1876) to Charu’s “Amar Gram” (“we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature,” writes Woolf on another continent). In this choice — “My Village” — Charulata is making another choice that makes her a relative of Woolf. The two imaginary people that Woolf says she meets on the train, Mr Smith and Mrs Brown, behave in starkly “opposite” ways when she “interrupts” their conversation: Mr Bennet “became silent”, Mrs Brown was “relieved”. Mrs Brown was “extremely small” and “had no one to support her”. Mr Bennet was “a man of business”, “bigger, burlier”. Mrs Brown, Mrs Dalloway, Charulata, “housewives”.“‘Can you tell me if an oak-tree dies when the leaves have been eaten for two years in succession by caterpillars?’ She spoke quite brightly, and rather precisely, in a cultivated, inquisitive voice,” Woolf writes about Mrs Brown. It irritates her male co-passenger into silence. “Tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure,” Woolf tells her audience in May 1924.AdvertisementWe women, are still irritating our listeners with the spasmodic a hundred years later.Roy, a poet and writer, is associate professor, Ashoka University. Views are personal