Summary
Jashoda is a “professional mother” who cannot remember a time when she was not with child or nursing a child. She is married to Kangalicharan and eventually has twenty children, living and dead.
One day the son of Mr. Haldar, a local wealthy babu, decides he wants to drive his brother-in-law’s new car. He always has whims and never curtails them, so he gets into the Studebaker and starts driving. At that moment, Kangali is passing and the son runs over the man’s feet and shins.
A crowd gathers and Nabin, the pilgrim-guide, yells out. Haldar thrashes his son for almost killing a Brahmin and they take him to the hospital. Mr. Haldar has deep reverence for Brahmins and knows Kangali and Jashoda well. He weeps and tells the doctor to do what he can. The doctor cannot save the feet, though, and Haldar has crutches made for him.
When Kangali is home he worries that his wife took up with Nabin, but she scoffs at this and says of course she was guarded by two maidservants from the big house and no one can touch her amazing breasts but Kangali. Jashoda had even had a dream in which the Lionseated came to her as a midwife and told her that her man would return.
Kangali talks to Haldar of how he cannot run the shop in the village anymore so Haldar decides to make him a shop on the corner of his porch, where many pilgrims coming to the Lionseated will stop. Kangali goes home and tells his wife excitedly what has happened, marveling that all of this is the Mother’s will.
As for Haldarbabu, his “change of heart is also Mother’s will.” He lives in modern India but “made his cash in the British era, when Divide and Rule was the policy. Haldarbabu’s mentality was constructed then. Therefore he doesn’t trust anyone.”
Nabin cannot stop thinking about Jashoda and her breasts every time he tries to think of the Lionseated. He talks with Kangali about how to make money but Kangali does not pay attention to him, although he should have—not long after, Haldarbabu dies and “truly left Kangali in the lurch.”
Jashoda is “fully an Indian woman, whose unreasonable, unreasoning, and unintelligent devotion to her husband and love of children, whose unnatural renunciation and forgiveness have been kept alive in the popular consciousness by all Indian women . . . She wants to become the earth and feed her crippled husband and helpless children with a fulsome harvest.” She decides to go over to the big house and ask the Mistress for a cook’s job in the vegetarian kitchen.
The Mistress grieves her husband and is now in charge of the house and the rice warehouse. So far six of her sons have married and she has six daughters; there are many, many children now. When Jashoda arrives she is trying to feed one of the grandsons and asks Jashoda if she will help, so Jashoda agrees and stays until the evening. Jashoda tells her why she has come and the Mistress says she will see. She is not “as sold on Brahmins as the Master was. She does not accept fully that Kangali lost his feet because of her son's afternoon whims.” Yet, she looks at Jashoda’s breasts with envy. Jashoda understands, and admits it was like she had a “flood of milk” with one of her boys.
The Mistress’s second son often impregnates his wife but wishes she could keep her figure, and suddenly he lights upon an idea—Jashoda. He tells his wife and they visit his Mother and tell her as well. Jashoda returns home and informs Kangali of the offer. He is initially wary, but changes his mind when he sees how much grain is coming to him from the big house.
As Jashoda can only nurse if she herself is pregnant and nursing, she begins to have many children. She is a professional mother and Kangali is now a professional father. Jashoda is highly valued at the Haldar place, and her sons “become incarnate Brahma and create progeny. Jashoda preserves the progeny.” The Mistress suggests Kangali take up the cooking so his wife can focus on her task, so Kangali does so. He feeds Nabin also, who inserts him into the temple of Shiva the King.
Jashoda is flush with milk. People are persuaded the Lionseated came as a midwife to her for this reason, and “Faith in the greatness of the Lionsteaed was rekindled in the area and in the air of the neighborhood blew the electrifying influence of goddess-glory.” Everyone is devoted to Jashoda. Nabin finds her daughters husbands. The Haldar husbands and wives are happy with the arrangement.
In thirty years Jashida is pregnant twenty times. Unfortunately, Mrs. Haldar soon dies and the daughters-in-law end Jashoda’s reign. They talk to doctors and have procedures so they do not get pregnant anymore. There is a “new wind” that “disturbs the peace of the women’s quarter.” It was always the “sixteenth century in the Haldar household,” but not anymore. The daughters-in-law defy the old lady and go to work. The old woman’s heart breaks and she eats too much jackfruit and dies. Jashoda is genuinely sorry about the Mistress’s death, but this is also the end for her. She weeps and mourns hysterically.
Jashoda asks the eldest daughter-in-law what is happening and the woman says she is staying here but the others are departing. She says Jashoda can stay and cook for her household, but asks pointedly about Jahoda's own. Jashoda is confused and the woman mentions Kangali in the Shiva temple and asks what Jashoda needs. Jashoda says she will talk to her husband.
At the temple, which is very popular, Jashoda and Kangali have a terrible fight. She knows he slept with Nabin’s niece, and he thinks she is ungrateful and tells her he does not want to see her again.
At this time the “various pilgrim-guide factions conspired to turn the image’s face forward, otherwise disaster was imminent. As a result, penance rituals were being celebrated with great renown at the temple” and Jashoda prostrates herself before the goddess. Her breasts are painful and she knows she is no longer of use to anyone. She lies in the courtyard for three days. She knows her time is over with Kangali as well.
She rouses herself and goes to Nabin, who was the one who dragged the Lionseated’s image the other way and was trying to convince everyone, even himself, that the Mother had turned on her own. Jashoda knows what he did and tells him the glory disappeared when he put his hands on the image. She then speaks of her sorrow and how Kangali was swayed by Nabin’s niece. Nabin shrugs and says Kangali is a man in his prime.
Jashoda is “half-crazed by the injustice of the world” and the empty room in which she is conspicuously not suckling a child. She asks the daughter-in-law if she can cook and serve, as she does not want to be at home and her husband lives in the temple now.
Jashoda’s entire good fortune was due to bearing children and now she cannot; it is her “downward time.” No one is kind to her anymore or listens to her. Her brain becomes foggy and her body is breaking down. Her breasts feel empty. One of the sons of the daughter-in-law finally asks what is wrong with her and the eldest son says they better find out, for if anything happens to a Brahmin daughter it will be a bad thing.
The eldest daughter-in-law notices that Jashoda’s left breast is bright red and Jashoda says it is as if there is a stone in there, which once moved but now does not. She refuses to see a male doctor. The daughter-in-law asks a doctor anyway and he suggests she has cancer. The eldest son scoffs at this and says all she needs is an ointment and he will not send her to the hospital. Jashoda does not want to go either.
The ointment fails and the eldest son is worried that she will die so he calls Jashoda’s sons. Kangali cries when he is informed of this, and starts thinking she was a “blessed auspicious faithful woman” and he never should have spurned her. He is shocked to see her sores and she sighs that there is no solution for her. Kangali is filled with sorrow. Jashoda asks him to call the holy doctor. Not knowing he has left, she rues aloud, seeking sympathy, that “If you suckle you’re a mother, all lies!” She feels like her breasts are betraying her.
Jashoda begins to experience fever and loss of consciousness. The babu’s eldest son, Haribabu, has her admitted to the hospital. The doctor explains that Jashoda has cancer and will not live long; she will not recover and can only be treated until she passes. He is actually annoyed that women do not take the signs of breast cancer seriously enough, and is convinced that cancer “means the patient’s death and the defeat of science, and of course the doctor.”
Kangali tells his sons there is no point going to the hospital anymore since Jashoda does not know them anymore. Besides, his “mind had already rejected Jashoda” as a person quite distant to him; she is “someone else, not Mother.”
Jashoda hangs on for another month. In her mental haze she is angry that the doctor, whom she assumes she suckled, will not help her now. Her breasts are open wounds and smell horrendous. One night she feels her hands and feet grow cold and she knows death is near. It does not make sense to her that she “suckled the world” and that she will then die alone. She is convinced someone was “supposed to be there at the end. Who was it? It was who? Who was it?” She dies that night at eleven.
No one picks up the phone at the Haldar house. An untouchable cremates Jashoda’s body. She “was God manifest. Jashoda’s death was also the death of God. When a mortal masquerades as God here below, she is forsaken as all and she must always die alone.”
Analysis
“Breast-Giver” is perhaps Devi’s most famous short story. Its title is what the story literally entails: Jashoda is a professional wet nurse who gives her breast to dozens of children in the local babu’s household. She is valued highly for this service, but only for this service; once the younger women of the household curtail their reproduction, Jashoda is rendered completely obsolete. Jashoda’s complete and utter objectification is not the only thing this woman suffers from, as she, rather cruelly and ironically, gets breast cancer and dies and painful and lonely death.
What is Devi’s aim in such a bitter, tragic story? Critics Indrani Mitra and Madhu Mitra explain that it is not just the obvious commentary on gender discrimination, objectification of women, the demands of motherhood, etc.—the story is also interested in exploring the exploitation of women by women due to the intersection of gender, class, and modernity. The Haldar household might first seem like it is still part of the 16th century, as Devi writes, but the death of the patriarch and the beginning of companionate marriages among the sons signal slow change. With the idea to bring in Jashoda, there is even more freedom for the wives, but the Mitras note, “what makes this progress possible, of course is their power (through their menfolk) to control the labor—in both senses of the term—of another woman.”
But things are different with the granddaughters-in-law. Devi writes of Mrs. Haldar’s confusion, “The most objectionable thing was that in the matter of motherhood, the old lady's granddaughters-in-law had breathed a completely different air before they crossed her threshold. In vain did the Mistress say that there was plenty of money, plenty to eat. The old man had dreamed of filling half Calcutta with Haldars. The granddaughters-in-law were unwilling. Defying the old lady's tongue, they took off to their husbands' places of work.” The Mitras explain that, “Resisting their reproductive roles, these women begin to explore new spaces, which, though still circumscribed by patriarchy, offer some new opportunities. Leaving the ancestral home, the Haldar women of this generation go to their husbands' places of work to set up their own homes. Jashoda loses her livelihood, but for the Haldar women this is a new kind of freedom.” The story “reminds us of those "other" bodies on which the narrative of our freedom has been written: women like Jashoda, whose proletarianization allows the first generation of Haldar daughters-in-law their first moments of leisure and engenders the preliminary stages of a feminist consciousness. Her decline, the literal consumption of her body by cancer, thus parallels the progress of the women of the privileged class . . . [it] subverts at every level the discourse of liberal feminism.”
Devi is also trying to comment upon how women like Jashoda absorbed the teachings of patriarchy to their own detriment. Unlike Giribala, who get sterilized, or Moyna, who asks questions, Jashoda calmly and passively accepts her role. In fact, as Devi writes, she emblematizes it: “Jashoda is fully an Indian woman, whose unreasonable, unreasoning, and unintelligent devotion to her husband and love for her children, whose unnatural renunciation and forgiveness have been kept alive in the popular consciousness by all Indian women . . . Jashoda never once wants to blame her husband for [losing his feet]. Her mother-love wells up for Kangali as much as for the children. She wants to become the earth and feed her crippled husband and helpless children with a fulsome harvest.” And while the community is proud of Jashoda, she too is proud of her role as wet nurse. She “became vocal,” Devi writes, asserting her opinions. She “thought of her breasts as most precious objects,” and revels in being elevated above everyone. Even as her fate begins to turn, she roars “Do you know who I am?”, leading the eldest daughter-in-law to scoff, “This is what I feared. Mother gave her a swelled head.” Thus, Devi is showing how Jashoda sees her worth only in her body and in her role as nurturer. She criticizes the younger women for not wanting children and leaving the house even though it is, as aforementioned, demonstrative of a new kind of freedom and feminism, making her just as complicit in the same patriarchy that leaves her utterly bereft.
