I propose to find out whether A Life Less Ordinary, written by Baby Halder, can be considered a testimonio or not. To do so, the views of George Yudice and Kalina Brabeck, who’ve both made notes on this literary genre, will be discussed. Then, in order to consider the socio-economic and cultural issues regarding testimonio in the context of India, I shall discuss the claims of two Indian scholars: Sharmila Rege and Gopal Guru, who have already done research in Dalit testimonio. A Life Less Ordinary focuses on the life of those who are marginalized in their own society. Baby Halder is a witness who, through her account of her own life, denounces the present climate of exploitation and oppression.

Our discussion turns around two basic things. One is Baby Halder’s book, A Life Less Ordinary, an account of a young domestic worker—a  woman who went through a very hard life in her childhood and later on, in her married life, faced continuous violence from her husband, even as she struggled to take care of her three children by working as a maid. She had no time to read or write until she started to work for a kind, retired anthropology professor who happened to see her eagerly browsing through his books when she was dusting them. It was he, Prabodh Kumar, who gave her a notebook and a pen and persuaded her to write. She started to write about her life at night, after her chores were finished and her children had gone to bed. When Dr. Kumar read Baby’s writing, he was amazed by it. He photocopied the work and sent it to his friend, who helped Baby in publishing her work. This book is written in Bengali and translated into several other Indian languages, and also English.

The other basic issue is the term testimonio. This special genre was ushered in during the second half of the 20th century. C. Alejandra Elenes (2000) says that ‘testimonial’ is a particular genre whose origins were in Latin American revolutionary struggles; it is linked to political activism, personal experience, and the rearticulation of Western constructs of knowledge.

When considering Dalit literature, Manohar Jadhav and Pradnya Lokhande (Rege-2006) think that Dalit testimonio is a distinct genre which rose from the creative dialectic between exploring and interpreting self and society, and the conflict between them.

To make this discussion clear, it should be noted that testimonio cannot be called autobiography—though they both have some features in common, their aims are different.Autobiography aims at sharing a writer’s feelings and thoughts; referring to the life of great men in order to understand society and its institutions (Casper-1999); learning from those who are privileged; looking at the past through the eyes of the present in order to see how the present came to be; or by looking backward and situating the movement of events within a more or less coherent narrative (Freeman). Testimonio, however, has other objectives. This paper will consider not only the aims of testimonio but also the features that differentiate it from autobiography.

George Yudice (1991) defines testimonio as an authentic narrative told by a witness; one who tries to narrate the urgency of a situation such as war, oppression, revolution and so on. This witness projects his/her own experience as being representative of a collective memory and identity. This genre criticizes a present situation of exploitation and oppression. It strives to invalidate official history. This kind of writing does not have an author. Yudice says: “We hear a narratorial voice mediated through an interlocutor.” (1985). The protagonist of a testimonio as it appears in A Life Less Ordinary wants it to be like an allegory for others, “a representation of people’s collective memory”, not to project herself/himself as an extraordinary individual—elements that Yudice (1985) noted for this genre of literature. Baby simply portrays her life as an allegory for those women who live in the same situation as hers.

Brabeck (2001) states that the ‘self’ in testimonio cannot be regarded in individual terms. It is taken as a collective self involved in a common struggle. The reversal of power is not the aim of this struggle. It is not a struggle to wrest the term ‘I’ from the oppressors. The goal of this kind of writing is to claim space for the “collective stance to exist on its own” as Marin says (Brabeck-2001). In her novel Baby does not show any revolutionary attitude; she also is one who struggles for a space to live on her own. Baby represents the plural because she is a distinguishable part of her whole group of subaltern women—Brabeck (2001) considers this as one of the features of testimonio.

In testimonio (Brabeck-2001) the speaker makes no claim to universal representation or emancipation, but looks for freedom and survival within specific and local circumstances. Testimonio is a form that engenders different models of collaboration. Individualism is replaced with collectivity and universalism with particularity. Baby does not lay claim to universal representation or emancipation; she just wants freedom and survival within her local circumstances. She struggles to make a space for herself, and ensure favorable conditions for rearing her children.
 
The practice of identity-imposition is not possible in testimonio as it obtains in Western autobiography, testimony or epic. In these literary works the reader may see the protagonist as a metaphor; her/his effort is to speak a universal truth. It means that the reader makes an effort to understand the text and its claim to universal truth through the substitution of her/his identity for that of the hero. But in testimonio the reader may be with the speaker, but cannot be her/him. The reader may stand beside the narrator but not on top of her/him. Such an identity-imposition is not found in A Life Less Ordinary. Throughout the account the reader does not express the feeling of substituting herself/himself for the protagonist, but just being with her; while at the same time emphasizing the diversity among women in the same community.

Testimonio’s political project is to confront injustices and, as in any act of testimony, the reader is called upon to stand with the narrator and her/his community against oppression. To me A Life Less Ordinary is a political gender project which tries to show the injustice the women in Baby’s community have to endure. Though this kind of exposure makes them aware of their oppressed condition as low-caste women in Indian society, it persuades them to stand and make a space for survival. She highlights the suffering she went through as the result of being in a patriarchal community in which subordination is the norm. She passed on her experience to other women and showed them how they could also attain self-realization and make decisions concerning their lives, and thus make a space for their survival. She showed other women that if they wanted to be considered a ‘subject’ they had to cultivate their creative aspects and realize their ‘self’-potential. At first they had to recognize through self-realization the mental boundaries which were imposed on and internalized in them, and then to erase them. The next step was to recognize the opportunities around them which they were ignorant of, and then plan  to use and operate each and every facility to reach their goals—e.g., removing the shame of working as domestic workers out of the husband’s home, and the shame of living alone without the support of their husbands as Baby did. Brabeck says,

For Baby Halder, the idea of writing an autobiography came from Tatosh (the landlord); it was dictated and produced as a literary work by Baby Halder and published by Tatosh’s friend; and it was finally translated into English by Urvashi Butalia. Besides its structure, testimonio has a form that produces a different model of collaboration; it replaces the individual with the collective and the universal with the particular. The lack of authorial presence and nonfunctional characters bring about a different relationship between the reader and narrator (Brabeck-2001). Brabeck (2001) suggests that the reader should read testimonio metonymically, “suggesting a lateral movement of identity through relation”. Testimonio is not like Western autobiography, testimony, or epic in which the reader may see the protagonist as a metaphor and her/his struggles in life as representing the universal truth. In Western autobiography the reader tries to find the claim of the text towards universal truth by substituting her/his identity for that of the hero. But in testimonio the hero does not lay any claim to universal truth, and so this practice of identity-imposition is not possible. In testimonio the reader may be with the narrator, but will not stand on top of the hero. That’s why the practice of identity-imposition is impossible. Brabeck says:

“The reader may be with the speaker, but cannot be her” (2001).
Testimonio opposes the autobiography’s identity-through-substitution; it facilitates and emphasizes identity-through-relationship. It also acknowledges the possible differences between ‘us’ as members of a centreless whole. On reading Baby Halder’s account, one never gets involved in identity-through-substitution. Baby shows her identity through her relationship with others. Her account also points at differences among women as the marginalized when she talks about the condition of her mother’s life, her sisters, and neighboring women.

The speaker of testimonio is not the one who exists for us, the speaker is a subject in her/his own right; and her/his subject acquires an identity by belonging to the community. Brabeck (2001) noted that if we think of the voices of subaltern peoples as existing for our benefit, if we focus on individual voices and universal truths, we continue to control third-world peoples from an elitist viewpoint.

The other aspect of testimonio I am going to talk about is that the speaker of testimonio is not only a witness. The speaker has the power to create her/his own narrative authority and to negotiate her/his own conditions for truth and representation. She is not merely a ‘representative’ victim of history, but is an agent of the transformative project aimed at fighting injustices.

Sharmila Rege considers Dalit literature as testimonio and counts some features which to some extent are applicable to A Life Less Ordinary. Rege (2006) notes that Dalit life narratives, as by Jadhav (1991) and Lihande (1994):

In her account Baby portrays the conflict between self and society regarding the concept of wrong and right. Baby writes of how society could not accept her mother working outside the home and earning some money while her kids were starving. She worried:

I’ve already noted that Brabeck believed that testimonio is not the struggle to wrest the first person ‘I’ from the oppressor, while Pandian (1998), when writing on Faustina Bama’s testimonio, says that Dalit life narratives have broken genre boundaries by bringing down the ‘I’ (the outcome of bourgeois individualism) and linking it to the Dalit community (1998). From my point of view, using ‘I’ is a sign of growing and becoming a subject and as a result, becoming aware of the right to govern one’s own life.

The narrator of A Life Less Ordinary is Baby Halder, and she is the real protagonist and the witness of incidents, who address her ‘self’ in the first person singular. The intention of her writing is not to be literary but to document the situation of a group which is oppressed, imprisoned and struggling. It is a kind of communication in which Baby Halder appeals to the reader to respond to and judge the situation according to incidents which mostly reflect gender inequality and violence against women in a patriarchal system, as John Beverly (1992) noted in his work.

Yudice says that testimonio is a kind of interlocutor. Rege (2006) also believes that these testimonios are stories that can be read easily as though the writers are in conversation with the reader. She observes that the writers of testimonio talk about several powerful and poignant moments in their lives, as Baby noted in her account:

Vida Rahiminejad earned her M.A. in English from Pune University. At present she is working toward her Ph.D. there. Her area of interest is Indian women writers in English. Her book “Cactus, It, She and I” is to be published.