Perveen and Petronella: 300 Years Apart But United
Until I came up with this title I did not even realise how their names alliterate. One, a fictional female lawyer from before India let them practice and the other, a businesswoman from before they could reveal their hand at work.
The Miniaturist and Perveen Mistry series were my August reads that I reviewed on my Bookstagram, if you want to know how I liked them. This post delves into some thoughts I had and observations made, but don’t worry about spoilers. There won’t be any major ones and if you don’t really plan to read these books then, this post will still make sense.
I read these two books back to back, not realizing how oddly similar their themes would be since the settings could not be more dissimilar.
‘The Miniaturist’ is a book by Olivia Burton, set in 1600s Amsterdam. It follows a young woman, Petronella, married to a man 20 years her senior, as she navigates life as a merchant’s bride. She has her riches but her husband seems disinterested in her and she clashes with an unwed sister-in-law who runs the household and will cede no control.
Perveen Mistry, the titular character of ‘Widows of Malabar Hill’ by Sujata Massey is India’s first fictional female lawyer modelled after the real one, Cornelia Sorabjee. The story traces her creating a niche by attending to the legal problems of women in purdah, while she is not allowed to practice in court. Her personal life also casts a light on how even the most liberated women in that era were constrained by patriarchal laws.
I was struck by the similarity of their problems, 300 years and 6800 km apart. Both women have dreams that crash when life’s absurd twists in matrimony, hit them. They are both forced to grow professionally, and they come to appreciate economic independence. They both are forced to face the fact that holy matrimony is often not all that it is hyped up to be.
There are differences aplenty, besides the obvious ones due to the setting of the books. Perveen comes from a privileged and progressive background with an incredibly supportive family while Nella’s marriage permanently rescues her from poverty even if she has to sustain the mobility herself later on. Perveen will probably never need to work for money. Petronella’s afterstory will be about whether she can make money or will have to resort to other means to stay fed and roofed.
The side characters are an interesting addition to the narrative about women’s lives. If Perveen and Nella were women taught to embrace an unconventional life, Marin and Alice are women who never want the conventional.
Marin is Nella’s sister-in-law. She spurns an early marriage offer when she realizes that as head of her brother’s household she never has to surrender to a husband’s supreme control. Her brother trusts her and respects her intelligence, something marriage will definitely cost her in the 1600s. She eventually ‘has it all’ in her own way, but her ending shows that ‘has it all’ exacted a heavy price back then.
Alice is a lesbian math professor whose family would prefer that she marry a man of social standing and give up her activist ways, but she chooses not to. Her father ultimately strikes a truce of sorts by allowing her a job as the afore-mentioned math professor. In contrast to Marin-Nella’s relationship, Alice and Perveen find solace in each other throughout the books (not romantically).
The Netherlands was among the early colonizers, gaining prosperity from the sugar plantations of the Americas while India was one of Britain’s most productive colonies. Despite the self-proclaimed superiority of the colonizers, the treatment of women was only marginally different. Colonizing women may have benefited from monogamy but all women at that time were seen as property, as chattel. Does being an only wife make a huge difference when the systems don’t listen to you, all the same?
Textbooks can teach you theoretically but novels can make you live the lives of the people you study. As I read about religion and patriarchal norms taking away the little freedom and safety these women had, I couldn’t help but think that things are actually better today. Modern, progressive laws may not be implemented well but Nella and Perveen today could have joined the 30 under 30 lists of the Forbes magazine.
