Search For Identity in Despandey

SEARCH FOR IDENTITY IN SHASHI DESHPANDES THAT LONG SILENCE, THE DARK HOLDS NO TERROR AND ROOTS AND
SHADOWS
SEARCH FOR IDENTITY IN SHASHI DESHPANDES THAT LONG SILENCE, THE DARK HOLDS NO TERROR AND ROOTS AND SHADOWS
"SEARCH FOR IDENTITY IN SHASHI DESHPANDES THAT LONG SILENCE, THE DARK HOLDS NO TERROR AND ROOTS AND SHADOWS", 1st Edition Dr.Kavya.B Price: 200/ 2012 by Laxmi Book Publication, Solapur All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN-978-81-923843-3-7 Published by Laxmi Book Publication, 258/34, Raviwar Peth, Solapur Maharashtra, India. Cell: 9595 359 435 www.isrj.net Email ID: ayisrj@yahoo.in
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
It is with great elation, I take this opportunity to express my profound sense of gratitude to my Research guide Dr. Shantha Naik N Assistant Professor, Department of Studies in English, Maharajas College, University of Mysore, Mysore, Karnataka, India for the valuable guidance, supervision and constant encouragement given throughout the course of the present investigation. His valuable support and timely suggestions have enabled me to successfully complete this dissertation.
I am deeply indebted to respected Prof. K.M.Chandar, Prof. C.P. Ravi Chandra, Prof. K.T. Sunita, Prof. Mahadeva, Prof. A.S. Dasan, Dr. Vijaya Sheshadri & Dr. Devikarani, for their encouragement, helpful suggestions and comments. I am grateful to my beloved parents Sri. R. Basavanna, and Smt. G.P. Pushpalatha for their constant support throughout my research work. I thank my husband Dr. T.S. Jagadeesh Kumar, Associate professor, University of Mysore for his encouragement.
I am indebted to Miss. Suman, Librarian, CIIL for her support. I thank my college colleagues and Principal Mr. Marpallikar,Govt.Pre-University College,Gabbur,Raichur for their co.operation. My special thanks to my friends Mrs.Mamata Krishna, Ms.Pushpalatha, Ms.Sujatha and my well wishers.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
TITLE
PAGE No.
INTRODUCTION
5-32
II
ERASING THAT LONG SILENCE
33-53
III
LIGHT OF AWARENESS THE DARK HOLDS NO TERROR
54-76
IV
RENOUNCE-ROOTS AND SHADOWS
77-98
CONCLUSION
100-106
BIBLIOGRAPHY
107-116
CHAPTER - I INTRODUCTION The aim of this study is to examine self-identity in the novels That Long Silence, The Dark Holds No Terror and Roots and Shadows written by the most renowned writer Shashi deshpande. Human relations form the warp and woof of Shashi Deshpandes novels; her greatness is revealed in the treatment of human relation capacity for a deeper probing of the human heart. Shashi Deshpande is a diva of female assertion. The Plight of middle class women that too educated and working women, the marital adjustments and quest for identity forms the crux of her novels. Her protagonists are more intelligent and capable women than men. Who desire to have their own individuality. Shashi Deshpande is fascinated towards the complexities of human relationships. She has confessed in an interview with Geetha Gangadharan: We know a lot about the physical and the organic world and the Universe in general, but we still know very little about human relationships. It is the most mystifying thing as I am concerned. I will continue to wonder about it, puzzle over it and write about it. And still it is tremendously intriguing, fascinating.1 (Indian communicator, 20 November 1994 P-11).
R.S. Pathak (ed), The fictions of Shashi Deshpande (Creative Books 1988) P.202.
The treatment of human relationships in the words of T.D. Brutons: Indian society has always been a group society; the administration of the west is still foreign. Thus even individual dreams tend to have a broad social content and one life reflects another. One sees this in the tensions between the new urbanized class and their village kinsmen, between minority groups and those who still seek to uphold monolithic class barriers, between the masses and those in public office between students and teachers and most strikingly between the young and their middle aged ( and often bewildered) parents and guardians. These conflicts are re-enacted in a million forms in modern India. The novelist can thus draw upon certain situations, essentially individual, which yet have almost the archetypal power of parable.2 Fiction has its own privilege among drama, prose and epic. All over the world the novel has become the dominant literary form. The once-popular modern of myth, symbol and parable have been mainly absorbed by the more esoteric styles of poetry. Whatever literary has spread the novel-realistic, precise, this worldly has swiftly followed. The Art of fiction as Henry James reverently called it, is not reserved for a few initiates. The modern world demands novels, just as it demands films and television programmes. Indeed, it is only through the novel that literature, the unglamorous written word without colour or illustration is able to compete with its brash competitors of the
T.D. Burton, Critical Essays on Indian writing in English. P.201-202.
screen.3 It is remarkable that Indian English novel has gained a challenging position. The Prose fiction in English Written by Indians is undoubtedly the most popular vehicle for the transmission of Indian ideas to the wider speaking world.4 A careful study of the Indian English fiction gives the clear picture of our culture. Indian English Fiction not only demonstrates its culture but its very soul is Indian and that makes it different. There is a remarkable growth from the first Indian novel in English Raj Mohans wife by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to the latest Jinnah: India Partition Independence by Jaswant Singh. Bankim Chandra is the pioneer writer whose translations to English are significant to the literary renaissance in India. Other contributors like B.R. Rajam (Vasudeva
Sastri), T. Rama Krishna (Padmini, 1909) and The Dive for Death (1911), P.A. Madhvian (Thillai Govindan), Sardar Joginder Singhs Nur Jahan and Nasrin are note worthy. After 1930, the emergence of the three great novelists Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao changed he scenario of Indian English literature. Mulk Raj Anands Across the Black waters, The Coolie, Two leaves and a Bud, The untouchable, The village and The Big Heart reveal socialistic pattern of society. It raised a wave of social revolution in the society by voicing the poor and oppressed.
T.D. Burton, Indian in fiction The Heritage of Indianess, critical Essays on Indian writing in English,ed. M.K. Naik, S.K. Desai, G.S. Amar ( Dharwar : Karnataka University Press, 1972), P.199. 4 Williams. H.J. Indo Anglian literature, 1800-1900 ( Orient Longmans 1976), P.109
R.K. Narayans novels revolve round the fictious town Malgudi a small town in south India in his first novel Swami and Friends. Raja Rao achieves Indianess by capturing the flavour of a regional dialect. Indianess is seen in the use of a few words here and these from the language use of imagery. Raja Raos Kanthapura (1938), is perhaps the finest evocation of the Gandhian age in Indian English Fiction. William Walsh rightly opines: It was in 1930s that the Indians began what has now turned out to be their very substantial contribution to the novel in English and one peculiarly suited to their talents.5 After the 1950s however, novelists indulged in portraying their private life. As C.Paul verghese pointed out: Most of them in their eagerness to find novel themes, renounced the larger world in favour of the inner man and engaged themselves in a search for the essence of human living.6 Indian English literature in the recent past has attracted a widespread interest, both in India and abroad. Women novelists have proved their worth by enriching Indian English fiction with their memorable contribution. With the born gift of storytelling women novelists have dwelled into the home of human minds and hearts with the core essence of sympathy, sensitivity and understanding. As in English literature women novelists Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters,
The Indian Sensibility in English in C.D. Narasimhaiahs (ed.) Awakened Conscience ( New Delhi, Sterling, 1978), p.66. 6 Verghese C. Palu, Problems of the Idnian creative Writer in English ( Bombay : Somaiya, 1971), pp.124-25.
Mrs. Gaskell Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf would be in the top list so as in Indian Women novelists Kamala Markandaya, Ruth Pawar Jhabuala, Anita Desai, Nayantara Sahgal, Shashi Deshpande, Shobha De, Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy, Gita Hariharan and Manju Kapur are on the top list. Literature which was male dominated forced to show with sparking contribution with the most educated women who urged to voice their feelings to redefine their space, to connect to the larger world. There was a time when Anita Desai had said about women novelists in English: With all the richness of material at hand, Indian women writers have stopped short from a lack of imagination, courage nerve or gusto of the satirical edge the ironic tone, the inspired criticism or the lyric response that alone might have brought their novels to life. In these last few years of thin articulary, they have been content to record and document but to satirize, criticize, lament? No, not yet. They seem unable to throw off the habits of reticence and acceptance of being uncritical and unobtrusive. Oddly enough, they have not gone to the other extreme of feminity or fantasy either. With their vast inherited store of myth, fable, legend and superstition, one might have expected here and there a touch of the fantasy of Narayan of Sudhin, but they have remained rigidly, self consciously prosaic perhaps here lies the crux of the matter rigidly and self consciousness, the natural descendents of the silence, the falsehoods and the shackles of the past.7
Anita Desai : Women Writers, Quest, No.65, April June 1970, Pp.42-43
Happily today the scene is dramatically different. Now our women novelists have gained international acclaim. Many significant literary awards have been won by many novelists: The Booker for Arundhati Roys The God of Small Things in 1997 followed by Krian Desai for her maiden novel Inheritance of Loss. The Commonwealth awards for best first books for Githa Hariharans Thousand Faces of Night (1993) Manju Kapurs Difficult Daughters (1998), the Common wealth Award for the Best short story for Sujata Sankrantis The Warp and the Weft and The Pulitzer Prize for Jhumpa Hahiris Interpreter of Maldies it is noteworthy that Manjula Padmanabhan is recipient of the Onassis Award for Drama and Rukhmini Bhaya Nair the Commonwealth Poetry Award. The history of emergence of women writers in Indian writing in English was a great significance during the last quarter of the 19th century. Toru Dutt (1856 1878) was one prodigy. She is the pioneering poetess who made a mark in the creative writing of 19th century by publishing A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields in 1876. It is very remarkable that there were women who contributed their share in religious and political movements of India. Pandita Ramabai (18581922) involved herself in the movement for womens emancipation. She started Womens Organizations, campaigned for womens education and medical training. She authored a book on womans religious law to safeguard women from blind traditions. Swarnakumari Devi (1885-1932), Rabindranath Tagores sister was the founder of Theosophical Society for Women of all
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religions. She was a co-editor of a Bengali Journal Bharati. In the 1889 Indian National Congress meeting there were ten women participants. After 1919, it was M.K.Gandhi, the father of the nation on the scene for freedom struggle who inspired Sarojini Naidu, poetess, orator, freedom fighter became the president of the Indian National Congress. Gandhis ideals gained respect to women and discarded her symbol of sex doll. In 1938 Gandhi penned, I do believe that women is more fitted than man to make Ahimsa. For the courage of selfsacrifice woman is in anyway superior to man. (Gandhi Quoted 80:125) Among the prominent post independent Indian Women novelists Kamala Markandayas contribution is note worthy whose fiction revolves round the sphere of traditional Indian society, which has been passing through a phase of transformation. She is a talented novelist defined as a Superb representative of the growing number of Indian Woman Writing Serious Literature in English.8 Markandaya deals with more on the rural backgrounds. Her first novel Nectar In A Sieve portrays hunger and starvation in Indian Villages. Her poignant and realistic expression of the pathetic conditions of the peasants is memorable. The plot construction in her earlier novels Nectar In A Sieve, Some Inner Fury, A silence of Desire, Possession and A Handful of Rice have a social background. Whereas in The coffer Dams, Nowhere Man, Two Virgins and The Golden Honey Comb deals with issues like alienation, rootlessness. Her novel The
Stephen Ignatius Hemenway : The Novel of India ( Vol. II : The Indo Anglian Novel), Calcutta, Writers Workshop, 1975, P.52
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Golden Honey Comb sets mirror to the talent of the novelist. It is a historical novel which spans Indo-British relations till the attainment of independent in 1947. Ruth Jhabvala is a versatile and humorist writer. Being Indo Anglian she deals with the personal relation, man-woman relationship and domestic life with a humanity amalgamation of East-West. Her first novel To whom She will (1955) was compared by critics to the work of Jane Austen. The Nature of Passion (1956) is about the upper class life in New Delhi, Esmond in India (1958) is a social comedy, The Householder (1960) is a realistic novel, Get Ready for Battle (1962) is a contrasting novel between materialistic values and eternal values of life, A Back ward place (1965) seems to be a sequel of Esmond in India. A New Dominiion (1972) a novel of spiritual quest and Heat and Dust (1975) is a remarkable work of art which won her the prestigious Booker prize. Anita Desai is one of the few renowned Indian writers in English with an International repute. Her novels occupy a unique place in the Indian English Literature because of her writing style, which is rich with psychological depth and sophistication. She took the literary world by a storm with her first novel Cry, the Peacock in 1968. It is a psychological novel exploring the traumatic emotional world of the protagonist Maya. Voices in the City (1965) is flavoured with depression, disillusionment and hopelessness. This novel is compared with Camus The outsider. Bye Bye
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Black Bird (1971) deals with the theme of frustration and alienation in a foreign country. Where shall we go this summer (1975) is again with a theme of frustration and loneliness in married life. Fire on the mountain (1977) revolves round the inner emotional world of Nanda Kaul, on old lady. Clear light of Day (1980) is a retrospective novel. In custody (1984) (also made into film), Baumgartners Bombay, Journey to Ithaca, Fasting Feasting, Diamond Dust and The Zig Zag Way (2004) deals with Personal struggles and problems of contemporary life. Nayantara Sahgal presents the dilemma of modern man very effectively through her novels. Her first Novel A Time To Be Happy (1957) presents the dawn of Indian Independence. In her first novel itself she has successfully portrayed a wide variety of characters quite convincingly and realistically. There is an autobiographical touch in almost all her novels. The novelist being the niece of Jawaharlal Nehru uses personal knowledge of politics in her second novel. The Time of Morning is about the fall of Kalyan Sinha an important figure in the Government becomes the crux of this novel. Storm in Chandigarh is with the theme of partition of Punjab into the Hindu dominated Haryana and Sikh dominated Punjab. It is in fact the story of the novelists break up of her marriage. The Day in Shadow (1985) is sensitive and political novel. A situation in New Delhi is a novel which deals with moral values of the politicians and
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frustrated youth becoming Naxalites. Rich LikeUs (1985) is her best novel dealing with Post Nehru era in India. From her first novel, The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980) to In The Country of Deciet (2009) Shashi Deshpandes central issue remain unchanged. She has been always keen on self assertion and freedom of self. Her real concern is exploring the human psyche. She documents Indian middle class women with Indian settings, Indian culture and Indian background. It is evident that all the characters old and new generation adhere to the Indian culture. All her protagonists rebel the traditional roles forced on Indian woman but reject to come out of the marital Institution as Nora in Ibsens A Dolls House. Though all her novels are open ended the protagonists would be a transformed New Woman with a new attitude in the end. Shashi Deshpande was born in 1938 in Dharwad, a prominent place known for its education and culture in north Karnataka. Her father late Adya Rangacharya (Sriranga) was a highly reputed and well-known Kannada playwright. She was educated in Mumbai and Bangalore, and secured her M.A in English from the University of Mysore. Shashi Deshpande also has to her credit degrees in Economics and Law. When she was living in Mumbai she did a course on Journalism at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan and worked for a couple of months as a journalist for the magazine Onlooker. She began writing rather late in life at her father's persuasion and insistence. In 1969, she visited England
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which inspired her to write and publish an account of her experiences on the English soil. Since then, her short stories began to appear regularly in popular magazines. Shashi Deshpande has written four childrens books, a number of short stories, and ten novels, besides several perceptive essays, now available in a volume entitled Writing from the Margin and Other Essays. She has also written the screenplay for the Hindi feature film Drishti. She was honoured with the Padmashri award in 2009 by the Government of India. Shashi Deshpande's first novel The Dark Holds No Terrors was published in 1980, followed by If I Die Today in 1982. Roots and Shadows and Come Up and Be Dead were published in 1983. While Roots and Shadows won the Thirumathi Rangammal Prize for the best Indian novel of 1982-83, That Long Silence published by the Virago Feminist Press in 1988, fetched her Indias Sahitya Akademi award for 1990. Her other novels are The Binding Vine (1993), A Matter of Time (1996), Small Remedies (2000), Moving On (2004) and In the Country of Deceit (2008) Her short stories have been collected and published in four volumes: The Legacy and Other Stories (1978), It was Dark and Other Stories (1986), It was the Nightingale and Other Stories (1986) and The Miracle and Other Stories (1986). Shashi Deshpande sticks closely to daily-life experiences. Her novels move in space as well as in time, and reuse mythical heritage, through internalized beliefs. She uses the realistic approach to domesticate English, she says, I am converting the life which is lived in
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different languages, a small part of it being in English as well into a Single language9 Womens suppression is rooted in the very fabric of Indian society in traditions, in religious doctrine and practices, within the education and legal systems, and within families. Traditionally, women bear primary responsibility for the well being of their families. Yet they are discriminated systematically and deprived of access to resources such as education, health care services, job, training and etc.10 Shashi Deshpandes novel shows how carefully she expresses the frustration and disappointments of women who experience in the social and cultural oppression in the male-dominated society. The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980) explodes the myth of man's superiority by portraying a career woman whose marriage is on the rocks. Sarita or Saru is a "two-in-one-woman" who is a "terrified trapped animal" in the hands of her husband Manohar. The novel dramatizes the reaction against the traditional concept that everything in a girl's life is shaped towards the sole end of pleasing a male. Saru in the novel is endowed with an ability to launch a selfsearch as well as offer a critique of the society in general without either sentimentalizing or over-dramatising the picture.
Writing from the margin and other Essays : Purdha in the Subcontinental Novel in English. Deshpande Shashi P.32-38. 2005 Viking New Delhi. 10 Soundary, M.H and Sudhir M.A. 2003, Status of Women Gender Disprity in Tamil Nadu. Social Welfare 49 (12) 4-27.
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If I die Today (1982) and Come up and Be Dead (1983) are different from the other novels of Shashi Deshpande. The former was originally published as a short story and later developed into a novel, the latter was meant for a serial publication. Both can be read as detective novels, even then it deals with women issues such as education, economic independence and motherhood. The theme of the novel is like an allegory of the story of Adam and Eve. The protagonist-narrator Manju is an honest, straightforward, broad minded, kind hearted and intelligent lady who is a lecturer in a college by profession. Manjus married life is caught in the well of silences and barriers. She fails to bring any harmony in her married life even after the birth of the second child and she thinks A marriage you start off expecting so many things. And bit-by-bit like dead leaves, the expectations fall off. But there two people who have shut themselves off in two separate glass jar who can see each other but cant communicate? Is this marriage? (Shashi Deshpande P.24). Come Up and Be Dead is a story of revenge. Miss Kshama Rao is the new head mistress of the high school. She has been appointed as a result of the good impression she made on the chairman of the body of Governors whom she encountered by chance in a train. The novels central theme is murder which probes the vengefulness in Varma. Varma becomes a misogynist and treats the whole female sex as his enemy. Note Girishs words to Devyani, Strange isnt it, that a man who has so much money should make himself vulnerable by going
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in for a thing like this? When I went to him I knew at once that he enjoyed this trade in girls." (252) Roots and Shadows encapsulates the artistic vision of feminity as expressed by Shashi Deshpande. It explores the quest for an authentic selfhood. Indu, the protagonist, symbolizes the New woman, and through her Deshpande portrays the inner struggle of an artist to express herself and to discover her real self through her potential for creative writing. Addressing the question of marginalization of women, among other things, the novel shows the emergence of a bold, challenging woman who defies male authority and expresses her vision of the struggle for harmony. That Long Silence, deals with a crisis in a middle class family, which triggers off a process of retrospection and introspection. Jaya, an urban, middle class woman exposed to liberal western ideas seeks to free herself from chauvinistic ideas such as the husband as a "sheltering tree." Moreover, into the texture of a novel supposedly about Jaya and Mohan, several tragedies of subordination are woven as though to form a tapestry. And at the end of the novel, Jaya asks herself in honest self-doubt and self-evaluation the question: "But why am I making myself the heroine of this story?" Urmi in The Binding Vine, in a moment of crisis, makes an inward journey which enables her to analyze the roles of women around herself. Urmi's comments, in the context of the narrative, on the girl child and society, rape in marriage, marriage in general in the Indian society, woman and family and
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career, relationship between mother and daughter, constitute the core of the novel and reveal the complex texture of a tradition-bound society which requires the redemptive power of love to free itself from violence, deprivation, and destitution. Shashi Deshpandes novel A Matter of Time interestingly traces the transformation of the ideology from the stage of the internalization of patriarchal values through awareness of the value of female bonding and self identity to assertion of womens rights. This is the only novel which has the distinction of having a male protagonist Gopal. The novel also endeavours to trace the plight of the woman who shoulders the responsibility of the whole family when her husband leaves the house all on a sudden without uttering a word. Her Sumis parents Kalyani and Sripathi spend a long period of nearly thirty five years without speaking to each other. Four generations of women project four variants of the ideology within the same family charting the course of social history and ideological change. Small Remedies potrarys social transitions occurring in Indian society. Savitribai and Leela represent modern women with vaulting ambition and courage and do what they want violating the frame of society. Madhu is summoned to write the biography of Savitribai Indorker, a classical singer. It is through her narration, Madhu goes into her flashback and recalls the memory of her beloved people and gains immense strength to lead her future life.
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In her novel Moving on, Shashi Deshpande has drawn the most private world of humans, the most intimate and secret world of man and woman. It stresses how the past of man sets test on the present and future. Manjari, realizes the urge of knowing her parents and goes through her fathers dairy. She learns about her parents' frustrations and suffocation in their marriage and thinks about her marriage which created gap and ultimately lead to the doom of their happy family. Through her Babas dairy she learns the essence of life and realizes that life carries its own truth within it, and in order to change ones circumstances, they have to be accepted. In her latest novel In the Country of Deceit Shashi Deshpande begins her novel with the demolition of the house. Devayani and her sister Savitha are looking at the empty space where once was the house of their childhood. Their parents are dead - their father as a broken, bitter man, and their mother after a long and difficult illness. The new house - a complete reversal of the old house - is large, spacious, filled with light. While Savitha returns with her doctor husband and children to Delhi, Devayani moves into the new house, happy to remain in their hometown Rajnur. She establishes friendship with Rani, a onetime film actor who, with her husband and children, has moved back to India from the US. While Ranis mind is quietly preoccupied with memories of her film career, Devayani spends her time teaching English and caring for her garden. She was leading a calm life until she meets Ashok Chinnappa, the new
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district superintendent of police who is older and married, with a 10-year-old daughter. Then there is twist in the story as they suddenly embrace on a passionate affair. He is in a highly visible post in this small town where everyone knows everyone else; she is unmarried and lives alone. Yet there is a desperate madness in their relationship and meeting in a car or in her house. Devayani feels that there is something sordid about meeting like this; but she cannot end it. There are no boundaries for love, she says silently. She frees Ashok from the bondage as he is transferred from Rajnur and thinks, Why did I do it? Why did I enter the country of deceit? What took me into it? I hesitate to use the word love, but what other word is there? And yet, like the word atonement, the word love is too simple for the complicated emotion and responses the made me to do what I had done. Ultimately, I did it because he was Ashok, because we met. Thats all. Recently to her credit Shashi Deshpande has translated Gauri deshpandes work Deliverance- a novella originally written in Marathi as Nirgaathi into English. The first thing that leaves a reader overwhelmed when he/she starts skimming through Deliverance is the sheer woman- power that oozes through the effortlessly powerful writing that coursed through Gauris pen, especially in an era more than two decades down the line!11 Feminism had its origin in the west. The term feminism is derived from the Latin word femina meaning women, originally meant having the qualities
11
Reshma Kulkarni, Literary Review, The Hindu, March 6, 2011
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of females. Its genesis can be marked during the last decade of the 18th century, when the struggle for womens Rights began. The core of feminism is the belief that women are subordinated to men in western culture. Feminism seeks to liberate women from the subordination and to reconstruct society in such a way that patriarchy is eliminated and a culture is created that is fully inclusive of womens desires and purposes. There are many different kinds of feminist theory but they all have these goals in common. Where they differ is in the particular visions of what such a reconstructed society would look like and in the strategies they employ to achieve it. Feminism has only working definitions says Donna hawxhurst and sue Morrow, since it is a dynamic, constantly changing ideology with many aspects including the personal, the political and the philosophical. It can never be simply a belief system. Without action, feminism is merely empty rhetoric which cancels itself out.12 Barbara Berg defines it as a broad movement embracing numerous phases of womens emancipation. It is the freedom from sex-determined role, freedom from societys oppressive restrictions, freedom to express her thought fully and to convert them freely into action13 The most Significant work, concerning-the quest for recognition of womens socio-cultural roles and struggles for womens Social cultural and political rights was Mary Wollstone Crafts- A vindication of the Rights of
12
Tuttle, Liss (1987). Feminism : A Movement to End Oppressions, in Anna Coote and Ters Gill (Ed.), Womens Rights : A Practical guide P. 65-66. 13 Hooks, Bell (1974). Feminism : A Movement to End Oppressions, in AnnaCoote and Ters Gill (Ed.), Womens Rights: A Practical guide, P.65-66
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women(1792). Wollstone Craft engendered a political activism that has remained at the core of western feminism. She says In tracing the causes that have degraded woman, I have confined my observations to such as universally act upon the morals and manners of the whole sex and to me it appears clear, that they all spring from want of understanding. Whether this arises from a physical or accidental weakness of faculties, time alone can determine; for I shall not any lay any great stress upon the example of a few women who from having received a masculine education have acquired courage and resolution. I only contend that the men who have been placed in similar situation have acquired a similar character. Fredrick among later works, with such quests include Margaret Fullers woman in the 19th century (1845) John Stuart mills The subjection of women (1869) Frederic Engels The origin of the Family (1884) and Olive Scheiners Women and labour. (1911).The struggle was cameo on the suffragette movement at the outset of the 20th century. In 1929, Virginia Woolfs book A Room of ones own Came to light and was recognized as the most important feminists document. The late 1960s witnessed intensification of the feminist struggle in Europe and America. The movement acquired political dimensions and turned aggressive and polemical nature. Western theories are a part of our intellectual capital for, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Phule, Ambedkar or Pundit Ramabai. During the colonial period the negotiation led to a trend of essential sing Indian culture and a construction of an image of recasted Indian womanhood as an epitome of that
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culture. (Flavia 1994) In the 1990s it was Elaine showalter, who claimed that feminist criticism has finished with her Gyno Criticism and needed to focus on gender and sexual difference in text by men as much as by women. Speaking of Gender (1989) focused on signification of the feminine in the works of Irigaray, Jardine and others. Thus from 1970s onwards the growing interest in feminist criticism has taken speedy strides like political feminism which began with the womens Liberation Movement in 70s, critical feminism today is shaped by a much richer understanding of difference. With such conceptions feminism comes a long way from power politics to an understanding of cultural diversification.14 Indian Women are credited with having resisted patriarchal oppression for more than 2,000 years (Tharu and Lalita, 1993.) The first major work in this direction was Kate Milletts Sexual Politics in 1970 which according to feminist social scientist is one of the first major attempts to provide a though theoretical examination of the oppression of women using the concept of patriarchy. The other major work is Adrienne Richs Of Women Born in 1976. This book suggests that women voices can only be authorised by hearing private and sometimes painful experiences. She painfully describes. I soon began to sense a fundamental perpetual difficulty among male scholars (and some female once) for which sexism is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be named patrivincialism
14
Sengupta, Jayita, Refractions of Desire : Feminist Perspective in the Novels of Toni Morrison, Michele Roberts and Anita Desai, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors (P) Ltd., 2006, P.52)
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or patriochalism: the assumption that women are a sub-group, that mans world is the real world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture and culture to partriarchy, that the great or liberalising period of history have been the same for women as for men, that generalisations about man, humankind, children, black, parents, the working class hold true for women, mother, daughters, sisters, wet nurses, infant girls, and can include them with no more than a glancing reference here and there, usually to some specialised function like breast-feeding.15 If Richs Of Women Born helped women in deconstructing
partriochialism, Nacy Hartsocks Money, Sex and Power (1985) draws on Marxists analysis of ideology to argue that it is the restriction of woman the private sphere which accounts to her dominance by the man. This exclusion of women for the public sphere affects the organisation of knowledge, specially in academic disciplines. Therefore, Hartsock argues on Marxist line that only an epistemology rooted in production instead of an exchange can ground a way of knowing that distinguishes reality from false appearances. That is to say, Hartsock argues that theories of power which employ the market model of exchange can only assume a experience of the domination because these theories reflect the experiences of the dominations, i.e., the experiences of men. She then concludes that only womens experiences provide a standpoint which
15
Adrienne Rich, of Women Born : Motherhood as Experience and Institution, New York, Norton, 1976, p.16
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can uncover the real relation of male domination.16 According to Chandra Mohantys definition of Third world Women are imagined community of women with divergent histories and social locations woven together by the political threats of opposition to forms of domination (Sexist, racist and imperialist structures that are not only pervasive but also systematic).17 In the Western male-dominated colonial, neo-colonial and post-colonial discourse, we discover three distorted images of southern women. The first image is that of Zenana, whereby veiled Third world Women are looked upon as mikndless member of a harem, preoccupied with petty domestic raivalries rather than with artistic and political affairs of their times.18 The Second image of the Third world Women is that of sex objects.This image is exemplified in Malek Alleulas exposure of the Colonial Harem (1986) and Rana Kabbanis Europes Myths of the Orient (1986). Here, the women of South are portrayed as eroticised, unclothed and therefore needed to be civilised through their contact with the colonisers. How ironical it seems that in the first image women of south are criticised for being fully clothed and in the second, for being halfnaked. However, both images define Third world Women as inferior and
16
Money, Sex and Power : Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism, Boston, North Eastern University Press, 1935, p.242 17 Chandra Mohanty, Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism in Mohanty et., al (eds), Third World Women and Politics of Feminism, blumington, Indiana University Press, 1991, P.4 18 C. Enloc, Bananas, Beaches and Bases : Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Barkeley, University of California Press, 1989, P.53
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subjugated- the object of sexual desire. Spivak says that in both images, the Third world Women are not allowed to speak and deeply in shadow.19 In the third image, the women of the Third World are portrayed as Victims. The feminists, who create such images, claim that they base their analyses on the shared and gendered oppression of Women. In doing so, they homogenise the experiences and conditions of the western women and apply it to women across the world. As a result, the varied interests of Women of South are not only misrepresented but produce reductive understandings of the Third World Womens multiple realities.20 The above mentioned three images of women depict Third World Women are traditional and non-liberated and need to be civilised and developed like western women. Nussbaum rightly remarks what is essential is the positive changes in the lives of women. According to her Essentialism and particular perception were not opposed: they were complimentary aspects of a single process of deliberation. Had the women not been seen as a human beings who shared with other women a common humanity, the local women could not have told their story they did, nor could development workers have brought their own experiences of feminism into participatory dialogue as if they had some relevance for the local women. The very structure of the dialogue presupposed the recognition of common humanity, and it was only with this basis securely established that they could
19 20
G.C. Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essay in Cultural Politics, New York Routledge, 1988, p.287. A.M. Goetz, Feminism and the Limits of the Claim to Know: Contradictions in the Feminist Approach to Women in Development: in R. Grant and K. Newland (eds.,) Gender and International Relations, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991, p.143
27
fruitfully explore the concrete circumstances in which they were trying, in the one case, to live and in the other case, to promote flourishing lives.21 Feminism in literature is essentially manifestation of women in society. Feminism always meant representation of freedom of womens mind spirit and body. One of the primary concerns of feminism is to declare that a woman is a being. She is not an appendage a subordinate of man. Rather she is an autonomous being capable of trial and error, finding her own way to salvation. With the rise of feminism in India in the seventies, literacy feminist critics confront to the feminine sensibility, an urge to create a literature of thin own. A literature written by women about women and for women. The writings of women all considered as feminists and many writers deny the tag and even a writer is referred to as a Woman writer while male is not referred as male writer. Shashi Deshpande on feminism in India and Reservation Bill says: I think it will never happen because men will never give women anything. It will happen because of women themselves. Further she says: I think consumerism is good in one way. You see a T.V and you see all those things and you say I want to have that and how do you get that if you dont work and your husband alone is earning? you know, my servant who has been working with me for many years, whatever she wants she buys with her own money. She does not wait for her husband to buy it. So, consumerism is going to be good in one way.
21
M. Nussbaum, Human functionary and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism, Political Theory, 20,2,1992 : 236-37.
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Because if people want the goods, they will need their own money. To earn the money they want to take up a job. Once you take up a job you became an independent person. Earlier Shashi Deshpande objected being called as a feminist. But later admits herself to be a feminist but only as a person and certainly not as novelist, she says in an interview her stance on this issue I now have no doubts at all in saying that I am a feminist``, in my own life, I mean. But not consciously, as a novelist. I must also say that my feminism has come to me very slowly, very gradually and mainly out of any own thinking and experiences and feelings. I started writing first, and only then discovered my feminism. And it was much later that I actually read books about it.22 further clearing her view point, she declares: I am a feminist, Im very staunch feminist in my personal life cruelty and oppression should not be there between the two genders, this is my idea of feminism. I am feminist very much and I strongly react against any kind of cruelty or oppression, decimal of opportunities to women became they are women the important thing is we have the right to live ourselves. But as writer Im not going to use my novels carry the message of feminism then it becomes propaganda.(Interview with Prasanna Sree XIII-XIV). She is a true huminist her views are more close to me modern feminist. More than being labelled as a feminist she expresses her desire to be a humanist in an interview given to Vanamala Vishwanath: I want to reach a stage where I can write
22
Lakshmi Holmstorm Shashi Deshpande Talks to Lakshmi Holmstrom, The fiction of Shashi Deshpande, Ed. R.S. Pathak, New Delhi: Creative, 1998, P.248
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about human being and not about women in relation to men. I dont believe in having a protagonist or sexist purpose to my writing. If it presents such perspective, its only a coincidence.23 Thus Shashi Deshapande deals with human issues, problems, which are of high concern. Her works, therefore, makes an outstanding contribution to Indian literature in English. There was a time when Womens writing was treated as trivial, sentimental and sensational and was not taken seriously. But now the conditions of the women writers are quite different. Women now enjoy equal rights with men so far as education is concerned. Moreover with the change in societys attitude to women, the attitude of the critics to women writers has also undergone a radical change and women writers portrayal of their experiences, especially the experience of sex and child birth is no longer considers it an abnormality or perversity for a woman writer to think of writing or portraying her inner and so called strictly personal and private experiences. The present study is divided in to five chapters. The first chapter is Introduction which traces the status of Indian English fiction and to project Shashi Deshpande as a leading Indian-woman novelist. The biographical details of Shashi Deshpande and the brief analytical synopsis of all her novels are given to prove the significance of her novels.
23
Vanamala Vishwanath Interview with Shashi Deshapande, Ed R.S. Pathak; The fiction of Shashi Deshapande, 1998, P.237
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The second chapter titled Erasing That Long Silenceis about breaking the long silence prevailed for seventeen long years by the protagonist Jaya. That Long Silence can be called as a psychological novel portraying middle class Indian womens lives universally appealing. The Third chapter titled Light of Awareness in The Dark Holds No Terror. The novel The Dark Holds No Terror is argued in different perspectives in order to illustrate that the theme is of varied significance. Saru who is binded with her emotions is subjected to mental torture and slavery. The Fourth chapter titled Renounce in Roots And Shadows. Shashi Deshpande with every new novel Attempts much more than what she has already explored in her earlier novels. Indu is a very bold character. She tries to gain freedom in all the aspects of her life. She is also caught in the maze of ageold customs and tradition. Indu is in the process of fighting and finding her way out of this. A pause from her routine life far away from her husband, Indu is able to resolve the riddle of failure in her life. She is able to understand herself and learn many truths about her life. The Fifth chapter titled Conclusion summarizes the techniques employed by Shashi Deshpande in articulating the Self in her novels chosen for study and records the conclusion. Women characters play a vital role in Shashi Despandes novels. They voice female identity, her freedom and challenges, psychological complexities and optimistic view in crisis. Marriage
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plays a crucial role in the life of a woman. That too in our country it is still the ultimate goal of a girls life. As a contrast to this Shashi Deshpande through her works condemns the institution that creates suffocation and deprives a woman of her identity. This concluding chapter also discusses how patriarchal society confines woman to kitchen withholding her talents by imposing rigid restraints on her and how Shashi Deshpande tries to address women with her bold ideas through her novels.
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CHAPTER - II ERASING THAT LONG SILENCE Shashi Deshpande studies the issues and problems of contemporary middle class woman. Her heroines are sensitive, intelligent and CareerOriented. A glimpse of her novel reveals how poignantly, she expresses the frustration and disappointments of women experience social and cultural oppression in the male-dominated society. That Long Silence is an individuals journey in search of ones true self who confronts the gender oriented tradition. It depicts the plight of a wife who suffers silently in the name of family. Marriage is still a social necessary, where women seek security and men respectability. As Eva Figes (1986) says: Dominance is the keynote in an analysis of the man-woman relationship where the male attributes are ones associated with mental thought and positive activity, whilst the woman is regarded as essentially passive, her role to be the respectable of male sexual drive for the subsequent reproduction of the species.24 Shashi deshpande started her writing career all of a sudden. In her own terms: There was really nothing. It was very strange. May be it was there waiting inside and suddenly at one moment, it came out. Until then, I was looking around to see what I could do. I was very unhappy not doing anything,
24
Figes, Eva. Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society (London : Macmillan, 1986) P.125
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just looking after the home and children. It was perhaps a kind of claustrophobic existence. I could feel something building up in me and that caused the outburst. Otherwise, it would have perhaps led to a breakdown.(Denying the otherness II) Her novels are autobiographical in nature depicting her own experiences of the educated middle class Indian womens predicament and they tend to be gender specific. Her work concentrates on the status of the women in the traditional bound, male-dominated middle class society of the contemporary India. Balzac wrote in Physiology of Marriage pay no attention to a womans murmurs, her cries, her pains nature has made her for our use and for bearing everything, children, sorrows, blows and pains inflicted by man. Do not accuse your self of hardness. In all the codes of so-called civilized nations man has written laws that required womans destiny under this bloody epigraph Woe to the weak. (Quoted by Simone de Beauvoir) That Long Silence is a muted and essentially sympathetic treatment of the problems of marital relationships maintaining a credible balance between sexes.25 Jaya, the protagonist, is a sufferer right from her childhood days, which continues even after marriage. She nurtured shame because she could not respond and admire the classical music of Paluskar and Faiyaz Khan like her father. Her grandmother has continuously chided her for her inquisitive nature and further cautioned her saying that for everything question for everything a retort what husband can be comfortable with that?(5). She is further cautioned
25
The Second Sex, Trans H.M. Parshley (London: Four Square Books Limited, 1961) P.255
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that a husband is like a sheltering tree (137) and that the happiness of your husband and home depends entirely on you (138). These tips of Vanitamami for a future wife became foundation of Jayas married life. This reveals how women are viewed in the society controlled by men and the tradition. Jaya wanted to confront security, she accepted Mohan as a sheltering tree that is why she did not bother to know if he was following shortcut ways for earning money. Ever since her marriage she had been content to follow the footsteps of the mythological role model of Sita, which authorities tend to sacrifice at one instance and she tries to compare herself with Gandhari:If Gandhari, who bandaged her eyes to become blind like her husband could be called an ideal wife, I was an ideal wife too. I bandaged my eyes tightly. I dont want to know anything. It was enough for me that we moved to Bombay; that we could send Rahul and Rati to good schools, that I could have the things we needed decent clothes, a fridge, a gas connection, travelling I class. (144). The family tree sketched by her paternal Uncle Ramukaka: Look Jaya, this is our branch. This is our grandfather your Vasu and me. And here are the boys Sridhar,Jaanu,Dinakar,Ravi... Jaya exclaims, I am not here! She was answered rudely. How can you be here? You dont belong to this family! Youre married; youre now part of Mohans family. But she was not found in Mohans family tree either. Generally, a womans identity is defined in terms
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of her relationship with man as a daughter, a wife and a mother it means virtually a woman doesnt have an identity of her own.26 Shashi Deshpande in all her novels raises her strong voice of protest against the male-dominated Indian society and against man-made rules and conventions. She confesses that only a woman could read my books - they are written from the inside, as it were. 27 In orthodox Indian marriages, it is not enough for the husband to be approved and admired; he wants immediate unquestioned obedience to his commands. This is clearly witnessed in the case of Mohans mother. As narrated by Mohan to Jaya I can see a picture of extraordinary clarity and
vividness-the woman (Mohans mother) crouching in front of the dying fire sitting blank and motionless, the huddles bundles of sleeping children (Mohan, his brothers and sisters) on the floor, the utter silence, the loud knock at the door They had all had their food, except her. Though she always waited for him, their father, however late he was (and he never gave her any indication of when he would be back) she had asserted herself in this that she would not make the children wait for him. She gave them their dinner, even the older ones and then she cooked rice for him again for he would not, he made it clear to her, what he called food as, your childrens disgusting leaving, He wanted his rice fresh and hot, from a vessel that was untouched. She had just finished cooking this
26 27
Indira Kulkshreshtha, That Long Silence Chapter 4 Women in the novel of Shashi Deshpande, a Study Vanamala Viwhwanath interview with Shashi Deshpande, A womans world.. All the Way!, Literature Alive 1:3 (1987), 9.
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second cooking and was waiting, hoping, perhaps that he would not be too late, for it wouldnt do to allow and as for lighting the fire again, that was unthinkable (P.15-16). At last, when he came in, he went straight to the bathroom to wash. By the time he returned, she had his plate ready. Hanging his shirt on a peg on the wall, he Sat down, drank a glass of water, poured some water into his palm to sprinkle ritually around his plate and then he paused, Why is there no fresh chutney today? he asked, not looking at her. She mumbled something, the next second, he picked up his heavy brass plate and threw it, not at her, but deliberately on the wall, which it hit with a dull clang. He wore his shirt and went out of the house. This is silently watched by the children, the mother silently picks up the plate, cleaned the floor and the wall of all the spattered food, and wiped it, she once again cooked rice and prepared fresh chutney, and sits clown to wait, when her children, who had awoken up by the clanging sound of the plate, finally drift off to sleep again, She was still sitting there in front of the fire, silent, motionless (36). Mohans reaction after his narration is quite revealing. God She was tough. Women in those days were tough (36). But Jaya sees a wounded woman. Mohan is so insensitivity that as a son, being witness to his fathers harassment is not condemning his father but praising his mother as a virtuous woman. Mohans sister Vimala too dies in silence rather than informing her mother-in-law about her problem, victim of ovarian tumour. If Vimala would
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have expressed herself it would have been in vain, that could be confirmed by her mother-in-laws response towards her ill health. God knows whats wrong with her, she has been lying there on her bed for over a month now. Yes, take her away if you want to. I never heard of women going to hospitals and doctors for such a thing. As if other women dont have heavy periods. What a fuss. But these women who have never had any children are like that." (89). At last, she killed herself. Silence, in a way becomes a symbol of high endurance on the part of a person who is silent. Her Ajji along with silence had taught her to wait the waiting game(30) For a man waiting brings in restlessness but for woman the game of waiting starts quite early in her childhood wait until you get married, wait until your husband comes, wait until you go to your in laws home, wait until you have kids. Yes, ever since I got married I had done nothing but wait (30) Women are blamed unfeminine and unnatural if they break the rules of patriarchy so they are forced to cling to be termed feminine. Shashi Deshpande provides perfect examples of victimized women in a patriarchal system. Jeeja, Jayas maidservant supports her good for nothing husband by all means. She does not protest him for getting her co-wife, in turn she justifies it by saying, God didnt give us any children. That was his misfortune as well as mine. How could I blame him for marrying again? When I couldnt give him any children? After the death of her husband and his mistress she willingly brings up their son, Rajaram and looks after his wife Tara. Jaya
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does not allow even Tara to abuse or curse her husband. She says, Stop that dont forget he keeps the kumkum on your forehead. What is a woman without that? (53). Then there is Kusum who is an adopted girl by the childless Vanitamami. In a letter informing Jaya of Kusums death, her mother writers: But it was a good thing in a way. She was of no use to anyone after she went crazy, nobody needed her." After reading the letter Jaya tears it furiously. Kusums madness and the way she committed suicide by jumping into the dry well depicts her insecurity as she failed in one of her goals, a male child the winning of mans heart, his long life and the propagation of his lineage through a male child are the goals of the traditional married woman. Mukta is Jayas immediate neighbour at her Dadars flat who tortures herself by fasting, If it wasnt her Saturday it was her 'Monday or her 'Thursday. Jayas reaction towards her piety: Mukta had more days of fasts than days on which she could eat a normal meal. Her self-mortification and reproach seemed to be the most positive thing about her. And yet her piety surely it was that which prompted those fasts seemed meaningless, since she had already forfeited the purpose of it, the purpose of all Hindu womens fasts the avoidance of widowhood. Even Jayas Vanitamami falls into this category of performing numerous Pujas and fasts in the hope of getting a child. But she had gone on with her fasts, her ritual circumambulations of the Tulsi Plant of
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the Peepal tree, even when their aim had gone beyond her reach, when her uterus had shrivelled and her ovaries atrophied. (67). Jaya, Jeeja, Mukta, Vanitamami, Vimala and her mothers story depicts the plight of Indian women. It shows how prescribed norms of the society are powerfully embedded in the female consciousness and her failure to surmount orthodoxy. Even today, women strongly cling to the various forms of female oppression, exalting and glorifying them with the proactive norms of their life. Jaya, too tries, her level best to imbibe the tradition of silence of her mother-in-law and sister-in-law, by enacting role of a devoted wife and dutiful mother, but the role playing is not as natural as it should have been, the cracks are soon visible. Once, she cannot control her anger, retorts back at Mohan, paying back his anger in the same measure- Then, getting the feel of it, I had met his anger with my own, deliberately using it as a weapon, raging, furious- I had flung accusations, wildly at him(1). Jayas absorption into the family fold and tradition is so total that from a fiercely independent girl, she gradually deteriorates into that a stereotype of a woman, nervous, incompetent always in hand of help, wanting to build an edifice of security around her husband and children, believing it to be a burrow into, to which she can crawl like a reptile and feel safe. (148) The very thoughts of the collapse of her marriage, particularly those fears relating to the possibility of Mohans death, keep constantly haunting her; I had lived in constant panic
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that he would die, I had clung at him at night, feeling with relief the warmth of his body, stroking his chest letting my palms move with his even deep breaths. The thought of living without him had twisted my insides. His death had seemed to me the final catastrophe. The very idea of his dying had made me feel so bereft that tears had flowed effortlessly down by cheeks. If he had been a little late coming home, I had been sure he was dead. By the time he returned, I had, in my imagination shaped my life to a desolate widowhood (96-97) Jayas married life has been lived on the same life of the wise sparrow, who built a home of wax and the foolish crow, who built her house of dung . On a rainy might the crows house collapses forcing her to seek shelter at the sparrows The sparrow is so possessive of her house and attached to the safety and welfare of her family members, that, she keeps the crow waiting out in the rain, for a considerable time. She allows the crow in her home only when the crow is thoroughly drenched and then guides her to the hot pan to warm herself. The foolish crow hops on to the hot pun and gets burnt to death. The moral of the story of the foolish crow and that of a shrewd sparrow, she learns to stay at home, look after your babies, keep out the rest of the world, and you are safe (17) Thus marriage means- to be at home, to take care of the children and the husband and to be away from the rest of the world. She has Attending to the needs of the husband and tending and caring of the children becomes her full
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time occupations she recalls in unequivocal terms that,Mohan is her profession, career and means of livelihood(75) She, like Gandhari of the Mahabharata symbolically bandages her eyes and grows blind to his weakness. Like Sita, who followed her husband into exile, she follows Mohan into the concrete jungle Bombay (11) Even faithfully she followed all the edicts laid down by the womens magazines. She says, They had been my Bible, and I had pored over the wisdom contained in them. Dont let yourself go. How to keep your husband in love with you. Keep romance alive in a marriage. The quality of charm in a woman. (96). Jaya says, And when I had been praised for anything, Id been so ridiculously pleased, I almost wag my tail, like a dog thats been patted by its master.(84) Mary Wollstonecraft argued that if women appeared stupid and passive, this was not because of some innate lack of intelligence but because women had not been told to cultivate their minds. Women are told from their infancy and taught by the examples of their mothers that little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience and a scrupulous attention to do a puerile kind of propriety will obtain for them the protection of man, and should they be beautiful, everything else is needless, for at least twenty years of their lives. Jaya even sacrifices her creative writing for her insensitive husband. In the early years of her marriage, she was on the threshold of acquiring some merit. One of her short stories bags the first prize
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and is published in a magazine, which is about a couple, a man who cannot reach out to his wife except through her body. Mohan thinks that the story portrays their own personal life, and he is very apprehensive of the idea that people may assume that he is the kind of person portrayed in the story. His words were enough to nip her creative writing in the bud. She says, Looking at his stricken face, I had been concerned. I had done him wrong. And I stopped writing after that (144). Even though she knew Mohan was wrong in his thinking she never dared to reason it out. Instead she turned towards popular writing and wrote for a Womans Magazine under the pseudonym of Seeta (In Indian mythology, Sita stands for total self-surrender. Sita and Savithri were strong and individualistic women but their energies were directed not towards self-liberation but towards the welfare of their husbands.). While Mohans actions before and during the sex are so typical that Jaya can predict them each time. He asks her the same questiondid he hurt her. Then he falls asleep turning his back to Jaya. The communication between them ends with the conclusion of the intercourse. Even in her sexual life Jaya is passive, submissive and yielding, while Mohan is callous, aggressive and self centered. It is this emptiness within which that draws Jaya towards Kamat. He is an intellectual man structured to loneliness. He was unlike her husband; he was devoid of male ego and loves to cook and do domestic chores, which are always
43
assigned to women exclusively. Kamats words provide her an insight into the truth about herself and make her accept responsibility for her deeds. He warns her against self-pity, I am warning you beware of this women are the victims- theory of yours. It will drag you down into a soft, squishy bog of selfpity. Take yourself seriously, woman. Dont sulk behind a false name.(148). She had a good comfort with him. It had been a revelation to me that two people, a man and woman, could talk this way. With this man I had not been a woman. I had been just myself - Jaya. There had been and ease in our relationship, I had never known in any other. (153). Kamat encouraged her like her father-Spew out your anger in your writing, woman spew it out. (147) It becomes so difficult for Jaya that she says- "It became difficult for me to distinguish between him and Appa for a second.Even like an adorable lover praises her beauty Your name is like your face.(152). She is not a sexual object to him but a good friend. As she says, I told him things Id never been able to speak of, not to Dad, not to Mohan (153). When she feels particularly sad about her father Appas death, she involuntarily finds herself in the comforting embrace of Kamat. It becomes difficult for her to distinguish between him and Appa for a second. But her body responds to his gentle look, voice and touch and momentarily her ego and id clash with the ferocity of two fighters. She remembers that experience- There had been nothing but an over whelming urge to respond to him with my body,
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the equally over whelming certainty of my mind that, I could not sole. Later, there had been confusion(157) His sudden death shocks her and she is heartbroken. But she turned her back to him, as she was keen to protect her marriage. "That night while having dinner I had thought someone I know is dead. I saw him dead. And I had been detached from that woman who had seen him remote from that experience." (157) Jaya is shocked when Mohan defended himself by saying, It was for you and the children that I did this, I wanted you to have good life. I wanted the children to have all those things I never had(19). She now realized that the seventeen long years of her married life had failed to make them one emotional, intellectual, only their physical bodies had occasionally met, not their souls, We were two persons, A man, A woman (8) Jaya, fails to identify her identity and doesnt enjoy her own individuality she sees herself as some ones daughter, wife and mother, shunning her own identity, she therefore remarks, I was born my father died when I was fifteen I got married to Mohan, I have two children, and I did not let a third live (2) This last sentence directly hints at an abortion of her third child without her husbands knowledge. She even lives up to this dedicated wifes role at the cost of losing her own identity. She remembers her relationship with her husband- I am Mohans wife I had thought, and cut off the bits of me that had refused to be Mohans wife (161). Worse than anything else had been the boredom of the unchanging pattern, the unchanging monotony (4). Both of them are leading their life like a pair of
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bullocks yoked together. The one was pretending, as most couples do, to be happy. But in reality, in a real happily married life there is no room for hypocrisies and pretensions. The imagery of the two bullocks yoked together signifies two human begins are forced together without any choice of then own. Mohan names Jaya as Suhasini after marriage. Suhasini becomes the symbol of submissive housewife, to only care and look after her children, maintain the home well in order. Shashi Deshpande condemns the scheme of changing a woman's name as the part of a marriage. Its not changing her name but changing her identity enslaving her to the new house. Charlotte Perkins Gilman says: "It's no, that, women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark Place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it. The Woman is narrowed by the home."28 Jaya is a gifted writer. But because Mohan does not like her writing and nurtures an idea, through Jayas writing public will know their personal life and hence restricts her writing career. Jays very faithfully given up her hobby and fits into the traditional role of an, ideal wife. She even shuts her eyes to the corrupt practice of her husband. She compromises her creative, talented writing skills and writes silly and non-sense things for a Magazine the Seeta column. For him the fiction is life, but for her life is a fiction, an illusion. This Seeta
28
http:// womens history. About.com/od/quotes/a/c c_p_gilman.htm
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column, in course of time becomes, a likable column for her female readers, Mohan and to her editors, Jaya sees in this Seeta columns a patriarchal construct, The means through which I had shut the doors, firmly, on all those women who invaded my being, screaming for my attention. I could not write about, because they might resemble Mohans mother, aunt, my mother, or aunt. Seeta was safer (149) Jaya, deliberately gives up her creative aspect which is so close to her heartand ignores even those subjects of womans suffering etc. She negates her own self and accepts the role of a traditional housewife. Jaya, right from day one of her marriage till now, concludes that her husband Mohan had never accepted her as Jaya (the victorious) but as he had renamed her as Suhasini he yearned her to be soft spoken, obedient, always smiling, ready to serve etc. But, when Jaya, in their fierce verbal battle, blurts out that Suhasini was dead; yes, that was it, she was the one Mohan was mourning No, the fact was that Id finally done itId killed her (121). Jayas feelings of detachment from the self, experience of a personality torn due to conflicts and a sense of disorientation are nothing but an expression of neurotic conflict. After marriage, a woman, in fact finds a split personality within herself. Jaya too has been living with this kind of split personality for the last 17 years of her married life.
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Suhasini had been her marital identity. Her real identity as Jaya is in crisis and she feels disoriented. On a secret visit to her posh church gate house, where her marital identity as Suhasini is fixed, sees her own divided self clearly. And now nothing seemed to connect me to this place, nothing bridged the chasm between this prowling woman and the women who had lived here. I was conscious of a faint Chagrin at her disappearance. Wasnt it I who had pain fully, laboriously created her? Perhaps, for that very rsum, she could not evade me entirely, and she appeared to me only a faint wraith of herself standing near this table, hand poised over a vise of flowers? (168).With Mohans disappearance, she experiences a fine quivering in her abdomen, which has always been for her prelude to a panic. There is no Kamat now to assure her of her significance and sanity nor the distant relative, mad Kusum, against whom to test her sanity. Thus her sense of confusion and turmoil meet her, with brutal force (125). I could feel myself gasping, drowning in the darkness, the wild, flailing, panic stricken movements that I was making taking me lower and lower into the vortex. Take your pain between your teeth bite on it; dons let it escape I came floundering out of the depths, thinking --am I going crazy like Kusum? (125) Jaya experiences utter mental pain and confusion, It is only after she gets Mohans telegram from Delhi informing her that everything is fine and their changed son Rahuls return, makes her think that she was silly in contemplating suicides earlier. She tells,Im not afraid any more, the panic has gone. Im Mohans wife. I had thought, and cut off the bits
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of me that had refused to be Mohans wife. Now I know that kind of a fragmentation is not possible, (191) Her step in breaking That long silence is towards restoring normalcy and happiness in the family. Elezabeth Robins Writes Shashi Deshpandes novel, That Long Silence announcing, as it were, the intention of this talented contemporary Indian Writer to break the long silence that has surrounded women, their experiences and their world. For a long time, woman has existed as a gap, as an absence in literature. Whether Western or Indian. This is not only true of the fiction created by men, but also by women, who have mostly confined themselves to writing love stories or dealing with the experience of women in a superficial manner, creating the same kind of stereotypes of women which they find so reprehensible in the writings of men. Women writers have also often fallen a pray to that prescriptive feminist ideology of creating strong women characters. This doctrine becomes as repressive as the one created by male hegemony and represses the truth about the majority of thin sister and thin lives. 29 Simone de Beauvoir in her work The Second Sex (1984) asserts that no biological, psychological or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization that determines this creature. She entreats women to discover their own identity, the authentic and autonomous self and not the derived and reduced figure of a genderized being. It is to
29
Singh Sushila (ed) Feminism and Recent Fiction in English, ( Prestige Books New Delshi) P.129
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achieve autonomy and a concrete subjectivity or that will be much more than just being the other of the universally authenticated man. Jayas self-analysis reveals her the fact that she lacked courage and the right of making a choice. The truth is that it was Mohan who had clear idea of what be wanted; the kind of life he wanted to lead the kind of home he would live in, and I went along with him. But I cannot blame Mohan, for even if he had asked me what do you want? I would have found it hard to give him a reply. When she is in this deep thinking Maitreyee comes to her mind who so definitely rejected her philosopher husband Yajnavalkyas offer of half his property. 'Will this property give me immortality?' she asked him.No, he said and she immediately rejected the property. To know what you want I have been denied that "(25). Shashi Deshpandes protagonists undergo a Psychological journey of self-realisation to define themselves to assert by their own identity. The French theorists of feminism like Julia Kristiva, Helence Cixous Luce Lirigaray and Monique within apply Derriadas method of deconstruction and look upon the language as a means of subjugation, they treat the structure of language as Phallo centric (or phallus-dominated) and hence reject all language and literature. In their over enthusiasm, they even call for a feminine language (parler femme). The Anglo-American exponents of feminism like Showalter, Gilberts, Gubar and Cheri Register, also opine that womans consciousness is
50
much different from that of mans, and so woman writers ought to be studied by their own standards and ought not be relegated to a secondary position. The French and Anglo American feminists channelize their energy toward exposing the sexist modes of male authors and patriarchal practices in society and assigning an honourable place to the literary works of women writers. 30 Jaya feels if Mohan is a sinner, then she too has to accept herself as one. She says,There was a simple word I had to take into account: retribution."(127). An act and retribution - they followed each other naturally and inevitably. Dasarath killed an innocent young boy Shambuka whose parents died crying out for their son. And years later, Dasarath died too, calling out for his son Rama Rama. (128). Jaya confesses her creative self, "She (Seeta) had been the means through which I had shut the door, firmly, on all those other women who had invaded my being, screaming for attention; women I had known I could not write about because they might it was just possible resemble Mohans mother or aunt or my mother or aunt." (149). Jaya is revaluating herself and now wants to choose her own way. Jaya even acknowledges her fear regarding writing and failing. "Middle class. Bourgeoise. Upper-caste. Distanced from real life. Scared of writing. Scared of failing. Oh God. I had thought, I can't take anymore. Even a worm has hole it can crawl into. I had mine - as Mohans wife, as Rahuls and
30
Writing the Females, Academy Awarded Novels in English. Mithilesh.K.Pande, A.N. Dwivedis Shashi Deshpandes- That long silence (88) A feminist Reading P.14.
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Ratis motherAnd so I had crawled back into my hole. I had felt safe there. Comfortable. Unassailable. And so I had stopped writing. It hadnt been Mohans fault at all. And it had been just a coincidence, though it had helped, that just then Mohan had propelled me into that other kind of writing. I encouraged you, he had said to me. He was right But, I went on with my chestbeating fit of penitence; Mohan had not forced me to do that kind of writing. Id gone into it myself. With my eyes wide open." (148). At last Jaya realizes that she has to make a choice of her own to assert her individuality. Maitreyee made a choice of her own. Sri Krishna told Arjuna in Bhagavadgita that he himself had to make his choice - yathecchasi tatha kuru Do as you desire. But now I understand. With this line, after all those millions of words of instruction, Krishna confers humanness on Arjuna. I have given you knowledge. Now you make the choice. The choice is yours. Do as you desire.(192) Jayas final choice is to erase the silence. If I have to plug that hole in the heart. I will have to speak, to listen; I will have to erase the silence between us. While studying Sanskrit drama, Id learnt with a sense of outrage that its rigid rules did not permit women characters to speak Sanskrit. They had to use Prakrit - a language that had sounded to my ears like a babys lisp. The anger I'd felt then comes back to me when I realize what I have been doing all these years. I have been speaking Prakrit myself." (192-193).
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Now Jaya is out of panic. Rajeshwari says, She chooses to operate within the self-imposed limits of the family, resolving to change her life by renegotiating the power-relations and improving the interpersonal relationships within it rather than through the instrumentality of her writing. (22) Jaya has now realized how much she has contributed to her self-destruction. It is only through self-analysis and self understanding, through vigilance and courage, they can begin to change their lives. They will have to fight their own battles, nobody is going to do it for them.31 By erasing the silence that had prevailed in her life for seventeen long years Jaya is asserting herself. It has been rightly said: Emancipation means communication; it does necessarily mean identification.
31
Palkar, Sarala. Breakin Silence: Shashi Deshpandes That long Silence Feminism and Recent Fixes In English, ed., Sushila Singh, New Delhi : Prestige Books, 1991 :134
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CHAPTER III
LIGHT OF AWARENESS IN THE DARK HOLDS NO TERROR
Man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man. And she is simply what man decrees . . . She appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex-absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential.32 In The Dark Holds No Terror the protagonist Saru undergoes a psychological journey to define her Self and ultimately with the knowledge of self she tries to assert herself. Deshpande has very exquisitely pin pointed the inner struggle and sufferings of the new class Indian women through the character of Index who has raise many basic questions regarding modern women who are rooted and shaped by the Indian customs but influenced by the scientific knowledge of the west. Assertion of a woman in a male dominated society like India is a challenge for every woman. It is not only gaining freedom from male oppression but also making one self-strong to lead life in a new attitude. A woman has to gain her own identity than representing herself as a loyal wife and dedicated mother.
32
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. 1949. London : New English Library, 1970. P.xxv
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The opening pages of the novel The Dark Holds No Terror holds the breath of any reader and creates curiosity for further reading. Malashri Lal commenting on the opening scene of the novel The Dark Holds No Terror says, Pornography is a convenient play for selling. But then Indian moral consciousness prevents pornographic fiction being accorded an honorable literary reputation. In the circumstances how does an Indian writer resolve the problem of ensuring sales in a society. Where book buying is not a habit, and simultaneously preserves the hope of earning a reputable name? Shashi Deshpande devises her own answer. The first two pages of her recent novel Dark Holds No Terror describe vividly, a sum of rape. It is printed in italics lest the reader should miss the import of such an epigraph A few paragraphs later, though the writer sets the readers conscience at rest by revealing the identity of the rapist as the womans husband; and since this womans 'point of view determines the action of the novel, the reader may look forward to further titillating scenes, all justifiable in the name of womens lib. Thus prurient delights and the social theme are violently yoked together."33 Shashi Deshpande in an interview with Lakshmi Holmstrom says, It didnt start for me, that novel, with the notion of rape or sexual domination. It started with a couple, the uneasiness or tension between them. And I knew the man was not doing well in his career as the woman was and I connected the
33
Malashri Lal, Good Luck to Entrepreneurs, Rao of The Dark Holds No Terror Indian Book Chronicle, Vol. No.9, May 16, 1981, 169.
6,
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two. Pramila Paul says, Married to a practising neuropathologist, Shashi Deshpande presumably has intimate knowledge of the neurotic world of the likes of Manu. But she shows remarkable restraint in the depiction of these scenes and spares readers the clinical details.34 In an interview with Vanamala Vishwanatha, Deshpande narrates how the novel was conceived: The Dark Holds No Terror came to me when I saw a couple. The wife had a better job and there was an obvious tension between them. He was aggressive and surely, that set it off.35 Saru had a very bad childhood due to her mother, who symbolizes a submissive figure of patriarchy. She follows the rules set by the rigid conventional society, to bring up her child. Thus saru is a victim of genderbased discrimination. The mother, full of a closed minded conservative society, has inculcated a moral bound to prefer a son to daughter. Saru at her very young age is made to realize that as a girl she is inferior to her brother Dhruva in all respect. As Chodorow (1978) argues that because adult women tend to be the primary caretakers of infants, most children begin life with a feminine identification. Whereas boys are compelled to break with this identification to establish a masculine identity, girls are encouraged to maintain this primary attachment to their mothers. Consequently, girls and later adult women, often
34
Pramila Paul, The Dark Holds No Terror, A Womans Search for Refuge, Indian Women Novelists, ed., R.K. Dhawan ( New Delhi : Prestige, 1991), Set 1, Vol. V.64 35 Vanamala Vishwanatha. A Womans World.All the way in Literature Alive, Vol. I, No.3 (Madras: British Council Division, Dec. 1987).
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experience problems developing a strong psychological sense of separation from others. This may lead to womens loss of self in overwhelming responsibility for and connection to others.36 Her mother says: Dont go out in the Sun youll get even darker. Who cares? We have to care if you dont; we have to get you married. Will you live with us all your life? Why not? You cant And Dhruva? He is different. He is a boy(8). This differentiation hurts her ego, cracks her identity and the real problems starts from here. According to Deshpande it is only the crisis of identity which is the root of all problems in human life.37 Saru lives and grows within the oppositional structures of freedom and bondage, domination and resistance, a space within which she negotiates, accepts, defies the norms of family and society. Saru is a neglected child without mothers nurturing care. She was aware of her mothers hatred towards her. She says, If you are woman, I dont want the one (55).Thus the mother daughter relation was in crisis. Saru is made to feel stranger at her own house. Sarus mother never forgave her daughter for being alive even after her brother had drowned, and she coud nor forget the traumatizing effect of her mothers hysterical outburst. You did it, you did this, you killed him you killed him. Why didnt you die? Why are you alive, when hes dead (62).Saru as a child was aware of the discrimination done to her. She says, There was, - always a
36 37
Chodorow, No. (1978). The Reproduction of Mothering, Berkeley : University of California Press, P.59 Quoted in AK. Awasthi, The Quest for Identity in the Novels of Shashi Deshpande, in quest for Identity in Indian English Novels, Part I : Fiction, (ed) Pathak, R.S ( New Delhi : Bahri Publications, 1992), P.97
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Puja on Dhruvas birthday. A festive lunch in the afternoon and an Arti in the evening my birthdays were almost the same - but there was no Puja(168169).After her brothers death the family slides into a perpetual mourning and there are no celebrations. Sarus mother is responsible for Sarus development of sibling rivalry who gave preference to the male child and neglected the girl child. As a child Saru was eager to grab her fathers attention towards her, she remembers: It had been Dhruva sitting on Babas lap and talking to him. And I had thoughtI must show Baba something, anything, to take his attention away from Dhruva sitting on his lap. I must make him listen to me, not to Dhruva. I must make him ignore Dhruva. But she had not succeeded. And when he is drowned, Saru is held responsible and her mother accuses for her no fault or rather her gender sets as her fault. Saru too, had lost her kid brother and was in need of emotional support. Though there was no direct hand of Saru in her brothers death, all the balance was shouldered on her and she was not allowed to have any escape from this sense of guilt, which makes her too vulnerable and insecure in her relationships with others. She recalls She (her mother) never really cared. Not after Dhruvas death, I just did not exist for her; I died long before I left home (32). Saru, fails to get any sympathy from her father, and this guilt suffocates her, and she is made to live with the guilt that she was the murderer.
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As Sarabjit Sandhu observes: The mother is very much attached to her son. Her attitude is a typical one; after all, he is a male child and therefore one who will propagate the family lineage. In another sense, also, the male child is considered more important than a girl, because he is qualified to give agni to his dead parents. The soul of the dead person would otherwise wander restlessly.
38
Sarus life is choked by her mothers routine criticism and
faultfinding. She is made to feel an ugly girl You will never be good looking. You are too dark for that (12). As she grows, the natural things her feminity is made to feel something guilty and faulty. A sense of shame is installed in her for her physical growth you should be careful now about now about how you behave. Dont come out in your petticoat like that. Not even if its only your father whos around (13). Normally a mother according to Simone De Beauvior : She scolds her daughter severely if, after two days, absence, she finds the house in disorder, but she is filled with anger and fear if she finds that the life of the family gives on perfectly well without her. She cannot bear to have her daughter become really her double, a substitute for herself.39 The dos and dont prescribed by the domineering mother make her hate the body and all bodily functions. When she attained her puberty she is told, You are a woman now. (14) Her mother tortured Saru by making her feel a sense of unclean for those three days of menstruating and banning her entrance
38
Sarabjit Sandhu, The Dark Holds No Terror Image of women in the Novels of Shashi Deshpande (N.D: Prestige, 1991), 20-35 39 Simone de Beauvior, The Second sex, For H.M. Parshley ( London : Vintage 1997) P-229-30.
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to kitchen and the Puja room. She is made to sleep on a straw mat covered with a thin sheet. It gave her a feeling of being a pariah, an untouchable, served in a special up and plate from a distance and her very touch seems to pollute. It is only when she begins to study anatomy and physiology in her first year of medicine does Saru felt released from her prison of fears and shames. Susan Bordo argues that: The body is not only a text of culture. It is alsoa practical, direct locus of social control. Banally, through table manners and toilet habits, through seemingly trivial routines, rules and practices, culture is made body converted into automatic, habitual activity. As such it is put beyond the grasp of consciousness [Untouchable] but voluntary, deliberate transformations.Our conscious politics, social commitments, strivings for change may be undermined and betrayed by the life of our bodies not the craving, instinctual body imagined by Plato, Augustine and Freud, but what Foucault calls the docile body regulated by the norms of cultural life.40 Her mothers attitude has given rise not only to remorse but also to a revolt. The mere presence of her mother makes her as a culprit, and in order not to be like her she acquires a medical degree. The image of a lady doctor, seen in her childhood becomes a source of inspiration for her, and hence aspires for the similar detachment and superiority. Her mother wanted to get rid of her daughters responsibility by getting married as soon as she completes her
40
Bordo, Susan, The Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body California: California University Press, 1993, Reconstructing Feminist Discourse on the Body In Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory. New York and London: Norton and Co, 2001, Pp.2362-2376
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degree. She even tells on the face to Saru that they cant spend money for her education as well as for her marriage. Veena Das says: Daughters are comparable to something kept in trust for another (amanat). You have to care for them, love them, and you will be held responsible for them but you are destined to lose them. Once a daughter is properly married and goes to her own house it is like a debt that has been paid.41 Saru seeks her fathers support for her admission to the medical college, and her father for the first time, is on her side. Saru after securing first class in her inter science finds a passport to shun from her mothers fist. Her fathers support signifies a victory and finally she would be free from her mother. This Victory is mixed one with the sour taste of hatred for her mother. There was a pain in my chest, my throat ached intolerably, there was a bugging in my ears, a blur in front of my eyes, I hated her. I wanted to hurt her, wound her, make her suffer (142). She revolts against her parents and runs away to get married Manu. Saru marries Manohar quite agonist her parent with, she doesnt feel any remorse at this separation but her childhood traumatic experience still haunts her. As she always feels in secured in her parent's home, her marriage to Manu is reaching the zenith of that sort of love and security, which she had always aspired for. Manu is an angel who gifted love and happiness to her life for which she is hungry for and each act of sex was triumphant assertion of their love and her of being loved of my being
41
Veena Das, Reflections on the Social Construction of Adulthood, in Sudhir Kakkar (ed), Identify and Adulthood, Delhi: OUP 1992, P.93.
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wanted. She had thought that her problems are nullified after marriage, but it gets intensified by the male chauvinistic attitudinal, beliefs of the society affect the husband wife relationship. After her marriage, Manohar and Saru travel not only in different directions but even in opposite directions. As Prasanna Sree Sathupati observes:"The woman in order to achieve her freedom seeks marriage as an alternative to the bondage crated by the parental family. The simple need to be independent eventually becomes a demand of the inflated ego and takes shape as the love for power over others. She resents the role of a wife with the hope that her new role will help her in winning her freedom".42 Disillusionment in her marital life makes her look for other avenues. Her affairs with Boozie and Padmakar Rao are temporary substitutes for her unfulfilled marital life. According to Saru Boozie is a handsome masterful man. Everything about him right from his language, his swift progress through the hospital wards etcappears to Saru, in perfect coordination. When later Saru realises that Mr. Boozies interest in Saru is not that of master and student but that of a woman and a man. It looks strange to her, she responds to his flirtatious manner, Very soon, their relationship reaches a stage, Boozie helps her with enough money to set up practice in a decent locality. She manages to fulfill her desire of attaining higher education and also better quality of life, which otherwise may not be possible for a common girl like her, Saru says: I
42
Prasanna Sree Sathupati, Conflict and Identity in Shashi Deshpandes Novels, Indian Women Writers, Set III Vol. 4 P.17.
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told myself my relationship with this man couldnt, wouldnt hurt Manu. It was just a teacher-student relation-ship. If he put his hand on my shoulder, slapped me on my back, held my hand or hugged me that was just his mannerism and meant nothing. It had nothing to do with Manu and me(91). Manu, never questions Saru about Boozie giving her so much money for opening a new constructing room. Saru becomes resentful towards Manu who had closed his eyes to Boozie displaying his affection towards her in public, at the inauguration in her consulting room. Her celebration of love ended a soon as she gained recognition as a doctor. Her marriage begins to crush under the weight of success in her profession. Till now, he had been the young man and she his bride. Now she was the lady doctor and he was her husband. Gradually Manu is subjected to jealousness, he cannot tolerate people greeting her and ignoring him:"the same thing that made me inches taller, made him inches shorter". (96)
There is a subtle contrast with Manohar, for he had a happy childhood, He is a good-looking man; he is a poet, an orator, director of plays and a cult figure. After marrying Saru begins to enjoy superior financial and social status. Both enjoy a harmonious relationship so far as Saru was only his wife. But after she assumes the role of a lady doctor and that he is recognized as her husband, the equation changes, he becomes a jealous; sexually aggressive husband. He cant tolerate that his wife enjoys better social prestige and it gradually destroys
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their marriage. She feels that, -The human personality has an infinite capacity for growth, and so the esteem with which I was surrounded made me inches taller. But perhaps, the same thing that made me inches taller made him inches shorter. He had been the young man and I his bride. Now I was the lady doctor and he was my husband (42). Though Manu don't express his inferiority complex, he would say her, "I am sick of this place. Let is get out of here soon. Infact the patriarchal domination is ingrained in Indian culture in an inescapable way, Jessica Benjamin observes: The anchoring of this structure so deep in the psyche is what gives domination its appearance of inevitability, makes it seem that a relationship in which both participants are subjects both empowered and mutually respectful is impossible. Benjamin also observes the object status of women. It is always man expresses desire and woman is the object of it clearly suggests womans sexual subjectivity and her recognition as his Object of Desire.43 Saru remembers what exactly changed the scenario of her marriage. A girl, who comes home to interview Saru for a magazine, innocently asks Manu: "How does it feel when your wife earns not only the butter but most of the bread as well?" (30).At that moment, Manu, Saru and the interviewer laugh over it as if it doesnt matter. But late that night, Manu expresses his feelings by attacking her like a wild animal. The next morning he behaves very normal, ignorant of his own actions. This type of wild attack is repeated on Saru when Manu's
43
Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love : Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination. London : Virago, 1990. (85-86)
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colleague and his wife comments on their trip to a hill-station. Manu gets insulted and vents his frustration once more on Saru that night, making her victim of his bestiality, brutality, as she later relates to her father. As Bell Holds observes: [b]etween women, male supremacist values are expressed through suspicious, defensive, competitive behavior. It is sexism that leads women to feel threatened by one another without causeSexism teaches women-hating and both consciously and unconsciously we act out this hatred in our daily contact with one another.44 Saru is scared and finds very difficult to face her sexually aggressive husband. Manu by his animal - like sexual attacks wants to prove his superiority or hold on his wife. Violence against women is an important issue in feminist theorisation everywhere. While liberal feminists generally view it as actions of psychologically and socially disturbed males, medical feminists consider it as the commonest and most important basis of male control over women. 45 Saru is totally shattered by this in due course, she feels utterly humiliated at the thought of being used and reduced to " a dare damp, smell hole" (24). She is very much emotionally disturbed and hurt by this act: And each time it happens and I don't speak, I put another brick on the wall of silencer between us. May be one day I will be walled alive within it and die a slow painful death." (25). I never knew till then he had so much strength in him: I could not
44 45
Hooks, Bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre Boston: South End Press, 1984. 47 S. Brownmiller, Against Our Will : Men Women and Rape, New York, harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976
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fight back. I could not shout or cry I was so afraid the children in the next room would hear. I could do nothing. I can never do anything. I just endure (201). She even admits that her success as a doctor and her flirtation with Dr. Boozie has ruined the self-confidence of Manu. Saru is assaulted and undergoes horrors of rape by her husband. She can feel the hurting hands, the savage teeth, the monstrous assault of a horribly familiar body. Saru is in a fix who is shocked to see her husband cheerful the next morning and asks her if she had slept well. Saru wonders if all this is a sham, a force, a ghastly pretence, or is it just a dream, a terrible nightmare that left behind this terrible after tasted of fear. But she cannot deny the reality of bruises on her body. Men often use violence against their wives when they lack in other means of control such as economic or educational superiority over women.46 Saru hates the word love and refuses to believe that such a thing can ever exist between man and woman, love, Its only a word, she thought. Take away the word, the idea and the concept will wither away (72). Lack of love and attachment in Saru Manu, she admits that, theirs was not a case of love dying, nor even of conflicts. Instead it was as if a kind of diseases had attached their marriage. A disease like syphilis or leprosy, something that could not be admitted to others. This very concealment made it even more gruesomely disgusting, so that she was dirty and so was he and so was their marriage.(70) His actions humiliates Saru and she thinks-And each time it happens and I
46
J.O. Brien, Violence in Divorced Families in theorizing Patriarchy, ed. S. Walby, Oxford, Baril Black well, 1990, p.136
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dont speak I put another brick on the wall of silence betweens. May be one day I will be walled alive within it and die a slow, painful death. Perhaps the process has already begun and what I am is a creature only half alive. And it seems I can do nothing to save myself (96) Tired of both the duties, inside and outside, she wants to leave the job but Manu knew the truth that it is by her income they are leading a comfortable life. But he can't digest that truth and sexually abuses harass her at night. Not only the dark evokes terror to Saru but even the day when Manu pretends as though nothing has ever happened. The nightmarish experience as the protagonist notices: The hands became a body. Thrusting it upon me. The familiarity of the sensation suddenly broke the shell of silent terror that had enclosed me. I emerged into the familiar world of rejection. My rejection that had becomes so dearly routing. Her own sufferings brings forth how her small brother Dhruva was once scared of darkness and had sneaked into her head, She how, as an adult realizes that she has to fight out the darkness herself, nobody can help her out, in order to live without fear she will have to look into the face of reality and grapple with it alone. She realises that: The terrors are within us, and like traitors they spring out, when we last expect them, to scratch and maul.(85) One has to kill or overcome the unknown ghosts that haunt us. Saru accepts her loneliness and tries to overcome it by- In the beginning love and sex
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was fulfilment of life, but now sex a dirty world (133). It had become dirty because of Manohars ego. To her sex becomes sting of scorpion to be borne by women 47All her inner sentiments, sensitivities and her self-identity had been trampled and crushed by his ego. Union with Manohar had turned to slavery as if: Everything in a girl's life, it seemed, was shaped to that simple purpose of pleasing a male. Endless nights of torture make her put in crudely: my husband is a sadist (199) Unable to bear the torture any more, with the news of her mother's death Saru dodged to her parents home - a place she had vowed never to come back to. Saru as a child was victim of gender discrimination, after marriage she is victim of the dogmas of marriage superiority of male in a marriage. Saru is guilty for her own failure in life she expects her father's sympathy but it is no avail. Saru suffers doubly, suffering alone with her guilt consciousness. Under such pressure she feels if she had an arranged marriage her father would have not turned his back as he did it to her. Saru's bitter realization of her marriage is that a woman must necessarily remain a step behind her husband. When asked by her friend Nalu to talk on Medicine as a profession for women to some college students, Saru makes up her imaginary speech for a successful marriage, which depicts her silent painful experience: "A wife must always be a few feet behind her husband. If he is an M.A., you should be a B.A., If he is 5'4", you should not be more than 5'3" in height. If he is earning five hundred rupees,
47
Lakshmi, C.S, The Face behind the mask women in Tamil literature, New Delhi : Vikas, 1984, p-6
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you should never earn more than four hundred and ninety, if your want a happy marriage. Don't ever try to reverse the doctor - nurse, executive - secretary, principal - teacher role. It can be traumatic, disastrous. And I assure you, it is not worth it. He will suffer. You will suffer and so will the children. Women's magazines will tell you that a marriage must be on equal partnership. That's nonsense, rubbish. No partnership can ever be equal. It will always be unequal, but take care that its unequal in favor of your husband. If the scales tilt in your favor, god helps you, both of you (137)."A Wife should always be a feet behind her husband, John Ruskin is of the view: A man ought to be known any language or science he learns, thoroughly; while a woman ought to know the same language or science only so for as may enable her to sympathize in her husbands pleasure and in those of his best friends. 48 Shashi Deshpande through Saru's words is mocking at the rules of successful marriage, where a wife is raped by her husband. There is another instance where Saru and Manu visit the latter's friend's house. They are invited to tea. Manu's friends talks to them while his wife like a waitress serves them silently. She is totally ignored by her husband and so her presence is not recognised, even by the guests. While going home, Saru smiles at her, but without response from her. Her face was unchanged, expressionless as if she had fallen in with her husband's desires and successfully effaced the person that
48
Sesame and the Lilies, quoted in Kate Milet, Sexual Politics (1969; rpt. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971), 74.
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was her. At the door I looked back for a moment, she stood under a light, a strong, unshaded bulb hanging low in the center of the room. I looked down at her feet and saw that there was no shadow. For some reason, the words came to my mind if I cast no shadow, I do not exist. (159). The hellish life of a widow is seen by Saru who lived in the next street with a bare forehead and drab Sari. She was frightened to see her empty eyes which are the ghastliest signs of her widowhood. She shudders at the womans plight; to put all of yourself into another and then be left alone (135). Shashi Deshpande points out the superstitions followed by older generation: the members of the older generation still suffer from superstitions some of them eat food from the unwashed plates which their husbands have used. If you utter the name of Rama, the soul of the dead will go to heaven quickly. The wife dying before her husband is to be considered good fortune. If a widow doesnt shave her head, she is a second class citizen. As a child Saru has seen her grandmother who was deserted by her husband a few years after marriage. She was a young woman then with two little daughters, one of whom was Sarus mother. Her grandmothers father had taken the deserted woman and her daughters to his house and got the girls married. The grandmother had never complained and accepted it as her fate: It was written on my forehead. The submission of women to the male dominated society is clearly shown through these characters. Even Vidya, one of Manus groups of aspiring writers,
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journalists and stage enthusiasts is reduced to a submissive wife after marriage. She had given up acting because Ashwin and his family do not like the idea of her going on the stage. But they dont mind her Associating with the theatre occasionally, but no acting, directing or anything like that. (156). Sarus friend Smita is an example for a typical middle class dedicated housewife struggling for her space and always surrendering. Smita has surrendered so much that she has given up her name also. She has readily accepted the name Geetanjali, chosen by her husband when she got married. Smita had been a slim rather frail looking girl with large vulnerable eyes. Now she seemed around all over with fat and hideously invulnerable. Her fat looked not only ugly to Saru but obscene, remembering the quality of delicacy there had been about her (117). Nalu rightly says: He! There is always time to do all the things he wants to do, but never any time for doing the things you want to do, but never any time for doing the things you want to do. You just tag on to him and drift a small boat towel by a large ship Smita takes credit of 100 Rs from Saru and says Saru that she is lucky not to have to ask anyone for money. Smita has to manage to save a bit from what her husband gives her for the household expenses. She is totally dependent on her husband and feels happy that her husband had written that he cant exist without her any longer. Saru sees just sexual hunger on the husbands part and a passionate response on Smitas part.
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Sarus friend Nalu is a spinster, dedicated to her job, Smita, wholly wife, mother and house keeper. Betty Freidan in her book The Feminine Mystique writes The first women in business and the professions were thought to be freaks, insecure in their new freedom some perhaps feared to be soft or gentle, love, have children, lest they lose their prized independence, lest they trapped again as their mothers were.49 Saru observes Nalu that there was a whole world of bitterness within her, ready to spring to the surface at any moment. She is bitter because she never married, never bore a child. But that would be a stupid as calling me fulfilled because and got married and I have borne two children. (121).While the married women reported to be dissatisfied with their marriage, the unmarried ones are reported to have there own sufferings and anxieties. Betty Freidan observes: Strangely number of psychiatrists stated that, in their experience unmarried women patients were happier than the married ones. 50 Saru is not able to break her silence and show the truth to her husband. She is struggling to assert her individuality Saru is able to analyze her life after she returns to her parental home. She expects a lost of sympathy from her father after having become a hapless victim of her senseless choice of a love marriage, she moans, Its my fault again. If mine had been an arranged marriage, if I had left it to them to arrange my life, would he have left me like this? (218). She is aware of the importance and womans strength in arranged marriage. She very
49 50
Betty friedan, The feminine Mystique, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 19 71, P.89 Ibid:p.23
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minutely remembers her friends sister who, as a result of a disastrous marriage, was surrounded with care and sympathy, as if she was an invalid, a convalescent. (218) Saru pours her heart out with all details about Manus brutality and expresses her helplessness she says I couldnt fight back, I couldnt shout or cryI could do nothing. I can never do any thing. I just endure(201). She whole-heartedly expects moral support from her father, and very frantically requests him But you have got to help me, you have got to. You did it once. And because you did I went to Bombay, met him an married him(204). Her father, a simple man fails to understand the words like-sadism, Love, cruelty. Actually, her visit to her fathers house is a kind of escape from the sadist husband and loveless marriage. It is again a kind of solace from her hectic routine to Her live with her father and Madhav is a relief, for no demands are made to her. The whole day in her parents house is spent to analyze her own desires and comforts. She recapitulates the kind of life. She had lived as a child. To Saru the idea of men going to work, children going to school, and women staying at home to work, clean, scrub and sweep appealed as she finds a supreme harmony in these tasks done by whom who stay at home-this is a kind of contentment in her new routine life, makes her feel that she has a totally new life, and now as she calls herself as a totally changed person and nothing old Saru is left. At her fathers place, slowly she looses, the awareness of her feminity, she stops thinking about herself as a women.
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Saru after examining her life, able to realize that she had been her own enemy. She says. If I have been a puppet it is because I made myself one. I have been clinging to the tenuous shadow of a marriage whose substance has long since disintegrated because I have been afraid of proving my mother right." (220).The aspect in doctor in her is more often seen than that of the wife, and the mother in her. Her neighborhood woman now visits her for their physical health. Mostly there simple woman keep more of their ailments everything as a secret. Sarita thinks that - Their very womanhood a source of deep shame to their- she calls them stupid, silly, martyrsI idiotic heroines. Going on with their task and destroying themselves in the bargain, for nothing, but a meaningless modesty (107). Joan Gallos opines: (D)evelopment for men has meant increased autonomy and separation from others as a means of strengthening identity, empowering the self, starting a satisfactory life course... For Women, attachments and relationships play a central role in both identity formation and concepts of developmental maturity... colouring how women see themselves, their lives, their careers, and their ongoing responsibility to those around them.51 Saru used to get solace from her disturbed mind only when she was involved in her profession, otherwise there was only emptiness in her, once she found herself cutting a piece of paper, telling herself. these are bits of her mind falling on the ground. Saru has no peace of mind, only fear and she has
51
Gallos, J.V. (1989). Exploring Womens Development: Implications for career theory, Practice and Research, in M. Arthur et (eds), Handbook of career theory, Cambridge, Mass : Cambridge University Press
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blocked herself in that fear in such a way that she cant find herself now. But each day she has an intensified thought I cant go on (23). Finally She realised: All right, so Im alone. But so everyone else. Human beings-Theyre going to fail you. But because theres just us because theres none else we have to go on trying. If we cant believe in ourselves, were sunk (220).It is worth to quote The Dhammapada which says: You are your own refuge; there is no other refuge, this refuge is hard to achieve. Loss, loneliness and grief are quite common in the life of all these characters. Soumya Bhattacharya says, the novelist portrays, grief and the vacuum that grief leaves in its slip-stream, but offers us glimpses of the core of strength and reserves of stoicism all of us need to deal with pain and sorrow and isolation.52 Madhav's determination " My life is my own"... and Baba's words, Are you not sufficient for yourself ? strikes her mind saru is forced to think about herself. Some days of gap with Manu and her job. She gained a chance to review her past and come to a conclusion to her problems. Saru who was escaping from her problems, who feared to encounter them is now ready to face them. She first asked her father 'Promise me,' She said, 'Promise me you won't open the door to him. Don't open the door when he comes. Later when she receives a call for her services she asks her Baba to make Manu wait for her. This shows she is very clear in her mind. She is ready to face Manu fearlessly and to lead her life hopefully, confidently. Though Saru rebels against the
52
Soumya Bhattacharya a Death shall Have no Dominion, the Hindustan Times, 14 May 2000.
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traditions ultimately tries to compromise with the reality, but without submitting herself. Saru all her life had led a life of maya filled with darkness now what she is feeling is real life filled with light. As Virginia Woolf says in her novel, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark. Sarus assertion is through the act on their own judgment and initiative which leads to their individual growth. Now, the time has come for Sarita to face her husband fearlessly. The fear of darkness or ignorance or the unknown fear that haunted her so long gets evaporated and decides to face her life. The novelist makes it very clear that a womans life is her won and she should start thinking that she is an individual certainly not a dependent but being capable of withstanding all trails in life alone. R. Mala rightly remarks: The novelists credo is to take refuge in the self which means that the self is not metaphysical but psychological. In other words Deshpande means that the heroines will in future assert themselves; they will no longer allow their she to get deceased. By this assertion of the self, Deshpande with certainty takes her heroines to the pole of feminism though she may not have aimed at propounding such an ism
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CHAPTER - IV RESOLUTION IN ROOTS AND SHADOWS Marriage plays a crucial role in the life of a woman. That too in our country it is still the ultimate goal of a girls life. As a contrast to this Shashi Deshpande through her works condemns the institution that creates suffocation and deprives a woman of her identity. In Roots and Shadows Deshpande is trying to define Indian marriage: Millions of girls have asked this question millions of times in this country? Surely it was time they stopped asking it. What choice do I have? Surely it is this, this fact that I can choose, that differentiates me from the animals. But years of blindfolding can obscure your vision so that you no more see the choices. Years of shacking can hamper your movement so that you can no more move out of your cage of no-choices. (125). Roots and Shadows has won Thirumathi Rangammal Prize for being the best Indian novel in English of 1982-83.Both Saru and Indu ventured to marriage with a hope to get escape from their caged existence, in a quest of 'freedom' but in turn they get trapped in another cage. A pause from her routine life far away from her husband, Indu is able to resolve the riddle of failure in her life. She is able to understand herself and learn many truths about her life. She says, "Have I become a fluid with no shape, no form of my own? (54). Indu, a middle class young girl, brought up in an orthodox Brahmin family
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headed by Akka [the mother image in the novel]. The novel begins with the heroines return to her ancestral house. The parental home initiates her into an understanding of the meaning of human life. It is here that she discovers what her roots are -- as an independent woman and a writer, and what her shadows are -a daughter and commercial writer. She rebels against Akka, her conventional world, and her rigid values and marries Jayant. To attain freedom, she seeks marriage as an alternative to the bondage inevitable in the parental family. She thinks by fitting herself in a new role of a wife to attain her freedom. Her longing to achieve a complete personhood is explicitly seen in these lines, This is my real sorrow that I can never be complete in myself. Until I had met Jayant, I had not know it [] I met Jayant and lost the ability to be alone (34). Akka, a surrogate mother, dominated Indu as a child and young lady. Being a motherless child Indu grabbed the love and affection from other members of the family especially from her old uncle Kaka and Atya. Akka, matriarchal figure represents orthodox, blind superstitions in our society. She was so obsessed with that, she denied to go to the hospital even when she was on her deathbed. The only reason to safeguard her caste: God knows what caste the nurses are or the doctors. I could not drink a drop of water there. (24). Nobody in the family could rule out the words of Akka. Indu remembers how
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Kaka even after becoming a grandfather, could be reduced to a red-faced, stuttering school boy by Akkas venomous tongue (24). Akka enforced rigid restriction on girls and reprimanded Indu severely for daring to talk to a boy in the lone corner of a library. As a child they had told Indu that she should be meek and submissive. When Indu questioned she was told, Because you are a female. You must accept everything, even defeat, with grace, because you are a girl. It is the only way for a female to live and survive. (158). Sex is biological whereas gender is culturally determined. Stollers definition on Gender identity: Gender identity starts with the
knowledge and awareness, whether conscious or unconscious, that one belongs to one sex and not the other, though as one develops, gender identity becomes much more complicated, so that, for example, one may sense himself as not only a male but a masculine man or an effeminate man or even as a man who fantasies being a woman.53 When Narens mother Saroja wanted to learn music, Akka curbed her saying: What learn music from a strange man! Sit and sing in front of strangers! like THOSE women? Are we that kind of family? Isnt enough for you to sing one or two devotional songs, one or two Aarti songs? What more does a girl from a decent family need to know? (55). The welcome of womanhood as she attained puberty was done in a crude manner. Kaki told,
53
Stoller, Robert J. (1968), Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity (London : Hogarth Press)
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Youre a woman now, You can have babies yourself. And Indu, who had the entire childs ignorance about her body, had for the first time, felt an immense hatred for it. The introduction to the beautiful world of being a woman made feel her unclean. For four days now you are unclean. You cant touch anyone or anything. (79). Indu develops aversion to the natural biological function of woman and longs to escape from the burden and responsibilities of womanhood. Simone De Beauvior observes: For an adolescent girl, her first menstruation reveals this meaning and her feeling of shame appears. If they were already present and they are strengthened and exaggerated from this time on."54 Since her childhood, it has been drilled in her mind by the women members of the family that she as a female has to Indu resents -As a child, they had told me I must be obedient and unquestioning. As a Girl, they had told me I must be meek and submissive. Why? I had asked. Because you are a female. You must accept everything, even defeat, with grace, because you are a girl, they had said. It is the only way, they said, for a female to live and survive(158). Akka was one of the victims of child marriage who underwent inhuman treatment under the shackles of marriage. Indus view towards Akka changes after hearing Akkas story from Narmada Atya: She was just 12 when she was married and he was well past 30. He was tall, bulky man with large, coarse
54
Beauvoir de Simone. The Second Sex, Picador classic edition, London: Pen Books Ltd., Carry Books 1988 p.335
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features. And she she was small, dainty, really pretty with her round face, fair skin, straight nose and curly hair. Six months after her marriage, she 'grew up' and went to her husband's home. She was not able to share her plight with any one as she had lost her mother when she was a child and her father remained aloof. Twice she tried to run away as a girl of 13. Her mother-in law, whipped her for that and locked her up for three days, starved her as well. And then, sent her back to her husband's room. The child, then said, cried and clinged to her mother-in-law saying, "Lock me up again, lock me up". But there was no escape from the husband then." (77). Her husband sexually harassed Akka as a child. The law as in section 375 and 376 of Indian Penal Code, which deals with rape, does not give a woman the freedom to accuse her husband of rape (until and unless she is sixteen). The society says that a husband has all the freedom to enjoy his conjugal rights as and when he wants. In a lot of marriages, it turns out to be a torture for the woman, but she cannot talk about her intimate details to even her loved ones. So where does the woman go?55 But Akka was able to take revenge on him when he was bed ridden for two years as a result of a stroke. Though Akka looked after him well as a dutiful wife she didnt allow his mistress to meet him. Akkas domineering character and the plight of child marriage could be witnessed here. In this case Shashi Deshpande not only throws light on the sufferings of victims of child marriage but also the liberty of
55
http://Womens history.about.cm/od/quotes/a/c_p_gilman.htm
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a man who can have another woman if he is not satisfied with his wife. This reveals as Neena Arora remarks: "Man considers it as normal behavior to satisfy his desires at both the emotional and the physical levels outside marriage, while it is ruthlessly condemned as adultery in case a woman indulges in it even though accidentally the slightest hint of any deviation on her part which may not even involve sex, man turns violent and hostile towards his wife and starts prosecuting her. This condemnation is dictated by mans interest in preserving his property rather than by any moral consideration.56 Indu marries Jayant, a man of different caste but of her own choice and leaves her parental home. Jayant gives her a feeling of solidity and certainty. She dreams that her marriage with Jayant would enable her to realize the need to belong, wanted, needed and loved, as she desired the freedom to express her true self to the world. Akkas warning is not heeded by Indu because Akka had no good opinion of inter caste marriages,-Such marriages never work. Different castes, different languagesits all right for a while. Then they realize (68). Indu leaves her ancestral house and enters into independent and completely free zone, but very soon, she realizes the fruits of her decision. Both she and Jayant wanted to achieve complete happiness, but her marriage with Jayant suppresses her feminity and her human demands. She is physically and
56
Neena Arora, A Feminist Studies in Comparison Nayantara Sahgal and Doris Lessing New Delhi : Prestige, 1991,61.
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spiritually dissatisfied with her husband, who takes her for granted and expects her to submit. According to Simone De Beauvoir: A husband regards none of his wifes good qualities as particularly meritorious; they are implied by the institution of marriage itself. He fails to realize that his wife is no character from some pious and conventional treatise, but a real individual of flesh and blood, he takes her for granted her fidelity to strict regimen she assumes not taking into account that he has temptations to vanquish that she may yield to them, that in any case her patience, her charity, her propriety, are difficult conquests, he is still more profoundly ignorant of her dreams, her fancies, her nostalgic yearnings of the emotional climate in which she spends her days.57 Her love marriage degenerates into a mere psychological affair and feels that she has abused her bodys sanctity, denial of full experience, satisfaction or happiness. The paradox of the situation is that Indu is not completely happy with Jayant, but at the same time, she cannot live without him---she speaks about her incompletenessThis is my real sorrow. That I can never be complete in myself. Until I had met Jayant. I had not known itthat there was, somewhere outside me a Part of me without which I remained incomplete. Then I met Jayant and lost the ability to be alone (31).She wonders how she in all the way is trying to please her husband, feeling of having lost her independent identity. Her other aunts and for that matter, other woman had surrendered themselves to the concept of the ideal women, without any independent identity
57
Simone De Beauviour, The Second Sex, trans. H.H. Parsheley ( Harmondsworth; Penguin), 492.
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performing all the time self-effacing notions and rituals. But in course of her own introspection of herself, she realizes that she is not very different from her conventional female counterparts, for she was unconsciously and consciously trying to mould and change and shape herself according to Jayants desires and needs. Jayant, on the other hand, in spite of his seemingly western style of life, behaves like an average Indian male. She feeds that an average Indian male. She feels that her marriage was something shameful in total commitment, It shocks him to find passion in a woman. It puts him off. When Im like that, he turns away from me; Ive learnt my lesson now. And so I pretend. Im passive. And unresponsive (83). She understands, that her over whelming love for Jayant is quite disturbing and her total surrender to him is frightening. She is shocked to see, that, she is turning into an ideal Indian wife, obeying her husbands wishes and fancies. At a crucial time, she even thinks of leaving her husband, hoping to become whole self again, but she hangs on to her marriage though beneath her skin, she knows that, her unwillingness to acknowledge her love, and her marriage as a failure. Indu seeks fulfillment in education and career, works as a journalist for a womans magazing, but gives it up for she was disgusted about women and their problems, and works for the others magazine. Women, women, women I got sick of it. These were nothing else. It was a kind of narcission. And as if we had locked ourselves in a cage and thrown away the key. I couldnt go on (78). The
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greatest sacrifice is her ambition of being a writer, on her own. She loses her interest in writing creative article when she is forced to suppress facts and present a glossy picture to the readers. She is angry, when her husband asks her to compromise and commands her not to resign her job. He says; Thats life! What can one person do against the whole system! No point making a spectacle of yourself with futile gestures. We need the money, dont we? Dont forget, we have a long way to go (17). Indu had dreamt of a happy married life, being independent, free from the clutches of her traditional Akka. But unfortunately her calculations go wrong after marriage with Jayant, she lost her individuality. Charlotte Perkins Gilman says: "It's no, that, women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark Place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it. The Woman is narrowed by the home."58 She says, This is my real sorrow. That I can never be complete in myself. Until I had met Jayant. I had not known it ...that there was, somewhere outside me a part of me without which I remained incomplete. Then I met Jayant.and lost the ability to be alone (31). Indu had thought she had found the other part of her whole self but she was rather haunted by an unusual feeling of total disorientation. She remains untouched and there is a sense of not belonging. For some reason I was an outsider. The waves of comradeship
58
htt;//Womens history.about.com/od/quotes/a/c-p-gilman.htm
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ripped all around me, but left me untouched(30). She suffers loneliness and it is suggested through the images of dust and barrenness (10) and dark room (21). Then we are out. It is dusty, a totally barren place. The glare and the heat are both fierce. I am alone now and move among people I dont know I had rejected the family, tried to draw a magic circle around Jayant and myself. I had pulled in my boundaries... I am alone(10). Indu acts up to the expectations of her husband: Always what he wants, what he would like, what would please him. And I cant blame him. It is not he who has pressurized me into this. It is the way I want it to be ..."(54). Indian women always have to adhere to Manus ideals of happiness, her world revolves round her husband above all in the ideals of the traditional cultures, the good woman is a Pativrata, subordinating her life to the husbands welfare and needs in a way demanded of no other woman in any other part of the world. The Pativrata conduct is not a mere matter of sexual fidelity, an issue of great importance in all partriarchal societies.59 Indu being educated, economically independent realizes that she is no different from the women like her Atyas and Kakis. In their eyes Indu was just a childless woman. For a woman, to get married to bear children, to have sons and then grand children is looked upon as a successful woman. Though Indu hated the traditions followed in her house, she hated the modernity of the city after living with Jayanth. She says, we belong to the smart young set. Do you know what
59
Sudhir Kakkar, Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, New Delhi : Penguin, 1989, P.66
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that means? Fresh flower in the house everyday. Even though doesn't like her way of living Indu has to adjust. We are rational, unprejudiced, broad-minded. We discuss intelligently, even solemnly the problems of unemployment, poverty, corruption and family planning we scorn the corrupt. We despise the ignorant, we hate the wicked and owe hearts bleed, for the blacks, for the Harijan but frankly we don't care damn not one god damn about anything but our own precious selves, our own precious walled in lives. (28). This shows a clear picture of aristocrat class of the society where they have only one face but can wear different faces for their own benefits. Indu in her self discovery thinks: Am I on my way to becoming an ideal wife. A woman who sheds her I who loses her identity in her husband's? (118). In contrast to Indu, is her cousin Mini,her passive acceptance is seen in words: What choice do I have, Induof course Im marrying him because theres nothing else you can do (125). In traditional Indian society, marriage means only fear, agony and frustration on the girls side. Indu learns from Mini that only compromise is the key word of marriage, and she has to learn to be content with it-Any man, Indu? Yes, any man. Any man who says yes You dont know what it has been like. Watching Kaka, Hemant and even Madhav--kaka running around after eligible men: if the horoscopes matched, there was true meeting to be Arranged, And all those people coming and Asking all kinds of questions and they would say, shes not modern enough.Shes too
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fashionable for us! Or too short, or too tall, or too dark, or something. And I, feeling as If I had committed a great crime by being born a girl.I am tired Indu, I dont care what kind of a man he is, Once we are married, and be becomes my husband, none of his flaws will matter (126). As though she is punished for her crime of being a woman she has to accept him with his flaws and habits. But man won't stop discovering flaws in her as he could dominate her thoroughly. As Simone de Beauvoir observes: Marriage is obscene in principles insofar as it transforms into rights and duties those mutual relations which should be founded on a spontaneous urge; it gives an instrumental and therefore degrading character to the two bodies in dooming them to know each other in their general aspects as bodies, not as persons60 Indu feels its "The Indian way. The husband. A definite article. Permanent. Not only for now, but for ever. To be accepted. Even Indu had stepped in this shoe without her notice. Indu is very much moved by the situation of Mini and says. Behind the facade of romanticism, sentiment and tradition, what was marriage after all but two people brought together after cold-blooded bargaining to meet, mate and reproduce so that the generations might continue?" (3). Men, by virtue of their penis, can aspire to position of power and control within the symbolic order. Women on the other hand, have no position in the symbolic order, except in relation to men, as mothers, and
60
Simone De Beauviour, The Second Sex, trans. H.H. Parsheley ( Harmonds worth; Penguin), 463.
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even the process of mothering is given patriarchal meanings, reduced, in Freud, to an effect of penis envy.61 Indu's family represents a typical joint family where the houses like an old banyan tree are sheltering many lives. Indu is confused if should she sell the house, the house where she had been brought motherless baby of fifteen days and spend around eighteen years of her life or pay for the marriage of delicate looking Mini? or should she benefit herself as per Jayanth's desire or should she buy the house and make Kaka and Atya happy? When she was in these thoughts suddenly she found solution for her problem. She realized that she had surrendered to Jayanth as she wanted to avoid conflict in order to show the family that she had a successful marriage. When this truth flashes in her mind, she acquires better understanding about herself and everything. Now she knew that Akka was a pillar of strength who acted according to her beliefs. Now she felt that the old house is a trap and she must come out of it. She decided to sell the house to Shankarappa, who wanted to demolish it and have a big hotel built on the site. It was not an easy decision to take. She says. "Had not the house lived a clean life? Did it not deserve a clean end? What if the champaka tree in the courtyard which had always fascinated her ever since. She had been a child, will be so completely destroyed that not even stump will remain to sprout again? She reassured herself. If not this stump, there is
61
Chris Weedon, Post-Structural Theory and Feminsit Practice. P.54
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another. If not this tree, there will be others. Other trees will grow, other flowers would bloom, other fragrances will pervade us. One era ends so that the other might begin. But life will continue, endless, limitless, formless and full of grace. By not getting influencedby anybody, Kaka or Atya or Jayant by monitoring her own will Indu achieves freedom. Indu, who got physically attracted to her cousin Naren and surrendered herself twice, seems to achieve freedom in sex. She says: Nevertheless I knew I would not tell Jayant about Nareen and me. For that was not important. That had nothing to do with two of us and our life together. (187). Indu, is quite impressed by Narens idea of detachment, and experiences a sense of freedom, and very openly talks about herself and her failures. The newly acquired sense of freedom, she got from Narens friendship, makes her aware of her natural impulses. Initial she rejects his love thinking that, it is monogamous, but later quite willingly offers herself twice. At that time, she doesnt mind love---making as a sin or crime, but the next day, she is quite worried and studies each and every action in terms of situation that pushed her way towards Naren. Her mind is often burdened with sin, crime, right and wrong. Indu says: A part from wronging Jayant? Wronging Jayant? I winced at the thought. But had I not wronged Jayant even before this? By pretending, by giving him a spurious coin instead of the genuine kind? I had cheated him of my
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true self. That, I thought, is dishonorable, dishonest, much more than this, what I have done with Naren (171). Indu is confused if should she sell the house, the house where she had been brought motherless baby of fifteen days and spend around eighteen years of her life or pay for the marriage of delicate looking Mini? or should she benefit herself as per Jayanth's desire or should she buy the house and make Kaka and Atya happy? When she was in these thoughts suddenly she found solution for her problem. She realized that she had surrendered to Jayanth as she wanted to avoid conflict in order to show the family that she had a successful marriage. When this truth flashes in her mind, she acquires better understanding about herself and everything. Now she knew that Akka was a pillar of strength who acted according to her beliefs. Now she felt that the old house is a trap and she must come out of it. She decided to sell the house to Shankarappa, who wanted to demolish it and have a big hotel built on the site. It was not an easy decision to take. She says. "Had not the house lived a clean life? Did it not deserve a clean end? What if the champaka tree in the courtyard which had always fascinated her ever since. She had been a child, will be so completely destroyed that not even stump will remain to sprout again? She reassured herself. If not this stump, there is another. If not this tree, there will be others. Other trees will grow, other flowers would bloom, other fragrances will pervade us. One era ends so that the other might begin. But life will continue, endless, limitless, formless and full of grace. By not getting influencedby anybody, Kaka
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or Atya or Jayant by monitoring her own will Indu achieves freedom. Indu, who got physically attracted to her cousin Naren and surrendered herself twice, seems to achieve freedom in sex. She says: Nevertheless I knew I would not tell Jayant about Nareen and me. For that was not important. That had nothing to do with two of us and our life together. (187). Indu wants to hide her relation with Naren and declares that she would go back to Jayant and lead an honest life. Indu feels she had not wronged her husband by sleeping twice with Naren but by pretending, by giving him a spurious coin instead of the genuine kind (171). She resolves not to tell Jayanth anything about it. P. Ramamoorthy says: This sheds a brilliant light on Indus awareness of her autonomy and her realization that she is a being and not a dependent on Jayant. The novel gains its feminist stance in Indus exploration into herself but it also moves beyond the boundaries of feminism into a perception of the very predicament of the human existence.62Now she has the boldness to tell Jayant that she was resigning her job. She would tell him. That I would at least do the kind of writing I had always dreamt of doing. That I would not enrich myself with Akkas money. That I would, on the other hand pay for Minis wedding. At the end Indu like Jaya hopes, Jayant would understand her. Now she has conquered her fear and is ready to assert herself. Thus Indu doesnt like to be the shadow of her husband and is asserting herself
62
P. Ramamoorthy, My life is my own: A study of Shashi Deshpandes Women, Feminism and Recent fiction in English ed. Shushila Singh ( New Delhi: Prestige, 1991), 124
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by taking her own decision. Thus as Bhatnagar says: In the end comes the realization that freedom lies in having the courage to do what one believes is the right thing to do and the determination and to adhere to it. That alone can bring harmony in life.63 Indu wants to return to her home to Jayant. In the end comes the realization that freedom lies in having the courage to do what one believes is the right thing to do and the determination and the tenacity to adhere to it. That alone can bring harmony in life. She returns home, equipped with that quality of courage, necessary to face the challenge of identity crisis for her marriage had, always posed returns to suffer, to question and to find roots.64 Indu experiences only disillusionment in sex and suffers a silent sexual humiliation with Jayant. Her extraMarital relationship with her cousin Naren, brings no guilt to her, and decides not to tell Jayant about it. That had nothing to do with the two of us and our life together(205). The very truth that she is aware of her body, autonomy and that she doesnt depend on Jayant gives her the courage to exist as a person. Indu realizes her position in her ancestral home; the responsibilities, fears and frustrations do not touch her. She is now an assertive woman with emerging new self. Through Narens idea of detachment, she rebuilds her lost vision. She now realizes, that she had only lacked the quality of
63
Quoted by Y.S. Sharadha in The Problem of Marriage and Affirmation of self in Roots and Shadows. Women the Novels of Shashi Deshpande by suman Bala, Khosla Publishing House, New Delhi, 2001. Patil, Ujwala, The Theme of Marriage and selfhood in Roots and Shadow, Indian Women Novelists, ed., R. Dhawan, Set I Vol. 5, New Delhi, Prestige Books, 1991, P.136.
in
64
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courage. Gradually, she feels that there was nothing shameful in her feelings for Jayant. She wants to project her true self to Jayant instead of the pretentious one she had been showing all these days. Indu reflects Here, in this house, in this family, was a role waiting for me. A role that I would, perhaps, act out more successfully than the one I had tried until now. For had I not, so very often, felt myself just a mouthing, grimacing puppet, dully saying the lines I had to, feeling, actually, nothing? Had I not felt myself flat, one dimensional, just a blurred figure merging into the background? Whereas here, I would stand out, sharp and clear (143) Like Jaya and Saru, Indu also realizes that the house she had fled from to avoid being faceless contains the roots which sustain her violation to attain self-identity, while her marriage which she had believed would take her to self realization had transformed her into a shadow. Indu realizes that, Akka knew her indomitable courage and strength while fulfilling her responsibilities. Akkas decision of making Indu guardian to her property leads much controversial discussion among her relatives. Their wants are never ending, their love is hypocritical, and their affection is filled with jealousy, hatred and envy. Indu observes- There are strong and the weak. And the strong have to dominate the weak. Its inevitable. And Akka thought I was one of the strong ones. Thats why she put the burden on me. And now, it is an obligation. I have to carry the burden. And to do that, I have to be hard. If Im soft, Ill just cave in (159). Right from her early days. She has been a rebel against the traditional role of a woman. It is the fear of suppression by the
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patriarchal society that makes her fight, turn aggressive and assert herself. Unless and until the roots, the source of her fears are not uprooted, Indu cannot achieve fulfillment, she therefore destroys the roots, eliminate her fears, confront her problems with courage and what she feels is right. Thus Indu extends support to vital, an orphan living with the family. Indu seems to be grown up with better understanding of the situation than that existed earlier in the family. Akka decides and made Indu her successor, because, she knows that among all her relatives, Indu is strong to bear the burden of the responsibility that goes with the wealth. Indu decides to take up Akkas burden and live up to her expectations. With the simple will made to her, she decides to fulfill all the obligations she has towards the family and towards herself. She even neglects the letter from Jayant, advising her to leave out the members of the family who did not ever bother about her for the last ten years. He further asks her to return home so that they both can make plans for the future with Akkas money. But Indu decides to finance Minis wedding instead of buying the old house. It really pains her to remember about her stay in the house for 18 years, would be demolished without a trace of their life spent in it. One era ends so that the other might begin. But life will continue endless, limitless, formless and full of grace65
65
Bhatnagar.P, Indian womanhood-fight for freedom in Roots and Shadows Ed by R.K. Dhawan, Indian Women Novelists, set I, Vol. 5-1991-P.127.
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She wants to go back to Jayant, for she loves and needs him, and wants to restart her life built on the foundation of honesty and decides to be her true self in relations with Jayant. Now onwards she is not going to suppress her feelings only to please Jayant. She really achieves freedom and decides to do what she thinks she should be doing. She also decides not to share her affair with dead Naren as she think that has nothing to do with Jayant. She Returns home, equipped with that quality of courage, necessary to face the challenge of identity crisis for her marriage had, always posedreturns to suffer, to question and to find roots66 Commenting on Indus decision to start writing according on her own wishes and not to use Akkas money to enrich herself. The important point which has to be noted is that she is making independent decision. Deshpande has very exquisitely pin pointed the inner struggle and sufferings of the new class of Indian women through the character of Indu who has raise many basic questions regarding modern women who are rooted and shaped by the Indian customs but influenced by the scientific knowledge of the west (Sandhu; 45) Indus acceptance of western values and her search for liberty with a precondition of unfettered growth and maturity of personality, despite the insidious conflict between tradition and modernity, ultimately results in her emergence as a human being evolving basically as a woman of determination not yielding to the dictates of the patriarchal society, S.P.Swain. Appropriately
66
Patil, Ujwala, The Theme of marriage & selfhood in Roots and shadow, Indian women novelists, Ed R.K. Dhwawan, set I Vol 5. New Delhi Prestige Books, 1991, P.136
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sums up Indus growth thus, The meek, docile and humble Indu of the early days finally emerges as a bold, challenging, conscious and rebellious women. She resigns her job, thus defying male authority, hierarchy and the irony of a womans masked existence. Her selfdiscovery is the frightening vision of the feminine selfs struggle for harmony and sanity. She is able to discover her roots as an independent woman, a daughter, a mother and a commercial writer.67 The traditional concept of love and marriage as sacrament and sex as a taboo is fast losing its importance Promilla Kapur, the renowned sociologist in her study on love, Marriage and sex, says that; now women aspire for natural companionship, respect, material comforts, satisfaction of emotional and physical needs, in marriage68. Calvin says: Self-actualization is the creative trend of human nature. It is the organic principle by which the organism becomes more fully developed and more complete. The ignorant person who desires knowledge feels an inner emptiness; he or she has a sense of their own incompleteness. By reading and studying their desire for knowledge is fulfilled and the emptiness disappears. A new person has been created, thereby, one in whom learning has taken the place of ignorance. Their desire has become an actuality. Any need is a deficit. It is like a hole that demands to be filled in. This
67
Swain. S.P. Roots and Shadows, A Feminist study, the Fiction of Shashi Deshpande, Ed. R.S. Pathale. New Delhi: Creative 1998-P.95 68 Kapur Promilla, Love Marriage and Sex, Delhi, Vikas Publishing House 1973.
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replenishment or fulfillment of a need is what is meant by self-actualization or self realization. 69 Nature has played a trick on women by giving them the eternal female dream of finding happiness through a man (Calvin S) And Shashi Deshpande questions the concept of marriage whether arranged marriage in the case of Jaya or love marriage of Saru and Indu are not a success. Promilla Kapur, a renowned socialist in her study on Love, Marriage and Sex, says that now women aspire for natural companionship, respect, material comforts, satisfaction of emotional and physical needs in marriage70
69 70
Calvin S. Hall and Gardner Lindzey, Personality, P. 249-250 Kapour Promilla, Love, Marriage and Sex, Delhi, Vikas Publishing House, 1973.
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CHAPTER - V Male violence against women is normalised and legitimised in sexual

practices through the assumption that when it comes to sex, men are by nature aggressive and dominant, whereas women by nature passive and submissive. Rape is an extreme expression of the patriarchal power associated to dominate women. It is used as a weapon by men to terrorise women and keep them under their control. The Third World feminists have used a definition of feminism to mean an awareness of womens oppression and exploitation within the family, at work and in society and conscious action by women and men to change this situation.71 The detailed analysis of three selected works of Shashi Deshpande That Long Silence, The Dark Holds No Terror and Roots And shadows has given an understanding of an Indian womens Self . Autonomy of selfhood of a woman in the patriarchal society is problematic. Patriarchal values are so grounded internalized that one cannot lead a life outside the boundary drawn by patriarchy. Individual autonomy in its extreme sense implies that it is free from all bonds, relations and even of self reflection. It is moving beyond identifying oneself merely as somebodys daughter, wife, mother, or sister but rather to
have their own identity. The concept of gender as distinct from the biological
71
Jayawardena, Kumari (1982). Feminism and National in the third world. Institute of Social Studies. The Hauge, Netherlands.
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fact of sex includes a complex of sociological, cultural and psychological associations with it. According to Sandra Harding: Gender difference is the most ancient, most universal, and most powerful origin of many morally valued conceptualizations of everything else in the world around us... As far back in the history as we can see, we have organized our social and natural worlds in terms of gender meanings within which historically specific social, class, and cultural institutions and meanings have been constructed. Once we begin to theorise gender-to define gender as an analytical category within which humans think about and organise their social activity rather than as a natural consequences of sex differences, or even merely as a social variable assigned to individual people in different ways from culture to culture- we can begin to appreciate the extent to which gender meanings have suffured our belief systems (land) institutions 72 Awareness in woman of her independent identity is a major feature of feminism. Betty Friedan says, The Feminine Mystique permits, even encourages, women to ignore the question of their identity. The Mystique says they can answer question who am I? by saying Toms wife... Marys mother.73 So a woman should posses her independent identity. Jaya finds her self in erasing the silence which had ruled for seventeen long years. She takes her own choice to be writer. Sarita finds her self in her selfless dedication to her patients. Indu finds her self in solving the Akkas money and choosing to
72 73
Friedan Betty, Feminine Mystique, New York : Dell Publishing 1984, P.71 Shouri Daniels : The Salt Doll. ( Vikas New Delhi 1978) in Literary Criterion, P.12
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write of her choice. As Shouri Daniel told, a modern Indian woman describes the female incarnate: she as no shape or form: she is everything or nothing. She is fluid, pour her into any mould and the takes it ... Ideals and principles lie outside her nature.74 Indu in Roots And Shadows sees that the women in the family have no identity of their own even they dont remember their own names as they are recognized just as mami, kaku, mavshi, vahini and so on. Gender consciousness has resulted in creation of awareness about gender based discrimination, exploitation and oppression of women and causes of their low status in the society giving rise to action-oriented movements and organisations. The 20th century woman is crushed between tradition and modernity. In 19th century modernity signified what was new in modern life experiences and creation of their cultural representations. According to Davis Frisbay (1986:13), in 20th century, it focuses on the social totality and its structural and institutional composition. Specific aspects of modernity have disappeared behind this Modernity is reshaping world according to liberal
totalising conception. principles.
Jaya in That Long Silence and Saru in The Dark Holds No Terror have romantic idea of love whereas Indu in Roots and Shadows is very practically thinking lady. Shashi Deshpande never likes to romanticize her protagonists; rather she portrays them as intellectual ladies. Because of the element of reason and thinking her novels acquire depth and profoundness. Through her characters
74
Harding, Sandra (1986). The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca New York: Cornell University Press.
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she brings feminist sensibility. The womens world is wonderfully depicted by her. Women all over the world suffer similar psychic disturbances in the male dominated world. The Heroines of Shashi Deshpande whether Indu, Saru, or Jaya are all intelligent and understanding women. They are not self- sacrificing mothers and totally chaste wives but are portrayed as human beings as they are in their real life. She created a New woman who is capable of self-analysis, The New Woman was an emphatically modern figure whose representation did not always offer a a particularly attractive model for late twentieth century feminism because of her embeddedness in heterosexuality and imperialist
discourse.75 Ibsens Nora who in A Dolls House says to her husband that she was simply transferred from papas hands to yours. You have arranged everything according to your own taste and so I got the same tastes as you or else I pretended to (66). Nora wants to assert herself and walks out of the family but all the protagonists of Shashi Deshpande fight against tradition within the frame work of marital institution. Saru is reminded of her visit to a house where a woman leads a nonidentical life: Her face was unchanged expressionless, as if she had fallen in with her husbands desires and successfully effaced the person that was her. At the door, I looked back for a moment. She stood under a light, a strong, unshaded bulb hanging low in the centre off the room. I looked down at her feet and saw that there was no shadow. For some reason, the words come to my
75
Ledger, Sally. The New Woman : Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siccle. Manchester, UK : Manchester University Press 1997, P.6
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mind... If I cast no shadow, I do not exist. (159) Sarus journey in The Dark Holds No Terror is an initiation into the mystery of human existence. She realises that parental home is no refuge. She is her own refuge. All right, So Im alone. But sos everyone else. Human beings... they are going to fail you. But because there is just us because there is one else, we have to go on trying. If we cant believe in ourselves, were sunk (200). Thus Sarus journey from self alienation to self-identification from negation to assertion, from diffidence to confidence. She learns to trust her feminine self: And oh yes, Baba, if Manu comes, tell him to wait. Ill be back as soon as I can (202). This is the assertion of her individuality, her willingness to confront reality and not to run away from it. She finds her emancipation through her profession. Saru reaches to the stage of self actualisation. The liberated woman ultimately resolves: My life is my own... somehow she felt she had found it now, the connecting link. It means you are not a strutting, grimacing puppet, standing futilely on the stage for brief while between areas of darkness (220). The heroines of Shashi Deshpande wants to liberate themselves from the shackles of tradition and exercise their rights for the manifestation of their individual capabilities and realisation of their feminine selves through identity assertion and self affirmation. Jaya is totally a silent and mute sufferer. She cries I cant hope, I cant manage, I cant go on. She is suffocated in the traditional norms set up by the patriarchal society. Gayathri Chakravorthy Spivak writes in her article can the Subaltern Speak?: Between Patriarchy and imperialism subject-constitution
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and object formation the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the Third-World Woman caught between tradition and modernisation.76 Jaya says about her marriage: A pair of bullocks yoked together. A man and woman married for seventeen long years, with two children. Its clear
physically together mentally apart. As Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) remarks that the relation between man and woman is never quite symmetrical and invariably not a complimentary one: In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.77
Mohan and Manu carry psychological warfare against their wives due to the fear born out of deep sense of insecurity. The division between female and male is socially created, and is deeply woven into the organisation of institutions and of everyday life. It is not just a division, but an asymmetry, with men having more power and status. The fact of being male and female carries connotations of different power and status, although other situational and relational factors may mitigate these connotations. Thus, gender does not have
76
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak? Colonical Discourse and Post Colonial Theory. Harves wheats half, 1994 77 Selden, Red. The Theory of Criticism: From Plato to the Presents, A reader ( London: Longman, 1988) p.534.
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a uniform impact across situations. It is because of this that gender alone as a stratification variable provides as incomplete an understanding as using only class, male, ethnicity or caste.78 Jaya, Saru or Indu wants to shake off the fear, wants to live without fear... fear of being unloved, misjudged, misunderstood... According to Usha Bande, The definition of New Woman: ... the New Woman is one who, shown of her feminine mystique, is aware of herself as an individual, she is free from her traditional, social and moral constrictions and is able to live with a heightened sense of dignity, and individuality. The New Woman, then, is the product of a new economic order in which woman casts aside her invisibility, comes out of the metaphorical purdha and avails of the opportunities provided by education, enfranchisement and employment. She, with her male
counterpart, struggles for achievements in the professionals and economic spheres and deconstructs the image of a submissive, repressed and self effacing being. Kelkar opines: One way to combat domestic violence in India would be to make women economically independent.79 Home is an important symbol in Shashi Deshpandes fiction. At first her protagonists come out of the house rebelling the traditional, superstitious and reactionary values. But when they return home disappointed by the person she had believed in, the home is seen in new light showing them the way to self78
Kalpagam, U. (1986) Gender in Economics: The Indian Experience, Economic and Political weekly, Vol. XXI, No.43, October 25. 79 Govind Kelkar, Violence Against Women in India, Bangkok, Asian Institute of Technology, 1992, p.8
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identification. Her characters struggle to record protest eventually in their lives. In their journey from a kind of slavery Shashi Deshpande takes them towards self-awareness at various levels and finally to an assertion for autonomy and freedom. The picture that emerges is of a self reliant, emancipated and happy individual, a person, sexually uninhibited intelligent, confident and assertive.80
80
Bande, Usha and Atma Ram. Woman in India short stories Feminist Perspective. ( Jaipur and New Delhi: 2003) p 14.
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Search For Identity in Despandey

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SEARCH FOR IDENTITY IN SHASHI DESHPANDES THAT LONG SILENCE, THE DARK HOLDS NO TERROR AND ROOTS AND

ERASING THAT LONG SILENCE

LIGHT OF AWARENESS THE DARK HOLDS NO TERROR

RENOUNCE-ROOTS AND SHADOWS

T.D. Burton, Critical Essays on Indian writing in English. P.201-202.

Reshma Kulkarni, Literary Review, The Hindu, March 6, 2011

http:// womens history. About.com/od/quotes/a/c c_p_gilman.htm

Sarus life is choked by her mothers routine criticism and

Chris Weedon, Post-Structural Theory and Feminsit Practice. P.54

CHAPTER - V Male violence against women is normalised and legitimised in sexual

totalising conception. principles.

Come Up and Be Dead, Dronequill Publications,

Krishna Kripalani, Indian Literature : A Panoramie Glimpse Nirrnal Sadanand, 1969)

Vishwanatha, Vanamala. "Interview with Shashi Deshpande," Alive.

British Council, Madras. 13 December 1987: 8-14. Reshma Kulkarni,

Literary Review, The Hindu, March6, 2011.

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