Emily Mullins

11/29/07

ENG 310C Watts

Paper # 3

The Gender Roles of Traditional Hindu Culture in Kamala

This story of a Hindu child-wife is one of persecution, oppression, and degradation. In

the novel, Kamala, Krupabai Satthianadhan writes of a young girl trapped in the confines of her

traditional socio-religious Hindu Caste System and locked in a marriage as a mere child.

Kamala’s new life within her husband’s home is depicted through the author’s critical opinion of

gender relations within a traditional Hindu community. Kamala is a young girl living in a

patriarchal society encumbered by the sexist opinions and restrictions of her society. The gender

roles of the hegemonic period of Nineteenth Century British Colonialism in India are represented

by the author as a realistic example of the religious and cultural traditions engrained in a

patriarchal society juxtaposed against the creeping New World ideologies. The author represents

Kamala’s life experiences and those of whom she interacts with, so as to resonate with the social

consciousness of the reader. The author shows how the gender roles within the novel are not only

stereotypical and part of the uncompromising orthodox Hindu society, but their existing

traditional scope of degradation, injustice, oppression, and victimization towards women is in dire

need of a reform. Satthianadhan, through a Christian critique of Hinduism, depicts Kamala as a

realistic and distressing representation of a woman of the upper-caste Hindu system and the

prescribed gender roles wives must adhere to within the house of their in-laws and in society.

The gender roles of husband and wife within this Hindu society are unusual and other-

worldly to a Western reader. The Hindu wife is scarcely allowed to exchange words or looks with

their husbands, and they often act like strangers in one another’s presence. Women are made to

keep silent, and to cover their head when their husband enters a room or approaches them.

Women are to stand aside, out of the way, and even when spoken to, they are to answer in the
most distant manner possible. Kamala was not allowed to even lift her eyes in her husband,

Ganesh’s presence. Women are thought have any feelings or to have anything of use to say aloud.

Kamala was treated similarly to other wives, “as a sort of chattel made to give him pleasure and

minister to his wants” (Satthianadhan 99). As his property, she was a creature “to be despised and

ill-treated” (Satthianadhan 62). Kamala’s friends even informed her that future beatings were

normal, and that it was a woman’s lot. Bhagirathi tells Kamala that one day not a day will pass

without her getting a good beating from her husband, and Rukhma informs her it will be for her

“misconduct, of course” as she “is the evil influence” (Satthianadhan 45). However innocent the

daughter-in-law is, she will always be the one to be punished.

Kamala, during her time in her in-law’s house, recognizes her duty as a child-wife to put

before her own self. Her domesticity is wrought by her low position in her new household and

she is to be kept behind closed doors. Kamala is thought of as less than a servant in her husband’s

eyes, having to submit to both mental and physical anguish. “It was but the old rooted prejudice

in the Hindu mind against women”, a prejudice Kamala didn’t understand from the people

surrounding her (133). From The Margins of Hindu Marriage emphasizes how the world of

women literally becomes their household, and the only “two basic roles for women [are] daughter

and wife” (Harlan 13). Kamala and other Hindu brides must devote themselves to their sacred

religion and to serving their new homes, as they have no control in their marriages and in their

lives. Hindu child-brides are confined and oppressed in a man’s home and world.

Kamala is not just a woman, but her new family thinks she is “penniless”, leaving her

doubly colonized (Satthianadhan 54). Women were only esteemed and respected in their culture if

they had money. Moreover, women in Kamala’s society were confronted and confined by

artificial barriers, designed to force the wife to submit to every tyranny within her in-law’s house

and to suffer silently as fate and circumstance would have it. It was “Fate who minded human

affairs” and even though she sometimes felt God wasn’t there, she had to trust in His plan and the

devices he uses to challenge her (Satthianadhan 85). And however she tried to dream and hope for
a better life, whims and wishes were extreme thoughts to a Hindu girl, and Kamala had to rely on

her faith to escape in her mind her prison-like home.

Kamala, as a child-wife, is helpless, ignorant, and confused by the degrading behaviors

and indifferent attitudes towards her presence. Her experiences within her new home portrays

how these traditional gender roles function in the humiliation and disgrace of Hindu women in

their specific socio-religious customs. Kamala depicts the mental state of a Brahman class girl

fulfilling her role in the form of domestic help in an orthodox Hindu home. Her place in the house

is shown most explicitly when looking at the Cinderella-esque relationship with her mother-in-

law. Kamala’s mother-in-law, along with others, only showed Kamala hatred when all she craved

was love. Ganesh’s mother was “very ill-natured” and “tyrannized over the little girl in a

shameful manner” (Satthianadhan 60). Indian mother-in-laws are so terrified they will lose their

sons and that he will come to only care for his wife, they do their best to execute all sorts of evil

methods to crush the young girl’s spirit and to come between their son and daughter-in-law. This

mother-son relationship is most unusual because it seems to represent a matriarchal power within

a patriarchal house and society. The son wants to do his best to please his domineering mother.

Ganesh often sat by his mother, “petted by her,” indifferent to his wife who hung back in the

shadows (Satthianadhan 63). Her mother-in-law was so jealous of Kamala’s relationship with her

son in the beginning, that she prohibited the couple from having any liberty of speech or action in

her presence.

Tradition is the means of trapping Kamala in an unhealthy state of being, as well as in an

unhappy home and marriage. Convention and custom are apparent in the institutionalized

patriarchal ideals of their Hindu culture. The expectations of Indian women are to be passive,

silent, feeble, yet virtuous while being physically imprisoned, emotionally and mentally

degraded, and made to grapple with the blame for any unhappiness displayed by her husband.

Ganesh, selfish and indolent, at first breaks the mold while he desires to teach Kamala when he

sees her knack for learning and remarkable talent for reading, but then, similar to the rest of his
family members, changes in his attitude towards his wife, becomes indifferent, and ceases to

teach her. He has not the courage, nor the wisdom to see past the subservient nature of his

traditional Hindu culture. And as many other Indian men do, he sees women “as mere appendices

of their great selves” (Satthianadhan 7). He uses Kamala to fuel his ego, and only his own self-

involvement ignited him to awaken her mind. In the end, he becomes convinced that traditional

wives were not to be cleverer than their husbands, for he was the one who should be allowed to

study and gain knowledge. These new-fangled ideas of a reform of gender equality of British

ideology were absurd and not to be acknowledged within a traditional society.

Hindu socio-religious convention doesn’t allow for women’s intellectual development, as

well as Kamala’s desire to “break the bonds of orthodoxy” (Satthianadhan 9). Kamala’s short

childhood was also different from other girl’s, in the respect she had a father who was vastly

knowledgeable of the world around them and taught her as well as loved her. This love was not

common place in a traditional Hindu father daughter-relationship, and neither was her informal

education. Education was mainstay in a man’s world. Kamala, having been raised by her father, a

sanyasi, gathered some awareness of the world, through her father’s teaching. She was, before her

marriage, “brought up in the innocent freedom of her mountain home, [where] she could feel free

like the air around her” and “was untrammeled by caste superstition and fear” (Satthianadhan 86).

Her new family though, saw her as having “lost all the instincts of a civilized life” as she behaved

differently than other girls her age (Satthianadhan 63). Her Father, Narayen, was all she had since

birth, as he was her “nurse, her confidant, and her instructor” (Satthianadhan 32). His cultivated

mind, however overshadowed by the dominant English learning, allowed him to see the

importance of his daughter’s learning. His love of nature and wandering was also passed to his

daughter, and he expected her to be happy in any condition with the peace and calm she received

from nature.

Kamala faces the many adversities of a child-marriage. In their restrictive culture, women

of this caste are not to have access to education, or to a career, or even to have knowledge of the
world beyond what lies in their house and yard. Education, being the most important attribute in

life, is also found to be the most lacking in the Indian women demographic. Satthianadhan

opposes the orthodoxy of their culture, and acknowledges the social and cultural reform the

British imperialism could bring about. Female education was seen as a vehicle for women’s

liberation, and those who believed a woman’s place was in the home did not see fit for women to

have their intellect awakened. The British colonialists, however, saw the downtrodden and

helpless Indian women, and thought they could bring them out of their “degradation” through

education (Satthianadhan 3). This new view did not blend well with that of the traditional

Hindus, who rejected the colonialist ideologies that would promote individualism and self-

awareness among their women. British principles represented a movement towards developing

women’s intellect, but Indian men wanted their wives and children to remain inferior and

subsidiary. Kamala, who wanted so badly to be educated, or at least to gain some form of

knowledge of the exterior world, serves as a symbol for protestation against the norm. Yet Ganesh

crushes her desire for intellect by failing to continue his teaching, and handing the reins to his

mother and sisters.

Ganesh represents a traditional Hindu male. He is heavily patriarchal, self centered and

spoiled. He is also impetuous, indulging, vain, and sexist. In this critique of the Hindu culture, he

is the stereotypical male, who only uses his wife to administer to his needs, and who uses his

female family members to fuel his ego and vanity. In Kamala and Hindu culture, the wife, child

or not, is seen as the property of her husband. In a Hindu marriage, “the silken knot, never to be

untied, which untied them for life, was tied. Living or dead she was the property of the man

whoever he might be” and “this law was never to be broken” (Satthianadhan 37). Their marriages

become like “living grave[s]” (Satthianadhan 59). There is an inner turmoil which exists in the

heart of a Hindu child-bride. She is separated from her husband’s family by artificial barriers of

tradition and caste, as she is forced into womanhood and her innocent childhood is prematurely

ended.
 Fate deals greatly with an Indian woman’s conviction to maintain and abide by the

prescribed gender roles of her community. Kamala’s “crude religious convictions” and acceptance

that “it was her fate” to suffer amongst those who showed no love or care for her, provided her

with the will to maintain a moral code to abide by and to always behave well and have love for

others despite the ways other treat her (Satthianadhan 58). In this “great lesson of humanity” she

saw “how good deeds were rewarded and bad deeds punished even in the next life, how humility

had its reward” and how one always had to be virtuous and respectful, even in trying times

(Satthianadhan 58). Child-brides, even of upper caste status or of wealth had to submit to their

fate and were unable to acquire their due in the world.

Kamala as the protagonist woman is again and again let down, and neglected by men in

her life. And after feeling so much hatred and neglect, she at first resigns herself to fate, silently

accepting her place as a servant wife in her husband’s family’s home until it becomes too much to

bear. At a certain breaking point, Kamala defies these stereotypical female roles, and begins a

small journey of self-liberation by defying her husband in an act of tumultuous rebellion. She

steps out of the normal passive gender roles, and does not suppress her feelings towards her

husband’s lover, Sai, a woman who also defies the prescripted female roles of a Hindu society.

Sai, who used intellect, scheming, abrasive and non-traditional feminine wiles to make Ganesh

fall for her was unusually allowed to behave in such a way. Ganesh, when confronted by Kamala

while he is with Sai, even asks her, “Who are you to interfere with my pleasure?” (135). This

would be a most unusual question under most circumstances to ask one’s wife, but not in a Hindu

household. According to From the Margins of Hindu Marriage, only if the wife takes a lover it is

considered adultery, a violation of religious laws, but if a man takes a mistress, it is “simply the

way of the world-the man’s world” (Harlan 161). Yet even after Kamala has confronted her

husband, she still wonders if she is to blame for his actions, displaying a truly Hindu woman

mindset.
 Nature played a large role in this novel, as Kamala sees the winds, the rivers, and the

sands as representing movement and freedom, a liberation from her current state of traditional

domesticity, ensnared in a life without love and happiness. The “fields, the rocks, and the flowers,

brought quietness and peace to her and filled her heart with a calm joy” (Satthianadhan 54). She

yearned for a happy home and a peaceful mind, as well as the love of those around her. Yet, she

was neither happy nor peaceful nor content. The freedom and happier existence the air and other

forms of nature presents, gave her hope in the midst of her struggle and conflict. From her father,

she was taught that nature was “kinder to [them] than human beings” (Satthianadhan 120). Nature

indicates to her a sense of freedom and the promise of escaping the confines of her existence. The

young physician, Ramchamber tried to use her love of nature to convince Kamala into coming

away with him, and even though the thought of being as free as the air and having a man to love

and cherish her, she lets her “religion [have] its victory” in the end, and tradition wins out

(Satthianadhan 155).

At the end of the novel, Kamala has purged herself of the sexist encumbrances of her

Hindu patriarchal society, yet she chooses to live her life within the parameters of her long-

established tradition. It is difficult for her to entirely cleanse herself completely of the religion

and the way of thinking she has become accustomed to, that which has been engrained in her

mind and soul. Satthianadhan writes of a young child-bride of the Brahman Caste in the Hindu

Caste system in an attempt to challenge readers’ usual ways of thinking and to show the need for

a reform of this traditional system. Women of the Hindu society are treated poorly and given no

respect, with their only life fulfillment to be a slave in their new family’s homes, and to behave as

a servant bending to the every whim of their husbands. These feelings and notions “are purely

Hindu, and are the outcomes of wrongs committed for generations on the poor unprotected Hindu

woman” (Satthianadhan 114). Kamala, in the end, comes out still different from other girls, as

she had learned to think and to feel, and to acknowledge what existed outside of male
indifference, and a prison-like existence, confronted by traditional socio-religious constructed

barriers, placed between genders.