Post on 18-Mar-2020
43
Chapter 2
Thwarted Desires: Emotional Crisis
Diverse cultures, societies and situations do make women diverse in nature,
but there are certain issues which are universal to the whole of womankind. A woman
of any origin, belonging to any strata of society goes through emotional upheavals in
life. In her work The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan who is regarded as the
harbinger of the second wave of American feminism brings out the fact that women,
who apparently have everything to make them happy and comfortable, cannot trace
the source of dissatisfaction and the cause of the emotional distress that they suffer.
Friedan realizes that this happens because women can not gratify their basic needs,
and can not fulfil their desires or exist as human beings.
An attempt has been made in this chapter to focus on the emotional aspects of
the conflicts experienced by the heroines and the manner in which they are resolved in
Shashi Deshpande’s A Matter of Time and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Sister of My
Heart. Social, cultural and mainly psychological factors are the perpetuators of
emotional crisis in the female. She is eager to do a number of things but is thwarted
by the various pressures of life. Shashi Deshpande’s and Chitra Banerjee
Divakaruni’s works deal with modern middle class urban women’s problems in an
authentic and sympathetic manner. They deftly portray the needs and demands of new
women and their inability to fulfil them because the age-old traditions expect them to
be obedient, passive, submissive and self-denying. These contradictory demands of
the self and society create conflicts in their lives and make them neurotic.
44
Both the novels taken up in this chapter describe the peculiar problems of
women who have for one reason or the other lost the support of their husbands. They
brace themselves up to the situation and the process through which they pass reflects
how the social situation determines a woman’s thinking. Life is not a bed of roses for
any of them and the way in which they respond to the problems of their lives reflects
the difference in the manner in which women of different generations respond to the
thwarting of their desires. A Matter of Time describes three generations of women.
While the first Kalyani compromises with a husband who never speaks to her, the
second Sumi does not try to patch up with her alienated husband Gopal, and the third
Aru wishes to take her father to task for having abandoned them. In Sister of My
Heart one witnesses how the two mothers cope up with widowhood and sacrifice their
own needs and desires for the sake of their daughters. Anju and Sudha (the daughters)
in turn experience upheavals in their lives which makes them more like the post
feminist women who are powerful and not influenced by emotional judgements alone.
They derive strength from their inner resources.
The basic view of feminism is that civilization is pervasively patriarchal. It is
male- centered and is organized and conducted in such a way as to subordinate
women to men in all cultural domains: familial, religious, political, economic, social,
legal, and artistic. Simone de Beauvoir notes,
Since patriarchal times women have, in general, been forced to occupy
a secondary place in the world in relation to men… in spite of the fact
that women constitute numerically at least half of the human race”, and
that “this secondary standing is not imposed of necessity by natural
feminine characteristics but rather by strong environmental forces of
45
education and social traditions under the purposeful control of men.
(233)
We can say that while one’s sex is determined anatomy, the prevailing concept
of ‘gender’ – of the traits that constitute what is masculine and what is feminine, are
largely cultural constructs that were generated by the omnipresent patriarchal biases
of our civilization.
Myths and legends that are also products of a male-oriented culture play an
important role in formulating the ideas on which woman is to base her life. Certain
role-models in every society determine the attitudes and expectations of women and
the inherent contradictions in culture make it difficult for women to indulge in their
desires. The conflict for Indian women arises when they try to carve out a viable
space for themselves in the society which is suffering from Sita-Savitri Syndrome. In
the debate on nationalism and colonial history as well, gender and sexuality have been
central to the conceptualization, expression and enactment of such relations across the
colonial spectrum. The nation/state or its guiding principles have often been imagined
literally as a ‘woman’, e.g.
The world's two primordial great epics, Ramayana by Valmiki and
Mahabharata by Ved Vyasa, both centre around the characters of Sita & Draupadi,
who are the archetypes of ideal womanhood from the male view point. The role
women play in literature and life in the past and present in both parts of the globe is
almost similar. In ancient Vedic literature, women were deified and there is a patron
goddess for every aspect of life but in reality a contradictory state of affairs exists in
India. Various questions arise regarding the actual status of woman such as who is the
real woman? Where is the real woman - What is her real entity? Has she an identity of
46
her own? The primordial myths gave woman an identity that is stereotypical and has
been reinforced by archetypes for ages. Sita of Ramayana and Draupadi of the
Mahabharata are considered to be the two poles of feminine experience in the world.
Sita absorbs all inflicted misery and humiliation of the male ego whereas Draupadi
challenges the male ego to the epitomic limits of human excellence. Sita accepts,
accommodates and withdraws. Draupadi resents, rejects and involves herself in the
process of life as a protagonist and yet never transgresses the rules. These two
feminine archetypes define the limits of feminine experience in reality, especially the
Indian Reality. There may not be an open articulation of the necessity for Indian
women to follow the examples of Sita and Savitri but these figures being an
inseparable part of our psyche make it mandatory for women to do so. The female
protagonists of A Matter of Time and Sister of My Heart are also supposed to tolerate
the whims of their male counterparts like their mythical predecessors. Respectability
will be granted to them only if they conform-that perhaps explains Kalyani’s
desperate desire to be able to apply kumkum and Sumi’s pretence that everything is
normal in her broken marriage. It is the necessity to appear ideal Indian women that
determines the behavior of the two mothers, as well as Anju and Sudha in
Divakaruni’s Sister of My Heart. This is done at the cost of personal happiness and
under great emotional duress.
Even in the present day literature woman is presented an unresisting tolerant
person. The traditional values of feminine grace and order are not eschewed
completely. She is now a more dignified Sita who shows her strength of character by
absorbing all male atrocities or an intellectual Draupadi protesting and revolting
against all humiliation. The gender divide in modern Indian literature moves between
new iconizations of these two bold and primordial figures who dominate over it since
47
ages. There is silent suffering coupled with utmost loyalty to man in the Sita type and
woman as an individual demanding social justice in the Draupadi types. The latter has
got greater appreciation. As Deshpande also says that:
Myths are still important to us. We do not want to demolish them, we
need them to live by; they have shaped our ideas for a great many
years, they embody our dreams. To destroy them would be to leave a
large rent in the fabric of our culture…In India, specially, myths have
an extraordinary vitality, continuing to give people some truth about
themselves and about the human condition. (Deshpande, Writing from
the Margin and Other Essays 99)
It is not arejection of myths but an adaptation of them to suit the needs of a
modern woman that is desirable. To quote Shashi Deshpande again, “We don’t reject
the ideals, but we know we can’t approximate to these pictures of ideal womanhood.
And we will not bear any guilt that we cannot do so. More important than knowing
what we are not, is to know what we are, what is possible for us.” (100)
In Deshpande’s works the contexts, figures and situations are mythological but
the responses and reactions of her protagonists are akin to those of contemporary
women. The characters are portrayed as reactionary. She deconstructs the ideal male-
devised mythological models to search and create what Chaman Nahal calls
“replacement models.” Elaborating on the term “replacement model” he writes:
It is very difficult to construct a replacement model. One cannot escape
the myth-the conditioning myth with which one has grown up. Unless
we construct new myths, we cannot construct replacement model. We
all revere Sita and Savithri; they did something out of loyalty, out of
48
dedication. We may not like it today, but can we disown them? We
cannot escape the myths. So, the replacement models are to be
constructed in the context of the myths we already have. (18)
We can easily draw parallels between the archetypes of woman and the
protagonists of both Shashi Deshpande and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. The image of
woman in literature emerges out of the existing world. The existing world obtains in
the mind and imagination of the visualizers of reality. In India, which has been
regarded by sociologists as a traditionally male dominated society, both men and
women writers have seen woman in relationship with man, primarily as mother, wife,
mistress and sex object. Woman as an achiever is either non-existent or considered an
exception. A woman's individual self has been given very little recognition, and her
emotional turmoil generally results out of the frustration resulting from this.
Carol Gilligan, professor of Gender studies at Harvard University since 1997,
opines that women are sensitive to the needs of others and play the role of a nurturer,
caretaker and helpmate instead of paying heed to their own needs. But men neither
value their love, care and concern nor reciprocate these values. Her seminal work, In
a Different Voice (1982), is based on the interviews “about conceptions of self and
morality, about experiences of conflict and choice” (2). Her study is highly
illuminating when study of the causes of conflicts in the minds of female protagonists
of A Matter of Time by Shashi Deshpande and Sister of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee
Divakaruni is undertaken. The protagonists Sumi in A Matter of Time and Sudha in
Sister of My Heart are the victims of devaluation of desired feminine virtues- care,
nurturance, self-denial, self-sacrifice, tolerance which brings their life to a standstill
and they find themselves unable to move on. Deshpande opines that when the
49
expectations based on role models and ideals to be followed are belied by the realities
of life, stress and depression set in.
The role models and ideals come down to them through traditions, faith,
dogma and mythology. As Madhu Kishwar opines, the mythical ideal woman is
presented
as a selfless giver, someone who gives endlessly, gracefully, smilingly,
whatever the demand, however harmful to herself. She gives not just
love, affection and ungrudging service but also, if need be, her health
and ultimately her life at the altar of duty to her husband, children and
rest of the family. (In Search 48)
The image of the ideal woman the so called ‘angel in the house’ exists in
Western patriarchy as well. Besides, this sense of duty in the woman makes her
practice a morality that makes her feel responsible for the welfare of the family.
Cultural constructs also teach her to feel guilty if anything goes wrong whatever the
reason for this may be.
Gilligan opines that man’s morality has ‘justice orientation’ whereas woman’s
morality has ‘responsibility orientation’ as it is more relational and based on the ethics
of care. Sumi, the female protagonist in the novel A Matter of Time, provides an
excellent example of ‘responsibility orientation’ of women’s morality as explained by
Carol Gilligan. Her husband Gopal faces certain conflicts in his personal life, finds
himself unable to move on, decides to leave home and easily turns his back towards
family responsibility. He is bothered about his own conflicts regarding life and death,
morality and futility of life but does not think about the impact of his decision on the
family. In spite of being in a shocked state, Sumi decides to fulfill her responsibility
50
towards her three grown- up daughters. Forgetting her distress, she proves to be a
strong support to her daughters. To the astonishment of the daughters Sumi’s behavior
on the day her husband announces their separation is so routine like that it makes it
“so difficult for them to understand the enormity of what has happened” (10). She sets
the tone for them; they go through the motions of their normal routine. Sumi’s
calmness and normality, makes it possible for them to think that it was a usual fight
between the parents and makes it possible for them to hope-‘he will come back’. In
Divakaruni’s Sister of My Heart we notice similar traits in Gauri Ma, Anju’s mother
who not only takes the responsibility of Anju, but also her husband’s cousin’s family
on her shoulders, after her husband’s death. Sudha in few words brings out her
character
Lines of hardship are etched around her mouth and on her forehead, for
she was the one who shouldered the burden of keeping the family safe
on that thunderclap day eight years ago when she received the news of
our fathers’ death. But her eyes, dark and endless- deep- they make me
think of Kaldighi, the enormous lake behind the country mansion our
family used to own before Anju and I were born. (5)
The basic nature of woman is that she is emotional; this is an essential element
of her femininity. She experiences emotional disturbances due to various reasons. In
the process of life, it is the selflessness of woman, societal and family pressures which
give rise to emotional turmoil. This chapter discusses emotional upheavals of Chitra
Banerjee Divakaruni’s and Shashi Deshpande’s heroine’s whose response to crises is
different from that of their predecessors. With greater freedom of expression being
granted to them, the woman novelists of today bring out the emotional stress of their
protagonists and try to resolve it as best as possible.
51
Both the novelists depict the emotional lives of their protagonists from various
angles. The causes for emotional stress are many-they are daughters, mothers and
individuals in their own right. So the ups and downs of life have their repercussions
on their relationship with the world around them. A study of A Matter of Time by
Shashi Deshpande and Sister of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni will verify
the fact that women both as writers of fiction and as characters in fiction have
acquired a new face. We no longer witness the sentimental outbursts that preoccupied
the mind of Anita Desai’s early heroines and made them revel in their misery.
Running away from home, taking a more desperate step as committing suicide are
some of the ways in which women put an end to their emotional problems. In Shashi
Deshpande and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni however, the resolution of emotional
issues is different.
Sometimes the woman is an activist who wields justice and power with self
controlled detachment. Deshpande’s woman characters are activists though Shashi
Deshpande is not professedly a feminist. She protests in a paper presented at a
seminar
It is curious fact that serious writing by women is invariably regarded
as feminist writing. A woman who writes of women’s experiences
often brings in some aspects of those experiences that have angered
her, caused her strong feelings, I don’t see why this has to be labeled
feminist fiction. (Deshpande “The Dilemma of Woman Writers”, 33)
Men and women in her novels fight shoulder to shoulder against a common foe, the
establishment. The women break through the tradition of home, hearth and veil to
fight the establishment with whatever weapons they can wield-or with sulking
52
detachment. In Deshpande’s novels women are all domesticated characters who revolt
against the dogma ridden society to find solutions for their emotional turmoil. Though
their voice echoes in the far horizon the rebellion remains inside the four walls of the
household. She depicts through her bold and reformist woman characters the
declining values and transformative adjustment between tradition and modernity,
between desire and decision, with natural psychological stress that ensues. Her
woman characters are not mute; they are ever questioning and cannot be daunted by
any pretext. This may also mean that she is a “revisionist questioning the adequacy of
accepted conceptural structures.”(Showalter 333) This may be taken to mean that
“Deshpande converts a muted woman into a “talking woman” and provides the cause,
will strength and means to articulate the silence of woman.” (Pandey 82) Her women
confront the problems of modern life but they basically stick to the roles of being
ideal wives and mothers. In fact most of the woman writers in India themselves attach
utmost value and dignity to their biological and social roles. Only sometimes while
retaliating or taking revenge do they transcend all limits of dignity even probability.
Shashi Deshpande does not go to the extreme because she knows that the “wails of
anguish or thunder of curses or growls of anger do not by themselves turn into great
literature.” (Kripalani 109)
There are of course many writers projecting the image of the new woman and
there are as many writers writing in the traditional vein about the meek suffering,
devoted wife and self abnegating mother. Literature of rebellion in India has to be
therefore understood with great care in the context of the heritage of our social laws,
our literary audience and its relationship to the inherent social code. Over years, the
age old image of the woman seems to be slowly blurring and gradually shading off in
to a new image. What is now needed is that a new man/or society must arise and then
53
with an equal partner the change that is going on in the new woman at home and
outside home could be portrayed with fulfilling experience. Where is the new man
who must welcome comparatively vocal women characters who boldly protest and
assert their right in the society with firmness and dignity? They have presented a
psychological insight into the inner character of woman with all its conflicts and
contradictions with authenticity and truthfulness in such a way as to carry our
conviction. It must be kept in mind that mostly it is the middle class educated urban
woman who has carved a niche for herself. Women in the rest of the country are for
the most part still dogma ridden due to lack of education.
There is the enlightened brave new woman and there is the helpless, illiterate
male-dominated woman existing side by side in life and in literature. An image of
woman in Indian literature is characterized by contradiction - there is a conventional
image and there is a protesting voice. Post independence literature reveals the
woman's quest for her identity giving rise to a number of issues. The new woman is
emerging and there are a number of new themes and issues to be taken by the future.
But we have to remember that family plays a pivotal role in the Indian scheme
of life. The new woman in Indian literature does not ever want to break the family but
dreams of how to make it "Home Sweet Home". If woman is absent, there is
ultimately no life in this world. But she is still walking on a tight rope to achieve her
right and social justice. Anees Jung in her book, Unveiling India rightly holds the
view:
In this complex pantheon of diversities the Indian woman remains the
point of unity, unveiling through each single experience a collective
consciousness prized by a society that is locked in mortal combat with
54
the power and weakness of age and time. She remains the still centre,
like a centre in a potter’s wheel, circling to create new forms,
unfolding the continuity of a racial life, which in turn has encircled and
helped her acquire a quality of concentration. (26)
Indian woman at the turn of the century is in a transitional phase vis-a-vis the
interface of tradition and modernity. Indian literature shows that the situation of
woman is not free from the influence of family, history and social modernism which
causes the conflict between her desire for self-fulfillment and the necessity of doing
her duties and the two are often opposed.
The women in Indian literature are more educated, sophisticated and even rebellious,
wary of shedding off the traditional values which form part of their inherited
consciousness. Moreover western culture, which has had a dominating influence on
India in the pre and post independence years, is not necessarily the alternative heaven
for the new generation in India. Arundhati Roy's God of Small things, in spite of the
sophistication of the Kerala women does not advocate a "jumping off" for personal
fulfillment. Velutha and his woman still wait for a "tomorrow" without trying to ride
rough on traditions. Indian women often are pre occupied with the idea of soul, moksa
and bliss. These militate against concepts of freedom, self-fulfillment and personal
moksa.
A Matter of Time has a failed marriage as its narrative crux. Gopal, a
university professor, walks out of his twenty year old marriage, leaving his job and
almost all his material possessions. He starts living a near monastic, spare life in a
single room over the ramshackle printing press run by his former student, making
something of a meager living from the occasional copy-editing he does for the latter.
55
The novel is more significantly about his wife, the beautiful and detached Sumi, and
about their eldest daughter, the eighteen year old politically inclined, self-identified
feminist Aru. Gopal is in fact the male character who gets the maximum sympathy,
well-roundedness and discursive space in all of Deshpande’s fiction. Sumi and her
family remain in touch with Gopal, a behavior rather inexplicable in the aftermath of
his abandonment of them. Keeping in view the society’s values, their attitude, is
strangely open and relatively uncritical, almost sympathetic of the spiritual and
philosophical turmoil within Gopal. Only Aru is occasionally harsh in her criticism of
the father. Caron Gilligan’s theory is apt here she says:
Since masculinity is defined through separation while feminity is
defined through attachment, male gender identity is threatened by
intimacy while female gender indentity is threatened by separation.
Thus males tend to have difficulty with relationships, while females
tend to have problems with individuation. (8)
A Matter of Time gives an account of four generations of women who look at
life from different points of view. It reflects the changing attitudes of women that are
changing with the passage of time. Manorama, the grandmother is completely
orthodox and would like her daughter Kalyani’s husband (who has deserted her) to
return home, even if his return is merely that of a presence in the house. Kalyani too
accepts his reinstatement in the household because this gives her the satisfaction of
being able to wear the ‘kumkum’ the sign of respectability, which married women
adorn and treasure. Living as an estranged wife is easier for her than to live as a
separated wife. However, when history repeats itself in the case of Sumi and Gopal,
Kalyani’s daughter and son-in-law, Sumi does not try to goad her husband into any
kind of compromise. Her eldest daughter Aru is ready to sue her father for his
56
desertion of the family. This surely reflects the changing response to the emotional
upheavals in life- the younger generation is obviously more aggressive in its reaction
to the turmoils of life.
The tension experienced as deserted women is further complicated with the
responsibility of motherhood. Being a single parent is not an easy task for a woman to
handle alone. In A Matter of Time we notice the stress on Kalyani and Sumi who have
daughters of their own to look after. Their strength as individuals is put to test and the
capability proved by the fact that these women do not give up or surrender themselves
Kalyani very bravely bears the burden of bringing up her daughters Sumi and Premi,
even after experiencing the trauma of losing her son, and her husband Shripati’s
withdrawal. Her husband’s silence pricks her all the more when she sees her daughter
Sumi going through a similar phase in life. In turn Sumi who is also separated from
her husband has a more difficult task to accomplish, because she is afraid that any
exhibition of emotions will affect her daughters who are still in the process of
growing up. So it is necessary for her to maintain her outer calm. “She shows no
outward sign of distress, but the girls notice a new habit in her, of touching them,
holding their hands, smoothing their hair, as if this physical contact is a manifestation
of some intense emotion within her.”(33)
But within, Sumi is in mayhem as she has to take major decisions about
settling down and about the future of her daughters. Aru notices in her mother a kind
of “purposeless extravagance about her movements, an exaggeration that is different
from her normal vivacity and quickness.” (33) The abrupt disintegration of her family
does not crumble her, desertion leaves Sumi seemingly unperturbed. But beneath the
façade of quietude is the suffering which she faces bravely. She undertakes the
journey of her life with her three teenage daughters and readjusts her lifestyle to suit
57
the situation she is in. Aru, Sumi’s daughter who is obsessed with the idea of suing
her father, is however, too proud to show her grief to her father or request him to
come home. Kalyani, Sumi and Aru all three of them face emotional tumult due to
various psychological factors that disturb their mental state but it is their acceptance
of their situation and stoicism that helps these characters tide over their disturbed
emotional lives. Shashi Deshpande in her talk on ‘The Indian woman-Stereotypes,
Images and Realities states: “The good woman-whether she is the wife, mother, sister
or daughter-in-law doesn’t matter-is always so selfless that she negates herself to the
point of extinction.”
In the extended family that Shashi Deshpande presents, two or three
generations live together. Deshpande has looked into woman’s changing perspectives
and their search for bonding within family as a mode of strength. Her young heroines
rebel against the traditional way of life and patriarchal values. Jaya, Sarita and Sumi
perceive the structuring of men and women in gendered roles, restricting their human
potentiality and fullness. They struggle to transcend the restrictive roles. They rebel,
reject and seek freedom from the traditional norms and way of life. Shashi
Deshpande’s portrayal of the women of different generations presents the world of
women divided into the traditional and modern.
Feminism is at the core of her novels. She deals with the woman’s psyche and
the way she is made to feel an inferior being, an unwanted child, a burden on the
family, especially in case of Kalyani. There is conjugal relationship between Kalyani
and Shripati. The lack of communication between them impinges on the wider issues
of patriarchy that influences the successive generations. While clearing the cupboard
one day Sumi comes across a photograph of her parents which she feels is unnatural
and obscene. Her mother Kalyani is dressed in heavy bridal silk sari and looks
58
childishly thin and the heavy necklaces seem to make her neck droop. Whereas her
father, “The man on the other hand is stern, his eyes hooded, arms folded across his
chest in the usual ‘manly pose’ demanded by the photographers for such pictures.”
Sumi can speculate looking at the picture that the sternness “here is not a pose, it is
real. And the way he is standing, he gives the impression of being by himself, wholly
unaware of the girl sitting by him. His wife.” (26) History repeats itself in the life of
Sumi. But on both occasions Kalyani and Sumi are silent. Kalyani suffers silently.
She fears a similar fate for Sumi. Kalyani’s fears are based on patriarchal oppression
that condemns women to the margins of silence. She is made to realize that while
losing her son, a male heir, she had abandoned her motherhood as well as her right as
a wife. Her punishment is that she has to live with this psychic wound. She is
compelled to accept her passivity. For nearly thirty-five years she remains a passive
silent sufferer. Her body becomes a ‘sight of colonizing power.’ Like colonized
subjects, women too have been ‘colonized’ by various forms of patriarchal
domination. They share with colonized races the politics of oppression and repression.
Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood have portrayed the
similarities between colonized races and women.
Undue importance is given to motherhood, especially giving birth to a male
child, makes a woman more respected in society. This is yet another form of male
domination. A childless woman is discriminated against by both men and women. In
this context P.G.Joshi says that “What is ironic is that owing to the long tradition of
such discrimination such unfortunate women themselves feel that they are barren and
handicapped.” (121) Shripati never forgives Kalyani because their male child is lost
through her negligence. In Deshpande’s other novels also one can witness similar
reactions. In Binding Vine also Sulu feels that her husband is justified in his threats to
59
throw her out on the streets and marry another woman who can give him a child. In
Long Silence Nayana is one such woman whose husband threatens to marry another
woman for a male child. During every pregnancy Nayana hopes to have a son.
Kalyani is also worried about her daughter Sumi, in Sumi’s life there is
vaccum because of Gopal’s abandonment. She tries to find out clues to the probable
motives of his past acts and utterances. She recalls that Gopal once mentioned that Sa-
hriday in the sense of oneness is an impossible concept. One day he realizes that he is
failing the idealistic expectations of his marriage. He can not feel himself a Sa-hriday
with Sumi and is getting out of step with her. The break down of their marriage has
circumscribed Sumi in an unexpected condition. Gopal’s absence leaves her in a state
of vast emptiness. She feels, “I can’t find my bearings, there are no markers any more
to show me which way I should go.”(63) Yet it is from the depth of her despair that
she tries to transform her emptiness into meaning in order to redefine her identity. She
does not remain a passive mother, but becomes an active agent. We cannot forget that
Sumi, like her mother, is a suffering oppressed and wronged woman. Yet she does not
question the man, her oppressor.
In the web of family history, Sumi and Shripati are killed in an accident. No
solution is found to their problem. The ‘Big House’ watches one more generation
going down in history and one generation struggling under the impact of a relentless
fate. Sumi’s daughter Aru is a rebel, she refuses to remain passive. She approaches
her father Gopal not expecting any sympathy from him, but because she wants to
expose the strange behavior of her father.
60
Silence is a major cause of emotional distress in women, the most striking
example of this is Kalyani who spends nearly forty years without speaking with her
husband, Shripati. Sumi also at times wonders
is that what has helped Kalyani to endure everything, the fact that she
is a wife and not a widow? The fact that she has the right to all the
priveleges of the wife of a living husband? Sumi remembers the tray of
kumkum, paan-supari and coconut Manju brought her, she thinks of
the old woman’s words, ‘What is a woman without her husband? (167)
Sumi further questions whether it is enough to have a husband who has never
looked at you or spoken to you for decades “but her kumkum is intact and she can
move in the company of women with the pride of a wife.” One of the major reasons
for the thwarting of women’s desires is the restriction on their freedom of expression.
Regarding silence in women Adrienne Rich states that
speech, assertiveness, even confidence, are discouraged in women
during processes of socialization, because such qualities are assumed
to be unfeminine, and therefore threatening to the status quo. For a
woman to break free from such constraints requires grappling with and
overcoming socialization and societal expectations of gender roles, and
also language, because the very language that surrounds us is a male–
dominated discourse, and of language of male domination over
women. (Qtd. in Greenberg 26).
For Deshpande, the privileged unit of the private sphere is the Indian extended
family, usually middle and upper-middle class, in its huge, sprawling expanse of
kinship networks that are nonetheless intricately woven. The shapes and structures of
61
Deshpande’s families seem deeply moored in the verisimilitudes of a realist tradition
that is also rooted in a very local soil, with regional values and cultural politics.
Rooted in specific cultural and geographical spaces that deeply shape their texture,
usually locales in Karnataka and Maharashtra, the two states of peninsular India
where Deshpande has spent most of her life. The family looms large as a powerful
and a paradoxical structure, replete in equal amounts with love, care, pettiness,
rivalry. Within the discursive space of the narrative framework such family structures
often seem near-complete by themselves, contained in their local, private lives, and
the upheavals in the public sphere seem very far away. It is perhaps not coincidental
that almost all of these fully-rounded private lives that are fore grounded as the
principal motifs in Deshpande’s novels belong to women. They are usually well-
educated, sometimes professionally established, often torn between the visible and
invisible networks of tradition that center on the overarching family-structures, they
are a part of on one hand, and a liberal bourgeois modernity on the other, neither of
which is spared a persistent critique.
The web of patriarchy, both obviously constructed and intricately spun, in the
minds of these female protagonists causes the dilemma. These characters variously
battle, aid, rebel against or are complicit with, and respond to it with anger, despair,
resentment, resignation, reflection, acceptance. The lives of the protagonists often
move back and forth between the turmoil-ridden spaces of home and family networks
on one hand and larger public or professional spheres on the other. The professional
sphere is like an indirect shadow which is rarely given adequate discursive space
within the narrative frameworks.
But interestingly, most of the incidents that cause emotional upheavals are
usually placed outside the narrative frameworks of the novels, from where they
62
trigger off a series of tremors that propel the fractured movements of the internal
consciousness. The narratives, deal with the deeper issues of women’s consciousness
and the reasons for this emotional turmoil but they are rooted in the mundanity of
their daily routine existence.
Deshpande’s protagonists, especially Urmi and Sumi share something of a
detached composure that makes such returns to the banal and reassuring texture of
everyday life both a natural and a necessary process. In A Matter of Time, After Gopal
has left his family and Sumi and her three daughters leave their home and come and
start living with Sumi’s parents, the enormity of the sudden change in their lives is
refracted through the minute nuances of everyday physical, domestic life, probably
because such verisimilitude is the easiest to admit in the middle of such loss and
shock.
‘We’re staying the night,’ Sumi had said, but it is obviously going to be a
much longer stay. The girls who have brought nothing with them but a nightdress and
a toothbrush each, have to keep moving up and down between the two houses,
getting the things they need for each day, living, not out of suitcases, but out of plastic
bags. Aru, with her innate sense of order, has to work hard at not becoming part of the
house, putting things in a kind of temporary order, so that the mattresses, rolled up
each morning, are left on the floor and the clothes, folded as soon as they are dried,
are not put away but piled on the table. “The room is like a guest’s, who, having to
catch a train in the evening, is almost packed and ready to leave. Kalyani enters the
game, too; the extra cups, plates and glasses go back into the storage after every meal,
from where they have to be retrieved each time they are needed.” (12)
63
Objecting to Aru doing housework, Sumi’s mother Kalyani says that she
should rather be spending time studying and having fun; she shouldn’t get involved in
“this mustard seed of domestic life” (36). But neither Aru nor the other two daughters
really end up staying away from the mustard seed of domestic life; as days go by and
it becomes clear that their grandparents’ house is going to be their home for an
indefinite period, perhaps permanently, they give up the charade of playing guests and
become insiders, immersing in the dailiness and the minute banalities of their lives
there. The loss of their home and family remains a permanent displacement — both
physical and psychological — but as in all Deshpande’s novels, life always falls into a
pattern. The humblest detail of one’s daily routine has its own, unique place and these
women return to the very site of loss and displacement no matter how intense the
feeling of these may be. The desire to keep one away from the mustard seed of
domestic life is therefore, a larger metaphor for the drift between the life-changing
upheavals and the predictable, routine rhythms of the everyday whose very texture is
identifiable by its banality as much as its indispensability.
The routinely patterned everyday is the site where most of the narrative
present of her novels is constituted, outside whose immediate framework the upsetting
tremors of private lives are located. Banality and locality are therefore mutually
contingent in Deshpande’s novels, in that, like much modernist fictions, they define
and constitute each other. The very constitution of banality is at least partially a
cultural phenomenon, as an object or a practice is established as banal, ordinary,
insignificant or a negligible part of the everyday only within the parameters of
specific cultures. The ‘banal’ and the ‘colorful’ or ‘exotic’ can therefore occupy the
same sites, depending on the perspective and the cultural position of the viewer. Many
of Deshpande’s women, and almost all the protagonists are caught in such interstitial,
64
conflict-ridden spaces between indigenous traditions and a liberal bourgeois
modernity, simultaneously appreciating and critiquing both.
Undoubtedly, tolerance, love, kindness and faithfulness are widely
acknowledged traits of female nature, but self assertion is not to be viewed as contrary
to these values. It is on this point that the feminist in Shashi Deshpande steps in, she
presents the woman’s picture of woman. She brings to surface the protesting and
defiant aspect of her character. These are the protagonists who consciously resolve to
fight and overcome domination which obviously leads to emotional upheaval in their
lives
In Divakaruni’s Sister of My Heart Anju and Sudha’s mothers are living
together with Pishi in the same house and the task of bringing up two daughters is not
an easy one. Nalini, Sudha’s mother is the typical traditional woman who allows
herself to drift along in life but Anju’s mother is not one to be cowed down by
circumstances. She runs the bookstore and tries to provide the best kind of upbringing
to the two girls born after their fathers had gone away from home. Bad health does not
prevent her from doing her best for the girls. She wants them to be settled before she
dies. She takes things in her stride and unlike the rest of the society does not condemn
the two daughters for the fact that they were born the day their fathers died. If
motherhood is difficult it is also satisfying, Sudha runs away from her in-laws home
because her motherhood is threatened when her mother in-law wants her to abort her
female foetus. For her child she is ready to bear any amount of emotional stress,
because motherhood compensates for all other setbacks in life. Sudha having tried
assiduously for a baby, but with no success is desperate she says,
65
I felt motherhood was my final chance at happiness. Perhaps I believed
it would give me back what wifehood had taken away. Or perhaps it is
just that desire lies at the heart of human existence. When we turn
away from one desire, we must find another to cleave to with all our
strength-or else we die. (183)
Simone de Beauvoir’s observation: “It is much more difficult, as things are,
for her to escape from her woman’s past, to attain an emotional balance that nothing
in her situation favours”, sums up a major cause of disturbance in life of women.
Echoes from the past cause emotional stress in the novel, Anju and Sudha the
heroines in this novel fight with their emotions as young girls because they both were
born the day their father’s died. Sudha could not forget the whispers she had heard
umpteen times and her mind goes over the words she has overheard that Bidhata
Purush doesn’t come for “girl babies who are so much bad luck that they cause their
father’s to die even before they are born.” (6) The taunts they have to face in school
from their classmates. The distrust Sudha feels about not being able to share with her
cousin Anju, the family secret and carry the weight of it all her life, the truth that her
father Gopal brought the catastrophe to the Chatterjee family. Pishi tries to vindicate
her of her guilt by saying, “whatever your father did it’s not your fault.” (21) But
Sudha still takes the whole burden upon herself.
Unlike the magic realism used in her first novel, Sister of My Heart (1999) is
written in the realist mode and describes the complicated relationships of a family in
Bengal. Born in the big old Calcutta house on the same tragic night that both their
fathers were mysteriously lost, Sudha and Anju are distant cousins, and are brought
up together. They are more intimate than sisters, and they share clothes, worries,
66
dreams. The Chatterjee family fortunes are at low ebb, as there are only widows at
home– the girls’ mothers, and their aunt. The novel’s forty-two chapters are set as a
sort of extended dialogue that is multi-tiered and over-layered. The chapters
themselves are alternately titled, Anju and Sudha, and contain within their folds,
techniques that are epistolary, and topography that is trans-cultural.
Love is a major cause of emotional stress in women’s lives. In Sister of My
Heart Sudha and Ashok have a strange courtship and given a chance Sudha would
marry him. But, societal pressures and her loyalty towards her mother prevent her
from succumbing to the temptations offered by love. She ends up getting married to
Ramesh, a respectable man, belonging to her own caste and class, and the problems
that follow are dealt with bravely. Sudha is unhappy with her condition but she does
not take any drastic step in life lest it should have an evil effect on her family. She
does not leave her home and come away because this could also put Anju’s marriage
at stake.
At every stage love poses a problem for Sudha. Her falling in love during the
school days deprives her of her freedom. She is not allowed to leave the house, not
even for school. And when she is marriageable age, she is of the belief that if Ashok
really loves her, if he really wants to marry her, “he’s got to make the first move.”(99)
Anju cannot comprehend Sudha’s stubbornness. Sudha who is madly in love with
Ashok has an ‘unfocussed look in her eyes’ when it actually comes to standing against
her mother’s wishes. Sudha contrasts her life to the fairy tale dreams, where she is
rescued from monsters by the prince and “when in some place impervious to logic,
she turned Ashok into the prince who has to save her from the clutches of the wicked
king.” (100). It is very difficult to understand her psyche. She wants to spend her life
with Ashok but being a fatherless child she cannot afford to take a radical step of
67
getting married against her mother’s desires. This is a major cause of emotional
distress for Sudha. She is bound by her own psyche and the Sita Savitri syndrome
which tells her that it is wrong to go against her mother’s wishes and make her
unhappy.
Nalini Ma Sudha’s mother actually finds a suitable match for Sudha in their
own caste and a respectable one, that’s when she realizes that it is too late and she
should write to Ashok. They even make plans of secretly getting married but her
realization that eloping would have an adverse effect on Anju’s lately fixed marriage
to Sunil prevents her from doing so. Sunil’s father would never let him marry a girl
whose cousin eloped with a man she met in a movie house.
Divakaruni’s heroines also face emotional constraints, for they also are unable
to express themselves. Sudha becomes strangely silent, particularly after marriage
about her mother-in-laws behavior towards her. The letters she would write to Anju
were as cheerful as ever, without any mention of her mother-in-law’s accusations, for
not being able to give her a grandson. Anju in whom Sudha always confided, wonders
I could understand her not wanting to bad-mouth her mother-in-law,
but why couldn’t she have written to me of how she felt about not
becoming pregnant? Together we would have grieved and raged and
thought up a way of coping, as we used to do as girls. (191)
The protagonists of both Deshpande and Divakaruni become even more silent
after they are married. As girls they grow up negotiating their mothers’ traditional
Indian value systems and desires with the Westernized philosophies influencing their
own generation, and afterwards compromise with their spouses. Anju in Sister of My
Heart follows her husband to America and grows stronger and more independent as
68
she undergoes acculturation processes, while Sudha, whose marriage is unhappy,
stays in India but leaves her husband to raise her child on her own, thereby drawing
cultural disapproval upon herself. The acculturation process might make a woman
more self-governing and autonomous but it does affect her emotionally and
psychologically. Divakaruni’s protagonists undergo emotional restraint because they
are positioned in the adopted country. Divakaruni constantly observes herself as an
immigrant in between Indian and American cultures, and she observes how other
women in her community, both Indian and Indian American, face the issues of culture
shock, old world and new world values, and acculturation. She illustrates the same
through her protagonists, who in the course of becoming self-determined are
emotionally shattered.
The intense pressure to conform to American ideals, and to retain ethnic
backgrounds pull immigrant children in two conflicting directions, resulting in mixed
and complex emotions. Anju and Sudha both feel that they had greater opportunities
for education, choice of studies in the U.S. but they realize that the freedom available
to women does not necessarily solve all their problems.
Anju and Sudha are not carried away by emotions as the earlier Sita Savitri women
were. Later on, when Anju feels cheated by her husband and leaves him to lead an
independent life, he regrets his infedelity and makes efforts to patch up with her. But,
Anju remains unrelenting. She does not return to seek refuge in her mother’s home,
nor does she get carried away by her husband’s desperate and persuasive efforts. She
decides to seek out some independent paths of survival and not break down. Sudha
too shows strength of character right from the beginning. She represses so many of
her desires for the sake of Anju and her mother and later on her child. She is married
to Ramesh and is forced to throttle a large number of her wishes. When she comes to
69
America and realizes that she cannot fulfil her secret desires she goes away from
Anju’s home. And finally, she decides to return to India with her daughter. She also
refuses to marry the men who are now ready to accept her along with her daughter so
that she can bring up Dayita in a convent as freely as she wishes. She thinks she will
be able to escape the constraints of a life lived among family and community.
Distancing themselves from the influence of the homeland enables both Anju and
Sudha to take the difficult decision of leading independent lives.
As women, the protagonists of both Shashi Deshpande and Chitra Banerjee
Divakaruni face similar emotional constraints. In patriarchy, men come to assume the
dominative, and women assume the dominated mode. The protagonists of both prefer
to remain silent about their condition. In the case of Divakaruni, the silence leads to
separation. The silence of the protagonists in Shashi Deshpande’s novels has negative
connotations. It stands for passivity, fear, inactivity and escapism. Sumi’s silence
results in surrender and the loss of self. We notice similarities in Divakaruni’s
protagonist Sudha, who is silent and makes compromise after compromise, when she
should have spoken and asserted herself.
In Sister of My Heart Sudha is emotionally distressed because of lapsed
communication, inarticulate love and redemptive memories. Sudha remains silent on
her love for Ashok because she knows that it would affect Anju’s marriage. She
remains mute before her mother-in-law’s inscrutable and objectionable actions. She
carries out her duties of running the household without questioning anything the way
her mother-in-law wants. She is even voiceless when she is asked to undergo various
tests because she could not get pregnant in three years of her marriage. Though she
and her mother-in-law know that the problem lies in her husband and not her.
70
To recognize Sudha’s character fully it would indeed fascinating to watch the
unveiling of the face of woman in Indian literature. Ancient Indian literature has an
esthetic vision and it goes beyond the hard reality of socio-economic facts. In ancient
Puranic literature Sita the heroine of the Great epic Ramayana and wife of Ram was
the embodied form of love devotion and purity. But she was also rebellious, and
revolted against the society's distrust of her character and entered into the earth. This
should not be misunderstood as suicide but rejection of the dogma- ridden society.
Sudha also ultimately runs away from her husband’s house because her mother-in-law
wants her to abort the female feotus.
The mothers in the Sister of My Heart face a major emotional dilemma. They
were pregnant when they get the telegram of their husbands being dead which sends
them both into early labor. They are blessed with the baby girls, which brings a lot of
responsibility for them. The responsibility of bringing them up in the finest way
possible, arranging their marriages and having them settled. They have to live with
comments from the people “For girl-babies who are so much bad luck that they cause
their fathers to die even before they are born.”(6)
The common ground of emotional stress in the protagonists of Deshpande and
Divakaruni are the ideological markers of modernism, the tension between tradition,
myth and memory on one hand and socio-politico-economic modernities on the other.
It is the love-hate relationship with the values and rites of her own society. And yet
their novels remind us that the relation between traditions and the epistemological
adventurousness of modernism can be a seamless one, where they do not so much as
rupture or overthrow the former. The fragmented interior monologues on part of their
protagonists minds are one evidence of this modernist strain on the process of
representation.
71
The clear narrative tension between tradition and modernityon one hand and
the internal, fragmented life of the mind and its fluid movements through uncharted
territories on the other constitutes one of the most interesting elements of such fictions
and a reason for emotional crisis in lives of heroines of both writers. Both Deshpande
and Divakaruni find solace in returning to traditional solutions. They do not resort to
desperate methods of escape but look for solutions within themselves.
72
WORKS CITED
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H.M. Parshley (1953; rpt.
Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1983).
Chaman Nahal. “Feminism in English Fiction: form and Variations.” Feminism and
Recent English Fiction, ed. Sushila Singh. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1991.
Deshpande, Shashi. A Matter of Time. India: Penguin, 1996.
---. “Telling Our Own Stories.” Writing From the Margin and Other Essays. India:
Viking, Penguin Books, 2003.
---. “The Dilemma of the Woman Writers.” Woman in Fiction and Fiction by Women,
Eds. C.D.Narasimhaiah and C.N.Srinath, Mysore: Dhvanyaloka.
---. A talk on The Indian Woman- Stereotypes, Images and Realities, 30 Oct. 1997,
Zurich, under the auspices of the Swiss Indian Society Zurich and the Volker
Kundermuseum der Universitat, Zurich.)
---. Indian English Literature. Basavaraj S.Naikar-2002-Literary Collection.
<http//:books.google.co.in/books?id=17PifkElopIC&pg=PA234>
Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. “Living in The US is a Complex experience.” Rediff
Chat. 23 Apr 2001.11 Jan 2004.
<http//:www.rediff.com/chat/trans/0423chit.htm>
---. Sister of My Heart. US: Doubleday, 1999.
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s
Development. USA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Joshi, P.G. Shashi Deshpande fiction: A Study in Women Empowerment and
Postcolonial Discourse. New Delhi: Prestige, 2003.
73
Kishwar, Madhu. In Search of Answers: Indian Women’s Voices from Manushi. Eds.
Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita. Manohar Publishers, 1996.
Kripalani, Krishna. Modern Indian Literature: A Panoramic Glimpse. (Nirmala
Sadananda, 1968)
Pandey, K.M. Indian Women Novelists in English. Ed A.N.Prasad. New Delhi:
Atlantic Publishers, 2001.
Quoted in Greenberg, Nina Manasan. “Defining Differences: Feminism, Race Theory,
and Identity Politics in the Academy”, Women of Color: Defining the Issues,
Hearing the Voices. (Eds) Diane Long Hoeveler and Janet K. Boles. London:
Greenwood Press, , 2001.
Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New Delhi: India Ink, 1997