the Tragedy of King Lear pdf by Suresh hosamani on Scribd
The tragic king Lear by Shakespeare
Roots and shadows by shashi deshpande
Reference:-
Dr. Shuchi Assistant professor, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, NIT Mizoram, India
Abstract: In this paper an attempt has been made to analyze the strength, courage and unconventional steps taken by the main protagonist of the novel. The novel Roots and Shadows, is about change and revolt. It presents the dilemma of a woman as a daughter, sister, beloved and wife. Akka the most dominating lady in the novel saved the Roots of the family by casting off the Shadows, through Indu. Family legacy which has been transferred by Akka to Indu is the main Root which has to be alive, and others who only want to take money and property are merely like shadows.Indu goes ahead and proves that despite of being out of the family for ten years she had a place in Akka’s mind especially in the sense of ruling and binding people together after her death. At the end she proves herself a disciplined and generous heiress. Keywords:Culture, convention, subjugation, successor, tradition. I. Introduction Ever since Indian writing in English has begun, new development in ideas and changes in writing occurred one by one. With the growth and changes all over in the globe, writing in India also took bounce. Now it is on its glorious peak, shining and introducing so many landmark pieces of work in literature. Initially stagnate subject matter brought monotony and people with increasing ratio of education and literacy demanded more striking themes to read. Gradual changes came in the writing pattern and with the inception of modernism hallmark work elevated the standard of writing. Modernism perfectly changed the thinking, observation, acceptance and behavior of people. It entered on the ground with utmost new concept in art, literature, music, and sculptor. It was a break from old traditions, conventions and rules, to religion, from early decade to the present century. In India new modern writers, including women writers, also undid themselves from the conventional writing. The fragile presentation of woman‟s condition, her status, poverty, famine in various parts of the country and many other issues were withdrawn by the new writers. On the other hand to achieve the attention of readers and place in literature modern woman writers crossed the periphery, and started writing on some specific hidden issues related to the women. ShashiDeshpande in her most succeeding and ultimate novel Roots andShadows, (1983) exhibited the journey of its rebel protagonist Indu. This novel has proved author‟s versatility and fertility of mind, as a novelist. The novel was awarded by the ThirumathiRangammal prize for the best English novel in 1982-83. This inducement gave her strength and number of novels, short-stories and other non-fictional works of Deshpande got published thereafter. Her technique of writing, pattern of unfolding fishy things and deep probing of character‟s psyche uplifted her standard among the other well-known Indian novelists. Most of her novels are having story of Joint family. It is quite difficult to get into the relational bonds in a large family, but Deshpande almost in her every novel combined the relations perfectly. Her flawless dare of narrating the life of each character made her essentially different. How the life of one character is interlinked to another, is her primary concern to delineate in the story. The crystal clear depiction of each character‟s personality connects them closely to their readers. The novel is full of unconventional issues and daring steps of Indu, the female protagonist of Roots and Shadows,who leaves her home to gain the popularity and independence. She finds herself unfit in every role and to compensate her guilt of not being successful she begins the search of her lost female identity, “the female phase which is a phase of self-discovery, a turning inward, freed from the dependency of opposition, a search for identity” (Showalter 3).She also gets married to a non-Brahmin and to hide the distance in relationship with her husband she develops illicit terms out of marriage. It is an endemic feature of Deshpande‟s heroines. Extra marital bond is their escape from the reality of wedlock. In long run it also does not provide solace to them and again the journey of escape ends from where it had begun. Similar condition comes with Indu. But her purpose and journey doesn‟t end with guilt, it ends with this thought that, “I would not tell Jayant about Naren and me. For that was not important” (Roots and Shadows 87).
The Bold Theme Of The Novel Shashi Deshpande is one of those prolific writers who followed the modern pattern of writing. Her new outlook towards society brought popularity to her credit. She dealt with the various themes in her novels like issues related to women, crisis within the families and relationships, caste, class and other social problems. Her heroines sail their life according to their will and conscious. She has presented every novel with outstanding theme but few of them are having unimagined stories like marital rape, treachery of a wife, and denial of conventions and traditions by woman to assert her „self.‟ She has presented a destructive divided „self‟ and its search as a whole. She also developed and employed a new writing technique in her novels which brought a freshness to the reader. The Psychological presentation of characters is the main hold of her novels which develops gradually in a philosophical way. Most of her novels concentrate on family relationship and its authenticity. Deep analysis of her writing reveals that beneath the traditional surface of these family relationship a hidden turmoil exists. It suddenly appears in the form of anger, jealousy, tyranny, domination, cheating and break in relationship. This tendency of her characters drags them far away from their actual families. But later, when they do not get satisfaction anywhere they try to recapture the previous position. At the end the selfdiscovery, self-introspection and self-revelation brings harmony in their life. Roots and Shadows, basically explores the hidden inner conflict of a woman who remains reticent in her few personal matters. In this novel again a woman is in the center and she is narrating her life experience within the family and out of the family. The story of the novel completely based on Indu‟s life experience, her struggle for success and problem of her marital life. Indu, a journalist,well-educated intelligent woman gets a chance to respite from her own baffled routine of life. Therefore after a long break of ten years she once again goes back to see her old conventional family, on the pretext of Akka‟s summoning. The novel has a large family with so many members including outsiders also, and Indu is one of them. She spent her childhood in this house but never felt it her own, and after her stay of eighteen years she leaves the family. She gets education, Job and husband of her own choice. Her education and independent „self‟ changes her life, vision, and way of living completely. It gives proud and jealousy both to her family members. The novel is about conventions, tradition, culture, prevalent superstitions in the society and social taboos. The subjugation of woman and domination of man is also visible in the family. The family is passing through a transitional phase also new generation is trying hard to shed old conventions and tradition gradually. They have their own beliefs, ideas, way of living, thinking, habits etc. This huge joint family presents every colour of life. The subtle interplay of jealousy and frustration completes the definition of an extended family where all type of people are living together for their own personal benefits. Reactions, despondency, altercation and retaliations reach on culmination when matter related to property and money has discussed. The reality of relations, love and respect for each other comes out clearly. Indu, then feels herself as a scapegoat in this battle of family because now she has to resolve the problem of everyone. The offshoots of culture in the novel are covering the whole family through rituals, ceremonies and other functions which are being held on massive scale. It also seems as a medium of get together with outsiders and with those family members who are staying far away. Their opinion about each other, malice and tit-bits bring charm in the novel. In this novel Deshpande portrayed the real picture of society, family and mentality of people living in it. So many sensitive issues have been discussed by her. There are rebels also, denying the authority and rules of society and culture. Past And Present Mixing Memories And Desires Indu‟s homecoming was an indirect rejection of new relation with Jayant including his domination and obsession, and with it she embraces the old forsaken relations. She feels nostalgic on coming back to home after ten years of elopement. She reminds her past in the house. The care of Atya and domination of Akka are like two paradoxical memories to her. She was only fifteen days old when AnantKaKa brought her home and since that day Atya looks after her as a mother. Indu a motherless child lost her mother during her birth. And her father never gave serious attention to anyone after that. Indu‟s father had a love marriage which was completely out of convention her mother was a non-Brahmin and no one preferred her in the family. But Atya‟s revulsion comes out one day and she says to Indu that she always wanted her mother to be alive for her father at least, “she could have made him happy look at him now! Ever since he lost her, he‟s been a wanderer. And with his brains, he could have gone far” (Roots and Shadows 43).It was Akka‟s domination and rude behavior which propelled Indu to leave the home. She possessed the power in her brother‟s home and ruled over the family. Indu addressedAkka with so many metaphors like, “ruthless, dominating, bigoted and inconsiderate” (22). Indu in the presence of Akka could not assert herself, as she used to restrict her. Indu even cannot talk to boys, it was her order. Akka‟shypocrisy and fake traditional woman‟s role made Indu peevish. She wanted to do something in her life and Akka puzzled her by creating many hindrances in her way.
But in her homecoming episode both Akka and Indu are quiet changed. Akka on her death bed wants to see Indu not alone but with Jayant. When Indu reaches to see Akka she asks, “Why hasn‟t your husband come? Why didn‟t you bring him with you?” (199) it was surprising for Indu that Akka acknowledged his existence after three years of her marriage. At this moment Indu wanted to argue with Akka but it was Akka who again hushed up Indu, leaves the talk incomplete and assured her that, “we will talk of it tomorrow if you want.” (20) For Indu it was injustice she wants to make things clear. Perhaps she wants to tell the truth of her decision of leaving the family or perhaps she wants to know Akka‟s feelings for Jayant and herself. It was jayant who gave future security to Indu. Indu looks a happy possibility in Jayant and gets married to him. The affinity comes in this new bonding. But Akka did not please with this marriage because Jayant was a non-brahmin boy. Culture, religion, tradition and family taboos lies in the breath of people in India, therefore, in Akka‟s sense Indu‟sintercaste marriage was a kind of disrespect to the family. Akka a conventional, superstitious woman observes that, “such marriages never work. Different caste, different languages…. It‟s all right for a while. Then they realize” (RS 68). Akka led her life with such out dated conventional theories. She was callous and very particular about caste. Caste issue is sensitive for everyone, and Deshpande in her every novel deals with it. Akka lived with such thoughts and applied it on everyone. Caste, at times seems deciding one‟s fate, which is quite ridiculous and it is a hatefull creation of orthodoxy. In Akka‟s sense if anyone goes against the system is not allowed to come back to mingle up with the family. Akka has maintained the full rigidity against Indu and her father. Akka made herself tough and rigid with this thinking. During her illness she denied to get admitted in the hospital she said, “God knows what caste the nurses are. Or the doctors. I couldn‟t drink a drop of water there” (21). She had totally been obsessed by caste. This rigidity offers death to her. Indu hates her way of judging people by caste. But Atya has different vision about Akka. She narrates Akka‟s life history to Indu that she was only twelve when she got married to a man of thirty years and as a child she had no meaning of marriage. Her ruthless mother– in–law kept torturing her for long. Once she tried to run away from there but could not succeed. Her mother-in-law punished her, locked her up in a room to starve and later sent her to her husband‟s room. As a child she doesn‟t have the meaning of such marriage and she cried out, “lock me up again, lock me up” (70).She had no liberty, no mean of entertainment. Social taboos are only made for woman not for man; she has to tolerate everything which infuriates Indu. Every woman has fear of expulsion and desertion if she breaks the law. But Indu doesn‟t care about it she thinks that she will never let Jayant know about it because now: I had learnt to reveal to Jayant nothing but what he wanted to see, to say to him nothing but what he wanted to hear. I hid my responses and emotions as if they were bits of garbage (RS38). Through Akka and Atya‟s tragedy Deshpande is dragging the attention of everyone towards, child marriage the prevalent evil in society. Such evil practice was very popular in the society earlier. Akka‟s resentment completely comes out after her mother–in–law‟s death, and paralytic stroke of her husband gives her chance to take her revenge. Akka‟s husband also used to keep a mistresses. Akka was childless so after fifteen and twenty years of marriage he took up with a woman that was unbearable to her. Her frustration appears out completely during her husband‟s unmovable condition. She shows wrath to him and crushes his desire to see the woman to whom he loved very much. She suddenly transforms herself and sheds the role of merging, agonizing wife. And one day she tells him, “listen to me. It‟s my turn now. I‟ve listened to you long enough she came here twice. She wanted to see you. She cried and begged to be allowed to see you just for a short while. I threw her out. You‟ll never see her again” (RS 71). This change gives power of domination to Akka. Akka did not merge herself to the identity of fragile female. She overpowered everyone but in Atya‟s sense she was generous also, otherwise it was hard to stay in the old house as a widow. She was ray of hope to everyone with her wealth security. She had a great contribution in running the family and maintaining the old house. In true sense she was the pillar of the house. Atya is also a victim of traditional and conventional laws. Through Atya, Deshpande succeds in presenting an ugly glimpse of widows ranking in the society. Indu narrates that when Atya comes as a widow in the old house Kaka resists, “the idea of the becoming a shaven widow” (118). But with this change and break from convention Atya had lost her status, “she was now a second class citizen in the kingdom of widows. The orthodox would not eat food cooked by her” (118). Dilemma Between Tradition And Selfhood In such a huge traditional family, Indu reminds, in her childhood once she had tried to change the serving method of food purposely and, “The result had been catastrophic” (14). Old traditions and conventions are not allowed to be changed. In the same house Indu flourished her love with her distant cousin Naren. Indu discloses that she hates womanhood and to defy this she always has gone against convention. From her first menstrual cycle she started receiving warnings that, “you‟re a woman now, you can have babies yourself” (79). Indu feels like living in imprisonment for those four days and everyone treats her like an outcaste. She even doesn‟t have right to “touch anyone or anything,” (79) because she is unclean. Simone De Beauvior opines:
For an adolescent girl, her first menstruation reveals this meaning and her feeling of shame appear. If they were already present, and they are strengthened and exaggerated from this time on (335). Indu doesn‟t want to compromise with tradition and culture on the basis of her identity as a female. She shed the role performed by her Kaki, Atya, Mini, Akka and other female in the family. She wanted to show her extra-ordinary potential. She aggressively says to Naren that, “I resented my womanhood because it closed so many doors to me” (79). She also leaves the Job of a journalist in a magazine because she got fed up of writing only about women. Deshpande through Indu perhaps wants to show her own resentment of being labeled as a feminist writer. Indu did not want to write about women‟s conditions, problems, pity and their position as a subordinate in the society. So she shifts from one work place to another and tells to Naren: Women, women, women. . . . I got sick of it. There was nothing else. It was a kind of narcissm. And as if we had locked ourself in a cage and thrown away the key. I couldn‟t go on (RS78). Indu‟s marriage with Jayant was her success. But on the other moment she realized her trap that it‟s not easy to live within marriage. Her marriage suppresses her „self‟ completely. She gradually gives up the „I‟ and submitted herself to Jayant. She explores that Jayant never compelled her to submit but it was she who wanted to show everyone her marriage as a success. She surrendered to him, “step by step, I realize now, that it was not for love, as I had been telling myself, but because I did not want conflict” (RS 159). The sense of lost identity fills her with despise againstJayant. She, at this moment undergoes through a paradoxical phase. This ambivalent attitude towards Jayant takes place in her mind. She hates Jayant but on the other hand cannot live without him. Just after their marriage like every Indian womanIndu also submits herself completely, and her sole motif used to be to please Jayant. It was Jayant who psychologically obsessed her. But materially he was not forcing her to do things according to him. It was her deliberate act because, “It‟s the way I want it to be” (49). Later she asks herself that why she is making all these efforts to please him? Then she realizes that she is behaving like those traditional women of her family to whom she used to see with disgust. In her sense their act of worshiping Tulsi plant for husband‟s long life was ridiculous. And she also has started molding herself in the line of a traditional wife who only wants to entertain her husband. She wonders, “have I become fluid, with no shape, no form of my own” (49).Jayant in her need and passionate hours of love did not give her space. He loves her according to his desire, need and time. In this way she starts repressing her sexual needs, and her husband, “effectively desexualizes Indu in refusing to accept her sexual personality and indirectly moulds her identity according to his perceptions” (Sree 32). She feels as if Jayant has destroyed her dreams of happy secure marital life. Jayant never tried to understand her feelings. Jayant‟s such vile behavior develops feeling of inertia in Indu. Rejection Of Conventions Indu can be said one of bold heroines of Deshpande‟s novels. Just to avoid her suffering and struggle she comes to find out the answers of her loneliness to old house. Here she meets to her childhood friend Naren. Naren is the grandson of old uncle and lived his life as an outsider in the family. He is an orphan. Indu meets him after a long break. A very irregular, indisciplined and careless man Naren again pleases her. Indu loves to stay in Naren‟s company. She shares her dissatisfaction in marital life and an image of an unsuccessful writer with him. Naren an educated boy understands her, argues with her and later reveals some truth of life to her. Naren teaches her the lesson of detachment also. Even in her discussions with old uncle she finds the same air of detachment. She understands that involvement brings suffering and humiliation which is called, “human predicament” (109). He also tells her that life will be more miserable in the crises of miseries, so ups and downs in life are like its part. Old uncle and Naren both worked as a healer to Indu. Indu finds her inner fulfillment in Naren‟s company. She reveals to Naren that outwardly she is successful but from inside she is totally alone, rejected, drab and disturbed. Naren is her hope; therefore twice she renders herself to Naren. Physical love with Naren gives her pleasure and satisfaction.It is surprising that Indu has no guilt of what she has done. After every act she becomes normal and feels that it is nothing like any crime. She thinks that she will never disclose about her affair to Jayant. Indu‟s character shows her fearlessness and assertion of desires: This sheds a brilliant light on Indu‟s 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 Indu‟s exploration into herself but it also moves beyond the boundaries of feminism into a perception of the very predicament of human existence (Rama Moorthy 124). Deshpande presents a wide chasm between love, sex and morality. Indu‟s act in her sense is not bad because she has suffered the pain of being lonely. She knowingly takes Naren‟s help in soothing her and displays her desire to satiate. In this personal matter, her physical union with Naren, she keeps conventions and culture aside. Because she thinks that her own satisfaction is necessary to be completed: Shashi Deshpande treads a radical ground to seek a justification of man and woman relationship in the context of Psycho biological needs. Male companionship is an inevitable need of the life of a woman. Indu‟s
failure to resist her urges and to seek their culmination in the company of Naren, is her ultimate realization of the real womanhood (Agarwal 64). She defies the conventional role of a dutiful wife and behaves like an opportunist, and works according to the demand of time. Through Indu, Deshpande displays the most courageous and reactionary woman. She uses her right of exhibiting her needs and demands, and Naren as a medium for it. Indu and Naren are like counterparts. Naren tells about the strange and rude behavior of family members towards him. He was expelled by everyone, since than he left staying with them. It was as if I have done any crime, he says. But later he thought, “I just wanted to live the way I felt like, the way I desired” (114). Since then Naren is living an irregular life, or enjoying instability and uncertainty of living but he leads his life as he desires. Naren himself is a rebel he is denying all the conventions, morality, virtue and ethics. He is also not a free flowing man. He is arrogant and rigid. He doesn‟t go to attend Akka‟s funeral because Akka hates her, he tells to Indu, “if I had gone to the funeral, I wouldn‟t have been surprised if she had got up and yelled at me. I don‟t want you here, you ippy!” (24).Indu is an opportunist and Naren is a freedom lover. Indu hates the way people impediment thegrowth of a girl child, as a result she starts undermining herself and accepts her role as everybody‟s assistant in the family. Therefore, Indu wants to break the system of abusing girl child.Indu states that how she had been preached by everyone: 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, for a female to live and survive (RS 158). This stereotyping of a girl child is prevalent in the society. She is being taught that she is made for household work, and their world is limited. Indu gets deeply hurt when she finds same feelings and mantality in Jayant. Deshpande through Indu, “has raised 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 109-10). Akka a traditional and conventional woman never let anyone to go out of culture. Indu did not tolerate Akka‟s domination. But Akka in her senses leaves all her property for Indu. It was shocking for everyone. Revulsion and objection of new generation infuriates Indu. She can see the unduly hate for her in the eyes of Sumant, who never accepted Indu as a family member. Each member has different opinion about Akka‟s decision. But everybody wants security and advantage in any case. Sunil her another cousin controls himself hardly, and burst out, “I think it‟s damned unfair. Why should all of Akka‟s money go to Indu? She has no right at all, if you ask me. She isn‟t part of the family now, is she?” (93) This weird property matter reveals every hidden face to Indu. Everyone, especially women of the family to win the favour tried to please the new heiress. For Indu it was only Naren who was far away from this family politics, therefore, she surrenders to him. On the contrary Mini, her cousin, accepts marriage as a blessing. She doesn‟t have any problem with the boy, she accepts the truth that, “husband is a sheltering tree,” (TLS 32) and she starts nourishing it. She feels that her guilt of taking birth as a girl will make her free by accepting this marriage. Because, she inculcated this belief in her mind that she is like a burden to her parents. Though the match is not suitable in the sense of other people but for Mini and her parents it is more than their expectations. It‟s the way to redeem one‟s sin of being girl. In VirndaNabar‟s words, “the girl as an alien in her father‟s home, it is man-made laws and social strictures that make her so. Right from birth, a girl is made to feel like a bird of passage in her father‟s home” (160). Mini accepts the fate like Sunanda, Narmada, her mother, Akka and other widows in the family. Deshpande has given the glimpse of rural and urban attitude. Sumitra loves to exaggerate things and to show herself city woman speaks English. Relative who come from city have no match with rural people of old house. But when property matter opens they all have the same voice. Indu‟s deep research gives her strength to become authoritative. She truly wants to act like Akka, and it was an opportunity to assert the power. Indu decides that she will dominate more than Akka which wouldn‟t depend on her liking and disliking. Now she decides to play the game of good and worst, and thinks that only deserving will get permission to stay in her kingdom. Till now everyone had given clue to Indu that what they think about others so she decided few things to change. She wanted to arrange a better match for Mini, she wanted to stay in the old house so that she can start writing again, she wanted to buy the house and at last she wanted to provide help to Vithal and to let the weak go out of the house, like SunandaAtya. But all these plans of Indu are out of others happiness. Indu, at last diverts herself from all these plans, and pleases everyone. She also puts the proposal of Mini and Naren‟s marriage to avoid the payment of dowry. Naren in Indu‟s view is well educated man who has sense of understanding things. But other thinks that he has neither money nor property and his education has no value. Everyone rejects him and speak against Indu: Here the novelist exposes the hypocrisy and double standards prevalent in society. The easily available Naren is not considered a suitable match for their daughter; instead they pay a handsome dowry for one who has nothing but his family‟s social status (Sharma 25).
Indu realizes that nothing will change here. Things are standstill since her childhood, and the mentality of people is also same. Only she moved from this place. But in other‟s life no novelty or change came, the same emptiness and boredom they all are facing. It was only Atya, Kaka and old uncle who after the death of Akka, were trying to keep the fabric of family alive. Mini‟s father loves Naren but her mother never liked him. And, due to her disliking for Naren Kaka did not accept his proposal. Naren‟s sudden death by drowning shatters Indu, she was attached to him, so on seeing his dead body she feels lonely without him. All the family members were claiming for his body but Indu with listless face finds that, “it was the sense of utter loneliness of the human spirit that overwhelmed me as I saw Naren lying there detached, remote and far removed from us and all our emotions” (RS 176). Perhaps Naren wanted to teach her the lesson of self-control. And she perfectly learnt it. Naren gives her the secret of life that life and death has an unending cycle, one death replaces by another life. Indu feels, “I was watching life itself . . . . endless, limitless, formless and full of grace” (184). Naren fills her with positivity. She at last decides the deal, settles the property matter and agrees on the matter of selling old house to Shankarappa. For Kaka‟s relief she keeps Akka‟s promise alive and tells him to fix up the date of Mini‟s marriage and she‟ll pay for it. The old house gets its end after housing four generation, watching many deaths, crying and enjoying people together. It also dies with so many memories. Shankarappa declares to build a hotel on it. II. Conclusion With the settlement of every affair, the fact of reconciliation enters in Indu‟s mind. She realizes that Jayant is her need and she is incomplete without him. This long break from Jayant provides a chance to her to restart life with him. She feels that now she recognizes her inner self. Her rebirth and realization takes place with the demolition of old house. She feels that she is living under the haziness of illusion but somehow she dispels it and now wants to go back to Jayant. Her sudden changed decision related to, pending property matter, and her own life gives her strength to solve it. She decides to go home, “yes home. The one I lived in with Jayant. That was my own home,” (186) her choice of safe side shows the sharpness of her mind. But she decides that few things she‟ll keep secret in her no man‟s land. She will never reveal whatever happened between Naren and her. One thing she would tell him that, “I was resigning from my job,” (186) this liberal and independent announcement of Indu declares her own desire of what she wants: The meek, docile and humble Indu of the early days finally emerges as a bold, challenging, conscious and rebellious woman. She resigns her job, thus defying male authority, hierarchy and the irony of a woman‟s masked existence (Swain 95). Indu weaves the fabric of her own intricate relationship with Jayant, contemplates and goes back with the positive renewal of life. The whole things in the novel transform one by one. Akka renders her legacy to Indu and with Indu everything changes. Her life undergoes through a transitional phase, but she buries the memories of Naren and their past. This change though snatches Naren from her but it also made her present better. Her self-discovery, self-recognition and revived relationship with Jayant gives her safety and protection for future. Indu after this self-discovery goes back to the life as its successor. Dr. Shuchi Assistant professor, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, NIT Mizoram, India
Roots and shadows by shashi deshpande pdf by Suresh hosamani on Scribd
On widowhood by pandith ramabai ,{ the high cast Hindu women}
The High Caste Hindu Woman by Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati Pandita Ramabai
Source://:-Author(s): Barbara Celarent
Source: American Journal of Sociology
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American Journal of Sociology
354
the entrance examinations to the E´ cole Normale Supe´rieure—Ramabai
was given the honorific titles by which she has since been known. Pandita
(roughly, “one greatly learned in Sanskrit and religious texts”) was not
enough, so her astounded admirers added Sarasvati (goddess of learning).
A series of controversial life decisions—her cross-caste marriage, her trip
to England, her conversion to Christianity, her evangelical witness—even�tually cost her her great reputation, at least in India. Yet by the late 20th
century, feminists, Indian nationalists, Anglo-Catholics, and evangelicals
would all be claiming her as a shining predecessor. Only the metropolitan
social scientists remained unaware of this extraordinary woman.
During her brief career as a social analyst, Ramabai wrote two works
that command our attention. The first, The High Caste Hindu Woman
(HCHW), presented Indian society to Americans via an analytic indict�ment of the place of women in traditional upper-caste India. Impassioned
and critical, the book yet maintained both Indian national pride and a
profound sympathy for the Hindu culture that Ramabai would never lose.
Reversing the exchange, Ramabai’s second book, Conditions of Life in
the United States (CLUS), presented American society to an educated
Indian (Marathi-speaking) audience. A synthetic work, it can be read
beside the other great foreign analyses of 19th-century America: Frances
Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), Harriet Marti�neau’s Society in America (1837), Tocqueville’s Democracy in America
(1840), and Bryce’s American Commonwealth (1888). Unlike them, it
brings a nonmetropolitan vision to its task.
The life that left us these books is the stuff dreams are made of. Ramabai
was born April 23, 1858, at her father’s ashram. Anant Shastri Dongre
was a learned Chitpavan Brahman who, although a rigidly orthodox
Hindu, conceived the forbidden idea of teaching his wife Sanskrit, the
sacred language. This dream failed with his first wife, who herself opposed
it. But after she died, another Brahman saw Anant Shastri bathing at a
sacred site one day and offered Shastri (then about 40) his nine-year-old
daughter as a wife. (The story is told in HCHW, without naming names.)
The girl fell in with her new husband’s linguistic plans and eventually
became herself a master Sanskritist. When public outcry about the lan�guage instruction grew annoying, Anant Shastri moved his new family
to a site he built deep in the forested mountains. Here he became a well�known holy man, and his ashram became a school.
And here Ramabai was born. Soon, however, her father’s money ran
out, and the family went on permanent pilgrimage. Moving constantly,
they read the Puranas in public (receiving in return the alms on which
they lived), visited the sacred sites, and gave away many of the alms they
received. Through all this, Ramabai’s mother taught her Sanskrit, the
Puranas, the Gita, and the commentaries. By 15, Ramabai was herself a
puranika, intoning the sacred texts for a living (indeed, she could recite
the 18,000 lines of the Bhagavata Purana from memory). Having wan�dered the whole of the subcontinent, she could speak Marathi, Kannada,�
and Hindi. It was now a time of famine, however, and when Ramabai
was in her late teens, her father, then mother, then elder sister all suc�cumbed. She and her brother wandered another two years, then came to
Calcutta, where the girl became a sensation for her learning, receiving
the titles of Pandita and Sarasvati from the most learned Indian and
Western scholars of the city.
In Calcutta Ramabai began her disillusionment with Hinduism as then
practiced, becoming a Brahmo (a monotheistic sect). She left Purana re�citing and became a popular lecturer, speaking largely on women’s topics.
Here, as throughout her career, audiences found irresistible the combi�nation of her astounding learning, her broad culture, her great beauty,
and her quiet charisma. In this period, she also began reading the for�bidden books—the Upanishads, the Vedantas, and ultimately the Vedas
themselves. After two years, Ramabai’s brother died of cholera. Surprising
her progressive countrymen in Maharashtra (who were planning to bring
her back to western India and fund her work), she quickly married a
long-standing suitor, who was a pleader in the Indian courts. It was a
forbidden marriage, for Bepin Behari Das Medhavi was a Kayastha (al�though Ramabai nearly always referred to him as a Sudra, which may
simply have shown her ignorance of all caste distinction beneath her own
level). The marriage caused a furor, followed by tragedy when Ramabai’s
husband died, leaving her with an infant daughter.
Ramabai then went to Poona, where she caused another furor by ad�vocating the education of women (especially of women doctors) and found�ing an organization for the advancement of women. After about a year,
she went to England to study medicine, planning to support herself as a
lecturer in Sanskrit during her studies. She first stayed with the Anglo�Catholic Sisters of St. Mary the Virgin, whose missionary community she
had known in India. Within months of her arrival, the friend who had
accompanied her committed suicide (another parallel with Durkheim,
whose close friend Victor Hommay committed suicide when Durkheim
was 28). Ramabai’s baptism as a Christian—never fully explained—came
a month later. About this time, too, deafness put an end to her dreams
of becoming a physician.
The Sisters of St. Mary proved too rigid for Ramabai, and she moved
on to Cheltenham Ladies’ College, again supporting herself in part by
teaching Sanskrit. After two years of being mentored by Cheltenham’s
remarkable Dorothea Beale, she went to the United States to attend a
countrywoman’s graduation from the Woman’s Medical College of Phil�adelphia. Caught up in the active world of late 19th-century American
feminism, she conceived the idea of creating a school for Hindu widows
(the child-marriage system guaranteed that there were many of these). In
her new language of English, she quickly wrote The High Caste Hindu
Woman as a fund-raising tract. She traveled thousands of miles around
the United States, lecturing and organizing “Ramabai Circles,” which
would contribute the money necessary for her planned school. Also during�
American Journal of Sociology
356
these American years, she took extensive notes, and on her return to India
(via Japan and China) she completed these as texts and assembled them
into the Marathi book Conditions of Life in the United States.
Thus by age 32, Pandita Ramabai had circumnavigated the globe,
raised metropolitan funding for a feminist social reform in her native
land, converted to a new religion (but only on her own terms), and written
two insightful pieces of social analysis. The rest of her career—founding
and managing her schools, becoming an evangelical Christian (and
thereby losing even more of her Indian supporters), translating the Bible
from original languages into Marathi (and in the process producing the
first Marathi textbooks for both Greek and Hebrew), and raising her
daughter—these things must be set aside here. We are concerned only
with her social analysis. But there is one last tragic parallel to Durkheim.
Like her French peer, Ramabai suffered the loss of a beloved child. Her
daughter Manoramabai died in 1921 at age 40. Ramabai followed, nine
months later.
Ramabai’s two major pieces of social commentary are yoked by an
eager desire to translate across cultural boundaries. In both works, the
foundation of that translation is women’s experience. Ramabai takes it
for granted that certain aspects of female experience—in particular moth�ering and being mothered—are universal to all types and kinds of people.
This focus on maternalism of course reflected the young widow’s own
life. In England she first lived in the all-female world of the sisters at
Wantage. Although Ramabai often disagreed violently with her spiritual
advisor Sister Geraldine, she was filled with respect and love for the much
older nun. At Cheltenham, she came under the spell of the forceful, devout,
but more free-thinking Beale, and in Philadelphia under the equally char�ismatic power of Dr. Rachel Bodley of the Woman’s Medical College of
Philadelphia. And behind all of these was her own beloved mother Laksh�mibai, who had died less than a decade before.
It is little wonder then that in places both works read like tracts from
the militant world of late 19th-century American maternalism, accepting
as given the notions that women are more moral than men, that women
are thereby society’s instructors in morality, and that the advent of women
to any workplace or social setting inevitably improves its social order and
harmony. Her accounts of the advances of women in education, in em�ployment, and in such social movements as the Women’s Christian Tem�perance Union all suffer from this somewhat one-sided position. But when
her empirical self dominates, Ramabai is plain enough about the failings
of women that complement this optimistic view of maternalism. In her
eyes, many American women are preoccupied with fashion that has no
meaning, with clothing and food that require the massacre of animals,
with small matters and trivial thoughts. Many of them, like their male
counterparts, participate in ethnic and racial hatreds that Ramabai finds
repugnant. As for the Hindu women, many of them have neither the�
education nor the emotional depth to take on mothering at the early stage
of life when it is forced on them.
But all the same, it is an audience of women and, more particularly,
reform-minded women that Ramabai takes for granted. Women’s expe�rience is the touchstone of her writing, and she is, for Indian women at
least, the figure who first systematized the feminist case against “tradi�tional” Hindu institutions. What made her difficult for later feminists to
swallow was her explicit Christian commitment, which increased with
time and which, despite her own efforts to contain it, would at times
become overbearingly evangelical. Yet while Ramabai remained an active
administrator and social reformer to her death, she turned increasingly
inward, becoming in her later years a holy person like her father: focused
on prayer and meditation and on the task of conceiving the meanings of
the Bible in three different languages.
The complex inward self of the later Ramabai is not evident in these
early works, however. Here feminism forms the universal experience that
can sustain translation between radically different cultures. For Ramabai
remained a Hindu, despite her conversion. Filling the pages of CLUS,
for example, are long celebrations of the beauty of nature and the graces
of the plant and animal environment. The writing is laced with Indian
proverbs. As a denizen of the tropics, Ramabai found snow unutterably
beautiful, but at the same time dangerous and frightening. Accustomed
to the calm waters of the Indian Ocean, she was overwhelmed and en�ergized by the fierce weather of the North Atlantic. These passages in
CLUS on the natural beauties of America are among the best in the book.
No other major social commentator on the United States took the
country’s physical beauty so seriously.
Also Indian is Ramabai’s implicit social theory. The most obvious ex�ample is her sympathetic treatment of the “Indians” of America, whom
she regards as analogous to the Indians of the subcontinent precisely
because the expanding Europeans defined them as related peoples. The
American “Indians” are for her an object lesson for the subcontinent, a
fate to be avoided. But there is a broader nonmetropolitan aspect to her
social theory. Throughout CLUS, she uses the word jati—typically ren�dered in English by “caste”—to mean “kind.” Racial bigotry is thus (lit�erally) kind-bigotry. Women are a kind. The black ex-slaves are a kind.
Each immigrant group forms a kind. To be sure, there are “kinds” that
later social critics would take seriously which Ramabai does not. Class
is one. She traveled first-class on the North Atlantic passage and makes
only a mild apology about getting preferred treatment when the boat ran
aground. Or again, she remarks in HCHW that high-caste women “have
inherited from their father to a certain degree, quickness of perception
and intelligence” (p. 132). Thus she accepts certain differences without
critique, although in the main her position is that “kind”-ness is not a
legitimate rationale for the differential treatment of human beings. Or
indeed of animals: her sympathy for the freezing herds out on the blizzard-�
354
the entrance examinations to the E´ cole Normale Supe´rieure—Ramabai
was given the honorific titles by which she has since been known. Pandita
(roughly, “one greatly learned in Sanskrit and religious texts”) was not
enough, so her astounded admirers added Sarasvati (goddess of learning).
A series of controversial life decisions—her cross-caste marriage, her trip
to England, her conversion to Christianity, her evangelical witness—even�tually cost her her great reputation, at least in India. Yet by the late 20th
century, feminists, Indian nationalists, Anglo-Catholics, and evangelicals
would all be claiming her as a shining predecessor. Only the metropolitan
social scientists remained unaware of this extraordinary woman.
During her brief career as a social analyst, Ramabai wrote two works
that command our attention. The first, The High Caste Hindu Woman
(HCHW), presented Indian society to Americans via an analytic indict�ment of the place of women in traditional upper-caste India. Impassioned
and critical, the book yet maintained both Indian national pride and a
profound sympathy for the Hindu culture that Ramabai would never lose.
Reversing the exchange, Ramabai’s second book, Conditions of Life in
the United States (CLUS), presented American society to an educated
Indian (Marathi-speaking) audience. A synthetic work, it can be read
beside the other great foreign analyses of 19th-century America: Frances
Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), Harriet Marti�neau’s Society in America (1837), Tocqueville’s Democracy in America
(1840), and Bryce’s American Commonwealth (1888). Unlike them, it
brings a nonmetropolitan vision to its task.
The life that left us these books is the stuff dreams are made of. Ramabai
was born April 23, 1858, at her father’s ashram. Anant Shastri Dongre
was a learned Chitpavan Brahman who, although a rigidly orthodox
Hindu, conceived the forbidden idea of teaching his wife Sanskrit, the
sacred language. This dream failed with his first wife, who herself opposed
it. But after she died, another Brahman saw Anant Shastri bathing at a
sacred site one day and offered Shastri (then about 40) his nine-year-old
daughter as a wife. (The story is told in HCHW, without naming names.)
The girl fell in with her new husband’s linguistic plans and eventually
became herself a master Sanskritist. When public outcry about the lan�guage instruction grew annoying, Anant Shastri moved his new family
to a site he built deep in the forested mountains. Here he became a well�known holy man, and his ashram became a school.
And here Ramabai was born. Soon, however, her father’s money ran
out, and the family went on permanent pilgrimage. Moving constantly,
they read the Puranas in public (receiving in return the alms on which
they lived), visited the sacred sites, and gave away many of the alms they
received. Through all this, Ramabai’s mother taught her Sanskrit, the
Puranas, the Gita, and the commentaries. By 15, Ramabai was herself a
puranika, intoning the sacred texts for a living (indeed, she could recite
the 18,000 lines of the Bhagavata Purana from memory). Having wan�dered the whole of the subcontinent, she could speak Marathi, Kannada,�
and Hindi. It was now a time of famine, however, and when Ramabai
was in her late teens, her father, then mother, then elder sister all suc�cumbed. She and her brother wandered another two years, then came to
Calcutta, where the girl became a sensation for her learning, receiving
the titles of Pandita and Sarasvati from the most learned Indian and
Western scholars of the city.
In Calcutta Ramabai began her disillusionment with Hinduism as then
practiced, becoming a Brahmo (a monotheistic sect). She left Purana re�citing and became a popular lecturer, speaking largely on women’s topics.
Here, as throughout her career, audiences found irresistible the combi�nation of her astounding learning, her broad culture, her great beauty,
and her quiet charisma. In this period, she also began reading the for�bidden books—the Upanishads, the Vedantas, and ultimately the Vedas
themselves. After two years, Ramabai’s brother died of cholera. Surprising
her progressive countrymen in Maharashtra (who were planning to bring
her back to western India and fund her work), she quickly married a
long-standing suitor, who was a pleader in the Indian courts. It was a
forbidden marriage, for Bepin Behari Das Medhavi was a Kayastha (al�though Ramabai nearly always referred to him as a Sudra, which may
simply have shown her ignorance of all caste distinction beneath her own
level). The marriage caused a furor, followed by tragedy when Ramabai’s
husband died, leaving her with an infant daughter.
Ramabai then went to Poona, where she caused another furor by ad�vocating the education of women (especially of women doctors) and found�ing an organization for the advancement of women. After about a year,
she went to England to study medicine, planning to support herself as a
lecturer in Sanskrit during her studies. She first stayed with the Anglo�Catholic Sisters of St. Mary the Virgin, whose missionary community she
had known in India. Within months of her arrival, the friend who had
accompanied her committed suicide (another parallel with Durkheim,
whose close friend Victor Hommay committed suicide when Durkheim
was 28). Ramabai’s baptism as a Christian—never fully explained—came
a month later. About this time, too, deafness put an end to her dreams
of becoming a physician.
The Sisters of St. Mary proved too rigid for Ramabai, and she moved
on to Cheltenham Ladies’ College, again supporting herself in part by
teaching Sanskrit. After two years of being mentored by Cheltenham’s
remarkable Dorothea Beale, she went to the United States to attend a
countrywoman’s graduation from the Woman’s Medical College of Phil�adelphia. Caught up in the active world of late 19th-century American
feminism, she conceived the idea of creating a school for Hindu widows
(the child-marriage system guaranteed that there were many of these). In
her new language of English, she quickly wrote The High Caste Hindu
Woman as a fund-raising tract. She traveled thousands of miles around
the United States, lecturing and organizing “Ramabai Circles,” which
would contribute the money necessary for her planned school. Also during�
American Journal of Sociology
356
these American years, she took extensive notes, and on her return to India
(via Japan and China) she completed these as texts and assembled them
into the Marathi book Conditions of Life in the United States.
Thus by age 32, Pandita Ramabai had circumnavigated the globe,
raised metropolitan funding for a feminist social reform in her native
land, converted to a new religion (but only on her own terms), and written
two insightful pieces of social analysis. The rest of her career—founding
and managing her schools, becoming an evangelical Christian (and
thereby losing even more of her Indian supporters), translating the Bible
from original languages into Marathi (and in the process producing the
first Marathi textbooks for both Greek and Hebrew), and raising her
daughter—these things must be set aside here. We are concerned only
with her social analysis. But there is one last tragic parallel to Durkheim.
Like her French peer, Ramabai suffered the loss of a beloved child. Her
daughter Manoramabai died in 1921 at age 40. Ramabai followed, nine
months later.
Ramabai’s two major pieces of social commentary are yoked by an
eager desire to translate across cultural boundaries. In both works, the
foundation of that translation is women’s experience. Ramabai takes it
for granted that certain aspects of female experience—in particular moth�ering and being mothered—are universal to all types and kinds of people.
This focus on maternalism of course reflected the young widow’s own
life. In England she first lived in the all-female world of the sisters at
Wantage. Although Ramabai often disagreed violently with her spiritual
advisor Sister Geraldine, she was filled with respect and love for the much
older nun. At Cheltenham, she came under the spell of the forceful, devout,
but more free-thinking Beale, and in Philadelphia under the equally char�ismatic power of Dr. Rachel Bodley of the Woman’s Medical College of
Philadelphia. And behind all of these was her own beloved mother Laksh�mibai, who had died less than a decade before.
It is little wonder then that in places both works read like tracts from
the militant world of late 19th-century American maternalism, accepting
as given the notions that women are more moral than men, that women
are thereby society’s instructors in morality, and that the advent of women
to any workplace or social setting inevitably improves its social order and
harmony. Her accounts of the advances of women in education, in em�ployment, and in such social movements as the Women’s Christian Tem�perance Union all suffer from this somewhat one-sided position. But when
her empirical self dominates, Ramabai is plain enough about the failings
of women that complement this optimistic view of maternalism. In her
eyes, many American women are preoccupied with fashion that has no
meaning, with clothing and food that require the massacre of animals,
with small matters and trivial thoughts. Many of them, like their male
counterparts, participate in ethnic and racial hatreds that Ramabai finds
repugnant. As for the Hindu women, many of them have neither the�
education nor the emotional depth to take on mothering at the early stage
of life when it is forced on them.
But all the same, it is an audience of women and, more particularly,
reform-minded women that Ramabai takes for granted. Women’s expe�rience is the touchstone of her writing, and she is, for Indian women at
least, the figure who first systematized the feminist case against “tradi�tional” Hindu institutions. What made her difficult for later feminists to
swallow was her explicit Christian commitment, which increased with
time and which, despite her own efforts to contain it, would at times
become overbearingly evangelical. Yet while Ramabai remained an active
administrator and social reformer to her death, she turned increasingly
inward, becoming in her later years a holy person like her father: focused
on prayer and meditation and on the task of conceiving the meanings of
the Bible in three different languages.
The complex inward self of the later Ramabai is not evident in these
early works, however. Here feminism forms the universal experience that
can sustain translation between radically different cultures. For Ramabai
remained a Hindu, despite her conversion. Filling the pages of CLUS,
for example, are long celebrations of the beauty of nature and the graces
of the plant and animal environment. The writing is laced with Indian
proverbs. As a denizen of the tropics, Ramabai found snow unutterably
beautiful, but at the same time dangerous and frightening. Accustomed
to the calm waters of the Indian Ocean, she was overwhelmed and en�ergized by the fierce weather of the North Atlantic. These passages in
CLUS on the natural beauties of America are among the best in the book.
No other major social commentator on the United States took the
country’s physical beauty so seriously.
Also Indian is Ramabai’s implicit social theory. The most obvious ex�ample is her sympathetic treatment of the “Indians” of America, whom
she regards as analogous to the Indians of the subcontinent precisely
because the expanding Europeans defined them as related peoples. The
American “Indians” are for her an object lesson for the subcontinent, a
fate to be avoided. But there is a broader nonmetropolitan aspect to her
social theory. Throughout CLUS, she uses the word jati—typically ren�dered in English by “caste”—to mean “kind.” Racial bigotry is thus (lit�erally) kind-bigotry. Women are a kind. The black ex-slaves are a kind.
Each immigrant group forms a kind. To be sure, there are “kinds” that
later social critics would take seriously which Ramabai does not. Class
is one. She traveled first-class on the North Atlantic passage and makes
only a mild apology about getting preferred treatment when the boat ran
aground. Or again, she remarks in HCHW that high-caste women “have
inherited from their father to a certain degree, quickness of perception
and intelligence” (p. 132). Thus she accepts certain differences without
critique, although in the main her position is that “kind”-ness is not a
legitimate rationale for the differential treatment of human beings. Or
indeed of animals: her sympathy for the freezing herds out on the blizzard-�
coated Great Plains is quite of a piece with her sympathy for mistreated
immigrants and slaves. One does not find such things in Martineau and
Tocqueville.
To be sure, one could read her entire position on “kind” as being utterly
aristocratic and Brahmin, a view from “above it all.” That this was not
the case becomes clear later in her life, for she moved steadily toward a
position that all human beings are in some sense equal. A better reading
of “kind” in these early works would therefore be that Ramabai was
deploying an early version of what would later be called the “other”
concept. She altogether avoids particular words for “tribe,” “community,”
“race,” “caste,” “ethnic-group,” “people,” and “sex.” All are jati—kind. By
doing this, Rambai insists that we view the world as filled not with
particular stratification orders and groups, but rather with “kind”-ness.
This is an important advance, one sadly missed by several of her later
English translators, who dutifully render the words into their different
(for the West) dimensions of difference.
Ramabai’s position implies that it is human to be particular and that
particularity comes in many types and kinds. Ramabai had, at one point,
early in her public life, a similar theory of religion: that there is, as she
put it, only one religion. “Now by religion one should not understand the
many doctrines such as Hindu, Muslim, Christian, etc. These names in�dicate doctrines and not religion. Religion is single in form” (“Strı¯ Dharma�Neeti” [1882], trans. Meera Kosambi [New Delhi: Oxford, 2000], p. 76).
Ramabai’s implicit theory of “kinds” of humanity thus seems an important
precursor of later ideas.
Ramabai’s view of temporality curiously combines a theory of decline
with a theory of progress. On the one hand, her interpretation of many
of the evils of her contemporary world was that they resulted from the
loss of the original messages. She goes to great lengths in HCHW to show
that the Code of Manu was more hostile to women than the earlier Vedas.
But she exonerates Manu on the subject of sati, which she attributes to
later priests and their deliberate mistranslation of the Vedas. Similarly,
she was scandalized to discover that Christians were as internally divided
as were the Hindus, and she attributed this sectarianism to a failure to
read and follow the original message of the Bible.
Thus Ramabai had a theory of decline. Yet at the same time, she
accepted the 19th-century West’s profound belief in progress, an accep�tance which is evident not only in her accounts of American trade, in�dustry, and agriculture, but also in her belief that most social problems
can be overcome by sufficient education and by an end to ignorance and
mutual distrust. Her faith in her American mentors Rachel Bodley and
Frances Willard—and more broadly in the American example—is no�where more clear.
Ramabai’s ambivalence about the direction of history is complemented
by her ambivalence about colonialism. It is easy to see her as having gone
over to the imperialists’ side. She chose their religion, although rejecting�
their particular version of it. She accepted western arguments for progress
and change. She got her funding and, after her Indian reputation faded,
most of her personal support from outside India. Yet at the same time
she was often a militant nationalist. In praising the religious pluralism of
the United States, she emphasized that it did not undercut patriotism:
“Although there are differences of belief among them [the Americans]
there is no fundamental difference in the religion they espouse. These
differences of belief do not stand in the way of anything that concerns
the welfare of the country” (CLUS p. 197). Similarly, she disliked the
Church of England because (among other reasons) the name of the im�perial nation was part of its name. Or again, a problem with Hindu high�caste women is their failure to help their nation: “[Women] grow to be
selfish slaves in their petty individual interests, indifferent to the welfare
of their own immediate neighbors, much more to their nation’s well-being”
(HCHW, p. 119). And “The men of Hindustan do not when babes, suck
from the mother’s breast true patriotism and in their boyhood, the mother,
poor woman, is unable to develop that divine faculty in them owing to
her utter ignorance of the past and present condition of her native land”
(HCHW, pp. 121–22). This nationalism occasionally crops out in the de�monization of the preceding imperialists (the Mughals), on whom she
blames (among other things) the rise of women’s formal seclusion.
In this, then, as in so many ways, Ramabai became a woman between
two cultures. One sees this especially in her analysis of sati. She gives a
straightforward feminist account of sati as a device for controlling women
with their “dangerous” desires. She is entirely in sympathy with the British
government’s proscription of sati. Yet she also realizes that that abolition
in some ways made matters worse, since many widows had chosen ritual
suicide, either because widowhood itself was so horrible, or because they
genuinely believed the official interpretation of sati, or because they truly
loved their husbands beyond life itself. The abolition, that is, removed
from women even their power to act and condemned them to the horrors
of widowhood or its only alternatives, escape and prostitution. It is a very
modern analysis.
Ramabai challenges us, finally, because she exemplifies those many
analysts of social life who were not professionals. Pandita Ramabai pro�duced her view of America not because she was theoretically interested
in improving a body of common knowledge called social science, but
because she had an ambition to change the place of women in India. She
thus takes a place beside the many reformers of the late 19th century
whose work laid the foundations of sociology in the United States (foun�dations quite different from the historical and positivistic foundations in
Germany and France, respectively). Most of that reform work disappeared
from the sociological canon, partly for want of method, but mostly for
want of “theoretical concerns,” the trope by which an emerging academic
discipline came to define itself.
But for Ramabai, social analysis was a precondition to—and a means�
of—reform. It was therefore a way station on the path to her fulfillment
as an activist whose life proceded directly from her religious devotion.
So also was social analysis a mere prelude to political power in the life
of Jomo Kenyatta or to cultural banishment in the life of Qu Tongzu or
to romanticized revolution in the life of Frantz Fanon. The non�metropolitan world could little afford the calm contemplations of aca�demic life. So we often find social science texts issuing haphazardly from
lives whose logic quickly drove their protagonists elsewhere.
This haphazard social science is all the more important for its com�mitment. A social science from nowhere lacks humanity: no human lives
in nowhere. Hence a committed social science is doubly valuable. But at
the same time, a social science utterly particular is equally problematic,
denying as it does the validity of others’ experience. The roots of humane
social science thus lie in translation, in making the systematic leap from
one social standpoint to another. Of this leap Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati
provides a profound example, both in her writing and in her life.�
That long silence by shashi deshpande
Shashi Deshpande’s Small Remedies is a self-conscious novel which has internalized a sophisticated awareness of current literary theory; it presents many of the contemporary issues which a woman writer has to face in her life as well as work. Like many postmodern novels of today, it problematizes the relationship between fiction and reality, and delineates the role of language in our attempts to construct our own realities. She has realized that though the really important aspects of life defy verbalization, there seems to be a genuine relationship between the process of fictionalization through words and our own attempts to organize personal experiences through memory. So this novel is as much about novel writing as it is about the characters who inhabit the fictional world. This is the kind of novel which presents a problem, analyzes it, and posits a kind of solution so that the focus is on the psychological process of becoming a mature person. The desperate search for meaning, the effort to find a sense of one’s identity and one’s relationship to the world outside, culminates in the realization that loss is never total, and it is essential to realize it because, in any event, life has to be made possible. The task of re-integrating a fragmented person involves an inevitable sliding into chaos, into madness, and what emerges as an urgent need is a call for re-evaluating and re-assessing many of the accepted values behind the stereotyped roles we ascribe to ourselves. This paper proposes to show how this philosophical need to accept the inevitable is psychologically made viable through an analysis of the fictional mode of representation. Madhu, the heroine of Small Remedies, has lost her only son Adit, and she is trying to get over the paralyzing sense of shock by writing the biography of the famous singer Savitribai, for which she has come to Bhavanipur where she is staying with a young couple, Hari and Lata. On the one hand, we have the actual story of Madhu and what happens to her at Bhavanipur, like her visits to Bai, her relationship with Lata and Hari, the paralytic stroke that attacks Bai, how Madhu is once attacked by a group of people, and so on, all these shown as happening in the present. On the other hand, there
is the story of Savitribai, as told by Bai but re-interpreted by Madhu, which is interspersed with memories of Madhu’s own past, starting from the days when Bai was her neighbour to the day she lost her son. There is a lot that is common to both Madhu and Bai. Bai’s daughter Munni was Madhu’s childhood friend, and by a strange coincidence, she too was killed in the same bomb blast as her own son Adit. But Bai had renounced Munni long before her actual death; she acknowledged neither Munni as her daughter nor Madhu as Munni’s friend; and Madhu is probing through the external facade of indifference to arrive at her actual feelings. Both of them are artists: one a novelist, the other a singer; both are childless mothers; thus Madhu’s attempts to bring out the woman or the mother behind the successful artist in Bai is really an attempt to understand her own self. More importantly, besides being the story of Madhu and Bai, this novel reveals the way in which novels are written: how Madhu listens to the words of Bai but interprets them in her own way, often stressing the pauses and silences in Bai’s narrative, bringing into this operation her own knowledge of human nature in general and her knowledge of Bai in particular. Thus the autobiography of the subject merges with the biography of the object, revolving round the central principles of imaginative reconstruction, thereby tracing the evolution of the story from the totality of loss to the possibility of retrieval through memory. Small Remedies employs the same philosophical principles of literary composition as That Long Silence so that it will not be an exaggeration to suggest that both novels are simply variations of the same theme. There is a sense in which it can be said that Jaya is potential Madhu. While Jaya resists her attraction towards Kamat, Madhu yields to the painter. Both are writers, both treat the process of fictionalization as the inevitable path to overcome their loneliness, despair and fragmentation. Both are dangerously possessive, both of them are strongly attached to their fathers, the transition is brought about for both by a catastrophe – the shattering of the stable routine for Jaya by the imminent dismissal of Mohan, and the death of her son for Madhu. Both slip into a temporary period of insanity from which they slowly emerge as integrated persons. While Madhu loses her son and feels guilty about it, Jaya has opted for an abortion and continues to feel guilt. Towards the end of That Long Silence, Jaya, wondering what she has achieved by this writing, concludes: “ I’m not afraid anymore. The panic has gone. I’m Mohan’s wife, I had thought, and cut off the bits off me that had refused to be Mohan’s wife. Now I know that kind of fragmentation is not possible” For Jaya, as for Madhu, writing is a vital process whereby she is trying to order
and organize her life so as to bring some sense to her existence. She has to let go the illusion of happiness as she discerns the gap between her mental picture of a happy family and the actuality of hostile relations in her own family. She realizes that she is like the sparrow in the story of the crow and the sparrow: they build their houses with dung and wax respectively. When the crow’s house is washed away in the rain, and as he comes knocking at the door of the sparrow, he is kept out for long under several pretexts. Finally the sparrow lets the crow in and invites him to warm himself on the pan on which she has just made the chapattis. The poor crow hops on to it and is burnt to death. Like the sparrow, Jaya had thought that the way to be safe is to stay at home, look after the babies and keep out the rest of the world. “ I know better now. I know that safety is always unattainable. You’re never safe” (TLS-17). Now she begins to see herself in a totally different perspective. She begins to see things in her own unique way. For example, when Mohan narrates how his father used to ill-treat his mother, and thinking of his mother’s stoic response to his cruelty, Mohan saw “strength in the woman sitting silently in front of the fire”, but Jaya saw only ‘despair’ (TLS-36). Look at the way she records her own method of reconstruction: “This is not Mohan’s story entirely. I’m writing it down, I have put together so many things – things he told me, things he left unsaid as he told me this story, things I have imagined myself, and the expression on his face as he spoke to me” (TLS-3435). This is precisely the method Madhu uses in writing the story of Savitribai. The version Bai gives is different from the one Madhu is building up. While Munni sticks to her own version of ‘the truth’, Hasina gives her truths about her grandfather Ghulam Saab whom she knows better than anyone else does and so she alone can give the complete truth about him. “ It is important for her to correct the idea that I have of his role in Bai’s life” (SR-273). Madhu is fully aware of the subjectivity of her version and the relativity of truth: “I think of the seven blind men trying to describe the elephant, each one making a different discovery about the animal, each convinced that his knowledge about the elephant is the entire truth” (SR-278). So she has to discover her own truth from the different bits of information offered to her in order to “create an elephant out of these disparate bits”(SR-278). It is this very same method Madhu and Jaya use in telling their stories. Further, it must be added that far from being a purely literary method, it is the very method, which enables Madhu to understand other people. She learns about Lata from the way she hands out ‘random slices of her life to the other person, wholly ignoring the spaces between them, explaining nothing’ (SR-40). Similarly, when Bai is telling her story, Madhu is aware of ‘the gaps in her story’, that ‘she is following the one
straight line of her pursuit of her Guruji’s, bypassing everything else’ (SR-129); so her task involves filling these gaps. Madhu’s reflexive comments on the complex nature of writing are worth quoting: I’ve realized that there are three books here. Firstly, there’s Bai’s book, the book Bai wants to be written, in which she is the heroine, the spotlight shining on her and her alone. . . . Then there’s Maya and Yogi’s book. A controversial one. Trendy. Politically correct, with a feminist slant. . . . And there’s my book, the one I’m still looking for. It’s evading me, not giving me a hold anywhere. (SR-125) Thus we see that there are several narrators in this novel. Madhu is obviously the chief narrator. Then there is Savitribai, giving her own version of her life as a singer, Hasina modifying it by giving her version of Ghulam Saab’s story and his role in Bai’s life, Munni with her ‘stubborn adherence to her own truth’ (SR-77), and so on. What distinguishes Madhu from other narrators is her singular status as the one who not only reports the other stories but also performs the task of fitting the various pieces to solve the jigsaw puzzle. While filling the position of the author to her own story, she fulfills the creative role of the ‘reader’ to the other stories, and assimilates them into the main narrative. Hers is the only voice, which refuses to be monologic. It is not an easy task. Bai is still suffering from the residual effects of a cardiac stroke, and Madhu has to grope her way ‘through the density of words to get at her meaning’ (SR-61). By excluding Munni and Ghulam Saab from the story, she is presenting ‘her own illusion of her life’ (SR-78). Once Madhu told her that she was discussing her with Hasina, and Bai became angry; she insisted on her exclusive right to tell her story – her portrait of the artist as a young woman. She asked Madhu not to write about the old woman that she is now. Bai is interested in projecting only that part of her young self in pursuit of her goal of becoming an artist as her true self. She seems to have severed the connection between the artist and the woman, and Madhu wonders whether Bai faces “the truth that confronts me every moment of my life – the futility of life without children”(SR-154). Madhu feels that Bai is ‘a nasty, tyrannical creature’ (SR-61); often she wonders: “ what kind of a woman are you, denying your own child?”(SR-78). At one moment Bai appears to be ‘the heroine of a passionate, beautiful story; at other times, she is just ‘a calculating, ambitious woman, using the man for her own ends, abandoning him finally when her need for him is over’ (SR-176). She formulates her task like this: “I have to negotiate my way between this woman and the cruel mother of my memory. Between this woman and the dazzlingly beautiful singer with her lover, whom she kept purposefully in the background So if she introduces Munni into Bai’s story, it is like saying: this is how it was.
But do we always know why we do things? “ Child though I was, I had the wisdom to know you don’t need to know everything about a person”(SR-175). As she is aware of the power of the writer-creator, she is wary of trapping and sealing her into an identity she creates for her. Instead of imposing her own vision over Bai’s story, she wants to capture her essence in all its contradictory aspects – as a rebel, a feminist, an artist, a woman who gave up everything for love, a mother who denies her own child, an ambitious woman who uses men to further her own ends, and so on. “Then where is the real Bai? The pampered child? The young girl who discovered what her life was going to be? The young woman who abandoned her child and eloped with her lover? The great musician, the successful Savitribai Indorekar?”(SR-283). And her answer is: “All of them, of course. It’s always a palimpsest, so many layers, one superimposed on another, none erased, all of them still there” (SR-283). It is not even necessary that she understand everything: “ Some mysteries have to remain unsolved, some answers will never come”(SR-322). The only way to arrive at the truth is through imaginative reconstruction the rules of which are exactly the same as those we use in our daily life. “ Fiction, then, it seems, is inevitable”(SR-169). In writing the story of Bai, Madhu is really engaged in the act of self-discovery. Madhu explains it thus: We see our lives through memory and memories are fractured, fragmented, almost always cutting across time. . . . Truly, dreams are the stuff of life, the hidden truth that lies beneath the hard reality. Invention, creation, is sometimes the greater, possibly the best part, of reality. Even to write our own stories, we need to invent. (SR165) This is the kind of novel Jaya would have written. When Mohan was displeased with her first story, she opted for the unproblematic enterprise of writing humorous pieces like ‘Seeta’, thereby shutting out all the other women who were clamouring for attention. By the end of the novel, Jaya emerges as an integrated person, a woman who can speak for herself in her own language. Her creativity is liberated: the novel itself is testimony to it. Jaya has written the novel in which she herself is the main character. She has learnt to speak, to listen, and to erase the silence. She has learnt, as she says, “to retrace my way back through the disorderly, chaotic sequence of events and non-events that made up my life”(TLS-187). Small Remedies gives expression to all those women held silent within Jaya.
That Long Silence is obviously the story of Jaya from a single perspective – that of Jaya’s. But towards the end of the novel, she ponders over a few interesting questions: “But why am I making myself the heroine of this story? Why do I presume that the understanding is mine alone? Isn’t it possible that Mohan too means something more by ‘all well’ than going back to where we were? (TLS-193). As if in answer to these questions, Small Remedies displays the multiple versions of her palimpsest story. Madhu is Jaya awakened. Despite the superficial similarities, Jaya and Madhu, it seems, are speaking about the same woman, the same things, same problems. Both novels end on a similar note: Mohan returns to Jaya, Madhu returns to her husband Som. Though they have become different persons now, though their lives are going to be qualitatively different, they are bent on starting a new life, both for themselves and their husbands. Shashi Deshpande highlights the Indian tradition in suggesting the continuity of family life despite the threatening darkness which surrounds our lives. It is not accidental that the solutions come from our ancient sages. While Jaya draws strength from the words of Krishna to Arjuna in the Gita, Madhu understands the meaning of ‘Putra-Moha’, an expression she hears from Som’s father, which is not love, but ‘obsession’, which involves ‘confusion, ignorance, illusion and pain’ (SR-188). She learns from Akka’s ‘drishti’ ceremony –‘the ritual to ward off the evil eye’ (SR-189) – where the chant asks the child to be protected from neighbours, strangers, and so on, including fathers and mothers. Now she learns that it is ‘from those who love us that we need to be protected’ (SR-190), because it is with them that we become vulnerable and defenseless. One of the distinctive features of both these novels is its subtle manipulation of female psychology. In terms of Freudian psychology, Jaya and Madhu manifest clear signs of Electra complex. Both are strongly attached to their fathers. Jaya harbours a grudge against her mother for making her homeless by selling their house after her father’s death. Her grouse against her father is simply that he died. His death shatters her completely. Again, she cannot relate herself to her daughter Rati but she is very sensitive to the needs of her son Rahul. There is a constant bickering between Mohan and Rahul, but Mohan can never perceive that quarrels between fathers and sons is the most natural thing in the Freudian world. This becomes more prominent in Small Remedies. Even though Som and Adit get along very well, and though Madhu remarks that it upsets Freud’s theory, her own attachment to her father, and her clinging to her son are essentially Freudian. For example, when
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Munni tells her that her father has a mistress, she cuts off all connection with Munni immediately. Such strong reaction is more that of a wife than that of a daughter. It is interesting to note that her first sexual affair was at the time of her father’s death, with a man who was her father’s special friend, a kind of father figure to her. The fact that he had once painted her picture as a child is a metaphorical way of indicating him as her father-creator. Perhaps the imminence of her father’s death had liberated the suppressed desire in her to possess him. The act of sex with the painter is her way of claiming her father back. As it is a forbidden one, she soon forgets the incident. Som finds it difficult to believe that she could so easily have forgotten her first sexual experience. Even the readers may find it a little unnatural. The whole thing can make sense only when viewed as a forbidden fact suppressed and relegated to the backstage by her subconscious mind. The memory returns to her after several years in a dream, where the corpse inside the gunnysack is obviously the memory buried deep inside her. Her clinging attachment to her son is also typically Oedipal; Hari is a son-figure to Madhu, and the figure is reinforced when he mutters ‘Adityaya namaha’ which revives in her memories of her dead son Adit, and that must be why she recoils at the comforting touch of Hari. Discovering one’s identity and establishing meaningful communication with others are two clear signs of a healthy personality. Writing is self-expression, but it is fraught with problems. In writing the story of Bai, Madhu is extremely conscious of the difficulty in turning Bai’s Marathi into English, ‘ the language I’m going to write the book in’ (SR-28). But her attitude to English itself is significant: “The language suits me. It avoids intimacy and familiarity and confers a formal politeness on our relationship” (SR-39). Madhu does not believe in the efficacy of words to communicate. Apart from language, there is the additional difficulty of having to ‘filter out what’s irrelevant’ (SR28). The problem of identity is sometimes expressed through the names of characters, and their own consciousness about it. Madhu, like Shashi, is a man’s name, and people often point it out. For Tony, to be called Anthony Gonsalves, was a real torture. Munni denies her name of Meenakshi and later turns it into Shailaja. Madhu wonders: “ if she’s Munni, why does she call herself Meenakshi? And if she is Meenakshi, why does everyone call her Munni?”(SR-31). The novelist seems to be inviting our special attention to the strangeness of names, again as in the case of Madhu’s mother and her sisters, who all have the names of rivers, such as Sindhu, Yamuna, Narmada, Kaveri, and so on.
In spite of Shashi Deshpande’s apparently random handling of events and incidents, Small Remedies manifests a very clear structural organization. The problem Madhu faces is stated in the ‘Prologue’ itself. After the death of Adit, she recalls this line from Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral: ‘ In the life of one man, never the same time returns’. And she adds: “ The line tells me the totality of loss, the irrevocability of it”(SR-5). Then she tries to write the biography of Savitribai, and her main concern is to discover how Bai has managed to live without her child. Finally the solution appears in the last lines of the novel: “ Memory, capricious and unreliable though it is, ultimately carries its own truth within it. As long as there is memory, there’s always the possibility of retrieval, as long as there is memory, loss is never total” (SR-324). Thus we see that both these novels delineate the eternal predicament of human existence through the various encounters of the heroines with life. As Madhu says: “ It’s always a losing battle. Such small remedies, these, to counter the terrible disease of being human, of being mortal and vulnerable” (SR-181). She believes that “we are responsible for our actions, that there are no excuses we can shelter behind” (SR-122). Similarly Jaya also believes that an ‘act’ and ‘retribution’ always ‘followed each other naturally and inevitably’ (TLS-128). But they know that one cannot escape through amnesia. Madhu recalls the words of Joe, the words which helped her once to accept her father’s death; the same words enable her now to accept her son’s death: “ It hasn’t gone anywhere, your life with your father is still there, it’ll never go away” (SR-324). Jaya has also learnt that though there is only one life, “ in that life itself there are so many cross-roads, so many choices” (TLS-192). She recalls the words of Krishna to Arjuna – ‘ Do as you desire’ – the words with which “Krishna confers humanness on Arjuna” (TLS-192). Acknowledging our human situation in its entirety, it seems, is the only victory possible to us.
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