Abha Shukla Kaushik
Reading Shashi Deshpande’s In the Country of Deceit as a Postcolonial Text
Post colonialism deals with the experience of colonialism in the past as well as present contexts. The ‘once-colonized world’ is full of contradictions, of half-finished processes, of confusions and of hybridity. It is important to accept the plural nature of the word postcolonialism, as it does not simply refer to the period after the colonial era. By some definitions, postcolonialism can also be seen as a continuation of colonialism through different or new relationships concerning power and the control/production of literature.
Post colonial investigation connects the literary with the sociological, the historical, the cultural, the political and the economic. The interdisciplinary nature of the theory renders it different from other purely literary theories. While talking of colonialism one has to take into account the presence of various power structures operating within a society. Post colonial discourse questions these power structures and suggests a reversal of the many binaries which exist. It is basically a shift in perspective resulting in a reversal of the subject object positions. Thus reading a text from a post colonial perspective keeping in mind concepts like subaltern, hybridity, cultural difference, shifting power structures etc leads to what Edward Said calls contrapuntal reading.
One of the earlier attempts to theorise post coloniality was made by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin in their book ‘The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post colonial Literature’. Though there can be no universally acknowledged methodology of reading a text as a post colonial text, Said’s concept of contrapuntal reading, Homi K Bhabha’s idea of hybridity and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of the gendered subaltern can be used as tools to read a text differently. Postcolonial literary criticism has primarily suggested a way of reading differently. Reading differently and challenging any accepted mode of reading is thus a feature of postcolonialism. There is a recognition of the influence of the coloniser but postcolonial literature has more to do with the representation of the indigenous experience. Therefore any discussion of Indian literature cannot but talk about the Indianness of experience that is presented through literary works. Postcolonial discourse is concerned with deconstructing the long accepted idea of the centre-margin binary by breaking away the stereotypical images of the two. It looks into not only the many and changing power plays in a society but also presents a very different picture of the hitherto marginalised subject as someone powerful and positive thereby shattering the colonial myths. The ultimate goal of post-colonialism is combating the residual effects of colonialism on cultures. It is not simply concerned with salvaging past worlds, but learning how the world can move beyond this period together, towards a place of mutual respect.
Postcolonialism deals with cultural identity in colonized societies: the dilemmas of developing a national identity after colonial rule; the ways in which writers articulate and celebrate that identity. Therefore, on the one hand while the colonizer's literature justifies colonialism via images of the colonised as a perpetually inferior people, society and culture, on the other, colonized people reply to the colonial legacy by writing back to the centre. The indigenous people write their own histories and legacies using the coloniser's language for their own purposes using their own themes and depicting their own spaces and problems. While the earlier anti colonial positions were centred around identity and nationality, post colonial literature has difference, hybridity, marginality as the new themes. Questioning the long accepted binaries and problematising the space of postcolonial discourse have replaced the issues of nation, colonialism, cultural identity and borders etc as themes in recent novels.
Shashi Deshpande is one of the major writers of Indian English novels. Here it would not be out of place to mention that the genre of novel itself is colonial in its origin. Besides, choice of English as a medium of writing speaks of the colonial effect. With ten novels, six collections of short stories, four children’s books, essays and translations from Kannada and Marathi into English, she is one of the few Indian writers in English with a corpus of work, and one who has successfully handled different forms. She has explored conventional feminist themes, as in her Sahitya Akademi Award winning novel That Long Silence. Though she herself rejects any type of categorisations, she has often been described as a feminist writer. A woman writer writing in a postcolonial society has to face both – a feminist reading and a post colonial reading thus rendering her doubly alienated. Deshpande herself says, ‘To be a woman writing in English is to be doubly damned for this writing is ‘elitist’. In her writings she projects a distinct aesthetic that silently but very effectively questions the dominant long established traditions. While speaking at the launch of Shashi Deshpande’s ‘In the country of Deceit’ the famous author Githa Hariharan said, “Shashi Deshpande’s feminism is a natural kind of feminism that is not based on theory. She writes about the web of family relationships, particularly those in extended family set-ups.” (Hindu)
‘In the country of Deceit’ is the latest novel penned by Shashi Deshpande. She continues probing into women’s experiences, constraints and problems in this novel also. Once again, like her other women characters, Devyani is an assertive woman who has her own will and way. The story begins symbolically with the demolition of the protagonist Devyani’s ancestral house in Rajnur in Karnataka. It is not just the house but also Devyani’s conservative outlook and inhibitions that have been done away with. House is a potent metaphor of the space allowed to women. It is not just the house that has been dismantled but Devyani’s life as well. With its demolition, the stage is all set for a new beginning for her. The new house that comes up in the place of old is a complete reversal of the old house. After her sister Savitha returns to Delhi with her husband and children, Devyani starts her life ‘anew’ in the new house. This life is indeed new for her as she finds new friends in Rani, a former film actress who has returned from US to settle in Rajnur and Ashok, the district superintendent of police who is posted in Rajnur. After a brief entry into the superficial life of filmdom, through Rani, the story of Devyani enters into a new realm of an illicit affair. Her relationship with Ashok presents profoundly difficult moral choices as Ashok is married, has a ten year old daughter and his position of esteem adds to the difficulties. It has to be a clandestine affair which has no future, is doomed from the beginning, and ends predictably. Both of them painfully acknowledge and accept right from the beginning that this relationship will take them nowhere. In between we find Devyani delving into her past looking for explanations for her desires and actions. Desire is an important line of action in this novel. Satisfaction, gratification of desire and fulfilment of desire rather than ignoring it is important for Devyani. As she says, “I want a needle point of extreme happiness; I want a moment in my life which will make me feel I am touching the sky.”(25) Physical desire and its gratification is what she wants and gets. However, this involves betrayal or deceit as the title says it. Deceit in its various forms – from betrayal to adultery, disloyalty to fraud runs through various strands of the story. It is a subtle mixing of desire and deceit that makes the novel so convincing and serves as a constant reminder that most of the time it is women who have to suffer and that bliss often has to be purchased at a high cost and that too will not last. Devyani’s aunt Sindhu who is a breast cancer survivor writes letters to her from the US where she lives, functions as a conscience keeper and her letters give voice to a perspective of age, wisdom and balance. She points out to Devyani in one of her letters, “Our country does not allow women to fulfil these desires without marriage.” (42-43) Deshpande describes the suffering, evasions and lies that overtake Devyani as she is caught in the web of relationships. The novel is rooted to the ground realities of life and works as a showcase of relationships, feelings and emotions for the readers. As expected ‘happiness’ has to be ‘sacrificed’ at the altar of ‘reputation’, but some questions are left unanswered. Is the pursuit of a hedonistic happiness which allures and consumes Devyani worth anything? Who is it that is being deceived – the society or the self?
‘In the Country of Deceit’ is a continuation of her earlier novels which have distinctive modernist characteristics like the importance of a sense of place – in this case Rajnur, which is both real and ethereal at the same time. The atmosphere of a small, non-descript town which in the process of change to keep pace with globalization and is representative of any small town in any far flung corner of India has been successfully evoked in the novel. In a quintessentially Indian way Devyani is sentimentally attached to the ancestral property in a passionate way. Yet, she would have none of the old structure and has it all pulled down and remade according to new specifications. The ‘new’ house in celebrated with both a ‘puja’ as well as champagne – one of the many examples of ‘hybridity’ present throughout the novel. The on-going process of modernity does not stop her from adhering to some traditions as well. There are relatives, family history, traditions going hand in hand with individuality, modern education and a no holds barred attitude. There is even an NRI aunt Sindhu who like all diaspora lives in US but is very ‘Indian’ at heart and gives advice to Devyani on relationships, desires and marriage. Like a dutiful aunt she is on a lookout for a suitable groom for her niece. These socio-cultural realities of the Indian society have been depicted in a very powerful and gripping manner in the novel.
Another significant post colonial trait that can be discerned is the Indianisation of English by using ordinary words like bus, station, bichaari etc in a very Indian way to achieve the creation of a way of life that has naturalised the cultural hybridity of colonial and post colonial life, especially its urban middle class aspect. Coming to terms with specific local conditions and connecting them to the global is one of the challenges that a postcolonial writer has to face. Knowing the colonial and neo-colonial engagements in all their complexities and finding a proper language and terminology to represent them presents a daunting task. She achieves the subtle balance of alienness and familiarity of the language in the context of Indian life by using everyday words evocatively encoding their deep rooted cultural connections.
It is not just the language of the ‘masters’ which has been put to ordinary use, the radical replacement of the worthwhile ‘grand’ subjects by ordinary everyday life events of ordinary people celebrates the ordinary with a mode of articulation that is far from ordinary and heightens the dichotomy between the familiar and the alien.
Another distinguishing post colonial feature of the novel is the play of intertextuality wherein two elements are predominant. First, her constant reference to ancient Sanskrit texts like the Mahabharata and ‘Puranas’ and second the knowledge of English literature her protagonist, Devyani exhibits. Her favourite author is Jane Austen and she teaches students to communicate in English. Aunt Sindhu reminds Devi of Jane Austen. She writes in one of her letters “doesn’t every heroine get married at the end of the story?” (27). However, Devi is not easy to convince: “I know that Jane Austin believed in marriage, that her heroines got their men at the end. But she believed in marriage with the right person. Why did she remain a spinster otherwise? Let me tell you one more thing she said: “Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection.” (28) There is reference to Darwin’s theory of evolution and also to how the world was created according to the Upanishad. “… I read about the opposition to his theory from the Church, specially to his idea that the world was not created by God, but evolved, I thought of the way the Upanishad explains the beginning of the world: First there was one, he wanted another and so he split himself into two. (Fission, not fusion!) So different from the fairy tale picture of a garden of Eden, a world of perfect innocence, from the idea of a first man and woman, of an Eve created from Adam’s rib. I thought that maybe the Upanishad is a little closer to the truth.” (97)
Postcolonial theory encourages thought about the colonised's creative resistance to the coloniser and how that resistance complicates and gives texture to European imperial colonial projects leading to constructed values of ‘civilization’, ‘humanity’ and ‘superiority’ with conversely established 'savagery', 'native', 'primitive' and ‘inferiority’, as their antitheses and as the object of reform. Post-colonialist thinkers recognize that many of the assumptions which underlie the "logic" of colonialism are still active forces today. The study of English and the growth of Empire proceeded from a single ideological climate and the understanding that the development of the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the other, resulting in a process, in Edward Said's terms of conscious affiliation proceeding under the guise of fililation (Said 1984), that is, a mimicry of the centre from a desire not only to be accepted but also to be adopted and absorbed. It caused those from the periphery to immerse themselves in the imported culture, denying their origins in an attempt to become 'more English than the English'. This process is clearly discernible in attitude of Bhavani who comes to Devi to learn to communicate in English. “She wanted to learn English to help her husband’s career, she told me, to improve her own status and social life and so that her children should not be ashamed of her. I was astonished at all the things she thought a language could do.” (46)
Comparison between past and present is another feature of a post-colonial text. Post the colonial period the colonised subjects remember the past and compare their situations then and now. In ‘In the Country of Deceit’ although Devyani is not the marginalised or colonised, exploited subject, she very often keeps revisiting her past. She remembers the time when the old house was built and how everything happened at an extremely slow pace and in spurts. She finds the new house “a complete reversal of the old house, a denial of everything our old home had been. The large rooms the light and the air that came in from the huge windows, the broad sills on which we could sit, the sense of openness-all these were a total contrast to the dingy, dark small rooms we have lived in. The most startling change was in our bedrooms, Savi’s and mine. Large, spacious and opening out on to the back where a walled garden was to be, they were Savi’s belated defiant statements against the tiny dark room the two of us had shared as children.” (4)
The assessment of the post-colonial phenomenon in Indian English writing as a discourse is a fairly complicated task as on the one hand while this writing can be seen as existing on the periphery or margin of the English canon in Euro American contexts, the fact remains that its authors are, more often than not, part of the privileged class or sections of society. This is reflected in the life of the protagonist of the novel, Devyani’s life also. Her life is not circumscribed within the domestic confines of home or other aesthetic and professional endeavours of varied range. She is aware of her ‘othered’ status in a patriarchal society, however, her education and her place in the small town society of Rajnur complicates her status and gives birth to other paradigms of the ‘self and other’ is used to signify the marginalised or the colonized. However, the identity of the colonizer and the colonized does not remain fixed or unitary. It not only displaces the history that creats it, but sets up new structures of authority.
Said’s use of the binary ‘here’ and ‘there’ can be seen in the novel by extending the argument to where Deshpande’s ‘here’ comprising of the intelligent thinking writing woman Devyani is supported by the ‘there’ comprising of the marginal domestic woman Kusuma, who takes on the domestic responsibilities upon herself thus enabling Devyani to think and write and be an ‘independent’ woman. One can also make use of Spivak’s idea of the subaltern in this context.
Devyani, the heroine of the novel can be seen as a representation of the middle class, upper caste, gendered subject who is caught in a struggle between the traditional and the western mode of thinking. The world of the novel is rooted in the Indian tradition and culture, yet this culture comes into conflict with the transnational with Devyani’s falling in love with a much married man Ashok and her giving in to her desires. Two opposing cultural strains are at work here – one traditional and the other practical, ‘enlightened’ and self centred, individualistic.
The novel tells about the conflict between a woman’s intellectual and emotional being. Devyani views the world with painful and brutal honesty. She is a woman who is not merely a daughter, a sister, a friend or a lover but someone capable of thinking and taking her own decisions. She is in line with the other protagonists of Shashi Deshpande: a not exceptionally beautiful, already past her prime, middle class, intelligent and unconventional and particularly gutsy woman. In this novel also Deshpande continues to probe into women’s experience, women’s involvement in and constraints of family life and problematics of matrimonial relations. Yet it is set in a new vein. The novel begins with the stage set for a new beginning. The old house has been pulled down and new one erected in its place which has been designed and supervised by architect sister of Devi so that it will give the most satisfaction to her. Even Devi feels “I felt as if I was waiting for the curtain to go up, waiting for something to happen.”(8) Ultimately, it is a story about people, about their struggle to live, to make sense of life, about people’s relationships with others. Deshpande deals with the idea of love in all her novels - different kinds of love and different faces of love. It is adult love that she is talking about here. Devi and Ashok are both adults and fully aware of the reality of their situations. Yet, when love strikes they can not help it. Deshpande herself says in an interview, “My novel is about adult love. Devyani, the protagonist, who chooses to live alone in the town of Rajnur after her parents' death, falls in love with the town's new district superintendent of police, Ashok Chinappa, who is much married and-as both painfully acknowledge from the very beginning older - it is a relationship without a future. In my book, the first thing the man tries to tell the woman is that I promise you nothing. But I stand outside your gate and cannot get you out of my mind. I think that's the real sign of love.” The lines presented as the summary on the back cover of the book, make the position of Devyani clearly understood “Why did I do it? Why did I enter the country of deceit? What took me into it? I hesitate to use the word love, but what other word is there? And yet, like the word “atonement”, the word love is too simple for the complicated emotions and responses that made me do what I had done. Ultimately, I did it because he was Ashok, because we met. That’s all.”
The novel unfolds itself at two levels – one of Devi’s experiences of her body and the other of her aunt Sindhu who reveals her own life and comments on or complements Devi’s experiences through her letters thus remaining present in the story. The novel consciously raises many questions about women in an Indian society. The fear of society and the expectation of society dominate the life of Devyani giving her the status of subaltern. However, categorising this way is not as simple as it seems. There are situations where the victim of one kind becomes the agent of oppression in another system. Thus a complex, multiple power structure can be seen functioning here, where even a woman coming from a particular cultural back ground (educated, well to do, independent) becomes an ambivalent subject – who is both a victim and an agent. In such a situation the ‘other’ is not always that which occupies the margin. As Homi K Bhabha rightly points out in his introduction to ‘Nation and Narration’, “The other is never outside or beyond us; it emerges forcefully within cultural discourse, when we think we speak most intimately and indigenously ‘between ourselves’.”(4)
The novel does not deal with the obvious themes for post colonial discussions like nation, neo-colonialism, identity crises etc., yet when approached differently with the help of some post colonial concepts like subaltern, hybridity, intertextuality and shifting power structures, leads one to gain a different perspective.
Works Cited
Ashcroft, Bill et al. The Empire Writes Back: Theory And Practice In Post-Colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.
Bhabha, Homi K., ed. Nation and Narration. London ; New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.
Deshpande, Shashi. In the Country of Deceit. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2008. Print.
‘In the country of deceit launched’. 27 Sep. 2008. Sat. 19 Feb. 2011. <http://www.hindu.com/>
‘Magical Terrains’. Jul 06, 2008. Sat. 19 Feb. 2011. <http://www.hindu.com/>