Jyoti Tabita Hermit

Feminist Consciousness in the Novels of Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande and Bharati Mukherjee

Over the last two decades, research into sex, gender and politics has become an established sub-field of literature, the way in which the relationship between women’s description and substantantive representation has been operationalized. Feminist consciousness has certainly given a fresh ardor and excitement to literary studies. Literatures in gynocentric texts across the world are raising the question of identity of the most marginalized and stifled creature called woman in the phallocentric social setup. A reasonable new perception of women in literature and works by women writers has unveiled some of the prejudices at work in traditional approaches to literature hitherto dominated by a masculine perspective.

All the societies in the world have been phallocentric, having an oppressive and discriminatory attitude towards woman, irrespective of her colour and class. Feminism is solely confined to certain classes and patriarchy is still the dominant world scenario. The patriarchate exists since the beginning of the civilization. The patriarchal culture has declared women as inferior, inefficient, silent and sober. The biological difference has enabled the male to affirm his status as a Sovereign subject determining the woman’s place in society and imposing his own law on her. Never in history has she been able to escape the patrimony of a man. Thus infanticide is very common among Arabs and the veiled Muslim woman is still a slave to both man and ‘burqa’. The ancient jews practiced the same customs as Arabs.

The condition of women has gradually changed globally and the meek female has yielded place to the liberated woman. The status of women in India has been subject to many great changes over the past few centuries. From equal status with men in ancient times, through the low points of the medieval period to the promotion of equal rights by many reformers, the history of women in India has been eventful. The image of women in fiction has also undergone a change during the last four decades. The second generation of Indian Women Novelists has moved away from traditional portrayals of enduring, self-sacrificing women towards conflicted female characters searching for identity, no longer characterized and defined simply in terms of their victim status. K.V. Surendran writes, “There has been a very slow evolution in women’s writing to come to its own. This may be owing to several reasons like lack of education, their social and familial obligations, tradition of child-marriage, child bearing and child rearing etc. History has ignored and submerged their contributions; the critics have dismissed their works and its aesthetics on the ground that they were concerned with a limited world of experience because they were more confined to their domestic duties and liabilities” (Surendran 74). Novelists like Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande and  Bharati Mukherjee have reacted to the changed  psychological and emotional realities of Indian life. Being enlightened and exposed to the nuances of life in East and West, they are able to deal with the situation efficiently. Thus feminism, free sex, self-assertion, quest for identity are some of the major thematic concerns of these novelists.

They have begun to delineate the mental trauma of their personages in order to expose the oppression inflicted upon women in the society. We see in the women protagonists the power and courage of women. Theses novelists shatter the myth that women find fulfillment in marriage and portray an honest picture of women who strive to be themselves. They move from submission to assertion in order to acquire an identity and to fit into the mainstream of the society.     

               
Anita Desai probes into the inner consciousness of her women protagonists and explores the realities of their lives. Owing to their indomitable spirit and compromising attitude, they emerge as winners after undergoing considerable hardships. Maya in Anita Desai’s Cry, the Peacock(1963), fails to tread the path or play the societal roles traditionally assigned to an Indian woman. Maya is a hyper-sensitive, young girl who undergoes great mental trauma born of her marriage to a much older, business-like, matter-of-fact Gautama. He is insensitive towards her physical and emotional needs and thus there is considerable discrepancy in their attitudes. Gautama’s indifferent attitude towards the astrologer’s prophesy along with his extreme involvement in his professional life intensifies Maya’s neurosis. Gautama expects his wife to adhere to the traditional customs of Indian society and be traditional, submissive, tolerant and compromising. In the initial years, Maya tries to fulfill his desires by being a duty conscious Indian wife but when she finds that he is insensitive towards her emotions and feelings, she becomes silent and passive. To Gautama, “lives are trivial and expendable” and a kind of understanding and companionship is impossible between the two ( Desai, Cry, the Peacock 20). To get rid of such a relation, Maya kills Gautama by pushing him off the terrace. She does so in a detached mood since his death would not matter her much for he had “never lived and never would”( Desai, Cry, the Peacock 172).

In Voices in the City(1965), Monisha’s marriage is doomed right from the very beginning. She is married into a family unlike hers. She is unhappy in Jiban’s house and remains confined in it, segregated from the city of Calcutta. She hopes for freer life in Kalimpong and Darjeeling.  She says, “They have indoor mind, starless and dark. Mine is all dark now”( Desai, Voices in the City 137).Ultimately, all her efforts to compromise with life fail. Life becomes so stifled and meaningless that she sets herself ablaze.

In Where Shall We Go This Summer?(1975), Sita a middle-aged woman is seen leading a purposeless and boring life. She lacks contentment even though she is married to a successful businessman and is blessed with four children. She becomes so fed up of her own intolerable plight that she runs away to Manori in order to escape from her “duties and responsibilities, from order and routine, from life and city”( Desai, Where Shall We Go This Summer? 128). At Manori, she realizes “what a farce marriage was, all human relations were”( Desai, Where Shall We Go This Summer? 89). The cause of her real grief was that “she was bored, dull, unhappy, frantic. She could hardly believe that although they lived so close together, he did not even know this basic fact of her existence”( Desai, Where Shall We Go This Summer?132). Finally she realizes that she cannot stay on at Manori indefinitely, also the fact that the child could not be kept inside her womb forever and thus evolves into a more mature woman. She comes to terms with the harsh realities of life and tries to fit into the mainstream of the Indian culture.

Desai’s novels are thus a reflection of the disturbed psyche of women who are victims of alienation and male dominance. However, they find a way out by self-discovery and introspection.

Another strong voice of female identity and assertion in Indian writings in English is Shashi Deshpande. Her own experiences and thinking helped her devise her own idea of fiction. Deshpande has revolted against the patriarchal attitudes, “However, I found out, very early in my writing career, that women’s experiences are believed to be of interest only to women, that women’s problems, ideas and lives are specifically and narrowly considered women’s problems and not human ones. It is male problems, male ideas and male experiences which are human”(Jain 33). Deshpande’s protagonists refuse to sacrifice their individuality for the sake of upholding the traditional roles models laid down by society for women. But they attempt to resolve their problems by a process of temporary withdrawal. In The Dark Holds No Terrors(1980), Sarita returns to her paternal home to escape from her husband Manohar’s sadism. The withdrawal helps her view her situation objectively. Besides being merely a daughter, sister, wife and mother, she evolves into an individual with her own legitimate expectations of life. In Roots and Shadows(1983), Indu too has a rebellious spirit like Sarita. At Akka’s bidding, she frees herself of the constricting traditional role of a wife and mother, and destroys the mantle of the family matriarch. Though she has married Jayant against the wishes of her family she soon gets disillusioned. She fails to get excessive happiness as she begins to loose her own identity. Her husband’s extreme dominance suffocates her and she feels trapped in marriage. She says, “When I look in the mirror, I think of Jayant, When I dress I think of Jayant….Always what he wants, what he would like, what would please him..Have I become so fluid, with no shape, no form of my own”(Deshpande, Roots and Shadows 34).
She realizes that her husband need not determine the role she should play in her own and other people’s lives. She gradually transforms into an individual with her own identity and begins living life on her own terms and conditions.

Deshpande’s That Long Silence (1989)deals with the hardships of an Indian housewife who maintains a long silence throughout her life. She is a symbol of a typical, submissive Indian housewife who patiently bears all the troubles afflicted on her by the male dominated society. Jaya keeps her eyes shut to her husband’s illegal earnings at office. Even her journalistic writings are circumscribed by her husband’s likes and dislike. While recapitulating her past she thinks:

Middle class. Bourgeosie. Upper –caste. Distanced from real life. Scared of writing,  scared of failing. Oh God, I had thought, I can’t tae anymore. Even a worm has a hole it can rawl into. I had mine-as Mohan’s wife, as Rahul’s and Rati’s mother(Deshpande, That Long Silence 148).

Finally she is able to evaluate her expectations of life and realizes the emotional frustration and trauma she has undergone over the years by being silent and passive. She evolves into a woman with her own identity, having gained tremendous courage and self confidence. Thus Deshpande’s female protagonists pass though tortuous physical, mental and emotional agony, which affects their entire personality largely turning them into a whole new being.                   

Bharati Mukherjee is a prominent author of the Indian Writings in English who has evoked the study of feminism in her writings. She is concerned with issues related to women in works like Wife, Jasmine and The Tree Bride. In the Introduction to Conversations with Bharati Mukherjee, Bradley C. Edwards writes, 

Feminism is a major theme throughout Mukherjee’s fiction, from Dimple, The protagonist of her second novel who murders her husband, to Tara, the main character of her most recent two novels who divorces and takes a lover. In her essay “A-Four-Hundred-Year-Old Woman,” Mukherjee reflects on her inherited position:  “I was born into a religion that placed me, a Brahmin, at the top of its hierarchy while condemning me, as a woman, to a role of subservience.” Mukherjee’s notions of feminism are rooted in her upbringing and the example set by her mother (Edwards xii).   

She deals with the phenomenon of migration, her emphasis being on her female characters, their struggle for identity, their psychological trauma and their final emergence as self assertive individuals free from the bondages imposed by relationships of the past. In her 1990, Iowa Review Interview she emphasizes that many of her stories are “about psychological transformation, especially about women immigrants from Asia”(Mukherjee 15). Mukherjee excels in depicting cross cultural conflicts of her characters and the emotional and psychic consequences of search for self identity. Her heroines endeavor for self realization and finally take control over their destinies.

Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife (1975) centers round the life of Dimple, a twenty years old, timid, middle-class Bengali girl who is eagerly waiting to be married. She has a romantic disposition towards life, a result of reading novels and film magazines which makes her negate the harsh and gruesome realities of life. From the vey beginning she is different from normal girls. She has set her heart on marrying a neurosurgeon, but her father is looking for engineers in the matrimonial ads. The author has pin-pointed here the dilemma of the Indian woman whose social role, by tradition, is defined by a patriarchal culture. It is the feminine duty of a woman in a male dominated society to subjugate her feelings and desires to the will of her father. Thus she believes that marriage is a blessing in disguise which will bring her freedom, fortune and perfect happiness, things she is too subservient to ask for in her own family: “Marriage would bring her freedom, cocktail parties on carpeted lawns, fund-raising dinners for noble charities. Marriage would bring her love” (Mukherjee, Wife 3).

Dimple desires a different kind of life- “an apartment in Chowringhee, her hair done by Chinese girls, trips to New Market for nylon saris” (Mukherjee, Wife 30).What pleases her most is imagining about marrying a man who would give her all materialistic comforts. Meanwhile her father finds a suitable boy for her. He is Amit Kumar Basu, a Consultant Engineer. Dimple is excited about her marriage but after marriage her desires remain unfulfilled. All of a sudden she finds her expectations and dreams shattered. The thought of happiness eludes her mind and she abhors the very idea of being a wife. What’s even worse, she regrets her pregnancy. While she is excited about going abroad, she does not want to “carry any relics from her old life” and wants everything to be nice and new (Mukherjee, Wife 42). In order to get rid of the vile feotus she skips her way to abortion.

She had skipped rope until her legs grew numb and her stomach burned; then she had poured water from the heavy bucket over her head, shoulders, over the tight little curve of her stomach. She had poured until the last of the blood washed off her legs; then she had collapsed. (Mukherjee, Wife 42)                

      
This being her first act of assertion marks the commencement of her evolution. She regenerates herself as she has never done before. She frees herself from the traditional role of a Hindu wife by revoking her motherhood. Having immigrated to America, she does not get any consolation from it. The life of New York seems destructive to her and provides little freedom to Indian house wives. She feels isolated from her new surrounding and finds that there is great disparity between her fantasy world and the real world. Instead of showing signs of improvement, she goes worse. She is frustrated with Amit who fails to provide her not only physical comfort but also emotional comfort. Her frustration increases and she begins having repulsion for Amit.

She is torn between the feminist need to be independent and assertive and the traditional Indian need to be submissive and self-effacing. Finally in a fit of frenzy, out of depression and disgust, she takes out the knife from the kitchen drawer, chooses a spot near her husband’s hairline and stabs him repeatedly at the same place seven times. Seven stabs are symbolic of liberation from the bondages imposed by matrimony. Dimple frees herself from the constraints of relationships and regenerates herself through blood.
This final act of Dimple’s shows her complete transformation into a ‘New Woman’. She evolves inwardly from a docile, obedient, submissive and typical Indian wife into a dejected, psychotic, sick and furious murderer in order to attain individual freedom.  

In a Patriarchal society, women find themselves in shackles of oppression and suppression. Women can only dream of liberation if their male counterparts consider them equivalent to themselves and understand their importance in uplifting the society. Mukherjee in her novel Jasmine (1989) deals with this aspect of liberating a woman from the feudal society who owing to her immense strength forges her identity on the American soil. Jasmine is a rebel from the very childhood. At every step she revolts against her fate, the life dawn for her. In this novel, Mukherjee has presented a conflict between tradition and modernity. Jasmine rejects the constraints and traditional values of the patriarchal society in which she is born for the liberal American values.

Jyoti is the fifth daughter of her parents. Since childhood she is bold and intelligent and has the desire to become educated. In the eyes of Masterji, she is his finest ever likely student fit for English education. She revolts against the prophesies of the village astrologer in hash terms. She says, “You’re a crazy old man. You don’t now what my future holds!”( Mukherjee, Jasmine 3). A disbeliever in the prevalent conviction that “village girls are like cattle; whichever way you lead them, that is the way they will go”, she refuses to marry the widower selected by her grandmother and marries Prakash Vijh in a court of law (Mukherjee, Jasmine 46).

Prakash sows the seed for liberation in Jyoti. He christens her as Jasmine and says: “you’ll quicken the whole world with your perfume” (Mukherjee, Jasmine 77). Prakash instills modern values in her which make her bold enough to fight wrong. Jasmine’s odyssey begins with the murder of her husband by Khalsa Lions. Just after her arrival in Florida, she is raped by Half-Face, the captain of the ship in which she has travelled. Instantly she realizes, “I could not let my personal dishonor disrupt my mission” (Mukherjee, Jasmine 118). Goddess Laxmi now assumes the avatar of Goddess Kali by slicing her tongue and kills the demon that has violated her chastity. This act of Jasmine is a kind of self-assertion and reflects a self-affirming transformation.

Post this incident, she begins a new life and reinvents her identity by adapting the American way of life. The woman who walks out with Taylor “greedy with want and reckless from hope” is entirely different from the woman we had encountered in the beginning of the novel (Mukherjee, Jasmine 241). Here is a woman who is ready to explore the best that future has in store for her. 

It isn’t guilt that I feel it’s relief. I realize I have already stopped thinking of myself as Jane. Adventure, risk, transformation: the frontier is pushing indoors through uncaulked windows. Watch me reposition the stars, I whisper to the astrologer who floats cross-legged above my kitchen stove (Mukherjee, Jasmine 240).

Jasmine defies estrangement in the society and rejects cultural stereotypes.  She not only transports us from one place to the other but also from one identity to the other to realize that transformation is inherent in her personality.       

                           
Another icon of New Woman is to be found in The Tree Bride (2004) in the form of Tara Lata Gangooly who according to legends, marries a tree at the age of five and eventually emerges as a nationalist freedom fighter. She portrays a sense of independence and lack of inhibition that characterizes a ‘New Woman’. The Tree Bride is a celebration of the strength of a woman as it traces the transformation of Tara Lata from a docile Bengali Brahmin child into an impassioned organizer of resistance against the British Raj. Owing to her strong will and revolutionary spirit, Tara Lata recovers from her painful past and develops into the steely Mother Courage of the independence movement.

Though the country has made a lot of progress, the role of Indian women in society remains only peripheral. Gender discrimination has been a universal phenomenon in human history from time immemorial. Owing to a new set of educational values and economic dependence, the position of women has certainly been enhanced and women have now certainly got a status in society. But in order to iron out the unevenness in society, they need to learn to assert their rights and shun the injustices heaped on them. Thus the new generation of Indian women novelists advocates independence and assertiveness in women by depicting their characters as survivors who successfully bear torment both physical and emotional and raise a voice against the brutalities and violence surrounding them. They tend to rebuke the male dominating Indian society which discourages self-reliance in women and urge women to build up their fragmented lives and express their affirmation.

 

 

Works Cited

Desai, Anita. Cry, The Peacock. Penguin Books, New Delhi, (1963) Print.   

…. Voices in the City. Penguin Books, New Delhi, (1965) Print.   

…. Where Shall We Go this Summer?. Penguin Books, New Delhi, (1975) Print.   

Deshpande, Shashi. Roots and Shadows. Penguin Books, New Delhi, (1983) Print.

…. That Long Silence. Penguin Books, New Delhi, (1989) Print.

…. The Dark Holds No Terrors. Penguin Books, New Delhi, (1980) Print.

Edwards Bradley C. Conversations with Bharati Mukherjee. ed Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, c (2009) Print.

Jain, N.K., ‘Women in Indo-Anglian Fiction’. Manohar Publications, New Delhi, (1998) Print.

Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, (1989) Print.

…. The Tree Bride. New Delhi: Rupa & Co, (2004) Print.

…. Wife. Boston: Houghton Miffin, (1972) Print.

Surendran K.V. Indian Women Writers: Critical Perspectives.ed Swarup and Sons (2007) Print.