Assistant Professor Dept. of English

Blood! Blood! Blood!

Cops Blood!

Naxals’ blood!!

Innocent victims’ blood!!!

Vikrama Simhapuri University

Nellore Andhra Pradesh

India.

All the blood is red similar in colour That is as widespread wild flood

That made the pastures the red Hades. Whose fault is it?

Who is the responsible for it?

Is it of extreme extremity between Jawans and Naxals? Both proclaim as the optimists

Both proclaim as the patriots

Both proclaim that their aim is one: Justice. India salutes to Jawans

At time of need and natural calamities, They are the Almighty in the human form. At time of danger at the border,

They protect us from the adjacent alien human beasts. They are the mother after the mother.

But, they also massacre the tribal naives in guise of peace!? The poor tribes bow down before the Naxals

And praise them as the living Gods.

They also protect the tribes from the exploiters.

But, they also slew the fellow human beings as perpetual foes. Is this primordial enmity not pernicious to society???

Who gave them power to kill each other (fellow beings)? Both are the parasites on the cause of justice

Both are the parasites on the rotten corpses of each other Both are the supermen who believe in Guns

Both are the wild vultures on the rotten bones of native naives Both are the Kaurava Pandavas

People are like dilapidated Drupadi Politicians are pseudo Krishnas.

India is afraid of Blood Tsunami at hand!!!!! When may the eternal massacre suffice?

Blood has the power to transform the human hearts That transformed the King Ashoka.

Look! Look!! Look at the pious blood on the cross of Calvary

That pure blood of Christ (symbol of Love) pacified the wrath of Jews. It seems they may transform after seeing the blood of innocent naives. It is over . . . over. . . .  over. . . . . . .

I hope the utter transformation is at hand.

If not, O! God descend down over again. . . . over again. . . . . . Utterly transform India to love.

Pooja Swamy

Ph D Research scholar RTM Nagpur University, Nagpur (Ms)

Abstract: The socio-cultural experiences associated with migration and different forms of displacement can be most appropriately captured by the concept diaspora. Diasporic works often locate themselves in a liminal space between cultures while the female immigrant writer has the difficult task of creating a foothold for herself in an even more minimal space, being a minority within a minority. Writing by women contribute a very significant gendered perspective to the diasporic discourse as they get into the areas now known by the broader rubric of ‘cultural studies’ dealing with significant everyday realities like food, clothing and leisure activities while exploring identity constructions in the new spaces opened up by diasporic locations. Meera Syal’s novel Anita and Me explores the conundrums of identity faced by two generations of Indian migrants in Britain struggling to find and retain their ethnic identity in a multicultural society.

Keywords: South Asian Diasporic Women, Acculturation, Nostalgia, the other, home.

When Meena in Meera Syal’s Anita and Me utters, “I am the others” she is reinforcing her author’s experiences as a non white British citizen in the England of the 1960s. She begins the novel with her thoughts on immigrants being “the gap between what is said and what is thought, what is stated and what is implied, is a place in which I have always found myself. I’m not a liar; I just learned very early on that those of us deprived of history sometimes need to turn to mythology to feel complete, to belong.”(10)

Syal successfully explores the contradictions inherent in growing up in Britain with immigrant Asian parents, and in living between two cultures in her debut novel. Her semi- autobiographical portrayal of a mixed-up girl trying to find her feet and in Meena’s case her voice emphasises the belief that diasporic authors give expression to their experience of relocation through their works. This paper analyses food as a marker between nature and culture. In the diasporic representations of food it communicates a whole network of cultural attributes. The symbolic function of food assumes overwhelming importance, as cuisine comes to be associated with the lost or abandoned homeland of the refugee or migrant. The

land left behind is equated with the food that can never be recovered.2

Diaspora in itself is a phenomenon of enormous magnitude which is reaffirmed through the ways it has taken place. Migration for better avenues does not leave a bitter aftertaste as in the case of forced dislocation. Moreover people who have a shared history of the pain of partition as in the case of major countries of South Asia like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh who can never be termed as a community in the usual sense are reformulated and comprised as a group in the foreign land. This feeling of reclaiming a sense of space through similar cultural artefacts is prominent in the writing and lifestyle of immigrants. The evocation of home through a shared history, geographical location, culture and cultural artefacts predominantly food forms the core of the diasporic consciousness. Meera Syal in her position as an immigrant in the Britain reveals the phenomenon of migrancy through a nuanced approach towards food and the eating habits of people.

It seems that a geopolitical invention is imagined and brought into being by a group of people residing in an area. The geographical/ political factors of a particular area affects the choices made by the writer i.e. the group as in South Asian Diaspora through their works

have created a distinct identity of theirs . Their identity as South Asian in a foreign land tends to give them a feeling of belonging. This new sense of rootedness, responsibility and belonging is the thread that binds the expatriates together. On foreign shore matters of caste, creed and religion is not given undue importance. Irrespective of differences of nationality these South Asians be it Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Srilankan or Nepali form a set consciously or unconsciously. What binds them together other than the colour is the basic need of food. Food develops a special affinity between the communities. The sharing of food is nothing less than a ritual, a tradition for them. This paper builds up the notion that the food helps the immigrants unfurl questions relating to identity, citizenship, nationality and belonging.

The story revolves around Meena, a British Punjabi girl (the “me” of the title), and her relationship with her English neighbour Anita as they grow up in the fictional Midlands village of Tollington in the 1960s. The family of Kumars comprises of the father Shyam, the mother Daljit and the little Meena who is rediscovering life in the confines of the small village. The young Meena dreams of spreading her wings with her delinquent friend Anita outside the limits of the small hamlet and above all her restricting family. Meena tired of sticking to the conformities enjoys aberrant Anita Rutter who is hostile and indifferent to any possibilities which is not in her interest while Meena’s friendship is based on the premise of enjoying the unknown, of defying her typical Indian family.

Meena is in search of ‘excitement, of something dramatic’ happening to her. She feels in her nine years nothing of big proportion has taken place. It was before her birth that her father had arrived in “Paddington with only twenty-five pounds in my pocket” (Pg.31) to try his luck while her mother was waiting for her husband in India. He had carved a life for him and his family through hard work. Friends become surrogate families in this distant foreign land. However, it is precisely these friends, hordes of them, whom Meena detests. She feels alienated from this group of shared histories and tastes in language, music, movies and above all food. These ‘non-related elders called Aunties and Uncles [and] talking in rapid Punjabi’ make up her extended family. Her aunty Shaila and uncle Amman were no less than real brother and sister for her parents for it was this uncle who had helped her papa when he first arrived in this foreign land. They were in unison on matters related to home, heart and food which become bones of contention for Meena. She looked down upon the Saturday parties her parents enjoyed with such fervour. She felt stifled in the familiar atmosphere whereby cajoling and pulling leg were the highlights of the evening. And above all what made it memorable for each of the concerned party was the unending flow of food.  Steaming varieties of food –curries, kebabs, paneer and non vegetarian snacks were in constant stages of preparation. The kitchen, in an immigrant home is not only the hub of all household bonhomie and activity but also of constantly creating and reaffirming culture.

The generational conflict between the first and second age group in Anita and Me is shown through food. The adolescent Meena who is trying to assimilate into the host culture of Britain is at loggerheads with her mother Daljit who through her mode of cooking, serving and eating, has ghettoised the whole cultural production relating to food consumption. Meena who is tomboyish in nature and doesn’t favour feminine sensitivities is aghast at the kitchen and preparation of food being given undue (in her view) prominence by every other Indian woman. It is as if they lived only to fulfil the pantry responsibilities for a family. Every living space was spent planning the next big ritualistic meal. All meals, be it regular or festive one, lunch or dinner would be elaborate and a three course meal was a norm. The extent of love of a mother for her children would be judged by the quantity of meals she would prepare. Anything less would be frowned upon. A simple dinner of fish and chips loved by Meena was scarce in their Indian homes where sumptuous homemade meals were the norm. As a consequence an Indian girl uninterested in cooking is a rebel. Cooking was synonymous with

other feminine virtues of dressing in ethnic clothes, speaking in a native language and appropriate behaviour. What was valued as a code of behaviour by this generation is the retention of ethnicity while Meena longs for assimilation.

For Meena the desi/ exotic markers of ethnicity are anathema as they call attention to one’s essential difference. In the village fete she realises that it is these differences that would mark you as an outsider but to her horror and dismay her elders did not realise that they stood out like sore thumbs. Meena wants to fit into the village community and to achieve her goal Meena befriends Anita who is severely grimaced by her parents but to no avail.

Syal, along with other diasporic women south Asian writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Talat Abbasi, foregrounds food as markers of cultural production in an alien land. It is this preoccupation with something as basic as food and taking that to another level, of binding that artefact with the sense of rootlessness and belonging that gives the whole feminine discourse of diaspora a distinct identity. This urgency to feel oneness with one of your own and not termed as the other by a person you look up to as in the case of her neighbour Sam Lowbridge who Meena likes and believes her feeling to be reciprocated. So it is nothing less than an emotion of betrayal after the incident of fete when Sam questions the community’s charity to what he calls ‘the others’. And not only Sam, but her so called best friend Anita too shatters her illusion, that anytime, anywhere Meena won’t be one of them, even if she drinks a whole drum of creamy sodas.

Meena’s embarrassment that her ‘front garden was the odd one out in the village, a boring rectangle of lumpy grass bordered with various herbs that mama grew to garnish our Indian meals.’ (Pg.15) Her introduction to the herbs by her mother was a trial for Meena. Eating ‘out’ always meant having food wherever English people were there as opposed to eating ‘in’ with the readymade family of Indians. An incident on Meena’s seventh birthday reinstates the fact that food was and would be thought of as a domain of the Indian woman. Also food, like cake is used as an of anti-depressant as her mother is unwell and she, encouraged by her husband, tries to eat her way out of her stressful mood. Similarly the unfamiliar taste and size of the hotdog gets stuck in the young Meena’s throat to give her what she dramatically feels is ‘near death experience’. Everything from being deathly to acting as a life saver in terms of moods, food is the focal point in the novel.

Food is also synonymous with home. It signifies the familial bonding arising out of shared meals for example, the 3‘..chopped onions for the evening meal..or watched the clouds of curds form..’(Pg.34) the list is endless. Through these narratives of food and hospitality an idea of a golden past is introduced. The stories of food, cooking and eating takes on the status of iconic symbols for the lost way of life.4 Food also comes up as an essential part of the process of acculturation. The ethnic minority community though struck on their homemade fare is not against trying new things. But complete assimilation is not favoured at all even be it in terms of food. The incident of lard sandwiches is strongly despised by Meena’s mother to the extent of her returning to her own language, ‘Bakwas lok!’. (Pg.55) Moreover religion plays a dominant role in terms of food in the life of an Indian immigrant. Their sensibilities are all fine tuned by the humble food.

Meena finds her own home kitchen to be cluttered in comparison to Mrs. Worall’s. The whole hullabaloo of ‘huge bubbling saucepans where onions and tomatoes simmered and spat..bright heaps of turmeric,masala,cumin..’(Pg.61) is not liked by her. She favours the clean uncomplicated feel of Mrs.Worall’s kitchen. It was as if she was in a whole new world. Fascinated by the whole process of making pastry she herself attempts it. This act of western cooking for Meena is symbolic of the freedom and sense of acculturation with Britain she is in search of. Every attempt of her mother to inculcate Meena into the mysteries of Indian cooking is strongly and unabashedly opposed. But the complete crux of the matter lies here in this conflict in food. For ‘this food was not just something to fill a hole, it was soul food, it

was the food their far-away mothers made and came seasoned with memory and longing, this was the nearest they would get for many years, to home’ (Pg.61). The simple acts of ‘rolling out a chapatti before making it dance and blow out over a naked gas flame,’(Pg.117) was not as uncomplicated as the women made it seem. It was their way of connecting. ‘Punjabis and baking don’t go together…not enough angst and sweat..’.(Pg.62)

Every description of kitchen and food is carefully delineated in the novel. Nothing less than an occasion would be made out of cooking. The whole process of cooking, serving and eating is also related to the culture of hospitality. For the Indians the guests were paramount to be a God. The chapatti making ritual ‘over a naked ring frame’ without actually burning your fingers is shown as a talent acquired only after marriage in an Indian women. So through food the qualities searched for and wanted in an Indian woman are also touched by. A funny yet ironical incident is Meena’s mother’s instance of the delivery of her son, “how she bent down to pick up a crushed kebab…brother’s placenta at her feet..”(Pg.132)

The change in Meena’s insight towards the Indian diasporic community with its engagement for food is perceptible after the fete incident. Her Nanima’s visit collides with it and her accident later in the novel together contributes for her change of heart. This can be seen when, ‘I forced myself to eat two aloo rotis which came sizzling straight from the griddle onto my plate..a glass of milk ..crushed almonds’(Pg.233) all suggest a sense of security and comfort food. The incident of supreme importance which truly shatters Meena’s delusion is the one when Anita’s mother Deidre runs off and Meena’s family feels shattered by such a betrayal. They try to console Anita by offering her food! Though felt as something very juvenile a step it is a momentous for Meena’s parents. They had never shared a table let alone a meal with any other person than Indians. Anita hardly recognises the fact and shrugs off the importance with trying to steal things from their home. She also laughs at the Indian way of eating with hands. Later too, in spite of Meena giving her different ideas she is unable

to get the hint of inviting Meena to her place, her home. As Sarah Sceats writes that eating is ‘the arena of our earliest education and enculturation.’5 For the migrant the easiest way to acculture and integrate is through food which is denied to Meena which is the last straw.

The whole journey of ABCD’s (American Born Confused Desi’s) in the novel, Anita and  Me  thus  begins  and  ends  with  an  evocation  of  food-  as  a  symbol  of  connection, belonging as well as alienation. To sum up in Syal’s text, food becomes a cultural marker: “And food is memory…Food memories, most of them forgotten or blurred, are a mystical heritage, long since digested and gone, but still lingering in our souls. Personal food, ethnic food, family food, the food of the culture in which we grew up, the food our mothers gave us- this is the eating that determines who we are,… what we love what disgusts us, and makes us feel better.”6

Works Cited:

1. Anita and Me. Meera Syal.(London: Flamingo,1996) All further references have been taken from this edition of the text.
2. The Writer’s Feast. ed. Supriya Chaudhari/Rimi B. Chatterjee (Delhi:Orient Blackswan,2011) .
3. Ibid.Pg.128
4. Ibid.Pg.131
5. Ibid.Pg.153
6. Ibid.Pg.81

Ph. D. Research Student

Dept. of English Shivaji University, Kolhapur.

Shashi Tharoor’s Riot (2001) is a novel about the history, love, hate, cultural collision, religious and fanaticism and the impossibility of knowing the truth. Riot narrates the story through journal entries, interviews, letters, scrapbooks, news  paper clippings,extracts from personal diaries, and conversations. . He brings conflicts and sense of nationalism in the novel. Tharoor depicts reality from a multiple point of view. He points out a balanced picture of the views of the different communities. Riot is about the majority community, the Hindus trying to establish and reinforce their identity and the minority community, the Muslims, maintaining theirs. The novel describes how religion is used as a tool of exploitation which has made India a wounded civilization. It has dismantled the silience and strength of Indian unity and integrity. The novel is fusion of chaos, disorder, violence and riots which leads to create a picture of postcolonial India. Tharoor in Riot presents how the prejudiced the Westerners look at India as Oriental, poor, illiterate country. The novel also sheds light on the innocent victims like Priscilla, Sundari and Fatima Bi.

Tharoor in Riot presents the real picture of Indian women. women are so submissive that they cannot raise a question concerning their welfare; rather they submit to the demand of their men-folk and accept any number of pregencies. Being forced to have babies is one form of oppression, of subjugation by men. Women are talented but weak to stand up and fight against the prison house of their tradition and society in limiting their family and thus providing their childrena quality life and preserving their health. Fatima Bi is the representative of all such oppressed women. She lives with her husband and seven kids in a two-room flat. Her life style is very poor and miserable. She wants to overcome this miserable life, the pregnancies but her husband Ali, a male dominator, is not ready to follow this family planning program. Another story of Sundari is also representative of all those marginalized women. She is accused of carrying a female child in he womb. Even she is considerd responsible for female child. Also she could not bring the expected dowry from her parents. Therefore, her husband and mother-in-law set her on fire. Such violence in Indian society frustrates Priscilla in her quest for solution. Priscilla Hart, an American volunteer working in association with ‘HELP-US’, wants to change the lives of Indian women. . She works to make aware the women of their reproductive rights not only to control population but to give them a sense of their rights as a whole, their right as women. If these women fight against such oppression then only they can improve their health and they have a real future so that they will give their daughters a real future. Her work is not easy because religion, age-old traditions and the male ego are the major obstacles in achieving her objective. She questions the authenticity of patriarchal society where a women still suffers somestic violence in spite of sacrificing so much for her family. She feels confused as to why men are after women’s life when they are trying to uplift their condition by showing a way of living infused with dignity and happiness. But she becomes the victim of the age old tradition. Her resistance against this social evil comes to an end with her death. Taroor shows how the resistance of the female is kept under a male system of control by suppressing the power to make personal choices and using violence to woman for bearing children. The framework of joint family structure, economic dependence and gender bias interpreted through the cultural codes of

civilization sustains perpetuation of explosive patriarchal, communal and religious value system. Sundari and Fatima Bi are victims of cultural values and subjugation.

Besides the oppression of women Riot throws light on many contemporary issues on history. Riot is based on the actual incident related to a riot that took place in Khargone, Madhya Pradesh . This incident is combined with another incident, the death of an in South Africa who was killed in the racial disturbances. Tharoor has fictionalized these incidents in his novel. In one of the interview he said that his novel portrait time and it is part of writers job to recapture moments of history. Tharoor unfolds the history through his various characters. Ram Charan Gupta, a Hindu fundamental reader, supports the cause of construction of Ram Mandir at Ayodhya. He strongly insists that the place of Babari Masjid is actually the place of birth of Lord Ram. By giving historical facts he proves his opinion. He informs that Himdu’s temple of Ram destroyed by the Mughal emperor Babar in 1526. Babar has replaced it with a mosque, and these Hindus want to reverse the history and put the temple back where the mosque now stands as Hindu community has much hurt by this. To him, Muslims are evil people. They are more loyal to a foreign religion, Islam than to India. According to him, Muslims are converts from the Hindu faith of their ancestors, but they refuse to acknowledge this. They believe that they all are descendants from conquerors. He expects that the non-Hindu people in India must adopt the Hindu culture and language. This is a hope for united India, a real urge to be unite. Mohammed Sarwar, a Muslim scholar, professor in Department of History, Delhi University tries to defend the Muslims and provides historical evidences. He believes that Islam has a great claim on the siol of India. He insists that Hindus should write a new history without doing violence. He hopes for united India where there is neither Hindu nor Muslim but both to call Indians. This is the new identity he wants.

Tharoor narrates about a state emergency in mid 75, proclaimed by Mrs. Gandhi. “She had been a dictator, for all practical purposes, for the twenty-two months she’d ruled under emergency, and she was, allowing the victims of her dictatorship the right to decide whether she could continue her tyranny!”( Riot:p.31). The issue of Golden Temple is also discussed in the novel which caused the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi. This assassination further result into massacre. The Police Supritendent, Gurinder Singh narrates how the blind retaliation by angry mobs caused countless massacre of innocent Sikh lives. He has lost his brother-in-law and nephew to mindless fury of blood thirsty mob.

Such historical incidents presents the picture of India after independence. Is it the India which has got new identity of massacre? Is it a proper way to resist? Do we have learnt anything from history? Are we happy with such chaos, disorder, violence in India? Are we rootless or do we have the roots of such massacre?

Tharoor has painted the real picture of India. He has severely presented in the eyes of foreigners and natives. The natives still find themselves poor, powerless, dependent, and weak. On the other hand foreigners look at India with their biased views. Ram Charan Gupta comments on how foreign journalists and photographers cover India. They cover India only as they are interested in the kind of India they want to see. The horrible, dark. India of killing and riots. They present the stories of poverty and widows, the caste system, untouchables, poor people selling their blood or kidneys, the slums, the dowry victims etc.. They portray India as weak and helpless victims of millennia of invasions. Rudyard describes India as a country with a middle class about hundred million. Katharine describes Zaliagarh as a bad place as flies buzz around everything. She finds India as people half-dressed beggar with open sores clamoring for money, ash-smeared sadhus in saffron waist-cloths and matted hair, men in dhotis and men in pants and men in kurta-pajamas, and women with golden bangles and silver anklets. The red stains make her to think of blood of tubercular or the homicide

rate are increased. But she comes to know that these stains are merely combination of a national addiction and poor hygine has come as a relief.

Tharoor comments on the five major sources of division in India i.e. language, religion, caste, class, and religion. He describes multi-languages, untouchables as outside the caste system, majority of lower class people. Riot presents India in as Oriental, poor, helpless, oppressed under domination. full of communal riots and desiring for better hopes.

Thus, Tharoor in Riot depicts the socio-cultural ethos. He plainly describes how women in India do not enjoy a respectable position. They are considered to be secondary and are marginalized. As if they are a plaything in the hands of their husbands, protectors or lord beings. Poor People in India believe that children will contribute to family income and share the burden and responsibilities, so they insist on more children and do not think of women health or desire. To conclude, Riot examines some of the vital issues of Indian society which may transcend the limits of time, place and culture. Tharoor dreams of extraordinary, polyglot, polychrome, polyconfessional country. For him democracy will solve the problems and it is the only answer for the frustration of India’s Muslim too.

Works Cited:

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffths and Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Post Colonial Studies. New York : Routledg, 1998. Print.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shashi_Tharoor 12 July 2013.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Print. Tharoor, Shashi. Riot. India : Penguin, 2001. Print.

Why yes, the pursuit ends here, An outpost of urbanisation,

Where an iron bench and rain-streaked wall Are the only topography.

Here our heir designate

Is no less solitary an individual Than the last – unlikely guarantor Of imperfectly understood beliefs.

These we do our best to recall – A solemn paperwork

Under protection of an ancient Representative, now throwing on

A long black coat, and anticipating All these dark, funereal umbrellas.

Assistant Professor Department of English New Horizon College

Marathahalli Bangalore.

The present plays of Currimbhoy offer extensive scope for studying the conflict of the modern man with religion. Currimbhoy seems to consistently project that the modern man’s spirituality leads to the victimisation of himself basically because his attachment with God and his adherence to religion is only through a war between his “ego” and the one placed above him in the hierarchy. When at times spirituality becomes the safe haven for absconding from sin, his ego does not let him acknowledge the fact that he is also governed or monitored by God. At the surface level, Currimbhoy displays this conflict of man with God but in the sublime, he is condescends religious ethics which work against humanity.

Svetaketu (Om), Andrew (Monsoon) and Abbé (Abbé Faria) are more the agents than characters which reveal the impact of religious and spiritual victimisation that in turn commandeer a person’s psyche as soon as he identifies the guilt within himself. The rapture comes in when the person senses his failure in conforming with the norms of the society and recoils back as someone guilty.

Svetaketu feels guilty that he has killed one of the soldiers in the war; Andrew feels guilty and sinful for no reason suggesting an absurdity in his character but wants to achieve purgation by consummation with an innocent and pure virgin so that he can bring in “immaculate conception” much like God did with mother Mary; Abbé feels guilty that his father died soon after his birth and that he raped his mother. Guilt overtakes the conscience of man; he yearns for redemption and finally takes recluse of religion to reprimand himself. However, this ascetic step further pushes him to the dark as he starts committing one crime after the other against the lives of the people associated with him and eventually allows his life to be seized. He becomes more inhumane and indulges in adultery and murder.

While constructing these characters, Currimbhoy neither validates their actions nor legalises religious ethics. He takes an objective stance and does not allow the audience to emotionally get involved with the characters. His is much like the alienation effect of Brecht but he achieves it in a different way which appears surrealistic at times. He does it by breaking the flow of time and sometimes making both the past and the present appear together by using the shadow play technique and then shuffling the names of characters and their age so that there is no subjective involvement in the audience as in Om; bringing in the comic in unexpected situations as in Monsoon; and sometimes keeping things vague till the end and putting in unrelated images in the scenes much like in surrealistic paintings and making it more dream-like as for instance in Abbé Faria where one cannot realise till the end who is more sinned.

This paper deals with two aspects of relevance in the three plays taken under study. Firstly, it tries to analyse how guilt consciousness constructs/destroys the three characters  Svetaketu,  Abbé  and  Andrew  in  the  plays.  Secondly,  how  the  women

become the site for violation and how the playwright uses them as agents to symbolise the exploitation of humanity that is exercised through the complex relationship of guilt and religion in the man.

I

In Om which is a trilogy, the playwright, from the outset explains the philosophy of the Vedas and the Upanishads intermittently in the play. The play is set at the backdrop of Hindu religious practices trying to emphasise its impact on a man’s life. The play highlights the religious philosophy that grew in the period between 2000 BC and 500 BC when the rituals began and the mantras or hymns were a part of the ritualistic tradition of the Hindus. Such rituals emphasised the two paths of meditation and unification with the deities as one thing and the Bhagavad Gita had this at its core. Not only is this, in all the three parts of the play Currimbhoy is unconvinced about the way bhakti and dharma are used as ways of achieving moksha in Hinduism. Currimbhoy shows the absurdity of such practices unless the man is free of his inner conflicts and has the freedom and necessity of going close to religion. Religion is soiled if it is taken as a safe haven to evade guilt in man. In all the three parts of the play, the main character Svetaketu appears in three different stages of life. The first Svetaketu is a young man burdened with the sense of guilt for killing a soldier during war. As a Kshatriya, he is expected to go for the war and his act of killing the soldier is just a “performance of his duty” which is “dispassionately done”. But, Svetaketu fails to convince himself and justify his act of killing a man. He acknowledges that he has committed a crime against humanity and feels guilty. He is haunted for penance. He decides to forsake his earthly responsibilities and turn into asceticism. But then, he is persuaded by his father and wife not to do so. His guilt makes him blind of his responsibilities towards his father and his wife. Svetaketu is torn between the conflict of a desire to merge with the Divine to escape from his sense of guilt as early as possible but is trapped in the maya of the materialistic world. Svetaketu’s close sense of recognising his guilt is a self-reflexive process through which he feels he is getting closer to the Divine Self or the atman. His guilt becomes a route to unification with the Divine whereas his wife and father try to hold him back in the materialistic world of maya. In Act II, Svetaketu is an old caretaker-priest of a temple who lives with his daughter. He is haunted by a dream where he carries a dead body on his shoulders. Svetaketu gets drowned in the river and tries to come out. He also tells his daughter that even though he is a Brahman and well-versed in the Vedas yet he is scared of such dreams. There is fear within him. He is not courageous to face death even though he is well versed in the Vedas. His knowledge of the Vedas is superficial because he classifies among humans and hates the stranger because he is from the lower class in society. What kind of a religion does the priest follow then if it divides man against man? The stranger poses a threat to Svetaketu through his knowledge, devotion and modesty. The stranger knows the divine in the world through feeling whereas the old man knows through reading. Currimbhoy, attacks religion owned through education and emphasises the necessity of internally feeling and experiencing what one learns keeping safe the modesty in oneself and giving respect to other human beings. Even then, the stranger acknowledges the old man as someone who is more learned than him whereas the old man denounces the stranger as ignorant and asks his daughter to keep away from the stranger and his song. The playwright thus satirises Svetaketu’s superficial religiosity and spirituality which has no compassion for humanity. The stranger is healed at the end whereas Svetaketu gets drowned to death. The stranger and the  daughter  are  seen  playing  in  delight  and  unaware  of  the  drowning  old  man

symbolising humanity forsaking vanity. The chanting of the word OM by the stranger is not mere superfluous devotion that he tried to put on show like the old priest. The playwright is critical of the way saints or priests are misconstrued of achieving God by thinking they are well versed in the Vedas.

In Act III, Svetaketu is hailed as someone who is the Truth, and the greater Self. The characters are interchanged and now there is only the Guru and the disciple. The Sishya has immense desire of achieving moksha but fails to achieve it. The Guru tries to convince his Sishya but the Sishya tries to strangle the Guru. This act of trying to strangle the Guru by a Sishya who is learning to achieve moksha through religion shows the corrupt attempts made by many in the name of religion to  achieve  salvation. Moksha is visualised as an object rather than a state of achievement through control over one’s own mind and this is the satire in the last part of the trilogy by Currimbhoy. Svetaketu killed a saint and is now guilty but also acknowledges the moment as a meeting with God when for the split of a second he could feel it while severing the head of the saint from the body. Currimbhoy shows it in a paradoxical way where the sinner is close to the Divine and feels the Divine while committing sin. This is contradictory in itself. Guilt is sensed if the person finds himself going against the norms of the society where he lives and this can help overcome the evil in him. As John Carroll rightly points out, the twentieth century reads guilt as a “terrible sin” whereas it should have been taken as the “richest” and “most hidden resource”, the “essence of humanness” in

men.1

Currimbhoy’s Monsoon is an extreme revelation of psychosis that can occur in the life of a man who identifies his existence with sin and guilt. The play is a narration of a story of one friend Andrew by the other Dr. Juan. Lies within the narration, layers of meaning that ultimately helps the reader to know how religion, superstition, instinct, learning, logic and race or colonisation can violate a man’s existence. Andrew is such an example in the play that dwells on experiments, well-versed in Bible but shattered by instinct at times. He is captured with the fact that he is sinful. Andrew is so much blinded by his absurd guilt-consciousness that he victimises a small child and isolates her from the rest of the world. Andrew’s treatment of the girl resonates with the treatment of Mary by God in the Bible. Andrew uses the body of Monsoon, the woman- grown-out-of-the-child under his vigilance to get his own child much like God used the commanded Mary for the “immaculate conception” of God’s child Jesus Christ. The desire in Andrew for a child reflects the human desire for preserving his own lineage after his own death. Andrew had a strange belief that through the conception of the girl he will achieve purgation but such belief stands against humanity. He was aware that it was sin but then he later tells that “sin is a necessity in the purification process” (89) When Dr. Juan diagnoses the girl and finds that she was raped by a syphilitic man, Andrew gets fired on her and her grandmother. The fact that the girl lost her virginity irritates him since it had spoiled his perseverance to achieve salvation. However, he could never come out of the obsession he had for Monsoon and waited till she could reproduce. The grandmother left the girl with Andrew forever and went away after Andrew got fired on the grandmother for letting the girl get raped. Since then Andrew

1 From “His Excellency, the grey eminence…”in Guilt: The Grey Eminence behind character, history and culture by John Carroll. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul plc., 1985. 1-5. Carroll also explains how terrible it was to be not ashamed after committing a sin after our first Judeo-Christian father Adam showed his disobedience to God and committed the first original sin. The critic adds Dostoevsky’s point of how only the greatest sinners because of the enormity of suffering cast upon them by their guilt become good saints at the end.

enclosed her within his house by building a big strong wall which he imagined was the Noah’s Ark. In this way, the girl was separated from the outside world and inside she only had the company of Andrew and she learnt only what Andrew taught her. Andrew initially taught Monsoon those lines from the Bible which tells about the “immaculate conception” by Virgin Mary.

Andrew’s obsession with the small girl is only hinted as sexual and never made explicit until after years of staying with the girl Andrew suddenly meets an old woman who prophecies through card reading. It was by chance that Andrew meets the old woman. After many years of isolation in his own house he comes out one day and meets Dr. Juan and Daisy the prostitute at Ling’s restaurant in the town. Daisy catches the old woman in the restaurant and asks her to tell her fortune. The old woman also reveals Andrew’s fortune that he would make the girl conceive and that the girl will bear a child whom he would love more than anything in the world. However, the mother of his child would always thwart his influence on the child. And all this finally end up being true.

Andrew suffers from an implicit domination. This is the urge of the White man to teach and preach the native and christen them. The girl is first separated from her grandmother because Andrew believed that her grandmother practised black magic and was a “heathen” unlike him who was a “White man”. The influence of the grandmother on the girl is repeatedly reminded by Andrew who shows a strong hatred of Andrew over the witchcraft or black magic of the native which has cast a spell on his life and for which he is suffering. He tries arduously to free the girl from the influence of the Grandmother but he is never successful till the end of the play. Therefore, his act of teaching the girl Bible can also be seen as his urge to educate the native heathen and his obsession for a child from her can also be seen as a desire of the white who remained in the colonies to get merged with the native and create his own progeny. The difference between the native and the White is suggested from the beginning when Dr. Juan and Andrew are seen meeting for the first time. They talk of why the one remained in the tropical island and why the other came back from the land of the Whites. And finally, when Andrew beats Monsoon and drags her out of the house he reveals his hatred to her and addresses her as the “cursed heathen”.

It is interesting to note how Christianity is involved in the play. Andrew emphasises only that part of the Bible which deals with the “immaculate conception” of Mary by the Holy Ghost. He reads those lines and transforms himself into the world of imaginary. In fact there exists only a thin line of separation between the imaginary and the real for Andrew. Andrew hallucinates. Andrew imagines that he is God and Monsoon the Virgin mother. He wants Monsoon to conceive his child just as God wanted his child to be conceived by Virgin Mary. Andrew is not a blind follower of religion neither is he a fanatic. This becomes clear when he asks Monsoon to tear off the page that had the lines of “immaculate conception” by Mary. He is cynical about the whole concept of “immaculate conception” and this act of God seems to haunt him. For him then, God is also a sinner. He says all through that he is a sinner but what is the sin he has committed is never clear. On the contrary, he is about to commit a sin through his idea of making Monsoon pregnant with his own child. Andrew called Monsoon “child” when she was small and took care of her as her mother and father but then when she grew up he started calling her Monsoon and waited for her to give birth to his child. Till the time she was a child, Andrew called her “child/my child” but as she grew in years Andrew’s obsession to see Monsoon as the “immaculate” mother became more and more deep. Finally, Monsoon gives up to Andrew and she gives birth to his child.

In Abbé Faria, Abbé is guilty from the beginning of the play for the death of his father soon after his birth and the loneliness of his mother due to the death of his father. Abbé is guilty for the rape of his mother which is again symbolic of the colonial rape of India by the Whites as will be discussed in the second section of the paper. His guilt makes him hallucinate and he sees the image of woman in black veil passing through him in a carriage very often. He took a Degree in Divinity in Rome and revolted against the National Convention in Paris and was elected a member of Medical Society in Marseille but then he is seen transcending all the norms of restrictions and reservations of a Christian life and visiting cafes, indulging into gambling, flirting and sex. Currimbhoy shows the sexual involvement of the Abbé with three women in the play. Moreover, his sense of guilt which haunted him is further bruised with the kind of exclusion he faces in society. Abbé is considered as “mysterious”, “evil”, “charlatan”, “imposter”, “false”, “anti-Christian”, and “devilish” and inclined to  “immoral practices”. Thus, the other characters in the play construct Abbé as a negative character. He becomes a victim of Christianity as he is looked at as the son of “a monk and a nun”. Ironically, the incomplete address of the relationship of his parents reverberates as a sinful cause for his birth and the fact that people scorn at him for being so adds insult to his existence. The fact that his parents were ordained monk and nun was after their separation which nobody knows.

Abbé had been away from his mother since his childhood. Once again, we come across the example of how religious norms practised or believed by society is  at disparity with humanity. He is distanced from his mother as she became a nun and forsook him; then he is removed from living the pious and spiritual life of a monk by the Christian society. Thus, he is twice displaced―firstly, from his biological mother and secondly, from his motherland. Similarly, he is excluded twice once, when the Whites colonised India and he had to go to Europe for learning divinity and second when he learnt divinity and stayed in Europe. It was after that that he was always looked upon as the exotic other of the Whites who is a native of India, no matter that he was by then well versed in Christianity. But Abbé gets a recluse in the Nimes girls’ school for being a rebel against Christianity and since he took a Degree in Divinity in Rome and revolted against the National Convention in Paris and was elected a member of Medical Society in Marseille.

After being excluded by the Christian society as “mysterious”, he joins Nimes school. The Rector allows him to join the school after going through his profile. He indulges into “both UnGod- and UnChristian-like” and experiments with hypnotism which is referred to as the “magnetisime animal” by the Padre and others in the academy. Abbé is a victim of Christianity and so gets solace by practising anti- Christianity as a vent out for his vengeance against Christianity. For him, there exist two worlds one is that of Christianity from which he is excluded though not overtly “excommunicated” as the Member of Clergy says, and the other is the world of anti- Christianity where he indulges into experiments of hypnotism trying to assert his “mysterious” power and prove his ability to see things through dark. Abbé mesmerises a girl to heal her in Nimes and gets involved sexually with her in the process of healing her. Not only with the girl at Nimes but with the can-can dancer Michelle and with Madame Florimond. Abbé is represented as an adulterer who mesmerises women and commits sin. This can be closely related to what Mother Isabella says about the Indians with so much hatred in her. She expresses with uncontrollable anger which turns into anguish against the Indians, “They were guilty! They mocked my abstinence and charity: they were guilty. Their swarthy bodies: copulating like animals. The whiteness of   my   robe,   Abbé   Faria,   unsoiled   by   virginal   blood.   I   kept   my   vows.

Always…remained…unshaken. You must know…what it means coming from there. Shameful and humiliating…to a woman…bearing its compulsion…resisting…Man’s insatiable wickedness.” (22)

Abbé’s identity as an Indian also acts as a sense of guilt in him. In the dinner party at the house of the Countesse when the men talk about him as someone coming from the East, and so having mysterious powers, “He has mysterious powers, I know, coming from the East, he does…” (42) His identity itself makes him feel guilty and the character of the Indian males is synchronised with the sexual involvement of Abbé with three women in the play.

Finally, we see that Abbé becomes a victim of his own practise of hypnotism. When he asks the choir boy to speak after mesmerising him, the boy reveals the secret of Abbé and not his own. Abbé shuts the boy’s mouth out of fear. He wanted to hide his guilt all through and run away from it but the revelation of the boy exposes Abbé and then the playwright has nothing left to tell about Abbé. The greatest secret about Abbé is revealed. The act of revelation acts as an act of pacifying the guilt in Abbé.

Currimbhoy brings in the technical closure of the play with the freedom of Abbé’s burden. Soon after this, Abbé is found confined in an asylum and normal. Finally when Abbé is in the asylum and confined, imprisoned he is considered to be no more harmful as he forsakes his practise of hypnotism and so the Superintendent gives him the key but he lies within the room and writes and dies. This is symbolic of the confidence that the coloniser has after overcoming his threat of the colonised. Abbé being a colonised also symbolised the threat to the colonisers. He threatened them with his mysterious power of hypnotism or the animal magnetism. Later when the Negress, the voodoo woman comes in to share his skill of animal magnetism it becomes clear that the playwright’s intention is of showing a kind of brotherhood that is deeply felt amongst the colonised nations. Abbé is more “sinned against than sinning”, and this is what is indicated by him at the end when he says to the Superintendent of the asylum where he lives till his death: “I was wondering, how much humanity is needed…to make any condition supportable…” (62)

II

In all the three plays women are seen as victims of the male paranoia and obsession. Although the men Svetaketu, Andrew and Abbé suffer from guilt and are in delirium due to their individual conflict with religion, women become more victimised. Svetaketu’s affection for his wife shifts to the Divine. He tries to transcend the material world of reality forsaking his responsibility towards his wife. He tells her, “You make me more afraid” and expresses how her love can be a bondage for him. He expresses ruthlessly to her that her love is not greater than the desire or love for the Divine. But when Svetaketu talks of his death, his wife cannot bear his words:

WIFE: (voice close to scream) Don’t! Don’t say that! Don’t ever say that, my love. (she goes into his arms). Never say that. My life would end if you should die. Don’t die before me. Even in old age. I could not live without you…for I love you so. (18)

His wife is one of the daughters of Shakuntala2, who tries to bond her husband with her love but fails and is forsaken. She is deprived of the happiness of a wife.

In Act II, the woman is a daughter. She is ignorant of the Vedas and Upanishads and so innocent that she gets mesmerised by the song of the stranger. This threatens her father the old Svetaketu, who is already frightened by the knowledge and perception of

2

the stranger. However, the innocent attraction of the girl to the stranger could not be affected by the father who is corrupt and is a pretender practicing false religion. In the last act of the play, the female is a servant who belongs to the lower class than the class to which the men belong to. She is doubly oppressed because she is a woman and because she is from a lower class. At the end, she dies because she never gets the concern in the inevitable struggle of the men around her who always try to achieve something for only themselves. This symbolises the struggle with which a woman has to fight against her wishes and try to suppress them. She finds no space for herself in the world of men and sacrifices her own life at the end.

Monsoon is a sheer critic of how meek and powerless are women when they are oppressed through obsession. This play shows Andrew in a position of power who exploits a human life right from its beginning— Monsoon’s rape as a child,  her isolation in childhood. Andrew’s obsession with “purity and innocence of a virgin” becomes madness and he creates a death-in-life for Monsoon. Monsoon never takes the liberty of exceeding her limits even though she is left with the key. The play highlights the way Monsoon could perceive Andrew’s thoughts much before she is a grown up lady. Monsoon receives the teachings of Andrew. The repetitive teaching about the conception of Mother Mary through God by Andrew is a premeditated step. Andrew did not want the consummation to be recognised as a human activity and therefore, lifted it to a God-like act. He identified himself with God and Monsoon with Mother Mary. He was a symbol of patriarchy for Monsoon much as God was for Mary. Andrew uses the body of Monsoon, someone whom he calls “child” at the beginning and then the act of consummation which is adultery. Currimbhoy criticises the concept of “immaculate conception” through Andrew’s relation with Monsoon. Monsoon is an agent for his redemption.

Even when Dr. Juan asks her she says Andrew has taught her what she wanted to learn and it becomes strange that she herself never tried to go out of his house. At the end, Andrew tries to consummate with Monsoon’s child for achieving the redemption. But Monsoon kills her child before Andrew could her. Monsoon undergoes an extreme stage of brutality in every phase of her life. Monsoon had the wish of flying free like the love-birds although for short moments as she tells her daughter towards the end of the play, “ Sometimes I see them flying…outside, free…and I get a sudden yearning, which all too soon passes away….”(135).

The male/female dichotomy is made analogous to the learning/instinct dichotomy in the play. Andrew emphasises more on learning and experimenting and this is how he fools Daisy and tells the fortune of Daisy in a scene later. Andrew could tell easily what happened to Daisy and what would happen to her by just learning Daisy’s instincts. Andrew could manipulate Daisy easily. Andrew is a close learner of instincts and uses this against the people around, a way in which a coloniser would learn the colonised or the white would learn the native. On the other side emphasising the importance of instincts is Grandmother of the girl in the play. Grandmother always advised Monsoon to follow her instincts and what the ancestors said. Finally, Monsoon sensed  that Andrew would use his own daughter for his redemption. Andrew is a “white demon” which Monsoon expresses at the end to him because he had always tried to colonise her with his knowledge and his obsessions.

In Abbé Faria, Abbé’s relationships with the women are momentary and take place when he is under the affect of his hypnotic experiments. The white girl whom he

hypnotises at Nimes talks of the violence that was done on her body earlier and which was more bestial than done by Abbé. The woman speaks of her suffering due to violence and due to her desire. Currimbhoy allows the women to speak of the violation they go through—one being the instance of the girl at Nimes and the other being the instance of Mother Isabella.

The words of the nude woman covered by a sheet black veil who tells Abbé, “They don’t understand, Faria my love, do they, what drives you on to fulfilment and despair…There is no love so pure as our own, Faria, though you must bury me…alone…Beware, my love, there’ll be envy and hate wherever you go, and fear you they will…” (46-47) echo the bond that Abbé has with his motherland India. The words show the curse that Abbé has to bear through his life for being from the East and the estrangement that he will be met with. The woman in black veil symbolise his lost attachment to his country and therefore his mother. Mother Isabella is also such an image. She had to go to India because she was a White and had to be with the Indians whom she gradually despised. She was used by the Whites as an agent for colonisation and looked at by the natives as an object of desire. Mother Isabella’s hatred for the Indians is expressed through her abstinence from any sexual desire, denouncement and suppression of her sexual life.

IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION

Currimbhoy shows how the modern man carries the guilt like Svetaketu, Andrew and Abbé. This guilt becomes a paranoia leading them to seek redemption and chastise through themselves in ways which ultimately separates them from the society. The guilt germinates because they have gone against their religious conviction. In an attempt to redeem them, they indulge in more sin. The individual’s sense of guilt is also a contribution of the society as Carroll rightly puts, “What happens once culture fails to connect the individual to his fellowman in a way that will allow his guilt expression to be worked through, and out, in the social arena? Is it simply that guilt turns inwards and overwhelms its victim with depression?” And Currimbhoy’s plays show this to be true. Svetaketu, Andrew and Abbé shrink internally and externally exploit the women who become the target of such guilty men. Thus, Currimbhoy’s present plays delve deep into the ways in which religion affects humanity by creating absurd norms or rendering men to read the norms in absurd ways. Either religion renders men blind and makes them inhumane or men are blind followers of religion.

Works Cited:

Carroll, John. Guilt: The Grey Eminence behind Character, History and Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul plc., 1985. 1-5.

Cixous, Hélène “The Laugh of the Medusa”. Signs. Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. 875-93.

Currimbhoy, Asif. The Complete Plays Edition ABBÉ FARI. Calcutta:P.Lal, 1968. Currimbhoy, Asif. The Complete Plays Edition MONSOON.Calcutta:P.Lal, 1965. Currimbhoy, Asif The Complete Plays Edition OM. Calcutta: P.Lal, 1961.

Reddy, P.Bayappa. The Plays of Asif Currimbhoy. Calcutta: P.Lal, 1985.

Seybold, Kevin S. and Peter C. “The Role of Religion and Spirituality in Mental and  Physical  Health”  Current  Directions  in  Psychological  Science,  10.1  (Feb.,

2001), Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of Association for Psychological. Science. University of Hyderabad, Indira Gandhi Memorial Library. 2011.21-24.

Vice, Sue. Introducing Bakhtin. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997.

Assistant Professor,

L. C. Institute of Technology, Bhandu

Gujarat

Indian English literature originated as a necessary outcome of the introduction of English education in India under colonial rule. In recent years it has attracted widespread interest, both in India and abroad. It is now recognized that Indian English literature is not only part of Commonwealth literature, but also occupies a great significance in the World literature. Today, a number of Indian writers in English have contributed substantially to modern English literature. The legendary and hugely venerated Indian English literary personalities like Rabindranath Tagore’s Sadhana, R. K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days, and the later writers like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Manohar Malgaonkar’s The Devil`s Wind, V.S.Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel, Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines, etc. have ceaselessly captured the spirit of writing and establish a distinct identity. Besides them Indian women writers have also contributed a notable signification in English writing. Indian women writers have begun to gain international recognition since the publication of the Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things in 1997. In the last two decades there has been an astonishing flowering of Indian women writing in English.

Indian women novelists are popular for female subjectivity and their works depict their own identity. In the mid-nineteenth century, more women started to write in the English language. Women writers have incorporated the recurring female experiences in their writings and it affected the culture and language patterns of Indian literature. Over the years the world of feminist ideologies begun to influence the English literature of India. In ancient India, we find many times women’s rights and dignity are honoured. In the Shri Brihadaranyakopanishat – ‘Gargi is honoured as the spiritually advanced woman.’1 Even Manu, the first lawgiver of Hindus has insisted to honour the women:

“Women must be honoured and adorned by their fathers, brothers, husbands, and brothers-in- law, desire (their own) welfare.”2

“Where women are honoured, there the gods are pleased; but where they are not honoured, no sacred rite yields rewards.”3

Feminists insist on women’s liberation from patriarchal social structure and thinking. They boldly demand human rights and dignity of women who remained dumb and docile for centuries in the male-dominant world. As Sarala Palkar writes about the feminist movement: “This women’s liberation movement was initiated in the 1960s by women who were politically committed – women who were active participants in the civil rights movement or in the protest actions against the war in Vietnam or those who belonged to the various progressive or Marxist groups. It was their bitter experience of the blatantly sexist attitudes that were evinced by their male associates in these politically progressive movements that finally led women to form their

own groups and association.”4

Thus emerged the western feminism. Media plays a very significant role to spread the feminist ideology. It becomes now the global phenomenon. Writers like Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, Shashi Deshpande, Nayantara Sahgal and Gita Mehta have chosen the problems and issues faced by the women in today’s male dominated world as the main theme of their books. Among the other writers experimenting with the feminist ideology in Indian writing in English, Gita Mehta has a unique place in the literary world. She is uniquely Indian and her use of words presents the customs and traditions of the people of India. She does not write for the foreign readers. She is basically Indian and writes for the Indians. Gita Mehta, an eminent novelist has emerged as a writer possessing deep insight into the female psyche. Focusing on the marital relation she seeks to expose the tradition by which a woman is trained to play her subservient role in the family. Her novels reveal the man-made patriarchal traditions and uneasiness of the modern Indian woman in being a part of them. Gita Mehta uses this point of view of present social reality as at is experienced by women.

Gita Mehta was born in 1943 in Delhi. She belongs to the family of freedom fighters. Her father Biju Patnaik was an industrialist, flying ace, and the most renowned political leader as well Chief Minister of Orissa. Her younger brother Naveen Patnaik is presently the Chief Minister of Orissa. She took her early education in India and completed her higher education from the Cambridge University in UK. She started her career as journalist. During 1970s she was the television war correspondent for the US television network NBC. She also produced and directed 14 television documentaries for UK, European and US television networks. Her famous four documentaries on the Bangladesh revolution, Dateline Bangladesh, were shown in cinema halls both in India and abroad. She has also made films on elections in the former Indian princely states.

She started writing to share her varied experiences earned from her political and journalistic background. She married famous Ajai Singh “Sonny” Mehta, head of the Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. publishing house, which helped a lot to begin her writing career. Most of her writings are based on Indian culture, history and Western perception about it. Her books have been translated into 21 languages and been on the bestseller lists in Europe, the US and India. Set on the border between modernity and tradition, where personal freedom and cultural identity are at stake, Gita Mehta is convinced that her books are about the merging of cultures. Because of her journalistic background all of her books feature keen political insight and because of her family history- she is the daughter of Biju Patnaik- her books are smart investigations into Indian ideas, history, mythology and personalities. She has the unique opportunity to collect  the richness of living on three continents and it is this rarity of perspective that gives her a uniquely witty and frank ability to define her vision of India through her work. Though Mehta’s narrators are predominantly men, her themes often centre on expectations for women. The male narrator is an appropriate choice for a feminist perspective as it highlights the disparity in power between Indian men and women. She recognizes her power as a storyteller without trying to draw the reader to her side while she projects and defines a set of ideas, places, smells and traditions that make up modern India. In her writings, Mehta wrote two essay-collections: Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East and Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India, muse on things Indian, from politics and social unrest, the endless clash of religions and cultures, spirituality, and the Indian textile industry to Indian literature and film, and so on. She also wrote two novels: Raj, a historical novel set during the early stages of India’s struggle for independence from

Britain, and A River Sutra, a modern amendment of prevalent traditions of Indian aesthetic and philosophical thought.

Raj, Mehta’s first novel, highlights the issues of Hindu women in pre-independent and post-independent India in the very realistic way. Raj is evaluated:

“Gita Mehta weaves the story of Jaya, the princes of Balmer and Maharani of Shirpur. It is intricately interwoven with the political events but it has the tears and romance of a woman’s existence in India which saves the work from being a mere record of the all-too-well known history of our freedom struggle, or a racy account of the grandeur and frivolity of the exorbitant life-style of the princes.”5

Raj is a historical fiction but under the veil of historical event it represents a woman’s – Jaya’s – constant struggle to live with dignity. She learns the lesson from the Renaissance in her childhood. After marriage she struggles very hard as her husband does not treat her as a genuine life-partner. Eventually she loses her husband and her son also. But she is not disappointed. Ultimately she identifies her identity as a human being in the ‘New India’.

In Balmer, the first book of the novel, Maharaja Jai Singh is the ruler of Balmer, the small state of Rajsthan. Jaya Singh is the intelligent, beautiful, and compassionate daughter of Maharaja Jai Singh and Maharani of Balmer. When Jaya was born, her birth was not celebrated in a traditional way as her brother’s (Tikka’s). As a matter of fact the birth of girl is not celebrated due to orthodoxy. But Maharaja Jay Singh has different opinion on female-child birth. When Tikka, Jaya’s brother was tickling with a long peacock feather the baby cries but Jay Singh says: “This is not the sound of a crying baby. That is a battle cry. If the name is auspicious, let call her Jaya, Victory.” 6 While Maharani has different approach regarding her girl-child, Jaya. As a mother, she thought and insisted that Jaya should be educated in the traditional manner of the princesses of Balmer. She thought that the princess should be brought

up in a traditional way so she could adjust in her married-life. Maharaja wants to break the traditional ways of following Purdah. He thinks that Purdah is like an imprisonment  in  a beautiful veil, like a nightingale in the golden cage. So he wanted that his daughter, Jaya, was not to be raised in purdah. As a result of maharaja’s order, Mrs. Roy taught Jaya English language. Jaya also learnt polo and shooting. Not only that but she shot a tiger when she was at her ten.

Maharaja could see the future of his state and daughter in danger, so he wished Jaya must learn Rajniti, the lesson of Saam, Daam, Dand and Bhed. On the other hand Maharani wished Jaya must learn the knowledge of Solah Shringar, the sixteen arts of being a woman, as Jaya was at her twelve. The concubine taught Jaya about the status of woman in man and woman relationship;

“No one understands how the attraction between a man and a woman is born, Bai-sa. Even worse, no one understands why it suddenly dies. We poor creatures must use every aid to keep a man’s affections constant.”7

Thus Jaya is taught that she is a woman and woman’s duty is to please her man. As the time passes, very drastic changes occur in Jaya’s life. Her brother, Tikka, and her father, Maharaja Jai Singh, died and Maharani became widow. It is a harsh reality of our tradition that the widow is not treated with honour. Soon after Jaya’s marriage was arranged by Raja Man Singh with Prince Pratap. And thus Jaya is removed from her birth-place, Balmer in helpless condition. Maharaja’s extreme wish to train his daughter as a modern woman is not materialized.

The second book of the novel Sirpur is about the marital life of Jaya and her husband, Prince Pratap, in Shirpur, a small state in Assam. In this book we can find the shifting of Jaya from a dry and dead land of Balmer to a fertile land of Brahmputra. Here, in Shirpur, Jaya felt various dreadful experiences from her husband as well as from the Maharani of Shirpur. She realized about her status in her husband’s heart when Prince Pratap told her, “Remove you vile, Princess. Michel is my personal attendant. Please treat him exactly as you would one of my grandmother’s eunuchs.”8 Not only that but many times she was treated without human dignity by her husband. When Prince Pratap meets her first time after his arrival in Shirpur, he walked slowly around her looking at her breasts and says her, “Wash all that nonsense off your hands and feet. And change out of these Christmas decorations.”9

Jaya could also understand about the place of woman in society when Maharani brought her to the Kamini Temple and also asked that; “May your homage to the Goddess bring fruit to your womb and may you enrich our house with son.”10 Jaya as a devoted wife obeys everything whatever told by her husband. She started to learn the art of living life in a western way to please her husband. Eventually, Pratap was allowed to go to England along with Jaya. In England Jaya was known as the ‘Black Lotus’ who has rare smile on her face. Meanwhile, Victor, the elder brother of Pratap committed suicide and Prince Pratap has to return to India. At the end of the book, Pratap is declared the king of Shirpur and Jaya becomes Maharani.

In the third book Maharani Jaya became the Maharani of the state Shirpur. Inspite of being Maharani Jaya does not remove her pains. She expects eternal love, satisfaction of life, and human dignity from her husband. She realized the bitter truth that her husband only touches her when he is in drunken state. For Pratap Jaya’s love and status are no more important than a concubine. With the hope of love Jaya convinced the child and became a mother of a male-child. But her maternal rights are not allowed to her. Pratap exploits her and prevents her to feed her son, Arjun. Jaya tells her condition to lady Modi who taught her the art of living life in a western way:

“he can’t touch his own wife until she is turned into a toy who no longer represents a woman. Or until he himself is so drunk he can no longer pass for man. He shrinks from the sight of his wife giving breast to his son, but not from wearing his ancient crest on his feet to visit a brothel. Is this the conduct of a husband? Of a king? ”11

Jaya passes her life miserably. Her son is the only hope of her pleasure. Soon after, Pratap’s extramarital affair with the dancer became scandal. Jaya also realized that this is the time to demand her rights as the regent Maharani of Shirpur. Pratap also realized and he gives it in written. In due course, the freedom movement led by the Nationalists was going in full swing. The Britishers and their policy were strongly opposed. The worst situations emerged for the royal family of the state due to their favour to British. Meanwhile, Pratap met an accidental death and Jaya became widow. To follow the custom she broke her bangles for the acceptance of widowhood. Four years old Arjun is officially declared as the king of Shirpur and Jaya as the Regent Maharani of Shirpur.

The title of the forth book of the novel is Regent. It is a tragic time for Jaya because Raj Guru of Shirpur tries to keep Jaya away from the administration and from her son, Arjun declaring her as an unclean. Her widowhood was the curse on her. She was treated thus:

“There were no bangles to be slipped onto her wrists; no long minutes spent combing the thick hair that had once fallen to her knees, no sindoor to mark the circle of matrimony on her forehead. She did not even have to cover her shaven head. A widow was not  considered desirable, only unlucky.”12

Jaya knows very well that she is not accepted as Maharani but she taught of her son who was child-Maharaja of the state. She purifies herself in Holy River at Banaras. When she met her mother, Maharani of Balmer after ten years, her mother cannot tolerate the widowhood of her daughter. She conveyed her daughter to be strong and reminded the words of Sati Mata of Balmer; Ram Nam Sat Hai. Meanwhile, the National Congress of India launched ‘Quit India Movement’. It was the tough time for Sirpur and Jaya, also. Arjun, the Maharaja of Sirpur became victim of the riot and lost his life. It was a great loss of Jaya. She lost everything and became lonely. When she went to meet Raj Guru of Balmer to get advice, Raj Guru reminded the lesion of Rajniti, the wish of her father, Maharaja Jai Singh. Jaya followed the advice of Raj Guru and by taking the leadership of Sirpur, she allowed Sirpur State to merge with the United States of the Republic of India. In the Republic India She contested as the representative of her state as an independent candidate. The novel ends here.

Here we can find that Right from the Beginning to the end of the novel, Jaya suffers a lot. She struggles constantly throughout the whole novel. Mehta portrayed Jaya as a woman with resources and education raised half in and half out of the traditions of purdah and Hindu ritual that reigned unchanging for generations before her. In her childhood her father trained her in such a way so that she can overcome the crises. Many times she became the victim of injustice due to male dominant and orthodox society. She cannot oppose her husband Pratap even if he indulges in extramarital affair with another woman. She cannot resist Raj Guru of Shirpur when he declared her unclean due to her widowhood and kept apart from her son. But gradually, her education, lesions on modernity strengthen her to overcome each and every divert circumstances and make her able to raise her voice against injustice. As a result she is declared as the Regent Maharani of Shirpur. Not only that, but, at last she emerges as an independent woman of the Republic of India whom the Hindu orthodoxy cannot unjust. Thus it is not only the historical fiction only but a story of woman’s struggle to set her identity as a human being.

Mehta, in her second novel A River Sutra, throws light on Eco-feminism. Again she focuses on feminist issues in her novel. Before going forward, it is needed to explain the term ‘Eco-feminism’. The term is believed to have been coined by the French writer, Francoise d’Eaubonne in her book, Le Feminisme ou la Mort. ‘Eco-feminism’ is the social movement that regards the oppression of women and nature as interconnected. More recently, eco-feminist theorists have extended their analyses to consider the interconnections between sexism, the domination of nature (including animals), and also racism and social inequalities. Consequently it is now better understood as a movement working against the interconnected oppressions of gender, race, class and nature. In short, Eco-feminism connects the exploitation and domination of women with that of the environment, and argues that there is a connection between women and nature that comes from their shared history of oppression by a patriarchal Western society.

The concept of Eco-feminism receives a new different cultural context, in the hands of Indian women novelists. It is all about the woman’s equation with nature, and her act of reaching out to nature in her crises and despair. Coming close to nature, the woman imbibes the serenity

and strength of this unchanged, ‘immortal’ nature. In her novel, Mehta beautifully portrays the Narmada as a young and attractive woman. The river is presented as an organic being full of human emotions as the narrator tells us:

“I can hear the heart beat pulsing under the ground before she reveals herself at last to the anchorites of Shiva deep in meditation around the holy tank of Amarkantak.”13

And then,

“The stream took the form of woman – the most dangerous of her kind: a beautiful virgin innocently tempting even ascetic to pursue her, inflaming their lust by appearing at one moment as a lightly dancing girl, as yet another as a romantic dreamer, at yet another a seductress loose limbed with the lassitude of desire.”14

In A River Sutra Mehta mainly explores the nature-woman relationship from a special context which also represents the essential Indianness of the novel. Last three stories among the six of the novel underscore the above theme in different ways. Particularly the last story of the novel, The Minstrel’s Story is remarkable in the context of present study.

The Minstrel’s Story is divided into two parts: the first part is about a girl-child and a Naga monk who saved her form a brothel and gave her new birth. Where as the second part of the story is about a minstrel (the grown up girl) and the Naga monk who re-enters mainstream life as Professor Shankar. In the beginning, the girl is just an exploited, abused child, who does not even have a name. She was just called ‘misfortune’ by her father because her mother had died on her birth. She belonged to a poor labourer’s family. Her father and three brothers worked breaking stones by the roadside. The child narrates – quite unemotionally – a story which is a grim reality so common in such homes:

“I was never allowed to eat until everyone else had eaten. So I was always hungry. And I was beaten by my father.”15

Then the girl was sold out to a brothel. Here she had been sexually abused inspite of being a child. The customers called her ‘Chand’; because, they said, her skin was ‘soft’ as moonlight. It suggests that the child’s body had been touched, examined and enjoyed by the customers. Even the monk’s first glimpse of the child also evidences this. As he came to the brothel to take alms on the light of Shiva, he found that a child was cowering behind a plastic- covered sofa, her face twitched with pain as a man gripped her chin in one hand. With his other hand the man lifting the child’s small body to bring her lips close to his own.

Somehow, the child was saved by the monk and then taken into the dense jungle far away from locality and finally taken across the Narmada. Here, she starts her new birth, new life, learns many new things in the lap of nature (Narmada), and is endowed a new name ‘Uma’. Monk helps her to take her plunge in the cold water so that she can be the daughter of Narmada. After a holly dip a new life begins for the child. Gradually, she grew up into a minstrel of Narmada and respected as a ‘singer-saint’ at temple-festivals. Her songs on  Narmada  also suggest the equation of the two. Both are twice-born. Narmada is twice-born: first from the water and then from Shiva’s penance. And Uma also, like the river Narmada, is twice-born: first from the monk’s penance and then from his love. There are many descriptions we can find in the novel which makes similarity between Uma and the river. Mehta describes the river as a desirable woman like Uma, who yearns to meet her Lord of Rivers (like Uma yearns to meet her husband). Later, the Naga Baba re-enters as Prof. Shankar in Uma’s life after three years. He came back to her to fulfill all her desires. At the end Prof. Shankar takes her to her husband, Rudra.

The Courtesan’s Story told by the courtesan and her daughter to the narrator. The story is about a mother, a courtesan and it manifesting the situation where the woman is treated as a consumer’s goods, an instrument of pleasure, and a priced commodity. The courtesan narrates how she failed to protect her daughter from the growing indignity around her. Her daughter is abducted by a dangerous bandit, Rahul Singh, a victim of this heartless society, and finally, they two come to love each other. Their only shelter is the forest on the banks of the Narmada. Eventually, Rahul Singh dies of an injury through an ambush with the police. The helpless girl ends her life in the Narmada and even her mother takes it lightly as if it were a perfectly normal thing. The girl reaches out to the river Narmada because Narmada is the only shelter for her to avoid all the terrible situations. She is scared to imagine her life ‘the life of a courtesan’ and ‘the life of a bandit’s wife’, so she turns to the Narmada (nature) as the only escape to avoid her despair and crisis.

The Musician’s Story reflects the identicality between the pursuits of a woman and the spontaneity of river (nature). In this story the musician tries to focus similarity between nature and music. As the musician teaches her daughter to sing, he instructs her to “imagine a raga as a river bed. You must think yourself as the water washing over stone, shaping it with the relentless touch of your love.”16 Soon after she herself tried to be the water to the river of her beloved’s raga. Later on (after being jilted) she reaches out to the river Narmada with the hope to get restored to her inspiration and still she hopes.

Thus, the woman and the nature have been made to appear extensions of each-other. The woman so long as she is under the clutches of the cynical society is crushed, tortured. But once she is allowed to come to nature, as ascetic, she is restored to the process of being, becoming, and fulfillment in which she becomes a representative of the great river itself.

Works Cited:

1. ‘Shri Brihadaranyakopaishat’, Shri Upanishado published by Shri Anand Ashram Bilakha, 1999, 3:8:1 to 3:8:12
2. ‘The Laws of Manu’, Sacred Book of the East ed. by P. Max Muller, Vol. XXV. Motilal Banarasi Das, Delhi: Varanasi: Patna, 1964, p. 85.

3.   Ibid., p.85.

• Palkar, Sarala. ‘Feminist Literary Theory: Creating New Maps’, Critical Practice, January 1995, Vol. II, No. 1, p. 137.
• Bande, Usha. ‘Raj: A Thematic Study’, Indian Women Novelists, Vol. 5 ed. By R. K. Dhawan, Prestige, New Delhi, 1991, p. 239.
• Mehta, Gita. Raj, Penguin Books, India, 1993, p.39. 7.   Ibid., p. 98.

8.   Ibid., p. 190.

9.   Ibid., p. 189.

10. Ibid., p. 185.

11. Ibid., p. 329.

12. Ibid., p. 355

1. Mehta, Gita. A River Sutra, New Delhi: Viking. 1993, p. 7.
2. Ibid., p. 8.

15. Ibid., p. 249-250

16. Ibid., p. 215

Assistant professor of English Mata Sundri College,

Delhi University.

Of all the blooms that decked the pews, so splendid in their vibrant hues,

the fragrant rose buds caught most eyes, holding the promise of long lives.

Yet outside on the dusty road, there lay a rose bud dirt-cloaked,

and hurrying feet to its beauty blind, buried it deeper till it died.

Thus embraced the lowly earth, another child in early death,

a tiny moment unheeded, unsought, no one to miss it, hidden by frost.

Cold it was and nature cried,

but colder still the hearts that shied, from picking up that helpless bud, choking lonely pleas to be loved.

And still goes on the cruel round

of crushing, stifling innocence bound, till we no longer hear the sound

of falling tears that sink the ground.

M.A. English (Semester III) Centre for English Studies

School of Language, Literature and Cultural Studies

Jawaharlal Nehru University, India.

Mud and sewage and the stink of Everyday excrement

Rotting minds

Wilting in the odour of

A putrid world, with no breath Or fresh air to save a

Dying soul of

The one with that thing between her legs.

Blood and dirt, and food staining The front and back of the

Worn cloth hanging on a bony frame With curling toes that are

Stumbling on the uneven ground Beneath cracking feet, Scratched and bruised heavily – Like that thing between her legs.

Walking and looking Towards nowhere particular, Aimless, in search for that Which she does not know,

With that unclean and diseased, Purpled, often bleeding Stinging, and painful

Thing between her legs.

Dancing and flying, Redeemed and cured at last – Or perhaps never rising

From the depths of the darkness Of a decaying body with

A decayed mind, festering silently The rest that would have been healthy But for that thing between her legs.

Research Scholar Department of English

Bangalore University

“18th-century women inhabited houses that were nearly always exclusively owned and dominated by men, and as there was virtually no exterior existence for these women, it is natural that the world inhabited by Austen’s heroines would have been one of interiority.” (Berglund. p. 14)

Contrary to popular opinions of critics, that of Austen as a writer who portrays the submissive and regressive role of women in society, Austen’s primary concern in all her novels is to find a role for women in the conventional society of her times. Women in the late eighteenth century England, were relegated to secondary roles in such a patriarchal society with respect to property and social responsibilities; for instance, women were not permitted to visit new arrivals to the neighborhood (such as Mr. Bingley in Pride and Prejudice 1813) until the male head of their household had first done so. Women in Jane Austen’s times could inherit only if there are no male-line heirs left, and if there is more than one sister, then they are all equal co-heiresses, rather than only the eldest member having better prospects of inheritance. Women however, are in a unique situation in such an economy; they are important consumers but they have no means of generating income. Unlike Charlotte Bronte who showed her displeasure to Victorian Society which did not recognize women as pivotal, Austen tries to give a vivid picture of her times as realistically as possible. Writing just before Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. Wollstonecraft’s text focuses and challenges the existence of women as second-class citizens around this time; Wollstonecraft does not deny the physical superiority of men, but this is just about the only way she finds men to be better than women.Wollstonecraft heavily laments the reality that society has constructed itself on the principle that men are in every way superior to women by virtue of the law of nature, and society thereby requires women to act accordingly. It is this basic principle that explains why women were excluded from things like participation in legislative discussions surrounding marriage and it is this idea that Wollstonecraft channeled her energy in working against. Women who were regarded as the more emotional, unstable, weak, and poorer of the sexes could only come to benefit and improvement by being under the direct control of more powerful, strong, and influential men.

On the other side, Ms. Austen differs from her predecessor; though critical of the prevailing conditions of life for women, she accepted the limitations of feminine existence. Only a rather small number of women were what could be called professionals, who though their own efforts earned an income sufficient to make themselves independent, or had a recognized career. Jane Austen herself was not really one of these few women professionals. During the last six years of her life she earned an average of a little more than £100 a year by her novel-writing. In Jane Austen’s time, there was no real way for young women of the “genteel” classes to strike out on their own or be independent. Professions, the universities, politics, etc. were not open to women. Almost every historian and literary critic of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century agrees that a primary definition of “work” for women during this period would be some form of sewing or needlework. (Wilson 167; Lieb 29) According to Parker,

“. . . the term was engendered by an ideology of femininity as service and selflessness and the insistence that women work for others, not for themselves.” (p 6)

Lower or working class women learn plain sewing (the sewing of domestic garments), and a young woman might even be trained to be a ‘. . . Mantua-maker’ (Le Faye p 125), making garments not just for the family but for other women to wear to the various balls; Women of the gentry or aristocracy learn sewing as ornamentation and as a social skill, useful in moments of emotion or ennui.

Excellent needlework skills were a sign that a young woman was prepared to take up her “work” in society, which Engle man has defined in reference to genteel women in eighteenth- century Salem, Massachusetts, but which applies equally to Regency England: “. . . no matter what her station was in life, a woman’s job was to marry wealthily, manage wisely, and mother well” (Engle man P 143). As critics have shown, sewing also provides the means by which a woman negotiates life in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, through communal sewing with other women, women’s acceptable work of sewing confine them to standards of quiet and patience is opposed to the activity of writing, a far more subversive fabrication of words that could potentially, as in the words of Mary Wollstonecraft, challenge society’s prejudices.The sewing that she does provide the women means for her support, although she is clearly living under financially difficult circumstances. Apart from the small vocations of sewing, embroidery etc, marriage for women in general as for Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice (1813), was the only honorable profession.

In rural communities there might be no physician within reach, and thus simple home doctoring remedies for herself and others were a necessary part of a Lady’s knowledge; few would willingly undertake the profession as nurses were generally thought of as without skills or morality& paid less. The other feasible option for women was being a governess i.e. a live-in teacher for the daughters or young children of a family or marrying into money. Unlike the present times where teaching is considered a noble profession, women who worked as governess were considered inferior, were not highly respected, and did not generally pay well or have very good working conditions. There is a sense of awkwardness when Emma refers to Jane Fairfax’s occupation as a governess. Talking to Mr. Frank Churchill, she asks:

“You know Miss Jane Fairfax’s situation in life, I conclude? What she is destined to be?. . . “You get upon delicate subjects, Emma,” said Mrs. Weston smiling; “. . . Mr. Frank Churchill hardly knows what to say when you speak of Miss Fairfax’s situation in life. I will move a little farther off.”(EmmaCh. 6)

Emma’s hesitant pause and remark reflects the attitude of the conventional society of her times. Hence, women during Austen’s time were afflicted with the twin problem of attaining economic security and in the same context achieving symphonic relation within the family. Marriage offered a solution to both these problems; some women were willing to marry just because marriage was the only allowed route to financial security, or to escape adisagreeable family situation. Thisquandary is expressed most clearly by the character Charlotte Lucas, whose pragmatic views on marrying are voiced several times in the novel:

Without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want. (P&P Ch. 22)

Charlotte is twenty seven, not especially beautiful, and without an especially large fortune and so decides to marry Mr. Collins “. . . from the pure and disinterested desire of an establishment.” (P&PCh. 22) Thus, working women were not given respect in society and spinsterhood was an option for women who had a considerable fortune to fall on. According to Baker,

“Single women (including widows) were generally treated the same as men for the purposes of private law, save that the rules for inheriting real property favoured males before females in the same degree of kinship” ( Baker  P 466)

Unmarried women also had to live with their families or with family-approved protectors; it is almost unheard of for a genteel young and never-married female to live by herself, even if she happened to be an heiress. Thus, when Lady Catherine says: “Young women should always be properly guarded and attended, according to their situation in life” (P&PCh. 37) she holds a mirror to the prevalent attitude of society of her times. When a young woman leaves her family without their approval or leaves the relatives or family-approved friends or school where she has been staying, this is considered very serious, symptom of a radical break. Only in the relatively uncommon case of an orphan heiress who has already inherited i.e. who has “come of age” and whose father and mother are both dead, can a young never-married female set herself up as the head of a household and even here she must hire a respectable older lady to be a “companion“. When Emma jokingly refers to herself as an old maid; there is a sense of fear of ending up lonely which was reflective of the majority of the women of her times. Jane Austen herself wrote in one of her letters to Fanny Knight:

“Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor-which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.”(Chapman p 483)

Therefore, a woman who did not marry could generally only look forward to living with her relatives as a `dependant’ more or less Jane Austen’s situation, so that marriage is pretty much the only way of ever getting out from under the parental roof unless, of course, her family could not support her, in which case she could face the unpleasant necessity of going to live with employers as a `dependant’ governess or teacher, or hired “lady’s companion”. On one occasion  Mrs. Bennet admonishes Elizabeth:

“If you go on refusing every offer of marriage, you will never get a husband …and I am sure I do not know who is to maintain you when your father is dead.”(P&P Ch. 20)

This was the maternal fear of the majority of the women who wanted their daughters to settle down well as early as possible in life. Austen herself seems to have changed her outlook towards marriage through the course of her novels. In the early novels the heroines possess values that simply outshine the harsh conditions of economic worlds that are capricious, for ex; in Mansfield Park (1814), Fanny’s personal integrity defeats Mr. Crawford’s fortune, while in the later novels Austen is more worldly wise and makes her women take more control of their fates through active engagement with the economy. A woman with no relations or employer was in danger of slipping off the scale of gentility altogether,and in general, becoming an “old maid” was not considered a desirable fate. Ex; Lydia says “Jane will be quite an old maid soon, I declare. She is almost three and twenty!”(P&PCh. 39)The estate as it lies solely in the hands of men and thus cannot provide her heroines with an active, managing role in the new economy. As Copeland remarks, “Finding an important and responsible role for women in these circumstances is central in Austen’s works.” (Pp. 77-90)Jane Austen’s novels on one hand celebrate the rise of the pseudo gentry, but by and large address the fate of women in that society. In Pride and Prejudice (1813) Elizabeth and Jane

will have only 1,000 pounds each due to their father’s irresponsibility but they are lucky enough to be married to Darcy and Bingley who are sufficiently rich. Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park (1814) is as much driven to marriage by property as Maria Bertram, through whom Wollstonecraft’s argument is expressed that a woman’s survival in the early nineteenth century depended on her making a good marriage which provided money and property. Maria Bertram settled for a marriage to Mr. Rush worth because it ‘. . . would give her the enjoyment of a larger income . . . as well as ensure her the house in town’ (Mansfield Park Ch.4) Her brother Edmund is the only one in the family to disapprove:

“He could allow his sister to be the best judge of her own happiness, but he was not pleased that her happiness should centre in a large income. . .” (Mansfield Park Ch4)

Both the Bertram sisters and Mary Crawford feel they must marry for property as it confirms their survival. When Fanny refuses Henry Crawford she is considered as senseless. Without education and the possibility of owning property themselves, they had to rely on the marriage market for survival. These women became adept in marketing themselves for property by choosing to behave in a way which made them a desirable commodity for men to buy and sell on the marriage market. The parallel this has with slavery is drawn subtly in Mansfield Park with reference to Sir Thomas’ plantation in Antigua. When Edmund explains to Fanny how pleased Sir Thomas is with the development of her character, alluding to her making a good wife. Fanny appears to change the subject in her question ‘. . . did you not hear me ask him about the slave trade?’ (Mansfield Park Ch. 21) Ms. Austen delicatelyexemplifies the skewed relationship between women and marriage as a form of slavery which maintains their subservience. Thus, patriarchal society is reinforced with the way their own ‘. . . propriety would keep everyone in [their] right place and ensure that everything would be done as it ought to be’ (Neale p 95.) According to Neale, the patriarchal structure of early nineteenth-century society ruled that ‘. . . women can only be what property makes them’ (p 98.) Therefore their survival relied on the adherence to a certain kind of propriety which privileged men and gained women property through marriage, but in turn kept them subordinate and uneducated. Sense and Sensibility (1811) may well be the first English Realistic novel based on its detailed and accurate portrayal of getting and spending in an English gentry’s family. The novel in fact opens with an act of familial ingratitude: Henry dash wood’s uncle secures the major part of his fortune for the benefit of John dash wood’s four year old son, thereby completely discounting all the attention which for years he had received from his niece and her daughters, the greed of John dash wood’s prevent any help to these women. On a biographical level Jane Austen had to face a similar predicament when her father Reverend George Austen died in bath in January 1805. A problem of practical nature faced Jane, her mother and her sister; how to sustain a living? The Church of England did not make any provisions for the widows and children of Clergymen, thus the Austen women were completely dependent on the men in the family to live a life of dignity. As Dr. Sushila Singh notes,

With her meticulous fidelity to the truth of contemporary life she could not have turned a blind eye to the shortcomings of women in that age of meager opportunities for their advancement. (p76)

CONCLUSION:The role of women in society was not clearly defined unlike for men who had to deal with clear cut roles of a provider, protector of the family. Thus, Household management was one area which was dominated by them. House-keeping was a full time occupation in its own right within the confines of the home; they could showcase their skills as efficient managers. Though the heavy work was delegated to servants, she had to manage everything; engage, instruct and supervise domestic servants; educate the children, manage domestic accounts and not run into

debt, educate her children, be a sociable hostess and maintain good relations with the neighboring Gentry. Thus, when Marianne Dashwood married Colonel Brandon, . . . she found herself at nineteen, submitting to new attachments, entering on new duties, placed in a new home, a wife, the mistress of a family, and the patroness of a village.”(S&SCh. 50)

In contrast, Mrs. Croft is her husband’s partner in economic decisions. On the occasion of renting Kellynch Hall, the Admiral and his wife meet Mr. Shepherd. After the discussions Mr. Shepherd remarks to Sir Walter: “… asked more questions about the house and terms and taxes than the admiral himself and seemed, conversant with business.” (Persuasion Ch 1)

Society of Austen’s time did not encourage a woman to cross the boundaries into male dominated sphere, and took a less tolerant view of them. Jane Austen herself had to write her initial novels under a pseudonym as writing was not considered a profession for women. Jane Austen accentuates in all her novels that parents play an important role for their children’s success or failure in life. In the institution of marriage by giving the female an equal footing with male and giving her a dominant role in the domestic sphere Austen has successfully carved a role for the women. With this social responsibility they play an effective role in promoting the idea of stability on the domestic sphere which in turn will give the larger society the much needed stability.

Works Cited:

Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility. United Kingdom: T. Egerton, 1811. Print.

— .      Pride and Prejudice.  United Kingdom: T. Egerton, 1813. Print.

— .      Mansfield Park. United Kingdom:  T. Egerton, 1814. Print.

— .      Emma. United Kingdom:   A. Bertrand, 1815. Print.

— .      Persuasion.   England:  John Murray, 1817 (posthumous). Print.

Baker, J.H. An Introduction to English Legal History. Bath, England: The Bath Press, 2002. Print

Berglund, Birgitta.   Women’s Whole Existence: House as an Image in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen. Sweden: Lund University Press, 1993.

p.14. Print.

Chapman, R.W. Ed. Jane Austen’s Letters to her sister Cassandra and Others.  2ndEd. London: Oxford University Press, 1952. Print.

Copeland, Edward. “Jane Austen and the Consumer Revolution”. The Jane Austen Handbook. Ed. Gray. J.  David.  Great Britain: The Athlone press, 1986. (Pp. 77-90) Print. Engleman, Elysa.  “Needlecraft and Wollstonecraft: A Case Study of Women’s Rights and Education in Federal Period Salem, Massachusetts.”   In Painted with Thread: The Art of American Embroidery.                       Ed.    Paula Bradstreet Richter.    Salem, Mass.: Peabody Essex Museum, 2001. (Pp141-47)

Goodnow, Minnie.  Nursing History in brief.  2nd ed. revised. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1943. Print.

Groves, Sylvia. The History of Needlework tools and Accessories.  London: Country Life Limited, 1966. Print.

Le Faye, Deirdre. Jane Austen: The World of her Novels.   England: Frances Lincoln ltd, 2002. Print.

Le Faye, Deirdre. Ed.  Jane Austen’s Letters. 3rd Ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Print.

Lieb,  Laurie  Yager.     “‘The  Works  of  Women  are  Symbolical’:  Needlework  in  the Eighteenth Century.” Eighteenth Century Life. 10 May 1986 (2): 28-44. Print.

Neale, R.S. Writing A Marxist History: British Society, Economy and Culture since 1700. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985. Print.

Parker, Roszika.    The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. London: The Women’s Press Ltd., 1984.

Singh, Sushila.  Jane Austen: Her Concept of social Life. New Delhi: S. Chand and Company Ltd, 1981. Print.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the Wrongs of Woman, or Maria. Ed. Anne Mellor and Noelle Chao. New York: Pearson Education, 2007. Print.

Ph.D Scholar/ Research Centre of English Language & Literature V.V.Vanniaperummal college for women, Virudhunagar 626 001.

TamilNadu , India.

Human relationships are innate and key bondage throughout the Universe. Human hearts are bonded with sensitive chords of family ties. In this neo-colonial era, when chords of family bondage is stretched across continents and generations, it changes it gets debilitated. The largely heterogeneous culture in the diasporic family space gives way to conflicts and complex pattern of relationship. This paper prompts to scrutinize how do family ties and family loyalty transmute in the process of immigration with reference to Chitra Banerjee’s “Mrs.Dutta Writes a Letter” and Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Unaccustomed Earth”.

Diasporic Family Space

Human relationships are an integral and intrinsic part of humanity. “Home is where you move frequently through the dark”. (Divakaruni 117) (qtd. in Sandhya 205). It is at home, human hearts are connected with sensitive chords of family bondage. Such family bondage is at the crossroads in the immigrant families. The era of globalization and constant relocations across countries have redefined the concepts of home and family bondage in the context of

neo-colonialism. The largely heterogeneous culture in the diasporic family space gives way to conflicts and complex pattern of relationship. The first generation Indian American community, attempts to inscribe the Indian cultural ethos in the new immigrant country. But the second generation imbibes the American mainstream culture and disapproves of their parents’ proximity to the ancestral ‘home’ culture. As a result both the generations live in different cultural worlds with much acculturation discrepancies which results in family discord.

This paper analyses two short stories of Bengali-American female writers – Chitra Banerjee’s “Mrs.Dutta Writes a Letter” and Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Unaccustomed Earth”. The core of analysis has been prompted to scrutinize the vigour of family bondage in diasporic family space against the backdrop of generational conflicts and cultural identity crisis. The word ‘space’ here suggests not just a geographical location, but a vigorous interactive network of relations. Foucault asserts that, space is fundamental in any form of communal life:

The space in which we live […] is also in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things […] we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not super imposable on one another. (http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html).

Ruma’s mother – a cultural anchor

Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story collection Unaccustomed Earth (2008) discusses the problem of complicated intergenerational relationships reviewed from migrant’s perspective. Chitraleka Basu in her review of Unaccustomed Earth rightly opines: “Lahiri’s hall marks are an extraordinarily sensitive understanding of the mutability of human relationships and the skilled

detailing of these emotions”. The title story “Unaccustomed Earth” focuses on the renegotiated relationship between Ruma and her father. She reckons her natal family as a source of shelter and support for her “alternatal family”. Natal family denotes the family into which one is born. Alternatal family is the coinage of Ambreen Hai, by which he means family of procreation, the family one creates through marriage. ( 185 ).

Ruma in her late thirties, with a young sibling Akash and expecting another one in neo- colonial America, longs for maternal comfort with the sudden demise of her mother. Ruma cannot resist mourning her mother’s empty space, which leads her to emotional alienation. Ruma’s life is at two different poles before and after her mother’s death. Ruma was exhausted by her domestic chores with the absence of her mother and her fruitful advice. Taking care of Akash took Ruma’s full concern leaving little room for socializing. She is so disinterested in everything that she avoids human ties and social relationship in Seattle. Ruma’s social isolation and her solitude lead to discontentment and frustration. The death of her mother rendered such a shock that had brought tremendous effect on her conjugal life. Whatever freedom and happiness Adam tries to provide Ruma, she finds herself estranged from her spouse Adam and feels the sense of void in her life.

The role of mother in a family is a crucial one, who not only nourishes the family but also nurtures the social, cultural values, customs and tradition. Ruma’s mother represents cultural anchor in the family with her deep-seated Bengali roots. She never allows her children to speak other than Bengali. She dissuades Ruma to marry an American because she worries that marrying a Euro-American will eclipse Ruma’s Indian identity. But when the marriage works out she begins to love Adam as a son, whenever visiting Ruma’s home, she would always bring a picnic cooler filled with homemade mishti, elaborate, syrupy, cream-filled concoctions which Ruma has never learnt to make and Adam loved. Ruma’s mother is very keen in introducing Indian traditions to her American-son-in law through her Indian cuisines. It supplies a bond between Indian mother-in-law and American-son-in-law, but this bondage is severed with the demise of Ruma’s mother. Ruma is unable to concoct her mother’s Indian dishes. She is impuissant to translate her ancestral Bengali cultural values to her fledging family without the cultural anchorage of her mother. Ruma still needed her mother but,” her mother no longer existed. Where had her mother gone, when life persisted, when Ruma still needed her to explain so many things?” (UE 59)

Complicated Father-Daughter relationship

Ruma’s  bondage  with her  mother  undergoes  a  gradual  evolution  in  her  middle  age resulting in close affinity between them. The void between Ruma and her father seems to grow bigger after her mother’s permanent absence. While Ruma is totally unmoored with her mother’s loss, his father seems to be unaffected and untouched by it. He “wipes out her mother’s presence” (UE 6) by selling the family house and started travelling all around Europe, enjoying the freedom of a widower. The fragmented and incomplete sentences referring to his schedule and travel updates  aptly  exemplify  the  shattered  father-daughter  bond.  Yet  the  story  unfolds  several glimpses of fatherly concern and affection during his visit to Ruma.

Ruma’s father willfully performed many household duties and of a great help to Ruma. He takes the role of nurturing grandfather for Akash. He sows the seeds of Bengali cultural customs within Akash such as taking off shoes inside the house, eating with fingers and learning

Bengali words – the customs which Ruma has abandoned. He is a supportive “feminist father” who insists on significance of self-reliance in his daughter’s life. He encourages his daughter not to sacrifice her career as a lawyer for the sake of motherhood: ‘Work is important Ruma. Not only for financial stability. For mental stability” (UE 38). Ruma’s father realizes how much Ruma is inextricably interlinked with her mother despite her rootedness in American soil. She engrossed herself in the chain of domestic chores, renouncing her career, ambitions and possibilities concerning self-realization. The moments of self-doubts and insecurity, the feelings of alienation and isolation are passed down from her mother as parts of genetic predispositions. Ruma’s father ruminates:

“Like his wife, Ruma was now alone in this new place, over-whelmed, without friends, caring for a young child, all of it reminding him, too much, of the early years of his marriage, years for which his wife has never forgives him” (UE 40).

Thus children are contaminated by their parent’s migrant experience and parent-child kinship may be regarded as a continuation of the dialogue between past and present. Stuart Hall rightly claims in his essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”: “Cultural identity is not a fixed essence” but a “positioning “constructed through memory and narrative”. (113).

Pull between American mores and Ancestral roots

As a second generation Diaspora, Ruma displays typical signs of assimilation and alienation from Bengali customs, a change noticed by her father as his children grew up:

“The more the children grew, the less they seemed to resemble either parent – they spoke differently, dressed differently, seemed foreign in every way, from the texture of their hair to the shapes of their feet and hands” (UE 54).

Lev Grossman’s assertion in Time that “everyone in Lahiri’s fiction is pulled in at least six directions at once” is true with Ruma; she is torn between sense of self and filial duty, American mores and ancestral Bengali roots and also between natal and fledging family. She enjoys bliss of American individualism regarding the crucial decision of education, marriage, job and ultimately her way of life. But there is a pull of ancestral culture and value system of her parents’ homeland underneath her, creates a tension within her. It is because of this pull, she preferred to follow her mother’s life style of a homemaker. “Growing up, her mother’s example moving to a foreign place for the sake of marriage, caring exclusively for children and a household – had served as a warning, a path to avoid. Yet this was Ruma’s life now” (UE 11).

Ruma struggles to continue her Bengali tradition by teaching Akash some Bengali words in babyhood. But when he grows out of his babyhood she switches to English, feeling that “Bengali had never been a language in which she had felt like an adult. Her own Bengali was slipping from her.” (UE 12). Her sense of self as being incompletely Indian is connected to her incomplete mastery of Bengali language. Werner Sollors has defined the essence of ethnicity as any boundary-constructing processor that function as markers between groups (192). Food and Language are important cultural markers. Ruma is inept to import these two cultural markers in her “alternatal” family. Ruma inherited the legacies of physical appearance from her mother but with bottom level of cultural legacies.

She drifts away from her Bengali roots with her scanty Bengali words and unskilled cookery of Indian food. Ruma stumbles to walk a tight rope between Indian and American identities and cuts a sorry figure in negotiating her cultural identity. Her inability to read her father’s letter in Bengali focuses Ruma’s feeling of being out of touch with her ‘self’, her family and her heritage. Ruma’s stance proves the notion of Lowenthal that remembering the past is crucial for our sense of identity and the lack of link to ancestral (personal) history, may lead to the disruption of self-continuity and personal integration. ( 197).

Conflict between family bondage and self-identity

Ruma was indecisive of including her widowed father in her fledging family network. She was a bit reluctant to perform the huge duties towards her father. Though Ruma’s father openheartedly praised whatever Ruma managed to prepare, she could not imagine tending to her father with delicious Indian meals as her mother used to cook. She feared that her father would become an added responsibility in her life. “It would mean an end to the family she’d created on her own: herself and Adam and Akash” (UE 7). While Ruma develops a harmonious bonding with her mother after maternity, her kinship with her father proves to be a static and distant one.

Ruma’s father rejected Ruma’s offer to stay with her, as his psyche is preoccupied with bliss of American individualism and sense of self-identity. Besides achieving the outlook of a Native American he has imbibed the core of American life style as a “paradoxical gift” (Said 336) of immigrant experience. He found free from the shackles of family ties with the loss of his life partner. Loneliness could not engulf his liberating existence. He took trips so often, which offers him a new companion Mrs,Bagchi, a widowed Bengali-American  professor. He is unwilling to disclose his new found “(non-procreative) alternatal alliance” (Ambreen Hai 197) to Ruma, knowing that Ruma will not justify his stand to replace her mother’s space with Mrs.Bagchi. He has a preference for self-reliant living,  than to live with his daughter. He justified his decision this way, which also testifies his fragile bondage with his own natal family. The following text signifies how Ruma’s father turned on his back on his parents in the name of ambitions and accomplishments, which the cross cultural space has offered to him :

Ruma hadn’t been raised with that sense of duty. She led her own life, had made her own decisions, married an American boy. He didn’t expect her to take him in… For what had he done, when his father was dying and his mother left behind?… there was no question of moving the(alternatal) family back to India and also no question of his eighty year old widowed mother moving to Pennsylvania (UE 29, emphasis added).

Ruma’s father- a source of shelter and support

Family is the site of restriction for Ruma’s father from which he wants to break away to form a new self, a new composite identity. He wants to maintain a distance between  his individual self and his family and so he rejects Ruma’s offer to stay with her  in  Seattle. Moreover Ruma’s father is not interested in putting down roots again with his daughter’s family on the West coast after re-rooting as an immigrant in the East coast. Instead he helps Ruma how to cope with parental loss and put down roots in her new home. Lahiri elaborates this key issue through the central figure of gardening:

[…] in honor of his wife, a small hydrangea. In a plot behind the kitchen, unable to resist, he also put in a few tomatoes along with marigolds. […] He spaced out the delphiniums, tied to stuck some gladiola bulbs into the ground.[…] He looked over Akash’s little plot, the dirt carefully mounded up around his toys, pens and pencils stuck into the ground (UE 49)

Ruma’s father cultivates her barren backyard by various elements such as his Bengali wife’s favourite hydrangea, American daughter’s needs (Indian and American vegetables) and American grandson’s toys and garbage collection. Ruma’s barren backyard signifies her dislocation, her lack of roots and lack of belonging. By cultivating her garden Ruma’s father enables her to put down roots in unaccustomed earth with Bengali and American cultural influences. Thus Ruma’s father becomes the only source of shelter and support after her mother.

Bondage of Intimacy and Detachment

Ruma suffers from “double displacement” and she is able to identify neither with her ancestral land nor with America. Ruma’s identity crisis made her “un-homed” and a “psychological refugee”. (Lois Tyson 241). Her sense of alienation is wiped out by her father’s passion to “toil in unfriendly soil” (UE16). Though there is an uncomfortable wedge between Ruma and her father, her father turns out to be the rescuer from her identity crisis. He succeeds in reconstruction of all that was deconstructed by the displacement and dislocation in Ruma’s psyche. Therefore the bondage between Ruma and her father is neither firm nor fragile. To be true their bondage is a dichotomy of care and neglect. The decision of Ruma to post her father’s Bengali letter to Mrs.Bagchi is suggestive of their kinship as amalgamation of intimacy and detachment. In her narrative style, Lahiri has adopted a curious technique of intimacy of the close perspectives and the detachment of third person narration to depict the dichotomous nature of the father – daughter bondage with intimacy and detachment.

Inexorable cultural differences among generations

Chitra banerjeec Divakaruni’s short story “Mrs Dutta Writes a Letter” was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in1998 and was included in Divakaruni’s second short story collection, The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (2001). Chitra Banerjee’s “literary voice is a sensual bridge between worlds India and America, Children and Parents, Men and Women, Passion and Pragmatism” (USA Today). Mrs. Dutta, an Indian widow with the sense of duty and love decides to live with her son Sagar and his family in San Francisco Bay area. She finds herself treading the rocky terrain of American culture. Her dream of awaiting paradise in her son’s family turns into a nightmare. Throughout the story Mrs. Dutta tries to disentangle her confused immigrant experience through her letters to her neighbour Roma in India.

The main theme seems to be the psychological aspect of acculturation among three generations – Old woman Mrs.Dutta, Parents Sagar and Shyamoli and Kids Pradeep and Mirinalini. Each generations live in different cultural worlds with much acculturation discrepancies which results in cleavage of family bonds. Thus familial relations and cultural differences are the linchpin of this short story. As Deepika Gurdev claims, “this story wonderfully explores a whole new gamut of human relations and the inevitable divide between East and West”. (The Sunday Tribune)

Mrs.Dutta is a dependent female immigrant unlike Ruma’s father. Her arrival to America is a matter of family reunification rather than individual determination to leave India for the sake of profession. According to Nita Shah, women belonging to recent immigration waves find it difficult to integrate themselves into the host culture than men: “An unassimiliable segment of society, they are impeded by poor communication skills […] the women even more so than the men” (qtd in Grewal 98). Mr.Dutta’s Indian moral codes conflict with the American customs of her son’s family. Mr.Dutta finds it impossible to dilute the Indian custom of, “good wife wakes before the rest of the household”. (MDWL 1, original emphasis). She is so traditional and sticks on to the old customs to the extent of using neem stick instead of minty tooth paste in her homeland. Bing a good sociable and neighbourly Indian old woman she wanted to visit her next- door neighbour, when she first arrived at Sagar’s home. Shyamoli stopped her by explaining that it is not the custom in California to drop in on people without calling ahead. Mr.Dutta gets confused with ‘American privacy’ as neighbours enjoyed each other’s presence in India. Jaydeep Sarangi rightly opines: “Culture provide a man (woman) with a system of meaning, which is valid within his (her) own socio-cultural group”. (39, emphasis added).

Acculturation discrepancies

Conflicts are higher in Indian American families when (grand) parents and adolescents are mismatched on acculturation style. Shyamoli and Sagar know their roots but they also know that to achieve success they need to adapt to new cultural codes of immigrant country. To use Homi Bhaba’s terms they live in the “third space” characterized by “in-betweeness” (37). Their entrance into the third space is a deliberate act. They are aware of what they leave behind in their homeland and what opportunities are in the new country for them and their progeny. Their life is an inevitable progression to assimilation and they find it easier to re-root their identity on the new soil of unaccustomed earth. Shyamoli was once a modest, respectable Indian young lady with conservative Indian culture, but the period of ten years in the United States weakens her ties with the ancestral land and forces her to be away from the endearing, filial family and community. She allows herself to move towards a hybrid cultural location.

Mr.Dutta wonders at the curious custom of children being allowed to close their doors against their parents. She is indignant at Shyamoli’s indifference in letting her children “unrebuked” for their disrespectful way towards elders. She is horrified when Shyamoli brought laundry into the family room and pulled out Mrs.Dutta’s undergarment before everyone. As the first generation old woman, it is the question of chastity for her; but Shyamoli being the second generation Bengali American woman, with the spirit of emancipation, does not cherish any such moral codes. Mr.Dutta who is ignorant of American etiquettes, struggles to understand the culture and customs of her assimilated children and grand children. Besides customs, technologies and machinery for performing household duties also terrify her. She is scared of machines for washing clothes. However she struggled to get accustomed with unaccustomed American life style with a positive stance:

“Dear Roma, although I miss you, I know you will be pleased to hear how happy I am in America. There is much here that needs getting used to but we are no strangers to adjusting, we old women. After all haven’t we been doing it all our lives?” (MDWL 32).

Cultural barriers tearing human hearts

Mrs.Dutta reminds herself the “land of America is home now” though the American protocols baffles her. But her positive disposition gets changed gradually after encountering American practice which contradict her inherited beliefs and she expresses her nostalgia for home, “Oh Roma? I miss it all much sometimes I feel that someone has reached in and torn out a handful of my chest” (MDWL 8). Yet she strives to find solace in cooking Indian food for her loved ones:

“At least the family’s eating well since I arrived… proper Indian food, rutis that puff up the way they should, fish curry in mustard sauce, and real pullao with raisins and cashews and ghee”. (MDWL 9).

Being an immigrant and minority in a vast American society, Shyamoli is very keen of not to be marginalized as ‘Others’. When Mr.Dutta requests to put up a drying rack in the back yard, Shyamoli protests, “It’s just not done in a nice neighbourhod like this one. And being the only Indian family on the street, we have to be extra careful”. (MDWL 13-14, emphasis original). That is why she bursts out when she knows that Mrs.Dutta drapes her clothes over the fence to dry. She considers it as a word of insult when her American neighbour instructs, “Kindly tell the old lady not to dry her clothes over the fence into my yard”. Fear of discrimination and sense of self makes her tear the heart of her mother in law with bitter words, “I know having her (Mrs.Dutta) here is important to you (Sagar). But I just can’t. Some days I feel like taking the kids and leaving” (MDWL 28-29, emphasis added)

Filial neglect

As Sagar and Shyamoli have confirmed to American society, they raised their children Pradeep and Mirinalini with American values. They call Mirinalini as “Minnie” and Pradeep as “Pat” – a comprehensive hint of the family’s assimilation into American culture. Born in the United States, Pradeep and Mirinalini, the third generation in the family, have imbibed breathe of American culture easily. In order to fit and be accepted by their peers in school, they are lured towards larger social space of American codes than the limited family space of Indian moral codes. They are brought up in media-driven and hi-tech American society with their western cultures. Mrs.Dutta is a steadfast Indian woman of moral codes. So the conflicts between their beliefs and attitudes, customs and cultures make them foreigners to each other:

… they (grand children) offer the most transparent excuses when she asks them to sit with her while she chants the evening arati… their American voices rising in excitement as they discuss a glittering, alien world of Power Rangers, Spice Girls, and Sprit Week at school, she almost cannot believe what she hears. (MDWL 11 ).

In Lahiri’s “Unaccustomed Earth” Ruma’s son Akash calls Ruma’s father as “Dadu” and Akash has some filial attachment to his grandfather. There is no such attachment for the grandchildren towards their paternal grandma in Chitra Banerjee’s short story. Mirinalini refers to Mrs.Dutta as “She” like an outsider. Though her grandchildren disrespect her, belittle her, she lauds them as her “flesh and blood”. She considers Sagar and his siblings as her only family. Sagar’s family has been far away from her for many years but now their love is put to test through her arrival on the Diasporic family space. She has faced the filial neglect in the backdrop of culture shock. She cannot bridge the gap of acculturation with the younger generations. She felt as a refugee among her own blood relations. Meril Silverstein and Xuan Chen rightly pinpoints the same, “the gap in

cultural values between generations suppresses social interaction between grandparents and their grand children and overtime reduces intimacy in their relationship, at least from the point of view of grandchildren” (196).

Fragile family bondage

The changing cultural paradigms are the barrier between human hearts which results in fragile family bondage. There is a great conflict between younger generation’s desire for “intergenerational autonomy” to the older generation’s desire for “intergenerational continuity” (Silverstein and Chen 198). Though Ruma of “Unaccustomed Earth” fears that her father’s arrival would put an end to the family she has created on her own, she longs for maternal comfort and parental support. Shyamoli does not expect any such maternal comfort and support from Mrs.Dutta. Even if she calls Mrs.Dutta compassionately ‘mother’, she has the impression that Mrs.Dutta has taken over the authority in the family. She feels excluded after the arrival of Mrs.Dutta and fears that her mother in law’s arrival has put an end to the family she has created on her own. Her words ‘my children’, ‘my house’ explicitly confirms the same:

Ordering my children to stop doing things I’ve have given them permission to do. She’s taken over the entire kitchen, cooking whatever she likes… I feel this isn’t my house anymore. (MDWL 30, emphasis added)

Sagar is compassionate with his mother as much as he can. He tries hard to be a ‘solicitous son’ tiptoeing around his mother’s feelings. But he cannot make her to be accustomed with the ethics of American life style.

Transformation from Dependency to Autonomy

As an old woman Mrs.Dutta is committed to the ideals of female submissiveness. But her stay in America modifies her perspectives related to the inherited model of womanhood. Through Shyamoli, the old woman is faced with a different model of womanhood that impresses her. In the beginning Mrs.Dutta believes that a woman is defined by her relationship with others (as a mother, daughter –in-law and wife). Her decision to come to America itself is dictated by an Indian norm – ‘a widow’s place is with her son’s family’. But her experience in America awakened the sense of individuality. During Sagar and Shyamoli’s fight, she does not wait until things settle down. Instead she ignores the conflict and gives priority to her own matter of writing letter to Roma, which exemplifies how American sense of self-identity is contagious.

Her American journey makes Mrs.Dutta to understand where she truly belongs. Her decision of going back to India, to live on her own is the ultimate gesture of self-assertion. Her journey to America can be interpreted as transformation from dependency to autonomy. Moreover she realizes that she is an outsider in her son’s conjugal nuclear family. She is superfluous and her maternal comfort and support are not needed in her son’s efficiently run household. She starts a new journey of ‘self-discovery’ to figure out what is happiness. She conceives happiness in different terms:

Happiness is not about being needed. It isn’t about being with family either… Perhaps we can figure it out together, two old women drinking cha in your downstairs flat (for I do hope you will rent it to me on my return). (MDWL 33-34).

Thus Mrs.Dutta’s physical displacement forces her to shatter her limited notions of happiness and womanhood.

Conclusion

Ruma in Lahiri’s “Unaccustomed Earth” embarks upon the phase of reconstruction after identity crisis. Her father, imbibing the core of American life style, succeeds in the reconstruction of all that was deconstructed by the displacement and dislocation. But for Mrs.Dutta even the reconstruction gets deconstructed. She picks up the pieces of her shattered hopes and aspirations and returns her homeland. Mrs.Dutta’s short cultural transplantation in American soil cultivates the florets of self-assertion, female emancipation and new concept of happiness.

Though Ruma of “Unaccustomed Earth” fears that her father’s arrival would put an end to the family she has created on her own, she longs for maternal comfort and parental support. The bondage between Ruma and her father is neither firm nor fragile. To be true their bondage is an amalgamation of intimacy and detachment. But in Chitra Banerjeec Divakaruni’s short story “Mrs Dutta Writes a Letter”, Mrs Dutta is superfluous and her maternal comfort and support are not needed in her son’s efficiently run household. She has faced filial neglect in the backdrop of culture shock. She cannot bridge the gap of acculturation with the younger generations. She feels as a refugee among her own blood relations. In this story each generation lives in different cultural worlds with much acculturation discrepancies which result in cleavage of family bonds.

Both the stories have poignantly portrayed the eternal struggle of Indian American community with disruptive cultural differences. Jhumpha Lahiri and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni have touchingly encapsulated, how do family ties and family loyalty transmute in the process of immigration. Though cleavage of family ties prevails in India, it is much prevalent in a different cultural ethos.

Works Cited:

Basu, Chitraleka. “Far From Harvard”. Rev. of Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri The Independent 6 June 2008. Web. 30 May 2013.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/unaccustomed-earth-by-   jhumpa-lahiri-841034.html

Bhaba K.Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.

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